December 13th
13 13 13 13 13 13 13
13 looked at Her hungrily, with wide, bloodshot eyes and cooed softly.
“Well,” She said, “I think that’s kind of fucked up, 13.”
13 responded with a sort of wiggle of the tongue and something of a lilting song. It was a halfhearted response, not really comprehensible or understandable, but something. An acknowledgment. The least they could do.
“We’ll talk about that later,” She said. “But first, I’m going to need you to fill the box again.”
She held out a small gift box. 13 produced the knife, a long, slender instrument dripping with venom. Technically the knife was Hers, She had made the weapon Herself at Vivileth’s forge, but it always stayed in 13’s possession. They both agreed that was probably the best place to keep it.
She picked the knife up and held it in Her hands, admiring Her own work. Its edges were perfectly honed and the pommel glittered with cut emeralds. There was dried blood still, all along the blade, but 13 didn’t mind. For 13, death was part of life — it didn’t matter if it was clean, it didn’t really matter at all what form it took, they were always ready to dispose of the flesh, to discard the nothingness of the body. They were always happy to give to Her.
She took to using the knife, sinking it into 13. They were a large, rotund mass of scales and fir and feathers and eyes, centered by a big toothy maw and one long tongue. They were always so sweet, so happy, even when it came time to fill the box. Right now they were at the end of a long decline in function, body slowly breaking down, and their flesh was malleable, bubbling with noxious fumes, perfectly ripe and easy to cut.
First She carved out an eye, while the creature sang, and then She went deeper, cutting wedge after wedge out of 13. The more She took, the softer its voice got. When She was done, there was silence. She put each piece of flesh, save one, into Her tiny gift box and crammed it down with the lid.
Sitting next to 13’s still corpse, She went ahead and ate one of the pieces She had collected. The very touch of it on Her tongue filled Her with a desire for more, more, more, but She only had 6 pieces left now, and they needed to last. One for each day of death. Moderation was key. Gifts were rare, fleeting, changing every day, making Her into something else, and She could not be too greedy. She closed the gift box tightly and saved the rest for later.
🜔
13
☿
When I was a kid, my Sunday school teacher gave me a little gift box at church, wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper. She said God’s love was inside, and whenever I needed it, I could hold it close. The key was to never open the box, because we didn’t need to see the love with our eyes to feel the love with our hearts, and whenever I held the box up close to my chest, I felt it. Sometimes when I was sad, I would sit with it, alone in my room and focus on that feeling of God’s love, and often it made me feel better. I really believed back then, and I kept the box for many years. But when I was cast out of Heaven, denied at the gates and banished to wander this earth aimless and raging, face twisted in torment, belief no longer felt as sweet. And the moment that the sweetness stopped, it all stopped, and I felt so clearly that the whole thing had been a dream. It wasn’t always a beautiful dream, but sometimes it was, sometimes dreams bring you things that you need, and now, without it, I was left to make my own dreams.
In the desert, writhing and gnashing my teeth in ecstasy and anguish alike, I conjured and I dreamt and I let the blood of my body leak into the sand, where it prospered, turning the desert into an oasis. There, I suffered nightmares and beautiful dreams, consuming the scared nectar of the source as it grew up from my feet. I had produced life, I had turned my own blood into something greater than me. 13 trees of creation sprouted from my feet, producing fruits — little morsels of flesh, dangling out in front of me. Each day I took one and placed it in my mouth, and I tasted the full flavors of delight and suffering and all their various diminutions of form. In the evening, my spirit wandered, and I saw world after world thrumming with the rhythm of Chaos, and I began to see Chaos as the divine rhythm underlying all rhythms.
But one night, I fell into the Void, and I don’t remember anything at all for a short window. I see bits and pieces of visions in my memory, but all of it is abstract noise — united only by the solitary rhythm of death. Meaning was first a gift granted to me, then it became something I grew out of the earth myself, and now it had become nothing at all. Somehow I had gotten the Void inside of me, and nothing seemed to fill it. In the Void I saw deeper truths — one truth, really — a great hungry maw, arrayed with teeth, hunting us from the heavens, sending fire down into the world and harvesting souls like ripe grapes from the vine, half-chewed fruit spilling out of its mouth and dripping down its face.
