You worked sixty hours but we still can’t pay the electricity bill? I’m twelve and not sure how to fix the hurt in your voice, so I cut out a chunk of thigh meat for you to eat. Is this a comfort? Do you want more?
The answer was always yes. Whether it was my student loan provider, or the manager at the Taco Bell where I worked third shift, or my mom drowning me in her trauma and filling me up with her hopes, they all wanted more more more.
Now this thing wants to eat me too. And just like with everyone and everything else, eating me won’t do any good becauseI’mnot the one killing it.
Ellis coughs hard. He’s hidden by the god’s bulk, but his voice is clear. “Come on!”
The god grimaces, and suddenly I’m sure this thing hovering over me with my blood painted across its mouth isn’t a god. It has the capacity for disdain, so it’s not an animal either. It’s somethingOther.
Whatever it is, it’s opening its mouth wide. It strikes, latching onto the place where my neck and shoulder meet. Its mouth is a vise made of broken glass. Something snaps. I think my collarbone.
I take a wheezing breath—maybe the last one I ever will—and bore my fingers into the greasy wound in its chest. There’s a bullet buried in the slowly pulsing heart there. Still, it beats. It’s so strange that something so Other can have the same thing in its chest that I do.
I dig my nails into yielding flesh and pull. What comes out is one special thing: its heart.
The first step to changing the world is committing to change yourself. Unlike the cicada, you are not alone in pulling yourself from the earth. We raise you up, then crack you open and uproot every limiting belief clogging your soul. What’s left is the beginning of the rest of your life.
Ascent Initiation Script
CHAPTER 21
I’m so tired of being eaten. I’m so tired of handing over pieces of myself so that someone else can fill their mouths in the vain hope of being satiated.
Can’t say I don’t understand though.
Because now, with my mouth slick with blood and raw meat sliding down my throat, I get it. The god’s flesh is a summer ripe peach between my teeth.
It feelsgoodto eat.
Black blood pours from its chest with every fistful I pull out. The smell of deep earth and sweet decay fill the room until I’m swimming in it.
It—the god, the thing, the monster—spasms, but doesn’t move away. It doesn’t even let go of where it has me in its teeth. I feel its surprise like it’s my own. There’s something else there too, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is filling my mouth.
Ellis is yelling. That doesn’t matter either.
There’s a gunshot and then another. Both hit the body above me. It shrieks and grows heavier, but still it stays.
I plunge my hand in up to my wrist and pull out more meat to put in my mouth. There’s a black hole in my gut. I’ve thrown in bits and pieces here and there, but nothing came close to filling it up. Howling hunger rips through me until all I am is gnashing teeth and a throat swallowing.
There’s running feet and coughing. Is Ellis gone? I don’t care. I don’t care because I’ve been hungry my whole life, and now I can finally eat. It’s finally my turn to feast, to take bites out of something alive, just like how living in this world and for someone else took never-ending bites out of me.
Finally, the god pulls away. I follow, fingers hooked in the sharp angles of its shoulders.
There’s blood in my eyes, in my nose, drenching my skin. The wound at my stomach glows coal-hot. My jaw stretches until it threatens to come undone, and then it does. It might hurt. It might feel like something. Mostly it makes it easier to push hunks of meat down my throat to the cavern below.
The god chokes and shakes while I gorge myself on more and more and more. I burrow my arm down its throat. Its tongue comes away easy and comes apart in my mouth like butter.
Eventually, it’s still and I’m left panting.
Buzzing insects stuff my skull with white noise. I didn’t know it was possible to feel like this—so full and filled up andwarm.
A twitch wracks my body. And another and another and now I’m on my hands and knees. Bile and meat spray outof my mouth. Pressure builds up behind my eyes, making my vision go red as my blood vessels pop pop pop. Convulsions grip my arms and my legs. My fingers twist in the blood-soaked blanket spread out under Ripley.
Every nerve ending is a shining beacon of pain. In the movies, characters pass out when they’re faced with insurmountable pain. They squirm and shriek but eventually fall quiet to blessed unconsciousness. The pain no longer pains them; the horror no longer horrifies them; they are allowed to rest.
There is no rest, and the horror does not stop no matter how I beg.
This isn’t what I wanted.
