Melissa Darcey Hall

The Body is a Hungry Beast

Mira didn’t know just how easy it was to fake an exorcism until she met Katja. Sure, there was a learning curve, but it came natural to her.

“I told you it was the best feeling in the world. You give into the body and let it throw a fit until it gets what it wants,” Katja explained between sips of her sidecar, the bowl of the coupe glass sweating from the warmth of the crowded, air-conditionless bar. “It’s a hungry beast of a thing, the body.”

Mira and Katja were celebrating the success of their first bachelor party, the men thoroughly shook by Katja’s dramatic eviction of the demon inside of Mira. When they called the bride-to-be to give her the summary of events—and how the groom worried the holy water might stain the carpet of the hotel suite and started crying—they all laughed.

“That totally sounds like something Kevin would say. His greatest fear is losing a refundable deposit,” the bride-to-be said. “I almost feel bad about all this. Great work!”

She Venmoed Katja the $500 fee, plus a $100 tip, and promised she’d refer friends her way.

“To men, and the women who worry they’ll cheat!” Katja raised her glass.

“And my demon body!” Mira shouted, tapping her glass against Katja’s.

That night, Mira collapsed into bed, her limbs heavy and muscles sore from the evening’s events. Even fake exorcisms did a number on the body. Hooking up with her coworker Matt, who she’d run into at the bar, didn’t help, and she’d probably regret it in the morning. Tonight, she was too exhausted to care. She reminded herself to do some crunches or push-ups or both before the next exorcism; maybe bridges to improve the flexibility of her spine for a more dramatic arch mid-demon spasm. She fell asleep before she could plan the rest of her workout routine, Matt beside her snoring into the pillow.

*

Mira first met Katja at a reading for a collection of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s diaries from her teen years. Mira admired Millay’s poetry; Katja loved the idea of reading someone else’s secrets and confessions. They were the only two attendees under the age of fifty, making it impossible for them not to notice each other in the sea of oatmeal cardigans that reeked of White Diamonds perfume.

Katja immediately captivated Mira. She didn’t know if it was curiosity, attraction, or both. Katja had a curtain of dark curly hair that dusted the top of her breasts and fair skin made all the fairer by her all-black outfit. Instead of a purse, she carried a canvas tote that read I WENT TO AN ABORTION CLINIC AND ALL I GOT WAS BODY AUTONOMY, PROFESSIONAL CARE FROM A DOCTOR, AND THE RESPECT I DESERVE AS A HUMAN BEING. She looked like Snow White if Snow White had gone through a rebellious phase; the type of person who would pierce her nipples at a party, just for fun. She was everything that Mira—a wallflower of a redhead with, according to her last boyfriend, a dozen too many freckles—wasn’t.

The two made small talk and covered the usuals: their jobs and rising rent costs, their hopes for a college loan forgiveness plan to kick in soon, their fears of the return of low-rise jeans. A few glasses of free wine made it easy to confuse a new acquaintance with an old friend. After the reading, Mira agreed to Katja’s offer to grab drinks at a bar down the street.

“So, Mira.” Katja placed two sidecars on the table. “I’m very intuitive—some might even say clairvoyant—and my intuition tells me we’re going to be good friends.”

Mira sipped her drink, uncertain how to respond. Was this how adult friendships started? At thirty years old, she still hadn’t figured it out. Most of her friends were from college; the kind she didn’t really see anymore, but texted every few months. The relationships no longer served a purpose, but they felt like keeping an old baby blanket long past its use—comforting, even if too sad to admit to anyone.

“That said, I’m here to propose something to you,” Katja continued.

Concise and to-the-point, she spoke as if reciting an elevator pitch that she’d practiced in the mirror: she performed exorcisms at bachelor parties and needed a new partner.

“Not real exorcisms, of course. I perform fake ones on a partner who has a fake demon in her.”

Women hired Katja for their fiancé’s bachelor party. Katja and her partner showed up as the entertainment, flirted with the men, and then pretended there was a demon present. The bride-to-be considered it relationship insurance. Her future husband would freak out and assume it must be a message from God that he should never betray his wife.

“The men actually believe you?” Mira asked.

“I tell them my uncle was a priest and taught me how to perform exorcisms.”

Wouldn’t the men have questions? Like, why would a stripper carry holy water with her? How did her uncle feel about her line of work? Was he disappointed in her life choices? Katja insisted the men never asked questions. The alcohol mixed with adrenaline and horniness made them gullible. That, along with a bossy woman in a miniskirt and another wriggling on the ground, fed the epinephrine.

“Some of them cry. It’s great,” Katja said.

