Bourbon Penn #38, April 2026
The story is narrated by an unnamed woman living in Los Angeles who observes, with skeptical detachment, the unraveling of her childhood friend Jenn Ryan. The opening establishes that Jenn has made the news, photographed in a retro disguise modeled on the mother from The Exorcist and apparently connected to a police investigation surrounding her missing daughter, Natasha. The narrator reflects on Jenn’s lifelong obsession with the occult — Tarot cards, Ouija boards, horror stories passed off as truth — and notes, with dry affection, that Jenn was always the first one invited to a party.
The narrator’s entry into the story’s central world comes through Angela, a well-off acquaintance from church who approaches her after mass to announce that her daughter Annabelle has been repeatedly exorcised. Far from ashamed, Angela speaks of exorcism as a routine wellness practice — a lifestyle, she insists, not a cure — and invites the narrator to attend a session at her Hancock Park home. The gathering feels more like a book club than a ritual: almond cake, fashionable guests, solemn affect. The exorcism itself is anticlimactic. Annabelle sweats and growls theatrically while a young priest chants Latin and flicks holy water. The narrator is bored rather than frightened and slips out early. Angela catches her leaving and, rather than accusing, offers a quiet warning: the narrator is lucky she doesn’t have daughters.
Drawn by concern for Natasha rather than belief in the supernatural, the narrator brings pumpkin bread to Jenn’s modest Larchmont house the next day. What she finds is genuinely alarming. Natasha lies in her bedroom emaciated, bruised, bloodied, and delirious, wheezing in an inexplicable cold. The narrator’s instinct is medical intervention, but Jenn resists. Natasha, she explains, is not possessed but obsessed — she has fallen entirely under the spell of a figure she believes will make her Queen of Hell. Jenn’s framing is almost romantic: she speaks of it the way one talks about a daughter lost to an unsuitable lover. The narrator notices, with mounting dread, that the kitchen table is laid out with wedding favors — handcrafted coffin-shaped boxes filled with devil charms — and a dark chocolate cake surrounded by white anemones. Jenn presses an invitation into her hand, then confides that she herself intends to go with Natasha and her groom, having already burned a crucifix and destroyed her religious keepsakes to prove her loyalty.
The wedding takes place that afternoon in Jenn’s backyard garden. Guests dressed in black watch as Jeff carries the barely conscious Natasha out on a velvet chaise. Then the garden gate opens with a metallic shriek. A blinding light prevents anyone from seeing clearly, but the narrator glimpses height, dark robes, and an exposed black heart before the figure sweeps Natasha away in fire and smoke. Whether it was real, a hallucination, or something else, no one can say.
In the aftermath, the narrator and other witnesses are caught between incompatible languages — legal, medical, theological — none of which can adequately name what they saw. Theories of murder, trafficking, and mass delusion circulate. The narrator feels a shapeless guilt, the sense of having failed something she cannot define. She slipped away without speaking to Jenn, squeezed her hand and promised to call, and hasn’t. The story closes in a kind of stunned paralysis: not disbelief, exactly, but an inability to translate witness into testimony, or grief into action.
Jan Stinchcomb is the author of Verushka (JournalStone), The Kelping(Unnerving), The Blood Trail (Red Bird Chapbooks) and Find the Girl (Main Street Rag). Her stories have appeared in Bourbon Penn, SmokeLong Quarterly and Menacing Hedge, among other places. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she is featured in Best Microfiction 2020 and The Best Small Fictions 2018 & 2021. She has worked as an editor for Paper Dartsand Atticus Review and as a columnist for Luna Station Quarterly. Based in California, she refuses to choose between the sea, the forest and the city.