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In the beginning, I brought you names. Dozens of them, like offerings, prayers at your altar. Gaia. Rheia. Cel. Plump names for luscious days of green and gold, you said, and you rejected them all. Papatūānuku, once on a whim, and you said it tasted ripe and meaty and didn’t understand why I had to take it back.
I said, “Doesn’t really roll off the tongue, does it?”
You said nothing. You spoke very little, then.
The waters rose and the ashes fell, and thus passeth the first day. And then the second and the third and the sixth, all of them just as cold and dark even after I figured out how to switch the sun back on. For a while, I really felt I’d done something there, patted myself on the back until it started raining and all the fallout made our skin break out in blisters, just as bad as the ashes had. So the rain was next up on the agenda, and then the nuclear winter, and all the bodies. Easy.
You said: IT IS TOO QUIET.
I understood what you meant. It was loud as, right after the nukes. Thunders and storms, winds blowing every day all day, and you used to put your hands to your ears and scream and scream because you weren’t used to listening to the world with human ears. But everything else was still as death: no creatures in the sky, nor the land or the seas, not even tiny bugs and crawlers. Not even cockroaches, those disgusting fuckers, who could’ve happily survived the bombs but still couldn’t live through what I’d done to you.
You couldn’t believe the world was so empty. You yearned to stretch out your senses, reach out to the depths of the oceans and the roots underground, seek out all those loud specks of life that had once been there. You used to stand in a spot with your feet planted into the dirt and stretch your arms up to the sky, like trying to get a signal with an antenna. But there was nothing out there to find, of course. And you had nothing to sense it with.
Annabel, when I made you, I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand what I was doing, what I was severing from you. The magnitude of it. You used to be everywhere at once, existing within all things, Feeling the world on a scale I can barely begin to imagine even now. Then I came along and trapped you in a meat cage, made you smaller and your old body a graveyard. Diminished, mutilated.
You said: THERE'S NOTHING ELSE LEFT ALIVE.
You said that about five times a day. I tried to switch it up. I tried names again. I asked, “Do you like Terra?” I thought it was pretty, just a bit on the nose, but you didn’t answer at all. I said, “What about Cybele? Sito? Deo?” I got very into all those ancient goddesses who had half a dozen names each. One woman, many divine incarnations. Talk about multitasking.
Not that you were a woman. I’d made you woman-shaped, but that had been on the fly. I didn’t want it to be, you know, an imposition. I didn’t make you so that you’d have to be a woman, I tried to explain, and of course I hadn’t made you not a woman if that was what you wanted. I tied myself in knots with whatever I was trying to say, but I really needed you to understand that I hadn’t made you a body because it would look beautiful to me, it had been for you. I’d just wanted…
And then you know, I lost it a bit. I cried, I think. It had started to sink in, what I had done. I said, “I’m really sorry.” Over and over.
And then it fucking rained again.
We walked a lot. We weren’t really going anywhere, but there wasn’t much else to do and I needed to see with my own eyes everything I’d done. You’d refused shoes, and the soles of your feet used to get all reddened and sore from the terrain and the fallout, so you’d limp a bit then heal then start limping again. The first time you cut your heel on a rock you stood there staring at the blood that had come out of you, smeared some of it on your hand and kept rubbing your fingers together and smelling the blood there, licking it up a bit. The whole time I wanted to speak—say something, anything, but nothing I might have said could’ve made it better, so I just gave you a hand whenever you stumbled and mostly kept my mouth shut. And on we boldly fucking went.
At some point, we ran out of land and ended up on a strip of sand overlooking the ocean. There was nothing but horizon in front of us, an endless dreary monotone stretch of fucking empty, and a volcano that I’m pretty sure hadn’t been there last week. I mean, I was never great at geography, but that was an active volcano right up the coastline, a big crater with a column of smoke rising from it. It looked like an apocalypse movie, like a fragment of a dream, burning red and angry even at a distance. I think they would’ve noticed it in Napier.
