To Whom It May Concern

That summer the succubus struck my town, there was a frighteningly bad thunderstorm every Thursday night without fail. Funnel clouds that never touched down were spotted throughout the county on those nights. It lent the summer a regular pulse. The succubus was less predictable.

The news media called them “attacks” but I know they weren’t because I knew some people who got visited and didn’t report it.

People could barely handle the idea, but when it’s on the local evening news you somehow have to face the truth of a thing. It got so bad that the authorities ordered all lights be kept burning in residential homes at night. If a cop drove down your street and saw all your lights out they had a right to cite you.

And people did—turn out their lights, I mean. Those who heard the rumors and wanted to be attacked. Like me.

It was the end of July or the beginning of August. I forgot the exact date because after it—she—first appeared in the corner of my bedroom that night I couldn’t remember anything for a long time; didn’t much feel like remembering anything except the way she felt. After the second time I never looked at the calendar, not until that final ungodly storm that spawned seven tornadoes on September 3rd, 2007. I heard an awful peal of thunder and finally looked up at the television I had turned on and not watched. Brian Williams was just about to announce the top stories and there was the date splashed on the screen. And a second later, the power went out.

So why am I telling you now… why am I writing it down… You can ask these questions, it’s alright. You can look at me like I’m crazy. You aren’t the first.

I am telling it now because it’s been almost two years since that night, and the people on the local evening news, and the people I knew who didn’t report their encounters, and even the people talking at the meat counter or at Starbucks or Wal-Mart are starting to believe it was all just some mass hysteria, a shared hallucination fed by rumors and panic, brought on by all the repressed things that burn deep and lusty under this town’s most dour and mundane shell.

I do not want to end up thinking like them. I know it happened, it was real—and I want her to come back. I have never been happy since. No one has been able to reach me like she did, like we were the same person. And I know that incubi and succubi and any other kind of demon or angel are supposed to be myths, or parables, or hallucinations. Still. Still.

Ephba.
Kefna.
Ojess.

She had many names, she said. I was supposed to call her whatever name she felt like to me; and to me she felt like Charlotte. And so that was her name, too. She said another man called her Betty, another Wynona. She said a fortyish woman, never married, called her Myrna and tried to hold her in bed forever, clutched at her weeping when she left. And there was darkness she admitted to as well; a boy who didn’t want it, a girl who fought to the end. The only injuries she ever left were in the mind, but those were terrible enough. Did I say I loved her? I did not. Still. Still.

Still. I want her to return, no matter what it takes. The world is flaccid and dim these days, I move as a robot among stationary machines. I get poetic for no reason. I get hard with the thought of death. Say Ephba, say Kefna, say Ojess, Ojess.

Say Charlotte, won’t you come home to me now?

A front is moving across the map; local evening weathermen sweat against the blue screens. A red line with jagged teeth roves across the Great Lakes, bears down on the little village. She is hungry again, and I sit here half-eaten. The western horizon oozes dark orange, the north is a mass of black. It’s mounting hair. I sit here, half-naked, eating a thick peach. My lights are never, ever turned on.

I am a robot with lights for eyes. I close them tight, and wait.