by Garrett Cook
He Moves Me
God doesn’t put up your pussy in a game of cards. Especially when he only has three fives. God doesn’t sit, listening as you scream while his army buddy savors his victory. God turns people into pillars of salt. God sends lightning to strike them, whales to eat them. Fire to burn them. If God does not do this, then what does he do? Is he jerking off too when the winner of the poker game shares his prize with six other yuppie scumbags? Is he the burning I feel as they unload themselves on my face? That fucker has a lot of nerve telling me what God doesn’t want me to do, accusing me of running around and being a slut. There were a couple of them, but I was careful every time. Most of the time. Which, according to our faith, God doesn’t want me to do.
The child of one of seven friends of my father or that guy from the concert or Steve Dreyfuss is hungry. So the little accident steals my dinner. It doesn’t ask “are you gonna finish that?” like Jen does and if I said “yeah” it wouldn’t listen. So my head gets light and my stomach grumbles as it takes everything it can from me. I punch myself in the stomach to let it know how I feel, but I’m the only one who’s hurt. Why am I always the only one who’s hurt?
I don’t know if it’s God that shows him to me on the news. Doesn’t seem like something God would do. But it’s something good, some kind of providence…yeah, that’s the word, providence. Pregnant women dead. Child ripped right out of them. Good for him. Over three hundred now. Three hundred less mouths to feed. Three hundred less squawking brats on airplanes and trains and at supermarkets. Good for him. And he is here! Right in the city doing his thing. I punch myself in the stomach out of excitement. I masturbate with a coat hanger to tease it, show it who’s boss. It tickles my insides. It tickles my heart.
I sneak out the window, following an inaudible hum in my brain that calls me out onto the streets. He is out there, the silencemaker, the holy abortionist. He will end my suffering and lead the way. I hear the name they’ve given him on the news and it moves me, he moves me out into the alleys tonight and if he can smell the whining fishthing in my womb like I can smell the power in him, then brighter days lie ahead.
I pass street musicians with open guitar cases and crackheads with signs saying they were veterans once. Say they were in Nam. Veterans only of the War on Drugs, which went just as shitty. God allegedly wants us to look out for these people. Because they’re the least of his children and shit. If the lazy fuck is out there, then why the fuck doesn’t he do it himself?
Down the alleys, into the maze. In the center, I’ll find the big, virile gorgeous Minotaur I’m looking for. He is bigger than daddy’s god and he wants me to find him, so I’ll find him.
I see scruffy strangers out of the corner of my eye, but none of them are him. I’ll know him when I see him.
Hours upon hours of wandering unfamiliar streets, looking up at unfamiliar faces, fewer as time goes on, quieter and quieter, further and further away from home. It kicks. It cries…
MAMA MAMA MAMA MAMA MAMA MAMA!
“Enjoy it while you can, you little fucker!”
The echo reminds me how alone I am and how much the crowd has thinned out. I’m scared. I’m a precocious eighteen year old alone somewhere unfamiliar with a baby I don’t want in my stomach looking for a man to take it out for me, maybe at the cost of my life.
I sit on the curb and cry. The thing in me and I cry together. We both know what it is to be helpless. Only difference is, I’m not stupid enough to think anybody’s going to protect me and love me. A sound explodes through the night. A reply that makes me feel more and less alone.
“Shhhhhh!!!!!”
Then there are footsteps.
“Shhhhh!” again. An angry hiss of a shhhh. The sound is a hand, squeezing my throat, choking back my sobs. Footsteps follow it. You’d think the sound of footsteps in the middle of the night in a quiet city would be impossibly loud, but they’re tiny, precise, quick and almost silent. In broad daylight or on a more crowded street, I doubt I could have heard them.
The footstep sounds actually stop, though I know he’s coming closer, the man who hissed at me. He has to be the man I was looking for. I turn around and I smile at him. He’s right behind me, tall, skinny, serpentine with long, thin, greasy unkempt grey hair. He reminds me a little of Riff Raff from Rocky Horror. But Riff Raff didn’t feel like he does. He is holy and terrifying.
