Hell is for Lovers began with a dream about a feral child, and then I asked myself, who are their parents?
This is the story before the story. A Black couple prays for a baby. Their prayers are answered, but not by who they expect.
Story Content Warning: My story does not describe in detail or linger on these traumatic topics, as it is a story of reclamation and joy that utilizes horror elements, but there are references to colonization, foster care system abuse, childhood neglect/abuse, and chattel slavery. As well as protohuman body horror, swearing, suppressed queerness, cosmic horror, and sexually explicit and liberatory content.
hell is for lovers
Malachi Li
There once was a not-mother and a not-father who prayed for a baby. The not-mother drove the 64 bus route, and the not-father was a janitor for a country club where nobody looked like him. Except Greg–but Greg traded being a nigga for being a capitalist long ago.
After a night shift, at 10:30 am, the not-father would get on the 64 bus, five blocks from the country club, and sit right behind his wife, the seat always open for him. He would kiss the not-mother on her round cheek, never pay. Then they would pray as the tires of her chariot choked down the pockmarked road. They prayed in different ways to the same god cluster.
The not-father would close his eyes in deceptive sleep, exposed by his grip on the barrier bar. Veins popping as he prayed, Holy Father, I come to you a sinner. Holy Father, I am unworthy and deserve nothing. Father in Heaven, forgive me of my sins, and I ask for nothing but a child to raise in your holy light.
The not-mother’s prayers were secrets. Her right hand smeared the steering wheel with a shea butter sheen, her left hand rolled a rosary hidden from any ladies who might enter the bus from their church. Only the not-father knew she wasn’t a Baptist, and he wanted to keep it that way. The not-mother was a Catholic, and their compromise meant she could never host their church’s women’s group, not that all them ladies could fit anyway.
Their tiny apartment too full of incense and too swollen with clutter deemed holy. Thrifted statues of saints, multicolored candles in glass cylinders with unreadable holy text, dolls she dressed up in beads placed below her soft sculpture of the Virgin Mary with the porcelain face. The not-mother hoarded these “Catholic altars of idolatry,” as her Baptist church called them, but she wanted her message to be clear. Bring me a baby Holy Mother. Though your love is all I need, a baby is all I want.
One night their prayers were answered.
The not-father’s long frame bent toward the TV like an iris at the end of its season. He was a quiet man with a cutting tongue. The not-mother’s hair stood on her arm as he became viler toward the sportsmen of opposing costumed color configurations slamming each other and chasing oblong orbs. She washed chipped dishes in the tiny kitchen, separated from the living room only by a narrow, peeling vinyl breakfast counter.
She wrung her hands, deep brown cracked grey from neon orange daylily-scented soap. She threw the towel against the sink.
“That’s enough, my love. Let’s pray.”
He looked at her, mouth guppied, pointing the remote toward the TV. She did nothing but sigh and kneel before the altar below her Mary. He sighed too, muted the TV, and joined her, angling his body so that he could still peek at the television in between pleas of subjugation.
During commercials, he named all his sins. His words repented to the alpha and the omega, but his eyes slid toward the TV as the colors of the warring athletes began to melt into each other like film bubbling on the projection bulb. He jumped up, startling the not-mother, thinking the internal wires must’ve caught fire. She gasped, but they both went silent as the curling technicolor image oozed from the intact glass screen. The boiling image grew as a festering ghost no longer bound by human limitations. The ichor began to pool on the carpet, and more bile dripped, not from the TV or the ceiling but from a wound in the atmosphere. A claw slid between the layers of skin of the third dimension and peeled them apart. The TV split in half as her head crowned.
Her broad shoulders forced open this gash in reality. The slice in the living room closed as her body fully extruded. The television re-fused. The men resumed their play. Touchdown.
