The Fall of Me

They say that Lucifer was the most beautiful angel. 

They say his silver tongue turned a legion against their creator,

That his face launched a thousand burning souls from their place

 in the heavens, to the pits of hell. I felt a pit in my stomach when I 

found out my grandmother was confined to a single floor of her house,

 unable to walk the stairs. She couldn’t go outside with her cigarettes,

so her smoke billowed out of her second floor window. My whole life

 I watched the smoke choke her as it flew from her throat, and I saw

 decades of lies fly with it.So when the man in the driver’s seat asked,

 “Do you mind?” I was shocked to hear myself say no, shocked to see 

myself rapt by the hand that first flicked a streak of golden hair from his

 face, then brought that awful thing to pursed lips. I have never felt so

 guilty as when the cloud of brimstone and stinking sulfur left his lips,

 and I thought it made him irresistible. The man who changed my mind

 on so many things, who represented everything I wasn’t, and a

 few things I hated. I could not help but think of him three years later,

 when I finally succumbed to the allure of his smoke I spent twenty

 years avoiding. I felt the heat within my chest, hellfire making its

 way directly into my body, and I thought that somewhere

 he might be laughing. Of course he wasn’t. He was

 a demon only to me. I’m sure he was unaware

 of how he tempted me to put aside everything

 I’d known for a slim chance at him,

 that he would have been mortified

 if he knew. But even so,

 He was my Lucifer. 

Beautiful.

By Ricky Birchfield