And she had the reviews to back it. She was a hit in the underground wedding planning industry. Apparently, an entire black market for weddings existed for those wanting white tigers at the reception or ivory-handled butter knives as party favors. The not-so-kosher stuff.

“The problem is that my partner just moved across the country to pursue a career as a ventriloquist. It’s possible for me to do these things alone, but then it’s just a good old-fashioned demonic possession, which isn’t my specialty.”

“What would I have to do? For the exorcism?” Mira asked.

“You’d be the possessed, and I would be your exorcist,” Katja said.

“Is it painful?”

“A fake exorcism is the most liberating feeling. It’s like simultaneously controlling and releasing your body all at once. It’s like healing every wound your body has ever experienced. If you’ve ever felt like your body has betrayed you, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

Mira swallowed the last of her drink and traced the ring of condensation on the table, a perfectly round globe smaller than her palm. She knew exactly what Katja was talking about.

“I’ll do it,” Mira smiled.

*

Katja embraced Mira as both her partner-in-exorcism and friend. It reminded Mira of friendships from her youth, when a favorite color or shared interest in horses was enough to secure the holy title of BFF. They developed an immediate comfort with each other, as if they’d known each other for years. Maybe Katja was clairvoyant. The more Mira spent time with Katja, the more she trusted everything she said.

On paper, Katja resembled Mira: thirty, saddled with college debt from an impractical degree (Philosophy for Katja; Classics for Mira), and in a job most would consider appropriate only for aimless college students who hadn’t figured out yet they needed to settle down if they ever wanted a 401(k) and decent medical insurance. But in reality, Katja couldn’t be more different from Mira.

Katja was one of those people who made money without a consistent job. Along with the exorcism gig, she moonlighted at a local florist shop, conducted tarot readings on Zoom, and sold her own pottery at farmers’ markets (mostly kitsch smoking pipes that resembled rolls of Smarties and Neccos). She wore the same pair of underwear two days in a row to avoid the laundromat. In public, she pointed out ugly babies and openly admitted she would never have children. And whether she was wearing sweatpants or a leather miniskirt, she seemed to accept her body as is. Mira had watched how she looked at herself in the mirror, and it was clear Katja liked what she saw, even if it’d been a week since she last shaved her legs or the cut on her arm from a gardening accident was still puffy and scabbed.

Mira, on the other hand, worked as a hostess at a trendy wine bar at which she could never afford to eat and owed thousands of dollars in medical bills she racked up years ago. The apartment she rented with a ghost of a roommate she only saw once every few weeks felt empty and dim compared to Katja’s maximalist studio.

But the biggest difference was their confidence, or Mira’s lack thereof. Mira’s palms gathered pools of sweat at the very idea of others watching her. Her relationship with a mirror was tenuous at best and masochistic at worst. Every day, she took stock of her flaws, visible or not. She hated the softness of her stomach, the dimples on her thighs, the freckles littering her arms. Most of all, she loathed the wounds and scars she couldn’t see; the internal ones that hid underneath her skin, like her missing appendix, her scarred Fallopian tubes, her multiple uterine abnormalities. They taunted her, as if to say, see? There’s nothing here for anyone but you to bear.

When Mira expressed her fear of performing in front of a crowd, that the very idea made her anxious, Katja squeezed her hand like a doting mother.

“Kierkegaard called anxiety the dizziness of freedom. It’s the fear of knowing we have complete free will to make whatever decision we want. The only cure for anxiety is to accept that you are in control,” Katja lectured. “Let’s start right now with your body.”

They were at Katja’s apartment for Mira’s fourth and final exorcism training. They had their first bachelor party performance scheduled for the following weekend. Mira had mastered the collapse (the trick was grabbing onto something, such as a chair or wall, to aid in her fall). She’d memorized her lines (they each had signals to notify the other when they were ready. Mira would say “I’m feeling a bit strange.”). And she’d learned the signs of a proper recovery (exhaustion and an urge to pray for the washing away of sins, such as unfaithfulness and poor decision-making).

This week’s training focused on the hardest part: the convulsions. While Katja flicked water on Mira’s face and mumbled a chant in Latin, Mira flailed on the floor.

“Your body has turned on you. Fight to regain control. Don’t let some asshole demon do what it wants with you,” Katja instructed, while Mira wriggled like a battle rope. “Push! Arch your back!”

Mira shoved her chest to the sky, grabbed onto the shag carpet with splayed arms, and threw her head back.

“Te libero!” Katja hissed, which cued Mira to collapse and then wake, five seconds later, as if from a daze. “Congratulations, you have completed Katja Olsen’s exorcism training.”

“Was that too porn star-ish?” Mira asked, still on the floor, elbows digging into the rough carpet. She picked at a piece of crud uniting two carpet fibers.

