dark am i, yet lovely, a lily among thorns, majestic as stars in procession

dark am i, yet lovely, a lily among thorns, majestic as stars in procession
WHY DESTROY YOURSELF? WHY DIE BEFORE YOUR TIME? THE KEEPERS OF THE HOUSE TREMBLE. DESIRE IS NO LONGER STIRRED. DO NOT CONFORM ANY LONGER TO THE PATTERN OF THIS WORLD.

Wednesday, 26 February 2025

Folded Away

I was on the 3rd hole, playing alone, when I prepared to take my next shot. My foot perched in something soggy, and next thing I know, I’m falling into a hole on the green. My legs went straight in, I gasped in shock. Where had this bog come from? What was it doing here?

I’m up to my neck in water. This secret puddle had caught me by surprise. Before you know it, I’m doggy-paddling for my life. WTF! It was then, in this surreptitious little hollow underneath the earth, that I realised that I wasn’t alone.

There was a woman in there, a strange alien woman with an over-wide smile. If not for the smile, I would have been scared. The fact that something existed in here was frightening. She had been born there and she lived there, a secluded hush-hush life form who had seen nothing but the 3rd hole lawn all of her existence. Age? Hard to say. I reckon about mid-twenties. But she wasn’t human, so I couldn’t approximate. A mermaid?

I climbed out, and pulled her out too. Her smile was so infectious, so endearing, that I fell in love with her instantly, at the drop of a hat. I put her on the back of my bike. We rode through the city blocks, sniffing their pheromones, showing her a different life, smelling street food and pollution and fountains. She talked to me in a language I understood perfectly, she said that she has always known that someone would come. She said that her name was Count Etna.

It was wonderful, with an alien in the city. Magical. But soon she started to suffer from dehydration, and I realised with dread to approaching raw fear that we’d journeyed too far away from her home. And people were staring.

A gang accosted me. They said that they were going to take my newfound bestie ‘up the arse’. They were from a clique named ‘The Stuff’, and they ran things around the neighbourhood. They were a violent and harmful and lethal mob. When one of them put their hands on my darling Count Etna, I grew a pair and started calling them all bullsh*tters.

“Youse are nothing but bullsh*tters! Leave us alone. Or do what you’ve got to do!”

My threats withered their composure. Stand up to bullies and they shrink. But the leader exposed his already-hard member and threatened to rape her. They’d narrowed us into a dark corner.

I stuffed Count Etna into my caddy bag. Her jelly-ish flesh fitted in with quite a struggle, but it was the only safety I could afford her. Then I held the bag close to my chest, and nutted the leader of the mob. As I ran away, I heard Etna squealing inside the bag. By the time I got back to the golf course, and to the bog where she belonged, she was stiff, like an old porno magazine. I tried peeling her limbs away from each other, she was such a delicately small bundle, so balmy and breakable, and it hurt her every time I touched.

“I’m not going to make it,” she said. “But thank you.”

I slipped her body back into the hole, weeping. Her family came up to claim her. They were crying too. But they were smiling like Etna had also.

                        © Zombie Publications 2025

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