Synopsis: A man suspects his girlfriend-turned-fiance of cheating on him with her cousin. The evidence piles up as their relationship decays, and the dark side of romance rears its ugly head.
She said yes to my marriage proposal with her dead eyes. Her horrible dead eyes. Goddammit, her eyes were so dead. She blew me a kiss moments after her answer of "yes!", instead of planting a real kiss on my face. I should have recognized the deadness in her eyes at that moment, as well as her eagerness to kiss me through the air rather than on the flesh, but I was too excited about the prospect of being married to this beautiful girl and starting a family to even notice.
Looking back on it I can't help but feel a little angry. Although, I guess I shouldn't feel too angry since, after all, I did set the ball rolling toward some kind of closure to the whole situation when I removed her nipples and froze them in my freezer to hand out to the kids in the neighborhood. I cut each nipple into thirds and dunked each piece into an exotic sauce that I learned how to make in a baking class I took in college. I never remembered how to make this sauce when I need to make it, but it was in just about every cook book I'd ever read. Since I had a lot of the cook books my dead mother had collected it wasn't hard to find the recipe when I needed it. The kids in the neighborhood loved the delicious treat and asked me to make more of it for them. I joked that they'd have to find me a new girl to break my heart if they wanted any more, but they didn't take me seriously because they had no idea what I was talking about. They didn't know they were eating nipples.
Her name is Julie. We dated for two and a half years before I proposed to her on the beach. I took a picture of her right as I proposed, and another one right after I placed the ring on her finger. It was clear to me that in the second picture all she really cared about was the ring and not the fact that she would be marrying me, her amazing boyfriend of two and a half years. Her smile was like a vacant parking lot with no cars ready to drive to the ends of the earth for anything less than a full waxing and a polish. Sure, I had the money to send her off for a wax and a polish whenever she needed it. But I tried to pretend that this wasn't the reason she was marrying me. As an overweight balding man I really wanted to believe she was attracted to me and not just my money.
I showed these two pictures to my closest friends for days against their will and asked them what they thought of her apparent reactions. Most of them said it wasn't very clear from the pictures how she felt about marrying me and told me to stop putting so much stock in a couple of photographs. I told them it was too late for that since I'd already removed parts of her body and sold them to kids in the neighborhood (this was before the nipples; I'd cut off her toenails and finger nails and put them in pancakes that I made for my neighbor's daughter Robin, and it turns out the rest of her friends like them, too). I lost some friends that weekend but I didn't care. It meant I could focus more on the meaning of my ex-fiance's looks in her photos and what was going to become of our relationship.
After I had removed the nipples from her breasts a week later, she called the police. She had to wait until she regained consciousness, of course, because she passed out shortly after I cut them off. But damn. When she woke up I was in serious trouble. It was jail trouble, not relationship trouble. But more about this later.
It's not like I did this out of meanness or bitterness. There was something about her gaze in the two photographs I took that told me she was cheating on me. I stayed in jail for a week before I got bailed out. After that I was put on house arrest until the trial. But I'm sure I haven't done anything wrong. I think she wronged me first. When I called her dad five days before I proposed to her and he said she had visited her cousin's cottage recently, I knew some shit was going on that I wasn't going to like.
"Yall'er fuckin, right?" one girl had said to my girlfriend at a party, three months before I decided to propose. But the "yallerfuckinright?" wasn't inquiring about me. The girl was asking my girlfriend if she'd been fucking this guy named Hambsom. Hambsom was her older cousin. We were at our friend Boner J's house. I was standing in the kitchen while Julie and her friend were in the living room. They didn't know I could hear every word they said. Alcohol's puppeteering hands were holding sway over my body at the time, so instead of getting jealous and angry at her response of "haha, yes, maybe!", I instead masturbated to the thought of her and her cousin going at it. I walked out of the kitchen, past Julie and her friend, and went into the bathroom to imagine the scenario while I privately touched my privates. It wasn't that incest got me off. That was sick. For some reason the idea of my girlfriend fucking another guy was both infuriating and arousing to me.
