Come Suckle My Child – flash fiction inspired by Sean Seal

Come Suckle My Child

Written by: David M. Brown

Art and Inspiration by: Sean Seal

 

           IX   VI   III   VII

-Suffer onto me-

            A lone candle provided the dim light in the otherwise pitch black cellar. My cage was so tight, so restrictive that no matter what angle I managed, my neck was bent at a painful angle. Time lost meaning down there. It could have been days…it could have been years since I’d seen the sun.

With no clothes to cover my body, my ribs showed themselves, the faint candle light seemed to only illuminate my decay. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to twitch. Things that I could not see moved about me, scurrying things with many legs. Sometimes these things would crawl up my back and wake me from whatever fever induced madness I was lost too. More than once, these crawling mysteries became my meal.

Every so often, a beam of white light would appear and my eyes would explode with pain. A group of things…humans I think, would gather around my cage and chant. After their prayer, a hand would reach into my cage and two fingers would dig into my mouth until finally emerging with a trophy. It didn’t take long before my mouth was empty of teeth. The white light would leave and the chanting beings with it, leaving me to weep myself into unconsciousness.

More indiscriminate time passed, I ate more mysteries. The acrid smell of piss and shit was becoming too much to handle. I vomited bile onto my chest…there was nothing else in me. I prayed for death almost constantly. The part of me that relied on logic was dead and rotting. I was becoming some blind, alien animal. Back to the blackness.

A dull red light summoned me back from the void. My dry eyes peered out from two faint slits in my face. It took time for my eyes to adjust but they finally remembered what their purpose was. What I saw then, was worse than all the darkness had ever been. My cage was surrounded by hooded beings, chanting in monotones. Standing directly in front of me, a fat, naked man with dried blood flecked all over his body. His eyes remained closed as he unhinged the lock on my cage, the chanting never letting up.

Without seeing, a fat hand clutched my leg and in an instant, my own naked body was on the damp dirt floor of the cellar. My eyes adjusted even more and I could make out some shape carved into the ground…a weird, esoteric thing I did not recognize. The chanting increased in volume as I was pulled upwards by my brittle hair and set on my knees in front of the large, bloody man.

The man’s powerful hand shoved my face into the cold flesh of his sagging chest. I could feel the rough flecks of the dried blood from his chest scraping my lips. He maneuvered my head until my toothless mouth found his nipple. The chanting was now more screaming than anything else…inhuman voices, alien voices screeched from inside their hoods! My urge to vomit was great but there was nothing left to be expelled.

The naked man forced my cracked lips apart and his cold nipple slid into my mouth. Some instinctual remembrance moved my jaw of its own accord. Then, with a hideous realization, I tasted a semi-sweet fluid in my mouth. This man was feeding me…and I was complicit! I tugged and pumped at his nipple with the hunger of a newborn. I was ravenous…I felt strength returning to my rotted body!

Looking down as the naked man moved me from one nipple to the other, I discovered he was aroused. Somehow this didn’t strike me as troubling…whatever was happening to me began to feel natural. It’s like I’d done this before and had only forgotten the details.

The screams of the hooded turned to howls of animal agony as they moved closer…ever closer. I sucked at the tit of the fat man until it was empty of its sweet reward. The chanting hoods were so close; my arms brushed into their cloaks…and to my surprise, felt no occupying mass there. What were these things?

I looked into the face of the naked man and I took the last drop from him and it was clear to me what was to come next. He opened his mouth as if to speak but only teeth…my teeth dribbled from his lips like pieces of yellowed candy. My hand, as if guided by an unseen force, reached into his mouth and down his throat. Soon, my entire arm to my shoulder had entered the man. Inside of him, my hand clutched his heart…the howls of the hooded were deafening.

I squeezed.

Everything went black.

I wake up with vague memories. No matter, all that is important now is food. Kill the hunger. All thirty-five of my legs moved in unison as I go off to hunt in the dark cellar.