I walk up to the door of the club. I've never been here before, I've never been to any club before. It's down a side street beneath an abandoned restaurant called Orchard Tables. I moved to this city a few months ago to work in software development and I've done nothing but work. That was until my old uni flatmate messaged me. I hadn’t spoken to him-shit, her. I hadn't spoken to her in years, at uni we were really close in our first year, we didn't have the easiest time making friends at first so we stuck together. But over time we made some more friends and after we left uni we didn't really see each other. But now I don’t have any friends in my new city so it was nice to hear from her again. She reached out to me, she was working now as a DJ and she invited me to her gig. It wasn't the kind of thing that interested me but I had nothing else to do, and I thought it would be nice to see her again.
I walk up to the bouncer, I hear the pulse of the music down below creeping up the stairs and out the door. A muscular woman with a buzz cut gives me a disapproving look, “Have you got a ticket? There's none on the door.”
“Umm.. I'm actually on the guest list…”, I stumble out, to a curious look, “It's James, I was put on there by Susie, she's DJing tonight…” She takes out her phone and after a moment she waves me on. “Have a good night doll!” I don't really register what she says, no one has ever called me something like that before. But I head downstairs, following the pulsing music and the pink neon light the creeps up from the basement. Tree painted in neon colours line the walls of the staircase. I push through the heavy doors that try to hold back the decadence. I pull out my phone to try and contact Susie, but I have no signal, I need to find her amongst the heaving crowd.
I look out onto the scene in front of me. It's not like any place I've ever seen before, there's barely any light and what there is is an otherworldly shade of pink. The music infects my whole body and I feel the aggressive beat like a second heartbeat in my chest. I walk to the bar and nervously order a rum and coke from the bartender, he gives me a sympathetic smile and turns to get my drink. He returns, I pay for my drink and turn to face the dance floor and there I spot her. Fuck, she looks beautiful. This is the first time seeing her since uni. She couldn't look more different yet she is still warmly familiar.
She's dancing to the music that's playing. I want to go over to her and say hi. But as the music moves her it seems to paralyse me. In the fluorescent lights I can see the silver eye liner she's wearing, and the glint of the button holes of her boots. So different from the shy, reserved guy that I met in uni halls. She's the kind of girl who would say a few words to me and I'd think about her for weeks… God, I’m pathetic.
Thankfully my paralysis is broken when she spots me and comes running over. She pulls me into a tight hug. We had been the same height before but now she towers over me in her platform boots. It is strange to have to look up at her, but it is so comforting to see her. “Ahhh, it's so good to see you Dude”, her voice hasn't changed one bit. “Come over and meet my friends,” she says as she grabs my hand and drags me towards the dance floor before I can force a word out of my mouth. She pulls me to form the edge of a ring containing her friends. I feel so alien in this group but they all welcome me with warm smiles.
She introduced me to them all. They each control my attention in ways that I didn’t know were possible. My fascinated stares are broken as Susie begins regaling her friends with a tale from when we were at uni together. She makes the story sound so much more grand and fantastical than it actually was. But when I hear her I begin to believe it myself. It is as if she makes it true just by her words. Before I know it they are all laughing and I chuckle in response. Their laughter soothes my nerves and a sip from my glass soothes them some more.
She invites me out to the smoking area. I've never smoked before but I don’t want to be away from Susie or her friends now. We walk out into a little courtyard surrounded on all sides by high walls, we can hear the sounds of cars on the street up above. One of her friends opens up a tarnished silver cigarette case and holds out to me a black obelisk with a gold base. “Umm.. I don't really smoke,” I say, trying to be polite. “Oh go on!” Susie encourages me, her face illuminated by the glow of her hand rolled cigarette, “You'll be fine, Zell’s fancy imported shit is pretty mild,” Zell shoots her a dangerous look but then smiles warmly at me. “Okay,” I say, taking it from her, “Can I borrow your lighter?” “Of course you can Doll,” she says, holding it out to me. Why does everyone insist on calling me that tonight?
I struggle to light it so Zell leans over to help, when the cigarette finally catches light, I think her eyes are flashing red for a moment. I shake off the feeling and take a drag. I pull the black smoke into my lungs, and I feel it creep all around my body. It makes me light headed but I like the feeling and the smell of the smoke, unlike any cigarette I’ve smelled before. Susie and her friends are talking about her plans for her set. I try to follow along with the conversation, but in that moment the cigarette demands my attention. The taste is unusual, not like I'd imagined. It's sweet and sharp, my tongue rejects the taste of the smoke at first but I persevere and carry on breathing in the smoke. Eventually it's time to go back inside and I cast my cigarette onto the ground.
