Swallow Me, Like Your Little Pill (Slow burn | Intimate| Dark | Size-kink | Erotic Vore)
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Author’s Preface: I subvert young-adult fiction by indulgently focusing on size-kink, sex, and vore.
This is part epistolary story, part horror novella. It is a dark narrative that, bit by bit, reveals erotic paragraphs of haunting complexity between male predator and female prey. In increasingly intricate word play, he abuses her, leading her down a destructive path until size-kink and vore violently converge.
it is my seductive little sleeper that has become a cult-classic at Eka’s.
That being said, to Daddy’s Dollhouse, I present an exclusive edit that will be seen here, first.
This is my small thank-you for providing safe harbor for a vorista like me.
This is the version it always yearned to be.
Part I
Chapter 1
Tease
The Beginning
Her hands moved over her body.
It felt foreign to her, somehow. But she had not the luxury to explore this further, because a sudden urgency filled her belly; a tip-of-the-tongue feeling that she should remember something, and it was urgent that she do so because somewhere, somehow, along the way she had lost the preceding event.It was all a blur.
First: She had been in the living room; her man between her knees.
Then: She was… – she was what?
And: Now, she was here. How?All of it was worrisome because how much time had transpired since her lapse in memory?
How could the middle narrative, the transitional piece have fallen out?Moving with delicate purpose, she sat upright, hoping that her change in stature would clear her head.
And a sudden, wild vertigo clutched her.
The environment that she knew: the soft silk pillows; the oak night stand; the decadent bed, she knew them, and she knew them well…
But.
She blinked her eyes, straining against the darkness.
A feeling of wrongness slid over her skin.
It was the room.
It was impossibly large. It was…
I’m high. I gotta be.
Trembling, she touched the quilt. It felt real, it felt painfully real. She could feel every wrinkle, every fold. Her fingertips knew it, knew it well.
But the bed: its dimensions so distorted by this lens of scale, seemed to stretch out before her into infinity.How?
And there was a shadow sliding across the wall; but it undulated, as though across an uneven surface.
But there was, she realized, a dimensionality to it. It was not flat; it had… it…
Her neck whiplashed in alarm.
It was a man. No; an abstraction of a man.
Because he was far too large.
And on his approach, the shadows melted away, creating the haunting specter of something materializing.
Is it you?
She looked to his countenance, hoping to re-create his face in her mind. But it was a difficult task. It was like standing directly before a cathedral back-lit by an aggressive sun. She could not hope to see its windows without first looking away from its ornate doors. And to look at its doors, would mean she would need to look away from its windows. And he was just as majestic and just as imposing for he was just a collection of parts that she could never hope to contain in her universe in one steady singular gaze.
She had to look at him feature, by feature.
His eyes: they were a vast diorama of fractal colors; blues and greens layered upon one another over and over until infinity. And in them, she saw herself. She was an inducement of color, of womanly shape and form, that was stunningly nude. And entirely too small.
In a contraction of sound, of movement, the air parting, the air-sighing, he joined her.
She felt him almost-tangibly, as an emanation of heat. He felt like the quiver of inevitability; something that would start panting in the dark.And there was, she realized, something moving.
Startled, she looked down to see a segmentation of shapes. She stared at those shapes dumbly, thickly, and suddenly realized that the cylindrical objects cleaving through the fabric, creating large furrows in their wake, were his fingers.
They slid up to fence her body in. And she knew them as a band of darkness. But there was an intrusion slipping between the openings of his fingers; a shadow-figment that was long, tapered, and suddenly broadcasted to her in arresting clarity.
It was his tongue. Nearly the length of her.
And through the cage of his fingers, he licked her.
She screamed.
It was a malleable heat, a devastating undulation of damp warmth.
Oh my God.
She struck a hand up to deflect, but his tongue dipped into her soft skin.
And her body trembled in the sheath of his moan.Heather
Heather went bolt upright.
She caught the nightstand with a jerk of her arms. An optimist’s inch kept her from hurtling over the edge.
But the concussive force bounced the glass of water off and it shattered on the hardwood floor. She looked down at it, miserable. It had been a nightly fixture, standing in a place of utility at her bedside. Sipping from it at night served to dampen the anxiety in her throat; but also sent her careening for the bathroom at the most inopportune times.
She grabbed her phone. The brightness of it branded her eyes, but she persisted. I’m ok. I’m ok. I’m all right. My name is Heather. I’m alive. It’s 3:45 AM. I’m alive. It’s been –
She turned her head, and her gaze swiveled to look at the calendar hanging from its barbaric nail, on the opposite wall – And it’s been three hundred and sixty three days since I got away and I have to pee.
She slid out of bed and tip-toed weakly around the shattered glass. She felt just as broken, just as naked, gleaming in the dark in a million little pieces.
For the moment she just wanted to wash her face – simple pleasures – and return to sleep.
Flipping on the light, averting her reflection, she twisted the tap handle with a violent toss of her hand. The water gushed to life.
It was as though the noise itself had the power to drive away her demons. She collected the icy water until it streamed from her fingers. Without hesitation she splashed her face, sending goose-bumps down her spine. The feeling was raw, bracing.
Once.
Twice.
Three seemed to be a safe number. With a snap-quick movement of her wrist she tugged a hand-towel free and dried her hands in vicious, rapid circles.
Heather flicked the television on. Her eyes darted down. Good, the volume was sitting at a multiple of five. On her return trip to the bedroom, she skirted the dark-colored tiles, skipped over the crack in the molding, and swept inside her bedroom.
But, curious, she turned slowly. And confronted herself.
In the mirror, she looked.
Her large, wide eyes – heavily-lashed - were still an arresting green, but they were the green of something venomous. There was an anger there, pinched around her mouth, a look of wounding; the look of a woman made weapon, a weapon hardened against the whetstone of dark trauma. And she weaponized her darkness. Her purple-black fingernails stood out against her white face as she cupped her own cheek in an expression of exhaustive scorn.Look at you. The fuck’s wrong with you? Still jumping at shadows.
Her brazenness was as bright as the light striking off her nose-ring; the stud glimmering against a backdrop of raven-black hair.
She was striking and beautiful only as something feral could be beautiful; not of the high class or high gloss of a sophisticate. Heather had the aura of a slutty woman with high-arched eyebrows framing an unaffected, cool stare that broadcast she was ever the sex object, but so many unworthy of her attention. And despite jumping at shadows, and missing precious hours of sleep, she was still lean and athletic, with a shape enveloped by muscular legs, and a vanishingly-small waist.
For three-hundred and sixty-three days she had dedicated the temple of her body to survival.
Heather drifted back to her bed, feeling weak, feeling small. With a world-weary sigh she slumped down onto the covers; the frame creaked under her weight.
Sightless, she stared up at the ceiling, going over the dream again and again. It was different in some way each time.
His mouth was a topic of great debate in her subconscious. Did he actually put her in there? She couldn’t quite remember. Or had he been intent on cupping her in his hands, and set out to crumple her like wet paper?
Try as she might, she couldn’t summon the memory; it was like pursuing the fickle light of a firefly, the more she pursued it, the more it danced from her finger tips. How had she escaped? Her stomach churned in anxiety. All she remembered… all she knew was that she had been tiny – and then, she wasn’t. And the moment she was free, she had sprinted down the rain-soaked streets, plunging into the unkind scrape of mother nature.
Desperate, she tried to gather her thoughts. But like most nights – as tonight – she could never find a moment of peace. That luxury had been stolen from her. Taken by something unholy.
Heather would never forget.
And she was hoping vainly, hoping desperately that he had forgotten about her. What was she to him after all? Surely he would forget her, surely he would move on to the next, and the next, and the next after that. To think that she could put a dent in his daily, racing thoughts… she could scoff.
But.
Her eyelids clicked audibly in the dark, blinking back vicious tears.
How could he? How could he forget her? When –
I’m the one that got away, her mind whispered, self-aware.
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@nephilim Wow…are you a pro at writing? Cause it was astoundingly great .
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@ilikehell Thank you for that! Not a professional writer in the conventional sense… but I do do a lot of writing as a profession, and hobby.
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I’ve fallen behind on the pace I wanted to sustain for my submissions, here. Sorry about that. My doctorate program is just now winding down for the summer, so I’ll be able to carve out more time for writing
I’ll be adding more chapters.
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Chapter 2
Ritual
Heather
It had become her nightly ritual.
Searching, searching.
How she had chanced upon her discovery was peculiar; perhaps, even, fated. It had culminated in a constellation of coincidences that had flowed from her fingertips as she had peppered the keyboard with quick, determined strokes.
The emergence of the idea had been but a germ first, a tiny seedling that had taken form and shape with a hopeful slapdash clattering of keys. It had felt silly and sophomoric at the time, but she had felt compelled to try.
Mouth Camera
Heather looked at the results. She felt snubbed. No; that wasn’t what she wanted, not exactly. A distillation of results flashed epileptically through the search library.
She saw glimpses of amateur side-reels, visual outtakes, bloopers, even a few auteur cinematic vignettes.
It was close. Frustratingly close, but not what she needed.
Off a sprig of inspiration: Inside Mouth
The cascade of images returned suddenly pivoted toward the medical. Heather scrolled through video thumbnails that felt clinical and outdated.
Heather tapped her chin. She was approaching what she needed. She felt it.
And with some sort of alchemy of coincidence, timing, and clever word gymnastics, through a bevy of images, snapshots, and stilted videography - typing and refining her search, typing and refining - deflecting duds and disappointments, and re-shaping the subsequent queries with more refinement, more instinct: a sudden sublimation happened and a terminology surfaced. It floated to the top.
Endoscopy
Heather stared at the word sitting in the text box. It waited for her. It feel alien, but resonant.
