Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "Devil's World"

The realer real realities can be pretty frumpy, right?
What God, or tapping into God-force energies, is—
a long, slow haul, in which you have to do everything
for yourself. You want quick action, you go to the Devil.
Quick action will be delivered, but the repercussions will
be negative, and everything you’ve accomplished will
be erased. Rocks and hard places. Except to say, that when
the days in Montreal ended with us ensconced, it seems to me
that Mary had on her mind, other than pictures, portraits taken
and places visited, the fretful sense, even then, that she should
be with someone else. Someone with more money, more worldly
power. She would choose to note, as she lay there, half-asleep,
that the fresh-faced David stud guy, with David capacities, who
was (she would have to admit) intelligent, was still a poor

substitute for the right kind of banker or trust-funder, who could
buy her clear passage to the right kind of renown. The depth
of my devotion to her was not in question. The question was
about what it means to live in the Devil’s world, in which all
that long, slow haul, God-force energy, is easy to doubt, because
we would all like something more demonstrative, more rapidamente.
The noises from Saint Catherine Street, from where we were on
the second floor, weren’t that obtrusive, but there were some.
No air conditioning meant I used a wet sponge to help me cool
off. Mary did similarly. If I had more money, of course, she
wouldn’t have had to, because we would be staying somewhere
more grandiose. In the Devil’s World, the long, slow, God-force
informed haul, which was to be our destiny, is full of doubts.
Mary wanted quick action, not just sex, part of the time too. Good night.

© Adam Fieled 2026