As I felt myself below the belt I imagined myself as the other guy - as Hambsom. In the body of her attractive cousin I was able to do things to my girlfriend she wouldn't let me do to her in our relationship. Being a different man, I was now an exotic, extra-romantic adventure she was excited about. This body wasn't an investment or a rusted trailer in the park for her, it was a vacation home. She felt the liberty to do anything she wanted and I was able to do the same. Since she knew she wouldn't need to devote her heart or her soul to a committed relationship with this man, all forms of filth and fury were accepted in the bedroom. But in this fantasy I tried not to focus too heavily on the details of the bedroom. It would be Hambsom's bedroom, of course. I knew of Hambsom's bedroom and the 1920's furniture he decorated it with. Julie loved all things from the 1920's and often spoke fondly of that decade to me. When I first visited her cousin's house and saw Hambsom's Great Depression-era furniture I realized Julie had formed her infatuation with this furniture around the stupid shit her cousin had in his home. In April of 2010 Hambsom grew a mustache. Only a couple days later Julie told me she loved mustaches. I grew one and she never liked it because it didn't look like Hambsom's.
It was clear to me Julie had a thing for her cousin. When she got an abortion a month before I proposed to her I took a peak at the fetus. I was a good friend of her abortion artist who let me into the fetus morgue. Julie didn't tell me she was getting an abortion, but my friend did. I didn't even know Julie had been pregnant. The abortion doctor pulled the dead pre-child out of a mass grave it shared with other recently aborted fetuses. The stench was awful but he told me to ignore it. The fetus had a fully developed face that looked a lot like Hambsom's stupid face and nothing like mine. I started to question the muscle of Julie's and my love. Was it strong enough to keep us together? I hoped so. I handed my abortionist friend a two dollar bill and took the aborted fetus home in hopes I could have a use for it. It was my thought that it would make a good surprise gift for Julie if I presented the fetus to her on our wedding night, perhaps dressed in a small tuxedo or gymnast outfit. I kept him in my closet, preserved in a recovered sewage tank filled with formaldehyde.
The poor fetus looked pathetic. Even though it had Hambsom's face I couldn't hate it. I hoped the formaldehyde would preserve it well enough, but I couldn't escape the thought that there might be a way to make the little guy better. Sure, he was dead, but I didn't know anything about fetuses. All I knew was they grew rapidly, so I thought there was a possibility they could regenerate and heal their fatal wounds. Deep down I knew it was impossible. However, I had also thought Julie cheating on me was impossible. That turned out not to be true, so I knew anything could be possible regardless of my expectations. Every day I poured milk into the sewage tank to provide calcium and vitamin D to the fetus, hoping the little guy's dead cells could find a use for the nutrients. I always had too much milk in my fridge anyway, and I thought it couldn't hurt to share some with the little sad looking fetus who could use it more than me. I kissed it each night before going to sleep, when Julie wasn't looking. We lived together, after all. She had kept the fetus a secret from me, so I was keeping it a secret from her.
Two weeks before I proposed to Julie she gave me pubic lice. I thought nothing of it because I knew you could get them from other people's clothes and she always borrowed her friends' pants. But these lice were huge. They'd burrow into my skin and lay eggs below the epidermis. When they'd hatch and come out it was like I was being eaten from the inside and blood and pus always ruined whatever activities I was doing at the time. The bigger lice had chunks of meat in their mouths that definitely didn't belong to my body or Julie's body. I fought the infestation with fire and killed them all in a few days. I took the big lice with meat chunks in their mouths to a man in the industry of science. I also brought him skin flakes of mine and Julie's so he could investigate something for me. The scientist determined that the chunks in the louse mouths had genetic similarities to Julie's skin... but they weren't exactly the same.
"Would you say the similarities between the two samples is about what you'd expect to see between cousins?" I asked the scientist.
"Hmm," he said. He adjusted his glasses and typed some things on his keyboard, scribbled some things in a notebook, pressed a button on a machine, sipped his coffee, and nodded his head. "Yes. That is about right."
"I knew it," I said. I stormed out of the scientist's facility with a couple of the larger lice in a jar, and went home.
I dropped the lice into the sewage tank with the fetus, and poured in some more milk.
