Pandora's Box

• Stephanie Johnston, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2009

Demons. The supernatural beings that are usually described as malevolent spirits; fallen angels if you like. They are the ones who were shunned by God and fled into the alluring arms of Lucifer. They are the ones who retain the ability to show a human face but not the emotions because of the lessons of God. And thus they are the ones who plagued humanity when the doors of hell were thrown open and God fell...

I cannot remember what it was like to be human. I’ve been a demon for so long that it’s all I’ve come to recognise. At times I fool myself into believing that I was born this way, that I had always been the scourge of the living, the friend to the dead. That’s when the memories come flooding back, the emotions, and I am sucked in. They are so vivid, so...in control that I feel lost inside them. They are absolutely wrong in every sense yet they feel so right. The pain of when I fell over and scraped my knee; the love when I married the man of my dreams; the fear when I saw the black smoke rising out of the ground. And then they stop and a name comes to the tip of my tongue. I say it a few times, rolling it around in my mouth trying to taste where I’ve heard it before; where I’ve said it. And then it’s gone, replaced by my own name...the name I was given when I first had that breath of death. Pandora.

I live in a world that once held the plague of humanity. The disgusting vermin that God created as his play-thing for when he got bored with toying with his angels. Lucifer led the charge against this terrible world. He was the one who broke through the gates of hell and released the Army of the Dead onto humanity. When the plague of pink flesh had been controlled he marched on the gates of heaven and this time God fell. The day of Revolution was upon us as God himself had foreseen yet he had not been prepared for the rage contained inside of the angels he had shunned. Heaven was destroyed and Hell conquered.

With Lucifer’s plans to expand Hell, as the demon of violence I had everything to gain. Yet my foolishness still prevailed. In the isolation of Hell I kept a box of humanity for my own pleasure and in an instant I became like that which I had sought to over throw and my own ignorance of what I had captured brought me to my knees. I had taken an angel with me and that action of keeping a box brought the end to the demon reign. The angel got stronger and broke free and set loose hope and the wrath of God before his attentions turned to me. He placed his right hand on my forehead and I saw and I felt...everything.