The being towered over the not-mother and not-father. Her horns scraped the ceiling even as she hunched in an ape-like posture of observation. The wide maw of a hyena dominated her head, her eyes hidden under layers and layers of dried lemon grass. Her kudu horns pointed straight up. Her wildebeest horns pointed to the side. Her elephant tusks curled forward. She was covered in golden and black fur that swirled in intricate splotches and stripes, forming symbols of language long forgotten. She set back on two digitigrade legs. She was naked. Her six breasts hung pointed and low as they jutted from the thick fur. Her cock twitched upward, throbbing toward the north star. Her cunt dripped sizzling fluid that would surely stain the carpet. The secretions nibbled through the polyester fibers down to the linoleum floor.
“I am here to answer your prayers.” The syllables elongated from her as molten earth slides toward sea. There was no growl in her voice but deep carnivorous yips that a fool would mistake for laughter. Many spoke at once behind her voice in only marrow-remembered languages. She did not open her mouth to speak.
The not-father looked at the print of a Last Supper painting where Jesus and every disciple were black as Hell. All the hairdos represented: afros, locs, cornrows. Jesus still had long hair like a natural sew-in or like he was 1/16 Cherokee. The not-father nodded at this painting as if every man in the painting nodded at him first in brotherly approval. He stuck his finger toward the entity and thought he shouted, but he sounded no louder than his 14-year-old self whispering in the church pew to the neighbor preteen girl that he wanted to put his hand down her stockings.
“Be-begone devil, you h-have no power in this house of the Lord.”
The couple expected the intruder to laugh and spit and growl in their faces, but she did not. She curled into herself a bit more, making herself look smaller, softer. Her ears flattened against her head.
“I’m only seen as devil because they took my children from me.” She took a step forward and cupped her hands toward them. Her hairless palms were black as her fur–claws retracted. The not-father took his first steps back. He was now behind the not-mother whose hand gripped her rosary so tight the string snapped, and the beads clattered on the linoleum, getting lost in the rug where the not-devil took another step forward. “I am only seen as devil because that is how the pale ones trained your ancestors to see me. Generations imagined me like this. I am your goddess,” she gestured to the not-mother, “I am your source of fertility. I licked the gorges and the staffs so they could make life. Beings forged of earth, grown of water, sparked by fire, and welcomed by air–babies.” There was a whine in that last word. A plead. “My babies are born into worlds where they do not know me, trained to fear a place called Hell, and with all their minds, they sent me there.”
“Babies?” He had no time to hide his fear, his secret unwanting. The word fell from his mouth. The not-father’s saliva felt as ash. His tongue, a toad swollen in gaseous defense. The not-mother heard one thing. Had one question.
“Hell is real?” The not-mother leaned into the crystalline egg that was her faith—an ornate protection. Someone in the unconscious darkness had poked a pin in her egg, slowly exorcising the yolk of Heaven’s bureaucracy and its executive Holy Father, one drip at a time. The Baptist church encouraged repentance and evangelism drenched in the blood of a good man. No amount of gratitude to the blood that gurgled in their throats could drown out the not-mother’s doubt. Her faith had been her own for a long time as His yolk slipped between her toes. Something mutated in the place of His love. She was gestating a goddess.
The not-devil placed her cupped hands against her chest. One of her children once again spoke directly to her.
“Hell is real. Hell is healing. Hell is hate-fucking. Hell is a place for those forgotten, discarded. For those needing a place to mourn and wail with abandon. It is not a punishment. It is a catharsis. Like any place, like this place,” she gestured to the room but meant all of Earth, “can be home, can corrupt, and can be left.”
The not-mother looked at her small sculpture of Mary, of her Lady of Charity. It could be cradled in one hand. The bedazzled golden cloak was fraying at the edges. Many sequins lost to time. The not-mother had resewn the crown on, but not with particular skill. Mary’s cloak splayed like moth wings, not as camouflage but as a moth of warning. Flashing bright colors to warn predators of bitter poison. The inconsistent flicker of the fluorescent light above made her Mary sparkle in a way that clawed a vague memory out of the not-mother of another lady. A lady of gold with copper skin holding a mirror. A mother of waters rolling onto lovers’ tongues. Two mothers witnessed on the water made one; their identities merged for the survival of story. The not-mother heard the voice of Ms. Donna in her head—the 72-year-old reverend’s 2nd and younger, but not unsightly younger, wife.
Ms. Donna commanded the women’s circles in her pastel-encrusted parlor room.
