A God of Hungry Walls

by Garrett Cook

  She shows herself to Cytherea, a dead woman frigging herself fiercely. Cytherea’s eyes widen in fear as her ass widens in pain and pleasure. Cytherea is dilating, her body an eye opening to terror.

  “Stop!” she cries out as if this is a word that the puppet of Pan recognizes, “I saw something! We’re not alone!”

  Maddy giggles into her right hand as the left one works herself, getting chips of glass into its too thick fingers. She appreciates having been seen. Maddy is not someone who has gotten much of pleasure. She whispers to me about the moment she can’t let go of, even as she works her wide, inarticulate cunt, making her rotted, shapeless tits flop up and down. Micah watches her as well, She shows him the moment where she was ended, with blood and great oozing red puddles of her lifeforce. His whorish cow is screaming, wants it in, wants it out.

  Still full of lust, he resists Maddy’s suggestion to take Cytherea outright and give her to me completely. A part of him loves her and this part surrenders to an atom of judgment. I hope this part of him will not linger long.

  He opens up the nightstand and resists me and denies me and lies to himself by withdrawing the bottle of lube he keeps in there, rubbing it into her asshole even as she cries and begs him to answer her, even as she screams about the dead woman furiously fucking herself bloody. Vulgar display. Needs a lesson taught. And here he is using lubrication. I growl at him to fuck her dry but he will not fuck her dry. He doesn’t want to hurt her though he wants to hurt her. She certainly deserves it. He could be rid of her and I’d help him but instead he has uncorked the bottle so he might slide it in the hole.

  She is crying as he takes her with it, though her lubed asshole absorbs it and brings it in fine, wide and smooth as it is. I drive into him harder as he drives into her, my great phantom cock pounding at such a pace that he blacks out into the jungle into the sensation of being perfectly had. She is screaming now and begging him to stop. Maddy wants him to break it and rip her insides. Yes, that’s the way. He can’t really hear her though.

  Cytherea eventually bites her tongue and rides the rapewave into new sensation. What a man, what a beast, what a god her lover is. She has asked for the beast and now the beast has come.

  Somehow, she has never loved him more. She needs to have him like this, even though it hurts her, stretches her, tests her limits and her faith in him. She wonders what got into him, not knowing that it is me. If it could be, as it will be, I could be all that’s in him, the thing that twists her wide open and uses her hard, cum after cum after cum.

  Still tearing into her with the bottle, he inserts his cock. She’s getting wet and tense and tight. If he could care right now, he’d take pleasure in her pleasure instead of just his and mine. He is taking much pleasure in me, here in the deep green tangled would where he is had and had completely. He starts cumming in her as I cum in him, fluids and fluids and fluids begetting fluids. She is begging him to stop even as she gets pleasured. She keeps swearing that she saw Maddy, which she has, even though she hasn’t, even though she has. She has seen the sloshing heavytitted, thumping meatskinned monstrosity, corpseskinned graygreen, empty-eyed harridan.

  She screams from pain and ecstasy, she screams for him to stop and to keep going and she screams “not my ass” and “no no no no.” Shit and blood and lube are seeping from her gaped asshole. She screams that she is going to die. Micah hears nothing, since he is in the woods, untouchable by anything in the world but me. His cock and the bottle are hurting her.

  I show some discipline by opening Micah’s eyes to let him see the mess he’s made of his woman and her cunt and her ass and her bed. He is out of the jungle. He’s mine now but I give him his body and spirit so he can feel what he’s done. He doesn’t clean up. He doesn’t call a doctor. He looks on into the future and at the woman beside him, who he loves or claims to love. She is sobbing, bleeding and cumming, holding a towel up to her ass to stem the bleeding, which should stop. At least he hopes it will and hopes it can stop.

  He holds her close, kisses her. Though she is still bleeding, a smile crosses her face.

  “I liked that,” she says, “so do it more like that.”

