To You It Shall Be for Meat
by Marisa McAdams
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
My name is Kenneth, and this is not my first meeting.
I’ve been to several so far, enough to ascertain that I am no different from any of you. Lackluster affairs with children’s teachers, desperate trysts with secretaries, midnight rendezvous with women of the night—our affliction is the same, at its core.
They say everyone’s recovery journey is different: What works for Tom may not serve Dick or Harry. Following that logic, you may not believe the story I’m about to tell today, but as surely as I stand at this pulpit, I am healed, and this was my path to recovery.
It all started out innocently enough. It always does, doesn’t it? No one wakes up one day and thinks, Perhaps I should be unfaithful to my spouse today. Perhaps I should become reliant on extramarital fornication to feel anything other than this pervasive, all-encompassing emptiness.
She first appeared to me as I slept—yes, the proverbial girl of my dreams. At night, I found myself wandering a forest of towering conifers threaded with mist. A disembodied voice called to me—a woman’s, I knew, because my dream-self perceived it as such. If the sound had been reproduced in the waking world, it would not, to human ears, have registered as belonging to a woman. My dream-self knew the truth.
I can see the incredulity in your faces. Perhaps I should preface my story with some background. Let me start over.
I have been on this earth for thirty years. Approximately thirty, that is. Ever since I met Her, my perception of time has been warped, and age has been of no consequence. Saying that out loud, I realize how illicit that may sound. Trust me, I am no predator. As long as I have lived, I have never harmed a living being other than myself.
By trade, I am a professor—was a professor. I taught a course in world mythology at a Tier 3 university until I was unceremoniously stripped of my title for inappropriate relations with another faculty member. That was the first time my affliction took a malicious shape. My wife’s position at a development company was lucrative enough that my termination did not significantly alter our quality of living; however, I did take up a semi-permanent position on the couch in our apartment after my trespass came to light. My penance, as it were.
Like many of you, I surmised that stagnation was the root of my affliction and sought to remedy it with minor transitions.
First, there was the child: Rosie. Rosalind, after Franklin. Cass, my wife, had it in her mind that the child was destined to become a genius.
Albeit one recognized during her lifetime, Cass clarified. Society has progressed considerably in its treatment of women in male-dominated occupations.
I added, And vice versa. Just look at us.
Cass’s parents had raised her on Baby Einstein CDs and International Baccalaureate programs, so Cass herself desired nothing short of brilliance for her progeny. Yet as bright as Rosie was, this attempt to fix our marriage, as Cass and I would later admit to ourselves, was as effective as a band-aid on an amputated limb.
So then there was the home.
Some years ago, Cass’s company had erected a twenty-four-unit single-family housing development in a “picturesque coastal town.” Of course, your mileage may vary on the veracity of that claim, but we needed a change of scenery, picturesque or no, and one of the houses was fortuitously on the market.
In my view, the house’s selling points were the ceilings. The soaring, vaulted ceilings, illuminated by the arched windows, lent the building an almost ecclesiastical air. Our first night, I playfully suggested to Cass that we christen our new home.
In lieu of answering, Cass pointed at the ceiling and said, Check that out. Doesn’t that look like a face?
The markings in one corner of the beam formed a pattern that indeed mimicked a startled human expression, with dilated knothole eyes and growth ring cheeks.
Before I could reply, Cass said, Am I crazy, or does it kinda look like Jen?
At the mention of the real estate agent, guilt contorted my smile into a grimace.
There’s a catch, the agent had told me during our tour of the house.
I said, Of course there is.
She insisted it was nothing really. It’s just weird. The family who lived here before you—they disappeared.
I asked, What, they up and left?
Out of the blue, she concurred. It was odd. They weren’t the type to go on vacations unannounced. And no one saw them leave, either. One day, they were just gone. She shrugged. But like I said, it’s nothing. There was no evidence of foul play. I mean, last I heard, someone claimed to have spotted the husband at LAX.
I said, My money’s on a cult.
