PRINCE OF LUST

by Lucien Burr

Blasphemy before I’ve introduced myself? The scandal.

Which is why I want to ruin my life, you see. I am older. I am jaded. And I no longer think God is merciful.

The first lustful thought I had taught me the severity of shame: that in recognising my body and its desires, I would be condemned. I had said the wrong thing; I was a child, and I saw an older boy pulling water from a well in my village, bronze arms tense and straining as he pulled—and I compared him aloud to an angel.

I still remember the look on my mother’s face, a disgust that was only dislodged when my father tried to beat desire out of my flesh.

What didn’t help me was that, in all my years of prayer and work and hope, nothing was enough to stop the dream.

I knew if I were to linger in the world, then I would do the unthinkable. I would fall in love with a man. I would touch him. I would love it.

This boy is touched by Satan. He resists, but I do not know for how long. . .”

But as each day passed, I learned more and more that nothing really was going to change me.

What has God’s love given you except shame? What has God ever done for you?”

another promise to the Devil: I am coming. I hear your call, and I will follow you. If God was calling for me, then I did not hear it. Thirty-five dreary years—thirty-five wasteful years! It shouldn’t have mattered anymore. It didn’t matter anymore. I ignored the anxiety sent by God to deter me and gave up all hope of redemption. Let the Devil have me.

God had been a detour, and pleasure was the only thing I wished to worship.

if this was a test from God, I was going to fail.

You’ve been wanting it for years. Someone to open up your body. To take it. To make you take it. To hold you down as they ruin you.”

I wanted to touch it and be touched. I wanted it to fuck me, stretch me, gape me, to render every waking moment I spent in the worship of God worthless. Make me an object. Make me yours. Compare me to something to be discarded, something useless at best, a body to be fucked. Make me forget everything but the feel of your cock.

“If you’re going to be my bitch,” it growled, “you won’t be wearing God’s dog collar.”

I wasn’t God’s anymore. Perhaps I had never been.

If I could be honest with myself, honest in the eyes of God, then that was better than lying for the rest of my life. It felt more honourable. More blessed.

“To be mine? Mine to use? Mine to keep?”

Breathed it all in and felt—satisfied. For the first time in my life, there was no noise in my head.