Book Read Free

The Cannibal's Prayer

Page 11

by PW Cooper


  * * *

  The stink of her is overwhelming, so powerful that it seems to exert a physical force. I breathe her in deep and fight the urge to retch. She is my god, and I am nothing. I live only for her, only to bask beneath her sightless stare.

  The eyes were taken a few hours ago, taken away in a plastic bag by a collector of Hollywood memorabilia. They say that he owns one of Marilyn Monroe's fingernails. Many have come, at my invitation they have come. Men who were ensnared by her lust, her digital seduction. I found them and I brought them here, to her.

  I gaze up at the beautiful face. The surface of her perfect skin all in ruins. The sallow curve of her sunken cheek, turning dark. The throat, purple with the hard marks of teeth. The shoulders black where our hands have clasped her. Her smooth calves, ripe with sores. Her breasts, kneaded to a running pulp that spills down her belly in ragged strips. The nipples cut off and given away. So much of her has been given away. Many claimed a toe for their own, only three left. I will not see them parted from my keeping just yet. I regret already having given up the eyes. Today I will cut away the lips of her vagina and I will eat them, raw and rotten. I worship her. Today I will begin eating my god in earnest, all the way to the inside.

  Her chains rattle when she moves. A frail mewling from her ruined mouth. I wonder if she can still hear me when I speak to her. It seems impossible that she still lives. But, of course, celebrities never really die, do they?

  I kneel before the wreck. She is nearly free of this world. The men of the city have devoured her.

‹ Prev