The Ophidian Eucharist

In the rotting heart of this world, where the church bells had long since rusted into mute hulks, a woman bled out her grief into dirt. They thought It was dead, a whisper could be heard from someone else in the room, but she wasn’t interested. The village barely fed the living, let alone another dying mouth. The tiny form was buried into another unmarked grave, no shrine, no epitaph: orthotanasia they say.

          That night, a cry was heard, and it wasn’t from the mother, it wasn’t from the field. It was her womb. She clawed at her hollow belly, screaming as something rippled beneath her skin, not a kick but a nail, and teeth. Dragging inward toward her spine, the pain split her vision and for a moment she saw a pulsing wound and something eyeless pushing from the other side. Then it was gone.

The Next morning a corpse was found kneeling in the confessional, it was the Village’s father, his eyes were missing, and the ribs were burst outward like a grotesque nest, the villagers gathered around, then harvested his remains for meat. But the hunger remained. Also, no one spoke about the tiny bite marks inside his collarbone.

The woman looked down, umbilical veins had grown from her ankles into the soil rooting her to the dead field, the shallow graves were breathing. She had a vision of a choir of stillborn cherubins, their wings were stitched from placenta and human remains. Something unholy was uncoiling from those grounds. Her recently buried child was hovering the ground and from its bleeding mouth a rift started opening.

A Hymn of Hollow wombs: It wasn’t buried deep enough. One by one the villagers started puking their own unborn. Decades of miscarriages, misery and hunger now were back into this world squirming alive on the dirt. They crawled toward the rift; their fused spines formed a ladder. The woman’s skin split as her missing womb partially regenerated, now a gate of putrid tissue. Inside, she felt the thing that had been her breed pulling both realms apart like burning curtains.

 The Last thing she saw before the village started bursting into formless flesh was her own hands, knitting a new flesh door over the rift. It was saying: “Do Not Mourn the Dead, Mourn the Never Born, They Remember, They are Coming.”

She Started praying but not with words as from their eyes, viscous, hissing things started dripping. People who still had tongues started screaming something like Latin but backwards, slithering out between their teeth. Her eyes burst, not with tears, but with serpents. The final miscarriage, a titanic worm with a thousand infant mouths, peeled raw and screaming bound in umbilical chains.

Her Jaw Unhinged; the throat became a tunnel to the rift. She tried screaming, but the sound hatched into swarm of winged beasts. They carried her final plea to the ruins of heaven: “Please, forgive me”. As Heaven’s regurgitated back a single, calcinated stillborn cherub folded into a noose. She cradled it into her waiting arms.

It bit her, poisoning her senses. And now there lies the mother of gates and her womb as thresholds. Her tears the key, turn away. Her body turned into serpent’s nest, even god’s answer becomes an abomination. Her heartbeat was replaced by the sound of hatching eggs. Now something prays back, now using her voice.