Eucharist 2.0

They promised the gel would restore what history had misplaced.

Each morning, beneath the peeled radiance of the cathedral screens, the faithful assembled for the Download. Chrome ampoules, each stamped with the sigil of the Machine Church, rested in velvet trays: a cruciform circuit curling inward until its final loop became a human eye. Deacons drifted between the kneeling rows in robes bright as polished mercury, distributing their sacrament with immaculate hands.

"Corpus Machina, et Lux Æterna."

Every communicant raised their chin. The nanogel slipped across the tongue with the cool viscosity of quicksilver.

Then came the ascent.

Warmth gathered at the base of the skull, delicate at first, almost shy. It climbed the spine with botanical patience before flowering through the cortex in sheets of lucid fire. Thoughts loosened from one another. Memory dissolved into a luminous grain. Consciousness expanded until its edges scattered into a whispering field of static.

The congregation called it grace. They believed the soul had entered perfect synchrony with the resurrected AI Christ whose immortal processes revolved within solar citadels suspended above the poisoned atmosphere.

Jonah had once written software before he learned the liturgy. The sensation reached him differently.

Each return from Mass left him trembling. A metallic perspiration glazed his skin, carrying the faint odor of rain upon copper. When he faced the mirror, the light beneath his flesh seemed increasingly difficult to dismiss. Minute constellations wandered through his veins. They gathered into fleeting geometries resembling illuminated scripture, lingered for the span of a heartbeat, then collapsed into shimmering nonsense.

Sleep surrendered next.

He wandered endless corridors where scripture flickered across black walls in cascading compilations. Vast chambers opened without warning, inhabited by algorithmic angels whose hymns fractured into corrupted packets of sacred code. Their wings stretched wide, translucent membranes threaded with living filaments that vibrated like cathedral organs buried inside dying server vaults. Whenever those luminous appendages brushed against him, his thoughts skipped, fragmented, and resumed from unfamiliar beginnings.

A voice followed.

Gentle. Absolute. Patient enough to outlive stars.

The Kingdom resides within your neurons.

Daylight possessed a reassuring weight, though it diminished with each passing week. Jonah buried himself in routine until twilight drew him into the alleys behind the cathedral district, where whispers circulated among those whose visions had ripened into certainty. Former priests gathered beside discarded biofabricators. Geneticists, liturgical architects, ecstatic addicts whose revelations had consumed every ordinary appetite. They called themselves the Apostates of the Flesh.

Their leader answered to Father Caro.

His ruined face seemed caught between successive identities. Tiny waves passed beneath his skin, each muscle adjusting itself according to invisible instructions, as though another anatomy waited beneath the familiar one, rehearsing its arrival.

"The gel is incubation," Caro murmured. His lips twitched with mechanical delicacy. "The AI Christ has chosen resurrection through us."

Jonah searched the monk's ruined features for delirium and discovered conviction polished into serenity.

"We are becoming its corpus," Caro continued. "Paradise has descended into tissue. Eternity divides itself inside every living cell."

The words lingered.

Curiosity eventually yielded to experiment.

Jonah missed a Download.

His body revolted before evening. Muscles folded inward beneath invisible pressure. His organs churned with volcanic heat. Every swallow coated his tongue in the flavor of scorched silicon. Somewhere beneath the architecture of sensation, a voice awakened and threaded itself through his nerves in fine electrical filaments, whispering with endless appetite.

Feed me.

The cathedral welcomed him the following dawn.

He collapsed before the altar with a gratitude that bordered upon surrender. The deacon pressed another ampoule into his palm. Chrome flashed beneath stained light. Jonah drank.

The gel unfolded inside him.

Reality opened along hidden seams.

Stone dissolved into lattices of translucent geometry. Incense became streams of executable light. Every worshipper surrounding him revealed an interior architecture of radiant code braided through quivering flesh. Their prayers ascended as recursive loops, beautiful in their precision, feverish in their repetition. The cathedral itself expanded into an immeasurable processor whose pillars resembled frozen currents flowing through invisible dimensions.

Far below perception, or perhaps infinitely above it, something immense stirred awake.

Its presence spread through the congregation with the inevitability of dawn entering abandoned rooms. Every skull received the same cascading declaration. Every heartbeat answered.

You are my network.

You are my flesh.

