Amber hit the brakes. Just a traffic light blinking red in the middle of nowhere, but the Devil would be here if he was anywhere. She pulled onto the shoulder, turned off the engine, and looked around. Nothing for miles but two highways coming together and a whole bunch of those big windmill things.
She went over again what her band teacher had said. He’d spent most of the period talking about Robert Johnson, some black dude who played guitar so good people accused him of selling his soul to the Devil at a crossroads.
She didn’t care about playing guitar. What impressed her was finding out she could trade her soul for something. Her mother was always telling her she was on the interstate to hell anyway. And Don kept saying the Devil was real.
Of course he was real. She had no idea if there was a God, but she knew there was a Devil. And now she knew where to find him.
Appeared in The Dos Passos Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2011)
Robert Rice 