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urundeaduncle · 12 days ago

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Southern Hunger | Chapter 2 | Chapter 1

word count: 957

I imagined the inside of the chapel like something of my own anatomy; drafty and stinking of shame. My skin crawled, despite the incessant pull I felt to enter. Her voice was like a leash, a noose around my throat coxing me into this once sacred building. I didn’t think either of us belonged there.

My hands trembled, hovering over the large brass handles of the door. I was reminded of the jokes my grandmother used to arm herself with. Something about how ‘I should’ve burst into flames’ crossing over the threshold.

She believed what she was saying. I think she was just disappointed every Sunday when it didn’t happen. I thought it might be more true now than it ever was.

I pulled the doors open slowly. They moaned unwillingly. Warm candle light spilled into the outside, cutting strange shapes into the darkness behind me.

“Esther.”

Her voice echoed from inside of me, grazing past my own lips as it left. The shape of her accent felt jagged and uncomfortable coming out of my mouth.

“I came like you asked.” I replied to myself. The words fell out of me in my own voice, shaky and desperate, but mine.

“You came because you wanted to.”

My stomach was freezing over with hunger. “What are you?”

Her presence penetrated every corner of my damp, human existence. She was inside the flowery fibers of my body. Tearing apart and building new molecular structures. Dragging her claws down the inside of my veins. Burning, like a fresh tattoo on the wrong side of my skin.

I couldn’t see her but I knew she was smiling, I could feel it; the open wound with all its rows of teeth. “Esther, my sweet, you know who I am.”

The voice distorted and garbled, like she was plucking a thousand options from the back of her throat.

“Stop.” My stomach clenched around the hunks of venison. She continued faltering between my mother and wife’s inflection; a grotesque Freudian hybrid.

“STOP!” All at once, I wanted to sever this inhuman, umbilical thread we shared.

“It is your shame that fills you-that now fills me, and what do you have to show for it? Nothing. Not yet anyway.” Her words slithered into the open space of the church, defiling it. I felt the pain in my knees before I realized I had buckled to the floor.

“LOOK AT ME.” She erupted. My neck craned to find her.

In the rafters, a crouched form had taken shape; an ancient gargoyle lost in the architecture. I couldn’t make out a single detail apart from the drapes of hair falling beyond the wooden beams; black tendrils growing towards the light-towards me. I tried to scream. I tried to find the strength to pull myself to my feet but I was paralyzed.

The shadow dropped to the floor.

“You’ve got such a pretty face.” She mimicked my mother. “I don’t know why you wanna dress like that.”

Now standing upright behind the lectern, I could finally make out the creature before me. “What a strange sentiment.” She sighed.

Her collar bones and shoulders prodded from behind her skin giving her a pointed silhouette. Her face was sharp, with high cheekbones and hollows that stretched beneath them. And the eyes inside each socket were like holes hiding pods of caviar; black and wet.

She wore a plain black dress that drug the floor and hid her bare feet. It clung to her breast, and hips as if she had been outside all night standing beneath the rain. Her long hair swam around in oily ropes, and her eyelashes were long and stuck together like she had been crying, only she hadn’t. She was completely dry.

When she moved towards me my stomach lurched. My hand flew to my mouth to shield my knees from the oncoming vomit, but it was in vain. Thick, viscous strands of the half digested deer fell out of me, covering my front in a pink glaze. The short fibers from her coat poked at my gums. I was crying, knelt over the evidence of my actions. I imagined her blood, the doe’s, leaking from my eyes like a rusty faucet.

“What’s happening to me? What did I do? ” I pushed my fingers into my mouth, trying to force the rest of the deer to leave me. I wasn’t sure what would be worse; to witness more of my carnage or to carry her inside of me forever.

“You were hungry-so you ate.” She squatted down in front of me, eyeing the mess on the floor.

“No-”

“Yes.” Her words nipped at the heels of mine like a dog closing in on a rabbit.

I understood the weight of that one word. As if she had pressed her fingers through my eyes and into my skull to scrawl its meaning all over the dome ceiling. I was hungry. So I had eaten. I knew what it meant now to be truly starved and I understood the cost of satiating myself, but only because she wanted me to. I understood my shame.

I felt her in her my veins, burning like hell fire. Maybe this is what it feels like to die. Maybe this was hell. I breathed in deep searching for that sweet smell again-the heaven I had known for such a short length. The place where shame hid between the muscle and flesh; silent like cancer.

