Too Pure

Time always seemed to run out so quickly. Once Celine hit her flow and built up that oh-so-important sense of rapport with her client, she would look up and see her manager raising their eyebrows at the clock overhead.

“I’m really sorry,” she said, “but we’ve come to the end of our session. You have all the numbers I mentioned, don’t you? Good. And remember that we’re o-”

“Celine.”

“-pen every night, starting at six. Please do call me back if you feel you m-”

“Celine; home time!”

“-ight need it.” Her jaw clenched and she made a clipped motion with her hand. “Alright, well please stay safe. I hope you have a good night. Bye!”

Stacey had already packed everything up and slipped into her coat. A single light remained on in the service, the only once necessary for Celine to return the phone. “Do we need to discuss boundaries again?”

“She was struggling. Her mum passed away in August and she doesn’t have any family left.”

“I don’t care about the gossip. As soon as that clock hits hometime, we need to be out of here. They don’t pay us overtime.” The woman was already trotting down the ramp to the car park, keys clinking together in her pocket. She always left Celine to lock up. “Are you sure you don’t want a lift, hun?”

“No, that’s okay,” Celine said, stifling a yawn. “It’s only a three-minute walk; it’d take longer than that to get in the car.”

“Alright.” The senior checked her watch as she leaned against the open door. “Just be careful, Celine, you know I worry about you. You’re too pure for this world.” Stacey had a way of talking that obscured the bounds between sarcasm and genuity. She confused Celine, at least.

The short honk as the car went by made the girl cringe; it was late and people were asleep. She waved nervously all the same. Cutting through the park as she had five nights a week for the last year and a half, she hastened. She’d witnessed a fight on the night of some football match not that long ago, and the memory of broken glass trampled into the pavement along with a bloody tooth still made her feel sick. The commute terrified her, but she still didn’t feel as though she could impose on Stacey. She’d be fine.

Until she wasn’t. She didn’t even hear the bigger woman coming. Seized by the collar at the back of her shirt, her toes lost grip on the earth beneath her as she choked like a hanging woman. “Wh-wha-ack!” Grasping at her throat, “Let go!” she screamed. Thrown up a few inches, the iron grip on her moved to hold both of her shoulders and she gasped. “I just want to go home!”

The woman tossed her hair back with a whip of her neck. Licking her lip in a flash as if adeptly applying a coat of gloss, her mouth split open in a gash wide and wet enough to contain Celine entirely. There was only the briefest moment to take in her pale skin, sharp with amber as streetlights cast thick shadows across her face in the same shade as her hair. The woman’s eyes, bestial with supernatural hunger, saw the smaller girl in front of her as she would a doughnut behind a counter.

Celine recognised the intention immediately, eyes widening, “No!” But the yell muffled somewhere behind sharp, pearlescent teeth. Saliva spewed across her features immediately and she felt some land upon her own tongue as she protested. Even struggling for her life, she spluttered with the indignation of tasting someone else’s spit, and that lapse made her arms buckle as she was shoved mercilessly to the back of the gullet. It undulated ahead of her in slow, greedy peristalsis, sealing up and opening again moments later like wet kisses, swallowed a hundred times as the woman struggled to ingest her whole.

The outside world, the traffic and the distant laughs of pubgoers, was gone. In their place, a heavy heartbeat that matched the rhythmic twitches of squishy walls. She felt the woman’s every breath in tight, suffocating swells that made meat creak and liquid slosh with messy displacement. One last hurdle and, when there was nowhere left to squirm, she curled naturally into a chamber she could only imagine in the pitch dark. The air hurt. It stank of vomit and cider and kebab-shop chips. Celine ran trembling fingers through the mucky pool she felt eddying and gurgling around her bum. It was rising. She flinched when she touched something solid, muscular and ribbed like a wall of surging worms.

“I can’t… this cant…” she panted desperately, stomach fumes making her choke, “l-let me out!” She huddled around her knees, tears running down her face. Liquid dribbled into her hair and down her neck, up her thighs. Everything stung like strangers had rasped their nails across her skin and left her raw. “I just want to help people!” The sounds barely registered as words when they filtered through despair, “Don’t do this to me!”

The world rocked with the cadence of relaxed footfalls. Celine wanted to lash out, to kick and scream and bite her way out of her gastric prison like an animal; but she was scared. She was scared of her surroundings, paralyzed; and that paralysis gave her predator ample time for a slow walk home. The real damage came once they settled on the sofa, and began a sleepy, half-arsed attempt at watching a film. As the mind slowed, the body frenzied.

A muffled, hazy belch that rippled out for far too long sucked breathable air away from Celine’s desperately gasping lungs. The chamber sealed tighter and the liquids rose to her breasts. They burned every soft inch of her flesh as she languished in agony. She lacked the breath to protest or force her limbs into motion. The only thing she had the energy to do was suffer, and she did that wonderfully. Liquefying meat slipped from her bones to congeal like a gory filling. Her stripped skeleton snapped with contractions and bellyrubs, marrow sucked into the nasty pool like everything else. Melted. Murdered.

“GuhwoOooUuurhp…” The predator smacked her lips, giving her stomach a light jiggle before switching off the tv and hauling herself to bed. While she slept, Celine poured into deeper recesses of her guts. The lengths of intestine were more than happy to accept the flood, diffusing weight from one heavy point beneath the ribs into a full abdominal dough.

Everything good in Celine was taken. She became padding on the belly that ended her, and the thighs that carried her away. She’d died in such torment that even her soul, in all its kindhearted perfection, repeated its fate in endless cycles, flashbacks of terror every time the woman passed wind.

The disgusting goopy mess that poured out of her devourer’s hefty bottom was the last anyone would ever see of the girl. The woman dug her claws into the lower curves of her buttocks and smiled sweetly into the mirror. “She was wonderful to me… hic~buurhp… why can’t they all be like that?”