Her hand reached for the mouse; stopped. It felt like an enormity. If she nosed the cursor over the web-page button and hit submit – so simple and effortless a gesture, just one finger-flick – she felt like something alien and terrible would emerge before her.
You can’t unring this bell, Heather Feather
Heather felt a peculiar sobriety fill her as she examined and re-examined the word.
Because she knew, only as a mad-woman could, that the word brandished before her would be the incantation to break the seal on her memories – and that pursuing what stemmed from it would do something even more terrible.
Give her memories context.
Pursuing this strange, resonant word would give vivid, objective meaning to her memories.
And the thought of being able to anchor her bizarre, fantastical memories to something real…
Heather twisted her lip in her teeth, and feeling punitive, feeling masochistic, feeling the absurd need to punish herself - punish him - punish her brain - punish her absurd state of affairs – clicked submit.
Oh shit. Oh fuck
Heather slapped shut her laptop.
It had only been an infinitesimal second, but she had seen something that her subconscious had recognized.
Oh my God. You are being ridiculous. Just open the laptop, Heather. Just do it. Open the goddamn thing
With a swipe of her hand she threw it open.
The video sat indulgent before her in a fantastical stasis, contracted down into a single frame, paused.
Shyly, she peeked through her fingers.
And hit play.
There was no sound. But she watched as the small lens advanced beyond the lips, the teeth, down the length of tongue – Heather gripped her face; her fingers dug into her jaw. The endoscope continued on its trajectory, and she watched, unblinkingly, fasteningly, as it coiled around an architectural shape beneath the curve of the tongue : a geometry of viscera half-cloaked in a vector of shadow that looked…
Heather heaved into her hands. Her head jerked away.
Familiar
She flexed her mouth, her jaw, circled it as she felt the need to heave again.
Her skin prickled. How else could she retain the memory of something that she knew not to even exist in the waking-world until this precise moment?
What the fuck is that? What IS that? That’s in me?
Heather watched in a sort of out-of-body stupefied disbelief as the crescent-shaped epiglottis loomed large into view, stretching from end to end across the screen.
She felt sick.
She felt the cognitive dissonance of a person suddenly, abruptly learning what lay inside their body - for years - without even being remotely aware of it to begin with.
It was like looking at a parasite.
But, worse.
Because as vivid and fanciful as her imagination could be, she would have never, in a million years, have dreamt up such an alien structure existed within her.
Which meant…
I experienced this…
It was awful for how simple it was. And it was simple in its horror because of how elegant it was. And it was elegant because it was, ultimately, simple.
She knew about this parasite, this bodily structure, because she had seen it before.
But how?
Although this - this thing aligned with her memories, she knew it wasn’t the product of her most feverish fantasies because she would have never envisioned something so ugly.
It revolted her. It compelled her. She felt her mental state see-saw as bodily as the video footage before her on the laptop screen. The instability of the footage made it that much more horrific.
In an unseemly fascination she gripped her arms and leaned in. The tongue undulated in an autonomous reflex as the endoscope cable breached the throat.
And Heather covered her face; her mouth. She swallowed - reflexively - as her own autonomous reflex gripped her.
I’m going to be sick
She looked away.
Trembling, she reached her fingers into her desk drawer, felt around the velvet bolster, and –
Fuck
She withdrew. She stared at her hand lamely. Disbelievingly she stared. It felt like she stared for an eternity. Then, finally, she inserted her finger into her mouth
A burble of hysteria went through her as she released it with a pop. How the hell had she fit inside of him? She had tried to trace the topagrophy of it, her presumable size, tried to make sense of the scale by mentally measuring and mapping out where her finger resided.
Holy hell I was small Her face sank into her hands. She felt her lips crumple, and her heart sink heavily, bodily toward her stomach just as the gastric colosseum of the stomach panned onto the screen in the video. And, aware of this in a far-off remote way, this strange inexorable twin-mirrored fate of what was happening in the video, she laugh-cried into the room.
“So, not only did he eat me. But he shrank me, too.”
The hysteria re-doubled.
Shitshitshit. I need more pills. I need…
She looked up. She looked away.
The panorama of the stomach was overwhelming. And to think, that what had happened to her that fateful evening, what had been attempted had a logical sequence of events, and what lay at the terminus of them was that pink bulbous organ, and the possibility that he had desired to send her into it –
“He tried to eat me.” She repeated.
Nervous, she tittered into her hands. It made an awful, chilling kind of sense. All the context clues had been pieced together. And they all made sense; and sensible they were when held together. But when she said it aloud, it kind of fell apart.
“I feel ridiculous.”
She looked down at her pill stash: empty. And she felt the same.
Empty because she sat with the enormity of this. Alone.
“Ok, so,” she continued. If she couldn’t believe it on its face, as it were, then at least she could try to labor to believe it by proxy? Pretend that its construction was an elaborate metaphor?
Except it was, her brain interjected, not a metaphor.
If she had slept, it was undoubtedly a broken sleep. Because when she woke, she felt orphaned. Orphaned by time, orphaned by reality. Alone, and shrinking. And shrinking further. Somehow, having watched the endoscopy footage in one long visual spasm had excavated something from her that she was not yet properly equipped to confront.
Miserable, she rolled from bed. Miserable, she set about her room. Miserable she looked out the windows.
She had foregone breakfast entirely. The thought of all that ugliness in her throat, and all that movement dessicated her desire to eat.
With a shudder she resurfaced from the memory and set about applying the war-paint. Her make-up was simple: a touch of black eyeliner to feather around her demure lashes, and a thicker streak slanted on the eyelid to give a more lasting, dramatic effect.
Cat eyes.
Is that why he had called her Kitten?
Stop
The nickname felt tainted now. She resolved to never use it again.
At least, she thought with a flush of pride, at least he hadn’t taken that away from her.
She still had her identity.
She exited her apartment.
Carefully, she wound her way up the block; vigilant. She avoided all of the cracks.
Most days, she could make it look cat-like, fluid, as though her grace would not permit her feet to land on any of the imperfections in the sidewalk that cleaved through the neighborhood. But today, she felt like invisible ghosts were watching; ghosts from her past that suddenly had light and shape, because she had a genesis for her memories now, and she had seen it in the endoscopy video.
I feel like I’m being watched
Troubled, she tried to outpace her thoughts as she moved through the city-neighborhood.
The poor, dilapidated neighborhood that appeared to be in perpetual motion: crumbling.
In order to avoid her previous life, she had moved to – what her father would call – the wrong side of the train tracks. This hamlet that branched off from the industrial district peeled open like a discarded carcass; the inhabitants lingered like flies, desperate to leave but unsure of how to escape their only food-source. It left a lot to be desired but Heather had found its despairing charm strangely comforting.
Here, the people were unconcerned with social cues or fashionable trends; here they survived. But despite its suffering – or, perhaps, because of it – there was a sense of community. The older folks would wave and wish her a good day from their stoops, the little ones playing in the sidewalk with chalk would smile up at her with their missing front teeth – and infected by their good humor, Heather would often find herself returning a smile of her own.
See? Not so ugly after all
Simple people. Simple pleasures.
He wouldn’t take everything. She wouldn’t let him ruin her completely.
However, often slinking between the kind matrons and the innocent children (not yet hardened by the streets) were the breed of vermin that put her on edge. The kind that would leer at her from the warehouse, everyday.
It was enough to make Heather’s face curdle in anger. But she walked by with head held high.
Yet, the brazen show of lust was unsettling. Heather hadn’t been in the company of a man since… well, what had happened. She had found herself unable to accept their advances. Kissing, tonguing, it had all felt too analogous to being tasted.
Yet, the men here seemed to want themselves inside of her rather than – well, rather than the other way around – she thought with a humorless laugh. She had found some form of ironic comfort in that, no matter how small. At least they were honest with their intentions.
A crack in the sidewalk loomed up at her, snagging her feet. This one… this one was different. It was not like the other thin fractures that cut across the hard ground, this one was like –
It’s like a mouth
It was thin on either side, and widened at the middle. It was a yawning mouth staring up at her in that same fantastical stasis she had seen in the endoscopy video.
Sweat trickled down her skin.
Fuck, fuck, fuck! Not now. No goddamn panic attacks now! Not here! Not in broad daylight!
She was right in front of that damnable warehouse and they were sure to be witness to this as she stared at the crack like a maniac.
No, please God not right now! Just turn the corner Heather! The fucking drugs are right around the corner!
A pair of hands gripped her shoulders and yanked her free.
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Chapter 3
Fingered
Heather
“Joseph!” Heather cried out, heart hammering. “You scared the shit out of me!”
“Sorry. You were…well you looked like you needed to be snapped out of whatever th-that was,” he remarked sheepishly.
Ever the book-worm, Heather privately regarded Joseph as her savior. Young men like him were canonized many tines over, in the very many novels of beauties and beasties that populated her very many bookshelves. He was, very much like his literary effigy: an anachronistic saint. Perched at the end of his nose was a set of red-rimmed glasses which did little to detract from his hazel eyes. They were too soulful.
Where’s your flock, Joey?
Joseph, her shepherd. And against his better (best) judgment, he would lead Heather to her poisoned chalice. A moment in time, would be a moment in divine: he would do anything for Heather. He would bend over backwards for a damaged girl like her: one he could take care of, one that would make him feel masculine and capable. A woman, whose rough coarse edges could be made smooth by his saintly aspirations.
And saintly they were. He had been working at the pharmacy for the better part of a year, handing out medication to the disadvantaged. It was a legally adjudicated practice, established by political fiat by a congressional sycophant, but it still required a doctor’s note. And Heather had no note to her name.
Heather had consistently, with a fearsome singularity of focus, refused to seek therapy. How could she? The words never left her lips.