I smile at him. He’s confused. He reaches into his jacket for something and his hands trembling, like he can’t find it or he’s scared to use it.
“It’s okay,” I tell him, still smiling. Why is it okay? I don’t know. But it’s okay.
“I’m not afraid of you,” he tells me.
“Why would you be?”
He pulls out a knife. His hands are really shaking.
“Why aren’t you scared of death and the silence?”
“Will you spare me?”
He shakes his head.
“I can’t do that.”
“Why?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Is it because you need what’s in me?”
He doesn’t say anything.
I laugh. Maybe I’m callous or insane or something, but he doesn’t bother me or scare me anymore. I know what he wants and I’m willing to give it. Why should I be scared of somebody like that?
“I’ll give it to you. If you can spare me. Can you spare me?”
He takes off his shirt, his body all lean, tense junkie muscle. There is a black gaping hole in his stomach. Two tiny skeletal hands are reaching out of it. To me, they do not look disgusting. They look as if they are both strong and delicate at the same time. I feel like kissing their bony fingers.
They’re incredibly strong, ripping my dress open, revealing a body that’s grown rounder to accommodate the intruder. I smile again, happy to be naked in his presence.
The fingers plunge into me, strong as I thought they were, and they rip my womb right open. The night air might be cold, but I feel warm all over exposed to this extent to this monstrous angel. He has torn my flesh, opened me up and I love him for it. He moves me like the God that forbids this never managed to do.
The hand reaches in and plucks out the pink abomination, half fish half ape, all suffering, all trouble and greed and theft. The hands raise it up, placing it in his hands. I’m open, vulnerable, I could bleed to death any second and there’s not a trace of fear in me. As soon as the thing is out of the skeleton hands and in his hands, they go to work. They seem to know instinctually how to close what they’ve opened, knit flesh together perfectly. The touch is light, gentle and I am ecstatic. I wish those fingers would brush against my nipples or explore my pussy for reasons besides taking out what’s in there.
“Please, please, touch me…” I beg them. They retreat back into his chest. The black hole closes up and there is skin where it used to be.
His hands, his real hands, raise the thing to his mouth. They’re trembling again, but with excitement, not fear. He licks his lips. He sniffs it. He takes a big bite out of it, chewing loudly. I’d like to believe it’s the thing’s rotten, thieving soul he’s trying to eat.
I kneel before him, clinging to his legs and kissing his feet.
“I love you,” I tell him. Words I never thought I’d never mean.
“You’re a god,” I tell him, “you’re beautiful and you’ve saved my life.”
He doesn’t respond, he eats. A naked teenage girl at his feet and all he wants to do is swallow up this tiny life…he’s more powerful and majestic than I had imagined, than I could have imagined.
“I love you,” I tell him again. He still ignores me. My heart pounds being in the presence of something so much greater than I. My love is meaningless to him and that intrigues me.
It’s not to be. I’m not meant to be happy, I guess. The holiness of the moment is shattered by the sound of footsteps, footsteps stomping on my joy and my chance to live in a beautiful world that makes sense to me.
“Run!”
I tell him, “run!”
He doesn’t move, he keeps on eating, savoring the little monster’s body and soul.
“They’re getting closer,” I warn him.
“It’s alright,” he replies, “dribbling bits of fetus down his chin, “Captain says this is part of the plan. Captain never steers me wrong.
They’re here. Four of them. Pointing their guns at him as if he’s done something wrong.
“Jonathan Cavanagh, you are under arrest for murder. You have the right to remain silent; you have the right to…”
I cannot hear his rights being read off. I am too busy thinking of the awfulness of a world without him in it.
“Please,” I beg one of the cops, “please…”
“It’s okay,” the cop says, “it’s all going to be okay.”
I look at my savior, my love, the man who took the screaming monster from me. He is nodding in agreement. The cops take him to jail and me to the hospital to recover from what they think is the most traumatic moment of my life. As I lay in that hospital bed, I’m not scared, even though they’re taking him away. He’ll be out and everything will be okay.
