LIFE GIVER, LIFE GIVEN
At thirteen, Erienne stands in the doorway to her bedroom, swaying at the knees. Her hair wild, dark with grease. Her complexion ashen; gray skin, blue lips, wisps of veins mapping their way across translucent flesh. She looks drowned.
A year ago she had been pink cheeked, rosey with girlhood. A few months ago your knuckles had been white on her clenched knees. Prising them open for your Gods.
“Come to visit me, Reverend?” she speaks and the tenor is nails against your brain. Gouging furrows, trenches, wormholes. “If you came for Papa you’ll be disappointed.” Her laughter is hissing, sizzling water boiling over a pot.
You step closer. Her eyes are sea-glass green, the pupils dilating and contracting, leaking uncertain darkness. There is a filmy distance in her gaze. The look of knowledge that has filled asylums and street corners for centuries.
Gods have touched her. Like water through cloth, They have passed through her flesh, leaving some ethereal knowledge in their wake. Poor girl, you think. Her mind can’t hold such things. Erienne’s father knew the price she would pay for their mission.
“Are you sure there is more than one baby?”
“I can count to three. Papa taught me that.” Her eyelids droop with ephemeral boredom.
“Where are they?”
“I can count the universes in the tongues of gods. I can count the deaths that will happen, that are happening, that have happened.” She does not raise her voice, but her confidence cuts you off.
Your stomach drops away in slow uncertainty.
“I am a life-giver and life-given.”
She holds out her hand. You can’t think of a reason not to take it. She is the vessel of new Gods, and even fear cannot temper your eagerness.
She leads you to her room.
Her father’s body is slumped on the floor. He has no nose. His face is shards of flesh and weeping bone. The blood around him is already congealing, the same texture that signaled Erienne’s ascent into reproductive readiness.
Your knees buckle. You tumble to the floor.
“What happened to him?” you choke.
“Babies are born hungry,” she says. A chorus from beyond your sight. Erienne glances behind her, expression beatific, a holy unvirgin mother gazing at the god gift of her children. Your fear rises, your bile too. You vomit, choke, and vomit again. You cannot move and so you lay in your filth, marinating.
You cry.
Erienne kneels down, crawls over to you with jarring, broken movements. She bends her head closer and laps at your tears with a cold, strange tongue. Blue and black, it feels like. Dead.
“You beautiful, little fool,” she says tenderly. “You never thought.” Her breath on your face is rotten fish foul. Cold, damp, thick. You close your eyes and imagine you cannot hear the slithering of her children clambering through the remains of her father.
“The gods wanted a woman,” she says.
She presses her pruned, peeling lips to your forehead. A child’s kiss to a favored toy.
Her children wrap themselves moist and strong around your throat.
FROM THE AUTHOR:
“I wanted to write something that would make H. P. Lovecraft squirm.”
©2022 S. Creaney
S. CREANEY is a writer born, raised, and based out of NYC. Her fiction has appeared in Sword & Sorcery Magazine and The Poetry Shed. Her stage works have been put on by Fordham University, The Poor Mouth Theater, and The Tank. She is the winner of the NYC-based David Dortort Creative Writing Award for Playwriting and was long-listed for the Staunch Book Award. She teaches writing at CUNY and storytelling at The Moth. Find her on Twitter @lil_shananagin.