And she had a new one now that was starting to nest in the bee-hive of her brain. It had become parasitic; latching onto the underside of her. She went to bed with it. She woke with it, she –
“Endoscopy,” Heather blurted. “Joey, what do you know about that?”
Joseph looked at her, startled. “That’s random, Heather.”
Heather suddenly looked up at her companion. “It – I… I, uh, what is it exactly? I mean, I have an idea, it just,” she shrugged, and after a clever, calculated second: “YouTube Rabbit hole, you know how it is.”
“Ah, all too familiar,” Joseph responded. With a twitch of his lab-coat arm, he eased open the door to the pill dispensary.
You wouldn’t do that, Heather thought silently. You wouldn’t do that to me, Joey. You wouldn’t subject me to ‘endoscopy.’
Not Joseph. Never Joseph. He was too kind. Too saintly. Too perfect. Which is why Heather had never projected signals of interest; and he, too polite, had never even ventured to try.
No; you like them rough, don’t you, Heather? You want them to fuck you coming and going.
“Well, it’s a medical procedure,” he began airily, as he took his erstwhile companion to the back room.
Heather half-listened as the pharmacy technician began an effortless, uninterrupted dissertation that at junctures where mere mortals would normally need to breathe, Joseph brightly carried on with detectable excitement.
Off her look: "Sorry. Medical stuff gets me excited. Especially since I want to study to become a gastroenterologist. "
Heather barked a humorless laugh.
In the posterior of the store there was an annexed area, one where the employees would linger between shifts. The front desk woman looked up as they transited, smiling a knowing smile. Heather resented her. She probably thinks I’m gonna suck him off for some pills. Mad world.
They left the front desk woman in their wake and advanced into the storage room proper.
Heather resigned herself to one of the stiff blue chairs standing vigilant by the coffee table. Anxious, she thumbed through an old magazine. A glossy magazine spread for indigestion medication materialized. Frustrated, she flung the magazine to the floor. (Besides, the drawing of the mouth in the insert had been too stylized to be accurate, and it was frustrating her further because how was she ever to learn what happened to her if -
Fortunately, Joseph returned, saving her from her racing thoughts. It was a shame she couldn’t just buy a bottle off him. The regular pittance he normally offered her wouldn’t last more than a week. But as he explained (in his saintly voice) he was filching from the stock. A bottle would be noticed, but –
“…a few pinches” Joseph said in unison with Heather’s returning chorus. It was their refrain, and they had grown to enjoy it. “Like always. Since if I take anything else, it’ll be noticed.”
Joseph handed Heather the pharmacy bag. In a spasm she clutched it. “All there?”
He nodded. “One to sleep, one to calm your nerves if you have another panic attack. And one to feel like you’re floating on air.”
Heather began to rise –
“Wait, Heather. Sit.”
She did. (Surprisingly). In fact, so surprised was she by this turn of character, that she was not even sure it had been a cognitive decision. She simply had.
He sat down in the chair beside her, leaning in, back hunched like a beaten cur. “You don’t talk to me anymore… Sure, we meet up once a week and do - do this - but, man, Heather, I’m risking serious jail time doing this. And I don’t even know why I’m doing it.”
Heather hardened. “No.”
Off her tone: “Heather?”
“No. I see what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to get me to open up and talk. And I told you, Joey, I told you, I’m not going to do that.”
“Something happened to you. You were free spirited and happy. The life of the party! Now you – what – hide inside like a crazy cat lady and pop pills? Come on, just let me in. Let someone in!”
Heather didn’t even look at him. She sat in the enormity of what had happened in that terrible bodily silence.
“D-did… did he hurt you? Your… the guy you’ve been dating. The one… he…”
Heather felt a coolness, a numbness whisk inside her.
Had he hurt her? Doubtless, they had had their squabbles; their tiffs; their outbursts. But his every argument, his every gesture had loosened Heather from her moorings. She had become unleashed, unabashed, and had begun meeting him stroke for stroke: in bed, in conversation, in ego.In physicality.
If she was honest - perfectly honest - with herself, she would have, with all of its complications, complexities, and conflictions, dissected her relationship down along its seams into neat, taxonomical slices of abuse.
Heather felt lost, then. To be asked so directly had rattled free a memory as painfully as anatomical dissection.
Wrestling with the knowledge of whether he had wanted to hurt her or pleasure her had plagued her days and nights. It felt like everything - everything - he did had the unspoken potential of becoming violent. There had been an intangible quality to him that had always felt feral. (Once an appealing trait had now become something vexing to Heather). The oral sex he performed had been emblematic of this. Heather knew he had been bribing her with his tongue (seeking her clemency) whenever he’d bring her to flawless orgasm; she had resented this, relished it, hated it, loved it, because it had felt sacred, apologetic when he did it, even if it was licentious bribery. Each tongue stroke had felt like it was an apology for the times he had hurt her. (Or she hurt him).
And that was the seduction of it, wasn’t it? He could be cruel; but he could also be sorry. So sorry. So very, very sorry.Lost to the memory, Heather resurfaced, and looked over at Joseph. “I… I don’t know. We were… complicated.”
“Complicated enough that you need to pop pills?! Jesus, H-town. What happened between you two?”
“Endoscopy,” she said lamely.
“What?”
In a moment of invention: "He - we - I … we argued over the term for it, and we got into this stupid fight, and - "
He tried to eat me, her brain supplied.
Heather felt brittle, like she would crack. This was the closest she had ever gotten to admitting, out loud, what had happened, to anyone. "It got pretty bad. It got violent – "
I think he tried to swallow me
“And…” Heather’s voice evaporated. She looked at Joseph with wounded eyes. A quiet universe of pain. She urged him, telepathically, to understand, to see - to see - through the verbal sleight-of-hand and observe the ugly truth running parallel to her fantastical metaphor, and –
With great intuition: “He… molested you?”
Heather could scream. Heather could cry. It was all so close.
She was drowning. Drowning with the need to say something, anything, to her spectacled savior. And whatever fault lines Joseph saw in her, he amended with a gasp: “He raped you?”
Bless him. Joseph could scarcely say the word. And Heather inured herself to this. She offered a silent, taut nod.
If she couldn’t explain what had happened in the black-letter of the law, then she would - God help her - get him on the same wavelength as this elaborate metaphor, so, then, at the very least she could milk him for his sympathies, and receive her precious (precious) pills, untroubled.
Left to his own reverie, it would seem, Heather daintily plucked the brown pill bag from the table and made hasty exist, but not before wondering if she had broken the poor boy, because he still had not moved from his seat, even as she strode under the soft, silvery tinkle of the dispensary bell.
That Evening
She ignored her phone for quite some time out of spite.
It had went off again, a minor reminder that there was a text waiting.Wait.
A prickle of curiosity. Maybe it was Joseph? Maybe she forgot something at the drug store? Was it work calling? Is it that sassy slut who thinks she runs the place? It’s a florist shop for chrissake, not a modeling agency. There was no ‘perfect bouquet.’
In a cloud of thoughts, Heather entered her apartment with a huff, slapping the brown paper bag down on the table. It toppled over gracelessly, and her precious, precious pills clattered free.
She stared down at the sordid collection.
They were what her father would call ‘horse pills’. Too big and too hard to swallow.Would I have been too hard to swallow?
Fuck! She could slap herself.
Heather pulled a face and walked resignedly into the kitchen.
She felt its every waxy inch. Heather nearly gagged. The quick wash of water disposed the pill down her throat.
Was it this? Was this what it felt like to swallow a tiny human?
Did he – uncontrollably, her thoughts wormed free from the pocket in her brain – did he feel it? That bolus, that sensation lodged in her throat, did he feel that? The pressure in her chest as it moved beneath her ribs: did a tiny human traveling through him move the same way?Fuck aren’t these pills supposed to stop the bad thoughts?
Troubled by her thoughts, and unsure how to reconcile them, she tried to outpace them: she crawled into a nest of pillows on the bed, and fished her phone free.
She was lilting. Laying on a cloud. She scanned through her emails (doggedly ignoring the one, errant text message), and she saw that her application for apprenticing at the Cosmetic Atelier, uptown, had been accepted. It would appear that working at a floral shop for the better part of her young adult life would pay sizable dividends. The hiring manager had thought she had potential: and she could see the glimmering promise of an artist in Heather’s sketch portfolio.
And, suddenly, Heather felt a sudden lift, a buoyant updraft of what could only be optimism. Perhaps, she could do this after all. Maybe – just maybe – she wouldn’t just survive, but she could thrive.
The pill was melting away her inhibitions, loosening her mind, she felt like she could stretch; forever.
The phone buzzed again. She ignored it.
Instead, Heather, reasoned, in order to celebrate, she would abort her current efforts, and detour into more ministerial acts.
Because it had become something of a religion hadn’t it? No; a ritual. Still, it persisted.
Heather sat a little taller; a little more upright. She typed the sacrosanct word into the text-box field.
And she was rewarded with her feed; her feed that, due to repeat alchemical reactions, was becoming more and more curated – in fact, the search engine seemed to take on a nigh-sentient ability, because the latest cropping of videos were exactly what she needed.
There was, she learned, a small, gifted population of people (nameless, faceless) that could ingest their own endoscopes. And unlike the unflattering, stilted video footage she had procured originally from medical archives, these were entirely different.
Heather knew, immediately - only as a madwoman could - that these videos were voyeuristic. And the host was possessed of a talent that distilled down into what she realized was an uncanny ability to control the motility of the mouth and throat.
Rapt, she watched. Unblinking, she watched. The drugs in her bloodstream conscripted in her an ability to see the images with arresting clarity.
The red of the reds. The black of the blacks. The raised texture of the tongue like very many cobblestones.
She felt safe in her nest of pillows. So she permitted the footage to play, uninterrupted. The pill had certainly imbued a soft, relaxing aura. Normally, at this juncture, she would have paused the video in an alarmed spasm.