She agreed, suggesting a sex cult, even, and our conversation veered toward more intimate matters.
I forgot to mention my wife was absent during this tour. This was a house tour of the private variety.
But back to the present. I said in response to Cass’s observation, She looks more like a Daphne to me. Cass gave a noncommittal hum, and we went to bed without further preamble.
So, that’s the context. Here’s where everything starts.
The mist-clogged woods of my dreams were silent. Not the clean sort of silence you hear when you’re far from the polluted skies of civilization. This silence was unnatural—an all-encompassing quiet that seeps into your head like floodwater.
Amid the quiet, I heard a lone voice calling my name.
I said before that Her voice would not have been recognizable as a woman’s. You’re probably wondering what that means. What I mean is, She did not speak as we do, with a single voice. It was as though the collective sounds of the forest had been wrung from the air itself and squeezed, dripping, onto Her tongue.
Perhaps under normal circumstances, this would have unnerved me, but as I dreamed, it was like drinking from a clear mountain spring after days of wandering, parched, through a wilderness. It crept down my throat and filled me. It brings to mind, now, a familiar verse: As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth…
I needed more of that voice. I ran toward what I thought to be the source, opening my mouth to taste the air, to call in response, Here, I’m here!
I woke up with nothing on my tongue but a hoarse cry: Where are you?
Upon opening my eyes, I thought for a second that I saw movement in the face on the ceiling. I blinked, and the movement resolved itself as a moth flitting across Daphne’s visage.
Ever hear that phrase, Once is a happenstance, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern? Something of that nature. It doesn’t matter.
The point is, I thought of the dream as odd, the first time it happened. I’m not the type to recall my dreams after waking, but there it was, clear as a mountain spring in my head as I cast bleary eyes about the room. It followed me through the day as I drove Rosie to her wunderkind preschool, as I sliced open cardboard moving boxes, as I popped open a bottle of IPA and glanced back and forth between a tedious dating app conversation and a Netflix documentary.
But it was nothing more than a dream—that is, until I visited the forest again the following night.
This time, Her voice was jovial, teasing: Come find me! I’m right here.
I stumbled through the mist in search of Her, but again, my hunt was fruitless, and I woke up, irritated, to the sound of knocking.
The irritation flared into absurd hope as I thought, It’s Her, She’s the one knocking, but this feeling was quickly extinguished when I heard Rosie’s waterlogged voice. It struck me as odd that she had knocked, as she normally let herself in, until I realized that the door was, for some reason, locked from the inside. Cass and I typically left our bedroom door unlocked and cracked open. We had not been intimate in a while, so we had no reason to keep it shut. Nevertheless, I brushed it off. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine Cass or me thoughtlessly locking the door when retiring for the night.
When I let Rosie in, my daughter’s face was flushed, eyes glossy with tears. There’s a monster, she said through a cough-sob. I felt a stab of concern—the most fatherly feeling I’d had in months, which perhaps isn’t saying much at all. But after tucking Rosie and her plush rabbit, Madame Curie, in next to Cass, I felt a responsibility to investigate.
I flicked on the light in Rosie’s room. Besides some scattered dolls and the rumpled bedspread, not a thing was out of place. I was about to leave—until I heard a faint thump coming from the armoire.
I thought I’d imagined it at first. But then I heard it again, and again. My mind conjured an image of ghostly fists and dismissed the thought as outlandish.
As I eased open the door, I could have sworn I heard a whisper, like a stirring of dead leaves. Yet all that fluttered out to ambush me was a trio of moths.
I resolved to call pest control in the morning. But after a dreamless sleep, the incident slipped my mind, and I proceeded with the day as I had the previous one—lost in a mental fog with thoughts of Her interspersed like rays of sun.
On the third night, She and I spoke to each other properly.
She said to me, Beautiful one, why do you call and wander so? I am here with you.
I said, Where are you? I wish to see you.
She told me, Be still, that I may embrace you.
I obeyed, and what followed is difficult to describe.
