ink n great soul
I kissed your blindfolded face, cheek, cheek and forehead, and lay you back on the couch. While from inside your gut came the angry thunder of an expert digestive system expected to be content with fast food you felt the bonds at your hands go slack.
“Lie back. Rest a while. I’ll be back soon with a treat.” You felt the cold metal of the paramedic shears touch your forearm, and I guided your hand to let you know where they were set down, in case you needed to free your feet and calves in a hurry. The caution made your lips twitch in a smile. Like your tendrils weren’t up to the task…
Softness accompanied my leaving. Soft music started to play, lulling you to a sugar-crash doze. A soft, weighted blanket draped over you like a hug. Incense, my favourite coconut and vanilla, eased its way into the air. With a soft kiss placed upon your lips I was gone. The front door opened and closed.
Time passed. Did you sleep? It was more like twilight in the darkness behind your blindfold. You never stopped being aware of the rope that bound your legs, the warm enveloping weight wrapping you in the couch. Much less the thousand little squeaks and groans and gurgles as an excess of processed food was expertly deconstructed and sent deeper and deeper into your abyss of a tummy. The feeling of anticipation, too, grew and grew. How long would I be? You didn’t count the time. Just waited in your warm, gurgling cocoon.
You hear the front door open. Something is placed on the floor, and whatever it is shuffles frantically. Panicked sounds deep in a throat behind airways that are largely blocked. I shush whoever it is tenderly and lock the front door.
Soft music continues. The darkness of the blindfold continues. You arch back, feeling the fabric of the couch against your skin. I’m in the room.
No greeting. Perhaps I see the way you’re moving, know you’re wrapped up in sensation. Let it continue, then. You inhale sharply as the blanket is removed. Your nipples suddenly exposed to the air stiffen.
A zip. Whoever I’ve brought fit inside the overlarge duffel bag in which I once brought you lunch at work. The sound of muffled whimpering becomes louder. “Shh, over soon.”
Dead silence. It didn’t seem to be me who caused it, either. Then, a low moan, horror dredged up from the bottom of an ocean of despair. A depth of feeling not normally accessible to a child.
I don’t seem to notice, and the sensory cocoon makes you lazy. When you feel my hand take the weight of your shoulders you let me stuff pillows under you till your head is tilted back. A straight line from lips to belly. You wet those lips with a swipe of your tongue and open up.
You’re hungry. In fact your stomach gurgles so loud it throws a tiny crackle of a burp out of your anticipatory throat. That small gust caresses two small feet, bound and held so tightly that they glide into your gullet so smoothly you could have thought they wanted to go down. Dinner is clean and washed and ready for bed, and you’re so hungry your mouth waters in welcome. Her legs slip down as easily as those feet. You can feel her calf muscles working beneath the surface, trying so hard to make move limbs already bound up in your flesh.
Her knees tremble against your tongue. You crane to take more of her inside, faster, and I just notice your greed because I push harder. It’s no time before her butt grazes your teeth. Finally, little legs breach the entrance to your stomach. It feels like she has a long way to fall.
Her low moan of horror rises and falls in a sine wave of disbelief and prayer. It doesn’t change one bit when your fang carelessly snicks her back, trickling the taste of copper sweetness onto your tongue. Where previously the cavern she was entering was close and wet with only your saliva, now she glides down a passage tinted with her own blood.
Her belly is smooth and warm on your tongue, and her chest passes swiftly. Her legs kick deep inside you and induce a happy-meal burp out past her. Seems she’s descending into the caustic gloop of a stomach not yet done with its former meal.
Her tears are bitter salt on your tongue. The last pure air she breathes jets out of her nose in a sob that’s cut off by the bucking of your tongue. Her long wavy locks glide down after her but she’s now all gone, wholly past your epiglottis, on her way to the place of her unmaking.
She reaches it. God, you’re fat, my Raven. Your belly swells but so little. Even the desperate struggles going on just below your deeply-buried ribcage are only visible as a faint ripple in your skin. Your heavy, satisfied breathing makes more movement than she manages.
Maybe her windmilling around in there loosens something up. I don’t know. I do know you’re so lost in sensation that you don’t seem embarrassed by a gust of exhausted cheeseburger displaced through your bumhole.
I can’t keep my hands off you. Tentative massaging tracks the shape of her, eases her into a nice comfortable foetal position. I am not kind, even though she is innocent. She is your food and I want you to squeeze every last drop of sensation out of her struggles inside you. I move her upright so she doesn’t drown.
She lasts tens of minutes gasping for air in chyme. I feel her go rigid at intervals and it takes a while to realise that those are the times your relentless stomach muscles clamp her down. What does she experience? It’s not long before your low burps carry metal across your tongue. Do disintegrating limbs grind themselves to mincemeat against your overmastering gut walls? Does tender young skin blister and peel into the monstrous soup you’re making of her?
Not a sound she makes escapes the gurgling symphony inside you, until right before she passes: a pure scream, faint, as if in a distant room. Then, silence.
Her soul slips, trembling, from a frame that can’t support it. She finds no release, only those same stomach walls, as impassable to spirit as flesh.
Something is different. You frown. From personal experience you know that spirits are not native to flesh: not really. Your own soul is imprisoned enfleshed; others presumably were born through their own motives. The greater and lesser souls your soul has feasted on tasted of past lives and the secret places to which you are native.
But the girl… her soul slips into yours and fills you up and keeps pouring out. Light fills you. Heat fills you. Even as her flesh liquifies in your stomach her soul struggles to cohere, to stretch out, to break free of yours.
The shape, taking form. Fractal recursions of brushstroke shapes tickle and stretch the pit inside you. Feathers scrabble to stretch out. Eyes, hundreds of them, blink and look out on nothing but destruction. How came this creature to be imprisoned like you? Or is this one of your captors?
It doesnt matter. You are its prison now: its tomb. The life-cry of the great soul inside you is cut off as you crush it down. Demiangel, pseudodevil or god, in your native form you are queen and your law is subsumption. You have just the place for this sister or brother.
It screams as darkness blinds its thousand eyes and pressure binds it once more to the form of the little girl sloughing into your guts. It will take days to process this being. Let them begin draining into your intestines as your soul pulls it apart and absorbs it.
From a meditation you surface with a gasp. Delicious heat suffuses your body and small bones crack in your stomach. Deep pressure, my hands massage your busy guts, helping pump your meal deeper.
“Raven,” I murmur, sounding concerned. “Where did you go?”
“Saw… maybe… a friend.” You keep your eyes closed behind the blindfold, preserving an image burned into your retinas. An image granted to you in the agony of the great soul dying inside you. An image of the fault in the stars, sister to the vision you were granted.
Part of the sigil you know will break down the walls of your prison and let you free.
But that will come later, when you have sucked your meal clean of every morsel of knowledge. For now, you groan and stretch out. Fat and blood and muscle melt and emulsify inside your guts, a far superior meal. Time to lie back and adore this body, capable of such pleasure. Accept the adoration I give it, in ambitious rubs from crotch to breasts. And accept every last scrap of what your young/ancient prey has to give you.