A totally normal short story that says nothing, psychologically speaking, about its writer

Thanksgiving approacheth. Christmas approacheth. The deadline for a cosmic horror zine that someone in my library Discord server claims is taking submissions approacheth, too, which is why I spent Friday afternoon banging out a short story to submit to said cosmic horror zine, because it was nice to have an excuse to write some horror, or at least something horror-adjacent. I think it’s the genre I have the least experience with, and it’s always good to practice.

And practice I did! It’s called “L’appel du vide” because I think the French is catchier than the English. Rare French W. Most of it is make-believe, obviously, since it’s a fictional story in which impossible things occur, but as I was writing it I noticed that I miiiiiiight have been exorcising some of my terror about being “too much” for people. I am sure some of you experience a similar fear, and I am sure some of you also experience the same sub-fear as I do, which is that even when you’re being “too much” for other people you’re still not being even a fraction as much as you could be, so even when people say you’re not “too much” for them it’s only because they haven’t actually experienced the Full Muchness.

Alright, I’m done explaining. It’s bad form to do it before you’ve even read the story, I know. I’m just nervous about sharing it.

Sensitive readers beware: this story contains descriptions of exposed muscles and viscera as well as what I can, unfortunately, only describe as “vore.” Not like that though.

Enjoy!

I swallow you whole and suffocate you inside me. The end.

While you’re in there, I tell you this: I faked it every time, but I didn’t mind. That’s not a gotcha. It’s just that I can only get off in one really specific way, and when I tell people, listen, you’re not going to be able to make me cum, they take that as a challenge rather than a helpful piece of information that frees them up to focus the elements of sex I wish they’d focus on, like putting part of themselves as deep inside part of myself as they can, because that’s all I want even if it doesn’t make me cum. So I fake it. Convincingly, too. My body is mine to do with as I please, every squishy square inch of it, with balletic precision, as I’m sure you noticed when I rearranged my rectus and transversus abdominis muscles to expose the thing that I have instead of a stomach, which I then used to swallow you whole and suffocate you inside me. (And don’t tell me that “swallow” is the wrong word for an action not technically involving a throat – the motion of my internal obliques and pyramidalis that forced you into me, little by little, deeper and deeper into the thing I have instead of a stomach, until I was able to close those abdominis muscles back over it, sealing you inside it and it inside me, so closely mimics peristalsis that it’s pointless to call it something different.)

So tightening my pelvic floor on command is nothing.

Before I swallow you whole, I take my skin off for you. You think this is very meaningful, very vulnerable of me. It’s an honor to have me take my skin off for you. I understand why you think this: when you take your skin off for somebody, it’s a big deal. It’s a sign of trust to let them go poking around in the wet red underneath; at the very least it signals that you think they wash their hands regularly. You know that I’ve taken my skin off for other people – you know that a man once took it off for me, that he removed and rearranged what was underneath until I was flat as a bearskin rug, and that I paid a thousand dollars (after insurance) for the pleasure – but it still doesn’t occur to you that taking my skin off is really no different, to me, than taking my shirt off. I get a little cold when I do it, so it helps to have someone there to warm me up, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s something I have to do on occasion, to let the thing I have instead of a stomach breathe. Really it prefers if I open my whole torso for it, but usually it settles for having the skin off for a while.

I take my skin off for you, and you say, “Thank you so much for trusting me. You have the most beautiful wet red parts I’ve ever seen. Your chest looks so different without the scars. How did I get so lucky? I think I’m falling in love with you.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I say. “It’s not like I opened my whole torso.”

“Isn’t that what this is?” you ask. You take your skin off for me and gesture to yourself, all those exposed muscles and pockets of soft buttery fat, and you say, “Look, my torso is open, too. We have both opened our whole torsos for each other.”

“No, we haven’t,” I say, “but that’s okay, because you don’t want me to open my whole torso. You’re about to tell me you do want that, but you don’t, and if you try to get me to open my whole torso anyway you’re going to regret it.”

“I do want that,” you say. “I do want you to open your whole torso for me.”

Ordinarily I would lie, like with the orgasms, and peel back just the top layer of my pectorals and move my sternum around a little bit, and let you beam with pride about having been the person I opened my whole torso for, having been strong enough to handle more of me than anybody else, but my therapist has recently been telling me that it is not good for my self-esteem to pre-emptively reject myself instead of letting others decide how they feel about me, so I open my whole torso for real and you regret it. Because then you suffocate inside me.