I reached for a spot in the hardwood floor that wasn’t touched by my vomit. I scratched at it until a small shard was lifted from the floor. It burrowed under my fingernail.

Hell seemed like a fitting place for something like splinters.

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urundeaduncle · 22 days ago

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“Southern Hunger” | A woman finds herself without memory, injured and fading fast in the depths of the Tennessee forests.

word count | 1,877

I could see her up there, hanging amongst the trees, limbs splayed, reaching out like a human canopy. My eyes seemed to squint, become heavy and fall on their own accord. And when I forced them open, I found her features had become liquid, ebbing like water in the small pond of her face. As if she was being swallowed up in her own depths; sinking further into the branches, falling upward, and away from me. I imagined reaching out, calling for her in hopes of solidifying her form, making her more real and more present with me in this moment; this uncomfortably warm death.

My vision syphoned until my eyes were closed again.

The air inside my unconsciousness smelled damp and sickly sweet. Like spring time death, blanketed in April showers; the stench of rot, lingering beneath petrichor. My mouth begins to water.

Inside my dying mind, I dreamt up a lengthy dining table, one that stretched in a never-ending loop around a large, viridian lake. The surface of the table was a buffet, decorated with food I could never have imagined the taste of. Yet here I was, the world’s menu at my fingertips. I gorged myself on all of them without pause, gouging my fingers into open halves of glistening fruits, tearing at the prime cuts of meat; the kind that leaked a strange mixture of lifeless pink and oily yellow when you prodded them.

After completing a lap around the banquet I lifted my now stained shirt hoping to find the evidence of my work; an extended belly, pregnant with all the lavish flavors I’d put down. Only to find nothing. My stomach was as flat as it had been before I arrived. Before I slipped into all that jagged nothingness and found myself here. I felt a tinge of panic, if you could call it that. Only as much as one might feel after realizing they’ve misplaced something. And I had seemingly lost something-left my body behind, underneath those trees; dying.

I remembered her, the amorphous figure impersonating my wife and shudder. The way her eyes seemed to slip into her cheek. The way her jaw swam in the air, as if to plant itself anywhere else instead of where it ought to be; firmly attached to her skull. It wasn’t her. I was sure of that and I was also certain that I was now dead; this place, some sort of heaven and her, some figment of my dying mind. I eyed the table curiously, like if I caught it off guard this whole facade would shrivel up and I’d be thrown back into my sweating corpse.

I reached out plucking a strip of meat off a larger hunk. Gently, I pushed it past my teeth, and onto my tongue. I should have been sick at the thought of another bite of food but amazingly and perhaps alarmingly, the flavors burst behind my lips. An electrifying sensation wormed through my body, lighting up my senses with such magnificent fervor I’d have thought I was touching myself. My face blushed as I took in the sight of it all. This glorious, O-shaped phenomenon. This had to be the next world and god somewhere in all the pines on the horizon watching me indulge myself. I felt a pang of shame as I made my way around another lap.

The flavors never dulled, and the setting sun never fully disappeared from the sky, casting the light into a million shades of orange and the shadows into crimson.

I sucked the variable flavors off my finger tips one by one and reveled in the satisfying pop each one of them made leaving my lips. My body quivered with a strange sort of excitement; a quality of liveliness I could only expect within the afterlife. I decided I would never sleep again, since I had fallen into some sanctuary; a version of heaven untold, and not entertaining it would lead me right back to where I was. I was certain.

I had made it about the table more times than I could count or was it that I had stopped counting entirely, distracted by my ecstasy. My shoes were full of sand and my clothes were littered with stains, beyond reparation. This is heaven, I thought, why should I be bothered with things like decency, and peeled them all off immediately.

I set my eyes beyond the shore. The whole world seemed swallowed up in the tall reaching trees. Though, I couldn’t be certain where I was in proximity to anything. For all I knew the table and its lake could be all this world had to offer, or it could stretch for thousands of miles; creating continents, hiding other people within them.

i pushed into the trees beyond the lake, now naked and starved with curiosity, following that sweet, vernal scent. The smell that seemed to signal to me my greatest reward for dying. I lifted my nose to the sky like an animal, dragging in deep breathes as the scent became thicker in the air.

As I approached an opening in the trees, my mouth became slick with saliva, ropes of it dripping onto my chest. The clearing widened into a perfect circle. The tall grass within it like a thousand skinny flames under the setting sun and inside of that inferno, her.

She was curled up like a newborn with her head molded into her chest. The blades of grass surrounding her slouched gently at their base, like she had always been there. They grew up and she had not.