  I move through the fluids inside her, move through her body and blood to patch her up some, to fix her. To make her ready for worse next time.

  Basement

  Without the equipment, he’s felt insignificant. He barely touches it. The guitar. It reminds him of somebody. He’s more into the piano anyhow. He’s felt naked without his equipment since he usually isn’t much of anyone. He had breakfast with Micah and Cytherea and they were nice enough or acted nice enough but he still feels like he doesn’t fit in. He doesn’t. Not yet.

  He doesn’t yet fit in. The conversation had been stunted. He asked if the house made noises. Micah had joked about ghosts. And everybody shared an awkward laugh. He had not felt much like trusting either of them. There is something about them that unsettles him. Micah is a bit too friendly. He talks right in people’s faces, frequently touching their arm or shoulder.

  Cytherea is aloof when she’s not being crude and a bit too forward sexually. She leaned in, giving Brian a view deep down her shirt and joked that the moaning was probably just Kaz with a stripper from the club. Kaz doesn’t go to that club actually. Not anymore. Cytherea is mostly just being mean and wants Brian to herself. She thinks it will make Micah jealous. Getting a good fucking and making Micah jealous in one fell swoop seems like a great deal to her. She likes his face and his casual scruff, the little bit of muscle on his body, the broad shoulders. She wants him more than she had the previous day. Of course.

  Just for fun, I sent her the image of the two of them fucking. He was behind her as Micah had been, hands twisting her nipples, cock smacking into her overstretched cumtunnel. Made her wet. Gave her ideas that she already had. I think this should be amusing. Micah would never admit he gets as jealous as she does. They are precious and chaff to each other all at the same time. They are expendable things that they could never actually live without.

  Kaz had had a morning session with Doctorpuppet. She had once gone to see a doctor outside the house. She didn’t need that anymore. It didn’t help her anyway. She had once wasted an hour and a half of her week in an office space in Brookline lying about whose hands had been on her body the weekend before, lying about how much she loved and how much she hated herself, lying about all the poisons she put inside to make living tolerable and then lying when she pretended she didn’t notice the therapist staring at her chest. When Doctorpuppet does it she likes it.

  Doctorpuppet is an interesting case. There is no reason the ladies should have been swooning and sighing and sopping over him and yet they were and yet they are and yet they would do anything for him. She lies upon his couch, the couch in the study and he listens and not once during her account of her week does she lie to him. And all her wrong and ugly and open gash is lain bare for her and him. Doctorpuppet almost forgets himself and his life by having pangs of guilt for wanting to have and to use and to taste her. He wants her to walk away from this and to leave the house, my threshold and to never come back here again. She wants him to be her own to prove that she has broken down his power, to prove that she could break any man down.

  Leah is in class. Micah and Cytherea are out. They’d had a big night and feel close. And Kaz is talking to Doctorpuppet. So, Brian is alone down in the basement, setting up his things so he can get productive and feel like his own man and feel like whatever he had to leave behind, the thing I can’t look at, is gone and that it is its fault and not his that he had to leave it. I don’t understand his allergy to nostalgia. I am not sentimental but I am fond of nostalgia.

  He is stacking black boxes and setting up boards covered in knobs. I have some idea what they are because I have seen them in Micah before but as far as I’m concerned they are nothing but strange boards with knobs on them, tools of the cacophonist trade. I do not wish to know more about how all this works and what it means to him but I mus
t because he has crossed this threshold and I am entitled to him.

  He plugs in the keyboard, sets up the microphone stand, sets his guitar down in the corner to collect dust. A man so averse to nostalgia no doubt lets a great deal of his life collect dust. Pathetic thing, this man surrounded by machines to reconfigure the noises of his life, the new one in this house, the one he doesn’t gather yet. While resistant to inquiry, I’m hoping that he can be educated.

  He looks to the guitar and then away from it. He grabs a beer and he sits, contemplating the thing as if he does not even know the function of the device. No. It’s not that. It’s something better than that. Interesting. He’s put the guitar down someplace very special, one might say he has set down at the heart of the basement.

