There is a ghost that haunts every single one of us. Mine is the devil himself. His face is cut out of construction paper, stapled to the corkboard outside my classroom. If I had not learned that he represents evil incarnate, he might appear nice. Simple. A red, oval-shaped head with horns, a forked tongue. It is my teacher’s effort to cut simple shapes and construct a caricature. It is innocent enough. Near his eyes are two staples that hold him to the board. Cut-out bubble letters spell out a message of hope: If you ever feel tempted by the devil, tell him to get behind you. God will forgive all of his children if they pray. It is written in simpler language, more concise, words that a first-grade teacher makes scrutable to a child. Two black eyes stare back at me. I think it later, when I am much older: he must lurk in these fields, scrubbing the red stains out of the soil.
My ankle is bleeding. I scratched a scab so much that it has reopened and is spilling into my white sock, coloring it red. I linger in front of the newly decorated cork board for longer than I need to. I probably won’t tell anybody about my ankle. Maybe that is why they find me so different. Too scared to tell a soul that I bleed. I stand solidly, but do not feel solid. My two feet hold me up, but my mind is wandering, moving, unlistening.
When I enter my classroom, I forget about the devil, but he still lurks in my thoughts, and emerges when I least expect it. I play with Barbies and dolls and stuffed animals. My mother reads me Nancy Drew and Magic Tree House books. Then, I lay down in my bed, and I am possessed. Most movies and TV shows depict demonic possession in the wrong way. Children are only possessed by the devil when nobody else is around. When my parents are asleep, when my siblings have been silent for hours, I lay awake, thoughts of hell playing through my brain over and over. I scream into my pillow. I finally fall asleep. When I wake up, I am a child again.
At school I learn about comfort and safety. We are safe in our community. Outsiders are not very welcome, and yet Christians must be aware of when Jesus is dressing up as outsiders, so be sure to show them enough courtesy that you still make it into Heaven. I notice graveyards attached to every church.
There is something that separates me from my classmates, but I am five and just beginning school. I cannot place it. I will not place it until I have lived for years longer, and even then it is evasive, ambiguous, and shifting. I am soft, speculative, and an easy target. I act differently from my classmates. I often cannot pay attention. The teacher says my name and I gaze out the window, unknowing. The classroom laughs, and I look back, red-faced, still unaware of what has happened, but they are looking at me, laughing at me. I embarrass myself, to others. I try to make sense of it, but cannot stop coming to the conclusion that in this Christian community, I am different because I am followed by an evil presence.
Every time I try to forget about the devil, to exorcize him from my nightmares, he reappears at school. I have found him in my textbooks, he is in every Bible study, every church service. I try to jump on my brother’s back for a piggyback ride, he yells, “Get off of me, Satan!” I realize that I could be the devil, and that is why it feels like he is following me.
I live in Nebraska. That much is true. Sometimes it is hard to picture other places. I wonder where roads lead.
When I turn seven it is summer time. It is always summer when I turn a new age. Other kids have their birthday publicly at school, bringing cupcakes, candies. I age secretly, away from my classmates. We go to my grandma’s house and bake a cake there.
My friends are nice to me when it is fun for them. We play house at recess, jump rope. We call ourselves a trio, three musketeers. Sometimes, it is more fun for them to be a duo, so they gang up on me. It is easy to do this to me. I am the smallest in my class, but I talk back when they are mean, which makes it fun for them. I tell them I don’t need any friends. They call me the devil. In the bathroom, one friend forgets they are still playing the game where I am the devil, and asks me a question. She gives me a hug. The other friend comes out from one of the stalls, appalled.
“Why are you hugging the devil?!”
The friend stops hugging me and starts fake punching me. Soft landings that hurt all the same.
“I was just pretending.”
They leave.
I go to my classroom and learn to read. I ask my friends if they would like to come to my house after school.
