christ the lord = 557 = Goat Phallus
christ the lord = 557 = Goat Phallus
The son lived in the heart of a city that persistently throbbed despite its tissues being too bloated to insinuate life. An oppressive cancer of wood and stone snaked through the land, traversable only where narrow streets incised it. A sea of people swam through its veins, dragging carts and barrels and sacks of produce half-eaten by contagion, with pestilent rats scurrying between their feet into cracks beneath houses. From every splintered rooftop gazed the black pearl-eyes of crows who knew that death was always airing her dark furnace, assembling a morbid feast.
Ravaging the populace—sweeping through bodies like a whore—was a malevolent plague. Many incarcerated themselves behind shuttered windows, flooding their homes with burning herbs and fanatic prayers as though the claws of sickness could be trimmed by faith. Others laid in the street lest their corpses poison the air for everyone else, peppered with maggots that could not distinguish between a pious and a heretical corpse.
This was a city of endless filth and eternal sickness—lurking in the air they choked on, in the wells they drank from, in the bread they ate, and in the animals they impaled on hooks. Disease was more a cosmic law than a single threat—as intrinsic to all matter as mass and volume. It loomed over the city, transcending it in both space and time, infernal substance scorching the earthly with its touch. And exponentially this maelstrom swelled—an insatiable cancer bearing eyes and teeth and tendrils that slithered into the flesh of every victim, devouring the lives of many whilst impervious to losing its own. The acrid stench of rot drowned them until their noses grew blind to its fetor, losing clarity but never presence.
Prior to the son’s nativity there was sickness, and long after his death it would persist without mourning. He was never a man of hubris, yet in the face of infection he was even less than he believed.
The son crept between trees with an arrow nocked at shoulder height, limbs suspended from above by marionette strings. His senses remained sharp for the sounds of wildlife between muffled crunches of vegetation, and the sight of fur against the backdrop of dark myrtle canopies. With every stride he envisioned a kill—turn, draw, aim, release—the taste of freshly charred game coating his tongue preemptively.
A deer’s head emerged from behind a cluster of trees, time frozen and silenced as the son’s footsteps halted, the universe shriveling down to its flesh and his arrow for a brief moment. The stag turned its head to meet his resolute gaze, its crown of antlers aligned with flawless symmetry as though posturing itself to be painted so that its life could be spared. It observed his face behind impenetrable black eyes, seeing a pale, slender visage framed by a thick beard, locks of hair draped over his shoulders. The son stared back with ivory buttons pulled taut by crossing strings, admiring the animal’s tawny coat. And the deer’s gruesome fate lay insidiously behind, unhinging its jaw.
His predatory reflexes took over, aligning the arrow’s point just behind the beast’s front legs. With a delicate slip of his fingers the projectile sliced through flesh—a momentary bolt of movement producing a sharp whistle before appearing lodged in the animal’s fur. The stag darted horizontally for a moment as though unharmed before its gait grew weak and tremulous, head bobbing in full sprint as its limbs struggled to cooperate. And soon its legs buckled, antlers compulsively scraping the earth as its hooves twitched in agony.
He darted towards the animal, letting his bow fall to the leaves as he removed a knife from his belt. And against the resistance of its flesh he pulled the arrow, stained bloody up to where it had met the skin. With a firm slice to the throat he spilled a fountain of hot blood across the leaves, the stag’s past, present, and future suffering dribbling away with each vascular pulse. He lifted the deer’s back leg and sodomized it with the blade, sawing up to its sternum as he peeled away thick slabs of skin and muscle to avoid shearing its organs.
With every drag of his blade he carved beyond flesh, rending the veil between the sprightly brilliance of nature and the abstruse realm of gore, a blood-slick serpent of entrails spilling onto the leaves as though ecstatic to be released. He gripped the gelatinous chain with both hands, excising it from its womb.
With methodical slicing he shaved skin from the white membrane of fascia, a viscid coating of blood exposed by the peeling. He brushed away leaves to reveal a circular patch of the earth’s raw, naked flesh before shredding a dry bundle of twigs into tinder with his knife. As it sat blade-down in the pile, a chunk of flint sent a shower of spermatozoic embers tumbling forth, and he struck persistently until the shavings became pregnant with flame.
