all gods are carnivorous
writing blog of sam .
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Drowning him is not enough. When the sun begins to move out of the fog, she takes his corpse where the early morning men in search of work won’t find him, where he can’t rot into uselessness and squalor. Marianne had killed him for herself, and she is not one to share with filthy dock-rats and feral dogs.
And so she pulls him underwater when she goes, drags him behind her when the fog leeches away from the shore. He’s stiff and blue in the water, but it will go away; thin and wiry and young, so much too-touch meat weighted down with a second hand coat and thick, practical boots. She pushes him into the gap of a rocky shelf, folds his legs up until he looks like a cramped, sleeping child and kisses his forehead before she goes.
(Arthur didn’t die quickly—he held out until Marianne had half a mind to pry his mouth open with her fingers, to dig her nails into the soft part of his mouth and hold his tongue down so she could watch the water in his throat, epiglottis fluttering like a pinned butterfly. As if in a final decision to deny her the fun of it, he’d inhaled too sharply and choked and thrashed and—stopped.)
Marianne checks back almost every morning, to shoo away the fish that would nibble at the ends of Arthur’s fingers and palpate along the meat of his arm, to push his head back into a comfortable position and make sure the current hasn’t tugged anything away. These cold English waters have never been to her taste, and most days he looks greyish and half-frozen, but days can be kept with the coming and going of ships from the harbor, and when she arrives the next day, she promises him there can’t be much longer to wait, and anyway didn’t he like the sea once?
She chucks him under the chin and asks if it’ll be the same later. Arthur, of course, has no answer for her, and Marianne finds herself wondering, rather uncharacteristically, what it might have been.
And when Arthur’s body is soft and pliant under her fingers, the wiry muscles atrophied and the colour in his face leeched away, she presses her teeth down along the curve of his shoulder and bites, sharp-edged carnivore’s teeth sliding into the meat of him like a hot knife, and even if he wasn’t as warm as he once was, he’s yielding now in a way he wasn’t when he was alive. And though he doesn’t clutch at her hair anymore or run his fingers down the space between her shoulder blades, she can lay into him like this, press his back to the rocks and make a feast of what’s left of him.
“…and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
England has lived through too many books to find merit in burning any of them.
“I guess it’s because we missed out on the Westermarck effect, y’know?” Alfred proposes one evening, a tatty physics book hanging halfway out of his lap. “Like—we didn’t really have the whole traditional childhood and stuff.”
Their parameters are an ever-changing work in the making, still halfway through working compromise but closer to an ends than they had been last week, or six weeks before that; Francis is half-surprised they’ve lasted, and that they’ve compromised at all. Because it’s something they’ve never managed to do before—to compromise was to acquiesce, to acquiesce was to lose, and neither of them lost well. But Arthur is a soft touch who asks first and doesn’t push at edges out of something like respect for an old enemy come not-really-lover; they keep a list of can-cannot taped to the fridge, and revise it almost fortnightly—and hunched over their kitchen table, pen in hand, Francis finds himself thinking they might last a few weeks more.
High seas had always held dubious tales: Of sirens, of course, those that would lure the unsuspecting seaman to his death, but also those of the Lorelei and the mermaids who would sink their ship—months at sea and most of them were fixated on women. Halcyon days tended far and few between, as was their wont, but their stories and superstitious legends carried with them. Carried over the line even, as they did their song and dance, with tales of King Canute who couldn’t stop the tides and was wise enough not to try. And when those same tides carried them back to port, the stories stayed, clinging like salty sea-film.
They hold Marianne, though to hold her would be a feeble thing at best—little holds Marianne unless she wishes to be held, and when she snakes up to shore to find him, smiling with too many teeth to fit in any human mouth, Arthur knows that, was it her wont, she would pull him under in half a heartbeat and keep him there until he thrashed.
She does once, maybe twice. Keep him there. Sirens, mermaids—those of her ilk, with all their beauty and malice, they like to touch. To prod at things that aren’t theirs and see how close they can get to thievery. She pulls at his ankles and throws him off balance, pulls him into the sharp saltwater because she can and keeps him there while she watches. Far enough beneath the surface that the water makes the insides of his bones ache with cold. She prods at his mouth with cold fingers, slips the tip of her nail between the seam of his lips and watches with wide, pleased eyes as he chokes.
But he isn’t a corpse when she’s finished, and he counts it a point in his favour.
