The Devil's Footholds
by Cyrus Stuvland
I stopped just outside of the cemetery and stared down at seven shiny purple eggplants, piled in the flower bed next to some trash. They had stickers on them that said “American grown.” I looked around and didn’t see anyone. I took a picture, thinking maybe I’d post some sort of poll on social media, asking what I should do with them. I knelt and rolled them over, poking them gently. Still good. Underneath one of them was some loose change—pennies, mostly.
I stood and entered the cemetery for my usual walk. I went on a cemetery walk almost every day at the time. It was winter 2020 and I was about to leave Washington DC, so I wanted to make the most of the time I had left. That cemetery—Rock Creek Church—was one of my favorite neighborhood spots. I’d wander around the headstones and mausoleums until I found a nice big tree, then I’d sit with my back against its trunk, put on a guided meditation, and breathe deeply. I liked to go there to think about death and do meditations that involved picturing my future self, telling my current self that I’m doing okay. I couldn’t focus that day though—couldn’t quite conjure future Cyrus, who I usually picture with glorious salt and pepper hair and no remaining childhood trauma. Instead, I wondered about the eggplants. Someone must have left them there on purpose, maybe to come back to them. At my old house people experiencing homelessness sometimes left little stashes of their things in the alley and then came back for them. Plastic bags with socks, a toothbrush. Not eggplants though. How would you even eat them? I hated the thought of them sitting there, slowly rotting. But it also felt weird to take them. The pile seemed so intentional.
I texted my housemates the eggplant picture and asked them: should I bring them home?
One of them responded: Yeah, we can have a little babaganoush as a treat! So I picked up as many as I could hold and walked the mile back to my house. “Cemetery eggplants,” someone Googled. We couldn’t find anything.
The eggplants rested on the counter.
When I was a kid, I would lie in my bed and look up at the plywood bottom of the bunk above me, which was covered in crayon drawings and boogers but at night seemed like an endless black sky, and I would think about eternity. Nothing scared me more than forever did. I was always a little planner I guess, always dreaming of the future. But I hated the idea of a future I had no say in, one that would stretch on and on like the nights I spent dreading it.
Sometimes I’d work myself up into enough of a panic that I’d eventually scamper out of my room on my tiptoes, my heart racing. I’d see a light coming from the living room and would find my mother in her rocking chair by the fire, Bible on her lap, head back, eyes closed, lips forming silent prayers.
“Mom?”
Her head jerked up.
“Hi honey. Did you have a bad dream?” Her voice was groggy but comforting. I climbed into her lap.
“No, I just can’t sleep.” I paused, thinking. “Mom, what is hell like?”
She perked up a bit, a gleam in her eyes. “Well, only God knows for sure I guess, but the Bible does say a few things.” She leafed to Revelations, looking for something. She read me something from Matthew about “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” but she ended by reassuring me with something like: “Honey, you know you asked Jesus to live inside you, so you won’t go to hell.”
A pause. A sigh.
“Unless you decide to turn your back on Jesus, but he won’t turn his back on you.”
I nodded, sleepier now because of the rocking, the sound of her voice. I stared at the coals in our wood fireplace, imagining little people burning in there. But heaven, too, would be never ending.
“What’s heaven like?” I asked eventually.
“Well, there will be no pain there, no suffering, and we get to be face to face with Jesus. It will be so much better than this sinful earth.”
I was feeling sleepy and safe in her arms. “But it will last forever?”
“Yes, honey. Now why don’t we pray together?”
I fell asleep listening to her implore Jesus to “bind Satan” from my dreams.
The night after I found the eggplants, I had the same dream I had almost every night for months about my teeth rotting and crumbling in my mouth. I’d feel them loosening and dissolving and then I’d take a bite of an apple and accidentally swallow them.
I woke up stressed out, a little more than usual, though that was also usual. It was March again, a dull gray inside and out. I wanted to sleep through it. I removed my mouth guard, which I have worn to bed every night since a dentist sent me to a gum specialist who looked in my mouth and asked, “Why can’t you relax?” before she showed me how much I’d loosened my teeth from grinding, causing my gums to recede, chipping a tooth even, making it harder to relax.
I put my mouth guard in its container next to my bed and the image of a rotten tooth flashed in my mind, but it was more of a feeling than an accurate image. It looked to me like a tooth becoming a fruit—blossoming, vaguely vaginal. I ran my tongue over my teeth to reassure myself. All there.
Later, I went to the store and I felt strange, floaty. In the produce section I noticed that the eggplants there did not have “American grown” stickers. Curious, since this was the closest grocery store to the cemetery. I turned to see some friends of my ex. I stood there for a minute, arms limp at my sides.
“Well, nice to see you,” I managed.
When I finally shuffled off, I couldn’t find the tahini for the babaganoush and then when I was a block away from home, I realized I’d left three or four items in a bag at the store, after having paid for them.
The tooth image flashed in my mind.
When I was a teenager, I woke up one morning to my mom’s loud, distraught prayers coming from the kitchen. I found her standing above my sister, her hands outstretched like Jesus, face lit up. She was wild eyed, “crying out to God,” she called it.
“Oh Lord Jesus!” she yelled, “Cast these evil spirits out of my baby! I bind you in the name of Christ Jesus!”
Below her, my sister’s husband held my sister on the floor as she convulsed. He was trying to focus but obviously distracted by my mom. The two of them were visiting and he had not seen my mom like this before. This was the first time I had seen my sister have a seizure and it was scary—she had clearly left her body. Her eyes were vacant, staring straight ahead at nothing. Her mouth was wide open and foaming, spitting a little. For all of her motion, she was silent except for the gagging sounds escaping her mouth. This made my mom’s prayers even louder.
At the time, this outburst did not surprise me. It was embarrassing whenever Mom behaved like this around people outside of our immediate family, but I was still living at home, still immersed in my mother’s world in which she’d often start praying aloud, so it was normal. She often got anointed at church and believed that the laying on of hands in prayer could cure you. We went to the doctor, but she loved herbal remedies, claimed apple cider vinegar could fix anything, and had a general distrust of modern medicine, especially of prescription drugs. It wasn’t unusual for her to bind Satan from this or that or say things to us like “don’t let the devil get a foothold in your heart.”
Anything could give the devil a foothold—sports games on Sundays, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, loud or angry sounding music, being friends with nonbelievers. She wasn’t exempt from her rules, either. She’d get “convicted” that she had done something to give the devil a foothold often. Her most common sins were gossiping and anger.
“I’m sorry, I listened to lies from Satan,” she’d say after she’d complained about my dad.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, I went with my parents on a “work and witness trip” to Ecuador, where we helped some missionaries build a church. It was a big deal since none of us had left the country before; some people from our church helped pay our way. In the worship services there, people used instruments called rain sticks. I liked singing in church, liked swaying and feeling moved by the music, the crowd, maybe moved by the Holy Spirit, I don’t know. But the rain sticks were extra special. I bought one for me and my friend, who also went to our church, and at night I’d turn the stick upside down painfully slowly for the calming rain sound.
A few weeks after we got back from our trip, I went out to our burn barrel to throw some garbage in it. As I approached it, I saw the top of my rain stick sticking out, smoking faintly. I pulled it out quickly, but it was already burned in half, not salvageable. I went back into the house upset.