But, tonight, as a silent reprisal against her erstwhile lover (imagining she was needling his oh-so-fabulously constructed ego) she deliberately forged ahead. She watched the precise moment the epiglottis flattened itself, neatly and –
Christ
The esophagus, appearing as nothing more than fault lines in the throat at first, suddenly peeled open.
Trembling, Heather leaned in. But the video smashed to black.
Shaking. She was shaking. She had not even been aware of it.
All of those shapes, those lines, those contours, they were horrifically familiar. No: they were not the lines, or shapes of her ex boyfriend’s oral cavity (and she dare not wonder why she knew this so affirmatively), but they were familiar to her in that…
That was a guy’s mouth She felt squeamish. The others, she realized suddenly, had been mouths attached to women.
But this one, this mouth. It was a guy’s.
So, there appeared to be a division of the sexes in the fetish. For fetish it was. Heather sensed that the intention of the filmmaker was to take their videography and charge it with an erotic undercurrent.
While she could appreciate the effort, it was certainly lost on her.
She was repulsed by it. Fascinated by it. Perhaps she steeped herself in it in order to armor herself against it. Be that as it may, she had started watching these more erotic versions, because the more slow, sensual presentation (unlike the medical ones) afforded her the luxury to actually see the environment (instead of the garish chaos of medical footage) and study the bodily architecture in great detail.
To what end, she was unsure. But she felt it was critical she do this, every night. It was critical she understand.
Understand what happened to her.
It did little to inspire though. The only thing these nightly rituals succeeded in doing, was fortify her belief - however absurd - that she had been in the very areas of her boyfriend’s mouth and upper throat where the endoscope had transited in those stranger’s videos.
So, he had never swallowed her. Small miracles, I guess.
But that left her raw with a new reality that was even more potent and dangerous; one now exacerbated by confusion: Why?An entire universe lay in that single syllable.
Why had he rejected her?
Similarly, she realized, she was still rejecting that lone, errant text message.It felt good. It felt good to be in control. It felt good to operate from such spite. It felt good to lie to Joseph, it felt…
Heather suddenly gasped back a panic. What was happening to her? What kind of monster was she becoming? Why was she undergoing some metamorphosis after escaping her erstwhile boyfriend? Certainly, he had lied often, cajoled readily, and twisted the truth to suit his purpose. But did that mean she did, too? Did she have to?
Well, you’ve certainly learned from the best, Heather.
Feeling contrite (and a smidge guilty) she finally thumbed away the rest of her open windows, and searched out the text message that had been pitifully chirping at her the better part of an hour.
Sorry, Joseph. Didn’t mean to leave you on read. I just don’t want to think about you, because thinking about you means I have to think about me. And what a monster I am.
Heather clicked to retrieve the message by rote.
She shrieked.
What
Heather caught her breath, panting. What was that? What was she looking at? Her subconscious brain had registered it long before her higher-mind ever had. But whatever she saw, she wanted to reject it from her reality.
Instead, she glanced down again.
No.
The phone clattered from her hands. She jerked back like it was a viper. Her fingers tightened, smothering her mouth. Blood coursed through her veins so quick that she felt like she would drop down on the hardwood floor and loose that precious pill. Right then and there.
No, I’m seeing it wrong. I’m seeing things.
Bracing herself, she looked down at the screen again.
It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. What she was seeing didn’t naturally register. But it did. She knew what she was looking at. Determined to confront the image, she studied it. Her chin jerked up in alarm. That’s me. Of course, she knew that. It was a photograph of herself, taken from a distance.
But.
There was an object, two of them, blocking her back in a way that looked suspiciously like they were - Oh God, no - like they were –Little Heather had enjoyed such optical wizardry in her youth, hadn’t she? Playing with perspectives and distance was a time-honored tradition.
But this was not the innocent, fanciful play of a child.
This was –
The two objects – fingers – superimposed on her tiny body as they were, at the distance she stood, appeared to be gigantic in form, holding her upright.
A god holding an ant.
Having opened the text message by rote, she had overlooked the sender. It wasn’t Joseph. It wasn’t her spectacled saint. How could it ever be Joseph? She had no saint. She had no savior.
And, a sudden follow-up text.
Unknown
: In my neck of the woods today?No, of course not. Heather was not allowed nice things. Heather wasn’t allowed peace.
She had only this. This cancer of the silence that stretched between them. Of what he had done. And what she had survived. And that she knew. And that he knew she knew. And he would mock her for it.
And, so typical of him, he was coming at her like a snake: sideways. Neither confessing to his sin, nor dismissing it.
Asshole
And in what could only be termed a spiteful lunge of her finger, Heather retaliated by sending – with what felt like telepathic whiplash – one of the endoscopy videos she had been watching.
Heather:
Dis you?A long immeasurable second passed. And Heather had not the luxury of that second to contemplate what she had done, what she was doing, that she was engaging him real-time, and permitting him to move ever-closer (she could almost feel him) when she responded with what she hoped to be equally unruffled glibness, when her cell phone chimed an incoming text.
Unknown:
That?! That amateur-hour shit?!Heather:
Oh, of course. Silly me. Since you’re such a professional and all.Unknown:
We aim to please.Heather:
Fuck off.Unknown:
Aw, cute. So pissy. Hugs, not drugs, kitty cat.Heather lifted her finger to type; stopped.
Subtlety was his craft. Suddenly, she understood.Oh God.
Her heart stopped.He knows, oh God, oh shit, he knows. He knows where I get my pills
And, in that uncanny way of his, of being able to answer her, in an almost-telepathic whiplash:
Unknown:
You’ve got me curious, Heather Feather. How bad is it? You gonna lead me back to your hidey-hole? -
Love it, love it!
This story would provide the very definition of an SW psychological horror in my book. It reminds me of a modern Rosemary’s Baby in some of the best ways.
I notice a lot of writers put their protagonists in solitude because writing dynamic interactions is fucking hard, but Heather’s isolation is deliberate and insidious, and the way you paint everyone else she knows and encounters as these strange wisps inhabiting a disconnected ghost world has the intended effect of describing what she’s doing to herself rather than being an indictment against consensus reality. (Joseph is bland, but I know I want to live in his world instead of Heather’s and our soon-to-be-introduced “antagonist”'s mutually constructed hell.)
Can’t wait for more!
-
@kisupure said in Swallow Me, Like Your Little Pill:
Love it, love it!
This story would provide the very definition of an SW psychological horror in my book. It reminds me of a modern Rosemary’s Baby in some of the best ways.
I am so glad that I hit the mark. I have a preoccupation with dark psychological gestalts, and I find SW themes excellent topical anchors for not just plumbing the human experience, but also exploring horror-erotica. Or, “dark romance,” as it were. Vore, also, is an excellent metaphorical conceit for this.
I notice a lot of writers put their protagonists in solitude because writing dynamic interactions is fucking hard, but Heather’s isolation is deliberate and insidious,
Yes! You are so very right. Heather is in a hell of her own making, so it’s only appropriate she’s written in isolation. But, ah, the dynamic between these two will be intense
and the way you paint everyone else she knows and encounters as these strange wisps inhabiting a disconnected ghost world has the intended effect of describing what she’s doing to herself rather than being an indictment against consensus reality.
Yes! Great writer’s intuition! Bang on! She is definitely walking ghostly through the barrens of her own social-exile.
(Joseph is bland, but I know I want to live in his world instead of Heather’s and our soon-to-be-introduced “antagonist”'s mutually constructed hell.)
Can’t wait for more!
And I can’t wait to share more. I have always love, love, loved writing the interactions of this couple. Because, it goes dark and deep, with raw, pivoting perspectives, and addiction, as we will learn, is a weapon pointed on both ends.
-
And I can’t wait to share more. I have always love, love, loved writing the interactions of this couple. Because, it goes dark and deep, with raw, pivoting perspectives, and addiction, as we will learn, is a weapon pointed on both ends.
It’s been a few years for me since I read the original, so I’m looking forward to reading the gruesome psychologia all over again!
-
Chapter 4
Pillowtalk
Heather
Three-hundred and sixty-three days.
Somehow, three-hundred and sixty-three days had progressed forward, dream-like, in a numb narcotic-soma into three-hundred and sixty-four.
Then, in another ripple of time distortion: three-hundred and sixty-five.Testament to this was the calendar. It was a solemn time piece.
And she studied it like the great texts. There had been a proud, nearly-audible progression of red X’s that had marched across its geometric face. They had been stamped on every square in a red sea of uniformity – until today.Today.
Today, seemingly at the toll of midnight, was the abrupt collision with his text message at three-hundred and sixty-five.
One year.
One year of survival. One year of existing. It certainly didn’t feel like living; not in form, not in function, because she simply continued forward - ever forward - in a hollow effigy of what she had been, and now she felt even more enervated knowing he had texted her, precisely, at the one-year mark.
Heather felt uneasy. Had it been deliberate? Did he know? Could he know? Was he aware of her nightly vigil?
Was he keeping count, too? Or was this the vanity of a self-aggrandized mind? In order for him to be motivated enough to keep count would mean that she meant something. And that - more than anything - was terrifying.
And seeing that empty square did feel terribly discordant. What did it portend? Why did it feel prophetic?
Seeking a lifeline, she picked up her phone. She re-read the texts. Awash with emotion, she put it back down.
It was paralytic: having so many questions. Having so many feels.And there was a magnetism there. She could feel it. She was suddenly feeling the inexorable draw toward something. And that something had a face, a name – one which she refused to say aloud, even to herself. And she need not to, in order to invoke him. Like a dark spirit, he would respond without his namesake. She need only think of him and he would be there; always.
