“The skin on your cheek, the mud collected in the sole of your shoe,” her Irish accent was so thick I could hardly tell where one word stopped and the next began. Despite this, because of the passionate scaffolding of her words, I understood exactly what she was saying. “There are microbiomes everywhere, tons and tons of living things we will never even see with the naked eye.” She paused, taking a look around the room with a kind smile on her face. “The microbiome of your gut is the most important part of the body.”
The microbiology lab was on the second floor of Central Campus’s Natural Sciences Building. The lab was split in two by a wall with a heavy metal door. One side had six lab tables, counters along the windowed wall, and an opposite wall of whiteboards. She stood in front of the whiteboards, drawing all sorts of things. Toilets. Flagella.
On the other side of the metal door was the biosafety level two room. There were fume hoods, frozen bacteria, and thousands of dollars worth of lab equipment. Professor Byrne studied the soil microbiomes of the college’s town. She had tenure.
“By next class I want you all to find a lab partner, and we’ll get to work on something very cool as soon as possible. I promise.” 11:30. We got up to leave.
“Well, she’s a hoot,” a girl said to me as we walked down the hallway together. She and I had sat next to each other at the same lab table.
“She seems nice,” I smiled at the girl and she nodded.
“I’m Sally.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Do you have class after this?”
“Yeah, and actually I think it’s a bit far. On North Campus.”
“Oh yeah, I had class there this morning. Someone told me it was a twenty minute walk from here but I took a shortcut through the woods and got there in half the time.” She grabbed a piece of paper out of her bag as she told me her tips.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I’ll see you on Wednesday.” She smiled, handing me the piece of paper. Her name neatly written, a school email address, and a note asking to be lab partners.
“See you,” I said.
August is always a month of humid heat. Sticky, slick, and sweaty. I was thankful for the path through the trees, for being able to stay in the shade. Like cooling hot metal in cold water.
The forest between North Campus and Central Campus was so dense with lush trees that it moved in the breeze like seaweed in a current. It was darker, too, like the trees formed an open umbrella over the forest floor. As I got closer, the trees seemed to move in more dramatic sways. Like they were dancers leaning over one another in a ballet where the music was sultry and smokey. A stage shadowed in black. Lingering smoke twisting around ankles and wrists.
There was an opening in the trees that appeared to me as the door into the woods. Students must have paved the little dirt path after years of short cuts. 11:37, class didn’t start until noon and I was hoping I’d have time to fill my water bottle once I got to North Campus. Sweaty palms. I’d always been one to run late.
As soon as I entered the woods a chill came over my body as if I had walked into mature Autumn. My lips, tugged up at the corners, spread in ecstasy because the humid world from before seemed like such a distant memory. The woods were quiet and so still I could barely hear the sound of my own feet pressing into the dirt. And with every silent step I took deeper into the woods I felt colder. A shiver that crawled up my body from the forest floor, through the top of my head, and up into the treetops where they seemed to shake just as I had began to. A feverish chill.
There was no sound. Nothing at all besides the slight ringing in my ears. Then, vomit. Vomit pouring out of my mouth like water from a tap. I heard nothing but ringing, felt nothing but an insane chill that brought a slippery sweat to my skin. What came out of me was seeping into the soil of the path like drops of rain into water.
Then, darkness.
I awoke to the sounds of birds singing within trees, and the rustle of their leaves as the wind passed through like a snake through reeds. I got up off the ground and brushed the dirt off my clothes and saw no vomit on the floor. 11:57. Cursing to myself in sharp whispers I began to run through the woods towards North Campus. I didn’t want to miss the first class of the first semester. And I did not want to think about what happened in the woods.
Somehow the sun felt hotter on my skin than it did before I entered the woods, and the sweat running down my body in tears felt like blood dripping from a wound. I pulled my t-shirt up from my waist to wipe the sweat away from my face and was surprised to see it soaked when I pulled it away.
I entered the building out of breath and the cool conditioned air shocked my system like an ice bath. I scrambled to find the lecture hall, room 103, which a series of plaques on the wall led me to. 12:02.
Seeing him there at the head of the lecture hall was like observing a rare oddity kept behind a case of glass and metal, sealed with solder and locked with a key. He was so enchanting that it seemed his natural state was one of innate performance, a show that constantly, and irrevocably, went on and on.
The only thing I could focus on was the way his black, curled, hair stuck plastered to the corners of his forehead by sweet sweat. The tension the fabric of his striped oxford shirt had against his upper arms as he brought his thick hands up and through that hair. His legs that stood strong against the floor as if this entire world were a block of stone and he was revealed from it chip by chip. Thin glasses slipped down the bridge of his broad nose and when he pushed them back up he cleared his thick, stubbled, throat before looking into my eyes.