We walk back in and Susie drags me to the dance floor. I'm hesitant to dance but she is insistent and the rhythm is hypnotic. I close my eyes and let the music guide me, I’m an imperfect instrument for it but I do my best. After a few moments I feel a light tap on my chest, I open my eyes to see Susie holding out two small black pills in her hand. She sees my eyes lingering and says, “Go on, take one. They’re good I promise.” I've never done something like this before, but I take a moment before to stare at the strange black pearls, I reach out and take on between my thumb and index finger. She smiles at me gleefully, and takes her own. “Crush it between your teeth,” she commands me. And I do as I am told.
I feel my mouth become saturated in a sticky and sweet liquid. I scrape it off of my gums and try to swallow it. Before I know it, it's gone. Susie can see the look on my face and sticks out a blackened tongue at me. I feel the world around me come into sharper focus and my body becomes soft like clay. The music becomes all consuming, it's everywhere, I move with its rhythm like a tree trapped in a storm. I don't feel real anymore but the world around me feels so incredibly real that I cannot be a part of it. It's calming and it's safe but it feels alien to me, but then again I am not of this world. I've been invited by Susie. The strobe lights crystalise each instant they are on, and destroy each instant they are not, like frames of my life being edited out of existence. I move my body in the way that the music compels me, I feel myself brushing up against other people as I dance. Normally I would shy away from physical contact, try to shrink myself to be as small as possible. But now I don’t mind it, my body is not a solid object anymore, not obtrusive, not fixed. I dance to the music as I feel myself fade away.
After a song or two something catches my eye, Susie is taking a sniff from a small brown bottle held by her friend April. She breathes in the fumes from the small bottle and then lets out a deep sigh of satisfaction. She must have noticed me staring at it because she came over holding it out to me and shouts, “Want some Doll?” I nod, and lean forward. She places the bottle beneath my nose and I inhale as much of its contents as I can. I feel it hit my brain as I become light headed and the inside of my skull begins to tingle. The feeling spreads throughout my body and I need to take a few breaths to calm myself. A moment later the world comes back into focus, and there is Susie looking at me with a shit-eating grin on her face. She turns back around and begins to dance again, I follow her lead and begin dancing on my still unsteady feet. Just a few moments after I begin dancing again something feels off and then it becomes crystal clear as someone bumps into me. A stray elbow hits my right nipple and I feel myself realing. There’s a sore aching in my chest just behind my nipples. The pain is so intense that I fall to the floor with my hands on my chest. In that moment an image flashes in front of my vision, a woman's face extruding from a tree, her mouth open and bloody, her eyes rolled back into her skull, revealing only the silvered whites of her eyes, like two disco balls made of flesh. Fuck, I shouldn’t have come, I shouldn’t have done all those drugs, this was a bad idea, fuck, what am I doing here. I am so deep in my own pity that I don’t even notice as somebody is lifting me up off of the floor. I break myself out of my self hate long enough to see one of Susie’s friends. Callie; I think her name is; is leading me out of the throng on the dance floor and towards a quiet corner of the club.
She sits me down and gives me a quick hug before she steps away. I feel myself go lower as I assume that she is returning to the dance floor, but a minute later she has returned holding a big cup of water out to me. I reach out with both hands and bring the cup to my lips. The cool water soothes my throat and mouth, which without me noticing had become parched. “Are you doing okay?”, she asks, her soft voice cutting through the drone of the music. “Yeah…”, I respond, “I think I just went a bit too hard.” “Not got much experience clubbing, do you?” I simply shake my head in response. “Well it looked like you were having a really good time. It was good you came along, I think Susie wanted to see you again, she talks about you a lot,” she says as she takes the water from my hands and takes a sip of it herself. “Really?”, I say with genuine surprise. She nods back at me with a rye smile, “I guess I just didn’t think I was that big a deal to her.” She moves closer to me to speak into my ear. “No, you were a big deal. It seems to me like you were the only person that really got her before… well before she got her.” All I can do in response to this is take a sip of the water and contemplate what has been said. A moment later Callie turns to me and smiles, “You’re really pretty you know!” She leans in closer and her makeup gleams right in my eyes, the colour rises in my cheeks, she's so striking in the neon lights of the club. “Can I kiss you?”, she asks, I can’t say anything, the words are caught in my mouth, Why did she call me pretty? I give a small nod and she leans in and gives me a kiss that stops me from breathing. It’s aggressive and passionate and the hottest fucking thing that’s ever happened to me. I feel her body shift and straddle me, she is pressing me down into the seat, constricting my body preventing me from moving. But I don’t care, she is beautiful, and she makes me feel desired, she makes me feel pretty. Why pretty? Her hands are on top of mine and are pulling them up to her chest and pushing them into her tits. They then migrate down to my hips and pull me in even closer to her. I’m in public but I don’t care, I can’t move but I don’t care, I can’t breathe but I don’t care. I am so turned on and I am shaking beneath her, it’s like she has connected deep into my desires. Her lips move off of mine and drift down to my neck, in an instant the caress of her lips is replaced with the kiss of her teeth as they sink into me. I let out a screech in surprise, but I find myself only able to make low guttural sounds after that. The sweet pain is paralysing, and as her teeth sink into me, I sink into sweet oblivion. I close my eyes and let the world fade away until I fear a familiar giggle. I open my eyes to see Susie standing in front of me. “I thought I’d find you here, and I figured I might find Callie on top of you.” Callie springs off me and in the stray flash of a strobe light I can see blood rolling down her lips and chin, looking at me like a prey animal. “Well can you blame me, I just wanted to show the boy a good time.”, she says before wiping her chin and sucking on the finger. “Oh come on Callie, at least give him a chance…”, she says, looking at me like an injured animal.
