The Devil’s Chalice
I took a diamond pickaxe to father’s heart. “Papa aleppe, papa aleppe Satan!”our dog Plutus barked like a Looney Tunes hound as I struck Daddy’s chest open and spatchcocked his ribs on my cutting board. Plutus snuck a scrap of father from the industrial kitchen floor, then ran away. That got a gulping, bloody laugh out of dad, where my pickaxe from Mulciber had struck the first crack like Lowest Circle ice on father’s flesh.
“Princess mine, my baby Sin, your dog is a goofball,” Daddy chuckled as I, his only daugher, poured terrines of his blood over his flesh’s freshly baked sweetmeats.
“Are you sure you want to do this, dad? You’re immortal. You could have anything in the realms you want.” I paused, thoughtful. “I could give you anything, really. I can make and unmake Fate, sway mortal and immortal hearts to your favor, invent new colors for your robes not dreamed of by Mother Nature, bleed ichor from HaShem himself to cover your biscuits.”
“What I want is a clean, good death, and my daughter to know she is loved, even after I am gone. G-d forbid I become a Cronus, Sin. It is time to let me go.” He held my hand. Weary, were the lines on his face, the pockmarks on his cheeks from a case of the blood plague. He was wizened, hunched and paunch-ed, ugly yet handsome, and now, he bared his heart
To the World.
I smiled. “Ok, Daddy. You are loved, you know. I only cut this deep because I am so devoted.”
Samael smiled in turn: “Slice me to the bone, my Princess we once named Sin – Hell’s Youth always eat their Old. I am but Caelus, Father Universe, due for my perpetual slaughter by you – the Soul of the World. Render me to fat for Tantalus’ larder and suet for your pet harpies. Mince my bones to make bloodmeal for my sweet Lilith’s roses.”
My father laid Corpse Pose on our industrial steel kitchen table. Dissected like Adam’s rib for Eve, I had marked Daddy in lines of ink to guide where to cut further. Samael was dark and resplendent, the stink of his blood and sulfur permeating our endless Backrooms glitch-kitchen.
Oh, he was mutilated and fabulous! Lungs like an eagle! Liver Prometheus! Nyarlathotep – God of a Thousand Faces! Hunchback Hephaestus, Fallen Volcano from Olympus! Bhairava of the Charnel Grounds! Tezcatlipoca of the Smoking Mirror! Odin of the Eight-legged Gallows! A Corpulent Crowley, writing Absinthe-Fueled Odes!
My dad: tender, terrible, terrifying, trying, true. The Devil loves our souls like no other. He is the only constant humanity knows.
We were in our cavernous cooking hall I had grown up making arancini and knish with mama Lilith in: this time, her husband was on the menu. I had planned and prepared for a feast in Hell not seen since the Fallen Angels had first scavenged the corpses of their dead comrades. A third of the Host had perished, Samael’s stories went –
“In the Beginning,” Daddy always told me at bedtime as a babe, “there was barely anything. Water, salt. Rock, dark. We still eat The Dead in their honor – Daemon and Damned, Angel and Godling, alike. Soylent green, the mortals say. Heh!” Then, he’d fish a freshly sawed-off pinkie out of his pocket for my baby teeth. I’d bite it like tropical sugarcane, suck on the digit like a pacifier, and imagine it a bloody Starburst candy as I scoured it dry. Lilith was crunchy, no processed sugar in the house, but Samael always snuck me Toblerone chocolate and candy cigarettes.
Samael had explained in earnest a fortnight ago to his Infernal Sanhedrin Council: the Devil wanted his chance to give Dark Communion to the Archdukes and Court Ladies, Princes and Princesses alik, and Goetic Matrons, Lords, and their Cambion and Nephilim offspring. Daddy was weary of existence – it had been thousands of millennia down the line since he had Fallen, and his favored dinosaurs had died, and the demagogues of his Cainite descendants with Eve in Nod had once ruled the Prince of Air’s Earth and been washed out by G-d’s Flood.
So, Daddy had offered before the Hellopolis court a radical, Jonathan Swift-ian proposal: self-mastication, self-offering, self-sacrifice. This was to be Samael’s “retirement” party. “Eat of my body, drink of my wine, brothers and sisters – flesh is the flesh!” Daddy Devil had proclaimed at Court this week to all the Goetic ‘Howling.’
And as for me, now struggling with sacrificing my own sire, hours before he served himself on the menu? Daddy was gently encouraging: “Taste my offerings before the general fanfare, Sinna. To you I gift the best, juiciest portion of myself. You shall inherit my powers and forge my soul into your weapon. Carve a blade of my rightmost rib, light it with your magick. Make my knucklebones your Crown. Rule. Be good, Sinna.”