He had (had) that effect didn’t he? She could feel him. They had always had that uncanny hive-mind. Feeling one another, sensing one another. Two hands on the same clock-face. And they beat together - their dark hearts - in a syncopation just as timeless. But did she want to be drawn back into that world? His world?
Heather wrung her hands in frustration. Because if she was honest with herself - perfectly honest –
Talking to him, even if it had been a quick transaction, had felt good. Trading the barbs. Fencing the words. It brought color and conviction back to her. She didn’t feel like a ghostly apparition when they goaded one another into a game of cat-and-mouse –
Cat and mouse.
Gonna lead me back to your hidey-hole?
If not then, then most certainly now he viewed her as a small woman mousing her way through the neighborhood. Back and forth she would go; in, and out; in and out; to and from her hole hickory dickory dock and –
Into what? His? The hole in his face?
Now she would have to make her usual trip with the knowledge that she would be burdened by his gaze.
And what would he see? How would he be looking at her? Would it be as Heather? As friend? Foe? Lady-prey? Something as of yet indeterminable and unknown? Would she be a lovely collection of womanly parts? Or would she be a woman in the throes of fiercely gripping to her personhood?
Heather wanted to berate him with questions. Worse: she wanted to berate herself. This was an alarming sensation: when did she ever care what a man thought about her?
When he tried to fucking eat you, Heather
Rattled, she ran her fingernails over the colorful assortment of pills. It was a gentle tinkling of nails against plastic. Was this her? Was she a pill to him? She picked up a capsule, studied it. At least her consumables didn’t have names, faces –
Heather was struck. Where had these ghostly pluralizations come from? How did one name, one face – namely, hers – sprout into many?
You know why, Heather Feather, her brain mocked. You weren’t the first. It made her squirm.
Well, this definitely gives new meaning to ‘body count’.
For, if there was one intimate, gripping piece of knowledge she had retained after watching the multitude of endoscopy videos, was that the talent for controlling the motility of the mouth and throat required practice. It was – she mused – no different than when she had labored to teach herself the skill of dry-swallowing her horse-pills. It was, she realized with a burble of hysteria, exactly what he had attempted to do to her.
And if he had done it multiple times, was it a skill? One that he could hone? How many had he done it to? And what was the purpose? Was eating her a perfunctory act? A rote contraction of movement that had barely, yawningly, stretched beyond other more base instincts?
And, more terribly, why did she care?
Because it matters. She told her brain. It mattered because she had to understand the genesis of the desire. Was it a limbic compulsion that had burst forth from his animal-brain? If so, then she was nothing more than gristle off the bone for him; an inducement of taste and sensation and wielded little power against him.
But, instead, if it was something – something more as she had hoped, then –
Hoped? She felt her brain snag upon that peculiarity. Why, indeed, was she hoping for something more complex; for something more reflective? Why was she hoping for something that went beyond primitive compulsion?
Because, she knew, only as a mad-woman could, that complexity made it dangerous. It made everything dangerous. And danger could be weaponized. Could she borne his own compulsion against him? Would addiction be a weapon pointed on both ends?
She stroked the purple pill in her palm. It looked to her like a lovely little lady in a purple dress. Heather had a brief dissonant moment, envisioning he had cradled her in his hands just as she did her precious purple pill. She could almost, almost understand him.
But she was struck by a strange compulsion then. It drove her to her feet. She opened her apartment door and walked out onto the street. It was scarcely a few hours past midnight, but it was the part of the nighttime that was breathless: thin and vaporous. The dark was penetrable.
Heather strode forward.
And as murky as her intentions were – and they were not yet even known to her – what she knew of them, she knew that she would not waste away waiting for him; she would not be the damsel in distress to cower under his beastliness.
If they were to painfully intersect, it would not happen at his whimsy. No; she would not permit that. If it were to happen, it would happen on her terms. And she wouldn’t permit him to weaponize her addiction against her. No, that was now her idea (so lovingly cultivated).
Heather pulled up short. She stood, wavering, in the middle of the sidewalk. She turned around slowly, scoping out her surroundings.
Now, if I was a six-foot asshole, where would I go?
To the front of her: a bakery with sleepy lidded eyes.
To the back: the warehouse.
Heather looked down at the photo in her phone; back up. She tilted her head to the side, made a slow-sweep, and progressed closer toward the entryway. Almost. The optics almost aligned with the photo-illusion.
She shouldered open the door and move inside. It was still very much an unfinished framework: hollow, wooden corridors connected and cross-connected to create hallways; a few annexed rooms abutted the corners; the rigid skeleton of rafters running length-wise above were exposed like a cavernous ribcage, and - as she entered the nearest space - a lone work-shop table sat spartan under a single overhead light left untouched.
Except, she realized as she moved closer, it was not.
Affixed to its surface like wax set-pieces were a coffee cup and a discarded pile of clothes.
Heather moved closer. Her scalp prickled. It suddenly felt like she was looking at the fantastical stasis of an after-moment : the shedding of a snake’s skin. She picked over the shirt, the pants, the belt. When he loosed his humanly coils, what leapt free?
Heather moved closer. She picked up the shirt. And without even realizing what she was doing, not even contemplating the wisdom of it, not even daring to consult with her higher-mind – she brought the garment to her face. It felt good. It felt soft. It felt familiar. Like a tiny woodland creature she sniffed delicately at it.
Hidey hole?
A viciousness pricked her eyes (she refused to call them tears). And her throat ached. She simply, plainly missed him. It hadn’t been all bad, had it?
He had been good at first, hadn’t he? So good. He had been on his best behavior (but weren’t they all?). He had given her oral sex, often. Said the sweet nothings, enough. Lavished her with the proper attention. Even dozed on the couch with her (his arm around her waist so she wouldn’t fall). Traded the in-jokes, the promises, the memes that had begun creating the scaffolding for their relationship.
And Heather had been wise. She knew the slow-drip trail of context clues he provided during their courtship indicated he nursed a compulsion for women that tip-toed over the polite boundaries of society. But she had willfully disregarded it.
You know why, Heather had chided herself. You absolutely know why.
It had been (at the time) nothing more than a mere metaphor.
Because he had told her, didn’t he?
Granted, he had presented it in abstraction – but he had confessed it all the same, right? But like the rest of his story, it was just shadows on the wall, it had only been a pantomime, a projection of the truth.
So she ignored it.
Because she had wanted to be with something special, didn’t she? She had wanted to be special. She had wanted to be with something other.
“This is how he gets you,” Heather began, bemoaning herself.
She clutched the shirt, holding it to her cheek. This is how he bursts out of the fucking ground like some kind of fucking snake, and gobbles you whole
But nothing happened. Despite holding, touching, scenting his shirt, from one moment to the next nothing interrupted the private interlude.
Nothing, that is, except for her intrusive thoughts: the ones she kept furthest from her, the ones she could not admit existed, not even to herself.
Because if she was honest, perfectly honest with herself:She had wanted to see what it would be like to be fucked by something other, something that had risen from the long, stoic shadows of her fantasy books. She had wanted to see what it would be like to run her fingers around the fangs of mythical possibility; to crawl inside the jaws of hyperbole.
In the spectacle of her head, it had all seemed so sexy; so hot. The metaphor shared between them, appealed. Which is why she had turned a blind eye to some of his uncanny behavior; the sidelong glances to observe her response.
“But it wasn’t supposed to be fucking real ! Not like this!”
A small tendril of steam hovered above the lip of the cup. In a spasm she grabbed it. He had been fine for her, perfect for her with all of his dark complexities, forever-teasing her with their shared metaphor, until he had ceased being demon and become something demonic.
She tilted back the coffee cup, and took a large punitive swallow. It was impulsive and childish, but she had hoped that somehow he could feel it. Was it this? Was this what it felt like to control, to dominate, to destroy with a singular swallow? She could almost, almost understand him.
It felt wrong, it felt perverse, it felt strangely thrilling to swallow something that had been in his mouth, transited the same corridors, the same contours, the same flesh - as though she could osmotically learn all of his secrets, his stories from this act. That, in this moment of infamy, she could taunt him, ascend him, and he’d feel it along this dark, teeming hivemind they shared.
And down the length of cosmic string, their twin enmity would tremble.
Heather felt strangely empowered by it. When she withdrew her lips from the cup, a bold, bright red stain remained. It wasn’t a red ‘X’. But it would do.
.x.
On the walk home she moved fast; her glances quick and frequent but no one was there to disturb her passage. No one, but the ghosts of her past.
It was the door that Heather noticed first.
It wasn’t shut.
The blood drained from her.
Feeling weak, feeling spent, she moved slowly toward the entrance. In disbelief she touched the hinges. They were ajar.
He broke in. He broke into my house. He knows where I live.
It was enough to send her to her knees. But she had to keep standing. She had to keep fighting. She didn’t know how not to. He had told her that once. She could remember his smile when he had said it. It had hovered somewhere between amusement and reservation.
Heather pulled out her requisite army knife (a gift from dear ol’ Dad) and flipped open the largest blade it could offer. She would be no wilting daffodil. Then with the tip of her foot she nudged the door open. It creaked, emitting a normally familiar and safe sound. Now it was a single cry.
Heather eased in, horrified that he had come here and defiled her place. The one piece of the world where she had felt safe from him. Now the walls felt thin, incapable of holding back the monster.
Her things were tossed aside as if an animal had barreled through a most auspicious camping grounds while searching for food. Food. Her brain taunted. Because I’m food.
But, no. Fuck. I’m more than that. Damn you, I’m more than that. You know it. I know it. We both fucking know it.
Heather moved into her bedroom like a warrior on the ascent.
It was imperceptible, like a wind-shift. Or the silence that trumpeted between ascending notes. Something was off. Instinctively, she knew something was wrong. Something had stirred through, something had –
– what was that?
She shifted closer.
There was a faint sheen on the pillow case.