“I found out those were used in Satan worship,” Mom explained. “You don’t want Satan to get a foothold.”
“But Mom, they used it in church!”
“It doesn’t matter. We can’t listen to lies from the world, the flesh, and the devil!”
My mom firmly believed in the spirit realm, in what she would call “spiritual warfare.” Satan was a real force in my childhood, sending his demons to convince us to sin. Worldly desires—fame, money, success—and fleshly desires—sex, alcohol, drugs—they all came from Satan. “That’s your flesh talking,” she’d say. Or: “Say no to your sinful flesh.” She’d often ask me to fast and pray with her for a day and if she or I were “tempted” to eat, she’d pray that God would take away our “fleshly desires.” Many years later, after she’d gone on a diet and lost 25 pounds, I’d come to suspect there was more to the fasting, but at the time it struck me as pious.
The rain stick wasn’t the first thing I’d lost to the burn barrel, and it wouldn’t be the last. Mostly it was music—there was a lot of secular music that could give the devil a foothold. Even some Christian music was a little too worldly, could be a “stumbling block,” convince us to let our guards down. Even so, sometimes Mom and I would dance to Fleetwood Mac in the kitchen while doing the dishes. I was always the one who put it on, but she still had a soft spot for music from her high school and college years, pre conversion, and most oldies were harmless enough to her.
When I got home from the grocery store, I saw that I had a letter from someone named Suzie Sanchez. I had been expecting a package from my mother, which always makes me anxious because her packages have contained letters with feverishly scrawled Bible verses, laments, and questions like “where did I go wrong as a mother?” ever since I left home. Something about the letter made me think of my mom and maybe it was just that I was waiting for the package but when I opened the envelope, I found a single, lined piece of paper with a Bible verse written out in pencil in large, shaky letters—a child’s handwriting: Just a little while longer and the wicked will be no more, it said. Psalms 37:10.
As I’d read it, I’d felt my skin crawl and my face flush with fear and shame. Underneath the verse was the name my family has called me forever: Crys. This one was spelled “Chris,” but it was still weird. The rest of the letter was in what must have been Susie’s handwriting, which was small and neat, and it told me to go to a Jehovah’s Witness website to learn more. After reading it a few times I’d reasoned that the verse was written by Susie’s child, Chris.
As I reread the letter in the kitchen, I thought of the hours and days I spent writing out, memorizing, reciting Bible verses for my mom. She would not have asked a Jehovah’s Witness to send me mail because they too are going to hell in her mind, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had something to do with her.
I felt that same skin crawly shame and fear come over me again. What was going on with me? The eggplants glimmered in the corner of my eye. I remembered that I was a little stoned. Plus, I hate seeing people I know unexpectedly. Even worse when they are your ex’s best friends. Probably I was overthinking again.
Despite my ongoing fear of forever—or maybe because of it—I was a devout Christian kid. I didn’t really know much else; our whole life was the church. I got baptized at four and by five wanted to become a missionary. I fell asleep praying for all my relatives’ souls because Mom said they were going to hell. I remember feeling so certain in heaven that once, during a camp-out sleepover, I had been brave enough to go outside and check to see what the noise was that we heard when no one else was. It’s okay, I assured them, if a bear eats me, I’ll go to heaven. I was eight; I was ready.
My certainty started to shift around my twelfth birthday when my sister Dawn got into a terrible car wreck because she had a seizure while driving. She had developed epilepsy at age 21 and we didn’t know until that accident. She broke 17 bones and had to move home to recover and get surgery after surgery and eventually begin the painful process of learning to walk again.
During this time my mother was worried that Dawn had given the devil a foothold and that epilepsy and the accident was God’s punishment, a wakeup call, or an attack from Satan. She didn’t often verbalize this to my sister, but she told me that Dawn had started to drink alcohol and she thought that might be it. Occasionally she’d ask Dawn questions like: “Do you think God was trying to get your attention?” I know this sounds harsh—and it was—but my mother simply could not believe in a God who would allow bad things to happen to someone randomly, without reason. Her faith was, and continues to be, reliant on a very particular view of God, one that I don’t think anything will shake. Her mind is capable of some amazing gymnastics in order to justify it. Her letters don’t just come to me, though I am the most backslid of her children. She sends them to all my siblings, even the ones who attend church regularly and maintain a relationship with Jesus. Any straying from the faith we learned as children seems to be enough to make her fear that our hearts are not right with God, that we will not join her in heaven. And this is too much for her to bear, so she stays up late at night praying for us, feverishly writing letters.
I had initially believed that the accident was some sort of punishment or wake up call, as I was primed to, but the more I helped Dawn and learned about epilepsy, the less I could buy into Mom’s theory. My sister had been a second mother to me growing up—she was nine years older than me, and I often preferred her to do things that my actual mother might have done, like brushing my hair, bathing me, dressing me. Every time my mom tried to brush my hair, I’d cry. She was rough, always in a hurry. Dawn was gentler, more careful. Sure, she’d been gone for a few years, but she hadn’t done anything that would justify God causing such a terrible car accident. I was upset to learn that she drank, but I also reasoned that so did many of my aunts and uncles and God hadn’t been punishing them with seizures.
I started to feel like I needed to protect my sister from my mom. We’d both sigh and roll our eyes at Mom and I’d say something to make my sister laugh when Mom said something mean. I still believed in God, but I began to doubt my mom’s theories about the devil, about her version of God. “When a believer turns their back on God,” Mom used to say, “He’ll do extreme things to get their attention.” But Dawn hadn’t turned her back on God. She went to a Christian college and attended church regularly—she was what my mom would call a God-fearing woman.
I also remember being happy to have my sister back at home again, happy that I could help take care of her and relieve my mom of that burden. The two of us would take Dawn out on long walks in her chair after her appointments. Sometimes I’d rollerblade or ride my scooter on the bike paths we’d go on, which was special because there was no pavement near our house. We’d get movies and books at the library and since Dawn was a grown up now or maybe since she was going through a lot, Mom let us watch things that she wouldn’t have let me watch alone.
Back in the kitchen, I tried to shake off the Susie Sanchez letter with some cooking. I rinsed the eggplants and started to peel and chop them, but I kept thinking about that little pile of coins. It seemed so intentional. What was I thinking? I stop chopping. Something was not right. I checked my Instagram to find a message from a friend from back home: “Dude, you better take those back. That’s some Santería shit right there.”
He was Lutheran, a white boy from Montana—what did he know about Santería? But I was feeling bad—there was a guilty, forgetful feeling, hiding somewhere on the left side of my brain. The tooth fruit flashed. Maybe he was right.
I Googled: “Eggplants near cemetery Santería” and sure enough, just five or so clicks later, I found out that what I stumbled upon was most likely an offering to the goddess of storms—Oyá, an orisha, which are in fact, the gods of Santería as well as Yoruba and other African religions. The blog I found called Oyá a “queen of storms” whose favorite weapon was summoning a tornado.
I got a warm, sinking, feeling as I read.