“Those orishas may be growing in popularity. But don’t be fooled, sisters. They are demons in disguise.”
The women hummed. The women nodded. The woman evoked God.
She was in her fifties but looked in her early forties. The not-mother did not notice the twenty-year age gap between them. As the not-mother sat next to Ms. Donna in the circle, she couldn’t help but watch how Ms. Donna’s thighs bulged in her close-cut primrose pink skirt with the slight mermaid trim. Cross her legs. Uncross. Cross on the other side. The not-mother watched Ms. Donna fan herself but never saw Ms. Donna sweat. Smelled her drooping peony perfume and baby powder blend with her dry heat. Ms. Donna did not dance as hard or catch the spirit as fervently as the other women, but she always had the solos in the choir.
“Those orishas are relics of our pagan past that our ancestors wisely forsook for the word of God, who delivered them out of mental and physical slavery. They represent vile concepts that look like reclamation to you or even black power to your children, but they are deceivers. There are even these demons that take on sexually perverse forms switching between man and woman.”
The women lost their devout attention and snapped their heads towards a woman who began to wail and slide from her chair. The not-mother only watched Ms. Donna narrow her eyes as the woman was held up and consoled. Ms. Donna adjusted her fitted blazer and leaned over behind her psalm-printed fan to the not-mother.
“Her son thinks he’s a girl.” And she tutted and shook her head.
The not-mother blinked twice and then mimicked the same gestures. Ms. Donna turned to recenter the women on her, on God. The not-mother exhaled.
Now, the not-mother stared up unblinking at the not-devil.
“Are you an orisha?”
The not-devil shook her mane with a thousand zebras contorting the sensibilities of flies. She shook off the mistake.
“I am older than the orishas. Older than their latest bodies. Those kings and queens.” She was unable to hide her spite. “Older than the people of the orishas who swallowed up my people before they were all partially digested by that insatiable tigerfish of the Christ. Many caught in his interlaced teeth.” The left side of her mouth curled slightly, revealing her fangs before it rested and her shoulders slumped. “I used to dance with your ancestors, eat their laughs, and fuck them to ecstatic oblivion. I guided them to heavens meant only for warriors and those who died in childbirth. Heavens for lovers, cats, and mischievous children. I protected them. But when our heavens crumbled from disbelief, from the insult of being rendered mythology, I gathered all I could, and they now exist within me, in my,” she smirked, “pocket dimension,” and a long clawed finger pointed down to her dripping hole. “Now they come with me always. If you can forgive my phrasing.” A bit of spit shot through her front teeth. It hit a lovely thrifted vase with faux gold embossed paintings of green chrysanthemums. The vase shattered on impact. “So sorry.”
The not-father squeaked in fear and ducked into the kitchen. He stood, half his body behind the support beam–a child peeking during hide and seek. The not-mother fell to her knees in emphatic prayer, her shattered rosary eager to burn off her fingertips in friction. The not-devil could not stop her lip from curling up into a snarl, but she made no disapproving sounds.
Instead, the not-devil crouched down as small as she could make herself before the not-mother–became more of herself. While she was always a feral goddess, Hell has a way of inciting the most ferocious parts of oneself, for pleasure and pain. The not-devil swallowed hard three times.
She swallowed back babes ripped from mother arms for reeducation for soldiering for digging, the smoke of her burning fetishes and idols licking the sky, kissing the feet of pride-swollen captors called chiefs, seeing those chiefs beheaded or bought out by sallow, wrinkled men covered in metallic trinkets, church sermons that scorched her throat as they demonized her sex her ferocity her beauty to grow self-hate and shame in the pits of her children. She swallowed until she found the voice she used to whisper into young lovers’ dreams, the voice she used when she provided aftercare for a village of devotees passed out from a night of submission to her. Her most human voice.
“You know I’ve met Mary. She’s quite lovely. Even lovelier than the pictures,” she eyed the doll of the Virgin Mary with her pale face, ugly baby, and frayed gold dress.
The not-mother looked up at the doll of her goddess. She wasn’t the Mary she wanted.
