To Kiss the World Through a Veil of Lead

Nutrition II

You are enveloped by fat, inside a cavern whose walls are lined with soft white materials. Tubes protrude from these greasy strata and penetrate you; from the tubes you feel periodic gushes of fluids and solids being pumped into your body. You swaddle with the forceful push of nutrients and reply with sucking and drooling sounds. The tubes also bring information: you do not need to open your eyes in order to know that another being like you is at a distance shorter than your stretched limb.

You extend an appendage and prod the sack of proteins and body parts right next to you. It does not reply: it is unconscious. Its stillness triggers a ravenous clawing inside your unused stomach, gushes of acid and fumes bubbling upwards and screaming words of hunger. You open your mouth for the first time and feel gastric juices dripping from it. You bring your limb to your mouth, slather it with the vomited contents of your digestive tract and claw at your sibling again.

You rip the amniotic sack that protects it. You dip your limbs in the flowing liquids and taste them, feeling the cold and fresh nutrients running down your skin. It is a concentration of flavours that collapses your consciousness into the smallest dot possible, imploding awareness into a point of sensation that attracts all that is you. All is the sweet fleshy taste of your sibling as you begin to nibble. This condensed state of consciousness starts to irradiate from the depths of your mind. What starts as a stirring within your limbs becomes a ferocious struggle: encumbered by the tubes that enter and exit you, you still manage to jump on top of your sibling and rip it apart, gobbling down chunks of its unborn and unaware flesh.