The blog also said that placing nine eggplants outside of the gate of a cemetery is an offering meant to protect from hauntings. There were only seven eggplants, but it must have been that. I felt bad mostly because of cultural insensitivity, not because I thought the goddess was going to haunt me. I didn’t believe in hauntings—or in spirits, demons, or gods, not anymore—but maybe it didn’t matter what I believed. It had been stormy for three or four days.
I stood in my kitchen with a knife in one hand and phone in the other. One eggplant was already partially chopped up. I panicked. I had taken something sacred, something someone thought would protect them. I paused and breathed for a minute. Future Cyrus wouldn’t have done this, but they reassured me I could make amends. So I gathered the rest of the eggplants into my arms and began the mile walk back up the hill to the gates of the cemetery. When I got there, the pennies and two other eggplants were gone. I looked around a little, wondering if the person who left them had taken them or if someone else had. I tried to put the four I’d carried back in the right spot and said a quick prayer to Oyá. It felt weird—I hadn’t prayed to Jesus or anyone in years and I didn’t know how to pray to a goddess of storms.
“Oyá—I’m sorry?” I faltered. “Forgive me, please. I only wanted to prevent food waste.”
I found out later that Oyá is the fiercest of the female orishas. She protects the cemetery and the dead—she has one foot in the living world and one with the dead. She’s said to dance frenetically with a whip made from horsehair, which she swings around rapidly. In depictions I found online, she’s a dark-skinned Black woman set against a stormy sky, wearing skirts that are bright red or a bright rainbow of color—it’s her skirts that cause tornadoes as she dances. In the images, she always holds her whip above her head and is poised mid-dance. In most images I couldn’t make out her facial expression, but there was one in which Oyá looked straight ahead intensely with violet eyes, eyes that reminded me of the eggplants.
The summer after my first year of college, the same year I stopped believing in God, my high school friends and I decided to play with a Ouija board. Three of us had grown up evangelical, but somehow we were all friends with the one Wiccan girl we had gone to high school with, Alissa.
We sat around in Alissa’s apartment, reminiscing and talking about our first year of college. Alissa hadn’t gone to college. She had stayed close to our hometown, where she was still the only Wiccan, and started working full time. Her grandma, who lived in a trailer on the top of a hill off the grid and raised horses, bought us booze. It was always vodka drinks—vodka mixed with juice of some kind. We drank fast, gulping from big plastic cups.
Alissa pulled the Ouija board off her shelf. “Wanna play?” she asked.
I looked at Gemma and Michael to gauge their reactions. Gemma had started straying as early as high school—drinking and hanging out with boys. I guessed she wouldn’t mind. Michael was at a Bible college though and had been getting even more religious, trying to fight off the gay, I suspected. But I was feeling brazen.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
“Ooooooh!” said Gemma. “Yeah, let’s do it!”
Michael shrugged.
As a kid I read a lot of Christian Fiction; the Left Behind series, of course, but also the works of a Pentecostal writer from the Northwest, Frank Peretti. Peretti’s books were all about spiritual warfare. The kids’ series was mostly about high schoolers who were bullied and got into some new age spirituality stuff as a way of coping, only to realize that it was a slippery slope into Satanism. Demons floated around, trying to get kids to play with Ouija boards so they could possess them. I read the adult books too, which were even more terrifying: people disappearing, being maimed, and losing their minds all because they cheated on their wives. Everywhere you turned, someone was worshipping Satan. My mom ate his books up and adopted some of the language he used, the ideas he had about demons. She thought that there was a demon who specialized in making her gossip, for example. I pictured it being a bird sitting on her shoulder while she talked on the phone.
Alissa set up the board and gave us a run down. We started playing, not taking it very seriously. Soon, we made contact with a spirit who called themselves Daniel. None of us really believed at that point we were talking to anyone but Alissa, so we decided to test the spirit’s knowledge. We each took a turn asking them a question that no one else there knew. I asked them what my cat’s middle name was, which I was sure no one knew. Daniel got it right. I sobered up a bit, but maybe I’d told Alissa and forgotten.
“Whoever is moving it, this isn’t funny,” said Michael, after his question was also answered correctly.
Everyone promised we were not moving it.
“If this is real,” Gemma reasoned, “what do you all want to know?”
“How we’re going to die,” I said.
It was a joke, but also a challenge. I was getting goosebumps. I don’t believe in this, I told myself. But it was happening. Ouija boards, according to my mom, convinced kids that they were talking to dead people, but really they were demons. Did I believe in demons anymore? I wasn’t sure.
“Okay, Daniel, are we all going to die of natural causes?” asked Alissa, an expert at turning our questions into yes or no questions.
“No.”
The air in the room buzzed.
“Who isn’t going to die of natural causes?” I asked.
“G - E - M -”
We all stopped touching the planchette in unison, as if an electric shock ran through it.
“Shit you guys! This is fucked!” said Gemma.
“I think we should stop,” said Michael.
“But wait, I want to know,” Gemma decided. We all put our hands back on, a little shakily.
“Daniel, how will I die?” Gemma asked, clearly scared now.
“M - U - R -”
We pulled our hands back again.
“I’m done!” said Michael, jumping to his feet.
We all began to laugh nervously. Michael sat back down and picked up his drink. “Whew,” he said. “That was intense.”
“That was…actually kind of fun,” said Gemma.
The rest of the summer, whenever Alissa brought up the Ouija board, we all scattered, feigning interest in something else. I went on to completely renounce my faith, but the Ouija board episode stuck with me as something beyond reason. I didn’t know who Daniel was, but they felt real.
After I shed my faith, I went through an angry phase. I was 19. I transferred from my Christian college to a state school where I joined a group of mostly ex-Christians called the “Secular Student Alliance.” We hosted debates and various events on campus promoting separation of church and state. We would rush to make cardboard signs and jeer when a man who called himself Sean the Baptist came to campus. He would show up with a wooden crate and a small PA system and “preach the Word.” He only drew a crowd when he started saying things about gay people going to hell, so he inevitably did that. Some of the gay kids would kiss in front of him, some of us would try to debate him. Once, someone got a little step stool and a loudspeaker and drowned him out by reading the entirety of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” much to our delight. Later, Sean the Baptist bought a desk from me on Craigslist. I recognized him right away but didn’t say anything. He was polite, respectful even, paid in cash and said, “God bless.”
I never told my family about this club. I said I had transferred schools to save money. But Mom seemed to know more. Once, out of nowhere, she asked me: “Why don’t you believe in God anymore?”
“I don’t not-believe-in-God,” I mumbled, a half lie. Now we don’t talk about it, she just sends me the letters.
A week or so after I’d returned the eggplants, I sat outside on a bar patio with some friends, sipping cocktails on a sunny afternoon. A thin older woman approached us with a bunch of roses.
“Do any of you want a rose?” she asked. We looked at each other.
“No thanks,” we said.
The woman looked at my phone, which had a sticker with a pentagram made from vegetables on it, from a vegan restaurant. It said, “Hail Seitan.” She looked directly into my eyes then and said: “You have to have this rose.”
She pulled the blood red rose from the bunch and thrust it at me.
“You’re a witch, aren’t you? I see your pentagram.”
“Uh, no, not really—”
“But the pentagram!” she said, still thrusting the rose at me. And so I took it.
“I used to be a witch too,” she said, looking around a little wildly. “But now I’m with Jesus Christ.”