“No way. Just slutty enough. It’s a bachelor party, after all.”

Katja grabbed Mira’s hands and pulled her to her feet. Mira rubbed her lower back. It really was a kind of workout; sort of like a New Age Pilates.

“If your body can survive an exorcism, you can handle anything. You’re stronger than you think,” Katja said.

Mira nodded. For the first time in years, her body felt strong and whole.

*

Katja maintained a consistent plan for every bachelor party: show up an hour after it started. By that point, the men were already drunk or fast approaching. Katja and Mira announced themselves as a gift from the bride-to-be—one last night of poor decisions as a single man. Katja liked to keep their names and costumes in rotation to avoid any potential Reddit threads on stripper cowgirls being exorcised. For Mira’s debut, they dressed as English governesses from the Victorian era. Mira was Helen and Katja was Jane.

“Will they get the Brontë reference?” Mira asked, pressing on the skirt of her black velvet minidress. It barely covered her ass. Katja said it made up for the high neckline.

“No. All they’ll care about is our little ruler for slapping their hands when they’re being naughty boys,” Katja said, lacing up her heeled boots.

Once at the party, Katja and Mira mingled for thirty minutes. The men flirted with them; they flirted back. Katja was right—confidence was a lot easier when playing a role. A demon was crawling around inside her; the dimples on her thighs were far from her thoughts.

“Helen, are you feeling okay?” Katja cupped Mira’s shoulder.

It was time.

“I’m feeling a bit strange.” Mira touched her forehead and collapsed to the ground, releasing a guttural scream.

Like a siren song, the men circled around her. Mira lay in the center of the hotel suite, the thin, commercial carpet unforgiving against her spine. When she opened her eyes, six men gazed down at her. The groom-to-be started hyperventilating and reached a hand toward Mira.

“Don’t touch her!” Katja shouted, pulling out a vial of holy water (really, it was just water with some essential oils) and a silver cross from her bag. “Helen has struggled with a demonic presence for years, ever since she cheated on her boyfriend. Something’s awakened it tonight. I need to expel it.”

“Is this a joke?” one man laughed.

Mira screamed again and writhed on the ground, digging her nails into the floor. “Does this look like a joke?” Katja snapped. “My uncle’s a priest. I’ve performed exorcisms with him before. Looks like I’m flying solo tonight.”

The men fell silent. Some chewed on their nails while others pulled at an errant lock of hair, but all of them stared at Mira, waiting.

Mira closed her eyes. Performing in front of an audience differed from rehearsing in Katja’s apartment. It was too much seeing them watch. Her heart kicked her chest like little demon feet attempting to break free. Her hand roved across the surface of her stomach like a hound sniffing for a cadaver.

“Helen, are you with us?” Katja asked, the cue for Mira to begin step two: the demonic possession.

Mira moaned and twisted on the floor. She imagined a demon pythoning through her body, suffocating her internal organs, lacerating her arteries, poisoning her bloodstream. Her body was prey to be devoured unless she fought back.

Mira writhed, her legs and arms pulsing, her lungs expanding and contracting. She would fight, she would fight, she would fight. If her body was an orchestra, then she was the conductor, and each organ and muscle would respond to every flick of her baton. When she demanded her back to arch, her spine curled. When she wanted to kick, her legs flailed. And when she wanted to scream, she released a battle cry. Every movement felt natural, as though her body had hungered for this all her life.

She opened her eyes. The roving eyes of the men were far from her mind. Let them watch, she thought. Let them see what she was capable of. Katja flicked holy water onto Mira’s torso, and Mira imagined a warm oil seeping into her body, curing her of everything that had once tried to destroy her.

“Te libero!” Katja shouted.

Mira collapsed, took a beat, and rose from a heady daze. Her hands marched across her stomach and felt the vast wasteland of nothing.

“Jane,” Mira spoke in a near whisper, but it was loud enough to fill the room.

The men released a communal sigh, clawed at their chests like grandmothers clutching their pearls.

A man helped Mira rise to stand. “I’m so happy you’re alright.”

“You were so brave, so strong,” another offered.

“I think we should call it a night,” the groom-to-be finally spoke. His face looked drained of life as he wiped his palms against his pant leg.

Katja and Mira exchanged a smile. Their work here was done.

*

Matt was still asleep when Mira woke up. She slipped out of bed, determined not to wake him until she got a good look at herself. Her body felt heavy. In the mirror, she saw a few bruises freckling her arms. She didn’t mind; she considered it a battle wound. Life looked a lot different after surviving an exorcism, even a fake one. Imagine if a demon had been inside her? And now Katja had healed her. If only it were that easy to fix broken things.