At some point, I sat again in my room, like I was as a child, weeping and inconsolable. I always knew how to hold things close to my chest when I was in public, how to be okay and never take issue, then collapse when I was alone, spilling out all that I wasn’t allowed to feel outside my own company. Overcome with despair, I spotted the little gift box, sitting there in a pile of old junk. I tore it open in a fury and then sat staring at its emptiness, not surprised, but still somehow unsatisfied. What had I really been expecting to find?
Crying, furious, I held the empty box up to my heart and I begged to feel something. I held it there, closing my eyes, focusing, focusing, focusing, but nothing happened, no love filled my heart, no answer from heaven ever came. But even if it had, it wouldn’t be enough anymore. Had it called out to me then, had word descended from on high, I would be ready to kill its messenger. The world had revealed itself to me now too deeply, torn its heart open and shown me all the worms in its guts and the songs in its soul, and there was no way left for me to forget its sight, to ever feel love from an empty box. Unseen forces are dangerous, and if there had in fact been something in this box, it would be my duty to bleed it dry, to protect myself with stronger magic. I needed some way to guard the bounty I had grown, the little abundance in my soul, to save it and all my other little dreams from being hunted like prey by an angry, tyrannous God.
🜔
13
☿
“It’s the very least I could do, Sir,” She said.
The man stood there, straight up, tall and removed his helmet. His black hair, freed but helmet-addled, sat on the crown of his head like the leafy top of a carrot peeking out of the garden soil. He set his helmet down and smiled at Her.
“I appreciate it, but—”
She interrupted him.
“No please, we have an abundance, we have plenty. If you can’t eat from our table, then please let us bring something out for you from the kitchen. We have more than we know how to do with, and the sisters and I, we simply couldn’t stand to see any of it go to waste.”
He sighed, and She caught his eyes drifting down down, sizing Her up. Good. He was hungry after all.
“Passionate about waste here, are you?” His eyes were piercing, but trying to wear a mask of kindness so as to conceal a ravenous nature. She was giddy. Everything was perfect.
“Yes, well, we are very concerned with excess. Our temple lights its beacon to the Vivith Princess, Lady Austone Vivileth.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know the kind of gods you keep in these parts.”
“Vivileth is so much more than a god,” She said, “She’s something beyond the concept altogether. Imagine a god you could grow in your garden, or one you could keep in a box and carry around with you. Imagine you speak a word and a god grows out of it. Imagine a god that bends over and lets you fuck him in the ass, not only because you like it, but because that’s what he made you to do.”
His face fell slightly, and the confusion was pronounced. He had no response, so she continued.
“Anyway, I’m getting a little out there, I can tell, but Vivileth is somewhere in that realm, somewhere beyond the things we normally think of as beyond. She ascended to her godhood after sleeping for 49 days straight, dreaming each evening on a separate despair of the world, and when she woke she saw fit to radiate her dreams out with her waking mind, and stuff them into the souls of men.”
“So, you could say it’s a bit like the god fucking me in the ass, instead?” He smirked, and she gave a polite smile back to humor him.
“As delightful as I’m sure that would be, it’s more like filling the soul. And those dreams were beautiful, for they came not from her despair, but rather from her joy, the opposite of her meditation. Today we celebrate the 13th day of her slumber, which marks the joy of abundance. In her blessing, we’ve been given a bounty.”
He shrugged. “Well, I can wait for you to bring something out, but I’m afraid I can’t stay too much longer than that. I didn’t even really intend to come up here or stop at all, but something… drew me to it. You’ve got a real beautiful temple here, Miss…?”
“You can call me 13,” She said, “All of us are 13 here.”
“Ah, okay.”
“You need not wait long, Sir. We’ll have what you need very soon, and then you can be on your way. But do be careful out there. There are demons in this wood who hunger for the flesh of men, who have been known to kill and eat them, then carve the flesh from their bodies. All up and down the great road they find the bodies cut open, missing parts of their insides.”
“Same story I hear everywhere,” He said, frowning. “Whole world’s gone mad these days.”
She smiled, then held up a little box. “Before I go to fetch your bounty, would you like a little taste of what we’ve got on offer? I was just about to have my daily, but I’d be willing to share. A little gift, just for you.”
She opened the box to reveal several cuts of flesh, sitting neatly inside. She picked one up then split it in two, putting one half in Her mouth and offering the other to him. She looked into his eyes, deeply, swimming in those pools of blue.