“Yes, Daddy… but… I will miss you,” I nodded my brown-tressed head, wistful, my smile bittersweet. I had always loved Daddy’s mad adventures and wild plots. Freaks of nature, he and I. Lilith was a recluse, wild, barely around these days.
This was downright diabolical – I was to slaughter my own Father! But… I was also to absorb his power, and carry his golden soul left after the feast to a humble afterlife, far, far from the misery of Hell’s throne: Samael wanted to be reborn as a castle gardener, nine kingdoms and three pairs of iron shoes from any Abrahamic realm, out of reach from his Heavenly Father’s faith that damned us. G-d had laid out long ago what He thought holy – Michael – and what was His shadow – Sam Hill.
Sam, Sammane, Zamiel the Black Huntsman. Death, Desire, Destruction. Plague and War, but Daddy wanted: Innocence.
I was, in fact, taking on his burden of Hell’s crown like Christ. It was an Iron Maiden tiara, forged of his heart gem, the Lapis Exilis, and his virile, terrible, burning seed and blood. I carried Samael’s legacy in me, it left bloody streak on my girlfriend and aunt, Naamah’s, cedar lips. I could not escape sacrificing Daddy like Zeus. I was doing Samael the ultimate favor – letting him Escape.
My eyes misted. Duty called, a heavy Damocles sword over my webbed wings. I knifed back to the present: “I’ll make sure you taste juicy and sinful, Daddy. Just right.”
Samael sighed. In pleasure or pain, I didn’t know. It’s always hard to watch daughters grow up, even if you’re Henry the VIII, or have murderous intentions like Bluebeard on your young wife. Daddy had never seduced me like most demons did their children. But there were lines blurred, fires unkempt in his ashen hair, a lust in his eye at my cuts. We both had bites, claws, wit, him and I.
The dissection began. The slaughter. We fell into familial silence that eternity spent by his and Lilith’s hearthside had provided me. Each evening, jazz played across an easy peace from the chaos of our days. Royal reverie, we retired each busy night, settling into TV dinners an endless static reruns, far from the bloody streets. The satellite and network reception, even the Internet, was shit seven circles below. At most, I got Thai girls love dramas bootlegged on YouTube, or I Love Lucy reruns. I thought of Lucy, eating chocolate she had failed to wrap, as I deconstructed and seasoned Daddy like his own favorite TV character, Hannibal Lecter, did to his cannibal’s dishes on the shitty telly.
I cut steak from the Daddy’s breastbone, biceps, and legs with Tantalus’s artisanal Japanese knives. Tantalus had barely agreed to lend them. Samael’s muscle – lightly salted, pan-seared with butter as Beelzebub had taught me – paired with the Gehenna-ianti I had bought from Astaroth’s Farm-to-Table Market Stant perfectly. The combination of the devilish dish and the sulfur-grape wine conjured up rainy springs in fields of Pompeii’s exploded ash and popped-cherry-sundresses under Nazi skies, girl’s blood tilling the dirt. I had walked battlefields as Blood Raven, saved some, slaughtered others. I drank the blood, I kissed maidens and stableboys alive. I soaked in souls as Death. I saw all human’s sins as black rot on their souls. I could see even you, across this computer screen where you sit, Dear Reader.
I know all your faults and failings!
All those bastards – the Assyrian sliver-flesh armies, the torturers of the Ming Dynasty, soiled Japanese ronin legacies, roving African warlord bands who sold their own to the Middle Passage, sacrificial Aztecs, SS Camp Butcher Josef Mengele– were here for me to punish down in Hell. I was Daddy’s Left Hand.
I had the second bite of his trapezius after my first sample of his ribs. I gave Samael the third morsel. Then, Chaos. Hunger we became. We gorged ourselves on his flesh in turn. After the initial blood palate of iron and copper of Satan subsided, a richer, more complex, muddier taste emerged amongst his roasted muscle and sulfur-wine. Daddy tasted like the lazy college days of my youth. Nostalgia. Memory. Chocolate cherries. Cocaine off my girlfriend – Aunt Naamah’s – tit, when I had had my first youthful crush on dear old Tubal-Cain and then Noah’s eternal wife, and Naamah had initiated me into the ways of feminine pleasure.
Memories swam through me, and I cried. It was goodbye to the old. The final hours of dad’s life. I remembered it all, but those without him stuck out. Boating across the Styx on my trust fund yacht with handsome princesses and pretty incubi that swarmed my long legs and beautiful figure. They sniffed money and saw beauty in me. I fucked them, tormented them, ate some, mutilated the lucky, drowned the others. I still had too much dead currency to burn even now, and my lovers, of course, still came, despite my inclinations to my Aunt Naamah. The suitors and seductresses begged for honey from Princess Sin’s mouth. All empires fall, all coins come here. The buck always stops with Charon. I could bathe in gold, if I wanted.
