Almsworth-worm - Normal Person Do Not Read My Mind.

the way ppl have designated cuddling as a purely romantic thing and is weird outside of that context has done widespread damage to our pack animal nature

Her nails were the first thing that was taken away.

The woman in front of her stands, holding her head between her hands, whispering soothing words. Promising it won’t hurt very much at all.

Her knife reaches out again

Her skin falls away from her, revealing layers of fat which follow in turn. Her muscles part, and are quickly and precisely removed. Organs are cut out, excised one by one so as to avoid making a mess or disturbing the ongoing work. Veins and arteries are removed with impossible cleanliness.

She doesn’t want to stain anything, after all.

Bones and eyes remain, so are taken as well.

She can’t avoid making a bit of a mess with this bit.

Splinters of bone fall to the floor. Her skull cracks, splits, shatters. She is removed, then her brain is tossed aside.

Then, from a place where she sees and feels yet cannot act, she watches as her miss truly begins her work.

Steel is melted, poured into molds, beaten out on an anvil, and formed into a beautiful new skeleton for her. Her miss works with ceramics to make her cold new skin. She works with bronze and brass and precious metals to build her lovely joints.

She spends weeks crafting new eyes for her doll.

When she wakes up, after months of watching the affection of her miss pour into her new body, she moves quickly, sure of her purpose.

She embraces her miss.

KIsses her with porcelain lips.

And offers a response months in the making:

‘Thank you.’

‘May I have your name?’ I enquire.

‘                 '

It rings hollow. It disgusts me. It is a lie, and there is nothing we detest more than lies.

But it proves that he is a fool. So I demand more.

‘May I have your assistance?’

‘Of course. Anything you want me to do.’

So his fate is sealed.

I ask him back to mine. To tidy up and arrange the place. To help in my work. Of course, he is inept at first. He was not raised to place flowers in vases, or use a broom, or organise a library.

So I make him adept. For each of his failures - each mote of dust out of place, every fallen petal in the garden, all the slight imperfections - I change him. He is the first thing to go. The mind follows shortly after, with the body trailing behind.

She is now hollower than ever, yet no longer hollow at all. She is adept, her porcelain fingers better at the housework than ever, her new shiny joints no longer complaining from long hours working in the garden, her unblinking eyes finding every little detail to correct and make proper.

Her new voice, light and musical, no longer elicits such disgust in me, for it cannot tell the same lies that the old voice, so coarse and grating, could.

After a certain amount of time, which I do not care to describe for time means little to us, she tells me this:

‘I’m happy, miss.’

The hooks push through her hands as she hangs there, motionless, swinging limply from the chains that connect her body to the ceiling.

It’s cold.

It’s dark.

It’s lonely.

Two sharp thumps can be heard as the door in front of her is unlocked. A harsh scraping noise emanates as it is pulled aside, struggling against the ice that conspires to hold it shut.

Her butcher stands, framed by the light from the doorway. As she waits there, taking in the sight before her, glimmering crystals of frost formed from her breath appear, then fall, then vanish.

Her butcher cuts her down, leaving behind a few vestigial bits of flesh. The ones with five fingers and palms and all those useless scraps.

Her legs fail to support her, buckling as she collapses towards the ground.

Her butcher catches her.

Holds her.

Changes her grip.

Carries her out of the room.

And then she is carved apart.

She is asphyxiated by smoke. She is dehydrated and left to dry on racks. She is minced and placed in neat little shells. She is burnt. She is chilled. She is preserved.

Under the watchful eyes of her lovely butcher, she is irrevocably divided and forever changed. Under her care she is given purpose and made to look perfect.

In the end, when all is said and done, it is the caring teeth of her butcher that sink into her. It is her tongue that tastes her. It is down her gullet that she is swallowed.

Her butcher appreciates her, savours her, values her.

Her butcher consumes her.

She invited him in, of course. He asked for her help, and this is one indulgence her boss allows her. Where people are nice and polite - all too rarely she must admit - she can help them if he deems her methods fit. Sometimes they dine at the small table in the kitchen with her. Usually, they are unsettled enough by both the house and her way of acting that they make excuses, and borrow a room for a few nights while she helps in whatever way she can.

It rewards good manners, and the supply of unmissed blood and bodies it gives her boss is a bonus.

There’s a third kind of person, she thinks. Someone who can put up a facade well enough to appear polite, but not enough self control to keep acting in the proper manner.

This man, for she will not grant him the perceived innocence the word ‘boy’ would bring, talks to her. He tells her he needs their help to eradicate evil from this world. Surely the owner of such a large building could spare some funds to ensure that the deviants and monsters and unnatural abominations are kept far from polite society. Surely he, her boss, - for no woman could have a role in the ownership of this beautiful structure - is a man of god, and wishes to uphold his holy words. He recites some scripture, bits she recognises from her time as a mortal in the 80s.

For the first time in a while, she thinks back to those years. She remembers some of the boys and girls and in-betweens and boths and neithers and more she used to know and hang around with when off work. She remembers some of the posters and slogans and verses that said the same things as this man. She remembers seeing it on TV, hearing it yelled at her on the street, reading it on the front page of the papers.

There were people who taught her about herself, who made her realise the things she felt and the things she most definitely didn’t feel, then held her as she cried and made her see that none of this made her any less human, any less worthy of being alive.

She remembers how some of these people cracked under the near-constant pressure. Some of them moved across the country. Some of them found twisted ideals to believe in. A couple paid lump sums to a programme that promised to make them normal, to make them normal and banal and regular at the same time and as soon as possible.

She never saw any of those people again.

Now, stuck in this room with a man full of nothing but hate and false pretenses and bad manners, she feels lonely. If there is a god, he abandoned her at birth and at her rebirth in a basement in Bath. There are indeed monsters and abominations in this world and she is one of them, but this is not because of who she is, it is because of what she is - Kindred. She will never again have that community or that love.

Now she feels angry.

She asks if he will join her in her room. She knows how he will see this, and she knows he will take the bait, and she knows she can make a mess there with no repercussions.

She could never make him hurt enough. How much hurt was doled out on the people she loved by ignorant fools like him? How much hurt was doled out not just to them but to people like them and like her?

He has been a bad guest.

He has been so much else, but this is the very last straw.

The screams last for hours.

The pain lasts for days.

The stains last for weeks.

When she meets her boss downstairs the next evening, he seems proud of her.

timeloop this timeloop that. you people are sooo repetitive similar to something else i’m aware of

you knock on my door and hear loud barking and scrambling noises and me yelling "no!! down boy!! down!!!" and then when i open the door there is a single crab on the floor

i should figure out how to homebrew white monster actually