TW: graphic gore
Nobody ever bothered to warn me, but I always salivate to corpses.
She'd rotted a week when I hoisted her fetal meat away with no gloves on. A skull caved in and festering. You shrieked a certain way at the gelatinous oilslick dribbling between my fingertips, suckling sticking to my skin— but as the unsupported back half squelched groundways, all that swelled was that deeply tantalized desire to unhinge and swallow a sweetly dead fawn covered in ants.
Gore is my most loyal companion. For over a year of the time I first met the Library, I rewrote one paragraph over and over on a near-daily basis. Opened Word and hit delete all just to rewrite it from scratch, adding new details, new narrative, until the tumor slowly grew to the length of twelve pages. The subject? A disgustingly visceral narrative of an unknown getting his head bashed in, crushed, splintered and ultimately smeared by a frying pan. I rocked myself to sleep on this lullaby. I daydreamed new forms of skull fracture at the dinner table. Imaginary agony became part of my creative existence.
It took six months after we buried the deer for my urges to take the better of me. To run past dark with a spade and flashlight. The ground may have been unwilling, but I managed to burst open that stone casket after just a dozen minutes. I stared. Mushrooms had ensnared the entire baby. They cradled her in ghostly fingers loving and gentle, an embrace so kind I had no choice but to lash my tiny blade and began hacking away, wild and religious, huffing and sweating and salivating as the disturbance plunged spores and bacteria and residual rot deep into my sinuses, deep inhales, clenching each tiny bone in shaking palms so that I perhaps could absorb their carnage and— put to rest a freshly reburied grave.
You asked me how I enjoyed my walk and I said fine.
Something must've gone magnificently backwards for me to be this way. Lovechild of Ares and Hades. I dug through literature to find those like me, those whose child fingers itched at the thought of crushing baby birds. A carnivore. It never came an easy answer; no syndrome for violent thrill, no outreach for imaginary cannibals. Until at last I came upon a promised land: some thriving web of creatives who dedicated their time to scenes of horrific and sustained cruelty. Who welcomed me in with open, bloody arms.
And I? I never walked there again. A territorial affair in the likeness of tigers.
For all the work I put into "the frying pan paragraph," I never posted it anywhere. It was too horrific and holy to be perceived. I thought of it a baby god, perhaps one bloated and rotting and endlessly reincarnated, that I cradled in loving embrace. Up until the day I erased it as routine and, this time, forgot to swing.