Grandparents tell their grandchildren, “I’ll eat you up!” It’s the same idea, in a weird way. You want to consume the person you love. You want to eat him so he’s inside you, so he becomes part of you, so he can’t leave you.
Grandparents eating grandchildren. Chewing the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus every Sunday in church. Swallowing Seth’s cum on the trail. Is it different?
Is it?
Once upon a time, a beautiful daughter was born to a king and his wife. At the age of thirteen, she vowed perpetual virginity in the name of her Lord Christ.
But when the Emperor of a nearby land threatened to make war on her father, and when her father took his family with him to Rome to negotiate peace, the daughter Philomena’s sacred virginity was threatened.
With one look at Philomena’s fair visage, her downcast eyes and lovely lips, the Emperor was struck with desire. “Give me your daughter to be my wife,” he demanded. “And I will not wage war on you.”
Philomena, who wanted to be of service to her family but had already sworn to be of service only to God, refused.
Where at first the Emperor had felt love, now he felt the strongest of hate for this young woman who dared to defy his wishes, who dared to prefer no husband at all rather than the hand of an Emperor.
And thus began Philomena’s torments.
First, the Emperor ordered that she be whipped, and whipped she was, her back stripped bare and a heavy leather strap brought down against its tender flesh, again and again, until the flesh was flayed and bloody, until there was nothing there that could be called a back at all.
But that night, two angels visited her in her cell and with their gentle ministrations, Philomena’s flesh ceased to bleed, closed up again, and became as if it had never been touched.
When the Emperor saw this, his malice doubled, and this time he ordered that Philomena be drowned.
Philomena was tied to an anchor and lowered into the river, her long hair floating on the water’s surface after the rest of her had been submerged; but the angels returned, and this time they cut the ropes that bound her and took her safely to the riverbank, where she coughed up the river water and lived.
Now the Emperor ordered arrows fired on the source of his aggravation and lust. When the arrows pierced her flesh, wounding Philomena in her legs and arms and chest, the angels came behind and, with a pinch of their fingers, removed the arrows and closed the wounds. When the archers shot again, the angels turned their arrows aside so that Philomena was unharmed by them; and when the archers sought to shoot a third time, the angels caused the archers to fall down dead.
Still the Emperor would not be stopped, not by the miracle of angels, not by anything at all, and he ordered that Philomena be decapitated.
And so she was, her head severed from her body at three o’clock in the afternoon on a Friday, the time of death aligning with the time of the death of her bridegroom Jesus Christ who had preceded her to heaven, and at last Philomena was free to join him, and she lived happily ever after.
He doesn’t call and I don’t call and I know it’s over. I blame myself, myself, only myself. He put forth a condition; I failed to meet it. And that is how our story ends.
???
Apollonia Corado came to our school just after winter break last year. That’s the best time to be a new student—when everyone is bored of each other, when a new face makes the most impact.
Louise was assigned to show her around, to make sure she knew where her locker was and where to eat lunch. And Louise did a good job, of course, because Louise is a good girl, but also because there is attention by association and Apollonia Corado is beautiful.
My mother told me that a man’s love for a woman is conditional on her beauty, but what she didn’t say is that the love everyone else has for her (or doesn’t) is conditional on that, too.
“There are two girls bathrooms in this wing of the school,” I heard Louise telling Apollonia as she escorted her through the hallway before lunch. “But you’ll want to use the one down there, at the end of the hallway, because it has new toilet seats. The ones in the other bathroom haven’t been replaced in years, no one knows why, and they’re gross.”
That was solid advice; the toilet seats in the other bathroom were gross, and over the years girls had carved words into them, words that pressed into the skin of your butt and thighs when you sat down—SLUT and CUNT and WHORE.
Why anyone would make the effort to deface a toilet seat was beyond me, and why no one had replaced them was a mystery, too. Louise and I had a theory that it was because the janitor, a white guy in his fifties whose name tag read ALLAN, which could be a first name or last, believed those words to be the name tags all of us girls should wear, and that we deserved to sit on them when we were peeing.
That first day after winter break, squatted down in front of my locker, half-hidden behind the swung-open metal door of it, I watched the hallway of students and teachers as Apollonia and Louise moved through them.
I watched as Seth walked up to them, the smile he wore saying everything even before he spoke. “If you’re done telling her about the toilets, Weez, I can take it from here.”
Seth—and most of the boys—called Louise “Weez,” a nickname she pretended to hate but really embraced for the simple fact that they’d bothered to give her one at all.
“That’s okay,” Louise said, clutching her books to her chest. “I’m supposed to show her around. I was assigned.”
“I don’t think it matters who takes the new girl to the cafeteria,” Seth said. “If anyone asks, I’ll tell them you had to take a shit and asked me to finish the tour. Come on,” he said to Apollonia.
Apollonia smiled at Louise, not unkindly. “Thank you for your help,” she said, and the words from her mouth, with her accent, sounded royal. And then she turned with Seth and walked away.
Louise’s shoulders raised and slumped, a motion of hers I recognized well, and then she came over to lean against the lockers next to me.
I closed my locker, spun its dial, and stood. Together we watched them, Seth and Apollonia, as they walked down the hallway, their bodies closer to one another than strictly necessary.
“All these years we’ve loved him,” she said, in her annoying brand of unnecessary honesty, “and on her first day she waltzes in and he’s gone.”
???
They were a matched set, Seth and Apollonia, she the dark-haired pepper to his blond salt. From the moment when Seth replaced Louise as Apollonia’s guide, where one of them went, the other followed. And it was Seth following Apollonia as often as it was the other way around. He’d hold her purse while she rifled through her locker; he’d share his tray in the cafeteria, waiting patiently as she picked through the yogurt choices and selected the one she wanted.