[Issue 2025.74]

‘Unblooded Gospel’, Justin Taroli

Art © 2025 Toeken

---

There’s a guy at the bar with lips like wet marble and a credit score you can feel in your spine. He orders vodka neat. Who drinks vodka neat? People who don’t need mixers, or feelings, or food. People who glide.

“Don’t,” says Marcus, leaning into me. “He’s one of them.”

I laugh loud enough that it startles the couple next to us. “One of what?”

Marcus just says, “They drink. But they don’t piss. Think about it.”

He always says shit like this. Paranoid, poetic. He’s had every STD they make. We met in a waiting room where the magazines were laminated and all the pamphlets had smiling men on them, hands in back pockets, looking into each other like one of them’s about to die first.

The guy at the bar looks over. Eye contact like a scalpel. His smile’s too slow, like it’s remembering how.

I leave Marcus at the table and go. “Vodka?” I ask.

“Double,” he says. “You?”

“I’m a negative.”

He smiles wider. “How tragic.”

We don’t talk much. I follow him out the club’s back exit, down an alley that smells like fried dough and bleach. He touches my throat like he’s feeling for the pause between beats. I kiss him first, because I want to. His tongue is dry. His teeth—when they graze me—are not metaphor. “I’m not like other boys,” I whisper.

He doesn’t care. He bites. And when he does, it’s like sucking on a live wire, because I lied. I lied so good. I lied straight through my gums. I lied so hard I brought death with me.

He recoils. Mouth open, panting steam. Blood on his chin, sizzling. Actually sizzling.

“I’m positive,” I say, wiping my neck. “Undetectable, but you know. Still a little toxic.”

He falls. Not like in movies. More like an insect in winter—knees buckling, then nothing. I leave him twitching by the dumpsters. When I get back inside, Marcus is gone.

---

The next night, I wear a mesh shirt and a bandage on my neck like it’s a club stamp. I let people think it was rough trade. I let people think I’m prey. I let people look. In the mirror at the bar, I adjust my lip gloss until it reflects the LED lights like a warning flare. I look edible, but slightly off. Like sashimi left out too long. That’s the bait.

They gather at the bar. Always the same types: translucent and toned. They glide instead of walk. They don’t carry phones, just stand behind people who do. You learn to spot them by the hunger in their stillness. Real people are always fiddling—drinking, texting, touching. These things just wait.

One slides up next to me. This one has cheekbones like knife hilts and eyes like day-old snow. “Do I know you?” they ask. Their voice is soft, like a violin note you feel in your molars.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “But I bleed pretty.”

A pause. Almost imperceptible. Like they heard something they shouldn’t have, or smelled something rotten under a perfect meal.

“You’re funny,” they say, but it isn’t a compliment. It’s a test.

I smile and finish my drink. I leave without paying, and they follow.

In the alley, they don’t waste time. Fingers like cold vines press against my jaw. My head tilts back without resistance. There’s an intimacy in being opened. But I learned something from last night. I took Marcus’ advice. I got prepped. Literally. The vial hanging from the chain around my neck isn’t decorative.

When they lean in to bite, I twist the chain, shatter the glass between my fingers, and shove the open wound into their mouth. Not my neck. My palm. Blood and glass. They bite down on reflex. Too fast. Too greedy. The reaction is instant. They don’t scream. They hum. A low, vibrating noise like a wire being sawed through. Their mouth fills with steam and something black. Their eyes rupture first. Then their tongue dries and curls like burnt paper. They drop, clutching their chest like something is flapping inside it.

I watch them die with my cigarette still lit. This one takes longer. Less dramatic. More like watching someone drown in syrup. I light a second cigarette off the first. “Two for two,” I say, and walk back toward the club.

Inside, someone’s DJing a remix of Tainted Love, which feels too on-the-nose to be accidental. Marcus is still missing.

---

I don’t see Marcus for three days. Which isn’t unusual, not really. He disappears all the time. But usually there’s a text. A meme. A photo of a back alley Jesus statue with eyeliner drawn on in sharpie. Something that says: I still think I’m funny. Something that says: Don’t die without me.

By day four, I start walking past his building. It’s a fourth-floor walk-up over a shuttered juice bar in Hell’s Kitchen, the kind of place that smells like sugar rotting in plastic. I buzz his number. Nothing. The super says he hasn’t been home. I leave a paper bag of Red Bull and peanut M&M’s on his welcome mat. That’s how we used to apologize to each other.

