monsters
Consume: an act that should read as fear, violation, destruction — as though consuming someone’s body, or more wondrous yet, something beneath his ribs and reason.
But what is consumption if not hunger taken to its furthest conclusion?
When desire and depravity take root, hunger is bred. Every hunger, when denied a proper name, curdles into monstrosity. For monsters are what people become when there is no acceptable name for their unmet longing for the forbidden.
They looked at themselves the way children look at shadows or nightmares stretched too long by the evening sun — recognizable, but somehow wrong and grotesque.
Even when Hikaru’s affection took forms too aberrant for language, the majority could comprehend.
Even when his hunger became frightening.
Even when that hunger turned toward him.
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Perhaps horror has its own kin: wonder.
Wondering why the wrongness felt familiar; wondering why fear softened into curiosity.
Although each instinct of Yoshiki screamed against the sinister and incongruous, inexplicably, he found flowers blooming from a corpse — beautiful, insomuch as it coerces capitulation.
They call themselves monsters: inscrutable creatures. Maybe they are branded as monsters for a less complex truth, for they discovered a feeling before humanity invented a word for it.
And in the absence of language, all they could do was hunger for one another.
Spine: the architecture of a being, the silent framework that allows a person to stand upright against the world.
A feeling in its most tangible form — a love letter written in anatomy. To give away that which holds a body together, that which allows a person to face the world, is a horrible overture. Be that as it may, to receive a hidden vertebra — a relic of devotion and possession — a bone that endures weights, binds two men together, a bond never skin-deep.
Writer’s note: monsters deserve sunshines, too.
