The Incubus & The Single Mom - Chapter 1

Transcript

I am your secret shadow. I am your dark blessing. Your bed is the altar.

Your body is the price. Remember how it used to be. Remember the mornings you woke feeling like you hadn't slept at all.

Remember the long noonday stretch when you struggled to keep your eyes open. You were feeling out of breath at the top of the stairs and at the bottom of the stairs, gazing up, up, up. The day used to feel like one long climb, didn't it? It wasn't very fair, was it? Because you worked so hard.

You care so much. And no one was here to help you. You could have done nothing.

You could have left all these silly incantations in the past, like your sisters and your cousins. You could have resigned yourself to exhaustion. You could have bottled up your fears and despair and lived a life of quiet depression until you expired.

Imagine if you had. Imagine the long nights lying awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering if you'd done all you could, staring till the sun came up, sleepless and worrying away, curling up like a butterfly in reverse, your beauty buried alive by its own cocoon. You never planned to do this on your own.

When you were young and carefree, you swore you'd never wear a man's ring, never subject your body to the patriarchal American dream, barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen. You traveled. You made rash decisions and laughed about the stories they left you.

You kissed who you liked. You let the winds of chance and serendipity guide your career, if one could call it that. You did whatever the fuck you liked.

Unfortunate that you liked him so much. He was cool. He was smart.

Not smarter than you, but smart enough. Smart enough to get you in bed? No.

To be honest, his face and his hands, his chest and his smile were all it took to take you there. No, it was what he did afterward that had you falling. Poetry under blankets, soft kisses on your back, a firm hand on your neck, and surprises.

Blindfolds, secrets, wine on rooftops, and dirty videos of him moaning your name. Months swept by and you were living together, working together, building a life. Yes, you said yes when he gave you his ring.

Family? You weren't ready, till he held you one night and whispered in your ear, I want you to have my baby. You were in heat for months, and then, when you were so happy, barefoot, postpartum, washing baby bottles in the kitchen sink, he told you, I can't do this anymore.

Broke your heart, broke your home, never even kissed the baby goodbye. It was just surprise. So, you woke up every time she cried.

You took time off work for doctor visits and daycare interviews. You took videos, by yourself, of the beautiful thing you'd created, because no one was there to hold your phone, but you. Then you went a little mad.

All mothers do. You give a part of your life to this new life inside you, so it can be born. Then you dedicate half your life to it, so it can grow.

What does that leave you? Less than half a life to plan and prepare and fret over the other half, without sleep, without respite, without a warm body in your bed to say, I'll carry the load, when it gets too heavy, I'll carry you, honey. You were so angry at him, frightened of yourself, in love with your child, but drowning in it, drowning in love, in guilt.

You needed help. Your parents are gone, your family doesn't live here, and you didn't have the money for a nanny or the patience for her judgment, but you did have a soul. Witchcraft runs in your family.

Your mother denied it, your grandmother was delighted to show you, a painting of her grandmother and her grandmother's cookbook. Not so much a cookbook though, was it? You've always been a smart girl.

You availed yourself of other resources too, city documents, libraries, old bookstores with certain volumes behind the counters. You're a long way from drawing Wiccan circles in the sand when you were a teenager, hmm? A black night with no moon, a cup of menstrual blood, wolf's bane to keep the worst ones away, wet panties to put me on your scent, and three hairs, one from your head, one from your armpit, one from the lonely place between your legs, six candles, smoke, and a silent prayer your daughter would sleep through the night.

And do you know what was the strongest magic of all? Your desperation. You could have kneeled in your closet, face salty with tears, and summoned me through the wet cracks of your floor, because you needed me that badly.

And a soul in need is my favorite kind. I am of smoke and blood. Before you gave me a face, I arose from your pentagram with the heat of burning coals and spread over the bedroom ceiling like a night without stars.

You didn't really think it would work, but the absence of sleep turns human thoughts to wild fancies. And I am, after the fashion, a wild fancy. You crawled back on your elbows, mouth gaping, eyes wet and completely silent.

No measure of fear could break your motherly instinct to keep quiet while the baby sleeps. And still I poured from the pentagram, smoke without fire, heat without light, rising in a roiling pillar, spreading my tongues and tasting your world. The candles guttered, and I opened my thousand eyes.

Woman, what do you want, I asked. You asked me what I am. I am that I am.

I am your deliverer, woman. If you accept my terms. Or you can blow the candles out and pretend you never saw me, though I will forever linger at the corners of your eyes, your curious and captivating eyes.

I want you to look at me like that, always, fear and awe and your way out, your answer, your master. You had terms of your own. I do love a woman with a head for business.

I pulled myself off your ceiling and stood in your circle of menstrual blood and salt. The terms. You will feed me.

You will bind yourself to me in return for the vigor of youth. No night shall ever deliver less than a restful sleep, whether in eight hours or one. All exhaustion, all weakness, collected in a ledger, to be paid in full should you ever deprive me of my meal, all standard fare.

If you negotiated an addendum, your daughter would be protected, her life, her peace, sacrosanct. Not only in this world, but from the harm of things like me. And for performing this duty, I obtained a privilege few of my kind possess.

The terms agreed to, we bound ourselves together in the ritual of blood and milk. I carved my mark upon your heart while you held my smoky hand, and then I suckled at your breast, the milk that gives life. And then there, upon your bedroom floor, I took my first meal.

No man had been between your legs since your husband ran away, but what of it? You've been so tired, so sad, so preoccupied. Blood was the last thing on your mind, but no man can offer you what I can.

Let me drink from you, and I will restore you. Let me fill you with my power, and it's yours, all yours. Do nothing but give yourself to me, and you will have everything you've ever wanted.

Safety, security, serenity. Because I will never lie to you. Because I need you.

You are my sustenance. I do not exist in this world without your consent. Doesn't that make you feel powerful? Doesn't that make you wet? And all you need to do to keep me is let me bury my tongue in that perfect pussy of yours, and suck at your clitoris till your soul leaves your body, as if I didn't already have it in my pocket.

You weren't ready. You knew the price, knew how to pay it, but you were not prepared to be taken on the floor. The word yes had barely left your lips before smoke spread over your naked flesh.

Your fingers skated over skin of obsidian, muscles of dark water, as I laughed at the blood that trickled from the fissures in your skin, your breast permanently scarred by my sigil, mine forever. Your blouse was open, nipples sore, but the shorts had to go. I tore them as easily as you tear a candy wrapper.

I was eager. My bloody mouth attacked your cunt, and your fingers dug desperately into my scalp as the lightning arced through your body and the heat of me pulled sweat from your every pore. There are a variety of ways a mortal may lick a woman.

Reluctantly, passionately, naively, poorly. What my tongue did to you, does to you, is nothing so pedestrian. Imagine you are naked on a clear blue night, riding a horse across the desert sands.

Imagine the heat of the animal, wet and rippling, and all that power between your thighs. Imagine the sea in all its fury, and your pelvis is the continental shelf. Imagine there is sugar buried deep inside you, and I am a very stubborn hummingbird.

Even now you cannot return to the memory without reliving the shock. Do you feel me now? This is not the past, but the present.

My smoke swirls between your wriggling thighs, solid one moment and discarnate the next. But the more you claw at me, the more sounds bubble up from your helpless throat, the realer the dream becomes. I am become flesh, maker of worlds, obsidian to skin, smoke to hair, stone to muscle, and my thousand eyes, too.

I gaze up from between your legs, and I have his face. No, you say, not him. Who then? Who am I to be? As my fingers split your labia and curl inside you, beckoning, I am too many men to name.

Your first love, your silverscreen crush, a beautiful dream.