I raise a hand to my neck and when I draw it away it’s sticky and dark. Fuck, she really bit me hard. “I promise you, it looks worse than it is,” Susie says, offering me a hand, “come on, lets go to the bathroom and I’ll sort you out.” I take her hand and she leads me up the stairs to the bathroom. We arrive and I realise that there are no urinals, “Ummm, is it okay for me to be here?” “Yeah,” Susie responds, “It’s gender neutral.” She dips into one of the stalls and comes out with some toilet paper, she pushes it onto my neck. The gentle pressure dulls the sharp pain from the bite. She looks down at me smiling, the light in the toilet makes the blue in her eyes turn violet. I’ve never been looked at like this before, it makes me feel nervous, and vulnerable, but I can’t look away. I breathe in her scent and I’m drawn deeper into her sweet embrace. “You’re really pretty. Have you ever had your makeup done?” I shake my head, why is she asking me that? “Hold this against your neck a minute”, she says, getting a makeup palette out of her bag. “Stay still.” “Okay…”, I’m unable to look away from her. Her hands move across my face, but I don’t notice what they are doing. All I can do is look at her eyes looking at me. Analysing the lines of my face, examining me, appraising me as she works her will on my face. Her eyes are like a lullaby, tempting me into sleep. The world seems to fade away around me, slowly the edges go dark and all I can see is the glow of her eyes and the shadows of her hands moving across my face.
In an instant I come to. “All finished”, she says as the snap of her makeup pallet closing rings in my ears. “Have a look at my handiwork”, she says softly. I drag my eyes away from hers and look in the mirror. But I don't see myself, or any reflection of the toilets. No cubicles, no sinks. Instead there are two women standing in a clearing, nude. Beneath a dark sky a pink moon shines down, illuminating them. The trees surrounding them hold small silver fruits hanging down from their branches. The taller woman walks over to a tree, picks a fruit and returns to hand it to the smaller one. She hesitates to eat it but she takes a tentative bite. She tries to tear off a mouthful but the fruit is too tough for her. The taller woman grows impatient and takes the fruit from her, tearing into it with her teeth. She makes quick work of the fruit before taking the smaller woman's head in her hands. She prys her mouth open and spits the chewed flesh into her mouth. The smaller woman dutifully swallows it. She kneels down as if to beg for more and the bigger woman obliges.
Then the women in the meadow fade away, the image of them replaced with a dirty reflection. But the reflection doesn't have me in it. There's Susie, and the cubicles and the sinks but I'm not there. Instead there's someone else standing with Susie. It’s not me I see, it’s someone else, someone beautiful and powerful. I can’t stop staring at her. Who is she? I reach out to the mirror to make sure that the image is me. That's me. But when I touch it it pulsates in response to my touch. The distressed silver surface liquifies and snakes its way up my arm and eventually around my neck before pushing itself into my mouth. The living liquid metal forcing the images in my body, holding me still, suffocating me. I feel a soft breathing in my ear, “You want this.” I stand in terror, I can’t move until I wrench myself free from the mirror, I scream in terror, “No I don’t…!” Yes I do. I run into one of the stalls and bolt it shut. I fall to my knees before the toilet, and shove my fingers down my throat. I need to make myself sick, I need to get that image out of me. Black bile begins to spew out of my throat, it coats the sides of the bowl and the smell repulses me, making me throw up more. I hear Susie coming towards the door and I shove my body against it to stop her getting in, “What have you done to me!! ”, I sob, the horrific smell of the bile mixes with my fear and makes my eyes water.
From the other side of the door, I hear her speak softly, worming its way through the sound of the club music downstairs, “I didn't do anything to you. I just invited you in, everything else you did to yourself.”