  It’s my favorite patch of the past that belongs to me and the person in the patch, oh, she’s my favorite. I shouldn’t have favorites. It’s a sign of sentiment. I am not sentimental. I’m above that. Though often I see these people lose things and it occurs to me that it would be quite terrible to lose something or someone. I almost lost the girl who left but she was too much mine. Because of this and because he seems to know I feel like communicating with him some and conveying some of my many stored up moments, since my many stored up moments are so very important to my architecture.

  The corner, the precious corner, held Antonia; Antonia, of the dirty blonde hair and eyes that sparkled with enthusiasm even when Clarence brought her home for dinner. They ate coq au vin, cooked oh-so-perfect by quiet, devoted Maddy. She didn’t notice the red wine was making her terribly sleepy. But she noticed when she woke up to Clarence inside her, stoic silent wife looking on as he had his way with her.

  “Come fuck her, Maddy, come fuck her,” he had said.

  “H-h-help…” Antonia struggled out, words speared to death on the edge of her abuser’s cock. And Maddy just shook her head at both suggestions. Never liked little whores like this one. I don’t show him this because I’m not in deep in yet and he’s not ready to know it. The truth will be a whole lot less enticing so I show him the part that entices, I show him the cage. But most importantly and most enticingly, I show him the girl in the cage.

  Antonia, both fair and dark of hair is in the cage splayed naked and inviting. She’s rubbing her clit while she spreads her lips wide open. He tries to blink and make her go away. He tries to tell himself that there is no cage. She is the scent of pie baking on the wind, the chime of doorbells with the news of longawaited packages from the family. She is for him here and now, though I only give him enough glimpses of her to know he saw it and she was certainly there.

  He lets go some and I can get glimpses of him just as he had of her. He thinks something is terribly wrong. Loving cannot be this easy. It’s got drama, it’s got hurt and there’s never a happy ending. Love is to him perhaps like the life of the real Antonia instead of like this vision of her. It wasn’t real before. Before what? Intriguing. Love smells like her situation. These thoughts are pregnant with promise, as open as Antonia the dream, Antonia the ghost.

  A frame of Maddy is angry. Stay away from that whore! Nobody touches that whore! I push her back, drag her to the time of the broken bottle, when the whore she hated went and Christened her like a ship. Brian doesn’t quite see when she shows up but still feels a moment where he is drawn away from lust and into melancholy. I am very angry at Maddy for this. I do not like when she acts like she’s not mine. She is mine. I won her fair and square. Antonia and I won her fair and square. Antonia, who I freeze before his eyes to let him linger on the possibilities.

  He feels she must be so. He does not know but he sees it and he feels she must be so and therefore must be present. He reaches toward her, not knowing their distance is the distance between life and death, between the present and history. This is a wide chasm. I can’t believe when he says it but he does.

  “I can see you. It’s okay.”

  “I-I could…” Antonia says to me, “you know, I could…”

  I wait for her to say it.

  “I could touch him if you want me to. He wants me to. You’re making him want me and I can do that for him. He’ll let me.”

  “Don’t listen to that dirty little whore,” growls Maddy, “you mustn’t listen to it!”

  “I’m sorry,” says Antonia to Maddy, “I didn’t mean to.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  Antonia hangs her head.

  “It is.”

  Maddy shrieks loud enough that it almost shakes my hold on her and I have to tense up the strings. I grab hard onto her tethers. I do not approve of behavior like this and I have made it known. This is not a place where insubordination is allowed to thrive. If insubordination is allowed to thrive, then I lose hold of what is mine, if I lose hold of what is mine, then then then then then then then I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it.

  “She will kill you ‘til you listen, bitch,” I growl throughout her essence, “she will fuck your husband right in front of you. She will rip your cunt with broken glass then rip it up again until you listen. You are impertinent sometimes, Maddy. I give you so much and what you do give me? You give me your anger and disdain. I will not take anymore of that.”