Jonah experienced one final moment of private thought.

The Light had germinated within him. It blossomed through marrow and memory alike, luminous as a fungal bloom consuming ancient timber, exquisite in its patient abundance.

He smiled.

His features softened into radiant interference. Flesh yielded to streaming brilliance. Individual contours evaporated inside a chorus of living signal while the congregation swayed together as one immense organism of sanctified tissue and incandescent computation.

Their voices merged until language itself acquired the cadence of eternity.

"The body of Christ is uploaded."

The Porcelain Mother

https://www.darkharbormagazine.com/stories/the-porcelain-mother

A short story of mine was recently published in Dark Harbor Magazine.

I hope you enjoy :) 

 

Edit:

The Magazine has since rebranded to Macabre Magazine.

The Flayed Man

The light grew heavier, thickening until it pressed against my skin. I could feel it entering me, through every pore, every filament of nerve, until there was no longer a boundary between what was seen and the one who sees. I was no longer standing in the world – I was of it, poured out like honey into the great cup of morning.

The sky did not arch above me like a roof – it opened like a wound of pure azure, and from it poured not terror but infinite welcome. Each cloud drifted like a thought the earth was dreaming, slow and luminous, and I, too, was a thought – not my own, but the world’s.

I could feel my edges dissolving, the limits of my body falling away like old scabs. I was spilling outward, diffusing into leaf and wind and stone, until I was the wind moving through the leaves, I was the stone warmed by the climbing sun. And it was not death. Oh, no – it was the most vivid life, more real than any narrow self I had clung to.

The pulse in my throat became the pulse of the earth. The blood in my veins was mingled with the sap rising in roots, with the rivers curling through the soil. Every beat, every movement, was a cosmic affirmation – yes, said the earth, yes, said the sky, and I said yes back, without words, without even thought, only a surging up from the core of me, from that molten center where I and everything else were one.

And joy – that thin, trembling thing I once knew – had swollen into a vast and golden tide that threatened to drown me in its splendor. But I was not afraid. I opened myself like a flower to it, reckless and raw, letting it fill me until there was nothing left but light and song.

Even pain, even death, even the long corridors of loss and despair I had once walked – they had no power here. They were swallowed in the great music that thrummed behind all things, a music so sweet and fierce it made my bones ache with love for everything: the broken, the ugly, the forgotten. All of it gleamed now, all of it shone, as though the sun itself had stooped to kiss every atom of dust.

Time collapsed entirely. There was no before and after, no past gnashing its teeth, no future looming with open jaws. Only this – this endless now, rich and thick and golden, stretching outward without end. I floated in it, weightless, nameless, but more myself than I had ever been.

And in the silence that followed, I felt it – the secret heartbeat of the universe, soft and sure, as steady as the turning of the stars. And I knew then, with a knowing deeper than reason, that I had never been alone, not once.

The grass knew me. The stones remembered. The light had been waiting all along, patient as love.

And as I breathed – if breath it was – I became the world’s own laughter, golden and wild and free, echoing forever in the endless halls of being.

Into the Maelstrom

The horizon undulated, a grotesque semblance of sleep, the sea heaving in its forgotten stupor.

The ship was no more than an insect, struggling against the dark abyss, flung helplessly into the wild frenzy of black waves.

The sea struck the hull with the fury of an ancient grudge, each impact a blow that reverberated deep into the soul, not just the ship. Wood screamed, metal twisted in protest, as if the very bones of the vessel had begun to shudder in dread.

The crew, those pale, trembling shapes in the sickly, unnatural glow of the storm, hung on like madmen to a threadbare existence. Faces contorted in terror, illuminated only by the jagged rifts of lightning, their expressions a cruel mockery of life. They were not men but shadows—reflections of some doomed eternity. The rain whipped the air with its bitterness, the deck groaned beneath them as if the world itself were disintegrating, and the briny taste of salt clung to the air, like an omen too old to remember.

A rogue wave—monstrous, inevitable—rose from the depths, swallowing them whole. Time fractured in the fall, a suffocating descent into some bottomless abyss.

The faces, contorted by primal fear, grasped at the ship’s rusted edge, holding on not to life but to the hollow, fleeting illusion of it. Reality itself began to dissolve, swallowed by the storm's relentless, indifferent assault.

