The last time Dee was invited to a family Thanksgiving was when she was fourteen. It was held at one of her uncles’ homes. In a small suburb outside of San Jose, the Morenos clustered into the house—a tent erected in the backyard for the children. Dee was just old enough to merit a couch, but she elected to sleep outside with the other kids. She liked listening to the sound of the traffic and the neighbors, liked breathing in the air that smelled of sunlight and freshly mown grass.
There were about twelve cousins running around, and she found herself intimidated by their height and experience; they talked too quickly and used slang she didn’t know. There were three dogs: two large mutts that seemed cowed by another relative’s Pomeranian. Adults gathered in the kitchen, cracked open beers on the counter and argued jovially about whose turn it was to use the oven. Someone ended up cooking the turkey on the barbecue outside because there simply wasn’t enough room in the kitchen. One of Dee’s great-aunts kept asking for those “good, home-cooked rolls” and Dee watched her uncle pull out a tube of the instant-bake ones when he thought no one was looking.
The dinner was chaotic and loud and Dee liked it.
She ate with the other kids in the living room, with some cartoon on that she didn’t recognize. The adults carried dishes into the kitchen, made towers of dirty plates and did some creative rearranging in the refrigerator, trying to fit all of the leftovers.
As they worked, some of the men went out into the backyard to smoke cigars and open a bottle of something stronger than beer. Dee watched as they poured small tumblers of the brown liquid. Dread curled her stomach into knots; she talked a little more quickly, as if trying to outpace her own fears.
It was a family gathering. She was safe here, among the others.
That night, as dusk began to creep over the horizon, Dee was on the back porch with three cousins and the Pomeranian. They were tossing the dog little scraps of turkey—and every so often, they would try to sneak a brussels sprout in there. To the kids’ delight, the dog would chew it a few times, then spit the vegetable onto the porch. It was clear proof that mammals were never meant to eat such things, one of the cousins declared, and this set off laughter.
A shout broke into their conversation.
Dee cringed; she shrunk in on herself before she was even truly aware of the noise’s source.
A fight had broken out. Half-smoked cigars littered the lawn, and two men were at each other’s collars.
Dee did not need to see her father’s face to know he was one of them. The familiar bellow turned her blood to ice.
She never learned what the argument was about—it could have been anything from an old family argument to politics to which football team should have won the Super Bowl in ’87. That didn’t matter—what did matter was the argument itself. It was like setting a match to tinder.
She watched her father slam her uncle into the fence, heard the crack of the wood breaking. A snarl of profanity, tangled up with her uncle’s name.
Two men managed to break up the fight, yanking the brothers apart and coming to stand between them. “Stop it, Mark,” said one of them. “Walk it off.”
“You fucking walk it off,” snarled Mr. Moreno. And threw another punch.
Dee never saw if it connected; she was already walking quietly inside, to pick up her things. “Come back when he’s sober,” said her uncle.
Within an hour, she was sitting in the backseat of their car. Her mother was in the driver’s seat, and her father the passenger’s. At some point, his anger had burned itself to ashes, leaving him apologetic and weeping, trying to pull each of his brothers into a hug, only to find himself shrugged off.
It was a thirteen-hour drive back home; thirteen hours that dragged by, punctuated by her father’s sobs and the sound of the car’s fuzzy radio.
Dee sat in the backseat, headphones clamped firmly over her ears and a magazine on her lap. She tried to lose herself in the glossy pages, reading about makeup and clothing she didn’t truly care about. It was a distraction, and that was all she wanted.
She turned a page and saw the next headline: INTERVIEW WITH A DEMON.
Her mouth twisted into a frown. People were still obsessed with these things masquerading as demons. It was stupid—it wasn’t as if—
But then her eyes fell upon the picture. A woman, smiling at the camera, her blond hair carefully arranged around her perfect face. But it wasn’t a woman.
Dee looked down at the photograph, startled by the certainty settling within her. Not human. She couldn’t figure out what had changed—but something had. She knew it wasn’t human; she could see it in the lines of the woman’s face, in the curl of her mouth, in the too-perfect brightness of her eyes.
After that Thanksgiving, Dee had no trouble recognizing the demons. She thought something about them must have changed. Perhaps the demons decided to unveil themselves to more people. It wasn’t until years later that she understood the demons themselves hadn’t changed.
She had.