Fae Food, by Amber Averay
My head throbs, and is so heavy now I can barely lift it. Or is it that my neck is just weak and can’t bear the weight of my skull any longer? I don’t know. My neck hurts, too. In fact, my whole body both burns with fire and is numb to sensation. I hate it. I love it. The pain assures me I’m still alive; the emptiness teases a relief that only death can bring, but won’t.
The stone at my back is cold, damp, my clothes quickly surrendering to mould and decay. Congealed blood soaks the ragged neckline of my shirt, sticks to my fevered flesh.
Drip, drip, drip.
Water plops against the mossy stone at my feet, chilling extremities that I think no longer have toes. I don’t care. The chains holding me to the wall stop me from falling, though my shoulders scream with agony. I like it. I want the pain to consume me til death tires of my pleas and comes to take me. To shut me up. To give me peace. To make everyone happy.
I can’t go home, if I was to escape. I don’t want to. I was never wanted. My earliest memory is being told, before my third birthday, that I was so fat and ugly and stupid I should have been drowned in a bucket at birth. That everyone hated me. That I was allowed to live through the generosity of people’s pity.
At two, that meant nothing. But the more you hear it throughout your life, the more the truth of it resonates. You become nothing but a receptacle for people’s bitterness, their hatred, their own emptiness; they fill you with their own inadequacies and insufficiencies until their problems are yours, and you believe you are the rightful owner. You are worthless. You are nothing.
It was those thoughts that got me here. I had to escape the family gathering, the pitying glances, the snide asides, the titters behind champagne glasses that breathed mockery into my lungs until they screamed for oxygen. So I slipped out, trusting the night’s shadows to conceal me, to hide me from everyone and just let me disappear.
But that wish became literal when I was pierced in the throat by something I never saw, a heavy darkness I’d never before experienced descended, and I was whisked away to this dank, miserable, hellish cellar that leaked water and grew moss and ate my clothes away as my soul screamed for release while my body strained to keep giving. Giving to HIM.
Feeding him is slowly killing me. He drinks from my veins, the pull of blood from my body to his mouth a phantom pain in limbs in which I’d long ago lost sensation. It leaves me dizzy, disoriented, desperate for death. Cold seeps into me, and just as I think I’m about to succumb he gives me broth, and water, and bread, and I revive enough to begin the healing process.
I still scream for death, beg him to come. But he ignores me. And I wonder, if this is my penance? My reward? For being nothing to everybody for so long, for being unwanted and hated and unneeded by anyone, now HE needs me to survive. HE requires my blood, my life, that he, himself, can live. He sees me, even if only as a source of sustenance. He needs me, more than I’ve ever been needed before.
Maybe death realises this. Maybe death wants me to know how it feels to be necessary for once.
Maybe this is not just for him, maybe this is for me, too…
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