Effigy
by R.L. Summerling
Meat Man, Meat Man.
The madrigal of children’s voices taunt him so. They throw back their heads and screech into the cloisters, teeth bared, capped in alternating silver and gold that glint in shafts of dust-filled light. There, pinioned under the bowers of crumbling stone, in this sepulchral cell, his heart is on fire, pierced with the tips of seven silver swords. Weeping sores stain the hessian mat he lays on. Inky diarrhoea streams from between his legs. Meat Man is coming apart.
The children are the only witness to his decay. They gawk at him (eyes lidless and threaded with tiny onyx veins) until they can no longer bear it; the sickness overwhelms them in a way neither natural nor holy. No paving stone is left ungilded by their vomit, a sea of lapidary: diamonds and opals and rubies strewn across the cathedral floor. Meat Man’s existence is anathema to everything the children have been taught about the world.
Meat Man wonders if the children are not in fact ghosts already. Their skin is death-touched; porcelain, glazed and shimmering like pearl. His own flesh (limbs roughly hewn and sutured in haste) is turning blue-black, rotting under his barbed-wired gown. His mottled skin sloughs off him like angel’s wings. Memories, too, are patchwork. Where they come from he does not know. Meat Man has visions of flames.. Of rubble and crushed metal. Of chemical spillage.
His thoughts are sticky, painful to pass. Breath after breath sucked from perforated lungs. Hunger gnaws at him with a constant urgency. He suckles on his feeding tube (encrusted with slop and spittle) until he can take no more and barks out a wet cough. Little jewels of blood spatter one child’s white stockings. Its face turns crimson. Where are their sumptuous mothers now? Not here to protect these little cherubims. Instead they fly like whirlwinds in diaphanous dresses through bars and clubs and music halls with miniscule cocktails in silk gloved hands, the carcasses of dead white birds pinned to their foreheads.
Sometimes strange sensations take hold of him. A feeling of being rocked back and forth gently on the waves. Meat Man is certain he has never seen the sea. But maybe his arm has. Or his leg. Maybe his feet belonged to a sailor who voyaged over an endless ocean. Maybe his torso had submitted to the caresses of beautiful men, whose hands wandered down his chest and over his belly to that delicate place between his legs, that place where now there is only a nest of scars in midnight blue.
The children press their heads together (adorned with curls perfumed with myrrh and ice) and devise their next torture. One by one they take turns to pluck a fold of skin (coated in scales of plaque) and tease it from his body. How far will it stretch before it tears? They even strain to reach the skin on his pus-filled, nailless toes. The need to pick and pull and peel back his rind is compelling; pain is still a novelty to the children. They shake him like a loose tooth which they will miss when it is gone.
Meat Man puts his arm stumps to his ear holes and starts to weep. He blabbers; he gurns. And the more he cries, the louder they laugh. Because they do not understand. It is not himself he cries for, but them. Bound together, he and they, abandoned in this sombre world of stone. For though they do not have the words to express it, through the repulsion there is also love.
At night, when the sky is ablaze and the children drift off on clouds of amber and ash, they are condemned to inhabit his world. That unforgiving realm where flesh is torn to reveal sinews and ribbons of yellowing fat. And when they die in the world of Meat, they will die backwards. Their eyes will unfurl and their hearts, those vestiges of far-flung stardust, will begin to beat the relentless ictus of life.
Then they will understand.
R.L. Summerling is a writer from South East London. In her free time, she enjoys befriending crows in Nunhead Cemetery. She has stories in Maudlin House, Seize The Press, Interzone, Northern Gravy, and more. You can find her at rlsummerling.com and on Twitter, Instagram and Bluesky as @RLSummerling.
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