A God of Hungry Walls

by Garrett Cook

  “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Antonia. You’re Brian?”

  He nods. She gets up on her knees and advances up his body, standing above him like he’s something she has vanquished. Not yet but she is on the way. The slave is so proud, strong and confident right now. This being who has been literally shat on quite often is completely in control.

  “Would you like to kiss me, Brian?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Yes,” he says breathlessly, “yes, I want to kiss you.”

  She kisses him. She delicately grazes his thigh with her leg and these things are enough to make him hard for her straight away. The dead girl makes his body surge with life. She uses the gift of shape and solid, the gift of skinagain well. There are reasons I treasure her so. He will grow to treasure her too. She pulls away from the kiss, brushes a second time against his lips but does not complete the kiss.

  “Do you like it when I kiss you?”

  She learned this under the lash and in the corner. The taste of Maddy’s shit clumping in the back of her throat taught her all there is to know about delicacy, subtlety and tact. And she says it through this almost-a-kiss. His body is shaking, shocked. It cannot help but tell that something is as wrong with this as it is so very right. But does he like it when she kisses him? The right and wrong are very insubstantial in this matter.

  “Yes,” he says. It was almost “of course” because the wispy nymph is clearly an of course. He grabs her entire buttocks, honed by thrusting and starving, in a palm and a half. He’s bold. She puts the lips that shockwaved through him on his throat. She sucks the flesh so slightly it’s almost just a breath in but if she held her breath, if she gave her all, she could drink it like an ocean, making suck up the whole of him. A sucking, a half inhale, a graze of teeth. Withdraw, then travel down, withdraw then taste a moment. Withdraw and make him want much more. She tickles his chest with a strand of her dirty blonde hair that swings over him like a silent windchime.

  Then she leans in, tasting his earlobe ever so slightly.

  “They beat me. They pissed on me and shat in my mouth. They choked me with belts. Whipped me. Fucked me in the ass ‘til I bled. Used the blood for lube. Do you want to hit me? Wanna choke me? Fuck me in the ass I bleed? Do you want that?”

  “No.” Part of him is lying. It is in the nature of these creatures to lie. He hasn’t done these things but he would really like to know.

  She kisses his chest, biting his nipple, reaches down into his boxers and begins to toy with his balls.

  “I like you, Brian. You deserve to have what you want.”

  He knows full well he’s not perfect but he feels right now like he might be.

  “Get on top.”

  “If that’s what you want,” she says, deftly yanking off his underwear. She lowers herself onto him slowly, letting each inch of him, each angle know how it feels to be in her. He fits into her like a glove and she squeezes him so tight and tender as he does. She sits still, doesn’t start moving, lets him just see what it feels like to be in her and know her. She bounces just once. Then again. She brushes her hand against his cheek.

  “Is this what you want?” she asks, “I like you.”

  He can only nod. I feel him opening to me a little, vulnerable, his mind knowing that he had been presented a gift by someone powerful and glorious and infinitely larger than him. He has had girls before but not like this. He was popular a bit for his guitar and for his hair and his sort of good looks. He was popular for his dark clothes and his time spent in quiet corners. But he has not had this. He has not seen anything this compliant or loving. The Closetsong is opening him some as if it wishes to be sporting, as if it thinks it’s helping. And then of course all I can get is how wonderful she feels, how good she smells how real she is, how silly his denials. She is picking up her pace, she is swirling her hips and he is controlling her with his hands.

  “I like you,” he sighs.

  “I like you too. Be calm. Enjoy this.”

  If there were questions, they’ve disappeared inside her with his cock.

  “You’re so beautiful, Antonia.”

  She feels a jolt of me in her, a jolt of shock. She knows what comes next. She knows what I brought her for. She knows what she objected to that led her to facing a corner for an eternity. She doesn’t want to say it but she loves me for what I’ve given her, this power and eternal life, this glory and beauty and a chance to be bigger than people. She doesn’t want to say it but she knows the consequences and she knows what happens when she doesn’t eat the words that I have fed her. Even if she had loved this man more deeply than life itself, she would have a hard time resisting.