The Other Side
I do not know how long I have sat atop the mountain for. I have tried to ask Lud how much time has passed, but he’s kept quiet. He doesn’t really seem to acknowledge that I’m here, except for the occasional sad glance passed between us. I have sat here alone, hearing bits and pieces of things said with a voice that is not my own. There is nothing ominous. So far it has been “Where am I?”, “Hello” and “I can’t eat that”. Nothing too meaningful, things I might have said myself if the voice hadn’t said them. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but I want to leave. I walk up to Lud and I have to tell him.
“I’m going now, I can’t stay here. You can come with me if you want to, but I definitely can’t stay here. He says nothing. I grab him and I try to shake him a little, try to make him answer me.
“Lud, come on, we’re going!”
As I shake him, the skin begins to flake off his face, his limbs begin to fall apart and soon there is a pile of broken doll parts that used to be General Lud lying on the ground at my feet. In the distance I hear a whisper, a whisper that grows into a shout.
“I can’t,” says the voice of General Lud, growing louder in my head, “I can’t!”
I grow cold at the sound. I suddenly feel like maybe I couldn’t either. This is Hell, this is the place for failures, this is the numb, sad place where you feel the pain that killed you and you see what’s happened because of your failures. The vantage point from the mountaintop now has a wider view. It seems like I can look down from here on all of creation, and I feel like doing it. I feel like seeing what has happened to the world and what is going to happen to it. I wish that I hadn’t.
There is no sun in the black, oily sky, no stars or clouds either. There will be no more day or no more night in this world. From the smokestacks of factories, wispy little fiends fly up, play, dance and fight, until they at last fade into the atmosphere, a sky made of black, smoky, little devils, generated forever by the machines below. Who could have lived where they came from? Who could have made the mistake to let these monsters be born and then unleashed? Who could have built the machines that let them foul their homeland? How could we have let them do the same? The Earth’s folly hurts almost as much as its consequences. The ignorance cuts, bashes and burns me.
Huge trees grow in the middle of the great, inescapable cities. These are the trees I envisioned before. These are the trees made of flesh that bare red, juicy hearts as their fruit. Naked, savage howling men tear at the trunk and roots for meat. Others dare to climb up and take from the branches. They chew the hearts eagerly, letting the blood drip down their chins. None of them work together. None try to get meat for the others. They just fight and struggle for scraps of food from the only vegetation that grows. These trees have become as natural as any and flourish under the dark skies, standing as high as the twisted, metallic buildings.
The buildings do not look like buildings. They are twisted or leaning over, set into clusters that make them look like nests of snakes. All others are made of glass, completely transparent so that any who look in can see what goes on in them. Inside some of them, large, red eyed grown Dark Ones, with bodies covered in scales or fur are raping young women, no longer needing the breeders to do it for them. The adult Dark Ones look like primitive men with enormous, rounded bald heads. Otherwise, each is different. Each has parts of another kind of beast. Each has signs of some different deformity. To contrast the ones with furry or scaly skin, or heads like lions and undulating quills, some are born with no skin at all, just networks of thick muscles and nerves covering their skeletons. These ones seem to be the leaders. I can see why. Without flesh, there is no sign of vulnerability in them, no pretense toward being human. The big headed fleshless monsters are oddly enough more human than most of the people that remain. It is not just the feral men that are the problem.
Having no skin isn’t as dehumanizing as having a satellite dish for a head like some of the people wandering the streets do. Their bodies are normal, clad in expensive business suits, but from the neck up, they are satellite dishes, receiving signals from somewhere out in space. They speak in staticky sounds to each other, unrealized mechanical attempts at language. One of the men with a satellite for his head holds the hand of a child with wheels for feet. Together they cross a road, avoiding the traffic from others like the child, worse cases with wheels for hands as well. From the speed they move at, I wonder if there are engines in their stomachs or something. Mankind has become extinct in the cities below, a remnant of better times before they came. If I could go down, if I could fight, but I can’t…I’m dead, I must be dead. In the middle of street, something rises up from beneath the ground, splitting the concrete and looking up on the same level as I am, at the mountaintop. The pole that Jack stuck Lud’s head on is looking at me.