When the not-mother and the not-father were living in sin two years into their relationship, they strolled a lovely Saturday afternoon fleamarket. The not-mother’s eyes gazed upon a multicolored tin portrait of the Mother of God. The size of a shoebox. It was the only Mary she could find in the flea market that was at least brown-skinned, though she wasn’t black or even dark-skinned like herself. You could find a dozen paintings of black Jesus on the street markets and church fairs, but Mary was nowhere to be found. This Mary was prominent on a table of folk art from Latin American cultures. Most Saturday strollers called them all Mexican and couldn’t decipher between newly manufactured and vintage items. Marco ran the table, an ageless El Salvadoran man she recognized from her bus route. He never failed to smile at her. She smiled at him first this time and picked up the tin bejeweled Mary. Wide eyes reflecting Mary’s rhinestone glitters.
“Babygirl, I can Google a picture of nigga Mary and print it if that’s what you want.” The not-father scoffed.
“How dare you! That’s the Mother of our Lord! Besides, she has to reveal herself to me. A gift from God.”
“Is it still a gift if you gotta pay 75 dollars?” He snarled, lip curling at the price tag.
She squinted at him.
“Alright, alright. Amigo, how about 40 bucks for the metal-Mary-statue-picture-thing.”
Marco’s grin stretched to cracking, “For you, big man, 60 bucks.”
“60–why I….”
The not-mother glared harder.
He pulled another crisp newborn twenty from his wallet. Its new knit fibers held in tender reverence between buyer and seller for just a moment before he pulled it back.
“Baby, I’m sorry, we just can’t do that. How much for the lil one?”
He pointed to the doll-like Mary, her gold crinkled crinoline making the dress look lumpy. Her body undoubtedly stuffed with styrofoam or –god-forbid– fiberglass. But at least she had a porcelain face, or it looked like porcelain, but Mary was pale. The baby pale. Rouge circles painted on heavenward infant cheeks.
“They made baby Jesus look like a clown,” the not-mother frowned.
The not-father feigned a gasp, “That’s our baby Lord,” and he handed the man ten bucks.
The not-mother’s face was even with the not-devil. The not-mother wiped her face. She didn’t realize she was crying until the tears tickled the curve where jaw meets throat. The not-father took several steps back toward the sink, shaking. A primal part of him knew it was his time to go belly-up, reveal his nipples, and subject himself to those more powerful. That primal part of him would never emerge as words, only as these shaking steps backward.
The not-mother focused on the shining black glints below the not-devil’s grassy mane. The devil is a liar, she heard the Church in her mind. She did not imagine a skinny slick old villain like the rest of the congregation. She took that to mean that YOU are a liar. You will lie to yourself about your worth, your God. Mary was her goddess. Mary was also the ability to put portrait to the concept of love. A mother’s love. She relied on the routine ceremony of Catholicism, but this was flesh. The not-mother smelled the not-devil’s breath. It was sex and smoked meat. She was holding eye contact with a denizen of Hell, and it was the truest love she had ever felt. At this eye contact, the not-devil’s dried grass rose into lush green daggers.
“There you are,” the goddess turned devil turned goddess cooed as she used the very edge of one claw to rest under the chin of the not-mother and tip her face up further. The goddess-devil shifted her body closer, softening her voice to a whisper. “Mary isn’t her name, not really. She’s also not a virgin, though she’s quite disinterested in sex, unfortunately,” she mumbled that last part. “She tries her best to meet you all who think you love her so much, but it’s hard to answer prayers when no one calls you by your name.”
The not-mother sniffed. She was doing her own swallowing. Her own calculating. She was supposed to be a survivor after all. She was supposed to be a representative for the lucky ones. She had faced a black American youth. Faced the foster care system, the police shootings, new home, the school shootings, new home, the vigilante shootings, new home, the check-collecting neglect, new home with the one kind, guilt-riddled Catholic family, severed from them and again until spat out by the unmothering of America. She survived the hands-off, the hands-on. She could face a devil.
She lifted her petite, calloused brown hand dabbled with decadent fat pockets and wrapped it around the claw of the goddess-devil. She pushed it slightly away, which the goddess-devil allowed, trying to hide her eagerness for this human touch.