Gawking. I had been standing at the room’s entrance in awe of him like a child to a gift wrapped in shiny foil. I walked a few feet to a row closer to the middle and sat in the open aisle seat. The students that had spared a glance at me returned their gaze to him.
“As I was saying,” his voice was like dark chocolate melted into the milk of the air. Smooth, rich, and bitter all at the same time. I wanted to drown in it’s decadence. “I have never taught in this room so please bare with me.” I felt a boyish smile on my lips. He wrote in such drafted handwriting on the chalkboard behind him. Each and every stroke an imagined caress.
“My name is Professor Grant,” he said as he wrote. “And this is Narrative Writing One.”
“The first thing you need to know about me is that I will know, through the work, whether or not you take this course seriously. And I will have you know that if you do not take this course seriously then you might as well leave right now and enroll in another.” He surveyed all of us in the chairs before him, a god over man. I could not take my eyes off Him.
“I do not say this to frighten you, I say it because what you create during your time here is heavily dependent on the care you put into it. I want for you to succeed, as do all of your professors, and too many times have I seen laziness kill potential with such swift and nimble stabs.”
Each syllable of every word contributed to my immediate attraction towards Him. I glanced around at my peers and thought every person in that room must have been as swooned as I was by His intensity and His heat. Yet no one looked as afflicted as I felt. He kept speaking but I barely heard the words because all I could focus on was the way His words felt inside my head. Like a pleasured pressure against an itch I could never reach. His eyes were like two inviting black holes, able to pull me inside of Him in totality and so fast. And His skin was like the finest fabric ever made, so woven and hairy. I wanted to know what He would feel like against my skin, the thought sent my head into a dizzying daze.
And all of a sudden I was cold again, and my skin was weeping with sweat. Honestly, the last fever I had was over three years ago. It was my sophomore year of high school and everyone in my home room came down with a 101 degree fever out of nowhere. One of the students died because she had a preexisting heart condition. I haven’t had one since.
And all of a sudden class was over and He was announcing the first assignment of the course.
“I’d like you all to write three full pages about any person, place, or thing that you desire. If you think you’re being crazy — I want you to push your limits and be crazier. It is due in one week. I’ll see you on Wednesday.” How could anyone resist writing about anything besides Him? It was a need.
My peers were flowing out of the room like ants out of their hill. It was just Him and I left in the lecture hall. He was standing behind the podium, writing in inky black on a sheet of paper with scrawled notes all over it.
“I’m sorry I was late,” He took his time looking up at me from the words on His paper. “I was feeling a little sick actually.”
“And now you’re well?” Sensations of pleasure and desire detonated across my body like mines in a field because His voice was as dark as a night sky filled with the brightest stars. As smooth as liquid smoke that twirls upwards into the air from a pile of lit logs. Hearing His voice was like being underwater while moonlight danced on the surface above, refracting light in such beautiful glimmering moments.
“Better.” Was all I could think to say, and then, “See you Wednesday.”
—
The sun set late that night and insomnia came at me in swirling spirals. There were moments where the room seemed hot and cold at the same time and my flesh felt like it was melting off my bones as they shook from the fever. I did not sleep yet I dreamed. And there He was.
Hanging, no perched, in the top corner of my room. His feet were on two adjacent walls, His hands pressed to the ceiling, and His clothes were tighter than they were before — emphasizing every hard edge of His arms, chest, and legs. And it was like I no longer existed as the man I was before but as the pure essence of craving. My body shook so violently, filled with nothing but want. The heat of it all sent sweat over my skin, and the red-hot coldness came from my inability to reach Him.
Siren’s songs must have been sung from the grin on His face that was as beautiful as fabric carved from marble. You want me don’t you? I heard the words from His lips every time I looked into His dark diamond cut eyes.
In the fever I rolled over and in the folds of the fabric of my blanket, my sheets, I saw His face contoured within the threads. His body too, as if He were draped in it and was so close to me. Primal arousal mixed with such intense fever became an orgasmic experience for me. Wishes of Him poured into my mind like water into a vase, and yearns danced off my tongue in a sickly smile.
—
During the following week, I spent my time working on the assignment for His class. Fever had infested my body as if I were a corpse ridden with hot and icy maggots. My nights were spent tossed, turned, and wet. He visited me every night. Sometimes He would be hanging on the wall, sometimes He would be sitting on the edge of my bed. My favorite times He would be held over me with His arms like table legs in the space above each of my shoulders. It was then that I became still, though I was unable to touch Him in the ways I needed to.
My skin had become washed out, my under-eyes sunken and charcoaled. Despite all of this I used any energy I had to do the work for His class. My story was three pages long.
