3.

The river gargles in the distance. You open your eyes slowly, lazily, and a huge shadow passes over your body. You look up and see back-bent bird-like legs. You’ve seen herons around here, near the river, but this thing is fucking huge, and its wings beating sounds like leather, not feathers.

Hooves? How the fuck can it have hooves?

Its red eyes remind you of a chittering pet rat’s, the bright eyes that your bestie said looked like Red Hots candies. Its horse-head jerks around, the bat wings arched up. You stand and slowly walk towards it, edging step by step, like you did with so many white-tailed deer in these woods growing up. The creature freezes.

“Shhh,” you say.

You recall the story from a 1909 Camden newspaper, reproduced in the pulpy Weird NJ magazine. It goes like this: They say that in the 1600s, a Quaker mother, Deborah Leeds, sweated, vomited, and writhed on a straw mattress, cursed the pain of 12 childbirths endured, and said, “The Devil take this child.” With these words, she forced a name on the creature who exited her body. Are you still her child if she exiled you from your first breath?

The creature called the Jersey Devil stands still, then bolts in the other direction, cracking small branches off trees as it escapes through a clearing in the forest.

“Do you have a name?” you wonder.