  “You like me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You like this?” She tenses her body, she pushes down on him hard, works him fiercely.

  “Yes.”

  “What if I was never here?” she asks, hips pounding like a hammer.

  “I don’t...” there is fear in his eyes though the rest of his body’s delighted.

  “What if I was dead? What if I was a murderer? A dead girl who killed a woman then was killed by her lover, or a man who thought he was her lover but was just her captor?”

  “Why are you asking this?”

  Suddenly laughter, laughter that shakes the world beyond their fucking. Laughter that can capsize him, drown him.

  “I was never here,” she says, letting her face rot away and drip onto his sheets, letting her face become like the face of the First Girl.

  “You’re crazy. Nothing happened, I was never here.”

  He tries to wiggle away from her but there is no escape. Her muscles are strong. They are my muscles and in these walls, I am god. To wiggle out the cunt of god cannot be done. He is exploding into her as her rotted face looks down on him in judgment, asserting absence and whispering gone gone gone. He doesn’t close his eyes because behind his eyes he’ll find me or else he’ll find the Closetsong. He reaches up and strokes her rotten face.

  “I don’t believe you,” he says.

  She struggles free from me, suddenly moved. She whispers to him again though she knows that I can hear it, knows she will be punished.

  “Good.”

  Her body goes limp and stiff, falls on top of him, his gaze locked with her dead face. He is trying not to cry or doubt his sanity. He just cries, lying underneath Antonia’s body, a body which fades from view as he throws arms around it. Though dead, he can’t help but treasure her as I do. I will have him, it will be so. I will beat him to death with history.

  Maddy and Clarence and the First Girl

  Maddy and Clarence are sitting at dinner. I don’t know what moves me to give them this moment. It might be that I start to fear insubordination. Maddy was younger, much thinner back then. Her face had been softer, her eyes less wide and crazy. She thought back then they were happy together. She thought nothing of the times that Clarence made her wear a bag over her head when they made love, when he would make her call him “daddy” or play dead. She had thought back then that he was just stressed out at work when he would break a dish to make a point.

  This was a man who loved her. He was handsome and a doctor. He was rich. She was proud to be loved by him even if she wasn’t. She remembers this time as a time when everything was good, this time before The Kitten. Though I have shown her the times he treated his patients like he’d treated Kaz up in the study, she would not watch I made her watch and yet she would not watch. I could keep her in that room forever and she would never never take in that it was bad before The Kitten.

  But this night when they are sitting at dinner, they are at their happiest. It might be so. How happy could they have been? They are enjoying a pot roast together, the fruit of an afternoon’s labor. Maddy is the perfect housewife and Clarence the perfect husband, coming home from the office to a dinner wrought from an afternoon slaving over a hot stove.

 
“This is good,” he says, straining. It is in fact a delicious pot roast but he is straining to tell her, to seem civil and not hate her for the weight gain and the children she can’t have. Not that he would want to raise anything that came out of her body. He is trying to be civil because there’s something he wants from her.

  “Thank you. It’s my grandmother’s recipe.” She doesn’t expect him to want to talk about pot roast for very long and wouldn’t want to go on for much longer and provoke his anger, anger he’d bring out in bed with something awful. So, she doesn’t expect him to talk about pot roast very long. He is going to talk about something else now.

  “I think I feel ready. To try this. Do you feel ready?”

  “I thought you were joking at first,” she says, lighting a cigarette, “I couldn’t have imagined that you’d...”

  Clarence stands up, puts an arm around Maddy’s waist and draws her close. He speaks to her quietly, warmly, smoothly. He speaks to her essentially in his doctor voice.