Your limbs gave up. One moment you were standing, slouching a little like someone who’s never had shoulders before, and the next you fell to your knees on that beach like a puppet with her strings cut. It was so scary to see. I got worried—embarrassingly, ridiculously worried, heart sinking in my chest, fell to my knees at your side and everything—but then I saw you blink slowly and I knew in my bones that you were fine, just very tired.
You were sad, too. You were staring at that volcano in the distance, the lava flowing from that crater down to the sea like pus oozing from a wound. It looked like blood at sea. The earth was bleeding and you were leagues away and you couldn’t even feel it.
That’s when it hit me. That is when it really, properly hit me, and I understood the weight of what I had done. What you had been and what I took from you.
I said, “I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, I didn’t mean to”. Which meant shit all, of course, but I had to say it. That I’d thought I’d lose you if I didn’t grab you, so I had. You were nearly a ghost, flying away, and so I fixed your soul within your body and kept you at my side.
I wanted so badly to touch you, but I didn’t know if I should. It was kind of ridiculous that I’d be so hesitant about it after I’d made you a body from myself, from my blood and bone, but now it was your body and I was afraid you’d turn me away. And I wanted to speak; there was so much else I wanted to tell you and didn’t know how, but you were always adept at understanding the meaning of all things just by the language of their bones. You looked at my hands and the shape of my metacarpals said: I couldn’t bear to let you go. I wanted you to consume me. My jaw said: I am nothing without you.
And then you got angry.
You gave in to your rage like the wrath of a hurricane. You had a human mouth now, a flesh maw instead of bubbling geysers, but the fury of your words burned hotter than the vapours of the earth.
I AM DIMINISHED, you said, I AM PALTRY AND MADE OF MEAT. I AM TRAPPED.
I had made you a construct. I’d put my human fingerprints all over your animal carcass, I made you flesh and blood when all you’d ever wished was to be rain and winds and thunder. I ripped you away and ripped you apart and now you had nothing left but me.
So you shoved me away. You threw yourself at me with all the puny strength of your human body. I was just as human and just as weak and you took me by surprise; I lost my balance and fell to the side, and slammed my head on a rock with a big loud thud.
For the record, it fucking hurt. But you know this.
I said, “Fuck,” and, “Shit,” and again, “Fuck.” I got it, by then. I understood.
I’m sorry, I said. I’m so fucking sorry.
Your hands were on my shoulders—you couldn’t stop staring at your own fingers, back then, like twitching pink worms—and then you slipped your small cold hand over my collarbone to feel my heart racing under your fingertips. My heart, beating frantic under the ribs from which I made you. You remembered that I’d eaten you. I ate the grass and the dirt, and I ate half your soul.
Your teeth tore into the skin of my neck. They were blunt but you made do anyway, tasting the copper and salt of my blood, and I screamed and screamed just as you had screamed that day. I grabbed you… I grabbed your wrists, but I couldn’t bring myself to push you off. You bit again and ripped away bits of skin with your small pearly teeth. I howled until my throat bleed, I thrashed and struggled and twitched there on the dirt like an animal, but I didn’t try to move away. I wouldn’t have dared.
When you pulled back, I was awed. Terrified. Your mouth and chin were red with blood, my blood; you licked the corner of your lips and I think my jaw fell open. I was a man of meat and clay confronted with the might of the divine.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. You know what. That’s fair.”
You spat my blood in my face. The wound was already healing; you’d torn my fucking throat out, but twenty seconds later I felt it tingle as the skin re-knit, and when I touched my neck there was nothing there except for some drying blood. You hated my new eyes but you liked the way I looked at you then, with nothing but wonder.
Annabel, at that moment, you were a thing of pure hunger. You scratched up my throat with your twitchy fingers, your sharp tiny nails, and your teeth mashed against mine—that hurt, too—in the way humans do when we cannot devour souls but enjoy mimicking the act. You bit hard on my tongue and my blood spilled into your mouth, and then I cupped your face in my hand and I kissed you back. I kissed you with the flimsy touch of a living creature, softer than falling snows and summer breeze, and you kissed me in a hard bite that tore off a piece of my lip. You cut ribbons into my chest and I sobbed into your mouth.