The next night I go to The Tomb. That’s not its real name, but it may as well be. A long, low bar with black curtains instead of walls and a chandelier made of ribs. People love to pretend it’s exclusive, but all it takes to get in is the right shoes and a willingness to pretend you’ve never been scared of your own reflection.

I ask around. Everyone knows Marcus. Some say he left town. Some say he got clean. One guy says he saw Marcus leave with someone last week. “Someone tall. Real pale. No sweat, even in leather.” Then he adds, “Didn’t speak. Just touched Marcus’ elbow, and he followed.”

The story is vague, but the detail sticks. These things—they don’t speak unless they want to. And when they do, it’s not always with words. Sometimes it’s a scent. A pulse. A look. Whatever they are, they don’t move like people. They’re fluid. They don’t blink enough. Sometimes they hum at frequencies just below your hearing. I’ve seen it. In crowded rooms the music will stop for a second and the air gets thicker, like syrup poured down your throat. And they appear. No sound, no door, just there.

The night I noticed it first, I thought I was high. Now I know better. They’re not just rich, or beautiful, or sadistic. They’re wrong. Just off by a few degrees from human. They don’t cast shadows right. I saw one once in a bathroom mirror and its reflection lagged behind.

Outside the Tomb, I light a cigarette and stare at the sky. No stars in Manhattan. Just planes and satellites pretending. I don’t want to admit I miss Marcus, but I do. His messiness. His teeth. The way he rolled his eyes like it was cardio. The way he saw everything—really saw it—and still showed up to parties just to throw glitter on the corpse.

If they have him, they’re not keeping him for fun. They’re not lovers. They don’t make friends. They consume. Slowly sometimes. Lovingly. But they don’t stop.

Back in the bar, someone brushes past me and I smell it—chlorine and clove. The way the air smelled the night I watched one of them die. I turn, but no one’s looking. The scent fades. I order a drink I don’t want, sip it, and wait for something to happen. In the bottom of the glass, I see it. A reflection. Not mine. Not the bartender’s. Not anyone near me. Marcus. Pale, hollow-eyed, staring up from the ice like he’s at the bottom of a lake. Then he vanishes. I leave the drink and run.

---

They call it a benefit, but no one says what it’s for. The invitation arrives folded into a black glove, slid under my door like a threat. The event’s called A Night for the Senses, which is either high-concept or just a bad joke. Either way, it’s bait, and I bite.

It’s held in a decommissioned bathhouse in DUMBO—drained pools now filled with candles, steam machines pumping scentless fog through tile corridors. The art is vague and wet-looking. People stand around in architectural clothing, drinking red liquid from ceramic bowls shaped like vertebrae. A chandelier overhead pulses in time with the bass, as if it’s breathing.

I come alone. I always do now. The air’s humid with intention. There’s a nervous sheen to the crowd, but no one sweats. That’s the first sign. I drift. Pretend to belong. I know how to loiter like a socialite. When I lean against the wall near the bar, I feel it—that crawling warmth between my shoulder blades. Watching. I count reflections. One too many. A man in a corner mirror looking at me, but not visible in the room.

I move down a hallway lined with velvet ropes and stretched canvases—portraits of men whose pupils have been scratched out—I find a side lounge lit in green and gold. A velvet couch. A man sitting with his coat still on, eyes scanning the crowd like he’s memorizing exits.

I sit across from him because there’s nowhere else to go. Because I don’t want to be followed into the bathroom. Because I recognize the look in his eyes: someone who already knows what I know, and worse.

He speaks first. “If you’re here for the wine, I’d skip it. Doesn’t pair well with irony.”

His voice is thin, frayed. He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t ask who I am. Just watches me.

“I wasn’t invited,” I say.

“No one is,” he replies. “You’re selected.”

I look him over. Hollow cheeks, a jacket too heavy for this crowd. His hands are covered in faded hospital bracelets, stacked like bangles. I recognize one of them—Mount Sinai ID, yellowed at the edges. I wore the same kind once. “They didn’t finish you,” I say.

He shrugs. “They got bored.”

“What’s your name?”

“Pace. Or what’s left of him.”

A woman glides past the doorway, her eyes lingering on us just a fraction too long. Pace doesn’t move. Just says, low and flat, “They don’t like us talking.”

I glance back at the bar. No sign of the figure in the mirror. The fog’s rolling back in. “What are they?” I ask.