“Oh?” I said, nodding politely. I was sensing some mental instability about her. The three of us exchanged glances, hoping she’d leave.
“Yes, but I used to be down with Satan though. Rock on!” she said, flashing me the rock on or devil horn hand gesture. I guess both, in this case.
When we left our table a little while later, she yelled: “Yeah, you LIKE that rose, don’t you?!”
We laughed about the interaction as we walked away, but I felt strangely shaken. Maybe it was just the sticker, or maybe it had something to do with the tooth fruit, with Oyá. Could she sense something? I had gotten the sticker when I lived at a house whose address was 666. We called it the Temple of Doom and made a lot of jokes about Satan, but sometimes an old feeling would come back to me and I would shudder, wondering if I should be joking about this kind of thing. It reminded me of the Ouija board, the Peretti books. I didn’t believe in Satan, but the fear was still there, in my body.
When I got home, I placed the rose upside down above the hearth, to dry. I went to bed but couldn’t sleep, thinking about the woman’s certainty that I was a witch, half wondering if Satan’s footholds were visible in my heart, half scoffing at myself. To be fair, my insomnia happens without any weird witchy interactions. Nighttime has only gotten harder since childhood—I get anxious, have panic attacks, can’t sleep. Usually I think about death—first panicking that I won’t be able to do all the things I want to do before I die, then that I will die before I figure out a way to get something notarized so that my parents can’t have some come-to-Jesus type funeral for me that my friends wouldn’t feel comfortable at. Then, finally, I panic again, always, at the thought of forever. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, or that I’ll have any consciousness after death, but it doesn’t matter.
I have never pictured the devil the way he is depicted in popular culture—all red and black with horns and a pitchfork. I don’t think that many Christians do, at least not the ones I grew up with. There’s the story of Satan being Lucifer, a “fallen angel,” which to me seems like he wouldn’t necessarily look any different from any other angel. Then of course there’s the fact that he was in serpent form in the Garden of Eden. Most Christians believe that he changes form—he is, after all, “the great deceiver.” This form shifting stuff is perhaps the most damaging, because if you believe this, you can see Satan in anyone, which is what my mom does. The devil’s footholds are literal for her. He climbs into hearts and minds, possessing people. I’m not sure if I ever fully bought that notion, but I know that I have never been able to trust that someone wouldn’t change and suddenly become someone else entirely—perhaps this is because of how quickly I changed once I’d left the faith or because I know about my parents’ conversion. Or maybe it’s just that everyone changes and life changes and that can feel like a betrayal.
About a month after the eggplant incident, I went for another cemetery walk with my friend Elizabeth. I’d just had surgery and I was slow, clumsy. It was already hot, at least for April, and I propped myself up against a tombstone in the shade and sipped a seltzer as we chatted.
When we go back out to the main road to leave, we saw that the gate had been shut. The sign on the other side said they were closing early. I sat down again, already tired from walking, while Elizabeth headed over to the security car that was parked by the church. They came back in a few minutes.
“It’s empty,” they said.
We could’ve just climbed the iron fence, except that because of my surgery I couldn’t put any weight on my arms or even lift them past my belly button. We walked around a little, looking for possible ways over the fence that didn’t involve the use of my arms while Elizabeth called some friends for help. I felt oddly at peace, although we had run out of water and it was getting dark and my pain meds were back at home. Perhaps this, I thought, is my punishment from Oyá. The tooth fruit had still been visiting me—my dreams were getting worse, and I was struggling to sleep again. It was probably just my anxiety and the fact that I had to be propped up on pillows, but part of me wondered if it was the eggplants.
A little less than a year after leaving my Christian school, I stood in the middle of campus surrounded by my new atheist friends. One of them, who’d been raised Mormon, stood directly in front of me with a blow dryer in one hand and an upside-down book of Mormon in the other. We had a sign in front of our table that read “Free De-Baptisms.” It was a publicity stunt because we wanted to attract new members, but he really was de-baptizing me, at least it felt like it to me—a kind of cleansing, a fresh start. He said the Mormon baptismal rites phonetically backward as I crossed my hands over my chest and closed my eyes and felt the hot air hit my face. The crowd cheered and the campus newspaper person snapped a photo of me that ran in the paper and later, in a national magazine.
I wasn’t an atheist then or now—just sort of agnostic and angry at how much of my life had been devoted to believing such damning things about myself and others. I didn’t last long in the club because so many of the atheists seemed to believe in their views with the same devoutness as the Christians I grew up with and I just didn’t know anything anymore. Sometimes I miss the certainty I’d had, sometimes I wake up in the night looking for it. But once I lost it, I couldn’t really find anything else—just a vague hope that one day I’ll believe in something again, even if it’s just a future Cyrus.
Elizabeth’s phone was about to die. I called my housemates. They didn’t have a car, but if they could find something I could step onto maybe it would work. The trick was getting something like that to the cemetery from our house. Elizabeth wandered around again and I stood next to the fence, trying to see if I could possibly wedge my foot into the space between the bars and then swing my other leg up and over without using my hands. It was probably only a five-foot fence, but I’m 5’3” and I’d just spent $2000 on surgery. I didn’t want to risk the stitches coming out.
While Elizabeth kept looking around, I stood still with a line from an Ada Limón poem about a panic attack ringing in my ears: “and this is what a day is.” Sometimes the line would pop into my head right before or after a panic attack or randomly as I went about my life and realized, suddenly, that time was passing. Other details from the poem would also sometimes come to me—a red mailbox, dogs barking. Limón perfectly describes how the littlest sounds bring you back to yourself from the strange soup of a panic attack.
Elizabeth returned with a piece of cement that looked like it could have come from a tombstone and we put it on the ground next to the fence, testing it out. It gave me six inches or so. Elizabeth moved it to the other side of the fence and then I stepped on their leg as they knelt. I was somehow able to swing my leg up and over in just the right spot of the fence and land on the cement block. Elizabeth hopped over quickly behind me. The two of us walked back to my house in the dusk, unscathed.
I eventually found out that there’s a plus side to Oyá’s storms—they may be tumultuous, but when they are over, things are clean, changed. She brings purification into our lives by blowing away all the things that no longer serve us, I read, and this brings fresh winds to blow in new things.
That night I dreamed another part of the Ada Limón poem. The lines: What if I want to go devil instead? Bow/down to the madness that makes me bounced around in my head as I was in and out of fitful sleep. At some point I realized I’d had it all wrong. I didn’t need to talk to future Cyrus, I needed to talk to baby Cyrus. And I saw my baby self clearly: I was 13 with my first ever short haircut—a fluffy pixie cut with a weird zigzag part down the middle. Young Cyrus wore a jumper Mom had sewn me for Christmas with a big coat overtop it that I refused to take off because I was embarrassed but didn’t want to make Mom sad. I could feel the raw teenage angst boiling just below the blank look on their face. The two of us stood in the pasture behind my parents’ house, looking down at our little house from above. It was a windy fall day, clouds passing rapidly in front of a fading sun. Young Cyrus looked at me skeptically.
“You’re fine,” I told them. “I know it hurts, but really, you’re okay.”
They shrugged, pretended not to know what I was talking about, but I kept going.
