CW: Explicit sexual content, ambiguous sexual consent, blood/bodily fluids.

“Happy birthday, my love. You deserve this.”

Bruce lifted the blindfold and waited, counting the heartbeats, as my eyes acclimated to the harsh lighting. Above us, bare fluorescent bulbs flickered and sputtered in their aluminum housing, throwing strange shadows down across the mosaic of mismatched tiles. We faced a line of three sinks: rusted faucets, stained basins, a halo of black mold around each drain. And we waited, for a time, breathing in unison, studying our reflections in the shattered mirrors—a triptych of ruined portraits, each image distorted, fractured in its own unique way.

Bruce fit the collar around my throat and took me by the leash.

He guided me past the trash bin overflowing with beer bottles and used condoms, past the line of nonfunctioning urinals, to the stall in the farthest corner of the bathroom. There, he swung open the door with a dramatic flourish. The toilet was clogged with shit and unidentifiable organ meats. Just above the empty toilet paper dispenser, a hole had been carved into the steel divider.

“You didn’t.”

“I did.” He grinned. “This is it, my love. Your fantasy. It’s all been arranged. I picked the guys. Everyone has been vetted and STI screened. We’ve got someone guarding to the door to keep out any riffraff. Everything’s been taken care of. All you have to do it get on your knees in front of that hole and wait for the cocks to show up.”

“Bruce, this is too much,” I said. “It must have taken you forever to organize all this . . .”

He affixed the free end of my leash to a stainless steel eyelet mounted on the wall next to the glory hole. And he kissed me on the forehead one last time.

“Not another word,” he said, pausing at the threshold of my bathroom stall. “No more talking until I ask you to speak. Is that understood?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

The stall door slammed shut.

Silence.

The toilet was cracked but not yet shattered, suspended in that liminal space between intact and broken. While I waited for the men, I studied the cracks in the porcelain: an intricate pattern of hairline fractures spiderwebbing across the stained bowl.

“It doesn’t break all at once, you know.”

I could see his feet through the gap under the stall door; he was facing away. How did he know what I was looking at?

“The fracture lines begin at the weakest points, where the material is most fragile, and radiate outward.”

His voice seemed diffuse, somehow, as though it had become part of the ambient noise of the bathroom, like the buzzing of the fluorescent bulbs or the dripping of the faucets or the low moan of the machinery humming beneath the walls.

“In ancient China, diviners would etch their anxieties onto the scapula of a dead ox, toss the bone into a furnace, then scrutinize the geometry of the cracks for answers,” he said. “They sought divine wisdom in the way things shatter. Maybe in time, my love . . . Maybe you will too.”

His monologue was interrupted by knuckles rapping against the outside door. I watched his feet disappear from the gap beneath the stall door, listened to the echoes of his receding footsteps. Soon after, there was only the sound of the men: the outside door swinging on its rusted hinges; heavy boots trampling over linoleum; muffled voices whispering obscenities; bodies shuffling against one another as each man took his place in the queue.

I watched the first man position himself behind the ragged glory hole. He unbuttoned his silk shirt, offering a glimpse of chiseled abs before undoing the fly on his slacks and easing his erection over the waistband of his boxer briefs. His cock was divine: long and thick, circumcised, beautifully proportioned mushroom head, neatly trimmed pubic hair. I put it in my mouth, gagging slightly as I struggled to take him all in, forcing the tip of my nose down against the bristly surface of his mons. I could hear him groan through the toilet partition—a raw, primal sound. I held his full length in my throat for a few moments, tears welling up in my eyes, before drawing back and teasing his smooth glans with my tongue while I worked the length of his shaft with one hand. Beneath the man’s frantic breathing and the ambient noise of the bathroom, I could hear Bruce’s voice, echoing from the farthest recesses of the chamber, coming from every direction at once. This is all for you, my love. This is what you deserve . . . The man came in my mouth, warm and sweet-tasting semen sliding effortlessly down the back of my throat.

The next man to appear behind the glory hole was noticeably more disheveled. He wore a white, mustard-stained cotton t-shirt tucked into a pair of ill-fitting blue jeans. When he pulled his cock out it was shrivelled and flaccid, haloed by a mane of greasy black pubic hair. He tasted sour when I took him in my mouth.

When you were ten years old, you stole a candy bar from your neighbourhood convenience store. Do you remember this, my love? Your brother had just gotten home from the hospital—he was always such a sickly little thing, wasn’t he?—and you wanted to surprise him with a treat. You didn’t have any money of your own, of course, and you were afraid to ask your mother, afraid to endure yet another lecture about how tight things were around the household. So you stole it. You rode your bike to the corner store, propped it against the wall, scurried in behind some elderly man in a bowler hat who reeked of cigars and body odour. And you stole it, didn’t you, my love? You stuffed that candy bar into your cut-off shorts, made your way past the cashier, palms sweating, got on your bike, raced back home to your little brother. Remember how he smiled when you gave it to him?