“You speak English well for someone who is not colonized.”
Now the not-devil did laugh. Bucked her head back as jackals circled in her throat. She laughed like a village drunk on fire, like fighting foxes, like shattered glass. This made not-father piss himself and the not-mother smile. A toothy grin she couldn’t control; she couldn’t remember a time she smiled this wide. It was the goddess-devil’s turn to wipe her eyes.
“I’m sorry, so sorry, it has been so long since a mortal has taken tone with me. It’s invigorating!” She bristled, and all the fur and lemon grass puffed and laid back down with delicate sigh. The not-devil’s many shining black eyes revealed for just a moment. She softened her voice again and extended her hand, palm up to the not-mother. The not-mother paused in flirtation, as she was trained never to look too eager. She took the hand and stood up. The goddess-devil didn’t stand up from her crouched position but adjusted to be eye-to-eye with this standing woman. “You want a baby. That’s a very good thing to want.” She eyed the not-father's soaked groin over the not-mother’s shoulder as he tried to hide in the kitchen. “He is not going to give you a baby. He can’t. Not yet, at least.” The goddess-devil opened her mouth to speak, closed it, then opened it again, “Are you sure you want a human baby?”
“Yes?!” the not-mother yelped, flabbergasted.
“If you insist. I think we would’ve made a lovely baby.” The goddess-devil’s cock twitched. “If you are sure you want his baby then he needs to fuck me. It is the only way to bless him in my current form.” A clattering of falling pots and pans rang from the tiny kitchen as not-father stumbled backward. The goddess-devil ignored him.
“Are you alright my love?” the not-mother called out, her eyes not breaking from the goddess-devil’s face.
“Yes, yes, just a little accident.” He stepped out from behind the breakfast bar rubbing his head, refusing to look up. A welt was starting to form. The not-mother gestured him forward and patted the ground next to her. Still vibrating, he sat in piss-stained obedience. The goddess-devil leaned forward and pressed her massive mouth against the side of the not-mother’s face so only she could hear.
“I would much rather be fucked by you, but you were born as vessel, not as wand. And though I have been fucked by many born as vessels, I require his seed. If you come to me when you die, I will let you into my paradise, and I will give you a wand, or you could have both, or you could have neither. Whatever you want.” The goddess-devil pulled her head back slowly so the moisture of her inner lip caressed the not-mother’s cheek as she bared her fangs slightly in puppy smile. “They told you there was only Heaven and Hell and that someone will tell you where to go. That’s not true. Someone will tell you where to go if you want them to, but you choose the next phase of your journey. And you don’t have to stay wherever you choose. The choices aren’t binary here. Why would they be in the next life?”
The not-mother felt all the choices that had brought her to this moment. She could feel the moments when running away from home meant no one could protect the little ones, when reporting her boss for misogynoir meant being black-listed from the franchise, when marrying the man who loved her meant she could never kiss a woman. She looked to her husband, and he choked on his understanding.
He looked at the dripping cunt of the goddess-devil, listened to the sizzle of her secretions against the floor. He felt his hungry child-self rise in him–his true self. The one gnawing inner world of virile capability, the curious little self who got caught over and over sneaking behind the playground equipment to kiss, to compare shapes between legs. He still felt shoeprint bruises of shame against his back every night he nibbled his wife's inner thighs, working his way up to a promise. He felt the prayer behind his prayer that a baby would never come. For if a child did, would he and his wife ever fuck again? His child-self wanted to be in this goddess-devil. His teenage self needed to be in this goddess-devil. He had no choice but to be inside her. He nodded in agreement. The not-mother’s eyes welled with tears and she smiled as she grabbed his hands.
“We will survive this gift.”
He nodded humbly with pious purpose as his cock throbbed in boyish mischief. The goddess-devil and all her children smiled back as she spread her legs.