  “Very serious, Maddy. I think this is who I am. I promised, Maddy, that I’d never judge you for who you are. And I know that you would never judge me for who I am. I have needs, Maddy. And dreams. I have to be able to do this without feeling afraid. I have to do this and know that you still love me and approve of me for who I am. Do you love me, Maddy? Do you approve of who I am?”

  She raises a hand to stroke his cheek.

  “Of course I do, Clarence. I would never judge you. I love you.”

  “So are you ready for this, Maddy? Are you going to help me?”

  Tears are pooling in her eyes. She is genuinely afraid. He didn’t know he was this man before they came together and now she is scared that she knows who this man is and she approves of everything about him, even this, even the worst thing, even the thing that maybe would have made her say no to him. But this thing doesn’t make her say no to him. His arm is around her waist, she’s clutched close and she’s safe.

  “Yes, Clarence. I guess I’m ready. I told you I love you and I want you to be happy. If this is what you need to do...”

  He shakes his head.

  “No, Maddy. I just need to know. Just once. I have to see if it feels right. I can never help but wonder.”

  “Would you like another helping of pot roast?”

  Clarence would not like another helping of fucking pot roast.

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  Maddy nods.

  “I am. This is uncomfortable. I didn’t know this about you when we first got together. I’m not sure I would have….I’m sorry for saying this.”

  Clarence hangs his head. He plays up the torture in him, he plays up the forces fighting for control as if it had ever been a fair fight, which it never was. The homeless girl he tossed into the Charles, throat slit, asshole caked with blood, appears in his mind’s eye and he remembers the sensation of power, control and certainty that brought him and the knowledge that he could do it again and get away with it because he was smart and charming and respectable and clever, most of all clever. He lets the feeling of torture appear on his face while inside there is the ecstasy of knowing somebody will know what he’s done and not only know but help him and not only help him but live day in, day out with the knowledge that they are a part of it.

  “You shouldn’t be. This isn’t something regular people think. It’s not healthy, no matter what I tell you. I have problems. I have a dark side, Maddy and I can’t pretend I don’t. I can’t expect you to love me, not when I’m this horrible thing that I am. I can’t deal with this alone and I need you to help me and make sure that I get through this okay. But I can’t make you do that.”

  She holds his hand. She looks deep into his eyes, seeing the torment and crocodile tears he wants to project and the fear of disapproval that he wants her to think plagues him and the repulsion and the sick novelty of it. She looks deep into his eyes and she sees exactly what he wants her to see because he’s good at that and that’s why I need him and also why I brought them both back here. It is, in a way, two people renewing their wedding vows, not the starched white false vows they made before the imaginary deity that lurks outside my threshold but before the true god in their walls and in their lives.

  “I’m here for you and if you need this, I’m here to help you. Til death do us part, I said and I’ve gotta take that serious. You need to know what this is like and if you can live without it.”

  He got away with this twice before. Twice before even meeting Maddy. He knew what it felt like already and didn’t want to live without it. Clarence needed power and dominion over the wills of those around him. Clarence needed to be able to change hearts. Doing this just with patients and fucking just his patients hadn’t been nearly enough.

  “Thank you. I love you so much.”

  “I love you.”

  And then suddenly Clarence is out and part of the night that he belongs in. He is stalking and waiting and dreaming. It has been too long for him since the last time. He feels as if five minutes was too long. He wants to take everything with legs and tits back to his house, have his fill of it and finish it off while his wife watches. But he does of course pick one, hard as it is, he finds her, young and wide-eyed and desperate and stupid.

  And then suddenly the First Girl is listening to a dashing older man at a bar, telling her she seems sophisticated for her age. And they’re talking about Eastern Philosophy and yoga and energetics and all of these things that Micah and Cytherea go in for. And they’re talking about politics and youth culture. And he’s listening to her as she brings up how apathetic her generation is and wonders where the dream of the beatniks and hippies has gone. He’s quoting Ginsberg and she’s asking him what he does for a living. And he tells her he’s a therapist, interested in Jung and Reich and all of these new techniques. And he asks her if she wants to go back to his place and drink some wine and smoke some marijuana. And of course she trusts him and wants to go back to his place and drink some wine and smoke some marijuana. He has always been good at making people trust him.