The devil wears many faces. He is cunning, he is beautiful. When he appears to me at age seven, he appears as my best friends. They do not know yet that they do not belong here. They think I do not fit in, and they are right. Somehow, I am different, even in this place that I was born, that I am supposed to feel a connection to. I am supposed to remember this place as my hometown, but nobody in this school should ever have been here in the first place.
I think about turning eight next summer. What will it be like, a year older? My mom asks on my birthday if I feel different, and I always think I do, yet somehow I still feel the same. How does that work, to feel the same every day yet look at yourself years later and have changed a great deal?
My friends like to play a prank on me. When I go to the bathroom by myself or leave the room to get something I need, they run away and hide. When I return to find them gone, I am forced to look around for them. I know that I look pathetic to them, wandering around, searching, calling their names. It is those moments that something can change so suddenly. I can feel calm and assured one minute then panicked and missing in another.
I look out the window of my family’s car late at night. Off in the distance, I see multitudes of red lights blinking simultaneously on and off. On, then off again. Over and over. It is mystical, far off, a sleepy vision in between heavy eyelids. It makes me feel lonely and vast, though I am only seven, or eight. So much activity, and yet no people. I do not understand what they are, yet already understand how sad it can be to feel alone. In Nebraska, you can drive for miles without seeing a single home, a single car, any signs of life. The lights are the only thing; perhaps there is a light at an otherwise empty crossroads, or to light the way for whatever farmer might be working in a field late at night. It is not usually what I want it to be. I want to see the lights of a home, a reminder that people live, but I don’t see that as often as I see the lonely red lights, blinking so repeatedly. I eventually find out that they are the wind generators powering electricity from the incessant Nebraska wind. I stare out the window, unable to read or draw because of the dark. The only preoccupation. Hundreds of lights blinking on, off. So vast, yet who is alive?
Red. The color of my blood. Of lights at night. Satan. Hell. Airplanes fly overhead, blinking that same incessant color.
My brother looks up at the airplanes with me. We wonder if our father is on one of them, right now. He tells me the one that just flew over us has dad on it. It is no comforting thought to me. How lonely, in the sky, miles away from anything alive. In my memory, my father lives permanently in the air. When I conjure him, I draw a blank, only seeing the man I know today, instead of the one I thought I saw as a child. The devil now appears occasionally as him, but he fades in and out of existence.
The devil leaves my friends alone and starts to take the form of my third-grade teacher. I complete a coloring sheet too early, so she makes me throw it away. I gloat that a math assignment is too easy so she rips up our papers and makes us do a harder task. She adores the other girls in my class but must find me appalling, because she often simply ignores me. I know this is unfair, but I don’t know what to do about it. I think about telling my mom but don’t want to make her sad. When my mother finally discovers my nightly possessions, I tell her. I am terrified of my teacher.
One night I creep down our enormous staircase to the living room. I spy my parents watching TV before they see me. I remain insomniac, unable to sleep most nights. My mother urges me back to bed. I tell her I am too scared, my eyes pouring tears. No, not of monsters. I cannot begin to explain my haunting to her, and that is when I tell her. It is my teacher. It must be. I convince myself of it, too. She is concerned, as a parent would be, about a person in the real world now. I have misled her. It is what is in me that is horrifying. I am scared of myself, of what my brain can conjure up. I think of things I do not want to. I imagine every night that I may not wake up in the morning. I pity my parents finding me dead. Yet every morning I wake. I am nine years old. I wake, still. It is a privilege I do not understand yet, to have not been killed already. There is terror in me. Of what has happened, of what is to come. I shut my eyes and see two red lights. They could be the eyes of Satan, or a manifestation of my utter loneliness.
Nebraska maintains a feeling of civilization, community, and caring while remaining eerie, unkempt, blighted. There were three abandoned grain silos in the middle of town that had been crushed in by a tornado. They smelled of rotting grain. The smell lingered as you walked away from them, enough that you couldn’t ignore it. The silos hovered over the main street, the grocery store, the city park. Despite going to church every Sunday, praying before every meal, and being generally good people, nobody could seem to get rid of the stinking demolished grain silos.
