En Pointe

Your teacher is always staring at you. There’s a test, but you can’t focus. Spare pencils are lined up on his desk, pastel pink. He keeps them sharp, and pointed at you.

Snap. Your pencil broke. You need another. You walk up and take one. A whiff of jasmine. A tight gold band clasping the red bud of an eraser. Drag it across your mistakes.

✦

Stabbing cramps wake you up. A nightmare radiating from your guts. Big hike tomorrow, but you have to call in sick.

✦

He looms over you, and you back up until you hit the towering stake, the seat of your shorts nervously brushing it. Dusk is falling, and you found something you shouldn’t have, in this remote clearing where the trees are too orderly and sharp, arranged in a circle, storms gathering darkly on the horizon behind them. You clutch your rape whistle, but your mouth is dry.

A stake just like this, he says. This was our empire.

You hear moaning from high above. And as you arch your head back, a drop of blood lands on your pink tongue. You taste it all the way home.

✦

You graduate early. The war needs every body it can get. You wear the tactical leotard of a senior scout, black rubber with a bloodpink ribbon streaming from your neck. You hunt parasites through the tropical dungeon of the Defile. One of them is your former teacher. Did Riparian find a new body? Or burn the old one? It doesn’t matter. They all converge in the end. Eaten from the inside, saturated with septic beauty.

Why are you running? There’s so much at stake!

HA HA HA.

You chase each other across the atoll. In office buildings and sewers. You dance and spin and twirl, just ahead of his mindboiling saliva, his infected dagger, and sometimes, his desperate, sick whispers. Until finally, in—

[ ] The park you hiked in your early teens, breathless but full of hope—
[ ] A beach lapped by pink water, bloody blooms of algae staining the sand—
[ ] The flashing red lights of a breached lab that could not contain him—

—his nails slash your back until the suit is ripped open. His yellow teeth sink into the nape of your neck, and he drools another megaton of disease into you, and you are paralyzed.

With your final spasm:

[ ] Twist your neck around, and spit in his face.

He laughs, then spits back. Burning, blinding, tastes like acid on your retinas.

[ ] I hate you. I HATE YOU. YOU DISGUSTING PIECE OF SHIT.

In his face, you see the final shattering of the mirror. The realization that you have finally come to share the opinion he has about himself.

His dagger drags up your sweat-soaked thigh, tingling, needling in your crevice.

But not yet. He knows exactly how he wants to take your virginity. It has to be at the moment he takes everything.

✦

He greases the pole, running his bare hands across it, saliva oozing into the oil. The fly prince is on all fours, caressing the sharp length he has carved for you.

You can’t believe he would do this. You can’t believe this is happening. Your eyes bulge, big and white, little red mouth spread in terror, braces shining under the ultrabright sun. All across the beach, the sand is stained red. Stakes stretch all around the atoll, an infinite circle of screaming.

Your stake cooks on the hot sand, drinking the sun’s radiation. You think of running into the ocean, but know the waves would bring you back. And then their hands are on you, these imperial parasites and the slender, evil flesh they wear, dragging you closer. You gasp as they lower you onto the tip, becoming hysterical and bursting into tears. The stake is grotesquely large under your schoolboy hips, swelling insistently as the stake is pulled upright. The dry heat of sauna wood, quickly becoming sticky. Your ribs flutter with panicked breaths as you become just another naked body in the sky. Scattered across the sand, you see all the shorts and skirts, panties and ribbons, suits and ties, pencil skirts for the sharpening. Like everyone decided to go skinny dipping.

To either side, you see the rest of your scout pack. Mouths open, but completely silent. Teeth forced apart by richly painted wood, a cross-section of their insides. These pulpy tips are their screams. In the distance, more stakes are lifted, and their wailing jiggles your stomach like cold jelly.

Your arms are bound behind your back, forcing your skinny chest forward. You can’t swat the flies, and there are so many. The white sands encircling the atoll have corroded to a black, buzzing halo. Flies, fighting your lashes for your tears, crawling up your damp thighs, a black-tie wedding gathered patiently on your spread cheeks.