And Marianne—more than anything—likes it. Sensical, if morbidly so; she declares once, with pale lips stretched wide around the vowels, “I could eat you. You might make half of a decent meal, less perhaps if only because you are tough and bony and bitter.”
“You haven’t done it yet,” he snaps back. “And I expect that you won’t.”
She sniffs, combing fingers back through her hair to pull it over her shoulder. “I could. I might, even.”
When Marianne smiles, she shows all of her teeth, small and shiny and sharp, and when she wants to bite and snap at heels, she does so with the threat of blood hanging behind her lips, no siren songs or sweet words to coerce wayward sailors; she’s set her eyes upon Arthur’s back. It isn’t a comfortable place to be.
Nor is the sea, when she pulls him under again, one hand wrapped tight around his jaw, the other in his hair, keeping him there until he chokes on saltwater, panicked and thrashing in her hold, until gasping for breath is a relief, the water cool on the inside of his throat.
“See?” She asks then, eyes very wide and very blue. “I could keep you here with me.”
He pushes himself back to shore, spitting up water, half-choking still. “Not for very long.”
“I heard that humans die in the water,” she says airily. “I don’t understand why, though—you’ve mouths just as we do. Why can’t you breathe the same as us?”
“Because you breathe like a fish.”
“And why don’t you? Think of all you’re giving up for those legs of yours, Arthur.”
“You’ll never see a city. I can always see a ship.”
“And I can always sink it.”
“Is that a threat?” He asks, turning in the rocky sand to look.
And Marianne, with her sharp fingers and her too-many teeth, smiles and says, “A promise, more like.”
The worst parts of this arrangement are the similarities—France finds an extra set of keys on the table where he keeps his own most mornings, and they run out of coffee twice as fast, though the rest of the kitchen fare diminishes close to its usual rate. Some evenings he finds his way into the living room with its tall, west-facing windows open to the glint and shine of the city at sunset and his doppelganger is already there. Old, familiar habits made alien within weeks.
Anonyme
In other offices (any other office in the world) there would be other motivations: raises, promotions, especially spacious corner offices with pleasant views. Being situated in the cubicle near-adjacent to the break room offers Ludwig enough motivation for improvement in of itself—an inevitably friendly word even early in the morning, the casual clamour of a group all too intent of socialising. Other mornings, though, Mr. Kirkland wanders down to use the electric kettle and, unobtrusive and polite, offers him a cup—those are the mornings (far and few between, but terribly satisfying) that he finds himself content with the company.
It isn’t even so much that he’s good looking (though he is), not anymore—he’s interesting, and while not the statuesque figures of a sculptor’s dreams, the sharp, prickly edges of his personality reflect themselves elsewhere, and that more so than classical beauty, is appealing. Appealing enough to warrant long, slow-winding evenings spent over a fast-cooling mug of tea, watching him skirt table edges and memorising the nuances of movement. Now it wouldn’t be enough to request that he sit fifteen minutes for a portrait (as it once might have been, had he managed the guts to do it); the interest is in movement and in personality and Ivan—hidden away in his corner with his condensation-damp sketchbook and his tepid tea—is becoming rapidly, unfailingly convinced that he couldn’t do him justice.
I.
By luck or chance or some errant mistake on Fate’s behalf, America finds himself in a cabaret, and he finds himself with France. France, who, raked with influenza and the remains of trenches drawn through his veins, is dressed to imaginary nines, every facet of his person carefully decided upon well in advance. Whose hair is parted far to the side and carefully finger-waved to fall elegantly but with great care. Who, holding himself with grace impressive even in Europe, beckons him from across the room, drawing covetous eyes. The year is 1919 and he’s wearing Chanel. It isn’t a suit.
For this KM prompt. FrUK at Dunkirk.
“I feel,” France says, a grim smile tugging at the corners of his lips, “as though we’ve been here before.”
England’s unimpressed, always—at France and at its nation, at the beach and the war and the cold water that laps beseechingly at their ankles, offering the gentler answer to the question of what now? Men had drowned in the Channel before, lost to her greyish waves; only a few days past expected time of arrival in port to be declared lost at sea, seven years to be declared dead.
“We likely have been, you bastard.” The sea winds around his ankles as the tide moves in—the clouds above are moving almost preternaturally fast. An ill wind, he considers. A bad omen.
As though he’d said it aloud, France turns his face to the sky, the scant light flashing on his collarbones and the crucifix he carries even now. “We must have tried to kill each other halfway up this coast—and yours too, my friend.”
“And look at us now,” England says quietly in return.
