Content warnings

Body horror. Violent imagery. Rats. Insects.

THE BOOK OF ATROCITIES

CHAPTER III.

1 BEHOLD the waste of that which once I called my love, and further and forever so I do name: my barque, my lighthouse, the shore on which I rest my head, shorn of its locks to make a nest for your anchor heart.

2 My love is a three-masted ship, proud and defiant against the very cheek of the fathomless deep, and I am her sailor spidered to the rigging; she is equally a lighthouse to my plover.

3 O mistress mine! The rats that swarmed and laid your bones a-bare, more naked than the blackened wick of a candle deliquesced, they have returned to their masters who first rode them into the bosom of our home, and, like dust, have fled and not fled, settling as a choking scarf on the lives of those remained.

4 I saved of you what I could from those raveners, dug deep through tender parts to tough, and when your liver ran liquid through my fingers I took your heart, well-muscled by the exertions of your love, and licked clean the spreading decay.

5 Your salted heart, its chambers caulked with smegma, and tattooed upon that spongy shriveled flesh: “Await my coming on the second dawn,” which cannot be—there has been no dawn since you have died, no light has touched my eyes that was not tainted by the smoke of whalefat rancid gone.

6 How explain the words inscribed in fat and ash upon the anchor of your heart? What sorcery or surgery could score that daring phrase? What clumsy, callow words are etched on mine? I must be a shivering leaf, a fallen twig snapped in half by an ignorant heel. Is my love great enough, terrible enough, to shout a final warning to the skies? Should I tear agape my ribs and risk a coward’s blood to pour? I do not deserve your reckoning, and now I fear your heartshot prophesy was not meant for me.

7 From its nest of root-ripped hair I take your heart, as cold as stone, as dense as teak, and bring it to the hilltop altar where once we cried defiance to the heavens and the seas: none could pry our fingers from each other’s grasp, and those who tried would find their flesh atorn as a seagull tears the meat from fishhook bones.

8 This altar, this slab of sacrifice, where congregants like poisoned ants now dither listlessly in their duties, where the rats have gnawed and chawed and broke their gnashing teeth, to this altar I bring your anchor heart barnacled with salt from sea and prepuce.

9 To the congregants I shout, “Await her coming on the second dawn!”, and though it’s night, as black as the hollow in a stomach starved, a light begins to burn in the west, a greenglow rising like the esca of an anglerfish to tempt her desperate prey.

10 Shorebirds stir and falter. No false dawn this, but a green sun, swollen, pus-filled and ripening, rising as a boil on the edge of the world, reversing its accustomed course to create afresh the cosmos.

11 There is no dawn but you alive!

12 Your first dawn has come, as new and awful as the first dawn of the world!

13 My heart erupts!

END

Author's note

This story took inspiration from both the Song of Solomon (from the Bible) and the Klingon wedding ritual (from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). Did you know you can take inspiration from anywhere and no one can stop you? No one can stop you.

Laura DeHaan

Laura DeHaan (any/all) is a masseuse and crematorium technician in Toronto, Canada. The jobs are remarkably similar, except for the smells.