Dear woman who summoned the devil
​and caught me instead

by Samantha Lucia

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​You whispered into the abyss, and I, a passerby, stopped to watch. The devil didn't have a chance of reaching you first. Unintended, I know. But you fucking seduced me through the rhythm of a body set ablaze. Your chants raised every fine hair of my being. And the blood beaded at your parted lips, bitten, drew me through the veil.

You felt me enter the room, enter you, unaware of what you had loosed. Overcome, you could hold nothing back at the final gasp of my possession.

Now, I lie beside your wasting frame. Each breath shallower than the one before. Nothing like the decades of breath we shared. You never knew that I was the trance you fell into, but it was always me, my love. I was the spell you cast that first night, and you, my origin, my essence. You are MY air. And because of me, you never got that dance with the devil, though you kept trying.
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I can't help but fear that tonight, you'll finally get your chance.


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Samantha Lucia (she/her) is a queer writer and photographer in the American South who works the seam of myth, the ancestral, and the body.    

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SHARE - Issue: 2.1 / October 2026