A moment later I hear the door close, I take some deep breaths to steady myself. I have to get out of here. I crawl back to the toilet, to flush away my misery. My head is over the bowl I reach to push the button and flush. But the acrid smell forces me to look down. The black liquid that was inside me looks so inviting. My hand moves from the button. And inside the bowl. My hand reaches down to the ichor and scopes it up. I bring it to my mouth and take this dark communion. Why am I doing this? That stuff is disgusting. I want it gone. Where did that voice come from? It sounds familiar, but it's not my voice it can't be. I want this. I imbibe another handful of the water. It tastes rancid, but I want more. I need to finish this. No, I need to stop now before it's too late. But I want this. I keep scooping it into my mouth, two hands at a time now. I need it all. I begin scraping the bowl, I can't let any of it go to waste. In the end there are only a few wisps floating in the bottom of the bowl, so I reach my head in to drink it directly. None was wasted.
I raise myself from the ground and unlock the cubicle door. I walk to the door and I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. There she is again that person I saw, but now she is painted with an unnatural black from the chin down. Who is that? It's me. It's always been me.
The music pounds in my chest as I search the dance floor for Susie, I need to apologise. I need to thank her. But I can't find her. No, I need to see her. I feel a hand grasp mine, I look and see Callie smiling at me. “Hey girl, you're looking good.” “Where is Susie, I need to see her.”, I plead. She points to the front of the dance floor and I see Callie about to take over at the DJ booth. I move to go and speak to her but Callie pulls me back, “She knows you're sorry. There's no need for you to say anything. She's taken you this far, let her perform and finish it.” “Finish what?” She just smiles and pulls me towards the throng of revellers.
Callie began to dance but all I could do was stare at Susie in anticipation. I wanted to speak to her so badly. But I knew that I would get my chance soon. She stepped forward to take control of the writhing crowd. When she put her hands on the deck, the sound was like a bolt through my heart. It left me paralysed, what could even make this sound?
A chorus of terrible screams from beyond the edges of the self ring out. The sound of flesh ripping apart and being made anew rises and falls like a melody. The heart beat of a subjugated god punctuates the song’s sweet agony.
I stand there unable to move, unable to speak. Only able to struggle for breath and to feel tears begin to stream down my face. This is why I'm here, this is what I'm for. I'm a part of this beautiful ritual. And I'm here because I want this.
I manage to take a deep breath and I feel the mass of flesh around me begin to dance, I decide to join it. I sway and jerk with the frenzied music, it lifts my heart and infects my body. With each bounce, with each shake of my head I feel my flesh begin to soften, become plastic and slide off my bones. On the ground it pools with everyone else's and I can feel them all. This has dissolved the barrier between us and now we are all one. I feel the movements of each body around me, I feel the sensations on their skin, I feel the joy and elation in their hearts, I feel the peace in their minds. My flesh crawls up against everyone in the crowd no matter how far they are, and I feel the touch of every person in the room.
I drink in the orgiastic revelations that we share, and I take the flesh of each person into me. In a moment I feel the compulsion to open my eyes and look at Susie in her pulpit. It is her, but she has changed. She is so beautiful. From her back two tree branches spread like wings, the black leaves shake with the thump of the music, ripe silver fruit hangs down beneath the leaves. Her hands move gently across the deck and her eyes look out upon the congregation that she commands. In an instant her eyes look up and catch mine. Go up to her. I push my way through the crowd, each flesh moving as one to let me through.
I reach her and the music seems to disappear, now all that exists is me and her. I try to hold back the tears that I feel behind my eyes but I can’t and they come flooding out once again, “I’m… sorry, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have been so fucking stupid…”, I want to say more I want to tell her I’ve been a terrible friend and I should have accepted what she was doing, but all I can do is choke out these words. She reaches and embraces me, “Shuuu, it’s okay, it’s okay. You did it, you realised what you wanted and you took it.” She moves back and begins to wipe the tears from my face. She reaches up and takes down one of the fruits from her branches. She hands it to me, it is warm and pulses like a heart. “Eat it, eat it and then you can become what you were meant to be.” Without hesitation and I devour it, I sink my teeth in and rip its soft flesh and swallow, barely chewing at all.
When I have consumed it, I can feel it growing in me, roots emerging from my stomach, ripping apart my flesh, I vomit blood and bile onto the floor in front of me. I look up at Susie, and her smile of approval is all I need to let the fruit take over. The roots emerge from me and branches sprout from my back, fruits begin to grow on my chest, on my legs, all over my body the silver fruits bloom. I know now what's supposed to happen. I turn to Susie, “It's okay. Let it happen. I want this.”
She smiles at me, and the music changes. It falls upon me, that mass of revelling flesh with a hundred mouthes. Tearing the sweet virgin fruit from my flesh. Each plucked fruit sends a sharp pain through me. With each bite they take a part of me into themselves. They want me. I want this.