“Yes, oh Father, I would love it.”
“Well, look in this churning barrel and despair, because when she has a respite from it, and she is burning in this fire, she dreams of another world, quite limp and unconscious; I assure you. A hideous world, but not as hideous as this world, of course. She dreams she is a young girl and has a child thing and puts it in a garbage dumpster, and that is the end of that. But sadly, in that world, the child thing was not alone, for the dumpster had a few permanent residents. Big, juicy rats. The mother did not know this, for she had left there, and went to meet a boyfriend, and they had a wonderful lunch at a restaurant. She did not know. She could not hear the screams, or know the terror of that baby as it was bitten to death and devoured by those sharp teeth. But now she continues to dream the same dream. Now do you know what churns in the barrel? That it is not molasses or oil, but the oily pelts of hundreds of rats as they gnaw and chew her repeatedly. How horrible it must be for her.”
And, indeed, they laughed for a few lifetimes at the sight of her, as she was lowered into the barrel, red spit slinging hungrily, and snapping white bone shined and churned and disappeared beneath the surface.
“Now this clearly is a breach of protocol!” a young female student stood and cried, giving no one else an opportunity to speak.
“Why is that?” he said simply, knowing full well what she was going to complain about. He had heard this before.
Her face was crimson. “Abortion is absolutely legal in our State. You are breaching protocol and common sense by condemning it!”
“If you had been listening, Student, you might have noticed that this was a live birth the dear woman trashed, not an abortion. I think maybe you can put away your Lectro-Current magazine and listen more closely next time, especially since you pretend to know so much.”
“I can see why so many people despise you.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“MORE LEGS IN THE PARK”
A woman was there when they had walked farther through great expanses of burning yards. She was barely visible beneath 17,000 layers of flame. She jittered and jerked, but could not free herself.
“I don’t know why she is here. I come because I love the memories of this light. Long, long before Bjorn blew across the night and threw out the Milky Way, I used to come here to dance at her light. I was new to her perfume then. I am her old flame now.”
The demon’s fathomless sockets gazed on her golden lights and he nearly loved again.
The demon walked and the man watched everything through his hot black holes.
“Look at this, my son. This exhibit is known in The Annals of Cruelty as ‘A Demon’s Abomination.’ There are a few things that even we cannot gaze at for long.”
A wasted man lay spread-eagled on the ground, facedown. Above him, pounding him with an enormous member, was another man. As the two bodies met, fifteen blades pierced them through. They writhed as they continued, unable to stop.
It cannot be truthfully said they were screaming, because with all that exists here, “The Scream” is The Base Unit. The Primary Law: “Nothing Ever Stops Screaming!”
“Can you tell, my son, which of them owns the blades that pierce the corpse of the other?”
“No,” he whispered in the demon’s head.
Red burst out laughing. “Neither can they.” He laughed for many times. “They will go on, blessedly, throughout eternity, in the heat, in the flames, in ‘The Burning,’ never ceasing in their stride. No horror can equal this. No mere man or demon can even imagine this, let alone look at it for long.”
It only increases in horror, thought the man, if you continue to think about it, which I choose not to do.
That’s true, thought the demon.
I will come out of you now, thought the man, and kiss your feet, Father.
Then it is done, thought the other. Out of the palms of his hands flew thick cords of silver that became glittering hooks. He plunged both into his own abdomen and savagely ripped (blurred) them sideways until his guts spilled onto the ground. “We call this, my son, ‘The Judas Solution.’ I cannot explain it to you, for it is an incredibly Holy Thing, and I would not anger the Chief of all demons by repeating the story of The Great Sacrifice.”
Burning and entwined in the gray and red entrails was the man, like a birthed adult. His eyes burst outward as the heat intensified. They bled out, dried up, healed over, opened, and behold, they were his eyes again.
“Son,” said the demon, “you’re going to get your toast cooked.”
“My toast cooked?”
“No, your toes cooked.” Red grinned insanely. “Approach me.”
The man did so because he had no choice.
“Give me one of your feet.”
The man obliged. The demon pulled the man’s blackened foot into his mouth and his jaws glowed red with flames. The man’s toes blackened further.
The demon repeated the process with the other foot.
“Know by this, my son, my great love for you.”
And the man did know.
“My son,” shrieked the demon in the man’s mind. “Come here and put your lips to my handsome chest.”
He obeyed and blood flowed fast from Red’s chest into the man’s gaping mouth.
“Guide my member up your hole so I can have my way with you, my son.”
The man obeyed and felt the writhing member tear him to pieces from the inside. Its thickness ripped him open more as the flesh bore itself upward, chewing as it climbed.
The demon huffed and puffed as he became lost in the exercise. Over and over he pounded his son until, finally, the man felt fire fluid flash within his insides.
“That’s good, my son,” the demon said. “Let’s do that for 13,000 generations.”
And they did.
On another night, as the demon rubbed burning oil over the man’s naked bottom, a thought occurred to him. “My son, there is only one sight of beauty in all my park. Let us go and I will show it to you. In my holiness, I will commit this act.”
The man extracted the entire length of the member from within him, eventually able to spit it out and watch it fall to the demon’s lap. Red rose and walked. The man followed and they came upon a living (dead) horror.
Two figures could be barely seen through the towering flames. They writhed in the center of a burning arena. A dark man was lying on his back on the smoking ground. His large hands gripped the hips of a white man trying to escape the connection between them, but it was an eternal struggle.
“All his natural life,” began Red, “the white man feared being raped by black men. Ahhh, sadly, he was only remembering his future:
“He will always be here;
“He will always be trying to escape;
“He will always be raped; and
“For all eternity!
“This is the only truly beautiful thing in the park. I never have it far from my thoughts.”
After this session a student stood to speak. “Is there a point to this?”
A young woman nodded. “Yeah, where are you going with this?”
The old man laughed. “Maybe nowhere. But, then again, maybe I am leading you on a wild goose chase.”
“We have never heard that expression,” another male voice near the back said. “Is that ‘old speak’?”