Tales From My Other Side

         When I was only about ten, I remember my demon taking control for the first time. I was feeding my fish after school one day, when I realized I was no longer in control of my hand. I watched it reach into the tank as if it belonged to someone else and grab the fish. I tried to put the fish back, but there was nothing I could do but watch as the hand – my hand – tightened on the fish until I heard a cracking noise. I came back to myself and couldn't even stand to open up my hand. I walked right to the toilet and flushed it without looking.
         I cried to my parents about how my fish had died and they comforted me, but I never mentioned how I killed it, or rather my hand had killed it. I thought I would get in trouble, and so I kept it as a secret.

         Some years later when I was in middle school the demon took over again. This time I was walking down the hall when it grabbed a smaller student by the throat and started choking him. I remember watching his face turn from confusion, to anger, to fear. The hand held with a grip I never would have had the strength for as it squeezed at his throat. I didn't even know the kid, sure I had seen him around the halls, but I didn't even know his name.
         A teacher came and pulled me off of him before anything too bad could happen, but the poor kid had marks on his neck for a week after. I was given detention and made to go to anger management courses. I was never angry at the boy though, just at my demon for what it made me do.

         It took control again in high school, after keeping quiet for a few years. I was sitting in social studies class when I felt my grip on my pencil tighten. I watched in horror as my hand raised the pencil and brought it down into the neck of the student sitting in the desk in front of me.
         She screamed. I screamed. I cried and apologized and tried to say it wasn't me, but other students had seen it. The guilt was clear as day as far as they were concerned. She ended up being ok after few weeks, but there was a time they weren't sure she would be. I was expelled and started working a menial factory job to support myself. I didn't want to live with my family anymore, I was afraid of what would happen to them. I stayed inside and kept to myself when I wasn't at work, and through all the safety regulations I figured I was in pretty decent shape. Plus, the guys who worked at this factory were tough, they could fend me off if they had to.

         Then, last night, it went too far. I was walking back home from work to my little studio apartment when a boy approached me on the street. He was small and young, looked like he couldn't be out of high school yet. He approached with a knife and demanded I hand over my wallet. With no hesitation, my hand grabbed the knife from him and plunged it into his right eye. He fell to the ground unmoving as I ran back to my apartment crying.
         It's been too much, I can't risk hurting anyone else. I took a knife from my kitchen drawer and held it to my throat. That's when, for the first time, I saw my demon. He has sickly green skin, like a decayed corpse, and long, slender limbs attached to a torso no bigger than that of an infant. He smiles with a lipless mouth and stares from eyes of pure milky yellow. He held the knife with me, and held my hand in place. He would not let me end it. We threw the knife across the room and I watched his body move in sync with my own. I locked myself in my room and piled everything I own against the front door. He's been taking control every few hours for only a few minutes at a time. He deconstructs part of my barricade then loses control. I regain it long enough to rebuild then write part of this journal. This has been going on since last night now, and I am afraid of what he will do when I finally have to sleep.