The day I proposed to Julie on the beach most things went well. Right after I took the photos I thought she looked beautiful. I was excited about marrying her, settling down and starting a family together. We went out to eat to celebrate. She kept looking at the ring while we had drinks and ate sensational chicken at a really expensive and excellent restaurant. I spoke of our plans together at dinner, and how I wanted to have a son named Hans, after my late father. For most of the night she stared at the ring and only half listened to what I said. We stayed at a beachfront hotel that night and were up late, continuing to drunkenly celebrate our engagement. It was the next morning that I began to pick up on the deadness in her eyes and the distance in her voice. She lacked the passion I was feeling. When I couldn't take it anymore I mentioned the vacancy in her gaze and her empty, heartless voice. She wasn't happy to have me bring it up, so we fought all the way back home. Once we were in the kitchen we yelled and yelled and yelled. This is where I ended up cutting off her toenails and finger nails and putting them in the fridge for the pancakes the next morning. She was really upset with me and didn't talk to me for the rest of the night.
The next day Julie packed her bags and went to stay with her mother. I continued to pour milk into the sewage tank, and began inquiring to my friends about their thoughts on the photos. This is how I lost my friends. They liked Julie and thought I was being unreasonable about the whole thing, and when I told them about the fingernails and toenails in the pancakes they just stopped talking to me.
When Julie came back to get her bras one night is when I cut off her nipples. It wasn't pretty, but I had to do it. She started scratching my face and spitting into my wounds as soon as she walked in the door. Her words hurt almost as much as her nails when she told me she'd been staying at Hambsom's house all week. At that moment a vision popped in my head. It was a scene from Julie's favorite show The View, and I saw Sharon Osbourne laughing about a man's penis being cut off. Sharon was telling me what I had to do. I ran into the kitchen while Julie continued to claw at my face and arms, and pulled a knife from the knife drawer. Within minutes those nipples were off, cooling down in my freezer, and Julie was running around like a maniac bleeding all over the walls and the carpet from her boobs. She fell unconscious, which gave me time to clean up the mess and straighten up the kitchen. When she awoke she was apparently still in pain and continued freaking out. She ran out of our home screaming. I knew the police would probably try to get involved and might even put me in jail for a while until they knew the whole story.
I took a whole gallon of milk to the sewage tank and opened it up. I dropped the whole container in there and whispered, "guess I'll be going away for a little while."
The police came to arrest me not even twenty minutes later.
When I was out of jail a week later I made the special sauce that I dipped the nips into and handed them out to the same neighborhood kids who liked my pancakes. I was on house arrest, now. I was awaiting trial and just trying to pass the time as I thought about Julie and Hambsom and grew angrier every day. She still had the engagement ring. She never gave it back even after I cut off her nipples. I assumed she'd probably give it back in court.
One night I was eating waffles in my kitchen when there was a knock on the door. I answered it and was pushed to the floor by two darkly dressed figures. They entered my home, locked the door behind them, and tied me to the couch.
They removed their masks to reveal their identities - Julie and Hambsom. They didn't look happy to see me and I wasn't particularly happy to see them. Julie ripped off her black shirt to show me the pair of fresh new nipples she had.
"A nipple transplant," she said. "Taken from the corpse of your dead mother!"
"You bitch!" I yelled.
"We dug her up and cut off her nipples and now Julie has them!" Hambsom explained.
"Yes," I said. "I gathered that much."
"I guess you know why we're here," Julie said.
"To fuck in front of me?" I asked. "To show me what you've been doing together all these months?"
"What?" Julie acted surprised. "No. We wouldn't - no. We're here to cut off your penis and make a cake from your scrotum."
There was no way to respond to this statement, so I didn't try.
"How do you know about Julie and me?" Hambsom asked me. "Like, the stuff about sex. How do you know that?"
"Shhh - shhh - shut up Hamby," Julie said. "Get out the blades."
Hambsom opened a black case full of long knives and scissors. If I'd had to choose which one of these tools they were going to use on me I'd have chosen none of them because they looked awful.
Julie removed my pants and pulled my penis through the hole in the front of my underwear. She held her hand out toward Hambsom to motion for him to hand her a knife. As he handed her the largest knife from the case there came a loud commotion from my room.
