“Who is that?”
“Some Polynesian deity. I can’t pronounce his name. Now, after you’ve done all of that, just take my blood and pour it into those sixteen bowls over there on those altars and then burn my body on this one. You got that?”
“Uh…yeah…I—I guess so.” Kitten’s stomach was roiling. She wasn’t sure she was up for this. The blood spurting from the wounds in his belly was already starting to make her woozy.
Jamie picked up the last dagger and poured the remaining lighter fluid over his head. Jamie coughed up a thick wad of coagulated blood from a punctured lung and smiled through teeth streaked with gore. He laughed, wincing from the pain of the blades crowded into his abdomen. His stomach acids had already begun to leak out and corrode his organs. Blood sprayed from his lips as his laughter grew louder. He almost fell from the altar as the pain doubled him over.
Tears squeezed out from the corners of his eyes and rained down his cheeks as he stared heavenward, his arms held out in supplication. With all his prayers and sacrifices he had still seen no evidence of the all-powerful deities he’d read about in so many cultures. All he’d seen were the terrible bloodthirsty things that lurked in the dark. He had still yet to find God. He still had no idea which religion was the right one. He recited more prayers in languages that were dead before the fall of Rome and shoved the last blade into his chest with such force that the tip of the blade burst out through his back.
“But…but suicide is a sin. It says so in the Bible. What if you end up in hell?”
“Then I have lost nothing.”
Jamie smiled in exhausted relief as his soul vacated the flesh.
He fell back upon the altar and Kitten seized the knife in his chest. She had to jerk several times with all her weight and strength to dislodge it from his sternum. She then began cutting out his heart in vigorous strokes that left her sopping in blood up to her elbows. She turned her head as she sawed through his rib-cage, thankful he had chosen a serrated blade to plunge into his heart, trying her best not to regurgitate on him. She lost the battle with her stomach and yesterday’s lunch spewed forth in a deluge of liquid yellow.
Blood pumped from Jamie’s wounds. His heart sputtered to a halt. Blood plastered Kitten’s t-shirt to her breasts. The sound of steel on bone was even more nauseating than the wet squishy sounds of the blade cutting into meat and tissue. More blood splattered her face as she severed his aorta. She almost feinted again when Jamie’s corpse began its death spasms. Kitten had almost forgotten about Jamie’s disease and had to stop to wash her hands and face and put plastic gloves on before continuing. It was probably too late now anyway.
Jamie hadn’t told her which knife to use to cut out his intestines or which sword to cut his head off with and for a moment Kitten stood there looking around at the mess of blood and meat in confusion. It was okay though; there were a lot of knives to choose from. She would think of something. She began chanting the different prayers Jamie had left for her as she continued to unmake his corpse. She’d do her best to make sure Jamie’s soul found peace, even though she was certain she had already damned her own to hell.
The night had begun to flee the morning as Kitten finished unmaking Jamie’s corpse and distributing it among the various altars. She was surprised that the police had not returned with the whores, but she did not dwell on it. The two women had probably picked up tricks on their way home or had gotten high or been snatched up by their pimps. She could only imagine the kind of beating their pimps would lay on them when they finally found them after being missing for days. She doubted that anyone would have believed that they’d been kidnapped by a terminally ill man and then released without so much as a scratch. Kitten thought of what her own pimp would have done and shuddered.
She sat there for a long moment looking at the remains of Jamie’s gutted corpse, looted of all its blood and organs. She’d even removed his eyes, teeth, and sexual organs which now decorated altars on both sides of the apartment. Kitten remained seated beside Jamie’s body, breathing heavily and feeling exhausted as if the long hours of ritual mutilation had sapped all of her strength. It dawned on her that the sky had remained in that dim twilight between morning and night the entire time she’d been carving on Jamie’s corpse. She poured more lighter fluid onto what remained of Jamie’s corpse and prepared to set it ablaze, but match after match failed to ignite. Soon, she’d littered the floor with an entire box of matches.
Kitten looked around the room as the fine delicate hairs on her neck and arms rose and her body began to tremble. The sense that something was terribly wrong grew inside her until she was completely terrified yet unable to articulate why.
The room was still near dark as Kitten rose from the floor and walked over to the nearest window. She slid the window open and was surprised at the silence that greeted her. There was no traffic on the entire street. There was no movement at all in fact. Not a bird chirped, not a dog barked, not a horn honked, not a single human voice or footstep could be heard, not even the rustling of the wind through the trees. Everything had simply ceased movement. Kitten looked up into the sky. Her head felt heavy and her neck muscles had barely enough strength to lift it. She wobbled and had to grab hold of the window sill to keep from falling over. When she finally lifted her eyes skyward her legs began to tremble and then finally gave out on her, depositing her on the seat of her pants on the hardwood floor of Jamie’s apartment.
The sky was not covered in clouds as she’d been expecting. There were very few clouds in the sky at all. The sun had simply not risen. It was still low in the sky just barely peeking over the ocean but it wasn’t rising. It was stuck there on the edge of the sky, boiling on the horizon. Even the clouds did not move, their momentum arrested, hovering in the sky. All movement everywhere had ceased. It was then that Kitten remembered the one deity that had most terrified Jamie, the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli. Jamie had warned her that without a blood sacrifice Huitzilopochtli would cease to provide the world with something he called tonally and all movement on earth would cease. But the sheet of paper with prayers she was supposed to recite to Huitzilopochtli was covered with so much of Jamie’s blood that she’d been unable to read any of it and so, she’d simply skipped them.
She looked back at the horizon hoping that she was wrong even as she began to feel her own energy winding down. The sun had still not moved and appeared to be dimming as if it too were losing energy. Her sin against the bloodthirsty Aztec deity had damned more than just this world…perhaps the entire solar system, maybe even the entire universe.
Kitten collapsed onto her back as her muscles lost all vitality and shut down. Her arms and legs went numb, her heartbeat slowed, and her breathing became more shallow. Even her thoughts began to slow. She imagined how enraged Huitzilopochtli must have been, watching as all the other Gods received their offerings of blood while He alone was denied. She imagined how intense his wrath must have been after centuries of being ignored by humanity only to be reawakened by Jamie with the promise of blood and then snubbed.
With a sigh that emptied her soul Kitten watched the sun turn black and fall from the sky just as the fading spark within her winked out.
A SPECIAL SURPRISE AT THANKSGIVING DINNER
by Elle Richfield
Hector had prepared dinner. There was nothing unusual here, as he always cooked all of their dinners, along with lunches, teas, and breakfasts too.