(from the January 2011 residency)

I once had a roommate who decided I was Satan.  The weird part was that she didn’t seem to mean it in a bad way.  We got along well – which perhaps says something about her – and she never accused me of being evil or malicious.  She only called me Satan once in a while, in place of my own name, and sometimes pointed out my “real” identity in conversation with others, in case they didn’t know.

When we saw Bart Simpson greet the Devil with a wave and a “hey,” she spent weeks gleefully imitating his wave and “hey.”  She even took to singing “say ‘hey’ to the Devil” first.

I bring this up for two reasons.  First, she was not the first person in my life to do such a thing.  Second, at the last residency Satan was connected with me again.

I started working on my thesis this semester, which meant setting up my first thesis meeting.  I was fortunate enough on the day we all arrived to spot someone else scheduling hers, so I quickly got in line and put my name down on Bruce’s calendar.  He wrote my name on his printed class schedule, reinforcing it to for legibility over the words “directed reading.”

We now skip ahead to dinner the next night, when I returned to the table with my dessert to find Bruce, cornered by three or four of his other thesis students who needed their own meetings.  One of these worthies, looking at Bruce’s calendar from an odd angle, saw the “S”, “t” and “n” in my name and said, “Is that Satan?”

Bruce looked up at me with a huge smile, but alas I was not in a position to hear what he said.  I wish I had, because the man has a ready wit.  When it was clarified that the appointment was mine, the jokes did not stop because no one seemed surprised that the confusion has happened before.

Of the jokes that followed, my favorite was the idea that my deep voice scares random people on the phone.  The joker in question shoved her voice down a register or two and said, “Hello?” then hunched in on herself, eyebrows crinkled together and mouth pinched closed before she said, after swallowing audibly, “Is this . . . Satan?”

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This week I submitted stories to The Crab Creek Review, Weird Tales, and Per Contra, and I queried Spirituality and Health magazine about an essay I wrote.

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