“Hey.” Matt yawned, his eyes half open as he sat up in bed.

“Hey,” Mira mumbled. She hadn’t done this one-night-stand kind of thing enough times for it not to feel awkward.

“Shit.” He inspected the deflated condom on the floor. “I think it broke.”

“It’s fine. I’m on the pill,” Mira lied.

“Thank God,” he sighed.

“No offense,” he added, a beat too late.

“It’s fine,” Mira said, gesturing to the front door. She had no interest in procreating with another redhead who had rosacea and a weak chin, anyway.

After Matt left, she assessed her naked body in the mirror again, feeling the graveyard of her abdomen. She used to think there was a Victorian romance to fragility. In college, her first serious boyfriend, Ivan, played the role of the hero. For their first date, he drove her home from the hospital after one of her ovarian cysts ruptured. When her doctor diagnosed her with endometriosis, she cried on Ivan’s shoulder. After she had a constellation of endometrial polyps removed, he gave her a card that said “I love polyp you, even the parts that are gone.” And when she woke up from laparoscopic surgery, he held her hand and assured her things would be better now.

But then Mira got pregnant. They were recent college graduates, living in a shitty studio apartment. She had just secured her hostess job while Ivan applied to law school. He was relieved Mira wanted an abortion, but a week before the appointment, she miscarried. After a few appointments and scans, the doctor diagnosed her with a hostile uterus.

“Is that the medical term for it?” Mira had asked.

“Sometimes we call it an inhospitable womb, if you prefer that,” the doctor said, all without looking up from his computer screen. His fingers dashed across the keyboard with a kind of furious speed usually reserved for writing a negative Yelp review.

Even after all those surgeries and procedures, her body had become a wasteland. The pregnancy was an anomaly; she had little chance of ever carrying to term. Even worse, the laparoscopic surgery hadn’t worked—she still experienced periods that rivaled hurricanes, that immobilized her for days. Mira felt broken and deceived, as if all the parts of her body had conspired against her.

The doctor’s news didn’t bother Ivan. He didn’t want kids. Mira didn’t think she wanted them either, but it didn’t seem fair her body would decide for her. She needed to prove the doctor wrong, that her body wasn’t hostile or inhospitable, so she stopped taking her birth control.

When Ivan caught on to Mira’s plan (he found a couple of pregnancy tests in their trash can), he broke up with her. He said it wasn’t just the deception; they wanted different things.

What he really meant was that he no longer wanted to watch her mourn her body. He didn’t understand why Mira couldn’t accept things as they were.

“That’s easy for you to say,” Mira said. “Your body isn’t intent on destroying itself like some rabid beast gnawing on an infected limb.”

“Maybe you don’t get to decide what your body wants,” he shrugged.

“How very Texas Republican of you,” Mira clapped.

They didn’t speak again.

Like Ivan, Matt seemed like a pro-abortion kind of guy. Mira would take a pregnancy test in a few weeks, just to be safe, but she knew the results already. In the past, this would devastate her, and she’d wonder what else her body could destroy. She’d learned the hard way there was no romance in fragility; but today, looking in the mirror and tracing the map of her stomach with her finger, she felt at peace. Her body had served her well last night, and she craved the next time she could give in to all its desires.

*

At work, Matt avoided Mira for the next two weeks. Mira knew he worried she might think they were boyfriend and girlfriend. He was cocky in the way many twenty-something guys with a full head of hair were; certain that any woman with whom they slept would attach themselves like discarded gum to a shoe sole. That night, Mira told Katja she was thinking about asking him about his parents just to freak him out.

“God, I love it,” Katja said between bites of pineapple pizza. “Do it.” In the background, The Craft played on TV.

“Chris is the worst,” Katja spoke again as Skeet Ulrich’s character appeared on screen. “This is why it’s fun to fake an exorcism at a party of meatheads. The minute those kind of guys realize they’re not in control or can’t get what they want, they lose their shit.”

Mira wondered if Katja felt the same freedom she did during the exorcisms; the autonomy of every movement, the liberation from all expectations. As the exorcist, Mira could tell Katja loved the theater of it all, the ability to command a crowd, chanting Latin phrases and admiring the way the men feared her power. Normally, Katja was abrasive around unfamiliar men; at bachelor parties, she flirted. If Mira hungered for power over her body, Katja craved power over everything else.

“Is that why you started the exorcisms? Did someone try to hurt you?” Mira asked.

“Puh-lease, Mira,” Katja rolled her eyes. “Society always needs to cast men at the center of every woman’s plot. Doing these exorcisms to get revenge on men is like thinking The Craft is about Sarah trying to get over Chris. I do them for me.”

