The Cannibal's Prayer

The Cannibal's Prayer

  PW Cooper

  Copyright 2013 PW Cooper

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, it may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  * * *

  Terminus

  It is a hot gray day under low looming cloud and she is dreaming of rebirth the world seems smaller on such days cowering beneath its cotton shroud like a child pulling the covers up overhead to keep back monsters of the night. Evening creeps close now and the street lights are starting to come on their dull orange glow is the single coal fallen from the fire and burning out in the dirt. The gulls wheel lazily over the empty parking lot their sharp cries filling the silence. She looks across that great expanse like a stony plateau all strewn with garbage there is garbage everywhere this could be the ruin of the world this could be the end of man all that remains of him is his garbage his crumpled papers his twisted wrappers his words warped and torn and fluttering in the wind beneath the call of gulls keening absent any answering white noise rumble of tireless ocean waves someday all this will be swept off carried away on some rising water everything will be made clean again and what will crawl up out of the damp? could it be us? could we return after this as though from a memory formed in childhood and never forgotten absorbed deep into the giving soil of youth and thought where nothing is certain and the world is as yet new untamed untested and waiting with such a warm and gentle anticipation to be known.

  * * *

  I find the celebrity floating face-up in the bathtub with a stomach full of sleeping pills. What right does she have to do this? What right does she have to take her own life? Her life does not belong to her, it is ours who have made her a god. We have given everything for her and now we will take what is ours. Her fame runs from her mouth like drool and we claw to be the ones to lick it from her chin. We have destroyed ourselves for her, have given up everything, and she thinks that she has the right to die here? I hate her and I love her.

  She was famous once, famous in that glittering way. Beyond human, beyond woman. She was light in its purest form. Stalking down the scarlet carpet while we stared up with our mouths open and our eyes open and our hearts open and our hands closed. Projected glittering on the movie screen: our beatific deity.

  Oh, to be near her! Oh, to touch her! Oh, anything if only just to taste the air that she had breathed! She belongs to us and we to her.

  And I find her here in the bathtub of her hotel room. This hotel where my grandfather the construction worker labored, raising the building from the ground on steel wings and concrete feathers. This same hotel where my father the bellhop and my uncle the cook and my mother the maid toiled away the dreary hours of their lives. And I. I am the manager of the hotel, all this is entrusted to me. See how the fortunes of my family rise through the generations?

  But it is nothing without her. I thought I could never rise high enough to touch her, neither I nor my descendents. What strange fate it is, that I would be chosen for this, that she would come to me.

  I force my finger down her throat. Her lips are full red and her mouth is warm. Her throat closes on my finger, wet as a cunt. Her eyes flutter open and for a moment she looks up at me. Before she vomits she sees me. The expulsion dribbles down her naked belly. I want to lick it off her. I can see the pills there, can see them dissolving, soft and bloated. I caress her wet skin. She is softer than anything I have ever known.