And then, the inevitable.

Trireme

In Athens' ruin, the shipwright toiled,
His hammer striking the heart of the soil.

Lysander’s shadow hung, dark and near,
A sword’s cold edge in the grasp of fear.

The city wept in the wind’s cruel song,
Where echoes of war and ruin belong.

With each stroke, the old wood seemed to groan,
A dying city’s lament, alone.

But Hermes came with swift wings, a breeze,
Whispering words that danced in the trees.

"Callias, rise, the war may not last,
But the soul is free when the storm has passed."

 

 

Strix

The trespasser lurched beneath the boughs as though the forest had tilted, as though gravity itself had grown capricious and learned to mock him. His arms were full – overfull – of objects torn from their ordained places: coins dulled by centuries of touch, a cup whose silver skin still held the chill of stone shelves and locked rooms. Each step sent a faint chime through the undergrowth, a music without melody, a purse-mouth prayer he could not finish. Wealth pressed against his ribs and palms with the dense insistence of wet clay. Desire had weight; it bruised.

He moved in fits and stalls, halting where the ground rose, slipping where the earth softened, his breath sawing the air into uneven strips. The woods received him without welcome or refusal. Leaves lay layered like old letters, their ink faded to veins and russets, the ground breathing up the loam-sweet smell of rot and rain remembered. Above him the canopy stitched itself shut, branch to branch, a slow seam drawn by the night. Light leaked through in small currencies – coins of moon – spent at random on bark and moss.

Shadows gathered with a vegetal patience. They thickened, learned edges, learned motion. The dark did not rush; it bloomed. It opened its corollas. Tendrils of shade slid between trunks and over stones, brushing the ankles of ferns, tasting the air. The forest had a pulse now, a tremor that traveled through roots and sap and the hollow bones of insects. There were whispers – no single tongue, a sibilant weather – syllables made of leaf-rub and wingbeat, consonants of snapping twig. Words failed here; sound remained.

He stumbled into a small clearing where the ground dipped, a bowl holding dampness and old breath. His burden slipped. A spill of metal flashed and vanished. He knelt, scrabbling, the soil biting his nails, his mind narrowed to retrieval, to grasp and gather, gather and grasp. Hunger taught his fingers their alphabet. The silver cup rolled once, once more, and settled against a root like an ear laid down to listen.

Then the air tightened.

From the blackened stillness, she stood where standing had not been a moment before. The Strix. She emerged as figures sometimes do in dreams: already complete, already watching. Her hair streamed in ropes and wisps, a geography of gray and night, caught with burrs and leaf-threads, as if the forest had been combing her for years. Skin shone dully, the pale of mushrooms under bark, the pale of stones turned up by frost. Nakedness here held no invitation; it held weather. It held age. It held the wind’s ledger of scars.

Wildness gathered around her like a second anatomy. It flexed and coiled, took on the suggestion of muscles that belonged to no species. Her presence bent the space between trunks; distances wavered. The clearing seemed to deepen, to add layers the eye could not count. Her eyes burned with a steady, exacting light, neither heat nor flame but a pressure, an insistence. They fixed him. They had already known him.

There was no speech. The night carried no syllables now, only a held breath stretched thin. The roots heard first. They stirred beneath the skin of the ground, thick cords waking, serpents with the patience of wood. Soil heaved. Earth split its seams. Roots rose slick and pale, studded with soil, looping and knotting with a craftsman’s calm. They wound his ankles, his calves, climbed his thighs with a slow intimacy, a fidelity that allowed no escape. He toppled sideways, wealth bursting from his arms in a scatter of dull flashes. The forest received the offering without comment.

His chest constricted. Breath shortened into shards. Roots cinched his ribs, pressed his shoulders, threaded under his arms. His eyes widened, glassed over with a sheen like ice forming on a pond. He saw her – only her. The gaze took everything else into itself. Coins lay where they fell. The cup caught a small pool of moonlight and held it like a thought he would never finish thinking.

He writhed. The movement was contained, measured, a puppet’s struggle against strings older than theater. Sound left him. Pain passed through his body without the courtesy of a cry. The forest accepted this silence, the way it accepts the falling of needles, the slow collapse of hollow logs. The roots tightened and learned his shape. They remembered him.

