a hunger for the things of God

The Father tries to comfort the thing weeping at his feet. He hushes it as if it is something innocent as an injured dog. It clings to him. Around them, the chapel is steeped in dying light, long shadows tangling together on the flagstone. The Father looks up at Christ dangling heavy from the cross as the thing presses its face into the soft meat of his thigh. He cradles close its head in cold and clammy palms, hands trembling. To hide it from His eyes.

It pulls back just enough to look up at him. His heart stumbles in fear. Its left iris is a splitting cell, not yet apart, two pupils touching, a third nestled in the fine blue filaments. A fourth in the yellowed sclera. There is a bottomless pit where the right eye should be. Stretch marks ripple like a shoal underwater from its temples down to its neck, disappearing beneath its baggy hoodie. The flesh looks as if it could come apart easily as bread. If he were to just pull . . .

Father, it rasps. Its jaw clicks and grinds, its mouth jerking wide, too wide. Please, God, make it stop.

He looks again, panicked, at Christ. Christ averts His gaze.

They leave sacrifices, it confesses, words lurching and sliding, I never eat, but— It coughs, wretches, folding in on itself as into its hand it vomits slugs of insides, small and animal, glistening in the fading sun. The smell is instant, thick, warm rot. Acid surges into his mouth, and he swallows it back down.

It stares at its hand, strings of blood-saliva looping its mouth to the insides. One by one, they slip from its palm to the floor, echoing in the quiet, splattering blood and bile and mucus over its legs, his shoes. I am still fed.

***

Home is home is an altar. She is offering, and Dad carries her from the car to the door over the gutted animal corpses. They left roadkill before, flat and gummed up with fuzzy blood; now, they hunt, feed her with purpose. Are you hungry? Look at what we’re giving you, aren’t you grateful? A hare laid out as if running on the doormat, belly open and emptied—inside, lock the door three times.

It’s a grey and white rental, ground floor, but Dad let her run wild when they first moved in. Fairy lights on the walls, stars on Command hooks, posters of the ’80s punk bands Dad raised her on. Shabby green sofa half-covered with a knobbly blanket from when she could still do things with her hands. Framed photos of them, smiling, on beaches, at fairgrounds. The girl inside them is irreconcilable with the thing she is becoming. She tries to distance herself; she is she, and this thing is something else. An it.

She takes off her hoodie, sees the curtains twitch in the flats across the road, and the shame is brilliant, tall as a pine tree. No use. They used to know her; now, they only see it.

Dad draws the blinds, sharp. “Puking on the vicar. Classy.”

Gingerly, she lowers herself onto the sofa. There’s something in her back, enshrined in flesh down the length of her spine, squirming from the inside to get out. Her head hurts from all the crying, throat sore, the supplication hollowed her out. She tells him it wasn’t on the vicar.

“You do not leave this house without me, okay? I didn’t know where you were. I thought you’d cha— something had happened or your little fan club—”

They’re unhinged.

“So you do understand. Morning, noon, and fuckin’ night they’re after you. I won’t let ’em, but work with me, kid.” He crouches down in front of her, hand palm up for her to take. Exhaustion is pressed into the fine lines of his face, purple under his eyes. There’s less of him now, his cheeks hollow, his shoulders slumping. Like she’s eating him to stay alive when she shouldn’t be in the first place. He’s the only normal thing she has left, and she’s killing him. “You and me.”

She gently places her hand in his.

There are people who say they know what it is, what is happening, what will happen. They leave dead things at the door and beg to be seen, to see. Dad bans the word they call it from the flat because, he says, she is still human. Once, when he was working, she let one of them in.

An old woman who sat in the chair meant for show by the door, sipped tea, and plainly spoke: this is what you are; you have no choice; your body is not your own. It has been claimed by something more. She will open the seal, and Hell will follow with her. She, only feverish and itching like her veins were brimming with baby spiders, didn’t believe. Then, she started changing. Prayer had not worked. The hospital only gave waiting times. She threw herself under a car, and it got back up.

Small bathroom, barely big enough for the two of them. Mould speckling the cellulite walls, a brighter patch where the mirror used to be. Night pressed up against opaque glass. In the white light, it rubs its thumb and pointer finger over each other, feeling the skin pull away from tissue beneath. What if it worked all this flesh loose, would it come off all in one? What would be exposed? Not exposed, she thinks. Freed. A fresh wave of nausea shudders through her.

Sat on the toilet lid, she watches Dad’s back as he fills a needle with holy water from a vial over the sink. He seems to find comfort in this, so she lets him. At the start, it stopped the changes. Then lessened them. Then lowered the fever or eased the aching but not much else. The holy water hasn’t worked for a long time. Is it her fault? Is she not worth saving? Dad still hasn’t given up despite her body splintering like rotting wood with the effort of staying whole. All the blood inside her, baying to get out. He must hear it; he doesn’t sleep, either. He barely eats. Her stomach is filled with sacrifice; she throws them up, unable to handle the squishy mass of raw organs that appears inside her. She misses her dad’s cooking.