He took the piece of flesh She handed him, put it in his mouth, and then smiled. Now he’s caught, now he’s mine. That mask in his eyes had fallen, and the only thing she could see now was predatory longing.
“Is that what I’ll be, when you’re done with me? A little piece of flesh inside a box?”
“Perhaps you will. I’ve never killed a man before,” She lied. “But maybe you can be the first.”
🜔
13
☿
One time that I considered murdering a man was when I was signing up for classes at school, and for some fucking reason we had to like meet with this person about it and talk to them about our choices before we officially picked and all this stupid shit. I had signed up for an astronomy class, to fill my science requirement, and this older man looks at me and says:
“You know that’s not an astrology class, right? It’s a science class, you’re gonna be doing math.”
I heard only the drums of war, fury pumping inside my veins, as my face grew red and hot. This fucking bitch. I might be a dumb faggot with a tight ass and beautiful silky locks, but I had whatever the skills were that you needed to be good at school and furthermore I really genuinely wanted to learn. I thought about peeling a piece of his flesh off, just a little gift, and placing it in my mouth like a piece of chocolate. But I swallowed it and meekly said “yes” instead of biting into his arterial vein. And now, because I didn’t kill him then — arguably self-defense, arguably justified in a court of law — now I’m 30 years old and I’ve killed so, so many people due to the regret and debilitating trauma that I carry every day for not killing him right then and there when I had the chance. It’s pure agony.
One of my victims was a man of a tall stature, a gaunt figure, dusted with azure hair and eyes that sang of death. I disposed of him, and into his body I carved Kepler’s equation, and I solved it, just like I did on all the others, carving my work into his flesh, waiting for the world to recognize my brilliance. I still remember him because, as he was bleeding out, he whispered something to me:
“Typical Virgo behavior.”
In response, I carved out a small piece of his flesh and ate it as he watched. When I was done, I thanked him for the gift, but by then he was dead and I was ready to get started calculating the orbital paths of heavenly bodies.
Many times I’ve tried to track down the origin of my pain, so that I can do to him what I should have done many years ago. But it has been impossible to track him down, and so, out of a lack of closure and because of what he did to me, I have repeated the patterns of abuse over and over and over again, killing one man after the other, until I became a vessel, a pure crystal, a product of my insufferable trauma. My form has twisted, solidified, shattered, and then cut itself into finer shape, a gem with 13 faces, but despite all these appearances I am hollow. To be full I have to be filled with a substance that you cannot see, there has to be a second nature to my essence, something undetectable, not necessarily believed in, but felt. Marx talks about the “thingly husk” of the commodity’s body form — oh, I’m paraphrasing, maybe he doesn’t really say that at all. But the point is, well, it’s like that Björk song, the one where she has to go out to the edge of the cliff every morning to throw little things off the mountain, contemplate suicide, and then return to her normal life. Without that she has nothing, it’s her little ritual, just as much as praying to the Lord, or smoking, or being a no loads refused pass around party bottom, or endlessly recreating the trauma of your abuse. We all have our little things.
🜔
13
☿
It was a dark magic ritual, is what it was. Deep boring eyes of fire, shredding through the soul. All those people had to die, you see, that was his ascendance, it’s how it happened.
There were 13 exactly, 13 deaths. And after that sacrifice, his eyes were empty forever. The day after it happened, he tripped and fell into a lit fireplace while he was addressing the crowd, and half his face was burned. He became a symbol after that, something elevated, humming with a dark fire. Everywhere he went there was death and he feasted on it.
After that, he gave it all up, moved out to Utah, and converted to Mormonism, which I firmly tried to advise him against, but my brother isn’t really the kind of person who you can try to tell what to do. He’s really angry, and not even entirely for bad reasons, people used to throw rocks and shit at him, he’s had a little bit of a rough go of things even though he’s better off than our parents. He didn’t necessarily want for a lot, though he did in a few other ways, and though he comes across as kind of prickly, he means well. He’s a good soul, who just wants love, and sometimes he only means to be silly, but it comes across all wrong. Well, that’s who he used to be at least, before any of this happened.