Please, I said, but I didn’t know what I was asking for and neither could you. There is no pleasing the storm until she’s satisfied, no appeasing the winds of the hurricane, and so you bit anew on my freshly-healed skin, a lioness devouring her prey. You tore up the flesh, blood spilling against your lips and on your fingers, and whenever you pulled back it was only to chew and swallow before leaning down again. You bit and you ripped apart and you spat out mouthfuls of blood and I yelled myself hoarse, and you tore me up again and again until I went still.
When I came back to myself, you were eating the dirt. You had spat out bits of my skin and blood to the ground, rubbed it into the sand and made a thin paste out of it, as I had done on the day I made you. You shoved it into your mouth and swallowed it—a bit of you, a bit of me.
“You killed me,” I said, stupidly. I didn’t yet understand all we could do to each other and still survive.
You said: YOU WOKE UP.
I thought, yeah, fair. You were a bloodied mess and glorious to look at, awe in its most primordial meaning. Your hair was matted blood-red and your chin was drenched in it, and I reached out and you let me put my hand on your face. I stroked your cheeks with my dirty knuckles, and I had never seen anything more magnificent. You couldn’t believe the wonder on my face. You saw me look upon your hideous corpse and you almost forgot to hate yourself.
WHAT IS IT?
I remember I swallowed, to buy myself time. We’ve been over this, Annabel, I am many things and some of them rancid, but I cannot lie to you. I risked your wrath, I said, “You are beautiful.” I meant every word of it and I always will.
So you asked: ARE YOU PLEASED?
No, I said. Yes, I said. And then I said: Fuck, no.
You reached for me and I sobbed, relieved that you would touch me still. You bent your fingers like claws and ripped away whatever was left of the shirt I’d salvaged from a corpse, and you splayed your hands on my chest to chase the warmth of my skin. You looked at me with my own eyes and I loved you, now and then and always, just as you loved me for years and years before I even came into the world and even after I blew it up.
“This is not ideal, you know? Not how I would have wanted to spend time with you.” I tried to explain. You were fear and reverence. “You’re terrifying. You’re…”
MEAT, you said. BONES AND SINEW. YOU BUILT ME A HUMAN PRISON.
As you spoke you sat on top of me, straddling my hips, and you ground down and I just jolted, like, a whole body shudder, all over, and you just had to keep moving like that and I got more and more turned on. Then you slid your hand between our bodies, still red and sticky with my blood, bits of my skin under your fingernails, and you cupped my cock over whatever ragged pants I still wore, and I was terrified and horny out of my mind. You felt the heat that made my blood rush and got me squirming where I lay, but you lacked the human words for it.
You said: YOU HUNGER.
I remember, I got a bit hysterical. I was like, “Yeah, guess so,” and didn’t know to explain that I was turned on, even after you ripped my throat open. Maybe because of that, let’s be honest.
I put my hand on your leg. It was the first time I touched you like that, intentionally and with real purpose, and my hands were dusty and my nails were nearly as ugly as your own, all jagged and dirty with blood and grime. You were so cold. I was worried about it, but I guess you didn’t mind—out of everything that had befallen you, you minded the cold the least. You had been so feverish for so long, all those years. You didn’t have the words to explain that either, so you just put your hand on top of mine, keeping me there.
I’d calmed down a bit, by then. You asked me for the words for what my body was doing, so I said, “Arousal,” and I tried to give a crash course in biology to a planet. “It's what happens to human bodies, when…” but then I stopped. Because you had figured it out, and you weren’t having any of it.
The thing is. You are infinite. You are endless, Annabel, you are so incredibly old. You know what pleasure is, you know what sex is, you sure as fuck know what reproduction is. You have felt billions upon billions populate the Earth, billions and billions and billions and billions until they were so many that your soul collapsed under the weight of it, and you couldn’t breathe as we suffocated you with our stench and our noise and you could no longer feel a damn thing.
So you got it. And you weren’t thrilled about it. You were fucking pissed off. You were pissed off at all of us, humanity, for what we’d done to you, and you were pissed off at me for what I’d done to you, and I was there, and you were so angry. You were straddling my thighs and ripped off my pants at the hips, whatever was left of them, and your hand on my dick and you just… squeezed. It felt good at first, and then it really hurt and it still felt good. And then it just hurt.