Pace leans forward, resting his arms on his knees like someone praying to stay upright. “They’re old. Older than shame. Older than consent. They eat feeling. Preferably fear. But hunger’s hunger, right?” He exhales, and for a moment it sounds like a sob. “I thought they wanted sex. That’s how they start. But it’s never the body. They want to unmake you. Slowly. Savor it.”

We sit in silence as the party continues just out of reach. Laughter like glass breaking. Music with no melody. Pace finally adds, “You have something in you. They can smell it. That’s why they haven’t taken you yet.”

“What do I smell like?”

“Resistance,” he says. “Or revenge.”

A server walks past carrying a tray of pale pink tongues on crackers. Neither of us takes one.

When I finally stand to leave, Pace doesn’t look up. Just mutters, “Check the mirror.”

I turn toward the long silver installation above the lounge entrance. In its reflection, Pace sits alone, hands folded. No me. No couch across from him. Just an empty space.

The fog gets thicker on the way out, like it knows I’ve seen something I shouldn’t. I push through bodies that aren’t dancing so much as swaying in synchronized submission. Someone touches my elbow—a cold graze, featherlight—but when I turn, no one’s there.

I take the fire exit. I don’t trust the front door. The stairs are wet like they’ve been licked clean and my boots slip twice before I reach the bottom. No alarms go off.

Outside, the street is too quiet. The air feels pressurized, like right before a migraine. Across the avenue a billboard flashes an ad for bottled oxygen. Beneath it, a man in a fur coat watches me without blinking. His mouth hangs open slightly, as if remembering how to breathe.

I walk faster down toward the waterfront, past locked warehouses and abandoned ferry terminals. The wind off the East River smells chemical and bruised. I should call someone. I should tell someone what I saw. But Marcus is still gone. Pace is barely a person. And everyone else I know is either on PrEP, on tour, or on something they don’t have a name for yet.

I stop under the Manhattan Bridge. It’s a place Marcus used to take me when he needed to scream. Not talk—scream. Just a full-throated noise into the night, echoing off the bridge like proof of life. I try it now, but all I can manage is a dry cough.

In my pocket, the invitation has gone damp. I tear it in half, then in quarters, then into smaller pieces until my hands are full of pulp. When I let go, the wind doesn’t take it. The paper just sits there on the sidewalk like it’s too heavy to move.

Behind me, a car engine turns over. Headlights snap on and I freeze. The vehicle doesn’t move. Just idles. Waiting. I can’t see the driver. The windows are tinted black. Not luxury tint—void tint. I turn away and walk toward the train. A few blocks up I hear the engine again, closer now. Still not moving fast. Just keeping pace and watching.

I duck into a bodega and pretend to shop. I buy gum I won’t chew and a bottle of water I don’t open. I wait around for a few minutes but the car never passes the window. It’s like it dissolved.

When I finally make it home I check the locks twice. Then I drag a chair in front of the door, not because it’ll stop anything, but because I need the gesture.

I watch myself brush my teeth in the mirror above the sink. For the first time in a long time, I don’t like what I see. Not because I look sick or scared, but because something’s changed in the way my reflection moves. Just slightly. Like it’s a step ahead of me now.

---

It takes four days to find Pace. I go back to the bathhouse twice, but it’s sealed now, locked behind construction scaffolding and signs that say things like temporarily closed for private restoration—which is rich, because the place was never open in the first place.

I try bars. Galleries. Clinics. I even check an old queer community center in Chinatown where Marcus used to run a writing group. No one’s seen him, but someone gives me a name I haven’t heard before.

“Try the tunnels,” they say. “People like that always end up in the tunnels.” It’s not advice so much as folklore.

On the fifth day I take the subway late, stay past my stop, ride until the end of the line in Brooklyn. I wait until the last few passengers file off then I walk the platform like I’m looking for a dropped contact lens. Eventually, a maintenance door creaks open. I catch it before it shuts and descend into the dark.

No lights. Just water dripping and concrete that hums with old electricity. There’s graffiti here, but it’s not written in any alphabet I know. It looks etched—not spray paint, but clawed, like the tunnel itself was marked. Beneath the third staircase there’s a man hunched under a broken EXIT sign smoking something thin and gray. His eyes catch mine like they were waiting for me.

Pace looks worse than before. Thinner. Greasier. Like he’s been sitting in a memory too long and started to rot inside it. “I thought you weren’t following me,” he says.

“I wasn’t.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I need in.”

“To what?”

“You know.”