When he came, the howls of the goddess-devil punctured the sky into rain. She lunged—body contorting and bubbling into primordial ichor. Her boiling blackness swallowed him whole. Her horns were the last element to curl and melt. The heat of summer's inner thighs radiated from the tar cacoon before it oozed away through the cracks in the linoleum–in the dimension. She sang as she sank. A song of homegoing only the not-mother could hear. He was left fertile, shaking, flaccid. The not-mother kissed the floor where the goddess-devil sank. When she became pregnant, she rearranged the living room to replace the TV with an altar to her new goddess. She never went to church again.
The not-mother became a mother, and she did give birth to a new vessel. And that child was born with rebellious spirit. And that not-father became a father and branded himself adulterer. Our mother would assure him over and over that it was a divine sacrifice he gave. After the child’s conception, he would not let her touch him. His penis was marked with a helix of purple scars as if he was shredded and fused back together again, though he knew only infinite pleasure during the act.
When the mother looked at these scars, she saw Jesus. When she looked at these scars, she hungered to feel them on her tongue, these etchings of holy intervention, evidence the goddess-devil was hers and not a dream. To him, they looked like chains. He went to meetings for adulterers but never spoke up. They would never understand.
The child would build worlds out of mud. Cuss out teachers. Identify with sharks, komodo dragons, and any number of poisonous beings. Talk to invisible creatures. The child would have hairy forearms and a wide nose with nostrils that flared when annoyed. The child would pierce their friends' ears when parents said no. Eat ghost peppers with no fear. The child would grow up to go to art school, drop out and start a community garden that was also a harm reduction center that was also a trade circle. Grow up to date packs of black and brown girls of vessel and wand, and other gender rebels. Those who may or may not also be devil-blessed.
The mother drove the 64 bus route, and the father was a janitor for a country club where 1/4th of the members looked like him but not at him. Much to the complaint of Greg, who thought they let anybody in the club these days. After a night shift, at 10:30 am, the father would get on the 64 bus, five blocks from the country club, and sit right behind his wife, the seat always open for him. He would squeeze the mother’s shoulder, never pay. Then he would collapse in his seat and complain.
“This is so much worse. I wish she would go back to dating those pathetic white boys.”
“They, my love, they.” She exhaled exhaust. Maybe he would breathe it in this time.
“I wish they would go back to she. What did college do to our babygirl?” He said under his breath as the bus's sway lulled him into sleep.
And our mother didn’t answer. She slowed to a stop and pulled the handle to open the door. When she turned her head to ensure the passengers paid, she was staring directly into the heavy chest of a woman her own age who was surely also a mother. Her low turquoise tank top complimented her honey skin but betrayed the heat of the day with the blooming sweat stain expanding between her tits. Our mother wanted only to press her face into the sweat stain to drown in her salt. Kiss every acne scar and run her tongue across every stretch mark, trace ancestral lines back homewards to summer storms bursting with gratitude for her hard work, calling out the pleasure from between this honey-woman’s legs and—
“I said my app just ran out of money, but I got you next time for sure.”
“Hm?”
“Are we good?” The honey-woman's gestures filled the air between mother and mother.
“Oh yea, yea it’s fine,” and she waved the honey-woman onto the bus.
“Ok? You sure you okay mama?”
“Yes!” The mother said a bit too loud. “Go on enjoy the air conditioning.”
“Alright, you don’t gotta tell me twice.” She spoke low, drawn out as she traced the gaze from our mother to her salted breasts. She dropped her phone. Bent slow for her joints to pick it up. Eyes low, but her whisper crawled up into the mother’s ears. “I live just ‘round the corner from here. Second-floor apartment of the teal house.” The honey-woman stood up with a crack. “Hot as Hell out here,” she bellowed and found her seat in the middle, facing the mother’s obscured profile. The honey-woman couldn’t quite see the mother’s buried grin.
The father was snoring behind the mother and saw none of this. Saw none of the mother’s hunger. He never did.
Wrenching the door shut, she stared out onto the digested road, thinking about the goddess-devil and her promise of an afterlife. Of entangled night-stained limbs and squelching, begging holes where her ancestors swallowed each other's bodies in an ouroboros of worship. She let herself think, maybe, just maybe, her child’s life with all their lovers might be the closest thing to paradise in this mortal life.