  And she goes to his office in the study through the back door. He talks about not wanting to wake his wife and she giggles. It’s an adventure. A dirty, secret adventure. She’s never done it with a married man before. She whispers that she’s a little ashamed of herself. He doesn’t go in for shame. An antiquated Judeochristian concept that society would be better off without. Denying one’s urges destroys the heart and soul.

  They kiss. He touches her thigh. Her top comes off. Her breasts are big and conical and she isn’t wearing a bra. She smiles at him and he smiles at her. Soon, they’re naked together. Soon he’s making use of her, not with the enthusiasm he’d use Antonia with. He pounds away at her apathetically, not like he wants to be pounding away at her, not in the way that I want him to either.

  He suddenly pulls out of her.

  “Hold on,” he says, “close your eyes. I’m going to get something.”

  She closes her eyes, expecting handcuffs, expecting a blindfold. She does not expect a syringe full of tranquilizers to be pulled out of his desk. She doesn’t expect to get dizzy, doesn’t expect to hit the floor. And she doesn’t expect that he’ll keep going when she does. She doesn’t expect a trembling, crying wife to come in and watch because he needs her to watch.

  “I brought the hammer like you wanted,” she says.

  “You’re going to watch, right?” he asks, urgent, momentarily ceasing his fuck.

  Maddy nods, head heavy, invisibly anvilled. She doesn’t want to see this. She doesn’t want to think about the thing she married. But she watches him entering her again. She’s surprised at how it feels.

  It is exciting to see her husband so much in charge. It is exciting to see her husband punishing this little whore for being stupid and for trying to take him away. Her husband has become an instrument of justice, righteousness and hope. Manly, assertive and in the right, he fills her with a burning desire for him. She is shocked to witness the spectacle of
him brutalizing this unconscious woman with his cock and feeling aroused by it. Her hand wanders between her legs and finds herself getting wet.

  And then she squirms awake. Her panties are stuffed in her mouth. The man she had gone home with and chosen as a lover is tossing her around like a ragdoll full of meat. A woman is sitting in the corner of the room masturbating. She tries to pull herself away from him but the drugs have made her drowsy. He hits her with the hammer and a trickle of blood appears on her head, as if he had hit her just to chisel it out.

  The hammer comes down again. He thrusts a few times. The hammer comes down again. She is pleading silently, though her mouth is sewn shut she is silently pleading. Maddy’s hand trembles. She’s not sure she could do this. She has never hit somebody before. Clarence’s fucking gets more intense, her body is shaking from him. Her eyes are full of tears, her mouth is full of semen and her insides full of him. Maddy is mad. She might be mad at Clarence for betraying her but she finds herself madder at this dirty little whore for enticing him. She punches the First Girl in the stomach. And then again. Clarence strikes her on the head once more with the hammer.

  She squirms. She bleeds. Bruise. Blood. Crack. Crack. Crack. Numbness. Less squirming. Clarence explodes with excitement. Maddy explodes with excitement. He goes at her fiercing, interspersing thrust and thrust with beating. Maddy cries out as the girl stops squirming. Seeing only red, feeling only cunt, he fucks her until he’s good and empty, he fucks her until he can do nothing but collapse into his wife’s arms.

  And this, for Maddy was love.

  Heap

  I shouldn’t trust the foe but I let it drag me along if only because I am confident in my godhood in this place. Kaz is bringing home junkies and Leah is eating buttons and Micah and Cytherea are entangled in coitus that neither one quite likes or comprehends. I should be paying attention to them instead but no, now it’s this. It shows me a boy. I know who he is. There is only person he can be. I know what should be mine but isn’t yet. I know when I’m being challenged or being taunted. Yet I go where it takes me.