The man was barely erect when he came—a pungent fluid that seemed to curdle in my mouth as I struggled to swallow it down.

This is all for you, my love. You deserve this.

The next man was sickly and emaciated. Through the ragged glory hole, I could see sharp hip bones protruding under his pale, friable skin. His pubic hair was patchy and sparse. Sores pockmarked the man’s penis and testicles, some scabbed over, others actively weeping a viscous yellow fluid that refracted the harsh fluorescent lighting and traced strange trajectories from his genitalia down to his ankles. The smell reminded me of the dumpster behind the meatpacking plant where I’d worked for a few days the summer of my first year of college, before I quit without notice and went vegan for the next few years.

Don’t speak unless spoken to, my love. Just stay on your knees and suck like a good little slut. This is all for you, my love. You deserve this.

I took the man in my mouth.

You cheated on your exams that last year of college, didn’t you, my love? Statistics never was your strong suit, so you hid a wad of folded-up notes in the bathroom stall and consulted those forbidden equations when you told the proctor you needed to shit, didn’t you? You barely scraped by with a passing grade, my love; surely you’d have flunked out if you weren’t a cheater. You’re a fraud, aren’t you? Your peers worked so hard to understand the subtleties of the Poisson distribution . . . But you—you took the easy way out.

I tried to keep as little of the man’s foul-tasting cock in my mouth as I could, delicately balancing his scabby glans between my pursed lips, stroking his shaft with both hands.

This is all for you, my love.

I pulled back as he came, letting it spill across my face and into my eyes. His semen was the same dirty yellowish colour as the pus that drained from his wounds.

You deserve this.

The next figure to appear behind the glory hole—garbed in rags and soiled linens—was vaguely human in form. This illusion was shattered, however, as soon it stripped away its clothing. The part of the figure’s abdomen that I could make out through the glory hole was broken up into irregular, interlocking segments, like the body of a millipede. The thing issued a low-pitched hiss as the sex organ unfurled and presented itself through the glory hole, countless cilia trembling across its uneven surface, viscous slime dripping from its barbed head.

Do you remember that night, at Ryan’s party, when I cabbed home early because I had a headache and you wanted to stay to have a few more drinks? You were the last to leave his house that night, weren’t you, my love? Remember how you lingered at the door with him, reminiscing about the old times? And when you hugged him goodbye—there was something unspoken between you two, wasn’t there? The way you held the embrace just a few heartbeats longer than you needed to . . . The way you let your hips press against his crotch . . . The way you rested your head against his neck, drank in his cologne . . . You didn’t kiss him, my love; I know this. You didn’t cross the line—not really. Nothing happened. At least that’s what you told yourself in the cab on the way home, isn’t it, my love? But something might have happened . . . You wanted something to happen, didn’t you? You wanted it to go further. Isn’t that what you thought about when you came home to me? Isn’t that what you were thinking about when you jerked yourself off in the bathroom before crawling into bed with me? Sure, you didn’t commit the act . . . But the intention was there, wasn’t it? The desire was there, wasn’t it?

The creature’s ovipositor pressed gently against my pursed lips. And at first I fought it, kept my jaw clenched. For a time, I allowed myself to entertain the delusion that I could opt out, leave the bathroom, reject this strange thing from entering my body.

It doesn’t break all at once, my love . . .

I closed my eyes, hands bracing against the toilet paper dispenser, counting the heartbeats. And, at last, I opened myself, let the ovipositor slide between my waiting lips. I could feel the creature’s pulse in its sex organ, membranes fluttering gently under the pressure of some unidentifiable fluids.

Millimetre by millimetre, it worked its way down my esophagus.

This is all for you, my love.

My eyes were watering. I wanted to vomit but couldn’t; each aborted spasm of my gut sent bile and stomach acid dribbling from the corners of my mouth. I could feel it pulsing inside me, depositing its eggs into the deepest recesses of my digestive tract.

You deserve this, my love. This is all for you.

Soon enough, the larvae would be ready to hatch.

I knew this.

They would be born hungry—we all are.

I knew this.

I knew the larvae would eat their way to freedom, slowly, saving the vital organs for last, preserving the meat as long as possible. I knew that the body doesn’t break all at once, but unwinds layer by layer, cell by cell, organ by organ. I knew that death, when it comes, does not come from some dark forest but from the moment of birth, lurking in the soft spots, the tender spots, where the tissues are most vulnerable, and radiates outward, spirals outward in fractal geometries, tracing the fault lines of our resolve, consuming us from within.

I knew this.

Bruce’s voice was everywhere: He spoke to me through the vibrations of the walls, the sputtering of the fluorescent bulbs, the dripping of the faucets.

Now, my love. Now. Now you may speak. Now it’s your turn to speak.

I groaned against the alien organ in my mouth, unable to form anything resembling normal human speech. It didn’t matter, of course: I only needed to think the words for Bruce to understand.

Thank you, thank you.

Thank you, my love.

Thank you for everything.

I deserve this.