Before I take my skin off for you, I spot you across a hotel ballroom at an early-career queer networking event, and the thing I have instead of a stomach yawns so wide and dizzying inside me that I almost open my torso for it – for you – right there. But my therapist has also been telling me it’s healthy to let my relationships unfold naturally rather than attempting to artificially rush intimacy. So I track your movements through the room, the easy way your long limbs sweep through the spaces other people leave for you, not even seeming conscious that they’re doing it, just moved by your grace, your confidence, your self-deprecating smile when you bump into the edge of a local credit union’s folding table. You are not handsome, but you are funny and charming – this I can tell from across a hotel ballroom – so you have probably been pursued just as often as you have pursued someone else, especially in gay circles where the micro-preferences that make looks everything have horseshoed around to making looks hardly matter at all. Handsome or unhandsome mean nothing to a man who is looking for a specific race, height, weight, fat distribution, and genital size.

But nobody has ever pursued you like I resolve to.

It takes months. I am a strange man to you, and you are smart enough not to trust even a small, soft-cheeked, wide-hipped, unthreatening strange man like me upon first meeting. So I orchestrate more meetings, expressing my delight at the serendipity of us running into each other like this, totally at random. (This is a lie.) I crack jokes about a philosopher you’re interested in, whose work I tell you I’ve read. (This is a lie.) We watch your favorite movie together when I tell you I’ve never seen it. (This is a lie.) I insist that you would do me a favor to take homemade baked goods off my hands, that I just happened to make too many, that I can’t possibly be hungry enough to eat them all. (Lies, lies, lies.)

All the while the thing I have instead of a stomach gapes open under a thin layer of muscle and skin that barely contains it, slavers, bright silver strings of saliva and hot pinpricks of desire swirling through it like constellations. I tell it not yet, not yet, but soon, soon. 

(This is supposed to be a lie.)

Because here’s the thing: I also don’t like that I swallow you whole and suffocate you inside me! I mean, you certainly dislike it even more than I do, but I don’t want to swallow you whole and suffocate you inside me. I offer you several opportunities to stop me from opening my torso. I warn you that taking my skin off just isn’t meaningful for me the same way it is for you. I do it for everybody. But you insist. You want me, you love me, and that means all of me.

When you say that, you don’t know how much of me there is.

In the time it takes me to pull aside my rectus and transversus abdominis muscles and show you the thing I have instead of a stomach, I think about asking my therapist, or maybe my plastic surgeon, to help me replace it with a normal stomach. I think about this often. Like always, I dismiss it out of hand. For one thing, it’s a heavy responsibility, having the thing I have instead of a stomach. Not everybody could handle it. Lots of people would look down at it, dehiscing inside them, and open their torso right away and stuff everything they could inside them to try to fill it. And they would fail.

I, on the other hand, know how to take care of the thing I have instead of a stomach. I almost never swallow and suffocate anybody – which I know might be hard for you to believe, particularly at the moment, but trust me when I say it’s true. And I like what it gives me. I like the kind of predator it makes me, raising the hairs on the back of my neck the moment someone beautiful or interesting or otherwise worth having crosses my field of vision. I like the control it gives me over my body, every squishy square inch of it. I like baiting it with games, with chases, with promises of not yet, not yet, but soon, soon. I like what it has taught me: wanting something, wanting it so badly that you are a statistically insignificant proportion of yourself compared to the want, and being just about to get it, being this close to getting it, is the best feeling in the world. But I can only prolong that moment for so long, and eventually the next moment comes and it is over. I win you, woo you, dissolve your last doubt in gastric acid. And then you insist I open my torso for you.

Once my torso is open, in those last few seconds when you’re staring into the thing I have instead of a stomach, you say, “There’s so much of it. How does it all fit in there?”

They’re not very good last words. In some ways it’s a good thing that you are almost certainly dead of oxygen deprivation inside me by now, because otherwise I suspect you’d be pretty embarrassed. But I understand why you say them. I see the thing I have instead of a stomach reflected in your dark eyes, whirling, endless, ever-expanding. How can it be ever-expanding if it is endless? What is it expanding into? I don’t ask these questions, which is another reason why I am better at handling this responsibility than most people would be. It just is, and for something that is so full of sparks and saliva and silver, what it is is vastly, completely empty.

So, ultimately, this is your fault. It’s your fault that I swallow you whole and suffocate you inside me. When any sane person would run screaming from the thing I have instead of a stomach, you, with its reflection glittering in your eyes, take a step forward, because for all that you are about to regret it – and you do, I see the pain and terror in those same dark eyes as my internal obliques and pyramidalis muscles force you deeper and deeper into the sucking cold emptiness of it – it feels good, doesn’t it, to be the center of the universe?

Faithful readers of Come Down will notice that I’ve stolen a line from Come Down for use in this story, which I personally believe is fine, since it’s not plagiarism if it’s all your writing and none of it is published anywhere yet. Speaking of, I’ll be back on Wednesday with the usual chapter.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving break!