Does the Devil Send Gifts?

She asks me over the phone—and I think of Pandora’s box, how it’s always the woman’s curiosity that wreaks havoc—not the maker of the box, but the one who releases it; for me, the fault lands on Zeus, always Zeus—and there’s that time there were flies lingering on my plate the day of my grandfather’s funeral, nothing but devil sent, I thought—and of course I never went back to that restaurant again—but have you seen the devil, at least in Bedazzled, God is a Black man and the devil a white woman in stilettos, and I’ve never seen better representation than that, because they’re sitting down for a game of chess, laughing while moving pawns and sipping espressos, and both are wearing white, because in that scene red would be too much of a cliché and I’m sure if we saw them we wouldn’t recognize them, and a gift that was definitely devil sent was a tape recorder I recorded myself saying bad words to when I was ten and then couldn’t delete so off to the garbage it went, and yes, I still feel guilty two decades later, and I really want to ask this lady what type of gift she means, maybe a colibrí outside her window telling her she needs to pour salt over her right shoulder for protection—colibrí means hummingbird but in my other language the word sounds so much better—and is that something the devil would say, I wonder, and I want to ask her even more, like do you think you’ll know if it’s a gift from the devil because he’s been around a lot longer than we have and how could you possibly tell, and I envision a gift on my porch wrapped in blue velvet and a tag that says to Victoria from the Devil in eighteenth-century penmanship, and I’d probably open it thinking it’s an ex-boyfriend trying to play a trick on me to find that inside there is nothing but air—that the box is the gift itself—and I realize I am still on the line, and if I say anything I want to say this might be a one-hour conversation or if I say the wrong thing, I’ll get reported, and well, they don’t pay me enough to answer questions about the devil so I take a breath and say all that’s expected of me: I don’t know, but I’ll pray for you.

VICTORIA BUITRON

Victoria Buitron is a writer and translator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Fairfield University. Her debut memoir-in-essays, A Body Across Two Hemispheres, is the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize winner and will be available in Spring 2022 by Woodhall Press.