“You don’t have to fight the devil. You don’t have to fight anyone. Bow down,” I added. “Just bow down.”
I woke up the next morning with the same sore jaw but a new feeling too—a surrender of sorts. The storm might end, might make me clean.
I stood and entered the cemetery for my usual walk. I went on a cemetery walk almost every day at the time. It was winter 2020 and I was about to leave Washington DC, so I wanted to make the most of the time I had left. That cemetery—Rock Creek Church—was one of my favorite neighborhood spots. I’d wander around the headstones and mausoleums until I found a nice big tree, then I’d sit with my back against its trunk, put on a guided meditation, and breathe deeply. I liked to go there to think about death and do meditations that involved picturing my future self, telling my current self that I’m doing okay. I couldn’t focus that day though—couldn’t quite conjure future Cyrus, who I usually picture with glorious salt and pepper hair and no remaining childhood trauma. Instead, I wondered about the eggplants. Someone must have left them there on purpose, maybe to come back to them. At my old house people experiencing homelessness sometimes left little stashes of their things in the alley and then came back for them. Plastic bags with socks, a toothbrush. Not eggplants though. How would you even eat them? I hated the thought of them sitting there, slowly rotting. But it also felt weird to take them. The pile seemed so intentional.
I texted my housemates the eggplant picture and asked them: should I bring them home?
One of them responded: Yeah, we can have a little babaganoush as a treat! So I picked up as many as I could hold and walked the mile back to my house. “Cemetery eggplants,” someone Googled. We couldn’t find anything.
The eggplants rested on the counter.
When I was a kid, I would lie in my bed and look up at the plywood bottom of the bunk above me, which was covered in crayon drawings and boogers but at night seemed like an endless black sky, and I would think about eternity. Nothing scared me more than forever did. I was always a little planner I guess, always dreaming of the future. But I hated the idea of a future I had no say in, one that would stretch on and on like the nights I spent dreading it.
Sometimes I’d work myself up into enough of a panic that I’d eventually scamper out of my room on my tiptoes, my heart racing. I’d see a light coming from the living room and would find my mother in her rocking chair by the fire, Bible on her lap, head back, eyes closed, lips forming silent prayers.
“Mom?”
Her head jerked up.
“Hi honey. Did you have a bad dream?” Her voice was groggy but comforting. I climbed into her lap.
“No, I just can’t sleep.” I paused, thinking. “Mom, what is hell like?”
She perked up a bit, a gleam in her eyes. “Well, only God knows for sure I guess, but the Bible does say a few things.” She leafed to Revelations, looking for something. She read me something from Matthew about “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” but she ended by reassuring me with something like: “Honey, you know you asked Jesus to live inside you, so you won’t go to hell.”
A pause. A sigh.
“Unless you decide to turn your back on Jesus, but he won’t turn his back on you.”
I nodded, sleepier now because of the rocking, the sound of her voice. I stared at the coals in our wood fireplace, imagining little people burning in there. But heaven, too, would be never ending.
“What’s heaven like?” I asked eventually.
“Well, there will be no pain there, no suffering, and we get to be face to face with Jesus. It will be so much better than this sinful earth.”
I was feeling sleepy and safe in her arms. “But it will last forever?”
“Yes, honey. Now why don’t we pray together?”
I fell asleep listening to her implore Jesus to “bind Satan” from my dreams.
The night after I found the eggplants, I had the same dream I had almost every night for months about my teeth rotting and crumbling in my mouth. I’d feel them loosening and dissolving and then I’d take a bite of an apple and accidentally swallow them.
I woke up stressed out, a little more than usual, though that was also usual. It was March again, a dull gray inside and out. I wanted to sleep through it. I removed my mouth guard, which I have worn to bed every night since a dentist sent me to a gum specialist who looked in my mouth and asked, “Why can’t you relax?” before she showed me how much I’d loosened my teeth from grinding, causing my gums to recede, chipping a tooth even, making it harder to relax.
I put my mouth guard in its container next to my bed and the image of a rotten tooth flashed in my mind, but it was more of a feeling than an accurate image. It looked to me like a tooth becoming a fruit—blossoming, vaguely vaginal. I ran my tongue over my teeth to reassure myself. All there.
Later, I went to the store and I felt strange, floaty. In the produce section I noticed that the eggplants there did not have “American grown” stickers. Curious, since this was the closest grocery store to the cemetery. I turned to see some friends of my ex. I stood there for a minute, arms limp at my sides.
“Well, nice to see you,” I managed.
When I finally shuffled off, I couldn’t find the tahini for the babaganoush and then when I was a block away from home, I realized I’d left three or four items in a bag at the store, after having paid for them.
The tooth image flashed in my mind.
When I was a teenager, I woke up one morning to my mom’s loud, distraught prayers coming from the kitchen. I found her standing above my sister, her hands outstretched like Jesus, face lit up. She was wild eyed, “crying out to God,” she called it.
“Oh Lord Jesus!” she yelled, “Cast these evil spirits out of my baby! I bind you in the name of Christ Jesus!”
Below her, my sister’s husband held my sister on the floor as she convulsed. He was trying to focus but obviously distracted by my mom. The two of them were visiting and he had not seen my mom like this before. This was the first time I had seen my sister have a seizure and it was scary—she had clearly left her body. Her eyes were vacant, staring straight ahead at nothing. Her mouth was wide open and foaming, spitting a little. For all of her motion, she was silent except for the gagging sounds escaping her mouth. This made my mom’s prayers even louder.
At the time, this outburst did not surprise me. It was embarrassing whenever Mom behaved like this around people outside of our immediate family, but I was still living at home, still immersed in my mother’s world in which she’d often start praying aloud, so it was normal. She often got anointed at church and believed that the laying on of hands in prayer could cure you. We went to the doctor, but she loved herbal remedies, claimed apple cider vinegar could fix anything, and had a general distrust of modern medicine, especially of prescription drugs. It wasn’t unusual for her to bind Satan from this or that or say things to us like “don’t let the devil get a foothold in your heart.”
Anything could give the devil a foothold—sports games on Sundays, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, loud or angry sounding music, being friends with nonbelievers. She wasn’t exempt from her rules, either. She’d get “convicted” that she had done something to give the devil a foothold often. Her most common sins were gossiping and anger.
“I’m sorry, I listened to lies from Satan,” she’d say after she’d complained about my dad.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, I went with my parents on a “work and witness trip” to Ecuador, where we helped some missionaries build a church. It was a big deal since none of us had left the country before; some people from our church helped pay our way. In the worship services there, people used instruments called rain sticks. I liked singing in church, liked swaying and feeling moved by the music, the crowd, maybe moved by the Holy Spirit, I don’t know. But the rain sticks were extra special. I bought one for me and my friend, who also went to our church, and at night I’d turn the stick upside down painfully slowly for the calming rain sound.
A few weeks after we got back from our trip, I went out to our burn barrel to throw some garbage in it. As I approached it, I saw the top of my rain stick sticking out, smoking faintly. I pulled it out quickly, but it was already burned in half, not salvageable. I went back into the house upset.
“I found out those were used in Satan worship,” Mom explained. “You don’t want Satan to get a foothold.”
“But Mom, they used it in church!”
