The Scavenger's Tithe
5. A Geography of Meat
The master bedroom door was a slab of lead-lined oak. Deke pushed it open, and the temperature immediately spiked. The air became ten degrees hotter, thick and oily with the scent of raw suet.
The room was a crater of filth, dominated by a mountain of refuse that reached for the ceiling. Deke raised the industrial flashlight, but the beam was a pathetic needle trying to stitch together a continent of flesh.
The light cut a stark, clinical circle through the gloom, revealing only wet, shivering islands of anatomy. First, the light hit a wall of translucent skin, so pale and thin that Deke could see the dark, churning tide of internal organs digesting beneath the surface. It was a slow, hydraulic motion of fluids that had no right to exist outside a body. He swept the beam lower, and the light caught the jagged angle of a pale, spindly leg anchored deep into a pile of sun-bleached human ribcages.
He jerked the light upward, desperate to find a face, to find something human. The beam found a swollen, misshapen dome of a head, where a curtain of thin, wet grey hair clung to the scalp like a drowned animal. But beneath the matted strands, there was no face, only a smooth, featureless mask of shivering fat.
Deke’s hand trembled, the light dipping down to her torso. There, the beam reflected off dozens of wet, obsidian surfaces. Eyes. Ranging from the size of marbles to clenched fists, they were embedded deep in the gelatinous rolls of her chest and stomach. They rolled independently in their sockets, blinking with a sticky, wet sound, staring blindly into the narrow tunnel of light.
She wasn't just a body; she was a geography of meat, a sprawling, breathing ecosystem where the boundaries between the woman and the waste had dissolved into a singular, sweating atrocity. She was an anatomy without maps, a cathedral of suet that defied the simple geometry of the room. To see her in her entirety would have been to look upon a new and terrible theology; the darkness was a mercy, hiding the true, infinite scale of her gluttony.
The tale continues...
< Previous | Index | Next >