I skate past the grain silos, unthinking. They have always been a part of this town, so who am I to question them being there? They are on my way to the pop machine. I am craving a grape soda. This hill is difficult to rollerblade up, and the cracks in the sidewalk make me feel like I am going to trip and fall at any moment.
I do not know yet how much death they represent. Layers and layers.
I live atop vast acres of buried dead. In Nebraska. Across the Great Plains. My life in its finite nature shows its weakness, placed somewhere it never truly belonged. The dead do not dare to speak to me because I am their killer. If not something I did, then something many did before me, that I bear now with utter despair. Underneath me lie lives lost to genocides of so many natures it is inexpressible. Death, in so many forms, unspoken, drifting off through the wind. Little bluestem beheaded, gentians drowned, spiderwort poisoned. All is paved over by dirt and chemicals; a waste laid bare and visible to all who drive through it, complaining that it is boring, unexciting, plain. What if I told you that the lives of those murdered lie just beneath the soil? It is not just the plants that were killed.
I always thought that someday I would write about Nebraska. I picture the backyard of my childhood home, the stepping stone trail leading behind the pool, descending into vinca and lilies. Often, it was filled with mosquitoes and flies in the summer, buzzing cicadas, lazy butterflies. I can remember the feeling of comfort, watching my grandparents follow me down that path after they got to visit me at school, then drive me home. I probably wanted to show them the “food” I had concocted out of hosta leaves, bush berries, and twigs. There was a turtle shaped sandbox there, and a large tree. An aging concrete patio housed a large picnic bench that we never dined at, due to the mosquitoes. There was a lot of yard to explore, to enjoy, to forget about.
There is now only the Nebraska I remember. Our house, Grammy’s house, the Lutheran school, the pop machine. Right now, I cannot help but try to picture everything that has happened to me. I was different there, I was different when I left. There was never a place I thought confidently: This is Me. I am This. I fear this manuscript falling off the page as the others did before. I dig too far and there is nothing, a void, maybe a sad six-year-old girl, or an angry eleven year old. Maybe just a girl staring out the car window at night. Sometimes these girls scare me, other times they are all I have. Digging like this, I encounter something much more horrifying than the fear or anxiety of a single self. I discover generations of it.
My younger selves stare into this abyss, unknowing. They do not know what once lived lies now beneath the farm fields. They do not see the graveyard yet. They sense the loneliness, they know this place should not feel so sad. It stretches without end, red lights blink off into what feels like infinity. I stare back at them, wondering what they have seen. It is when I grow, and move, and leave that I learn. Not just about wind generators, but about the killing. I am disgusted. I realize that the things I was taught were wrong. I develop my own creed. I finally learn about evolution. The devil cannot haunt me so often if I do not believe he can exist.
Yet somehow, the devil still finds his way into my dreams, spilling into my subconscious when my conscious unbelief has drifted off to sleep. Last night I dreamt that I had to go back. My mom had decided it was the only option. I was a student at the Lutheran school once again, forced to reconnect with my friends, awkwardly inserting myself back into a life I hadn’t known for so many years. The feeling of utter dread and despair that bloomed in me during the dream lingers when I wake. As if I can never leave. Maybe this is why I cannot continue to write about Nebraska no matter how many times I begin.
In another dream, my older self greets my younger selves. My 11-year-old self is playing in the woods, pretending to live in a world of wizards, demigods, detectives. Always living somewhere else, desperate for fantasy. I live in comfort. My family loves me. My mother reads to me at night. Despite this scene, the 11-year-old cannot shake off the shadow behind her. It is her own, of course, but it darkens her figure just enough that I can tell she is haunted. Hiding in the ground, walking invisible through the air. To her the devil is behind it all, but is he now? My six-year-old self sits quietly at a table, careful not to disturb anyone around her. I turn away when I see the red face, the horns, creep up behind her. I cannot really see it, but she knows it is there and so do I.
So do I.
Red lights, blinking on and off, forever and always, amen.