A burst of red-white pain—her thumbnail skitters across the vinyl floor. She stares at the empty, fleshy nail bed, only realising she pulled the nail out as blood seeps to the surface. Dad turns to her, and she curls her hand into a fist.

He hands her the syringe. “You hear that?”

She shakes her head. Why, or how, he still believes anything is beyond her. She pushes up the hem of her skirt and sinks the needle into her thigh. Closing her eyes, she pictures purest light coursing through her, cauterising the dark, sealing wounds without scars. Undoing the damage. She sits with the pain—her insides feel like sparklers. Her stomach churns. Her knuckles white around the syringe.

She feels Dad gently take it from her, the slow upward drag of the needle leaving her skin. The sound of plastic rolling against porcelain. Prickly heat trickling up her spine. His hand on the nape of her neck, thumb rubbing back and forth in her hair. The dark tips forwards until her forehead presses against his chest. He breathes deeply; she tries to follow. There’s something crawling up her throat, sitting gritty and wet at the back of her mouth. Inhale, let the hurt build, exhale. Inhale, let it—

She gags, barely managing to turn her head to the shower in time. Dad holds her hair back. She vomits up entrails in waves, her jaw cracking open wider, wider, wider. It won’t stop. On one side, the bone, it—

Snaps, unhinges, her cheek unevenly ripping open as if clawed, elastic strings of flesh pulled taut over too many teeth, finger-length incisors jutting like open fractures between molars. An invisible hand forces hers. She takes hold of the other side of her jaw (her dad shouts, tries to grab her wrist) and pulls; with a wet ripping noise it distends, a new mouth torn open. Torn free.

***

On his hands and knees, the Father scrubs the flagstone where the thing knelt, and still it will not come clean. There is a stain on consecrated ground. He scrubs. Candles flicker, their shadows long. The dark moves around him, doglike shapes that disappear when he looks at them. The smell of rotting meat is still thick enough to chew. How? The word like a kicked wasps’ nest in his head. How to get it out, how could this happen, and how to him? He can’t save the girl, the shell. It’ll crack open and then . . .

He scrubs. He scrubs. A sudden crack in his spine jolts him upright. He winces, rolling his shoulders back. Another shadow moves in his periphery, but when he turns to it, it stays there.

A hare. Slowly creeping towards him down the aisle, ears back. He can’t move, his heart pealing in his chest, not enough air in his lungs, Christ’s gaze boring through the back of his head. As it crawls closer, into the light, he sees the halves of its belly hanging open, brushing the ground.

***

It lurches down the corridor, yanking out its fingernails with its teeth, convulsing with pain and fear big as a cathedral roiling inside it but unable to stop. Your body is not your own. Flesh is flesh is nothing, muscle and keratin and nerves stretched translucent over the abyss. Need to get to the church. There is a red string, tightening.

Its fingertips brush the door handle as Dad grabs it around the waist, lifts it up, feet skimming the ground. It struggles, clawing with raw nail beds at his arms. The pain gives shaking clarity: it loves—she loves him. She doesn’t want to hurt him.

In Dad’s arms, she holds her breath until the whole sky expands inside her chest. Whites of eyes popping. A door opens like a wound. Thousands upon thousands of unseen hands crawling all over her, forcing her mouth open; still, she does not breathe. Her head lolls back onto his shoulder. The body writhes. She will not breathe—she will claim the body back—it will die here—she will—

A voice plainly speaks her name.

She gasps. The sky rushes back in to a needlepoint, a flood in reverse, lungs filling like a flask. This is it. Certain as cliffs, this is it. The revelation sits fat and cold in her stomach, her knees buckling under the weight of it. Dad holds her up. She clings to him. Hands cradle her face, stroke her hair. Your time is nigh. Get ready.

She shuts her eyes. He smells like home.

The hands wrench her from him. Animal wailing, a sundering of flesh, together like a choir. Countless nails sink through her skin easily as rotting fruit and pull her open.

***

A silhouette steps onto hallowed ground. It is not human. Cannot be. Too stretched out, too sinuous, arching and writhing with every step. Distantly, the Father thinks, the shell smashed. Hell is here. The hare still crawls closer like a fuse burning down, Christ reflected in its black eyes. Unbearable pressure building in his skull, blood from his nose like ants from a hole. Under his breath, he chants please God make it stop please God make it stop please God make it stop. The hare now sniffing at the sole of his shoe. His mind scatters like dirt over a coffin.

It stands before him like a tall flame. The blood does not move it. The hand does not guide it. No-one can hide from it. It opens the door, but there is nothing on the other side.