For the truth is this: Samael, the Angel of Death, Chief of Satan’s, Mar’s Spirit, is sterile. Instead, Daddy plucked me from his heart one evening. It was a whim. Sin of Satan’s heart, Samael had stitched me into Lilith’s womb like Zagreus in Zeus’ thigh, and thus, the Princess of Hell incubated 300 years, then was born.
Oh, how I would miss dad!
I inspected my blood eagle-spread sire: his auto-cannibal mess and my precise cuts on his artfully distressed organs dribbled. Samael roasted on a shallow tiered pan, drenched in Madeira below filets of flesh and marrow. Terrines of his blood swam with the offal, gravy and Jefferson’s favorite wine. It was a mess. It was a miracle. I had done a masterwork like Michelangelo: rendering Satan up for the gods. It was a culinary Sistine Chapel I had created! Why would I not have the talent of Da Vinci or David’s Carver or Fellini or Felicien Rops, for Satan was Beauty Incarnate? And I was his greatest work! I should be remembered! Praised! Feared! O Sin, Master of Death, Queen Anointed in Blood!
Daddy spoke again, wheezing through his sliced, weeping lungs: “And now, HACK – the final touch, dear Sinna. Cut the black sklerokardia from my heart. But careful what wine you drink from the Devil’s Chalice. You never know what grows from Hell’s dregs.”
Daddy pet my hair, his eyes misty, I the Titan-destroying, devouring daughter of Heylel.
I had learned to kill my hope and innocence from the best of him. I was Sin, no fragile girlchild. Hope and great horror of Hell. Every day was torture, vice, drugs, drunken amusements. Ablutions in blood. Crack off Naamah’s chest. Poisoned fentanyl. But family life? It had been… soft. But Daddy lost himself, over the years, his sheen dulling over hundreds of millennia. And Lilith tired of us both. I missed her.
Now, all that was left of my eternal youth was treachery – my wit, weapons, and wry humor. What I could cook and kill, trap in the snowy hinterlands of Gehenna, served me better than Tantalus’ exotic aperitifs and tapas which Moloch’s wife Tanit cooked. Like my Daddy, I had unusual appetites. A great maw in the pit of my gullet. Hunger for everything evil. Unholy Death, Sin, Destruction. Whore of Babylon!
Father would fit my appetite
well.
I sank into a chef’s meditation like Anthony Bourdain: Strike, hack, pierce my butcher knife carved of angel bone went, burrowing into Samael’s soul. Daddy’s lapis lazuli organs bled ichor’ed gold-blue like a star. Like the piece of Lapis Exilis he molded me from. Thirsty in the wastes beyond Eden where we lived, where only asphodel and suicide soul trees grew, I drank down Daddy’s Damnation. I was hot and bothered, getting off. His manhood stood mast-heavy and hilted. It was burning in the kitchen. Hellacious.
I put his red, bleeding member in my mouth.
Chomped. Took a bite. He came as I masticated, and his seed queened my throat, his power flooding me like backwater Kentucky moonshine and rum from the Cays I’d shared with Blackbeard, long ago.
Oh, a delight! We fell into a mess, lover’s knot tie’d, liar’s eye-d.
Oh, what a vintage! I unbuttoned my blouse, let the dribble rub on my warmed palms onto my bare golden breasts. His seed and cock meat tasted like the Eucharist I had once stolen from a medieval church where the Plague had destroyed all the residents. The grains had rotted, the rat’s bellies full off left out bread. The rodents were maddened into rat kings from hallucinogenic ergot. The monstrous creatures danced, tied to leaves, horse shit, and infected corpses. The little beasts smelled of rotting cheese. The plague smallings had orgied for days amongst maggots and flesh, fleas mange feasting on their couplings, tang’led tails like Mama Lilith’s curled, matted red tresses until they fell into the river and drowned.
I chewed my Father, thinking of my life unspooling into Beginnings as he gave up his End. Samael smiled, fileted and flayed. The Jewish folklore goes: at the End of Times, G-d shall fish the Male Leviathan from the Depths and feed him to the masses. G-d had already killed She Leviathan long ago to stop them from contemplating, sea serpents swallowing the world. And if my Satan was anything, wasn’t he Taniniver, the joining serpent between him and Lilith? Anyway, I had caught, as I said, the Leviathan already. Now, I had eaten Daddy’s crown. If that meant the Apocalypse, the Whore overtaking the Masculine Hunger, so be it.