The Romantics wrote about the notion of the sublime, the joining of man with something higher than himself, which is perhaps the best way to explain what I experienced that night. I felt, in that moment, as though I were at sea during a hurricane, mere heartbeats from being swallowed by a great wave, or gazing into the yawning depths of a canyon, on the edge of being forever enfolded into the darkness’s embrace. I felt simultaneously exalted and insignificant, terrified and tranquil. For the first time in years, every nerve in my body thrummed with life. I, who had prior to this moment spent my days in a perpetual state of ennui, felt alive.
I questioned whether I was truly asleep. Perhaps this dream world was real life, and the waking world was only a dull echo of what really was.
The sensation of terror ebbed and gave way to a tender, delicious warmth.. I opened myself to Her, to receive Her, and my soul was rejuvenated, restored. That restless hunger for something, anything, to fill the aching maw of my emptiness, it was—well, it wasn’t gone, per se. Not entirely. Silenced, perhaps. It felt, for the first time, like I could finally hear myself over the constant needling of my affliction.
Who are you? I asked Her breathlessly, then: The face in the ceiling—it belongs to you, doesn’t it?
I sensed—felt—Her smile at my words. The gentle warming of sunlight through foliage, pure and sweet. I needed more.
I begged Her to show Herself to me.
She chided me gently in response. You men, She said. Always taking. Always wanting more. If you saw me as I truly am, the experience would destroy you.
Once again, I woke up hard and aching, my hand wrapped around myself.
I’ve neglected to mention this detail before. It is crude, perhaps, but pertinent, as only She seemed to induce this reaction.
In addition to my existing affliction, I also dealt with a mild form of impotence. It reared its ugly head—poor choice of words, I know—regardless of who I was with. Too ashamed to address it with my primary care physician, I deduced from some cursory internet research that the issue was an unfortunate side effect of my antidepressant prescription, excessive alcohol consumption, and a mostly sedentary lifestyle. Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, I had access to a solution, albeit a transient one.
However, I didn’t need aphrodisiacs with Her.
Our relationship finally reached a turning point on the night of the housewarming party.
The gathering was Cass’s idea, of course, but as the stay-at-home parent, the lot fell on me to prepare. I went through the motions in a daze until a spread sizable enough to feed thirteen people appeared before me.
Aside from filaments of bone in the fish and a dead aphid on a ribbon of romaine—The cost of going organic! Cass laughed, smoothing over the tension somewhat—the dinner was reasonably successful.
When the conversation invariably turned to Cass’s friends’ favorite subject—careers and occupations—Cass gave her usual spiel: One thing they never tell you about making it to the C-suite is just how many meetings you have to sit through!, et cetera. Comfortable, easy, until someone asked about my job situation, and the ensuing tension was thick enough to choke on.
I forget who asked confidantes made no secret of loathing me and pleaded with her to file for divorce. However, just as easily one of my friends—scant acquaintances from my college days who stared at Cass for too long and, for reasons different from those of Cass’s friends, wished she would divorce me, too–could have asked.
Après my expulsion from the college, I had, at Cass’s urging, sent out the odd CV to a few junior schools, but no bites. Not surprising, given the stain on my record. It was all so futile. Perhaps I could have cast a wider net. Truthfully, I had no desire to leave the home.
Since my youth, I had always been something of a recluse. Home was a sanctuary, safe and predictable, and when the solitude grew too suffocating, I was free to invite company over—female company included.
Since meeting Her, however, my thoughts no longer dwelled on human companionship. Not Jocelyn, Julie—what was her name again? Jen. No, my mind wasn’t straying toward Jen—who, strangely, I had not heard from since our last dalliance—or any other human woman.
And so, I looked whoever had asked the insipid question in the eye and said: I don’t need to leave the house. I have Her. And She has me. What else do we fucking need?
They all stared at me, as dead-eyed and uncomprehending as the fish on our plates.
Without another word, I rose from my seat, strode from the table, and locked myself in my bedroom.
