Grandmother's Devil
An otherworldly being watches over a comatose grandmother molested by an unscrupulous nurse. Grandmother's Devil intends to drag the nurse's soul screaming into hell, but Grandmother has other plans.
One moment I am vaguely aware that something horrific has happened and the next I am floating in softness, suspended in some soundless warmth. I think I should be terrified, but it seems too late for that now.
I reach out to touch the angel in front of me. I am not surprised that he is blacker than burnished ebony. Or is he a purple so deep, so rich I can't distinguish it from black? I have never sensed a color like this, so powerful, so complex, so pristine.
I am consumed with erotic greed, with incandescent lust. I hunger for this angel to wrap his powerful arms around me, to draw me towards that polished slope at the join of his thighs where mortals would have genitals. I want our bodies to commingle, our souls to fuse.
The angel looks at me with perfect serenity and then dissolves. In his place, a devil has taken hold of my hand.
He, too regards me with perfect serenity. He is not the unpleasant fellow I had always believed he would be. I presume I am damned, since the angel has abandoned me. I presume this devil is here to oversee that everything goes according to plan with my damnation.
My lust is spent. I feel flushed and I know I am wet, but I am completely bereft of understanding. Nothing makes sense. And It seems not to matter.
I consider that this devil holding my hand is not leading me anywhere. We are directionless, floating here in this pleasant warmth. Perhaps this devil is merely an emissary. A minor demon assigned to a minor sinner. After all, I have done nothing truly evil in my life. I cheated on my husband a few times but surely that is not completely unforgivable. Besides, he has already forgiven me.
I masturbated regularly as a teenager and infrequently as an adult. I learned at a weekend workshop at Asilomar that most women do. They called it "jilling off." It seems like no great sin if it is a sin at all.
I actually did it a few times for my husband while he watched and he said it made him hard. I laughed. "You get hard when the wind blows, I said. He laughed too.
I continue cataloging my sins since I am certain this is what my devil expects of me. One of my girlfriends gave me a vibrator at a surprise 40th birthday party - a sausage party, she called it, with male strippers. Of course, I fondled a few sausages. Everyone did, I think, except for my friend Millie who was slightly disgusted.
The vibrator didn't do much for me, but Millie told me she likes hers much better that her ex-husband's sausage, with all his clumsy fumbling around down there. She hadn't even blushed when she said it. But all of us who knew Charlie understood perfectly. Charlie was the one who helped Millie figure out she was a lesbian.
Strange isn't it? When we consider our sins, our thoughts go immediately to sex.
I knew, of course, that I had other kinds of sin to my credit.