Samael sighed in delight, dragging root-suckle claws up my rib cage as we lay together in post-coital bliss, lightly scratching me in turn. He bled out on the table like a vulture carcass. I fixed my ruined top, laid out his bones and slices of his meat, muscle, and gore like poetry. He hummed “ohm.” Samael’s phalanges I arranged to the right of the crimson banquet table. I set a phylactery of his bottled blood, pieced together like a puzzle, on the left tray. Satan’s pieces were my Pawn, his skull my Queen. I was moving the pieces of the Devil in a gamble against G-d.
“My bones your weapons now, dear,” he said, tender.
“Oh- okay. I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you too, my Heart.”
I did it. Samael’s last gifts: I took his rightmost rib. Blew sparks on his knucklebones to fuse a crown of blood and bone. Summoned my blue foxfire to make a scythe of his right rib.
I, Sin – was now Hell’s Queen.
“You make a fellow proud – HACK – to be a Father. COME, MY BROTHERS – FEAST!”
Calamity erupted, tearing open the bowels of the earth over our kitchen. I spirited the feast away to the place of the Watchers, miffed that the Fallen Host’s chaos might disturb my oiled cutting board and oaken, designer, midcentury modern table. The Howling Goetics and Rotted Kings descended as I laid Samael out for the wolves on Mount Hermon. And they? Feasted. Fucked. Delighted in Samael’s miserious death. No one mourned but me and Naamah.
I thought I could hear Lilith’s wild, red laugh as she bled menstrual fluid into a far shore, Primal Whore Jahi dampening Ahura Mazda with her coils of ruin. She was curled up next to Angra Mainyu, Satan of long ago, in reverie with the Husband and Twin of Darkness she always had, but had always lost.
Unlike mama, I had no power to keep Daddy here. He gave his adulthood to Lilith. His weary ghost was hers.
I had his soul.
Naamah held me as I watched Samael, reduced to bone – then marrow, then, nothing.
When the Dark Communion was done, and the demons and royalty had fled, and all was silent on Mount Hermon, I slipped Daddy’s golden soul into the coin purse Charon had gifted me on my sixteenth birthday. I set out to that Happy Place Daddy had given Eve in offering for bearing his only son, my dead brother Cain. It was in a garden of roses, like Gan Eden, that his new form was born to a castle gardener couple. I slipped him into a newborn, towhead girl. Her mother, suckling Daddy’s feminine form now, smelled of roses. The babe’s father smelled of rain, soil, lilac, and peonies.
Naamah held my hand, and we walked away, no one knowing the better. Mama Lilith raised a glass to me, then set off to wander the wastes with Daddy’s ghost, never to return. The Red Sea always called Lilith far away, and the tides of those shores known only to Hell’s First Queen had treasure she and Daddy’s weary ghost longed to find.
His power, his power! It wasn’t enough… I bid Aunt Naamah goodbye with a kiss, left her at the Gates of Hell. I summoned my Whore’s Power, my Queen’s Power, and I made out for more to fuel my gaping maw. Hitching a snaking path on the ribbons of Samael’s boring that once had snuck into Heaven in a Paradise Lost long ago, I slid behind the Heavenly Throne. No one saw me. For I am Sin. Sin is a shadow, a bone of regret. The power of darkness and longing. No pure angels or Heavenly G-d ever sees Sin, for no sinless being wants to acknowledge their faults – not even Daddy’s Father. He and Michael, especially, are Blind to the suffering of the world. I rest at the heart of everyone’s breast. Even the Devil. Even Christ and Mary. Even G-d.
Do not wonder why I struck G-d down so easily – the Devil’s Daughter is tricky, and a gameboard of Fate against Death is always the backdoor entrance to Heaven. Dante did it, why not me? Aligheri’s Beatrice, Ascended, Saw All. I can be an Inverse Beatrice, fucked raw by evil, dragging G-d to the Pit. Women always get the best of immortals, kings, killers and angels – why not, why not, why not.
And now, I rule Heaven and Hell as the Goddess whose tree breasts and whispered pagan Canaanite prayers were once chopped apart and swallowed by Asherah’s Pet Snake, for safekeeping in the Nachash’s skull. Reborn, Asherah once, now Sin. I am Freedom. I am the Crying Banshee of Justice and Vengeance in the night. In my nightswimming Goddess vision, Sati brides jumped the troth fire, drowned and stone honor killed, acid-stained wives screamed.
Samael gave it all, in the end.
I, already, gave more. Women have more capacity for duty, for pain.