All three of us looked toward my bedroom door. The noise came again. It was a heavy, deep rumbling; almost a roar. The walls shook and then a furious pounding sound began. The floor was quaking. The door to my bedroom flew off the hinges and landed across the room. Out of the darkness of my room emerged a horrific beast standing on thick, hooking, sharp legs, with similar looking arms protruding from its sides, long hairs sprouting from odd corners of its body, an umbilical cord hanging from its nightmarish abdomen, and the unmistakable face of Hambsom at the top of its body, though with disgustingly exaggerated and mutated features, and bulging black eyes that implanted horrors into my mind. On the sides of this disgusting caricature of Hambsom's face were two other faces, the faces of crablike lice with chunks of meat fused to their sickening surfaces. The beast stood about six feet tall and gazed at us in my nicely lit living room.
As it moved slowly toward the center of the room, where I sat helpless on the couch, the creature stared at Julie and Hambsom. It must have recognized them, somehow, because it didn't look happy. Hambsom and Julie must have felt a little familiarity toward this thing because its face was a distorted, monstrous version of Hambsom. A family face. The mouth of the creature slowly opened before it let out an eardrum shattering scream that pierced so sharply into us we were each paralyzed. It kept screeching and lumbered over to Hambsom and stared with its large black eyes into his. It quit screeching for a moment and I remember we all sighed with relief for about a second. It was literally only about a second, because after that second the creature lifted up all six of its arms and ripped Hambsom's guts out of his torso and shoved some into its gaping mouth, and flung others across the room (mostly intestines since they were so long). Hambsom didn't really scream, as every muscle and nerve in his body was probably busy trying to cope with being torn to shreds in a matter of seconds. Julie screamed, though. It was loud and appeared to startle the feasting beast who lashed out with two of its arms at Julie's exposed breasts.
Two nipples flew from her and landed on the couch next to me. I was both disgusted and kind of amused. Hambsom's mutilated body fell lifeless to the floor, where a large puddle of blood quickly formed. Julie kept screaming and tried to run from the monster, but it lifted her into the air and screamed into her head, knocking her into a daze that ended her screaming. Then the monster stuck Julie's head into its mouth and started sucking. I heard bones break and the unmistakable sound of blood bubbling up. Julie's body appeared to shrivel up as the beast sucked, and her blood flowed into its mouth, splashed from its face and dribbled down its body. When it was finished, the creature bit off Julie's head and swallowed it whole. It dropped her deflated, shriveled carcass on a table and approached me.
It stood above me, covered in the blood of Hambsom and Julie. It spit something out of its mouth that landed next to me on the couch, opposite the nipples. They were Julie's eyes. Her horrible dead eyes. I was tied down and unable to move, and awkwardly, my penis was still hanging out of my underwear where Julie had left it. The monster stared into my eyes and then its mouth started to open.
"Here we go," I said. It looked like I was going to be its next meal.
But it didn't eat me. In fact, it said something.
"F...f... f a t h e r ?"
A tear fell from my eye. I had forgotten about the fetus and lice in the sewage tank after I had gotten out of jail. It looks like that gallon of milk made them strong over the weeks, and they had grown up into a remarkable specimen of hybrid fusion. When milk no longer provided the vitamins and minerals the spawn needed, feeding on humans was its next logical step. I was proud to see that it had instincts for survival.
"Untie me, son," I said.
The creature freed me from my restraints, and we hugged. After I put my pants back on, I poured the creature a glass of milk and pulled the couch out into a bed so he could sleep on cushions instead of sleeping in a sewage tank.
I was arrested later that night for what appeared to be a double homicide in my home. Neighbors called the police after hearing Hambsom and Julie screaming. The creature hid in my basement while the police investigated the scene and questioned me about the condition of the two badly mauled bodies in my living room. I told the creature to stay downstairs until everyone was gone because I didn't want anyone to hurt him. But I really don't think anyone could hurt him even if they tried.
I'm in prison now for a double murder and it looks like I'll be in here for just a little while longer. I didn't murder Hambsom and Julie, but I pleaded guilty. I didn't want any suspicion directed toward the beast that is living in my home. I want my son to be safe. After the forensic evidence proves my innocence, which should be sometime next week, I'll be back at home with him and I'll get to raise him right. I'll be a better father to Hans than his biological parents ever would have been.
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