The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 18 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
Elena held out the excerpt, and I took it. I perched on the coarse, waist-high wall, legs outstretched. I would surrender to her woven spell, a meticulously crafted incantation designed to bottle up a experience that would revive its magic upon consumption.
The narrator wondered how long they had spent in the clearing as if the outer world had gone dark. From dawn to dusk, a granite sky peered through the canopy, and night blackened to tar in minutes. The narrator forgot which weekday dawned, but they wanted to forget such concepts existed.
The narrator sat on the pebbled shore of a lagoon when hunger twisted their guts. Their belly was sunken. They needed to leave the clearing for provisions. The narrator waited for a woman to surface from the stagnant water, but fifteen minutes passed without any ripple stirring the green scum and mud. That woman submerged in the lagoon as casually as if retreating to the bathroom, and whenever she returned, soaked and dripping cold water, she curled against the narrator as they peeled lichen patches from her skin.
I looked up and found Elena’s pale blues fixed on me, as if scrutinizing every subtle twitch of my expression while I absorbed her writing. She lounged on the lawn chair, her hands folded over the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie.
“May I rely on your external input to learn the gender of the narrator?” I asked.
“Sure. I’m cheating you out of the full experience; a regular reader would already know. As you might imagine, I can’t start any random scene reminding them that the narrator has a penis. So does the protagonist of today’s other excerpt.”
“That makes three out of four male narrators so far. Does it mean anything?”
“That’s how the stories came out. As the conduit, I don’t question these things. If the story demands a male narrator, who am I to argue? Besides, I have no issues with my narrators’ gender. I only care if they interest me. Now, read on.”
The narrator left the clearing in darkness. Distant streetlights invaded through the passageway’s rectangle. Emerging onto the deserted street, he hurried to the opposite sidewalk’s vending machines like a thief stealing food from sleepers’ homes. Next time hunger speared him, he was kissing that woman, her legs entwined with his. The narrator’s dizziness spiked, and he rolled onto his back, gasping. He imagined himself leaving the forest again, but against the nakedness of skulking amidst cement, metal and glass, that ache for food didn’t matter.
Memories of the outside world faded like yellowing photographs. Minutes after twilight yielded to a granite dawn and birdsong, hunger cramps woke the narrator. His guts clung like an old balloon. He pictured the effort to dress, go down the trail through the trees, and hurry to the vending machines hunched and disheveled. He resolved to stay in the clearing. Sheltering there had stripped society’s makeup. He refused to breathe in its stink again even if his starved stomach devoured its own lining and spilled the acid into his core.
The woman looped her arms around the narrator’s neck and urged him to eat. He claimed he would last until hunger stopped his thoughts. She insisted he needn’t endure it. The narrator refused to leave the clearing again, and considered hunting for critters. But she brought up a better option: to feed from her. Then, she leaned back in the grass, tilting sideways. She clenched her side at kidney level and yanked until she tore a handful of white flesh out. In the gash, grooves scarred where her fingers had dug in. Blood pooled. The narrator froze as she folded his fingers around the proffered chunk of meat.
Saliva drowned his tongue. He yearned to savor that flesh as much as he longed to hold the woman against him, joining their warmth like two coals in a bonfire. As he brought the piece to his mouth, he could tell apart the white threads of fiber in the meat. Its surface had grown slick with juice from the pressure of his fingers. His teeth grazed the soft flesh. Saliva spilled from the corners of his mouth, trickling down his chin. He clenched his jaw millimeter by millimeter, the fibers taut against the tip of his tongue. Before he could refuse to feast on the woman, a hot, sap-like juice flooded his mouth. He tore off a morsel and swallowed. It left an aftertaste of turkey. The rest, he devoured, then he licked the juice off his fingers.
A crisp rip startled me from the fictive dream. Elena had torn open the pack of Príncipe chocolate cookies. She plucked one, bit into it, then chewed as crumbs clung to her lips. I imagined myself as that cookie: crushed by her teeth, then ground to fine particles that mingled with hot saliva, coalescing into a doughy pulp. It would slide down the tight, pulsing cylinder of her esophagus and into her stomach, where the pulp would dissolve in gastric acid and become her flesh and blood. A warm vibration welled within my loins.
Her white throat contracted as she swallowed. She leaned forward to pick up the carton of Don Simón from the grass, lifted it, and sipped. A droplet of orange juice escaped her mouth, but she caught it with her thumb.
“Sorry for the noise. You’ve yet to touch your peanuts. Want me to toss them?”
“Don’t worry,” I said, my voice dry. “I can survive for weeks on my fat reserves. And I’d rather not distract myself from your writing.”
Elena shrugged, then set the carton back on the ground.
“Alright. I’ll just keep munching on my cookies.”
She stuffed the remainder of the cookie into her mouth. Crumbs sprinkled her hoodie.