The son’s hunt ran vicious and hot-blooded as the sun and moon circled him, stalking, killing, carving, and feeding as quickly as his gluttony demanded. He’d fashioned gambrels out of lumber to hang his kills like a slaughterhouse without walls, animals spilling gore from rifts in their abdomens that he siphoned into his own.
As the sun crept over the horizon on the 40th day, shafts of light skewered the canopy—now with an amber hue as though their pigment had shifted with the weather.
A tortured lament buzzed in the son’s ears—seemingly from the throat of another human. He swiveled his head in search of an origin, gaze crawling over the thick vegetation as he tried to distinguish the swaying of leaves from humanoid movements.
Volatile rays of sound drew him onward, a clairvoyant arrow nocked lest he find a predatory beast at their source. But these cries came from no beast—instead a nude woman laying on her side in the underbrush. Another intemperate sob escaped her throat, a web of hair matted against her face, arms tightly crossed as though her ribcage would skitter away.
Carved from her face to her throat were chasmic slits dessicated with dry rot—likely torn by claws—their insides caked in blood and pus. And caught in the wake of these lacerations was her bottom lip, ruptured down to the gums, its fissure yawning like swollen labia. Her right eye coruscated with misery while her left was absent, leaving a raw, open wound with tears of blood still gushing from its corner.
Without warning, an eruption of furious laughter rattled his skull—so lucid it seemed a beast of hell had placed its nose against his temple, jaw gaping with hysteria as it panted sour halitosis. The son gnashed his teeth and slapped palms over his ears, yet defiance only seemed to make the noise resonate. The earth shuddered violently, trees becoming a distorted tempest of swinging branches as birds retreated skyward.
“RAPE HER.” The voice furiously extorted. “FUCK HER THROAT UNTIL YOUR SEED DRIPS FROM HER WOUNDS.” He’d never heard such an intricate, hellish sound—shrieking pigs and squelching gore twisting among deep, abrasive growls—forming the jagged silhouette of each word. Such infernal timbre crystallized his blood, crimson icicles tearing open veins as the current dragged them forth. With his terror concealed the son spoke to an unknown listener, asserting that he would do no such thing to an innocent woman.
The son knelt down and took her trembling hand—rough with soil and petrified blood—extending and turning her arm to further inspect the damage. And through some invocation anomalous to both of them, death began to wither beneath her skin, allotting space for life to weave with her blood once more.
Festering boils simmered away, pus drying until it crumbled to the ground like dust. Skin regained its roseate hue and lesions in her face began to narrow as though drawn by invisible stitches, cauterized without a sign that they were ever torn. A spider’s nest of capillaries crawled around the woman’s orbit, unspooling a deflated sclera that bulged with vitreous fluid until seamlessly filling the cavity. Humors transmogrified, diffusing across membranes—bile into phlegm, phlegm into blood. She tenderly kneaded her throat, fingers scanning up to her face as the fear of death escaped in a single exhale.
The son returned to the city through swaying fiefs—eternally unharvested—inhaling the familiar stench of abandoned corpses and rat feces upon entering its veins. Soon cobbled walls towered over his head and a sea of people brushed by his shoulders, currents twisting and sliding in all directions. They moved like rats that squeaked with the sounds of commerce, a thousand flicking tongues blending into a dense murmur.
Like a rigid noose his bow lay hooked around his neck, and a chandelier of rabbits hung from his fist, tethered by their feet. Over his shoulder lay a morbid phylactery—a bloodstained fawn carved from chest to bowels, its severed throat allowing the head to sway flaccidly with each step.
On a thin cloth at the street’s fringe lay a cadaverous figure, motionless and curled up like a dead insect. Inadvertently the son fixed his gaze on the corpse, believing that it was surely one of the plague’s victims and that paying it any mind would be in vain. Yet, the prospect of it being alive and in need of a remedy drew his footsteps away from the predominant flux.
A wooden bucket with a lone silver coin sat at his feet and a splatter of blood clung to his lips—dried to near blackness. A cough pierced its halituous thorns into his throat, raking them through swollen epithelium as it emerged. Beyond a frail convulsion he lay static, unable to shield the world from his blight.