“Careful,” I said. And I said, “Fuck,” and then I said…
I said a lot of things after that. I was sobbing, I was screaming, I was squirming like a worm under your touch. And your beautiful dainty hand, which I’d made myself, was ripping my dick off, bursting my balls like grapefruit. It wasn’t cruelty. It was the mindless force of a natural catastrophe. I remember looking up at you through the tears, and you looked so… implacable, so deeply inhuman. I cried, I babbled, I couldn’t stand it.
“Please,” I said, “please, it hurts.”
You knew it hurt. You’d been hurting for centuries. You squeezed your angry fist and felt soft flesh give way and I threw back my head and screamed so loud, and you knew that sound, the first sound you heard with your human ears. You were made from it. The sound of my desperate screams.
The whole time, while I was sobbing and crying and shaking, I had my fingers clamped around your wrist and the thing is, I never tried to push you away. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference, but I still didn’t. I never said “stop”.
You pulled your hand back, at some point. It was a gory mess covered in blood and soft tissues, and I watched you lick it off and I felt like I was going to pass out just from the sight, but I couldn’t tear my eyes off you. I’d scraped my throat raw with all the screaming, bit through my lip and my tongue, and I just spat it all off in a big bloodied glob.
“Fuck.” I didn’t have breath for more. My eyes were watery, my face was a wet mess of spit and tears, and you looked pleased with the sight. It hurt to speak at first, then it didn’t. “Fuck, that fucking. Fucking hurt.”
You raised your hand and I flinched right off, but still didn’t pull away. I had so little breath back. I said, “Please,” and my voice broke on it, but then I looked at you, really looked, and then I got it. I understood it, Annabel. I understood you and understood myself, as fully and completely as two souls possibly can, two souls so alien to each other and forever joined as one. We were the only two living beings on a rotting carcass of a planet and there was no undoing what had been ruined. I hurt you and you hurt me and what of it? Such is human love.
You said: I LOVE YOU.
I said, “You did just rip off my balls. But thanks. So do I.” And then I closed my eyes and laughed because, look, everything was so fucking ridiculous, and I kept laughing until a bit of saliva went the wrong way and it turned into a coughing fit.
“Okay,” I said, when I could speak again. “Hadn’t expected the sex angle, but I can roll with that.” And then I got thinking, was it a sex thing or were you just curious about our meat puppets, mine and yours, and the way they were different from each other? I was like, I could probably give your body a dick too if you think it’s anatomically interesting. When I made your body, I hadn’t meant anything by it.
I said, it had been a total rush job. “Didn’t stop to think about it one way or the other, you know, just went with the default setting. The classic option. I didn’t stop to think at all. But I wanted to make something you’d like.”
And I said, “I could try to switch it up a bit, maybe.”
NO.
You answered right away. It was the first time you’d been so unambiguous about something, and it took us both by surprise. Guess you didn’t want to make your flesh body even more vulnerable to human peculiarities like nerve endings and pain receptors and dangly bits, which, fair. Even as we were having that conversation you were touching me, straddling me, and I was getting turned on again. Really turned on. Part of it was because I found you beautiful, but most of all because I found you terrifying.
You said: THIS WILL SUFFICE.
I don’t know what my face was doing. I said, “Right, we can work with that.”
You said: I AM MADE FLESH. I WOULD LEARN TO WORK IT. And then, after some consideration. THE WAY HUMANS LIKE TO FEEL GOOD.
“And you’re asking me that.” I’d nuked you and then I ate your soul, and then you smashed me up and I got off on it.
You said: I AM THE CORPSE OF WHAT IS LEFT.
And then you thought about it and said: THERE IS NO ONE ELSE TO ASK.
As if I could forget about that.
On that terrible first day, after you died and were caged, I took you by the hand and taught you how to walk, one unsteady foot after the other. How to stand, how to breathe so that you might talk, how to bend your joints so you would not snap them.
You came into this world nude, but you were cold and bereft, and frankly distracting to look at, so I clothed you in a shirt and pants I got from a dead cultist. After a week, they were pretty much rags.
