The Devil Alive in Jersey by Catherine Buck
“The Devil Alive in Jersey” by Catherine Buck is the winner of the CRAFT 2024 Dialogue Challenge.
In “The Devil Alive in Jersey,” Catherine Buck explores how a cautionary tale is constructed, how mythology is made. Through this poetic piece of dialogue-only flash fiction, Buck investigates the scary stories that haunted her childhood and adolescence—the rumors of a creature targeting children in her native New Jersey. Buck wonders, “What role did the community rumor mill play in turning a personal experience into an enduring urban legend?” To capture this sense of shared gossip, Buck curates a communal voice in her text. This narrative voice, consisting of an unspecified, ungendered mass of citizens, churns against itself with the energy, texture, and percussive voice of a real neighborhood full of conversation. Distinct tones weave and swerve within this communal voice, taking on the roles of witness and judge alike, reveling in the bittersweet allure of gossip. These voices within this community condemn the Leeds family even as they claim to sympathize with their misfortune, even as they dance around the foreboding sense that the misfortune that has befallen the Leedses can befall others too. Within the cacophony of overlapping voices, Buck shrewdly leaves the specifics of the discussion and the Leedses’ misfortune unclear, creating a monster and a fear that lives in the shadows of daily life. This ambiguity draws the reader in, inviting them to join the crowd and the community to “find meaning in filling in the gaps,” and to insert themselves into this riotous conversation. Now a part of this community, however, the reader must confront their own culpability in creating the stories and gossip that spiral through time, in creating the devils that are still alive in Jersey. —CRAFT
“She cursed that baby—”
“Her thirteenth, I heard, and who can blame her—”
“You can’t blame her for thinking it, but doing—”
“Who among us—”
“I wouldn’t—”
“That’s you, though, isn’t it?”
“You’re better than us?”
“You think she’s better than us?”
“Did you see the tracks?”
“I saw the wings.”
“I heard the screams.”
“My cow is dead—”
“A dog got your cow.”
“The devil got it—”
“We’re talking about a baby?”
“A monster—”
“Hush!”
“Oh Mother Leeds, ma’am,”
“You poor dear, how are you faring?”
“The little ones?”
“Of course, you come by soon—”
“Well.”
“Well, I never.”
“Did you see her smile?”
“How could she smile?”
“How could she come to market?”
“Does she think we’re stupid?”
“She must think—”
“Of course not, you have no sense—”
“Down at the school house, they said—”
“My husband heard—”
“I heard it myself, I’ll swear on it—”
“I saw the baby myself.”
“You what?”
“You’ve been holding back—”
“Tell us, tell us,”
“You can’t be serious?”
“Poor dear.”
“Poor Mister Leeds.”
“But that’s not all—”
“Wings of a bat—”
“Head of a goat—”
“Devil tail—”
“The devil itself—”
“The devil alive in Jersey.”
“You think that she…?”
“I don’t believe it.”
“After the four others? Burying those babies? And Mister Leeds, the way he—”
“You aren’t defending her?”
“I’m not condemning her.”
“Is that the only other option?”
“I think that—”
“What if it were yours?”
“Mine?”
“Any of us?”
“Nonsense.”
“I would never—”
“Hush now, here’s her eldest!”
CATHERINE BUCK lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University–Camden and was a member of the Tin House YA Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Cotton Xenomorph, Bending Genres, Vestal Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best Microfiction 2024. Find her @catherinebuck.bsky.social.
Featured image by Timothy Dykes, courtesy of Unsplash.