It all started when he began smoking A M BITCH I O N with his girlfriend, who is lovely and they have a child together now. One time I did coke with them while their kid was in the other room with our friend Lori — she got her bump first of course, and then they switched off with her. They liked to have fun, you see. One time we drove all the way out to this haunted attraction together, and he was already a little drunk, did a little coke beforehand, and we smoked in the car on the way there. When he got fucked up like that he was really fucking annoying, and all night everyone was staring at him in line while he went on and on and on about all kinds of shit — stocks, construction, politics, it was endless.
When we got home, we sat in their living room and I watched him get out a little piece of obsidian stonework. He opened a small chamber inside the stone, removed a red ember, and then dropped the ember into a big well in the center of the object. From a mouthpiece at the top, he inhaled, and then he exhaled iridescent smoke, glittering in the air with vivid, shifting color. He offered me some, passing me the object.
“A little gift from me to you,” He said.
I declined, and he passed it on and fell into the carpet, overcome with visions, muttering and slurring his words. That was the first time I ever saw him use A M BITCH I O N and it was like something entered him that day. Whenever I saw him after that, it was like his body was humming, potent with some kind of charge, and every time I saw him subsequently the humming grew steadily, until the incident, when 13 souls were snuffed out.
The story goes, and this is only hearsay, that A M BITCH I O N puts you in touch with the realm of spirits and the great Void. What you find is purely up to what A M BITCH I O N decides, however generous or wicked or apathetic or mischievous it feels on a given day. It has a mind of it own. When you smoke A M BITCH I O N you’re smoking something else. You’re smoking someone else. The first time he ever smoked it, he had been smoking himself. Later, his girlfriend found a piece of his flesh missing, and then later a piece of her own, and it went like that week after week. They cut out parts of their flesh and offered them to something — when their home was raided, they found an altar in the basement, hosting many gifts of flesh, some of them traceable to both my brother and his girlfriend, some of them still a mystery. But for each piece of flesh on the altar, there had to be many more that had been transformed, somehow, into A M BITCH I O N and smoked.
Eventually, it seems, they developed a craving for heavier and heavier doses, and that’s how the plot of the 13 deaths started. But what’s interesting is — and this is just what I’ve been told — apparently the 13 people all volunteered. He told them they were going to die, that to him they would give their greatest gift, and in return he would allow them to ascend to heaven. They would reach heaven first in order to prepare for his coming. When he arrived to join them, he would be welcomed as a Lord among Lords. They would build him a city for his arrival, a city among cities, and upon being welcomed through its gates, he would bless them eternally and win them the favor of God. And they believed it, all of them, every one. I couldn’t tell you how or why they would do a thing like that, to this day, but the investigation determined, one way or another, that they all entered death willingly. None of them were on A M BITCH I O N, but my brother and his girlfriend were when they found them, writhing and sputtering on the floor, claiming to have discovered 13 eternal secrets. The only thing the 13 bodies had eaten that day were little shreds of flesh, talcum powder, and milk, lots of it. The entire crime scene had been covered in nothing but milk…
🜔
13
☿
Milk is the kind of thing I just can’t abide, diva. Picture me, arched back, he’s in me and I’m giving pillow princess with the soft, delicate moans, and then it gets bestial and sweaty and it starts to stink. But then he pulls out of me, 13 cocks, and he starts fucking milking each one. Disgusting. At first, it starts to roll down my thighs, but then he finally manages to get it in me and it burns and besets me with visions of Ozymandias, but I don’t mean the poem, and I don’t mean that as a metaphor — the real actual Ozymandias, Pharaoh Ramses Ozymandias the Terrible that, coincidentally, on the day Percy Shelley’s name was finally forgotten forever, washed up in the Mediterranean, coming ashore on the sandy isle of this pussy.
This guy is still milking, which makes me angry, which makes me forget all about the mummy washing up, and I’m furious, but I let him do it anyways because I’m going to kill him afterwards. The reason I’m going to kill him doesn’t really have anything to do with the milking, but the milking has made me want to consider a crueler death for him, maybe something more torturous.
I mean, here’s the thing, really. I don’t just want to do this, I want to do it right. I’m a perfectionist, I care about my craft, I’m not careless. No, my work is a gift to the world, it’s careful, it’s an art form. It has to linger. What good is a sudden death to anyone, really?