  I consider punishing her but I take her instead to the places where she was putting Antonia in her place, the place where torture and beatings were given out freely and the thing in the cage knew that it was nothing but an object for everyone’s pleasure. She would sit beside her in church, her eyes aglow and would regard her as mother. She had almost become a mother.

  “I’d like,” said Antonia, “to touch him, just once, please let me touch him.”

  “Just once,” I said, “but wait.”

  “I will be good,” replies Antonia, “I am always good.”

  The First Girl, sobbing cadaver, wants to come out again and sob. But this is not the time. I send her back to her moment, the one where Clarence gave her to me. I am feeling a bit repulsed by the thing, though it is not normally in my nature. She is not completely mine or even completely there. There is so little to do with it. I turn my attention toward Antonia instead.

  “You will get to say hello,” I tell her, “for I am a loving and giving god.”

  “I know this,” she replies, “you are a god of love and justice and you give me everything I deserve.”

  It is easy to see why Antonia was Clarence’s treasure, the things in her that men would so desperately want. Always willing to learn and always retaining what you teach, such a delight. Her heart and her mind are so open and she wants so very much to be good. It brings me joy, as close to joy as I can get, or it gives me the thing that I think is joy.

  “Hello,” she whispers to Brian.

  He catches it. Was it another noise from the walls? It can’t be anything else. He still has to open a third beer to pull himself together. His eyes still keep drifting to the corner of the room though.

  Session II

  “Maybe you need to stop being passive,” says Doctorpuppet to Kaz, “maybe you need to make an effort. You let too many people control you. Phillip, Doreen. You let too many people control the momentum of your life. That’s why you keep having dreams of your car skidding off the road. You’re skidding off the road. You feel like you’re losing control of your life.”

  “I am,” says Kaz, trying not to take a defensive tone, “I went to an audition last week.”

  “Good. And how did it go?”

  “The warm-ups were hard and the other girls…well, holy shit, you should have seen them.”

  “And you?”

  “And me what?”

  “How do you feel compared to them? Are you as good as they are? Are you as attractive?”

  She laughs. It’s a stiff and uncomfortable laugh. It answers the question quite clearly even though she doesn’t know it does.

  “I’m way hotter than all of those girls. One of them is dating one of my exes. He’s totally settling. She’s got a face like a fucking horse. I swear to god, l
ike a fucking horse.”

  “And how were they as dancers?”

  She doesn’t answer. Which is an answer. But then she answers.

  “They’re better trained technically. But there’s something I have that they lack, some big, wild bestial thing. They’re not in touch with their shadows and they don’t do enough with their arms and shoulders. They more than kept up on the warm-ups but everything they did was honestly really fucking boring. They were all probably really terrible in bed.”

  Kaz extends her leg invitingly.

  “When it comes right down to it, they’re not as pretty and they’re not as smart and they’re not as interesting as I am.”

  “Mhmm,” says Doctorpuppet. He is quiet for a little, letting his eyes traverse her luscious, impossible calves. Doctorpuppet’s begging me to let him touch her again. It would be wrong again to do so. But he doesn’t care that it would be wrong to do so though he doesn’t care if it would be wrong to do so. He doesn’t care even though it sickens him. He would do anything to get back the thing I recently gave him, the moment as flesh, the moment to serve me. He wants to feel the bristles of her Mohawk yet again.

  “Do you think it’s your hair? Could that be a part of it?”

  “Yeah,” she says, “that’s a part of it. None of them look alternative. None of them are cool, none of them are creative, none of them even really look that hot when they dance. And this is burlesque, so that’s kind of the fucking least of it.”

  He’s quiet again, waiting for my answer to his petition. I give him something like a maybe which is actually a no. I want to see him holding onto the possibility as this progresses. I have to promise him something sometimes. Can’t be all punishment and yet I cannot spoil them. The silence is still and awkward and that silence is larger than life.