“It doesn’t matter. We can’t listen to lies from the world, the flesh, and the devil!”
My mom firmly believed in the spirit realm, in what she would call “spiritual warfare.” Satan was a real force in my childhood, sending his demons to convince us to sin. Worldly desires—fame, money, success—and fleshly desires—sex, alcohol, drugs—they all came from Satan. “That’s your flesh talking,” she’d say. Or: “Say no to your sinful flesh.” She’d often ask me to fast and pray with her for a day and if she or I were “tempted” to eat, she’d pray that God would take away our “fleshly desires.” Many years later, after she’d gone on a diet and lost 25 pounds, I’d come to suspect there was more to the fasting, but at the time it struck me as pious.
The rain stick wasn’t the first thing I’d lost to the burn barrel, and it wouldn’t be the last. Mostly it was music—there was a lot of secular music that could give the devil a foothold. Even some Christian music was a little too worldly, could be a “stumbling block,” convince us to let our guards down. Even so, sometimes Mom and I would dance to Fleetwood Mac in the kitchen while doing the dishes. I was always the one who put it on, but she still had a soft spot for music from her high school and college years, pre conversion, and most oldies were harmless enough to her.
When I got home from the grocery store, I saw that I had a letter from someone named Suzie Sanchez. I had been expecting a package from my mother, which always makes me anxious because her packages have contained letters with feverishly scrawled Bible verses, laments, and questions like “where did I go wrong as a mother?” ever since I left home. Something about the letter made me think of my mom and maybe it was just that I was waiting for the package but when I opened the envelope, I found a single, lined piece of paper with a Bible verse written out in pencil in large, shaky letters—a child’s handwriting: Just a little while longer and the wicked will be no more, it said. Psalms 37:10.
As I’d read it, I’d felt my skin crawl and my face flush with fear and shame. Underneath the verse was the name my family has called me forever: Crys. This one was spelled “Chris,” but it was still weird. The rest of the letter was in what must have been Susie’s handwriting, which was small and neat, and it told me to go to a Jehovah’s Witness website to learn more. After reading it a few times I’d reasoned that the verse was written by Susie’s child, Chris.
As I reread the letter in the kitchen, I thought of the hours and days I spent writing out, memorizing, reciting Bible verses for my mom. She would not have asked a Jehovah’s Witness to send me mail because they too are going to hell in her mind, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had something to do with her.
I felt that same skin crawly shame and fear come over me again. What was going on with me? The eggplants glimmered in the corner of my eye. I remembered that I was a little stoned. Plus, I hate seeing people I know unexpectedly. Even worse when they are your ex’s best friends. Probably I was overthinking again.
Despite my ongoing fear of forever—or maybe because of it—I was a devout Christian kid. I didn’t really know much else; our whole life was the church. I got baptized at four and by five wanted to become a missionary. I fell asleep praying for all my relatives’ souls because Mom said they were going to hell. I remember feeling so certain in heaven that once, during a camp-out sleepover, I had been brave enough to go outside and check to see what the noise was that we heard when no one else was. It’s okay, I assured them, if a bear eats me, I’ll go to heaven. I was eight; I was ready.
My certainty started to shift around my twelfth birthday when my sister Dawn got into a terrible car wreck because she had a seizure while driving. She had developed epilepsy at age 21 and we didn’t know until that accident. She broke 17 bones and had to move home to recover and get surgery after surgery and eventually begin the painful process of learning to walk again.
During this time my mother was worried that Dawn had given the devil a foothold and that epilepsy and the accident was God’s punishment, a wakeup call, or an attack from Satan. She didn’t often verbalize this to my sister, but she told me that Dawn had started to drink alcohol and she thought that might be it. Occasionally she’d ask Dawn questions like: “Do you think God was trying to get your attention?” I know this sounds harsh—and it was—but my mother simply could not believe in a God who would allow bad things to happen to someone randomly, without reason. Her faith was, and continues to be, reliant on a very particular view of God, one that I don’t think anything will shake. Her mind is capable of some amazing gymnastics in order to justify it. Her letters don’t just come to me, though I am the most backslid of her children. She sends them to all my siblings, even the ones who attend church regularly and maintain a relationship with Jesus. Any straying from the faith we learned as children seems to be enough to make her fear that our hearts are not right with God, that we will not join her in heaven. And this is too much for her to bear, so she stays up late at night praying for us, feverishly writing letters.
I had initially believed that the accident was some sort of punishment or wake up call, as I was primed to, but the more I helped Dawn and learned about epilepsy, the less I could buy into Mom’s theory. My sister had been a second mother to me growing up—she was nine years older than me, and I often preferred her to do things that my actual mother might have done, like brushing my hair, bathing me, dressing me. Every time my mom tried to brush my hair, I’d cry. She was rough, always in a hurry. Dawn was gentler, more careful. Sure, she’d been gone for a few years, but she hadn’t done anything that would justify God causing such a terrible car accident. I was upset to learn that she drank, but I also reasoned that so did many of my aunts and uncles and God hadn’t been punishing them with seizures.
I started to feel like I needed to protect my sister from my mom. We’d both sigh and roll our eyes at Mom and I’d say something to make my sister laugh when Mom said something mean. I still believed in God, but I began to doubt my mom’s theories about the devil, about her version of God. “When a believer turns their back on God,” Mom used to say, “He’ll do extreme things to get their attention.” But Dawn hadn’t turned her back on God. She went to a Christian college and attended church regularly—she was what my mom would call a God-fearing woman.
I also remember being happy to have my sister back at home again, happy that I could help take care of her and relieve my mom of that burden. The two of us would take Dawn out on long walks in her chair after her appointments. Sometimes I’d rollerblade or ride my scooter on the bike paths we’d go on, which was special because there was no pavement near our house. We’d get movies and books at the library and since Dawn was a grown up now or maybe since she was going through a lot, Mom let us watch things that she wouldn’t have let me watch alone.
Back in the kitchen, I tried to shake off the Susie Sanchez letter with some cooking. I rinsed the eggplants and started to peel and chop them, but I kept thinking about that little pile of coins. It seemed so intentional. What was I thinking? I stop chopping. Something was not right. I checked my Instagram to find a message from a friend from back home: “Dude, you better take those back. That’s some Santería shit right there.”
He was Lutheran, a white boy from Montana—what did he know about Santería? But I was feeling bad—there was a guilty, forgetful feeling, hiding somewhere on the left side of my brain. The tooth fruit flashed. Maybe he was right.
I Googled: “Eggplants near cemetery Santería” and sure enough, just five or so clicks later, I found out that what I stumbled upon was most likely an offering to the goddess of storms—Oyá, an orisha, which are in fact, the gods of Santería as well as Yoruba and other African religions. The blog I found called Oyá a “queen of storms” whose favorite weapon was summoning a tornado.
I got a warm, sinking, feeling as I read.
The blog also said that placing nine eggplants outside of the gate of a cemetery is an offering meant to protect from hauntings. There were only seven eggplants, but it must have been that. I felt bad mostly because of cultural insensitivity, not because I thought the goddess was going to haunt me. I didn’t believe in hauntings—or in spirits, demons, or gods, not anymore—but maybe it didn’t matter what I believed. It had been stormy for three or four days.