There on the beach, you undressed. You took my hands and placed them over your bare skin. I was a clumsy worshipper, I’m afraid, all unsteady hands and reverent touches, but cut me some slack, Annabel. It was our first time.
You liked being touched. That felt familiar to you, the sensation of being mapped by my hands and lips and tongue, of being discovered inch by inch by hungry eyes. Your hair fell to the ground like a waterfall of burnished gold, like wheat out in the fields, and you let me caress it while your curious fingers traced the planes and curves of my skin. I never could pull off a stubble—I had sort of a struggle patch by then, not very cool—but you were fascinated by it, kept rubbing the side of your hand up against the grain. You liked my eyelashes, too. I liked to run my hand up and down your spine.
You asked me to show you to rut as animals do, as you put it, to rub the flesh until you’d shiver with it. I got you off on my fingers and marvelled at the way your skin flushed all over, and the whole time I really wished you’d let me use my mouth. You liked it well enough, I think, but it just wasn’t enough to satisfy you. You creature of endless hunger, you never were much for tender touches and delicate pleasures. You craved more.
So you shoved me off you, again. You climbed atop me, again, and from there you set yourself to learning the human body.
For the most part, I let you. Sometimes I forgot myself and tried to push you off, but never for long. You were weak but so was I, both malnourished and fatigued but you twice as determined, and it was no struggle for you to hold me down until I’d calm down and remember that my flesh was no longer mortal. I’d look up at you and lick my lips and you would lean down and bruise my mouth in a biting kiss, and the whole time you were taking me apart.
Your fingernails were blunt but you made it work, eventually. It hurt like a bitch but that didn’t stop you and, besides, by then pain was sort of part of the appeal. I don’t know if I was always like that or if I got my wires crossed somewhere along the way. Maybe it was the bombs, eating your soul, and rising well past human. Maybe it was that day on the beach, under your touch.
Annabel, you sliced me up. You cut open my chest and caressed the ribs from which you had been made, and then you dislodged three of them to cup your hand over my heart. I screamed, of course, and there for the first time you kissed me like a human lover, licked your tongue into my mouth and swallowed all my cries. I LOVE YOU, you said, and I understood, because I loved you so much and I made you suffer, too.
I said, “I love you too.” You put your fingers around my heart like I’d put my fingers around your soul, and you held it out to me and I said, “Eat it.” I said, “It was always you.”
You told me you liked my heart. That’s always nice for a guy to hear, I think. You called it putrid, too, which I guess wasn’t meant to be literal, and you marvelled at the sight of it in your hand, red and bloody as it was. You didn’t eat it, but you held it in your hand and watched it beat and beat and beat and thought of all those hearts that never would again. I passed out then, but I sort of remember you putting my heart back where it was supposed to be, and all of my ribs but one.
You pulled away and watched my bones lengthen and reshape into an arc, the tissues regrowing over them. The rib you kept was still in your hand, sticky and coppery-wet, and I watched you snap it in half and suck down the marrow. You did it so hungrily; you were a vision. I laughed, choked on some blood and laughed again and look, the sister had filled my head with Scriptures in those last few days, alright?
It just came out of me. I said, “Behold, I have created the destroyer,” and you came screeching at me and socked me on the jaw. You scratched at my eyes in fury, punched all over my ribs, and I didn’t understand what was happening until I did.
Because of course, I haven’t created you. You were already there, and I plucked you from the sky—the roots, whatever—and I took you and took and took, and now it was my turn to be taken. You claimed me to be remade, moulded and forged by your hands.
“I hated to hear you scream,” I said, trying to explain, as you clawed at every patch of naked skin you could get your hands on, made me bleed and it still wasn’t enough to satisfy your fury. You used the jagged piece of my rib to cut across the skin and hissed like a predator as you watched it knit back, blood-pink to brown. By then it had been hours since the first time you’d thrown me to the ground, and you were tired—we both were, bone-weary with pure human exhaustion—but you were hungry still, the Beast inside you implacable. It was so cold that day, out in the open and exposed to the cutting winds, but I was drenched in sweat. Grains of sand stuck to my skin everywhere, both of us coated in radioactive dust and blood-matted body hair.