Exile from one's own dwelling was no rarity—hardly a vain decision between the jaws of such brutal miasma—more a collateral scourge at the hands of sickness. With such close proximity to its prey, the son envisioned this plague’s malevolence—how the beggar’s exorbitant humors stretched his cavities thin while others lay raw and dessicated.
With piety suppressing abhorrence he told the beggar he’d banish his ailments. The beggar met his gaze with eyes alone, mandible slack with apathy. With another excruciating wheeze he asked what fictitious panacea the son was advertising, certain that death had already branded her tenure on his skin.
The son wondered if his previous feat indicated bloodborne theurgy, or if he was merely a drop in another’s vein—a puppet with the illusion of independence. He thought himself vain for even considering such a blessing his own, though he’d rather entertain a conceited prospect than forsake such divine power.
The son knelt down and planted his leporine fetish on the stone, pressing two fingers against the beggar’s pale hand. Against the son’s conviction, his intermittent sputtering became an outburst, eyes clenched and watering with agony. He clawed his throat until the skin flushed red as though excising his own trachea would be less painful than forcing such jagged air through its cervix.
With a wet gargle a flux of black liquid burst from every orifice, showing only faint crimson where it glistened in the sun—too dark and viscid to be blood unless blackened by illness or emulsified with hot pitch. Fluid slithered to the ground with autonomy—a homogenous effluence of hungry insects voiding their ingested corpse. The blight coalesced into a swirling pool before scuttling into the crowd—a serpent twisting its scarlet length between shoes—flicking its tongue in search of a new host.
With frantic ventilation the beggar sat upright, his gaze skewering the crowd as though his affliction had left a noxious trail of smog. He studied his own fingers like they’d been stitched to his hand moments ago, no longer painted with a white mark for retrieval by death.
The beggar inhaled a cavernous breath for the first time in ages, locking eyes with the son in a moment of world-shattering marvel before declaring him a purveyor of miracles. But the son told him sincerely that this gift was all from god, and that he needed to return home while his game was still free of maggots.
A bristly sounder of pigs scuttled parallel to the son’s travel, probing their snouts at the houses beside and the dirt below, scanning the earth with scent more than sight. These city-pigs were of vastly different blood than farm-pigs, trotting with a sinuous athleticism unseen in any corpulent scaffolding for meat.
A hand pulled twice at the shoulder of his tunic, and the son swiveled his head to find the stern gaze of a young man—strikingly close as though he’d been dangling his own head at an arm’s length. The man held his gaze just long enough for its severity to be tacit, and his shoulders crept away as he beckoned the son to follow with a subtle wave. His dire stare remained branded in the son’s mind as he pondered what it implied, doubtless that he was sought out among thousands of others.
The son wove between marching figures, closely tracing the man’s wake, and as the band of hogs stood just beside them his shoulders regained their bluntly symmetrical posture. He spoke without delay, eyes stuck to the crowd in fear of divulgence. He’d watched the son restore another from the edge of death, praising his influence as though to summon pride, and asked if an exorcism was within his power.
What demon plagued this man remained coiled beneath perception, eliciting no tremors in his movement nor sigils across his flesh. Yet he insisted that this malevolent fiend clawed his innards—billowed between organs like an embolus of semen through blood—whispered obscenities so perverse he would not relay them to any saint lest he foul his own tongue.
Confident now that divinity permeated his blood, the son pressed two fingers against the man’s forehead without need for explanation. A familiar manic laughter impaled their ears, disrupting the crowd’s perfusion as it resonated through the earth. The man’s gaze darted around in horror, his phantasms erupting with unbridled savagery. “BETTER A SWINE THAN A FILTHY PRIMATE. PURGE ME FROM THIS ABHORRENT SACK OF FLESH.”
Obliviously the hogs rubbed their noses into the earth, as though reality began and ended within their guts. The son envisioned this demon’s words like a chain of regurgitated entrails still hanging from its throat, musing on their intent. He did not wish to negotiate with a being of hell, yet he could not refuse an immediate offer to save its victim.