The diseased oil itches as the stake begins to slowly, agonizingly sheathe itself in your softest parts, sucked down by gravity. The crawling heat of his veins, the most intimate animals of his cells are becoming part of you. And as you stretch open, the infection will become opportunistic, red lines splitting, invisible at first, then blossoming to fissures. You will feel his rapist pathogens swimming up through the tiniest holes in you, and eventually the largest.

But not yet. Your naked feet…

[ ] Still dirty from chasing him, then running from him, boots ripped off, dragged through sun-sparkled mud and dark dungeon ordure.
[ ] He washed them. The dirt dripped away, exposing bare pink soles. And these smooth arches are mounted high in the sunlight for all to see.

…your naked feet stand on two spikes projecting from the stake. Two little platforms, pins an angel could dance on. And you do.

With your weight on the spikes, and your ass clenched tight, you can almost sit on that broad spike. It props you up, like a desperate naked boy on a sheer cliff face. And you realize, he is forcing you to choose. You are not allowed to resign yourself. Not you, the one who came closest to piercing his entrails, and his heart.

Standing on spikes is better than your entire body being impaled, isn’t it? These two tiny points are so much smaller than this huge stake. But when the sun is peeling your skin, and your sweat is a caustic slime of salt, and the flies have become brazen and hungry, and the ants crawl up your insoles, and the spikes are digging into the soft meat of your feet, and feet have one of the highest concentrations of nerves anywhere on your squirming body, and that logical equation, spikes versus stake, is obliterated by pain—this is when you wiggle those toes or strain the balls of your feet, trying to experience the spikes from even a centimeter away from their current point, but the feet also have one of the highest concentrations of sweat glands.

A scream. And the first trickle of blood.

You scream like you’ve been castrated. But he left that intact, perhaps curious to see if an involuntary erection could be provoked once the stake started stretching you out. He. She. It. The parasite, the black void, what does it see through those eyes? Did it ever mean what it said, when it lured you with the far side of its digestive tract, the part that could wear lipstick and smile and make promises? You hope so. You hope this hurts.

There you go. Balls of your feet back on the spikes. En pointe, Cancer dancer. Your final performance.

The impaling angel dances and glides and slithers around the stake, finally embracing it. The boy’s body is rocking it, and what muscular agony it must have taken to loosen that stake even superficially. Humming into Riparian’s lips as he licks the red nectar of your anal virginity. The taste excites him, antennae fully erect. The parasite emerges from his guts, lifting the seat of his dress and rising like a tail. He grinds his crotch into the vibrating stake, lubricated by blood and urine. What a fountain it is becoming. The salty tears of your twitching toes, and the dark jam of fear leaking with the blood. Subtle notes from this wine of the bowels.

He wonders if the blood is from anal tearing. Something that could heal. Or if it has finally perforated your intestines, piercing from the rectum into the sigmoid colon, and the long septic agony will begin.

How long will his disease keep you alive? And why? Did he want to feel you glimmering up and down his puppetmaster arms, sharing your nerve opera? Or was it somehow an act of mercy? Could you survive even this, and be taken down like the Redeemer, to rise again? To flee in the night together. To find some boat off these blackened shores.

To rise, yes. Again, and again, and again. Innards slowly regenerating until you cough up black blood, as if rescued from a sea of gore. Your charred retinas regenerating until you can dimly see the fresh new stake carved for you. Intestines slithering back inside your defissurizing hole, slurping like giddy eels up your nyctinastic rectum, prolapse closing like a flower at night.

This is how hell was described to you once. The sodomite is impaled on a stake of endless length. No matter how high he climbs, mouth filling with splinters, throat and stomach hauled across the harsh wood that impales it, he cannot find the top. Eventually he will taste his own filth again, and see the revolting, fly-jeweled stains of where he started. His nostrils will fill with his stench, and his lips overflow with blood and excrement. And no matter how far down he slides, he will never reach the bottom.

The parasite burns with immortal fever, devouring its own intestines, impaled on itself. It can never escape what it is. But it can show you.

✦