I give credit to jimmymc

He said, “You know ... this could go on. Just saying...”

More true words were never spoken

There is a demon in my kitchen holding a mattress advertisement like it’s a sacred text, and I have twenty minutes to give him a name.

“Sealy,” he says. “Sealy Posturepedic.”

“No.”

“It has weight, Cora. Authority. A man named Sealy Posturepedic has never once been asked to leave a room.”

“A man named Sealy Posturepedic has never once existed.” I take the flyer out of his hands. He lets me, mostly because he’s discovered that letting me take things away from him results in me standing very close to him, which he has decided is a loophole in the concept of losing. “We’ve been at this for forty minutes. Pick a human name. A normal one. One that a person at a party could say out loud without their face doing something.”

He leans back against my counter and crosses his arms, and the sleeves-shoved-up thing happens, which I have asked him not to do while I’m trying to accomplish tasks. Three weeks of cohabitation and I still lose about nine seconds every time.

“Blade,” he says.

“Where are you getting these.”

“Your bookshelf. I read it.”

“Which one.”

“All of it.” He says this the way you’d say I had a sandwich. “Also the manual for your dishwasher, the pamphlet from your dentist, and the bylaws of your homeowners’ association, which are a crime against language. Article Six is four hundred words about a fence.”

“Article Six is about a fence—”

“Article Six is a cry for help.”

Here’s what happened, briefly, because I’ve had to explain it to exactly zero people and I’m still workshopping the phrasing:

Three weeks ago, on a Tuesday, in the depths of a breakup and two glasses into a Malbec, I lit a candle my sister mailed me with a note that said manifest something worth wanting. The candle worked. It worked in the sense that a load-bearing wall “works” until you take a sledgehammer to it, at which point you find out what the whole house was resting on.

He’s an incubus. That’s the word. He hated it at first. Now he says it the way other people say they’re in insurance.

He didn’t leave in the morning, which the old stories say shouldn’t happen. He hasn’t left since, which the old stories don’t cover at all. He has, in three weeks: learned to work my espresso machine with unsettling precision; developed a relationship with the ice maker that I would describe as devotional; discovered infomercials and formed opinions; and started buying groceries with money whose origin I have decided not to interrogate.

He has also, and this is the part that matters today, never once told me a name I can pronounce.

He told me his real one, that first night. It landed in my chest like a struck bell and it is not a thing my mouth is built to do. I can approximate it. I do approximate it, frequently, usually somewhere between eleven at night and one in the morning, and every single time he closes his eyes like I’ve handed him something he can’t believe he’s allowed to hold.

That’s beautiful. That’s also not going to work at my sister’s engagement party.

“Okay,” I say. “New approach. What do you want to be called?”

He goes quiet. This is the trick with him, the one I figured out early: ask him what he wants and he short-circuits, every time, like the question has never been pointed at him before. Nine hundred years of being summoned and used and never once asked.

“Something short,” he says finally. “Something you could say fast. If you needed to.”

“Needed to.”

“If you were across a room.” He shrugs, and it’s not a casual shrug, it’s a shrug doing a lot of work. “If you wanted me to look up.”

I must put the flyer down and hold the counter for a second.

“Ash,” I say. “The first sound of your real name is close to it. Ash.”

He tries it. Rolls it around. Something in his face settles.

“Ash,” he agrees.

“Ash what? People are going to ask for a last name.”

“Posturepedic.”

“Ash.”

“See,” he says, delighted, “you said it fast.”

✦ ✦ ✦

The party is at four, at Margot’s, and Margot is my older sister, and Margot is the one who mailed me the candle.

I need you to understand the specific texture of my dread here. Margot has been into what she calls Her Practice since her divorce four years ago. Her Practice involves crystals on every windowsill, an app that sends her moon updates, a smudge stick situation that got her building’s fire alarm replaced, and a level of belief in the unseen that I have spent four years gently, lovingly, condescendingly humoring.

I once told her, at Thanksgiving, in front of our mother, that manifestation was “astrology for people who found astrology too rigorous.”

And now I must walk into her engagement party with a nine-hundred-year-old demon on my arm.

“She’s going to know,” I say in the car. “She mailed the candle. She’s going to take one look at you and know, and then I’m going to have to live in a world where Margot was right.”

“Is that worse than the demon?”

“Substantially.”

He laughs. He has a great laugh. It’s the only thing about him that doesn’t seem designed — everything else on that face was clearly drafted by someone with a grudge against the general public, but the laugh is just his, unguarded, and it does something to the back of my neck that I have decided is a private matter.