Idle Hands

      My sister Linda, her friend Rochelle, and I are in Linda’s bedroom – red shag
carpet cream furniture with fake antique handles, the walls textured, thick with
layers of white paint. Heavy red curtains hide autumn sun, the kind of drapes you
open with a rope and pulley system, a dozen sharp metal hooks we’re forbidden to
touch.
      We’re huddled around a French telephone, its elegant mouthpiece
curved like an ivory horn.
      "Just do it, already,” Linda commands.
      “You do it. It’s your idea,” I say.
      Rochelle laughs through her nose. She’s lying on her side, propped up on one
arm, fingering the three-inch mass of neon jelly bracelets on her wrist. “You’re
scared,” she says.

“I am not!” I insist. I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor, inspecting the shiny
pennies in my cordovan loafers. My mother taught me that color – cordovan. It
looks like burgundy to me.

We’re trying to prove a rumor going around our elementary school: if you dial
666 on your telephone, the devil will answer.

“Not necessarily the devil himself,” Rochelle specifies. “You could get one of
his helpers.” She tugs on her chewing gum until it breaks, snapping her chin, a
sticky string of pale pink dangling.

“The devil has helpers?” I ask. “Like Santa’s elves?”

"Sure, something like that," Linda says, giving Rochelle a look, as if to say
she's impossible mimicking my mother’s expression when I ask too many questions.

“Okay, but what do I say when he picks up?” I need to know.

“Just say, sorry, wrong number,” Rochelle says.

I imagine telephone lines sleeping in the ground, red and yellow and black,
spider-like fingers stretched beneath earth. The devil sits in a leather chair,
somewhere in hell. I grab the receiver from its pearly cradle, and dial.

Karen Dietrich’s writing has appeared in Nerve, Tarpaulin Sky, The Henniker Review, and the anthology Who’s Your Mama (Soft Skull Press, 2009). She lives in Pennsylvania.