As soon as the door slammed shut, Cass’s fist followed. She first pleaded with me to open up, then demanded to know what the hell was wrong with me.
Instead of answering, I stared at the moths flocking around Daphne. I saw more this time. More than I could count.
I heard Cass swear at me, her voice short and sharp, before stalking away.
When I was certain she had gone, I got up and, before I could consider what I was doing, kicked a hole in the wall. As expensive as the house was, it gave way like eggshell against my weight, and I soon had a hole the size of my fist, and then I was pumping myself into the ragged opening, my breath sawing through my lungs, crying for Her and Her alone. I craned my neck to gaze at the ceiling as I grasped myself, and I imagined the seething mass of moths was Her face and the wood Her flesh, and I swore I could hear, among the scuttling of wings a voice—Her voice, calling to me: Beautiful one, why do you weep for me?
I confessed it all: that the dreams weren’t enough, that this life wasn’t enough, that I longed only for us to be together, united as one flesh. I begged Her to reveal Herself to me. I didn’t care if the revelation resulted in my destruction, as even oblivion would be preferable to this pale imitation of a life. I was incomplete, as empty a shell as the walls of this house.
As the moths beat their wings, I heard Her lilting sigh. She said, Tonight, when you are asleep, I will show you everything. I will tell you everything.
I came apart to the sound of Her voice and knew nothing more.
Sometime after I fell unconscious, I dreamed. And as I entered the forest that night, She kept Her word. She told me Her story.
Long ago, this place—the forest—was at once Her home and Her body. She served as guardian and protector to all who took shelter in Her boughs and undergrowth. Everything She had ever known was torn away from Her the day the men came. Armed with their instruments of annihilation, they reduced Her body, once breathing with birdsong and teeming with life, to a silent wasteland.
But this death, as She soon would learn, was not the end.
She lay dormant within the viscera of the trees for days, until the construction started, and the forest’s remains were skinned, carved, and contorted into strange skeletons whose rigid angles resembled nothing in nature. The skeletons were stuffed and festooned with alien substances: a gray viscid mud that hardened to stone, soft pink slabs like the matted pelt of some great beast. At the culmination of this ghastly endeavor, all was slathered in a bone-white liquid, as though to hide the carnage from which it was molded.
As humans came and went, appraising the garish living cadaver She had become, She came to understand the purpose behind Her body’s torment.
For the second time that night, I wept for Her, this time burdened with the knowledge of the role I had played in Her desecration.
What can I do? I demanded. Tell me what I can do for you.
She replied, Set my soul free. Only then can the regeneration take place.
But how? I asked, oblivious to, yet uncaring of, what such regeneration might entail.
What destroys, then yields regrowth? There you will find your answer.
When I woke up sweating and feverish in the middle of the night, with my wife snoring on her side, our daughter nestled between us, and the moths clustered on the ceiling in droves, I knew what my duty—my fate—was to be.
And so, as quietly as I could, I retrieved the tools required for my task and got to work.
As I said in the beginning, you may not believe all that I have told you. I can tell from the looks on your faces that you are skeptical, that you think me a madman.
But perhaps not all of you. Some of you, once this meeting is over, will seek to substantiate the morsels of truth within my story. You will search for news of a house fire in neighboring cities or counties. News of family men who snapped and destroyed all that this world considers worth loving. You will suspect that the name I’ve given you—if you remember it at all—is false, but will insert it regardless as an addendum to your query. Maybe you’ll find what you’re looking for. Maybe you won’t.
Perhaps the more perspicacious of you will locate the charred remains of my former home. You will see the ruins of the ceiling that once stood tall. If you search the remains, and are sharp-eyed and lucky enough, you will see three new faces seared into the beams. And if your memory of today is acute enough, you will find that one of the faces is familiar to you.
Regardless of what you choose, the truth of the matter remains: Today, I stand before you a new creation. A cured soul. And I hope, one day, that each of you will experience the same liberation.
Thank you all for listening.