I turned my head away, tired of looking at my eyes on your inhuman face, and you grabbed me by the nape and shoved me down. You ground my face into the blood-drenched sand and it felt like a blessing. I was still hard, even after you’d cut me open, because the pain came and went but you remained, beautiful and unrelenting—I couldn’t help it. I moaned, I thrust uselessly against the ground. Rutting like an animal, you’d have called it. I couldn’t even find my hands long enough to remember how to jerk off.
DOES THAT FEEL GOOD?
You spoke in that detached voice of yours, Annabel, you were so polite in your curiosity. I felt like a beast, a specimen behind the glass, and I really didn’t want to answer. “Touch me,” I said instead, and you grabbed my shoulder and turned me around like a rag doll, and I looked up at you and my breath caught in my throat. Annabel, you held the beauty of the aurora. “Take me,” I begged—it just slipped out, and I remember the noise you made. You liked that. You liked that a lot. And so I said, “Do you want to fuck me?”
You had been alive countless years but you didn’t know what that meant, not for one embodied as you now were. But you could learn. You grasped the bone you still held in your hand, my curved rib, broken and bloodied, and you thought of how our bodies might fit together again. I writhed on the ground and you sat atop me and took me inside you, and I don’t mean to be crass, but your tits were right in my face and that almost set me right off.
You were hungry. You billowed atop me, sinking and soaring in an unrelenting tide; you bent down to make a mess of my mouth and you liked it when I paid you back in kind, just as bloody and just as greedily. I smoothed my hand over your ribcage and felt your heart beat in sync with mine. Your skin was cool but you burned inside, the molten core of your human flesh. I reached down and stroked you there, circled my thumb over the seam where you’d let me inside you, and you shuddered all over. Your nails clawed into my back and your whole body rippled around me and then, you know. I think I shouted. Your teeth clamped around me as you came, a neat little row inside your cunt that bit me, just as ravenous as the rest of you, just as sharp and bloody-minded.
Look, I hadn’t meant to put those there. It was just a thing, teeth sprouting where they didn’t strictly need to be, like with those roses, and by the time I could’ve sorted it out you’d gotten quite fond of them, so I left it. These days the teeth mostly come out only when you want them to – and thank fucking God for that – but there was no controlling it back then. You squeezed tight around me and I bled inside you, and you certainly didn’t mind. I grasped at your hips and pressed bruises into your skin like blossoming violets, and you liked that so much that your teeth clamped down harder. You kept your grip on me and didn’t let me go, rode me into the earth that had once been You and now was just a corpse, rotting and barren. You fucked me like I’d begged you to, and I’m not sure I liked it, not that time, but I know you did. You liked the sounds I made, my sobs and pleas and my saltwater tears.
You said: I CHOSE YOU FROM THE MOMENT YOUR EYES OPENED.
The eyes you wore now, even though you never asked for them. I repaid you in kind. “I’m yours,” I said, as though we both hadn’t known already. “I took you. I grabbed you from the world, and I didn’t know what I was doing. And you’re so beautiful.” I tried to convey what I meant. Not the body, but the feeling of you, the brightness of your soul inside me.
I said, “I love you.”
You kissed my face the human way, and then my neck over the jugular. Your teeth– both sets of them– bit down with the force of ten billion lost souls in a frail human body, hard. I came like that, crying out as my body shook under you and my tears mingled with the dust.
When I named you, you almost didn’t hear it. I moaned it into the sand as you waited for me to roll around and get up, to go back to searching for a purpose.
“Implacable,” I said, and then, “Alecto.”
Alecto. You wouldn’t know until much later what the name meant, and when I had to bury you I came to regret it, but you liked it from the first. You were pleased with the sound of the word on your lips, the way your tongue shaped around the L, the jagged sound of the T.
ALECTO, you said. It was an agreement, it was a new beginning, it was a baptism.
And so I named you, Annabel, and it was good. And there was night, and there was day, and then I finally fixed the weather, and there was some fucking light.