I stood in my kitchen with a knife in one hand and phone in the other. One eggplant was already partially chopped up. I panicked. I had taken something sacred, something someone thought would protect them. I paused and breathed for a minute. Future Cyrus wouldn’t have done this, but they reassured me I could make amends. So I gathered the rest of the eggplants into my arms and began the mile walk back up the hill to the gates of the cemetery. When I got there, the pennies and two other eggplants were gone. I looked around a little, wondering if the person who left them had taken them or if someone else had. I tried to put the four I’d carried back in the right spot and said a quick prayer to Oyá. It felt weird—I hadn’t prayed to Jesus or anyone in years and I didn’t know how to pray to a goddess of storms.
“Oyá—I’m sorry?” I faltered. “Forgive me, please. I only wanted to prevent food waste.”
I found out later that Oyá is the fiercest of the female orishas. She protects the cemetery and the dead—she has one foot in the living world and one with the dead. She’s said to dance frenetically with a whip made from horsehair, which she swings around rapidly. In depictions I found online, she’s a dark-skinned Black woman set against a stormy sky, wearing skirts that are bright red or a bright rainbow of color—it’s her skirts that cause tornadoes as she dances. In the images, she always holds her whip above her head and is poised mid-dance. In most images I couldn’t make out her facial expression, but there was one in which Oyá looked straight ahead intensely with violet eyes, eyes that reminded me of the eggplants.
The summer after my first year of college, the same year I stopped believing in God, my high school friends and I decided to play with a Ouija board. Three of us had grown up evangelical, but somehow we were all friends with the one Wiccan girl we had gone to high school with, Alissa.
We sat around in Alissa’s apartment, reminiscing and talking about our first year of college. Alissa hadn’t gone to college. She had stayed close to our hometown, where she was still the only Wiccan, and started working full time. Her grandma, who lived in a trailer on the top of a hill off the grid and raised horses, bought us booze. It was always vodka drinks—vodka mixed with juice of some kind. We drank fast, gulping from big plastic cups.
Alissa pulled the Ouija board off her shelf. “Wanna play?” she asked.
I looked at Gemma and Michael to gauge their reactions. Gemma had started straying as early as high school—drinking and hanging out with boys. I guessed she wouldn’t mind. Michael was at a Bible college though and had been getting even more religious, trying to fight off the gay, I suspected. But I was feeling brazen.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
“Ooooooh!” said Gemma. “Yeah, let’s do it!”
Michael shrugged.
As a kid I read a lot of Christian Fiction; the Left Behind series, of course, but also the works of a Pentecostal writer from the Northwest, Frank Peretti. Peretti’s books were all about spiritual warfare. The kids’ series was mostly about high schoolers who were bullied and got into some new age spirituality stuff as a way of coping, only to realize that it was a slippery slope into Satanism. Demons floated around, trying to get kids to play with Ouija boards so they could possess them. I read the adult books too, which were even more terrifying: people disappearing, being maimed, and losing their minds all because they cheated on their wives. Everywhere you turned, someone was worshipping Satan. My mom ate his books up and adopted some of the language he used, the ideas he had about demons. She thought that there was a demon who specialized in making her gossip, for example. I pictured it being a bird sitting on her shoulder while she talked on the phone.
Alissa set up the board and gave us a run down. We started playing, not taking it very seriously. Soon, we made contact with a spirit who called themselves Daniel. None of us really believed at that point we were talking to anyone but Alissa, so we decided to test the spirit’s knowledge. We each took a turn asking them a question that no one else there knew. I asked them what my cat’s middle name was, which I was sure no one knew. Daniel got it right. I sobered up a bit, but maybe I’d told Alissa and forgotten.
“Whoever is moving it, this isn’t funny,” said Michael, after his question was also answered correctly.
Everyone promised we were not moving it.
“If this is real,” Gemma reasoned, “what do you all want to know?”
“How we’re going to die,” I said.
It was a joke, but also a challenge. I was getting goosebumps. I don’t believe in this, I told myself. But it was happening. Ouija boards, according to my mom, convinced kids that they were talking to dead people, but really they were demons. Did I believe in demons anymore? I wasn’t sure.
“Okay, Daniel, are we all going to die of natural causes?” asked Alissa, an expert at turning our questions into yes or no questions.
“No.”
The air in the room buzzed.
“Who isn’t going to die of natural causes?” I asked.
“G - E - M -”
We all stopped touching the planchette in unison, as if an electric shock ran through it.
“Shit you guys! This is fucked!” said Gemma.
“I think we should stop,” said Michael.
“But wait, I want to know,” Gemma decided. We all put our hands back on, a little shakily.
“Daniel, how will I die?” Gemma asked, clearly scared now.
“M - U - R -”
We pulled our hands back again.
“I’m done!” said Michael, jumping to his feet.
We all began to laugh nervously. Michael sat back down and picked up his drink. “Whew,” he said. “That was intense.”
“That was…actually kind of fun,” said Gemma.
The rest of the summer, whenever Alissa brought up the Ouija board, we all scattered, feigning interest in something else. I went on to completely renounce my faith, but the Ouija board episode stuck with me as something beyond reason. I didn’t know who Daniel was, but they felt real.
After I shed my faith, I went through an angry phase. I was 19. I transferred from my Christian college to a state school where I joined a group of mostly ex-Christians called the “Secular Student Alliance.” We hosted debates and various events on campus promoting separation of church and state. We would rush to make cardboard signs and jeer when a man who called himself Sean the Baptist came to campus. He would show up with a wooden crate and a small PA system and “preach the Word.” He only drew a crowd when he started saying things about gay people going to hell, so he inevitably did that. Some of the gay kids would kiss in front of him, some of us would try to debate him. Once, someone got a little step stool and a loudspeaker and drowned him out by reading the entirety of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” much to our delight. Later, Sean the Baptist bought a desk from me on Craigslist. I recognized him right away but didn’t say anything. He was polite, respectful even, paid in cash and said, “God bless.”
I never told my family about this club. I said I had transferred schools to save money. But Mom seemed to know more. Once, out of nowhere, she asked me: “Why don’t you believe in God anymore?”
“I don’t not-believe-in-God,” I mumbled, a half lie. Now we don’t talk about it, she just sends me the letters.
A week or so after I’d returned the eggplants, I sat outside on a bar patio with some friends, sipping cocktails on a sunny afternoon. A thin older woman approached us with a bunch of roses.
“Do any of you want a rose?” she asked. We looked at each other.
“No thanks,” we said.
The woman looked at my phone, which had a sticker with a pentagram made from vegetables on it, from a vegan restaurant. It said, “Hail Seitan.” She looked directly into my eyes then and said: “You have to have this rose.”
She pulled the blood red rose from the bunch and thrust it at me.
“You’re a witch, aren’t you? I see your pentagram.”
“Uh, no, not really—”
“But the pentagram!” she said, still thrusting the rose at me. And so I took it.
“I used to be a witch too,” she said, looking around a little wildly. “But now I’m with Jesus Christ.”
“Oh?” I said, nodding politely. I was sensing some mental instability about her. The three of us exchanged glances, hoping she’d leave.