A letter from follower to God. From me to Him.
—
“What do you mean?” Her voice was stained with quiet anger. I did not care. “We needed that work done to finish this lab.”
“I was working on other stuff,” I told her. “For other classes.”
“What other classes?”
“Narrative Writing.”
“Aren’t you a biology major?” She spoke to me differently then, as if she was asking out of genuine concern rather than anger at my lack of effort in our shared course.
“Yes,” I hesitated. “But it’s only our first year so… anything could change.” I shook in front of her, in the violent ways I sometimes did during the fever.
“Are you alright?” She placed a hand on my shoulder and I shoved her off. There was still an hour left of class. Ignoring Sally’s hushed questions I waited for the professor to turn her back towards me. I grabbed my bag and left the lab.
It was a simple truth. I had to see Him. Every single milliliter of blood in my veins pulsed with the intention of keeping my body alive so that my body would soon find His. It was what I was sustained for. It was what I had been born for.
Autumn had crept over the campus slow and contained. Yet as time went on, the forest between Central and North Campus became a flaming cloud of red, orange, and yellow against the eternally bleak sky. I had lost count of the days.
The familiar, flattened, feeling of the forest path felt muted by the soles of my shoes. I kicked off my shoes and shoved my socks inside of them, tying the laces around the strap of my backpack so they dangled off of me like silent bells. Skin to soil. Warmth to cold. Fever, fever, fever. Where was He?
And then I was laying on the forest floor. The sky was dark, the nearly full moon so high it was like a ceiling light — bright and white. And He was there, leaning against a nearby tree. His shirt was unbuttoned so that His chest was exposed as the painting that it was. Like brushstrokes of the finest oil paints created every single hair. His legs had grown stronger, about to burst the seams of His pants. His face was even more defined than it was before, he looked like a comic book drawing, an alien form of a man in the most erotic way.
“Stop laughing at me!” I called out to Him because his grin was like a scythe and I the wheat. He moved from the tree and where he had been leaning was worn down as if smoothed by eons of pressure and friction.
You want me to laugh at you.
He knows me.
You’re just dying to taste me, aren’t you? You want me so bad.
“I do.”
You don’t deserve me, you don’t deserve anything other than the pain of desire.
“Please,” please. Please, please, please.
You want to please me?
“Yes.” A million times. Yes.
And what if this pleases me?
“Then never stop.” And all of a sudden He was gone from the forest floor and dangling in the sky among the red, yellow, and orange leaves that floated around the air like a fog. My body shook and sweat so intensely that my eyes rolled back in my skull and I became a living fire of orgasmic release.
Visions of He and I, explosions of ecstasy and lust and heat overcame my body like a tidal wave taking me from shore. A surging, pulsating dark. Complete stillness.
—
Diluted bleach. Diluted bleach and something fungal. That is what I smelled when I woke up in the lab. How could it have been possible? Not minutes before I was in the middle of the woods, in the middle of Him and all of His delicious flavors, in the middle of a sudden night.
It was Wednesday when I met Him in the woods, yet the board said it was Friday.
I picked up my things and ran out of the room as fast as my feet would take me. It was Him. I had to see Him.
I walked into the woods with my eyes shut tight, hoping to make it all the way across so that I would see Him in the lecture hall. I didn’t even stop to take my shoes off even though the soles of my feet begged and pleaded that I did. But when I left the woods and opened my eyes the color and light from the sky had been replaced in full by the dark allure of night. The air was a few degrees colder and my skin was so wet with sweat I thought I felt it begin to freeze. I ran to the building, threw open the doors, and found the classroom. The lights were off, the room empty. I checked my watch, maybe he would still be in his office. I had to find the room number.
By the time I got to my dorm room I was running on so much adrenaline that I did not feel the pain that my body was in, it registered as strength. Papers flew off my desk as I tore through it’s drawers looking for his syllabus.
You want this? His words were in my mind as if they were my own thoughts. I looked to the bed, where He laid in my sheets so naked and so shiny. My mouth went dry as dead bone. My heart beat fast like a rolling drum.
Come to me.
“I-“
Come. He reached out His hand to me. His body seemed to grow larger as He lay splayed out on my bed like a gift, or an offering, set on display.
As I took one step towards Him, then another, He only became more and more impossible. His legs, like massive roots over the side of my bed. His arms, like giant columns of pure marbled muscle. His fingers, like large cables that I wanted to be strangled by. He must have grown to be eleven feet tall. I was weak at the sight of it.
Now.
I threw myself to Him but in an instant He was gone.
The cold air cut my face like tiny needles through the air as I whirred through campus on a bike stolen from the storage room of my building. I was wearing nothing but a pair of boxers and a grey t-shirt.