She dipped her fingers into it.
Wet.
“Cum? Did you jerk off on my fucking pillow you…”
She rubbed her fingers together. No; the quality of it was such, the wetness of it was –
Oh God. Her stomach turned, knotting painfully. The knife clattered from her fingers. And what if she had been under those covers? What if her cheek had been laying on that pillow? What if… Her chin jerked forward in nausea. She would throw up. She would scream. She would cry. He had –
he had licked her pillow.
Does… does that mean he can taste me?
Determined, she bent down, retrieving the knife. And what do I taste like you son of a bitch?
She looked at the mise en scène: the palpable violation that disrupted the soft interlace of her sheets; the wet stain that, when lifted by her fingers, stretched like spider-silk. The vivid image of his tongue stroking the pillowcase –
It was erotic.
“Fuck. It was never a compulsion. It never was. So why’d you flip your fucking lid?! Why’d you try to eat me?!”
Unless.
A chill entered her.
It was both.
It was neither compulsion nor desire. The genesis of it did not originate in his higher-brain, nor his lower. It was something borne of the zeitgeist of the evolutionary period when primitive beasts walked over the evolutionary aisle to become man, but some terrible force -ancient? prolific? evil? biblical? - did not permit the completion and left the two - in all of their ugliness - as cohabitants, but divided.
And, in this evolutionary fall-out, Heather found herself at the violent intersection of both. She was trapped in the gaze of both a man, and a monster.
“You have a very excitable prey-drive,” Heather murmured.
She felt a measure of relief, then. Because, if he had been attempting to eat her dismissively then that was a sin she could never forgive; but, if –
she looked to the pillow –
if he had attempted to eat her less like a beast, and more like a man, then, somehow…
“NO.” Heather shouted. “You can never forgive him. Not fucking ever. Not after what he did. He could have fucking murdered you.”
Heather sat there, struck. Had he attempted to murder her? It was a thought that, although as logical as it had been considering the progression of events, she had never permitted herself to entertain. How deep did this desire-impulse go? Was it so-rooted in the primitive muck of his brain that he would have gone that far? To murder her so sweetly?
“Or, what? He would have spat you back up? But, shit, isn’t that exactly what he did?” Running worried fingers over her face: “Man, I wish that was cum on my pillow. That, at least, is something I can work with. I can understand that.”
But this? How could she ever confront this, fight this, overcome this? Something so alien?She picked up her phone and mentally coached herself, reminded herself to be the ever-so-cavalier and charming Heather. Showing him fear, she knew, would be anathema.
Heather:
Someone’s been sleeping in my bed.
Unknown:
Someone’s been eatin’ my porridge(And it was not lost on Heather that the night she had taken of his coffee, sipping it, leaving her mark, that he had left just as indelible a mark).
They had been two points of oral fixation coming to separate, yet identical, conclusions for the evening, like those two arms on the clock face, now, spinning wildly out of control (Maybe he had felt her drinking his coffee after all?).
Heather:
Spooky.
Unknown:
We better be careful. Somebody might end up mistaking us for having a connection.Heather strained at her phone. The fuck am I supposed to do with that?
She wanted to slap him. Her. The situation. Her brain. No. We are never, ever, ever getting back together again. No… Jesus… just…
Heather shed her gaze on the text messages; looked at the calendar; contemplated their moments shared when they had been resoundingly a couple.
And the pervasive quality of her thoughts created a clairvoyance: she knew she was encroaching ever-closer, moving toward something ineffable. Something that was both terribly alien but also hauntingly familiar: she could detect the outline of it – similar to how her lower-brain had seen something subconscious in the first endoscopy video that had imbued in her a raw, visceral understanding that what was happening was –
Sexual.
Heather:
Gotta say. This is the strangest foreplay I’ve ever had the misfortune of experiencing.A slight pause, then:
Unknown:
What can I say. I like playing with my food.Shit. That was the closest he had ever come to externalizing a confession, to externalizing the sin. To making it real.
Heather:
I’m not food. I’m not your food. I’m not anyone’s food. I’m not food.
Heather:
You like fucking your food, too?
Unknown:
Look at you, a real fucking spitfire aren’cha? Hitting me with that double text.Heather:
Fuck you! I’ll hit you with that triple text if I want!
Unknown:
Got something to take the edge off, little girl?(even if it was in text form, it still felt sneering)
Heather:
Don’t call me little.
Unknown:
Oh you will be.Heather sprang into the bathroom to throw water on her face. The thought of being small again… (God. It was an anathema).
One, two, three splashes. Three felt like a safe number. Yet when she looked up from the sink something caught her eye. Through the mirror she could see the top of the toilet was –
No.
“No, no, fucking no!” Heather slapped her hand against the medicine cabinet. Threw the towels from the rack. In the pulsation of a high, screaming guttural sound, she tore the toilet mechanics apart, drove her hands in, elbow-deep, cutting her skin on the porcelain. Gouts of red gushed down her arm.
“Oh my God no!” Her hands flew up to her head. Heather rushed out of the bathroom and began to pace. Back and forth, back and forth. Then the nausea revisited her, burning acidic in her throat. “NO. You fucking son of a bitch. NO.”
Fear wicked the heat from her body. Her hands turned cold. Her arms pulsed hot with her blood. Clumsily, she pulled the cell phone from her pocket. His message loomed back at her, leering as visibly as its author. “I hate you,” she grit between her teeth. “I hate you.”
Got something to take the edge off?
Heather:
Give them back! You motherfucker give them back!Once she was finished Heather dialed Joseph. Perhaps she needed him after all.
After two rings he picked up. She could weep in relief. Saintly Joey. Good Joey. God, why are you so perfect.
“Hey? Heather? I was just getting up, what’s up?”
Up
What time was up?
5AM branded itself against her eyes as she looked at her cell phone; then, she returned to the conversation at hand:“Joesph?” Her tongue felt thick, swollen, but she spoke. “I need you to come over. Bring your gun okay? The little pistol you said you keep under your driver seat. Come to my place please.”
-
Author’s Note
Dear intrepid reader,
This part is coming to a close. We are approaching the climax. It will be told in parts because there is much to cover. I hope to have the first part done and posted before next week. I go out of town next week, and would like to leave you with a little parting gift.Their reunion has become inevitable.
Stay tasty.
-
Stay tasty.
Funny, I was about to say the same to you
-
Chapter 5
Climax, Part I
Heather
“Heather, I can’t. I have work in a few hours. Call the police or something.”
Heather stared mutely at the far-wall; the calendar; the violated pillow; the palpable disturbance to the bedsheets; the decapitated toilet.
And a sound lifted from her lips, it spoke ghostly into the mouthpiece. It was, she realized, her voice, and she was speaking. “…sure. okay.”
(faintly) – “I can come over later, though, ok? After work. Promise.”
But his response fell on deaf ears. His disembodied voice receded from the foreground as she slipped the phone into her pocket.
Alone. Heather turned in a tight, worrisome circle. It felt like her center had fallen out.
And as though conspiring with her thoughts, in that maddeningly knowing way of his, a text came through with a palpable vibration.
She looked at the text.
Unknown:
Come get.Peevishly, she shoved the phone back down into her pocket –
but not before it went off again.He had sent a follow-on text.
Curious, she looked down at the image on her screen. At first she could not understand what she was seeing. The photograph seemed to be –
It had the contours, the lines, the slow, indulgent emergence of shapes that were hauntingly familiar to her, and in a moment of dissonance, the memory of the endoscopy video in its fantastic stasis bled through, seemingly overlapping with –
Oh my God.
A cold, hot-headed feeling swam up her neck. She threw up.
For the message that had so-teasingly followed on the heels of the first could have been a sophomoric prank or a religious perversity. It was a tight, close shot of the purple pill lying on the bed of his tongue, framed by the curl of his lips; the smooth muscle was extended, vibrant against the backdrop of neutral colors, the tip curled ever-so slightly in a come-hither flick.
Panic: panic such that she never felt before entered her system, and it was a fear so mounting she could not feel it.
And simply for the reason that he had her precious pills, she felt bereft.
Mine she mewled softly.
She stared at the photo. Her pupils widened, taking in the image; it branded itself against her skin, her eyes. It was wholly him; his mouth. For if there was one gripping, intimate piece of knowledge she retained from watching the endless visual cacophony of endoscopy videos, was that no two mouths were alike. They were all uniquely different, and differently unique. And it was idiosyncratic, but, Heather had also realized – over time – that the mouths between the sexes were also different.
The men: more angular and cavernous; commanding.
The women: more soft, and wilting; dainty.And some - both male and female - were inherently attractive.
And this mouth – this one, because it was an extension of him, she need not see the whole of him to sense, to know, to understand its personality. It was simultaneously a liaison that did the bidding of his body, but also an alien part that seemed to wield its own sentience.
His tongue: privately commanding her, seeking to milk more of her ruination with so simple a flick.
His lips: seeking to suckle on her fear by conspiring with his red throat.And, like a petal – or a lovely lady engloved in purple – the pill sat in repose on his red tongue; glistening ever-so faintly from a vaporous sheen.
No; none of those mouths, those oral cavities had looked like this one. This one was imbued with so much character, so much personality that it held about it an intangible quality: a darkly-seductive menace.
It was not lost on her that – despite its intangible menace – even his mouth was inherently aesthetic, sexual. But in the lines of his jaw she could see the lust of the rapist.
I have to leave. I have to get out of here. It’s a death trap in here
I have to survive
And she did not know how not to. So, on she went in her own procession of stilted movements; moving slowly, moving carefully as though any abrupt movements would shatter her.
Slowly, she extracted the army knife from the back of her sock drawer. Slowly, she slipped the phone back into her pants. And slowly she placed the knife in her front pocket.
