Ruler Of The Kingdom

When first they gave me the poison I was told that I must be careful and do certain things so that it would take hold. I call it a poison for I can presently think of no better description, although it is more like semen than poison. But semen is after all a type of poison, a thing which comes in and causes change, causes the death of the young woman and the birth of the new babe and mother. This that they gave me was like semen, filled with new hidden life, a type of life which I, as I then was, could not even fully comprehend. Like a person asked to take a mysterious package to an unknown house, I cannot know whether the package delivered means life or death. Certainly it delivers both, but whether it is for the benefit or detriment of your cause all depends on which side you’re rooting for, mobsters or coppers, guerillas or soldiers. Some, like myself, agree to carry the package not because we are partial to one side or another, but rather because the dangerous opportunity has at last been either ferreted out or stumbled upon, and the chance that it could mean death for the courier is promising. I did not care to be what I had been anymore. I did not care if I lived or died. No, that is not true, I preferred to die if possible. Suicide would be the choice of a more reasonable person, but I have never been reasonable. I had decided that suicide was for the weak and I wanted to be strong, strong or dead, and there is only one way to meet one or the other of these two fates. One must jump into the fray. So that is what I did.
It was described to me in a variety of ways with the usage of a variety of terms. They called it a lineage, they called it a way. There was talk about the transfer and transformation of substances. At times I thought it was like being sprinkled with pixie dust, it was a mystical something which might effect a change upon me. Most other times I simply understood that IT, rather than I, was the most important part of the equation. Yes, there were times that I understood that, in theory, I was a host for something. A host just as the mother is host for the human embryo as it grows within her, for it is a fact that throughout a pregnancy the developing fetus functions as a parasite within the mother’s body and it is by a clever and necessary internal trick that our body is swayed into harboring this guest. I understood this theoretically, philosophically. I was comfortable with this "idea".
And then I changed handlers, went away to another master. At that time, the talking stopped. The idea was forgotten. I was given things to do and I did them. I stopped thinking about the transference of substances. I was kept busy doing things which would seem to an outside observer to be perfectly ordinary things to do. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, I walk. I write silly nonsense stories. I make love to my handler. I cook and clean for my handler. I make love to my handler. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, and I walk. Perfectly ordinary things to do. I did them, and I did them as instructed. Time passed. I felt differences in my appetite; in my appetite for company and music and movies and books and yes, even foods. I noticed these changes, and I even imagined that these were signs of success, but silly me, I didn’t think to make any predictions with regards to what such signs might foretell. Perhaps it is not so strange that I did not wonder or guess at what might lie ahead. Very few animals do truly posses the ability to foresee what effect they may be causing in the present moment. For example, many dogs will run into the street to bite a tire without expecting to die or cause an accident, and teenage girls fuck as they please and are shocked to find themselves impregnated.
I did as I was instructed to the best of my ability and shifted little by little into being something other than that which I had been. I did not understand that this difference in me was just the beginning, a preparatory phase.
One day I felt uncommonly sleepy. I lay down to nap and began to dream of mating with the Bistea Neptunis, which looked to me a bit like one imagines Poseidon, bearded and muscular with a beastly fin. It was not how it looked so much as how it felt that seemed monstrous. Its presence was alien. I was suspended in the water above this creature and my heart was wide open and golden love seeped from my heart into its own heart and with its tail, it fanned that same love back to me, it spewed from its genitals into the water which carried it into my tingling vagina. It all felt so good. Then I was abruptly awakened by some heated quarreling taking place in the room adjacent to mine. My head began to hurt very badly. It hurt for three days, and, by the third day, my stomach also hurt immensely.
In the afternoon of that third day, the pain was unbearable and I laid down upon my handlers bed with my hands folded upon my chest. I was alone in the room. I felt myself shifting and moving out of my body, reaching with many waving tentacles from my center. The pain in my body seemed to be a disturbance caused by the discord inherent in having this subtle many tentacled thing within me rubbing and moving about within a body that is the wrong shape. We were both very uncomfortable, myself and my alien occupant. I decided that it was a sort of growing pain shared between us. Something would eventually give, my invisible body would stretch to accommodate it or it might slowly devour that body and take its place. I could not, of course, be certain.
My handler was unconcerned by these developments. His only instruction to me was this: "Stay calm."
That was when I knew that the time had come for me to be careful and do what was necessary to ensure that this delicate bloom of the netherworld would take hold within me. This is what I had agreed to do, whether I had understood that in the beginning or not.
Somewhere along the way I became the whore of Babylon. Somewhere along the way I had picked up a package and now I walk with it, unsure of whether I will survive this little voyage, not knowing what impact its delivery might have. I look to the outside observer as if I am running an ordinary errand. I walk, I snap my fingers, I scratch my head, and I walk some more. Ripe with poison and rocked with shock, I do the little things I have learned to do in order to nurture the life hidden inside of me. They have become habit, so that as this new thing eats away at the old and eventually replaces it, it will already be accustomed to walking upright, to snapping its fingers, and scratching it’s head, to making love and writing silly stories, and no one will even know when it was that I died and it took my place as ruler of the kingdom.