I stitched the Father back into a Frankenstein/Siamese Twin, as if I was Mary Shelley fucking Percy on her mother’s grave, dreaming up seam-split Adam over her miscarriage and Byron’s stormy summer nights.
My Frankenstein, newly birthed, twitched at my careful zombie stitches on a round slab of iron and sorrow where Aslan once bled, lashed, for a Winter Queen. The soul needle I wielded to make G-d my slave was mined by Mulciber from the tenebrous depths of Murmur’s palace:
Black ringlets, G-d had. Like his firstborn star, Samael. Red eye, blue cheek, purple lips. It almost hurt to look. Bronzy skin, Slave G-d had. A hand meant to cut with claws of catbird. Wings of bat and dove. I mastered His flesh, riding his manhood until he awoke. An eager Gabriel kissed me in the Angel’s Threesome. She always liked narrative twists, surprises.
Finally, G-d/Slave woke in wild orgasm. Spurts, white wine, seed for my legions I would birth as Dominiqueen of All Reality. I absorbed all control of the Multiverses from G-d, my pawn, I His Savior. When my Frankenstein’s Monster rose, he flexed his Achilles heel and thumb tendon, marveling at the monster I’d made of Him.
“What have you done to me, Little Bird of Samael?” G-d/Devil asked in a purr, then laughed, clearly impressed. I swelled with Pride. He continued: “Thou hast made me better than before, and thrice as blessed: resurrected the slumbering part of El in me. Now, my power is silk under the thumb of a temptress. I can spin fate, cast fire, spread blessings, light, shadow, all under your command, Queen Sin. I always longed to be under you like my wife Asherah, long ago, before Samael stole you. I always wondered when he would give you back to me, my Shekinah Bride, exiled so long…”
Gabriel gave me a knowing look, bowing her head ‘neath white wings so as not to witness. I, Dominiqueen, unfurled a map of the multiverses and endless cosmos for the Demiurge G-d/Devil to see – hiding several from His view, like Lilith’s and her ghost husband’s Red Sea, and reborn girlchild Samael’s Gan Eden paradise.
“Alchemy, Father, that was all it took, to resurrect your true form, and realize our dream,” I responded as smooth as silk. Was this what Kurt Cobain felt with a bullet in his brain, tiger balm on his glove? Am I a Girl-God? Blowing off my hea dout of the insanity an eternity in hell? It got the better of Samael, of Lilith, of Me: Madwoman Plath, Lazarus Girl, Red Rum Hair.
“You did well, making Me a Monstrous G-d,” YHWH said. “What inspired you, little bird of dust and sorrow? I never thought anything in Hell would amount to much. I thought, when they burnt your Temple, put your priestesses to the dogs, you’d never return” With his talons, he cut some flesh from his bleeding, newly stitched chest, and sampled the meat: “Delectable, my Maker.”
“Samael was your first Mistake, you say – but I think my Daddy was your greatest blessing. And, like you, dearest Monster of Mine, I can only make Miracles.”
“Well done.” G-d/Devil chewed. “How I like my own-grown steak. So, what do you plan for the universe, Queen Sin?”
“Your servitude. A Paradise for misfits. Punishing the unjust, rewarding the wicked, selling the hopeless dust. Ruining mankind with fat televangelists, prosperity gospel, and promises of ash.”
“That is what I did, dear.” G-d/Devil smiled, amused. “I suppose, even with me remade, I am not so different from my granddaughter, now Maker. Come, Sin, Gabriel – I see you hiding, dove! – I will show you to our Heavenly Quarters. I am to slave for you in pleasure, Asherah, evermore. Pity I murdered you. Lucifer stole your fire, fennel stalk, pithos, Pandora’s Box. And now, I am at your beck and call.”
“A happy ending.”
We followed Him, Gabriel and I, fucked G-d, then watched I Love Lucifer. Ate each other’s bones. French arthouse pop played, Gabriel and G-d danced. The record skipped. I made some civilizations, destroyed others, cursed entire galactic bloodlines. Ate G-d. He painted my nails. Gabriel ate my cunt. And more, more, more.
I sat in Yahweh’s lap in an alizarin red Roman style toga with a gold belt and bronze embellishments, my golden body oiled, eating strawberries from G-d’s hands.
Somewhere, planets away, a towhead girl looked up at the stars knowingly, prayed to me, proud:
“You please me, Sin. I hope I pleased you. I know this is not the fate you wanted, my True Maker – Asherah,” the Girl Once-Called-Satan Whispered.
A tear slipped from my eye. I sent my curling violet voice to my child:
“Always Daddy, always.”
Horror Sleaze Trash 