The black pear remains under extreme pressure after being plucked from its branch; before it can be eaten, it must be pierced with a knife, then allowed to bleed for three days. While the teeth and bones must eventually be removed as well, this drains the majority of the fruit’s venom, allowing those brave enough to consume its pulp directly a chance at survival.
The minotaur only killed a handful of victims during his storied career, and did so with little effort; between each swing of his hammer and goring by his horn, seven years of silence would pass. He spent those lonesome months oscillating between dreams and meditation, lost in the winding corridors of his brain.
“You’re not seeing my shadow because I ate mine in the womb.”
He didn’t exactly believe her, but then again, she really didn’t have one. “Is that normal?”
“It’s not very common, but it happens.” She ran an index finger around the rim of her wine glass. “Have you ever tried umbratarian cuisine, my dear?”
Frater Cleon opens the sanctuary doors, and two dotted lines of burgundy neon bloom along the floor. They create just enough electric glow to know that there is a path forward. He clutches a lone bottle of fine malbec against his silvered robes.
“You have arrived in the innermost sanctum,” a soothing voice speaks. It is that of a once-mortal consciousness preserved in silicon amber. “Speak your intent, that I might know if you are worthy to enter.”
After several years spent bathing in a white noise of ink, Jason could at last hear the narrator’s voice. The world melted into view, and he could see the walls of the gas station that surrounded him, the shelves lined with rainbows of high-fructose nothingness, and the broken roads of a desert town just outside the window. His nameless manager leaned over and whispered to him, “check out that guy on pump three.”
“So, what’s the weirdest thing that you believe in?” Her hands were busy sawing through a thick cut of swordfish. After a few rough dates, she figured that she would lead with the question this time. “I’ve got a doozy, but I want to hear your story first.”
“Well.” He put down a forkload of farfalle. “Sometimes, you know… I guess I remember things from my childhood that couldn’t possibly have happened. It's made me wonder if this is actually the universe that I was born into.”
He withdraws her bones one-by-one from the living flames, violet-hot from the forge. With each blow of his hammer, he discovers yet another intricacy of his lover’s interior. He measures out the breadth of her collarbone, the space between her radius and ulna, and the diameter of each individual vertebrae. It pains him that he cannot reach down and touch them; at least, not yet. He leaves out the two bottom-most ribs on the left hand side, a reminder of her distance from life’s original creator.
The batteries bulge at the seams when inserted into your flashlight, as though filled with flesh or bubblegum. There’s no satisfying click of connection- only a sense that they don’t belong in such a device, and that any more pressure would cause them to burst. “Do not squeeze,” reads the mostly-black label in seven different languages. This warning is printed next to a cartoonish silhouette vomiting some sort of jagged fluid.