It speaks. I should have expected it to speak. Looking back, that’s pretty much all that General Lud ever did.
“You have to leave here. You cannot be here with me.”
“But this is Hell. I have to stay in…”
There is no more time for argument. My blurry eyes open and I am in a dark, smoky room. I am relieved to be able to turn my head, but shocked by the grinning demon looking at me. It laughs, but I am fairly certain that the laughter is in my imagination. It’s a statue. I think it’s a statue at least. No, I hope it’s a statue. I don’t know what it is I think about anything right now. Especially about my whereabouts. My vision is still blurred, and I think that if I am not dead, then I have at least been drugged. I hear the sound of wheels coming to me.
In my mind’s eye, I see the people crossing the road, the human cars from the city of the Dark Ones. It must something like that. The mechanized men are coming for me. They have built a better robot and they will build a better one from me. That’s why they left me alive. They’re coming to take out the organic parts and put mechanical ones in. I will have a satellite dish for a head, beaming galactic blasphemies into my automated brain twenty four hours a day. I will have wheels for hands and clockwork guts. When the fleshless Dark One scientists come for me, then I will be so frightening and inhuman, that even the mechanical beasts will shun me. I shall be the subject of the most foul ridicule in the city of the damned.
The wheels are in fact the wheels on a hospital gurney. A young, naked, frightened woman sits on it, surrounded by Dark One breeders. Are my captors Dark Ones? Do they just know of them? I suddenly remember the Dark Ones don’t have me, but they might as well. I am in the hands of something awful, but it is not one of them. Why, then does he know that I will be tortured by the sight of this woman being impregnated by the monsters? I watch it drip the black sperm on its proboscis into her and she shudders. Maybe she is shuddering because of something else. Perhaps that is so. She too is in the hands of Godless Jack. When a young woman with black angel wings o
n her back and a sharp knife in her hand enters, I know how I am going to be tortured. She turns the hospital gurney to face me as she gets down on her hands and knees and prepares to make the cut. It dawns on me that the naked young lady on the gurney is pregnant already. Already filled with one of the things. Do they know that one of the things is in there? Do they know what is they’re going to extract?
“Don’t…don’t…it’s…” I mumble. There are words in my head, but I’m too weak and confused to turn them into speech. The “nurse” in the black wings makes the cut. The wings seem to flutter and move about of their own accord. They don’t look plastic to me. When the nurse extracts, almost come to term, it looks straight at me with the reddish pink eyes. It’s covered in fur and has paws like a gorilla. The “nurse” holds it up to show me. It seems to wave hello. But that’s not why she’s holding it up. It’s the first part of a show. Of the magic trick. I hear in the distance the applause of a studio audience. Am I being televised? The virus is in you. Look away from this.
It seems that way when Godless Jack enters in a ratty t-shirt to the roar of clapping and whooping. He bows to me, then to the audience which must be somewhere, I think. The audience is the virus. The audience was in the syringe. The t-shirt has a big, red zero on the front with the words “the alpha” printed above it. On the back of the shirt is another red zero with “the omega” printed above it. The zero moves back and forth, squirming with life. It’s whispering to him in a language I can’t understand.
“Hello, Mr.400. I just wanted to remind you where babies come from.”
Howls of canned laughter originate from somewhere, possibly my subconscious. I wouldn’t know either way. The ‘nurse’ laughs at Jack’s joke. The woman doesn’t. It might be that the breeders continue to drip the black goo into her ravaged womb. The child claps. I am certain it claps. It should be dead, but it is one of them, so it capable of clapping. The black goo seems to be collecting together. It bubbles like a tar pit, which a pair of tiny hands emerge from. They too are applauding. Look away. Let me help you.