“Yes, but I used to be down with Satan though. Rock on!” she said, flashing me the rock on or devil horn hand gesture. I guess both, in this case.
When we left our table a little while later, she yelled: “Yeah, you LIKE that rose, don’t you?!”
We laughed about the interaction as we walked away, but I felt strangely shaken. Maybe it was just the sticker, or maybe it had something to do with the tooth fruit, with Oyá. Could she sense something? I had gotten the sticker when I lived at a house whose address was 666. We called it the Temple of Doom and made a lot of jokes about Satan, but sometimes an old feeling would come back to me and I would shudder, wondering if I should be joking about this kind of thing. It reminded me of the Ouija board, the Peretti books. I didn’t believe in Satan, but the fear was still there, in my body.
When I got home, I placed the rose upside down above the hearth, to dry. I went to bed but couldn’t sleep, thinking about the woman’s certainty that I was a witch, half wondering if Satan’s footholds were visible in my heart, half scoffing at myself. To be fair, my insomnia happens without any weird witchy interactions. Nighttime has only gotten harder since childhood—I get anxious, have panic attacks, can’t sleep. Usually I think about death—first panicking that I won’t be able to do all the things I want to do before I die, then that I will die before I figure out a way to get something notarized so that my parents can’t have some come-to-Jesus type funeral for me that my friends wouldn’t feel comfortable at. Then, finally, I panic again, always, at the thought of forever. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, or that I’ll have any consciousness after death, but it doesn’t matter.
I have never pictured the devil the way he is depicted in popular culture—all red and black with horns and a pitchfork. I don’t think that many Christians do, at least not the ones I grew up with. There’s the story of Satan being Lucifer, a “fallen angel,” which to me seems like he wouldn’t necessarily look any different from any other angel. Then of course there’s the fact that he was in serpent form in the Garden of Eden. Most Christians believe that he changes form—he is, after all, “the great deceiver.” This form shifting stuff is perhaps the most damaging, because if you believe this, you can see Satan in anyone, which is what my mom does. The devil’s footholds are literal for her. He climbs into hearts and minds, possessing people. I’m not sure if I ever fully bought that notion, but I know that I have never been able to trust that someone wouldn’t change and suddenly become someone else entirely—perhaps this is because of how quickly I changed once I’d left the faith or because I know about my parents’ conversion. Or maybe it’s just that everyone changes and life changes and that can feel like a betrayal.
About a month after the eggplant incident, I went for another cemetery walk with my friend Elizabeth. I’d just had surgery and I was slow, clumsy. It was already hot, at least for April, and I propped myself up against a tombstone in the shade and sipped a seltzer as we chatted.
When we go back out to the main road to leave, we saw that the gate had been shut. The sign on the other side said they were closing early. I sat down again, already tired from walking, while Elizabeth headed over to the security car that was parked by the church. They came back in a few minutes.
“It’s empty,” they said.
We could’ve just climbed the iron fence, except that because of my surgery I couldn’t put any weight on my arms or even lift them past my belly button. We walked around a little, looking for possible ways over the fence that didn’t involve the use of my arms while Elizabeth called some friends for help. I felt oddly at peace, although we had run out of water and it was getting dark and my pain meds were back at home. Perhaps this, I thought, is my punishment from Oyá. The tooth fruit had still been visiting me—my dreams were getting worse, and I was struggling to sleep again. It was probably just my anxiety and the fact that I had to be propped up on pillows, but part of me wondered if it was the eggplants.
A little less than a year after leaving my Christian school, I stood in the middle of campus surrounded by my new atheist friends. One of them, who’d been raised Mormon, stood directly in front of me with a blow dryer in one hand and an upside-down book of Mormon in the other. We had a sign in front of our table that read “Free De-Baptisms.” It was a publicity stunt because we wanted to attract new members, but he really was de-baptizing me, at least it felt like it to me—a kind of cleansing, a fresh start. He said the Mormon baptismal rites phonetically backward as I crossed my hands over my chest and closed my eyes and felt the hot air hit my face. The crowd cheered and the campus newspaper person snapped a photo of me that ran in the paper and later, in a national magazine.
I wasn’t an atheist then or now—just sort of agnostic and angry at how much of my life had been devoted to believing such damning things about myself and others. I didn’t last long in the club because so many of the atheists seemed to believe in their views with the same devoutness as the Christians I grew up with and I just didn’t know anything anymore. Sometimes I miss the certainty I’d had, sometimes I wake up in the night looking for it. But once I lost it, I couldn’t really find anything else—just a vague hope that one day I’ll believe in something again, even if it’s just a future Cyrus.
Elizabeth’s phone was about to die. I called my housemates. They didn’t have a car, but if they could find something I could step onto maybe it would work. The trick was getting something like that to the cemetery from our house. Elizabeth wandered around again and I stood next to the fence, trying to see if I could possibly wedge my foot into the space between the bars and then swing my other leg up and over without using my hands. It was probably only a five-foot fence, but I’m 5’3” and I’d just spent $2000 on surgery. I didn’t want to risk the stitches coming out.
While Elizabeth kept looking around, I stood still with a line from an Ada Limón poem about a panic attack ringing in my ears: “and this is what a day is.” Sometimes the line would pop into my head right before or after a panic attack or randomly as I went about my life and realized, suddenly, that time was passing. Other details from the poem would also sometimes come to me—a red mailbox, dogs barking. Limón perfectly describes how the littlest sounds bring you back to yourself from the strange soup of a panic attack.
Elizabeth returned with a piece of cement that looked like it could have come from a tombstone and we put it on the ground next to the fence, testing it out. It gave me six inches or so. Elizabeth moved it to the other side of the fence and then I stepped on their leg as they knelt. I was somehow able to swing my leg up and over in just the right spot of the fence and land on the cement block. Elizabeth hopped over quickly behind me. The two of us walked back to my house in the dusk, unscathed.
I eventually found out that there’s a plus side to Oyá’s storms—they may be tumultuous, but when they are over, things are clean, changed. She brings purification into our lives by blowing away all the things that no longer serve us, I read, and this brings fresh winds to blow in new things.
That night I dreamed another part of the Ada Limón poem. The lines: What if I want to go devil instead? Bow/down to the madness that makes me bounced around in my head as I was in and out of fitful sleep. At some point I realized I’d had it all wrong. I didn’t need to talk to future Cyrus, I needed to talk to baby Cyrus. And I saw my baby self clearly: I was 13 with my first ever short haircut—a fluffy pixie cut with a weird zigzag part down the middle. Young Cyrus wore a jumper Mom had sewn me for Christmas with a big coat overtop it that I refused to take off because I was embarrassed but didn’t want to make Mom sad. I could feel the raw teenage angst boiling just below the blank look on their face. The two of us stood in the pasture behind my parents’ house, looking down at our little house from above. It was a windy fall day, clouds passing rapidly in front of a fading sun. Young Cyrus looked at me skeptically.
“You’re fine,” I told them. “I know it hurts, but really, you’re okay.”
They shrugged, pretended not to know what I was talking about, but I kept going.
“You don’t have to fight the devil. You don’t have to fight anyone. Bow down,” I added. “Just bow down.”
I woke up the next morning with the same sore jaw but a new feeling too—a surrender of sorts. The storm might end, might make me clean.