Peter
It was Reformation Day.
The heathen neighborhood children were running around, dressed as the devil’s own ilk, begging candy to rot their ill-fated teeth, like shoulder demons whispering sweet nothings into my ear.
I shook off the thought. I was better than that.
Those pretty little promises of sin and vice did not sway me. I knew from whom they came, and I had no desire to toddle into the eternal lake of fire. I straightened my shoulders against the autumn breeze, trying not to look at the children, as I continued my walk through the city center.
A tragedy.
Did their parents not know? Did they think it was a game? Something that could be forgiven, wiped clean later, in those hallowed little rooms, under a priest’s Latin drone?
No. Not even Latin anymore. Frustration, warm and sticky, simmered in my joints. I clenched my fists, hoping to break the calcified resentment from my fingers, as I pulled my jacket tighter across my chest. No one took salvation seriously anymore, not even the Church. They had gutted themselves, eviscerated their fundamentals, with Vatican II.
A group of children fluttered around me, engulfing me for a moment – or two? Or an eternity? – their cheap black capes and pumpkin buckets jittery and waving with their own over-sugared movements.
One of them stopped and looked back over his shoulder. Short tufts of golden hair stuck out from behind a red, horned mask. “Boo!” he screeched, before running off to rejoin his friends.
I watched the group disappear into the darkness outside of the yellow glow of sodium lights. The moment lasted too long. If I were a weaker man, that gaudy reminder of everything that waited for those who led evil lives, would have shaken me.
But I was not a weaker man.
I knew, knew. The truth was etched on the fabric of my soul. Evil was all around us, grasping and swirling like those cold reaching fingers from the river of death. I needed to remain steadfast to resist.
I took a deep breath. The bell on the door jingled as I pulled it open, and the adjacent neon sign reading Leo X’s, spit and hummed.
“Hello, Peter.” Her voice was like butterscotch, dripping on the air currents inside the coffee shop. There was a lilt of an accent I never asked about, because the sound of it was like sweet burning sulfur, insidious like a tempting eddy.
I stood up straighter as I walked to the counter. She was wearing an orange apron. A fine dusting of flour dulled the color from the middle of her torso down, below her breasts and over the slight swell of her belly. I watched her lips curl into a ghost of a smile, as she tucked an errant strand of her red hair behind her ear.
I was not a weaker man. “Hello, Leona.”
Leona
I loved when Peter came into the shop. He was so fun to tease.
I turned around to the back counter, under the guise of rearranging the stack of coffee cups. I undid one additional button on my shirt. The effect wouldn’t be obscene, because of the apron, but I liked to show him just a little extra cleavage.
I liked to watch him struggle to keep his eyes on my face. One could almost watch that beautiful internal argument inside his achingly pious head, could almost watch the nervous glance, quicker than a blink, onto my bare skin displayed for him.
I licked my lips. This game had been going on for months, and I liked the challenge of him. Now that I was older, I found that I enjoyed the slow burn of a man’s descent.
Metastopheles meowed softly from his perch on top of the pastry case next to me, and I scratched behind his ears. He began to purr, and I watched Peter’s eyes track to the small black cat.
“Can I tempt you with an indulgence today, Peter?”
His skin flushed, and I could see the air molecules around him dance with the added heat.
My smile widened. He would break, eventually.
They all broke eventually.
This one, though, he would be a feast for the centuries. The ones that thought they were good and moral always tasted the best, because they were the ones with the creeping darkness of unfulfilled desire scraping along their internal meridians. The worst lie is the lie you tell yourself.
And he was a true believer in that rotting lie; it seasoned his muscles, simmered his cartilage from the inside out.
My mouth watered at the thought of that delicious deceit.
I would suck the marrow from the bones of his soul, and it would be perfect. It would be a satisfaction I had not known since the day that German preacher posted his theses on the doors to the church. I knew the thought was dilating my pupils and hardening my nipples, and I bowed my spine to push a little bit closer to him.
He coughed and tried to avert his gaze. He didn’t succeed. “Just black coffee, thank you.” His voice held the anxiety of a man standing on the precipice.
He knew that the black water below hid the jagged rocks, like claws sharpened through eons of agonizing arousal.
He thought he knew.
One day, I would show him. One day, I would take his hand, and we would dive into the oily depths together, and I would eat until I had my fill.
I pouted, a minor flirt. “One day I’ll get you to indulge.” I nodded toward the pastries, as if that were the only thing I were talking about. I reached around the back of me for one of those coffee cups, the porcelain warming from my touch.
If I were honest – and well, God knows I wasn’t – I would admit that the coffee shop had been one of my better ideas. Selling little punny pleasures of sugar and caffeine was like a slow drip of sustenance, it was almost too easy to stay alive. It wasn’t like in the old days, drawing men off the darkened path with the promise of a wild ride. Those were meals, but they were work.
And I wasn’t as patient as I was today.
I was young and eager, too eager just to live and eat. Too excited for my new corporeal form, shaped from torturous thoughts of everything wanted and denied. I could still remember that gnawing hunger that I had felt, like a hole that would never be filled.
Those times had been feast and famine, fed by the scisms of the flock and their cloying hopelessness. Humanity had always been stronger as a group, and every split created a fissure for the manifestations of hell to slither inside. That had been what sustained me through those first starving years. I had been too new, too freshly conceived, to know any alternative. It was nothing like today. The individualism of the new world, coupled with the crumbling statutes of faith, made it too easy for things like me to thrive. Today, people walked in of their own free will, and happily paid me for indulgences, although the papal pun was lost on too many.
It wasn’t lost on him, though.
I poured coffee into the mug, privately wondering why he kept coming in here. Peter had to know; I barely made a secret of it.
Why did he keep doing this to himself?
I pushed the thought away, remembering that I didn’t care. Self-flagellation only served to tenderize the meat.
He took his coffee in exchange for money and went to sit in one of the corner couches.
One day.
Photo by Melanie Picazo on Unsplash