I returned to the excerpt. When the narrator looked up, shame flooded him. The gash in the woman’s side dripped blood down her hip, splattering the grass and pooling on the dirt. He rushed to cover the hole with his hands, but warm blood seeped between his fingers like soup. The woman calmed him, assuring him that her flesh would regrow. He wanted to laugh, but a whimper escaped. He couldn’t live off eating her. She doubted he would eat so much that he’d swallow her whole. Besides, he argued, he needed to ingest proper liquids. The woman lay on her back, then cupped one breast and squeezed the nipple. Thick milk oozed like honey.
From then on, the narrator avoided glancing at the clearing’s exit. He felt that a monstrous hunter stalked that pine-guarded trail, and if he wandered its bends and hollows, the creature would ambush him, tear his limbs from his torso, slurp the marrow off his splintered bones. He wondered how he had dared to enter and leave this clearing without realizing it. Beyond the forest, the machinery of society would grind on, its gears, lubricated with the sweat of nine-to-five drones, screeching as they pulverized bones caught in their teeth. Whenever such images and memories assailed him, patches of his brain crackled with electricity. He wanted to pinpoint those patches and scour them with bleach.
They rolled in the grass, rubbing sweat and soil onto each other’s skin as her tongue probed his mouth, and the part of his brain that believed itself in charge checked out. Sometimes his consciousness resurfaced and found him biting and tearing at her breasts, digging deeper until he should have chewed through her ribs and burst a lung, but instead, just a handspan beneath her skin lay white meat free of veins, arteries, tendons, organs, cartilage, or bones. Kissing along her nape and spine, he sank his teeth into her back and gnawed off a chunk. His mouth flooded with blood that flowed hot and coppery down his throat.
Lying beside her, his belly full, the narrator traced the contours of her ribs and pelvis with his fingertips. Her skeleton held. But whenever he bit, he found white flesh. Even so, a moment after tearing off a piece, the wound oozed blood, and minutes later, when he looked back, her body had stiched itself together. The missing bite was outlined in sticky, half-clotted threads of blood.
Once, the narrator devoured her neck to the extent that he nearly decapitated her. Another time, prying apart her labia with his tongue, as she bucked her hips to his mouth, he chewed into her womb and beyond, splitting her abdomen open to the ribs. He ate an entire thigh and ended up clutching her detached calf, foot dangling from the end. He shoved himself backward on his ass, driving his heels into the earth, and screamed. But when the narrator dared to glance back at the woman, she stood on both legs, and his hand gripped air.
-----
Author’s note: Today’s song is “Velvet Waltz” by Built to Spill.
And why not, here’s a 90s anime version of that concept:
Elena held out the excerpt, and I took it. I perched on the coarse, waist-high wall, legs outstretched. I would surrender to her woven spell, a meticulously crafted incantation designed to bottle up a experience that would revive its magic upon consumption.
The narrator wondered how long they had spent in the clearing as if the outer world had gone dark. From dawn to dusk, a granite sky peered through the canopy, and night blackened to tar in minutes. The narrator forgot which weekday dawned, but they wanted to forget such concepts existed.
The narrator sat on the pebbled shore of a lagoon when hunger twisted their guts. Their belly was sunken. They needed to leave the clearing for provisions. The narrator waited for a woman to surface from the stagnant water, but fifteen minutes passed without any ripple stirring the green scum and mud. That woman submerged in the lagoon as casually as if retreating to the bathroom, and whenever she returned, soaked and dripping cold water, she curled against the narrator as they peeled lichen patches from her skin.
I looked up and found Elena’s pale blues fixed on me, as if scrutinizing every subtle twitch of my expression while I absorbed her writing. She lounged on the lawn chair, her hands folded over the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie.
“May I rely on your external input to learn the gender of the narrator?” I asked.
“Sure. I’m cheating you out of the full experience; a regular reader would already know. As you might imagine, I can’t start any random scene reminding them that the narrator has a penis. So does the protagonist of today’s other excerpt.”
“That makes three out of four male narrators so far. Does it mean anything?”
“That’s how the stories came out. As the conduit, I don’t question these things. If the story demands a male narrator, who am I to argue? Besides, I have no issues with my narrators’ gender. I only care if they interest me. Now, read on.”
The narrator left the clearing in darkness. Distant streetlights invaded through the passageway’s rectangle. Emerging onto the deserted street, he hurried to the opposite sidewalk’s vending machines like a thief stealing food from sleepers’ homes. Next time hunger speared him, he was kissing that woman, her legs entwined with his. The narrator’s dizziness spiked, and he rolled onto his back, gasping. He imagined himself leaving the forest again, but against the nakedness of skulking amidst cement, metal and glass, that ache for food didn’t matter.
Memories of the outside world faded like yellowing photographs. Minutes after twilight yielded to a granite dawn and birdsong, hunger cramps woke the narrator. His guts clung like an old balloon. He pictured the effort to dress, go down the trail through the trees, and hurry to the vending machines hunched and disheveled. He resolved to stay in the clearing. Sheltering there had stripped society’s makeup. He refused to breathe in its stink again even if his starved stomach devoured its own lining and spilled the acid into his core.