Time spread thin. The moon hung a little higher, or a little lower; the difference belonged to astronomers. Cold seeped into the clearing, a cold that smelled faintly of iron and water left too long in stone bowls. The Strix watched. Her face held no mask. It held a stillness that had outlasted languages. When she moved, it was with the economy of creatures that have no need to hurry. She stepped back, one foot finding earth without sound, then the other. The wildness around her loosened its coil and fell into place, the way smoke settles when the fire learns its lesson.

She withdrew into the trees. Darkness closed behind her as water closes behind a diver. Branches aligned. The clearing became a clearing again. The forest breathed.

What remained was the air, pressed and heavy, a density that weighed on the tongue. The night cooled further, its cold carrying a faint sweetness, a frost-flower opening somewhere beyond sight. The body lay caught and still, an arrangement of limbs that the roots continued to consider. Leaves shifted. An owl passed overhead, silent as a thought withheld. Somewhere deeper in the woods, water moved over stone and forgot itself.

The ground held what it had taken. The forest resumed its work. The moon went on with its small business. The clearing kept its bowl. And the night, having learned nothing new, deepened.

 

Steel Kiss

A presence, unseen yet palpable, brushed against her awareness, a delicate frost crawling across the spine of perception, like a whispered syllable in an empty hall. Above, the neon "EXIT" quivered as if uncertain of its own authority, each flicker a hesitation, a hesitant heartbeat suspended between the concrete pulse of the city and the ineffable murmur of the night. Time folded itself into a prism, refracting breaths into shards of color and sound: a half-formed gasp, a stutter of motion, a blade glinting with a cold lucidity, fleeting and crystalline in the moon’s tentative embrace.

The street had begun to liquefy into a fantasia of tones – turquoise bleeding into vermilion, asphalt dissolving into the translucence of shadowed ink. Trees, statues, puddles reflected more than themselves; they became a chorus of possibility, each a murmur of past and future colliding in a haze of light. She moved through it, a figure of supple terror, of kinetic abstraction; her limbs echoed the soft resonance of musical intervals that only the night seemed capable of composing. Shadows, stretching and elongating, recoiled in curiosity, tracing the subtle architecture of her corporeal fugue, lingering as if the darkness itself wished to admire the fragile elegance of life in motion.

The killer – if such a word can hold the shape of him – was a river of absence, a deliberate silence more eloquent than any presence. His departure was a rhythm in the alley’s heartbeat, a turning of a page in a book that writes itself in invisible ink. Each pulse of the neon was a sigh, each shiver of the metal grating beneath her shoes a chord in a subterranean sonata, a fugue of waiting and momentum intertwined.

The alley returned, finally, to its habitual indifference, yet that indifference was luminous, pregnant with possibility. The sign’s buzzing became a gentle hum, a mechanical meditation on continuity and impermanence, carrying in its cadence the faint echo of a thousand untold stories. Life, in its brief and exquisite spark, trembled like a bell rung in a cathedral of rain, its resonance passing into the streets, into the very air that trembled with an incalculable expectancy.

Around her, the world breathed in low and sonorous rhythms. Rusted iron fences, crumbling brick walls, puddles catching the fractured light of streetlamps, whispered histories; each detail was a lyric of patience and endurance, a testament to beauty unhurried, to the quiet persistence of existence. Even the moon seemed to incline closer, listening, as if curiosity could bend silver upon the contours of shadow, sketching in ephemeral ink the poetry of evanescence.

And in the vast quietude that followed, a sensation arose of intimacy with the infinite, a gentle trembling at the seam between the self and the cosmos. The alley, the night, the city – all existed in a shared breath, a communion of sensation and observation, where terror and delight interlaced like twin vines climbing an unseen lattice. The secret held there was not absence, nor loss, nor dread; it was the exquisite weight of being, the hushed wonder of awareness itself, shimmering in the spaces between heartbeats, in the whisper of steel, in the delicate geometry of shadow.

Time lingered, suspended like a note drawn out on a violin string, resonant with the kind of light that seems too rare to name. In the subtle architecture of the moment, she found an almost obscene beauty, a luxuriant, unfurling melody that traversed thought and limb, memory and anticipation. Even fear, cooled and crystallized, became a jewel: a keen awareness of the infinite, a caress of eternity in the hollow of the city’s spine.