In a concentrated moment of faith the son ripped the infection from its host. A dense baleful aura coiled around the man—a dreadful intensity marked by a subtle haze. This malign presence seeped across the air like a hemorrhage beneath skin as he compelled it towards the swine, distorting reality behind it before abruptly vanishing.
With an anguished scream the hog collapsed on its shuddering limbs, reflexively grinding its face into the dirt as though it would still the agony. Viscera swelled—bloated with rot—its howls layered with an abrasive belch. The son grimaced as an obscure cachinnation growled in the back of his mind, yet he exhaled in solace as the demon had eviscerated livestock instead of its original host.
With a deafening crack and a tangible shockwave, the pig shattered into fine chunks, drenching every passerby with a heavy deluge of gore. The son wiped a warm layer of fluid from his ivory as the rest of the herd scampered away, gazing at an enormous mural of splattered viscera behind a torn sheath of skin that used to be a pig.
Days and nights of mundane living scraped by at a uniform pace—laying bricks, carving wood, hunting the beasts and catching the fish of the woodlands. And as he tread along the city’s roads with slaughtered game on his back, the prospect of salvation still smoldered in his mind, each passerby whispering of need despite no words emerging from their lips. In spite of his hope he found no sick begging to be cured nor possessed bodies beseeching him to wring demons from their flesh. His messianic pride began to wither and his status as a vessel began to appear as truth, divinity finding no further need for his mortal hands. Even so he could not mistake fruition for defeat, and so he accepted his fate with due humility.
Your flesh is rancid—
Unfit for ingestion.
I’m sick from my gut
To the head of my tongue,
And it’s your fault.
The son grabbed a quartered log from beside his furnace—nearly the length of his own stature, clamping fingers over its coarse, hyperplasic veins of bark. With a hollow thud he dropped it to the ground and pierced the cambium with his knife, gradually peeling away cork with the blade's assistance until the wood lay nude. He settled his weight into a chair and held the log between his knees, its base suspended at chest height. With his thumb on its blunt edge he grazed the knife against the pale sapwood, adroitly tapering both ends into a stake until his lap was scattered with shavings.
Eucharists and dormancy
Could never amount
To the raw exultation
Of bringing death.
With his palisade the son punctured the earth’s grainy flesh where it was exposed by a wound in the cobbled road, swaying it to ensure sturdy anchorage. And by the tension of his marionette strings he ascended, rising gracefully as they stretched, aligning his vertical axis with the spike.
Give ecstasy to the world
And open your throat.
At once he released the strings, allowing his weight to plunge into the honed spire as they recoiled. The apex skewered through his rectum which ruptured around its girth, goring his entrails as though too impatient to follow the path of least resistance. It pierced his gastric antrum, sliced through the glutinous, sanguine flesh of his liver—and as his heels struck the cobblestone—impaled his right ventricle. His heart wrenched out a final languid throb before its myocardium began to die.
Scalding agony flared from anus to thorax, the son’s body convulsing until the pain gradually abated, reality dwindling into absence. Blood spilled from every laceration, menstruating down his thighs, pooling between stone keloids. And with it effluxed his soul—spectral vapor dissolved in bodily fluids. Upon reaching the ground it diffused across soil, trickling through bedrock and bubbling mantle before reaching hell where his ethereal phlogiston would smolder for an eternity without flesh.
The son’s blood did not descend to a world below, but instead suggilated among the dirt. And from his death arose a terminal surge of life—a final ejaculation just before his pelvic diaphragm succumbed to rot. His crimson issue nucleated like an abscess, his elements stretching and mitosing, forming new matter that herniated into new space. The inflammation grew cancerous, sprouting eyes and teeth and wrapping itself in an embryonic veil of skin.
The cobblestone vibrated and began to crack like a cervix beaten by insolent thrusting as this orphaned gestation culminated in birth. The cocoon shattered with a final barbarous slam, revealing a black-haired scalp, slick with a grainy alloy of blood and dirt. The creature lifted its arms and shoved them into the ground, extruding its naked flesh from the soil. A swarm of monozygotic offspring followed—vermin uprooting themselves from subterranean wombs—and they wandered with vacuous liberation through uncharted streets.