PRINCE OF LUST

by Lucien Burr

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

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.

But as each day passed, I learned more and more that nothing really was going to change me. Do you know the horror of that realisation? To see the Devil reaching for you every night, to realise that you live for the moments Satan gifted me: dreams of men’s lips, their kisses, their touches, their cocks. To wake in shame, sweat-covered, seed spilt on the sheets, and to leave my chamber with a false mantra ringing in my ears: holy, holy, holy.

“You came here thinking it would change you. You came here hoping it would. Choral singing and stained glass and the fetor of clogging incense—you wanted it to cleanse your insides. Destroy the infection in you with sacred light. And instead, two decades of it has made you this: barely contained, feral, furious. What has God’s love given you except shame? What has God ever done for you?”

In order to summon him, you must be filled with true desire for him. Draw the symbol. Draw blood. With the same hand that drew blood, touch yourself as you wish to be touched.

My body and my mind crystallised to that singular focus; a building rhythm in my groin, hand cupped with pestilent desire, the blood and the body: I achieved a kind of mysticism.

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

It will gut you, I thought. Bishop Jonah thought. It will gut you. It will fuck your insides. It will leave you to die. I imagined briefly what that would be like. The vivisection, belly torn open, and organs exposed and steaming. I imagined pain giving way to a perverse pleasure, a cock slipping over the looping heat of my intestines, and I found myself wondering if it would keep my vessel holy.

Gingerly, I removed the bandage and exposed the puckered flesh beneath. It hadn’t been long enough to heal, and in fact, Asmodeus’ forked tongue had pried the cut open even deeper than I had first made it. What if it made it larger? What if it used that wound to pleasure itself? Made it stigmata, made you holy with every thrust until you were stretched in the form of crucifixion, until you could look at your reflection in its black eyes and see the Son of God looking back? Desire felt complicated.