For example, the other day someone executed the King in broad daylight, and it was too quick. This is a man who, personally, I think well deserved to suffer. Don’t just give him death, make him beg you for it! Milk the death from him, for all the milk he’s stolen from you. Or something like that. Pierce 13 udders with 13 syringes full of 13 ravenous fires! Burn the milk before it’s even produced, fill it with rot, corrupt it and beat its form until it, full of pain, turns back around on you. Because if Hell isn’t real, then we have to come together and create it, just for him, that is our duty, that is our gift that we hold with outstretched hands.
🜔
13
☿
She left the man waiting outside for 4 days, and the fog rolled in heavier and heavier with the passing of each sun. He had no comfort, no succor from the wind. The doors to the temple were shut, but the gate to the outside world was too, and so he wandered around the exterior screaming, complaining that he was starving. She left him in that state while She added up all the sacred numbers. There were so many, after all, and somebody had to be the one to add them all up around here. Could he really fault Her for having such important work to do?
As he starved, his sweat began to glow and his body would shimmer in the light of the fog, more and more, day after day. The more the fog became a part of the air he breathed and the landscape he saw and the mindset he immersed himself in, the more his sweat produced powerful magic. Every night, She and the other sisters crept out and harvested it from him while he slept. Sweat was sacred to them, as it had been to Vivileth when she woke from her slumber, finding her dreaming bed soaked with an elixir of metamorphoses that continued to ooze from her pores day after day. With all that oozing, her dreams could leak out into the world, made real, something to mold and whip reality into her shape. To this day, the sisters harvested sweat in her honor.
On the last day, they brought out the bounty — 13 cornucopias, wrapped up, bursting with abundance. As they surrounded him, the man was all smiles, no complaints. After starving for 96 hours, suffering outside the temple howling and pleading, finally he had broken down, finally he was quiet, finally he might accept the gift of death.
“Today is the 13th day of your trial,” She said, “7 days you wandered the earth, 2 days you lay dead, and 4 days you stood outside the gates of the temple begging Vivileth to grant you death again, but today we give you her bounty, the gift of abundance, to rhyme with her 13th night of slumber.”
She and the sisters delivered the cornucopias one-by-one to him, resting them at his feet, and then they stood and watched as he did nothing. With all the bounty of heaven and earth before him, fresh berries, melons, glittering souls, legs of lamb, spiced fruits, damned spirits, bread, succulent grapes, he was no longer hungry. He simply stood, silent, unmoving, before falling over. He hit the ground and spilled the cornucopias, plunging all that bounty into the dirt.
Then they went about the real work, stripping his body, washing it, preparing it for the altar. Each of them cut a piece from him — some of the sisters went for rarer cuts: organs, buttocks, perineum, genitals, while others stuck to thigh or leg. Then they doused the cuts of flesh in the collected sweat and buried them in the garden. Together they made 13 mounds in the soil, and then She took her final piece of 13’s flesh, 7 days old, and made a 14th mound next to the others.
By next harvest, they would have 14 men, grown straight up out of the garden — 14 bodies new, 14 cadavers rotting, 14 lost spirits wandering through the fog, waiting to be allowed to return to form, ready to enter union with their new host. One of them would return to Her, some day farther down the line, and then they would do it all again but greater, ready for the next harvest, steadily increasing the bounty year after year.
She went upstairs to Her quarters and sat patiently. From the back of Her throat it came, a little morsel, the end of a long string. She felt a humming in her soul, a fear, something old and ancient returning to her at long last. She began to pull the string out slowly, but it was tangled up in Her insides, so every time She pulled She could feel things stretching and twisting in her gut. It was a slow game, little by little and then a quick pull. Little by little and then a big give. The string got longer and longer this way, coming and coming until one little pull yanked the rest of it out, disgorging a tangle of string and flesh that widened into a bulb at the very end. She felt a sharp pain on Her insides, and then the words started coming to Her, one after the other. She scribbled down some notes on a scroll:
From these 7 days of death, come 7 days of life— 13 giving way to its superior, A bloodletting, one of many, Fuel for the return of that darkest rhythm, For that shadowed era, The giving and receiving of gifts most unholy, That hum with the power of an angry god, trapped inside their form, The giving and offering of blood, A song whose words and melodies, even now, Begin to echo in my mind, no longer forgotten, So that maybe all this death can give way to life.
