Friday Flash - The Devil Wants Your Small Change

Some stories require very little introduction...

The Devil Wants Your Small Change


Late last year, the Devil decided to stop asking for souls and start asking for small change instead. This wasn’t any kind of fiscally motivated decision. Despite what you might have read in your red top newspapers, the recession hasn’t yet hit Hell. The Netherworld is doing pretty well from all those conniving bankers, corrupt politicians and Facebook philanderers, thank you very much. Takings were up 30,050% in the last quarter alone. Maybe that was part of the problem.

The truth was, the Devil was sick of taking souls. Not only were they starting to clutter up Hell (and Hell was infinite, so just imagine how many it takes to clutter the place up), there was little challenge to it any more. People would sell you their soul as soon as look at you these days. For a shot on The X-Factor, for two weeks in Magaluf with a Page 3 Stunner, for a mild win on the bingo, for a blowjob and a Kit Kat. Everybody had a price, and the price just kept going down. There was no value to souls any more. Small change though – nobody’d give up their small change. Not without a fight.

The Devil discovered this to his chagrin late one Saturday afternoon outside the bus station in Carlisle. He was supposed to be catching a bus to Barrow to meet an Archduke of the Nephilim, but he ended up 85p short for the price of his ticket. He really shouldn’t have had that extra pint with his lunch in Wetherspoons. The late afternoon lethargy was already setting in. He couldn’t even be bothered arguing with the bus driver or consigning him for eternity to the Fourth Circle. Instead, he got off the bus and decided to try asking one of the locals for the 85p he needed to complete his journey.

Obviously the Devil doesn’t like to be recognised when he’s using public transport, so he wasn’t dressed as himself this particular Saturday. He’d left the horns, the cape and the pitchfork back home and put on some jeans and a moth-eaten Fair Isle sweater his mum had given him for his birthday back in 1823, ditching the whole red skin and brimstone thing for a rather pasty, unshaven look. He badly needed a haircut too, but his favourite barber had won the keys to Heaven from St. Peter in a poker game and the Devil was having a "himself" of a time persuading Barney to bring his scissors back down to the fiery regions, even for half an hour on a Friday. What can you do? When you find a good hairdresser, you’re loathe to go anywhere else.

In short then, the Devil looked exactly like the kind of person you’d expect to find scrounging for your small change outside a bus station in Carlisle on a Saturday afternoon. Which is probably why nobody would give him anything.

“Hi, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m a little short on my bus fare. I really need 85p to get to—“

“Sorry, love, I don’t have any change.”

“Excuse me, sir, I wonder if you can help. I’m not a beggar or anything, but I—“

“Fuck off, mate.”

“Hello, sorry to… Hello? Hello! Charming!”

Now while any normal person might have been discouraged by non-stop brush-offs and sporadic abuse, the Devil found it quite heartening. He hadn’t been so roundly rejected since the early days of soul bartering, back when you really had to pull out all the stops to get people to part with their eternal quintessence. Faust, Tom Walker, Robert Johnson – these were men who drove a hard bargain. The Devil missed that kind of ruthless negotiation, it’d been too long. He decided to change tack and see what he might offer in return for his much-needed 85p. Obviously riches were out, if he had the necessary funds he wouldn’t be in this predicament in the first place. Unfortunately, despite profiting from everyone else’s economic woe, all the Devil’s money was tied up in ISAs and High Interest Accounts requiring 7-day notice before withdrawal, so he had to think what else he might have to trade.

“Madame – how would you like to maintain your ravishing beauty throughout all the ages?”

“Are you being sarcastic? Piss off! I’ve got a boyfriend, scumbag!”

“Sir – how would you like to bed any woman you fancy with nothing but a smile and a saucy wink?”

“I’m gay, mate, you're wasting your time with me."

“Hello, I wonder if I could tempt you with a… Hello? Hello! Thank you!”

The Devil soon grew tired. The entire human race was so cynical and jaded – not to mention parsimonious to its core. He was losing all faith in them. Nobody believed in anything any more. That was why it had become so easy to take their souls – none of them even supposed they had one in the first place. But they all knew exactly how much money they had in their pockets, and they weren’t about to give it up to some scrounging layabout who’d probably just spend it on cheap booze and fags. He’d tried everything he could and no one would even give him the time of day, let alone 85p. He was most upset. He sat down on a fold-up seat in the bus shelter and started to cry. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried – some time before the fall, he reckoned. It was amazing his tear ducts still worked.

It was starting to get dark and the Devil realised the Archduke of the Nephilim had probably given up waiting by now and gone to the club without him. His whole weekend was ruined, and all for the want of 85p. That was when the children came to him. There was a small gang of them, four boys and two girls. The eldest couldn’t have been more than eleven, they certainly weren't teenagers, though the girls were dressed like slatterns, but that was just the fashion of the day. The Devil was used to that sort of thing. Very little shocked him any more.

“Here – mister – you all right?” said the ringleader of the urchins.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” said his cohort, a blubbery lad in a tracksuit who was laying the groundwork for some serious acne in years to come.

A third child, one of the pre-slutty girls, came over and offered him a crumpled tissue, which the Devil took and used to dab his tear stained cheeks. He thanked her and started to explain his predicament when three of the lads jumped him, knocked him face down onto the concrete, and held him down while the fourth stole his trainers. They ran away laughing.

The Devil retaliated by wiping the city of Carlisle off the map in a firestorm of pestilence, frogs, hailstones and locusts that still rages to this day.

And the moral - if you want to call it that - of this story is... the next time you’re walking through town and a straggly stranger comes up to you and asks you to spare an odd amount of loose change for the bus to somewhere daft… spare a thought. Is 85p really going to kill you?