“Okay, confession time,” Mira sighed, warm from two glasses of wine.

She told Katja about Ivan, about trying to get pregnant to regain control of her body to prove to the doctor her body wasn’t hostile or inhospitable.

Katja was horrified.

“Hostile? Inhospitable? Those are the exact terms society uses for women who don’t adhere to gender norms. Besides, you already have control of your body.”

That night, watching Sarah in The Craft invoke the spirits to heal herself and fight back, Mira realized Katja was right. Sarah knew what kind of person she was and used that to overcome her other weaknesses, ultimately discovering her true power and not letting anyone or anything take it away.

Over the next few months, Katja and Mira booked six bachelor parties. At each party they took on new names, new stories, new costumes. They were dancers and law school students and accountants. Mira experimented with new moves, made demonic noises, and, at the end of every exorcism, felt as though her body had healed. The cramps in her abdomen and heavy throbbing in her lower back still arrived every month with her period, but they didn’t paralyze her. She wasn’t sure what was in Katja’s fake holy water, but Mira’s skin glowed. By the fourth month, she could feel a speed bump of muscle building in her arms, a tender press of abs scratching at her core. In the mirror, she placed her right hand on her pelvis and felt the silence not of a wasteland but of peace.

*

On the eve of Mira’s sixth-month anniversary working with Katja, they had their biggest bachelor party yet. Most of the parties they attended were local and intimate affairs in the city—a hotel suite with a half dozen men. This one was thirty miles outside the city at a cabin in the woods with twenty of the groom-to-be’s closest friends in attendance. The stakes were higher than ever, but Mira felt confident.

“The bride-to-be comes from money and her future husband comes from a long line of wandering eyes, so we have to put the fear of God in this one,” Katja said, her hand digging into a near-empty bag of Doritos.

Mira nodded as she rearranged the too-big cups of her dress. They were Lena and Elsa, German Oktoberfest barmaids, with pigtails and all.

“Are you sure this isn’t cultural appropriation?” Mira asked.

“As long as they see some cleavage, I doubt they’ll care.” Katja snorted.

Other than the larger crowd, the party was like the others. The energy always shifted when Katja and Mira arrived, like an ensemble of elevated heartbeats and plummeting inhibitions. Katja searched for the groom-to-be while Mira took a lap around the room.

And then Mira saw him. Ivan. “I love polyp you” guy.

Even after all these years, Mira still recognized his gruff and scratchy baritone voice. He was talking to a group of three other men, twisting a thick black wedding band around his finger.

“Everyone says the second one is easier, but that’s a total lie,” he said. “Michael’s eight years old now, and he’s not keen on having a little sister. This is my first night out since Calista was born seven weeks ago.”

Mira listened a little longer. Ivan had recently moved to a gated community because of the acclaimed school district. He hoped to take the family on vacation the following summer. Rent a beach house and play board games and eat saltwater taffy. Everything he’d told Mira he never wanted.

Mira didn’t realize she’d laughed so loud until Ivan turned around. He caught her eye and his lower lip dropped.

“Mira?”

Mira used to fantasize about running into him again; that he’d see her and regret the breakup, that he’d remember his promise to love all of her, even the broken parts. But looking at him now—a suburban husband and father of two wearing khakis—she realized he’d been right. They wanted different things. He’d figured out what he wanted, and Mira had, too. She scanned the room for Katja, caught her eye, and nodded.

“Elsa, are you okay?” Katja said, just loud enough to quiet the room.

Mira looked at Ivan watching her, at the men watching, at Katja watching. It was her move, and she knew exactly what she wanted, what her body craved.

“Lena, I’m feeling a bit strange,” she said, dropping to the floor.

By now, her body knew the routine. Her legs kicked, her arms spread, her back arched. She could feel every muscle pounding, every bone electrified, every vein pulsing. She was alive, her body vibrating with vitality. Her eyes shot open and caught Ivan’s gaze. His mouth crumbled into a pained expression, but he couldn’t look away, couldn’t turn away, couldn’t move a single foot. Mira wouldn’t let him.

She matched his look of horror with a smile and released a whisper of a laugh that only he would hear, that she imagined would haunt him for weeks. And then she released him, closing her eyes so she could be alone with herself; she had no need for Ivan, no need for the room full of men, for anything. Her body, that hungry beast of a thing, had everything it wanted, and she bathed in the pleasure of knowing it.

Melissa Darcey Hall is a writer and high school English teacher in San Diego, California. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast Journal, phoebe, Nimrod, Fugue, and elsewhere. View more of her work at www.melissadarceyhall.com.