Then She went out into the garden, buried the tangle of flesh and string, and waited. In the late evening, as the sun began to set, bathing the earth in a glow of crimson ichor, She pricked her finger and let some blood fall into the garden.
At the very stroke of midnight, 13 returned to Her, cooing softly as they approached her through the darkness, coming to settle in Her lap. They were just as before, a big mass of fur and feathers and other features, but larger, humming with a brighter energy, more alive than ever. She held them in Her arms and cherished the beating of their little heart.
“I missed you,” She said.
13 responded with an aria, a long and pronounced work of vocal acrobatics, and then licked Her face.
“I have a gift for you,” She said. “It’s that time of year, after all…”
She handed 13 a little gift box, and they squealed, lilting and leaking and shaking as they tried to open the box with their long threaded tongue. She put her hand on them, and ran Her fingers through their fur.
“I conquered God and tore him from the sky. I didn’t kill him, but I cut him up into 13 pieces. I put him in this box, for you. A little fragment of him here, shuddering, trapped in this vessel. Powerless, for once. Then, I made a man in his image, released him into the world, and when he returned, no longer remembering his origin, thinking himself his own creator, I gave him back to the earth. Now he will be 14 men, in your glory, 14 cuts of flesh, 14 flowers waiting to bloom. And they will grow, as you will grow. 7 days of death for 7 days of life — passing into a new form, haunted by endless visions of worlds that could have been. But with God, here, inside the vessel — no need to worry about any of that. No need to concern oneself with anything at all.”
13 sung, happily, lifting its voice in song, as it finally wrested the box open, revealing a single beating heart.
“Merry Christmas, 14,” She said, patting the little beast on the head. 14 grabbed her hand, with their ragged maws, and stripped Her bones of Her flesh. Down in the yard, past the greenhouse, the buried pieces of flesh grew, slowly, wriggling through the soil, becoming 14 faces and 14 mouths. And those little pieces of tissue that were starting to construct little lips twisted themselves into 14 warm little smiles.
☿
14
🜍
This story is part of the Twenty-Four Doors advent calendar
December 14th Seajade
I had a lot of fun with this! I’d been meaning to come back to it.
The story itself has a mythical parallel in Pandora’s box. Like opening the box examining faith can lead to its destruction but just like Pandora found hope at the bottom our characters appear to have also grown somehow. I can’t articulate exactly how but they seem to have developed their own values. I also liked the dark comedy in some sections.
I appreciated the fractal like story structure with each section mimicking parts of the others and all of them centering around the number 13.
I’ve tried for a while to pin down who your writing reminds me of and I’ve decided that at least thematically it’s probably Clive Barker. I don’t read as much poetry so it confused me that something felt familiar about your writing but having seen two short stories I think Barker is who you remind me of. The strong focus on feeling exiled, physical pain, and sensory pleasure helped me make the connection. If you haven’t read Barker I prefer his short fiction but thematically I think the novel Mr B Gone might interest you. It’s stayed with me since I read it as a teenager because of how weird it is. Books of Blood has a lot of his best known short fiction and I’m a bigger fan of it. He deals more directly with Hell than the author I’m about to mention.
The part about the maw reminds me of Nicole Cushing’s Great Dark Mouth (no spoilers but it’s a god like thing used to express similar themes). If you haven’t read Cushing she also combines esoteric themes with mental/emotional problems. A lot of her protagonists are driven to cruelty by an obsession with their own emotional pain. The line “we all have our little things” really reminded me of Cushing. I had trouble understanding the setting in some places but this is also true of certain Barker pieces. It isn’t a story breaking problem and can be an asset in some contexts. I think Cushing has a stronger sense of place despite devoting more of her word count to interiority. One of my favorite things Cushing does in A Sick Grey Laugh is create intentional ambiguity about certain aspects of the setting with strategic double meanings which is something I think you could totally try if it interested you! I think you’d be good at it with the poetry you write.
Also if you haven’t read Gogol I think he’s worth looking at if you like Barker or Cushing. While none of them engage in exactly the same flavor of esotericism I think they might at least be interesting to you. Good job with this!
Oh I was not ready to read this in the morning! It was so good and my brain could take this into so many interpretations but my mind was so focus on how you constructed or manipulated flesh in the story (literally). I loved it!