His office building was open and I walked as if I knew exactly where to go. His dark oak door was thick and had four panes of frosted glass on the top half. I tried the handle. Nothing. I looked around for a key. Nothing.
My shirt wrapped nice and tight around my hand. I tried to wrap a lot of it around my wrist to offer the most support, then I plunged my wrapped fist right into the pane of glass closest to the doorknob. Blood, warm and slick like sweat from the fever, began to cover my forearm in slow motion. My fingers slipped against the lock on the inside of the door but it opened on the second try.
Stacks of books, papers, even plants filled the office. The dark smelled, tasted, like Him in every way. I wanted to take it all in.
The lights flickered on and a voice came from behind me.
“What’re you doing here?” He sounded so concerned. He cared about me, the sentiment sent tears to the corners of my eyes. He stood next to the couch, which had a pillow on the left side and blankets laid on top of the cushions. There were empty mugs of coffee on a small stool next to the couch, His clothes sat in a heap on the floor.
Something about Him was different. Simpler. His eyes looked so awake, His mouth a tight line.
He was wearing flannel pajama pants that draped over His legs in the most alluring way, and the waistband of them hung low exposing the skin and hair below His navel and the hem of His shirt.
“I came because you called.” The room was silent besides the quiet drip of my blood onto the floor.
“Let me see that,” He walked towards me and took my bloody arm into His two hands, pushing some hair behind His ear to get a good look. Where our skin touched had felt white hot, a serious burn. I wanted to be covered in it.
There was a small porcelain sink to one side of the room next to a mini-fridge and a hotplate. My blood mixed into the water as He rinsed the wound clean.
We did not speak as He cleaned my wound but I didn’t need to talk because the connection we shared was a bond that transcended communication through words. He wanted to care for me, He wanted to give me comfort and all-
“You should go to the student health center.” His words broke my train of thought. He handed me a shirt, which I put on, and pants which felt warm against my skin.
“That looks bad.” He dropped his gaze to the bandaged wrapped hand.
“Why do you sleep here?” I asked, nodding to the couch made into a bed.
He looked at me, clicked His tongue, and raised His eyebrows with a little shake.
“My wife wants me to sleep here for now.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” my smile is hard to hide.
“Why did you come here?” He sat on the couch with His legs spread wide and His body relaxed as if drunk or high. When His head came back up, faced to me, the all too familiar grin and darkness to his eyes had returned.
Do you want me now?
The answer could not come out of my mouth before my body flew onto His and my hands took His head into them and our lips came together in a breathless urge.
His hands moved under my shirt like snakes through grass and I felt them growing larger. His tongue tasted like alcohol in my mouth but I wanted more of it. It felt like the entire dark universe was filling me and while I looked at its stars I saw his grin, felt his tenseness, and wanted nothing but to exist in that state until the drawing of my final breath.
There was no dividing line running through the creature of primal libido that we had become. No Him. No me. Just us and all of the pleasure, heat, and rush that we generated.
—
The white walls of the hospital room are bright with reflected morning light. Movement sent sharp pain through my limbs and when I looked down I saw that my wrist was now in a proper cast, my left leg too. There was a brace around my neck.
“You’re awake.” An elderly man stood up to my bedside.
“What is happening?” I looked around the room, tried to sit up and failed.
“Well, you broke into my office last night.” He exhaled long and patient. “We had a conversation and then all of a sudden you collapsed. Started to seize.” A chuckle came from the old man’s gut and his hand stroked his beard. "I’d never seen anything like it. Your body was shaking so hard your arm broke, your leg. You smiled the whole time.” Oh. It was Professor Grant who looked at me with pitying eyes.
And in the corner there He was. The form of the professor I had been familiar with up until now. He was naked and steaming in the corner of the room. His grin so devilish that it looked more inhuman than I had ever seen before, His eyes darker than the night sky. Complete and endless voids of black.
“What is happening?” A whimper came from within me. And in the corner He began to grow taller and taller. “Can you see Him?”
Professor Grant’s eyes followed mine and they lingered on the wall for so long that I thought he must have seen the tempting creature in front of us. So tall that He now crouched, squatted on His knees with His head pressed against the ceiling. His hands were the size of doors, His cock hanging between his legs like a hypnotic pendulum pushing me into some thing deeper than sleep.
“Is everything okay?” Professor Thorne looked at me with such sincerity that I was sure he thought I was insane and maybe I was. My eyelids felt so heavy but I kept them open to look at Him.
I tried to speak to Him but my voice had been stolen. He grew bigger and bigger, obscuring everything else from my view so that He was all that ever was. He was all that would ever be.
He is.
I am.
He is.
I am.
He is.
I am, I am, I am.