Anthropophagic

Even to now, there’s no soul I’ve taken that is contorted into such madness as Hejat Vanderheir. At his back still sears the heavenly blaze of contrition, that cauterizing and horrifying light that burns him to face, so he does not face it. He inclines instead desperately towards my own ravages. When claws rake him, he screams THANK YOU. When a paw crushes him, he squeals LET ME PLEASE STAY HERE. When he boils breast-deep in pitch, and fangs descend to shred off his head as flowers mown off a lawn, the crumbs that sizzle out of the maw all cry, MY MASTER, YOU ARE MOST MERCIFUL.

All to avoid the full-frontal blast of the bright shadow breathing always behind him.

It’s still a rack of pain. Nobody numbs themselves to this violence. Beneath his praise, he still flinches and he sweats and he wails. But what he is, is broken, forever broken, to accept his murder as gracious, fearful beyond death of both the light and the dark, and yet unable to shatter.

When I consider him, though he is an odd circumstance, I am satiated that he’s received more than his due.

I sat up kneeling upon the table. Down my spine shuddered transcendence, soft like the tease of a feather, more golden than the purest of honey, fresher than the breeze through an orchard.

“God,” blissfully choked a whisper, through a mist of tears.

The aftertaste cloyingly, seductively, lingered. More. Yes. My body slammed down as if for worship into the vacated carcass, to bite and to snap and to suck and to gobble the remaining bones and the viscera. Of course, the soul itself is what sates the hunger, which was yawning already to curl up and sleep, and its imbibing is both what dampens the pain and kills the entrapping fields, which I dimly recognized had already gone, but you don’t really, exactly, stop, midway through such a well-made dessert. Like, who just licks the cream out of a bastani? Who doesn’t delight in the waffles too? Echoes of the divine flavour so laced the flesh, burst mouthfuls like ripe cherries, sanguine pools of attar syrup and thick clots of pomegranate jam, firm biscuits and soft batters... it’s like my reward for cleaning it up, and it’s, very, very...

The Bishop was still in the room.

I lurched up.

A chunk of—yeah—plapped to the table.

We stared at each other.

He was a statue of a stern god in marble. I was totally painted in blood. And, it was, kind of awkward but, also, like, yeah, like yeah, we both knew that I was like that, uh—by his appalled frown, I did snicker a thread, and by his steady unease, I did blossom some guilt. But more than anything it was just embarrassment.

Clearing my throat, I tugged the collar of a fresh cloak, which fell about me and fluttered still. The corpse, the Bishop, yeah so, yeah, he wouldn’t want to just, let me, have it, but yeah, so the Bishop...

Some blood had spattered on his sunshroud, and above everything I was really just wondering if he’d let me suck it out.

He crossed his arm over his chest, glaring.

Alright sorry. My gaze averted to the wall and I licked blood from my lips—man, and man!, what a flavour.

The Bishop sighed out more like a long groan. I made this person sigh a lot, I guess because I’m a bloodsoaked menace and his nature’s super responsible.

“I’m baffled to Heaven why you would want this,” he said. “Of anything you could do, this. Either of you.”

‘I CAN’T do anything,’ deep rage whipped my heart and abated. Catlike I licked my hand between each knuckle, between each finger, considering what were the right words to explain—it, to explain all evil.

Not quite confession, not quite chastisement, miserably happy, I found them:

“It’s fun.”