I’ll take you down with me.“I’ll cut you open.” She whispered, voice wavering. “I’ll kill you before you kill me.”
And like a small, petrified woodland animal she slowly shambled forward, out the door, beginning her walk to work for three rather justified reasons.
One: her backseat would be the ideal place for someone to hide.
Two: she wouldn’t be alone outside. There was no way he would just take her in plain sight. (Right?)
And three: with the way she was trembling – violently at that – she was in no position to drive.
.x.
Heather kept moving, looking over her shoulder. Again and again. Jumping at every passerby – man, woman or child.
But time had passed in a sonorous drone, and her phone remained silent. Between her apartment and work there had been nothing but the mundane whoosh of cars and the soothing chatter of the neighbors to accompany her.
Simple sounds. Simple people.
You shouldn’t be here. He was out of place. This was her place, her safe zone. The kindly waving folks and the innocent children playing in vaporous clouds of chalk, all of this – this was her world. Not his.
You don’t belong here you son of a bitch.
Once, Heather had loved his “big talk.” She had been a girl on the cusp of womanhood when she met him. Hailing from college with spotless grades, clean slates and sharp thoughts. In her former life she could party and partake of the social customs – it was an art – but she had come to quickly realize that the cultural rituals of young adults was beneath her. They had become trite and boring. And from within the rabble of bad boys with the leather jackets and dyed Mohawks – coming at her in a Technicolor-sea of disappointing machismo — what emerged was the vivid realization that what she had been craving for, searching for, was a man.
And – he had been that man.
Fuck had he ever. He had his little girl wrapped around his finger in a cleavage-bearing tube top dying for his attention.
Maybe that’s why I hate him.
Not because he had tried to eat her. But because she had loved every fucking second of being his pretty little doll up until the precise moment he had made her into one.
Fuck.
Dream-like, Heather dropped her head into her hands. Enough time had lapsed since the morning that she was left feeling displaced and despondent. (And she stole furtive glances at the photo of his mouth).
It’s him. It’s really him. He… th-that was his mouth. That was his. Everything I remembered, everything I remembered about it was real. He knew her so well, so perfectly well that he knew enough to know that a simple candid photo of his mouth cradling her pill would break her world.
It was, she thought with a chill, befitting of any predator: that he know his prey better than they know themselves. Prey, her mind echoed back hollowly. Is that what I am? Again, she looked at the photo. It was him. So him. So him. That mouth, the one that haunted her dreams, she knew it with a feverish obsessive intimacy.
It was a feverish, obsessive intimacy - that she knew - was not entirely her own.
And that scared her more than anything. This was not the coalescent, faithful need of a lover. This was the ugly, guttural need of a mad dog that had clamped its jaws down over something tender.
I have to keep moving. That’s all. Just… keep moving. One little falter and he’d see it. He would see her weakening and –
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Tammy snapped.
Heather jumped up, startled.
The other woman was looking down at her, her soft brown skin radiating in the lurid glow of the fluorescent lights. She was pretty with her smooth even features and requisite diva mole, but her personality was loathsome.
Somehow, the hours had waxed and waned in the quaint little flower shop, and with the depleting day Heather’s anxieties had receded into a tingle of white-noise. But, now, the day was coming to a close, which meant she would have to help with closing.
“Nothing Tammy. What do you want?” Heather looked at her challengingly, which was no small feat, sitting upon a dilapidated, dusty box.
She popped a little green bubble in her mouth, smacking the gum carelessly. “That time-a night, Heatha. You do da stockin’ and I’ll count ta cash regista.”
Sure, Heather thought silently, so you can slip a few twenties into your pocket and walk out sight unseen.
But Heather made no protest: the mindless task of lifting boxes and storing them in the back had given her a simple, meditative quiet and she relished it. In the solitude of her labor she had begun mentally analyzing what her next move would be. Maybe she would call Joseph and have him drive by her house? Hold him to the promise he made? Have him call her with regularity to make sure she was still of this earth?
Preoccupied by her thoughts, and the soul-deep good feeling of working her hands and her legs, she looked down in silent appreciation at them. Track, she remembered hearing herself say, as his lips had wandered down to her breast bone. Bet I could outrun you. It was the only reason she had survived that night. The moment her body had returned to normal she had torn off, running and yowling like a mauled cat.
I had waltzed into the wolf’s den and that’s no place for your average pussy cat.
Even now Heather could remember her bare feet beating against the pavement: she had been nude, and she had collided with her parked car; wrung the door open, flung herself inside, and peeled off the property, the wheels spinning three hundred and sixty three days ago.
Tammy was looking at her pointedly. Her respite would be short-lived; work would not offer her the sanctuary she had been hoping for. She wouldn’t be able to stay the night, either.
“Fine, I’ll go,” Heather made a resigned sound and reluctantly got to her feet.
She left the flower shop, and entered the arms of dusk.
.x.
She returned to her apartment. Her arm wilted down by her side. Out of habit she had reached into her secret stash. But, there was no use plunging her hand into the flush mechanics to fish out the ziploc bags, because her pills were no longer there.
Feeling bereft, she crumpled down onto her bed. She retrieved her phone; opened the messages, and feeling the same irresistible impulse, braved the inevitability of the panic, and once again, looked at the photo.
She felt a terrible sadness, a loneliness enter her. She hugged herself. Her skin began to prickle.
And there was a knock at her door.
Heather froze.
And there was a sound emanating from it, from the other side that was sealed away, tucked from her reality, and the sound was stretching across the length of room, seeking her out, and it was – she realized – a voice: it was speaking.
"Oh, Joey,” she whispered, trembling in the after-shock of startlement: “I forgot about you.”
She began tearing apart her make-shift barricade. Desks, end-cabinets, chairs, they were all removed with a startling efficiency. Joey, hold up, I’m coming
And a sudden madness seized her. She didn’t want to be alone. Not now. Not ever. To be alone meant she would be an easy target. Easy prey. Faster she went, harder, until at last she upended the final obstruction with a most-satisfying thunk.But Joey must have been wresting the door knob with his hands, a hair-trigger second away from bursting through it in his own desperation, because she had scarcely relieved the final weight from it, when it burst open –
.x.
– and the bright crinkle of the door chime sounded pleasantly. He stepped quietly into the flower shop.
Looking up, he became immediately aware of two things.
One: that he was not alone, and two: a most delectable woman-shaped specimen was peering at him, her hand sliding surreptitiously through the cash register draw.Cocking his head to the side he gave her a forward once-over. “Uh-oh. Hand in the cookie jar?” Then he gave her a sympathetic look. "Don’t worry, I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Tammy looked up in mortification.
But without missing a beat, he continued airily: “Heather’s not here, huh?" He set his hip in a casual lean up against the counter. See? I’m harmless. "She go home?”
Funny, cuz I was just there. Man, Heather, we dance around one another don’t we?
Tammy snapped back from the register. The cash scattered in a brilliant green explosion. Without thinking, she set down on her hands and knees, scrambling to collect it like a cat trying to gather a cloud of feathers.
“I don’t know what yeh talkin’ 'bout.” She snapped. And not even bothering to look up, she continued snatching the money from off the dusty floor planks. “Who-a yuh anyways?”
The stranger relaxed into his role. He allowed the common tongue to slip through. It was verbal camouflage; mimicry. See? I’m one of you.
“Oh, justa… friend,” he answered demurely, sliding around the counter slowly. “Well, no; actually thas not true. We were togetha’ for a while, me and Heatha’. We had a falling out.” He shrugged. "But we’re still friends. I wanted ta check up on her. Make sure she’s okay.” Sudden inspiration struck him: “She’s not wit that Joseph guy, is she? I don’t trust that type. Specially since he’s dealin’ in pills an’ all’a that shit.”
He moved closer; but slowly, gradually. If she looked up and attempted to recall how close he had been to the door, she wouldn’t have been able to tell with any honesty if he had moved further into the shop.
A creak.
Tammy looked up.
The stranger had moved abreast of her, shifting forward silently And, blessedly distracted by the money, he had slid one shoe forward to settle it down on Tammy’s fingers.
“What! Fuck!”
Tammy’s shoulders rolled in whiplash. But before she could open her mouth to protest, he caressed the top of her hand with the instep. “Nuh-uh. That’s not yours.”
“Get off my fucking hand!”
“Nope. But, you can do me a favor. Call Heather. I need you to find out if our little girl has got company.”
.x.
The phone rang.
Heather jumped. Joseph started.
"Who is it?” he asked, visibly flustered.
"Tammy. Why is Tammy calling me? Tammy never calls me.” Dread began to race up and down Heather’s arms, grating palpably against her withdrawal tremors. Breathlessly, she held the phone to her ear and connected the call.
“Tammy?”
Heather shot Joey a warning look. Be quiet, her eyes said.
Then, returning to the phone: “Tammy… is…” Heather took a deep, calming breath, and continued. “Is there a man there?"
Yes.
Tammy had said quietly. Heather’s heart dropped; it began beating hollowly in the pit of her stomach.
“You need to… you need…give him the phone, Tammy. I’ll talk to him.”
The sound of a scuffle.
.x.
He wrenched the phone free.
And he was suddenly, vividly alive; back bowed, hairs on end. Would Heather speak? Would she speak to him? The thought of hearing it cupped inside his ear sent a sudden, anticipatory shudder through him. He listened intently.
But there was nothing.
The silence stretched on as something he would call expressive.
And, it dragged on resiliently.
He could feel the intensity of her rebellion.
He couldn’t resist the vicious smile. Defiant to the end. That was his Kitten.
And, unable to contain himself a moment longer, he uttered a cajoling: “Well?”
.x.
His voice.
Heather’s teeth came together in a spasm.
