Unnamed Gore #1

“The distant burning hearts of a million suns long for your crimson flesh, you know.”

Her lifeless eyes could not appreciate the poetry. It wasn’t especially good anyways - it was markedly deranged, unquestionably a symptom of his delusion and newfound insanity. He was talking to the half of her that remained, the top half, sitting up in the dining chair opposite him, across the table where they’d shared so many family meals before. Obviously, things were different now. Macy wasn’t alive anymore, and Sarabelle, their daughter, had been missing for two months.

It made one wonder; two months, she’d been gone, and that was enough to drive her father down the rabbit hole, too far to be pulled back by even the best therapy. She wasn’t college aged, barely a high school freshman, but what if she had been leaving home? Would knowing she left of her own volition, as certain as any parent could be that their child was safe - would that have sent him over the edge too? Perhaps Macy’s fate was sealed when she got pregnant, or perhaps it goes back further than that, perhaps her destiny was set in stone when she met Phil at a car swap in her young adulthood, or when her father got her into repairing old muscle cars to flip. Perhaps, somewhere along her ancestry, one of her forebears made a choice that killed Macy. That, or she was just unlucky, and too stricken by grief to see Phil come unhinged.

It started with an insatiable sex drive. An unusual presentation, any psychiatrist would say. Macy was in no mood to put out, she was anticipating having to grieve her child. Phil got it elsewhere, and often. His work as a mechanic was interrupted by great lust. Lust turned to greed, a feeling that more had to be had, and greed to wrath, that more and more was required, by any means necessary. Even in her final moments, Macy was spared this undignifying knowledge. Phil didn’t want to hurt her. He wanted to become her. Wrath had turned to gluttony. When there was no more satisfaction to be had from women, and near the end, some men, he had to get in them, as though he were wearing their skin. He wasn’t literally skinning them into suits, but he was taking them inside of him, and turning them into a part of him. He sought victims, and absorbed them. 

He hadn’t intended to kill, dismember, and consume his wife. But one day she found the strength to get out of bed, and the desire for normalcy was so strong that she went to the garage, to the freezer, to get something to make a family dinner, because maybe that was all it would take to bring Sarabelle home. She opened the lid and saw a dead woman, and she screamed. Phil heard it. He heard where it came from. He connected the dots. He took the fire extinguisher from the kitchen cabinet and clubbed her in the back of the head with it. She went down like a stone in water. Then he took her legs and roasted them, and gave her a facsimile of the dinner she had envisioned. 

And then the doorbell rang. The dining room table was in the front of the house, next to the door, but separated by a half wall that obscured the view of the foot of the table. Nobody on the outside could look past Phil to see Macy, but all Phil had to do was look to his left. He felt safe in his delusion to open the door wide, smiling, not a care in the world, until his eyes slid down to see his daughter looking up at him.

“Daddy,” she choked through tears, “I made some really bad choices.” She buried her head in his chest. Despite everything, his arms wrapped around her instinctively. 

“That’s alright sweetie,” he said, in disbelief. A part of him, deep inside the meat, where one could argue his soul would’ve been, wanted to scream, and cry, and celebrate the return of his child, and kill himself over the terrible things he’d done. But he was too far down the rabbit hole now. The man in control of Phil couldn’t appreciate his daughter, only her body. He got down on his knees and took her face in his hands. Tears streamed from his eyes - not tears of joy, nor tears of sadness. They were the same tears of a starving man being given food, of a thirsting man being shown an oasis. 

“Sweetie,” he said, smiling, bursting with anticipation, “who else knows you’re here?”