Love Songs: The Wrong Note - A Collection of Short Stories

Demon

1

What's in a name?

A lot if you happen to have one that conjures up thoughts of evil spirits, of goblins, of all those creepy, scary things that go creak, squeak, and bumpity-bump in the night.

My father had thought it particularly witty to name his only offspring – Demon.

My mother despised the name, but she was a broken woman by the time I arrived, so to keep peace in the family, she allowed my father to hang me with it.

I cannot recall a single time that Mama ever called me by my unholy Christian name, preferring instead to call me Son.

Once I reached school age, it became a moniker of misery, and I quickly fought every schoolmate to be rid of it.

Instead of Demon, I became known as Luke.

Why would a sane man name a child Demon?

Did he want me to have a ready excuse to fall back on should I grow up to become a grand failure?

Did he hate the fact that my birth tied him down to a wife and family he never really wanted?

I never knew.

All my questions went unanswered.

He hung around until I was twelve years old, drinking and making my mother's life a living hell, and then drove his old truck off the side of a mountain one muggy summer's night.

Was it suicide?

I doubt it. The story was told that he lost control of his vehicle while trying to outrun the revenuers.

No one saw the accident unfold. The wreckage was found the next day when a long hauler noticed the break in the wooden side rails five miles from our home. A couple of broken jugs were found in the woods by my father's wrecked, mangled truck.

That gave rise to the revenuer story.

But that sounded pretty far-fetched to me. A romantic tale attached to a wretched man that seemed to let my father leave this earth in a blaze of glory.

There had never been anything glorious about my father's life. Much less, I believed, his untimely demise.

My guess is that my father simply lost control after a night up at Snoot's.