I touched the downy wool on her back, dancing my fingertips over her small head. The hair on her face was shorter and course; a fine juxtaposition to the curls on her spine, I thought. Then I planted a gentle kiss on her forehead. Her eyes were closed, but I was sure if I peeled open the lids I’d find saffron ovals beneath.

The blood in my face began to heat up. Hunger, like the quiet hum beneath my pulse, suddenly screaming.

I knelt down and closed my jaw around the flesh of her neck. She tasted like the earth, like the outside of unwashed fruit, like eons of day and night. She lay there, her body limp and jostling beneath me; perfectly quiet as I tore into it. I began to cry. The salt of my own lamenting complimented her taste. So I sobbed harder as I plunged more of her down my throat. The sound seemed to echo into every corner of the earth. It rang out of me in wet, garbled howls and returned in waves; as if I was wailing at myself. As if I was weeping for her, begging myself to stop her slaughter.

But I ate until my jaw was sour with nausea. Until the ochre hue of the earth had dulled into night. Until I had fallen asleep, stomach plump half with shame and half satiation.

My face was taught. A thin film covered my skin, like a large, flakey scab around the wound that was my mouth. Warm droplets had begun peppering my face, successfully stirring me from my sleep. I imagined them as they went; rolling off my chin and neck, creating pink streaks in all the dried blood.

Did it rain in heaven?

I squeezed my eyelids together, like teeth grinding inside a wired jaw. I refused to open them. I pressed my fingers into the earth beside me. Mud, with sparse blades of grass poking through like oily strands of hair. Wrong.

I listened closely, attempting to draw up a picture of my surroundings-the lake, the table, the feast-the lamb.

There was too much. Every individual sense seemed to fight for dominance here. Each one funneling itself into me with such barbarity, I felt ashamed-naked, despite my now being fully clothed. A truth that should have perplexed me sooner.

Keeping my eyes shut, the only sense that hadn’t been completely overwhelmed, I ran my hands over the articles covering me. My tank top, my belt, my pants-all clinging to my body in heavy, wet sections like gobs of cotton and polyester. My hands shook violently.

My sweating corpse.

I began to weep, my shoulders squelched horribly in the muddy earth below me with each shudder.

I wiped viscously at my face. I scratched at the dried blood and shoved my fingers in my mouth. I sobbed hideously as I tried to remember her taste. And then I screamed at the spiteful god who granted me such flavor and had seemingly been bored at my performance.

“Not bored. Fascinated.”

My eyes fluttering heavily, then opened.

Staring back at me was a stretch of tall pines, a canopy of emerald. My head lulled to each side searching for the owner of the voice. Nothing.

I felt the incomprehensible weight of what I had experienced begin to crush me, splintering the grey matter inside my skull. I wanted to die, wholly. I wanted whatever in between stage I had fallen into to come back to me. And if not that, I begged to be swallowed up into the quivering void before it.

I thought of tearing my clothes off again, making myself completely vulnerable to the elements; to whatever, man, woman, or thing that might destroy me.

I let my eyes fall shut, as I began to tug gently at the buckle of my belt.

“Come to me.”

My limbs felt like links of sausages, flaccid and heavy at each joint. I ignored the voice like a scorned child. I was not startled by its existence inside me. I welcomed it aside my conscious, like a secondary narrator. A persistent spirit lurking around the wiry pile of my dying mind.

“I cant.” I sobbed. This time I imagined the hot streaks, dripping down my face and into a bowl; a briny marinade.

“You will.”

I curled into myself, cradling my stomach. My body felt like an empty frame, spidery metal rods with the fleshy bits draped haphazardly over them; hardware and viscera thrown together without thought.

I couldn’t feel the hum of my blood rushing, the pounding of my heart. The thoughts in my head felt continuously chaperoned by another course of consciousness. I was different. Maybe this what dying feels like, I thought. Maybe god hadn’t abandoned me after all.

“My Lamb. Come to me.”

The words echoed in my skull. They vibrated more than anything, like the existence of colors or light. They existed in a strange sort of radiant silence.

I couldn’t say how but I knew she would save me; feed me. I knew if I got up, and I would, follow the shivering in my head, I would be better, full.

I would be whole.

I forced myself to my feet, taking small note and then completely disregarding the mangled corpse of a deer in the mud next to me. Her eyes were black and stoney. She was stiff-dead.

I drug my cold form through the woods, guided only by a fathomless starvation. I thought of the lamb, then the deer. One so warm and one so cold.

My mouth begins to water.

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