To hear it again, to hear it speaking to her, she felt dizzy, faint. It was a sickly relief to know that it was no longer a ghostly memory, nor the shadow sliding through her nightmares – it was, instead, a true, vocal sound. An utterance made by a man. By a living person.
He was uncaged from her nightmares.
“You,” she whispered.
She refused to say his name; to think it; to indulge it.
A peculiar mania went through her. She almost laughed.
She had tried to unknown him, hadn’t she? She had tried to render him nameless, faceless. To excise his identity. But in her attempt to unknown him, she had ascended him, exalted him; and he had re-surged as a surreptitious entity that needn’t a name to stir her to fear.
Because there was nothing more horrifying than a name. And nothing more intimate than the utterance of a name. Because a name was the connective tissue to her surreal reality. A reality in which he had tried to ingest her.
“It’s been a while.” She had to dig her nails into her palm to keep focused. “Back off Tammy. She’s not who you’re here for.” That unfortunate person is me.
Heather walked to the living room window and peered out into the setting sun, the town open to her vision was basked in a warm orange glow. It’d be dark soon. Wolves hunted in the night. “Wh-what do you want?”
.x.
He looked down at the phone. She was speaking. Speaking to him. And it was not the approximation of what he heard in his day-dreams. It was her. It was his Heather.
Her voice: the sweet soprano with its lush, throaty cadence… Oh God. How he missed that. He simply, plainly missed her.
But, his throat tightened. He had missed out on the opportunity to have her, too. Didn’t’ he?
And after what felt like a biblical lifetime – he finally spoke.
"That’s a loaded question, Kitten. But, for starters: you. " And after a clever moment: “Alone.”
(from the earpiece) “But, I am alone…”
“Are you?” He lowered the cell phone so that it could project the sound, and jammed his shoe down on Tammy’s fingers.
.x.
There was a vivid, hollow crack.
Heather torqued her body away from Joseph. She squeezed her eyes against the wet, unctuous sound of ligament tearing, bone breaking, the shrill shuddery sound of Tammy screaming.
“STOP.” Stop it her brain commanded. “Just stop. I - fine. OK… I’ll do it. I’ll tell him to go home.”
Then, she spoke in Joey’s general direction, her voice both carrying its command to her awkward companion whilst also wafting over the mouthpiece: “Go home… Joey. Just go. I… I don’t think it’s a good idea if you stay. Don’t do anything stupid like call the cops, and don’t try to come back. Just go.”
But Heather flicked her chin toward the closet.
Bless him. Joesph played along, moving the furniture from the front door before opening it and shutting it for dramatic effect.
With practiced finality: “He’s gone,” Heather pronounced. “Now leave Tammy alone.”
Heather ended the call. She turned to Joseph. "If I need you I’ll call. But don’t come out a second before that. Got it?”
Like an obedient puppy, Joey nodded his head. And without further instruction he slid into the closet, closing it tight behind him.
Heather moved over to the bed. She killed the lights.
She picked up Joseph’s pistol.
.x.
Tammy was a female apostrophe: curled on the floor in silent punctuation. She had involuntarily shriveled into the fetal position.
In a boneless spasm she clutched her broken hand. Her head lolled back to look up at her aggressor.
He retracted his foot.
And without a parting glance he strode from the flower shop.
He made his away across town; there was no spring to his step, no merriment to his stride. Only the steep, purposeful strides of a hunter compelled.
The lines of the apartment complex etched into view. The windows on the facade were dark and un-shuttered like lidless eyes.
And mantled by the dark, he entered the lobby. He retraced his steps. He knew them by heart.
To: the foyer.
Up: the stairs.
Down: the hall.His pace quickened.
He broke into a full run.
He charged down the hallway.
And stopped.
Delicately, he sniffed the air. Heather.
Scenting, tasting, he turned, hunting like a blind snake.
In two, quick purposeful strides he moved to the door.
He leaned in closer, intent. Every nerve alive. Every tendon flexed. Every breath calculated, controlled. He stood, hovering; scenting.
He was vigilant, alert; every nerve and sense on end. What booby traps you got laid out for me? His ears pricked forward. Where was she? A primal excitement curdled in his stomach.
After a long moment, he placed his hand on the door – as though with that gesture alone he could feel her, sense her – and pushed.
The door creaked open. It was the emittance of a single cry –
.x.
– that bugled from Joseph’s throat as he charged into the living room.
Heather shrieked at the eruption.
Joseph lofted the knife high into the air, and swung.
Heather sprang from her cover and ran.
She bolted out the door; but not before first sensing, feeling, absorbing an undulation of movement.
There was a single yelp; the punctuation of a shoe scrape, and an athletic shunt of weight.
Don’t look back. Just run. You stop, you die
“Track!” She shouted. “Remember?!”
Her heart was pulsing. Her feet were pounding.
It was an explosion of sounds, of colors. The world whipped through her in a diorama of lines and circles.
Shapes ushered into her vision; sounds cut through her ears.
And she pushed herself.
Her breath burned in her throat. But on she ran.
Each heel strike was loud, discordant; it was a slamming, a banging in her ears that echoed inside her head. It was deafening, especially in counter-point to the procession of swift, fleet sounds that were suddenly, terrifyingly coming from behind.
He’s chasing me.
Like a wolf-dog in hot pursuit, the chase had his blood up. It was driving him onward, forward. And she could feel it from him, swelling larger like a balloon: excitement.
Let out of his cage, he was running her down.
The fear drove her forward.
The trees flew past. The cars. The bejeweled string of ocean glimmering under the dusky sun.
The ground swayed.
He’s too fast. Even with her head-start, he had covered the distance with a startling dexterity.
But Heather continued. She kept going. She did not know how not to.
The fixed, central point of the horizon danced before her as she destined to run toward it, desperate to jump into it – when her world swayed, and the limitless image of the sunset rotated – as she realized slowly, realized belatedly that it was her body falling, her body crashing through the warehouse entrance, with only the sound of the security panels groaning and the security panels slamming into the concrete behind her after the very moment she had dove under them, clearing them, with only an optimist’s inch to spare.
Heather rolled onto her back, laughing. A peculiar mania gripped her then. She had done it. She did it. She had nearly been guillotined by the security gate, but she didn’t care. She had outran the devil himself.
Her head lolled up.
And the room was as she remembered it: work bench, single overhead light, coffee cup, discarded clothes, and all of their requisite shadows. Except, she realized, mentally counting, there was one too many.
No
Heather’s head swiveled.
He was standing in front of the double doors, the iron security panels absorbing all sound; all life. He looked like a stolid tyrant standing giant before an iron balustrade. It was just the two of them, entombed.
Heather flung herself backward. She crashed into the far wall. Disoriented, terrified, she landed ugly on the floor
“Track,” he parroted back. “You forget, I’m a fast motherfucker, too.”
End Part I
-
Heather and her research:
-
End Part 1
Well, I just re-read every installment to date, and I gotta say the most recent entry has really taken me aback. You have made quite an unexpected departure, and I’m very curious to see where you end up.
As I imagine was your intent, Heather’s inner narrative is that of someone supremely gaslighted (gaslit?). She has three times as many thoughts, rephrases, and metaphors as someone with average confidence in their grasp of the world. She has to convince herself—over and over—to make the most straightforward observations and decisions. It’s quite exhausting being Heather.
The most rewarding aspect of this story is that it doesn’t presume that its readers are (already) into shrinking/vore. By resisting the absurd impossibility that she was ever small enough to fit inside his mouth, let alone that he contrived to get her in there, the horror of that scenario has the time and space to seduce the reader, who, if they aren’t already looking for vore, might reject the whole proposition out of hand.
More importantly, you are forced to explain why vore is attractive to you, from a prey’s perspective. All the elements, sensory to psychological, need to be detailed and choreographed to fully transport the reader. Part of that is Heather doubting her own memory and sanity. At the same time, abusive relationships and gaslighting are familiar concepts to most all readers, and the logical extension of those tropes to physical possession and consumption eases everyone (Heather not least) into accepting the story’s premise.
I expect the Joseph
charactercaricature is here to demonstrate how Heather can be just as manipulative as her pred is. “Hurt people hurt people” and all that. Heather’s inner narrative regarding “Joey” is rather vicious, going beyond the basic lashing-out that many abuse-victims respond with toward people who try to help them. Until his heroic charge from the closet, I was prepared to believe that Heather’s account of Joseph was wholly invented to suit her emotional needs.The possibility that Heather is an unreliable narrator might have been worth preserving, if only to accommodate non-fetish readers who would otherwise sympathize and/or identify with Heather, but you undercut that by introducing her pred’s perspective.
And this is the departure I mentioned at the outset. I was fully expecting to spend the rest of the story in Heather’s head, where her pred is magnified, mystified, and beautified. With his seeming omniscience and ubiquity, Heather can never escape or outwit him. With his hooks into her appetites and flesh, she isn’t sure she wants to. He’s a primal bogeyman out of fairy tales or myth.
Once the narrative leaps into his perspective, however, he becomes mortal. Fallible. Foolish, even. We do get an up-close view of how cruel he can be when he interrogates Tammy (since when does Heather care about her, btw?), but we also get to see his petty vindictiveness. To be honest, I’m not sure I want him to catch his prey.
Random notes:
“Endoscopy,” Heather blurted. “Joey, what do you know about that?”
Joseph looked at her, startled. “That’s random, Heather.”
Speaking it aloud for the first (?) time, she probably mispronounced it.
Talking to him, even if it had been a quick transaction, had felt good. Trading the barbs. Fencing the words. It brought color and conviction back to her. She didn’t feel like a ghostly apparition when they goaded one another into a game of cat-and-mouse
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON This is how she got addicted.
Now, if I was a six-foot asshole, where would I go?
That’s a different kind of vore, Heather.
“You have a very excitable prey-drive,” Heather murmured.
Where did she get that phrase?