The woman looped her arms around the narrator’s neck and urged him to eat. He claimed he would last until hunger stopped his thoughts. She insisted he needn’t endure it. The narrator refused to leave the clearing again, and considered hunting for critters. But she brought up a better option: to feed from her. Then, she leaned back in the grass, tilting sideways. She clenched her side at kidney level and yanked until she tore a handful of white flesh out. In the gash, grooves scarred where her fingers had dug in. Blood pooled. The narrator froze as she folded his fingers around the proffered chunk of meat.
Saliva drowned his tongue. He yearned to savor that flesh as much as he longed to hold the woman against him, joining their warmth like two coals in a bonfire. As he brought the piece to his mouth, he could tell apart the white threads of fiber in the meat. Its surface had grown slick with juice from the pressure of his fingers. His teeth grazed the soft flesh. Saliva spilled from the corners of his mouth, trickling down his chin. He clenched his jaw millimeter by millimeter, the fibers taut against the tip of his tongue. Before he could refuse to feast on the woman, a hot, sap-like juice flooded his mouth. He tore off a morsel and swallowed. It left an aftertaste of turkey. The rest, he devoured, then he licked the juice off his fingers.
A crisp rip startled me from the fictive dream. Elena had torn open the pack of Príncipe chocolate cookies. She plucked one, bit into it, then chewed as crumbs clung to her lips. I imagined myself as that cookie: crushed by her teeth, then ground to fine particles that mingled with hot saliva, coalescing into a doughy pulp. It would slide down the tight, pulsing cylinder of her esophagus and into her stomach, where the pulp would dissolve in gastric acid and become her flesh and blood. A warm vibration welled within my loins.
Her white throat contracted as she swallowed. She leaned forward to pick up the carton of Don Simón from the grass, lifted it, and sipped. A droplet of orange juice escaped her mouth, but she caught it with her thumb.
“Sorry for the noise. You’ve yet to touch your peanuts. Want me to toss them?”
“Don’t worry,” I said, my voice dry. “I can survive for weeks on my fat reserves. And I’d rather not distract myself from your writing.”
Elena shrugged, then set the carton back on the ground.
“Alright. I’ll just keep munching on my cookies.”
She stuffed the remainder of the cookie into her mouth. Crumbs sprinkled her hoodie.
I returned to the excerpt. When the narrator looked up, shame flooded him. The gash in the woman’s side dripped blood down her hip, splattering the grass and pooling on the dirt. He rushed to cover the hole with his hands, but warm blood seeped between his fingers like soup. The woman calmed him, assuring him that her flesh would regrow. He wanted to laugh, but a whimper escaped. He couldn’t live off eating her. She doubted he would eat so much that he’d swallow her whole. Besides, he argued, he needed to ingest proper liquids. The woman lay on her back, then cupped one breast and squeezed the nipple. Thick milk oozed like honey.
From then on, the narrator avoided glancing at the clearing’s exit. He felt that a monstrous hunter stalked that pine-guarded trail, and if he wandered its bends and hollows, the creature would ambush him, tear his limbs from his torso, slurp the marrow off his splintered bones. He wondered how he had dared to enter and leave this clearing without realizing it. Beyond the forest, the machinery of society would grind on, its gears, lubricated with the sweat of nine-to-five drones, screeching as they pulverized bones caught in their teeth. Whenever such images and memories assailed him, patches of his brain crackled with electricity. He wanted to pinpoint those patches and scour them with bleach.
They rolled in the grass, rubbing sweat and soil onto each other’s skin as her tongue probed his mouth, and the part of his brain that believed itself in charge checked out. Sometimes his consciousness resurfaced and found him biting and tearing at her breasts, digging deeper until he should have chewed through her ribs and burst a lung, but instead, just a handspan beneath her skin lay white meat free of veins, arteries, tendons, organs, cartilage, or bones. Kissing along her nape and spine, he sank his teeth into her back and gnawed off a chunk. His mouth flooded with blood that flowed hot and coppery down his throat.
Lying beside her, his belly full, the narrator traced the contours of her ribs and pelvis with his fingertips. Her skeleton held. But whenever he bit, he found white flesh. Even so, a moment after tearing off a piece, the wound oozed blood, and minutes later, when he looked back, her body had stiched itself together. The missing bite was outlined in sticky, half-clotted threads of blood.
Once, the narrator devoured her neck to the extent that he nearly decapitated her. Another time, prying apart her labia with his tongue, as she bucked her hips to his mouth, he chewed into her womb and beyond, splitting her abdomen open to the ribs. He ate an entire thigh and ended up clutching her detached calf, foot dangling from the end. He shoved himself backward on his ass, driving his heels into the earth, and screamed. But when the narrator dared to glance back at the woman, she stood on both legs, and his hand gripped air.
-----
Author’s note: Today’s song is “Velvet Waltz” by Built to Spill.
And why not, here’s a 90s anime version of that concept:
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