He doesn’t answer. Just stubs the cigarette out on the sole of his shoe and says, “Come on, then.” But he doesn’t take me to the lair. Not right away. First, he leads me through steam tunnels, past rooms filled with burnt mattresses and broken light fixtures. He moves slow. Not out of caution, but because he wants me to see. Wants me to understand what I’m asking for.

He speaks only once, after we pass a room where the floor is covered in hospital bracelets. Hundreds of them. Most still locked closed. “I’m not a guide,” he says. “I’m just what’s left.”

We come up through a maintenance shaft behind a studio in Brighton Beach. The kind of place that smells like coconut oil and disappointment. From there, it’s another walk through alleys I’ve never noticed, buildings with no windows, lights that flicker only when you look away.

Pace stops in front of a brick wall. No door. No sign. Just brick and the sound of wind moving through a vent above us. “Watch,” he says. He touches the wall. Not taps, not knocks. Just lays a palm flat against the surface. The brick doesn’t open exactly—it peels like paper burning without flame. Behind it just darkness. A hallway, narrow and breathing.

I hesitate. “You sure he’s in there?” I ask.

“No,” Pace says. “But it’s worth checking out.”

I step inside and the wall seals behind me. No sound. Just gone. Inside, the floor feels soft and wrong. The walls aren’t walls—they’re membranes, veined and pulsing. The hallway slopes downward like a throat.

I walk. No lights. Just faint glows from under the skin of the place. I pass shapes. Things on tables. Things that twitch. Things that maybe used to be people. I hear voices—but not talking. Not words. More like a chorus of hunger layered over silence. Then I find the room. Circular, like a drained fountain. And in the center is Marcus. Not bound. Not unconscious. Just waiting. His eyes find me immediately. Too quickly. Like he’s been watching the hallway through the walls.

He stands and moves like he’s been rehearsing it. “Devon,” he says, voice soft, unbroken. I don’t say his name. I don’t step forward. He’s beautiful. And that’s the worst part.

The room doesn’t breathe, but it has a rhythm—something pulsing just below silence. A hum in the walls. Or in my blood. I’m not sure anymore. Marcus stands at the center of the room like he was placed there, like someone posed him and forgot to press play. His arms hang at his sides. He’s barefoot, dressed in something smooth and pale that moves like liquid when he shifts his weight. I don’t recognize the material because it isn’t fabric.

He says my name again. “Devon.” It’s not a question. Not surprise. Just a statement, like observing the weather or naming a wound. I don’t answer as I take one step forward. The light in the room doesn’t follow me. He smiles slightly. Not symmetrical this time. Something slips out at the corner of his mouth. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says.

“You shouldn’t look like that,” I reply.

He laughs, short and flat. “They gave me things. Took others.”

“What did they take?”

Marcus tilts his head. The movement is precise, mechanical. His eyes scan me like I’m something under glass. “I don’t sleep anymore. I don’t taste food. I don’t dream.” He pauses. “But I remember you. So maybe they failed.”

I take another step closer. My boots don’t echo. The floor swallows sound like it’s hungry for it.

“Are you still you?” I ask.

Marcus doesn’t answer right away. His hands twitch once, then still. “I wanted to die,” he says. “Not because I was scared. Because I thought that was the rule. You get close enough, they finish you. But they didn’t. They opened me, looked inside, and left me there. Like I wasn’t enough to digest.”

The way he says it—there’s no pride, no shame. Just fact.

“What are you now?” I ask.

He looks at me then. Not with hunger. Not with awe. With something like guilt. “I think I’m a message.” That lands in the middle of me like a nail. He takes a step forward. “I told them about you,” he says. “After I realized what they were. I said you were sharp. That you were impossible to drink from. That you had blood that tasted like forgetting.” My body tightens but I don’t move. “They listened,” he continues. “They’re still listening.”

I glance around. The walls don’t have corners. The air doesn’t have weight. We’re not in a room—we’re inside something. A body. A thought. A trap. “I came here to bring you out,” I say.

Marcus nods, almost like he expected that. “But you’re not sure if you can,” he says.

“No.”

“I’m not sure either.”

We stand like that for a long time. Two silhouettes in the middle of something older than language. Something waiting. Marcus reaches out—not fast, not threatening. Just slow and deliberate, like someone turning a page. His hand brushes my jaw. It’s cold but not dead. “If they try to take you,” he says, “I’ll try to stop them.” I place my hand over his, because I want to believe him. But I’m not sure that’s what I came here for.

---

Marcus walks me to the exit without speaking. His hand never leaves my back, but it’s not affectionate. It’s directional. Like a guide dog trained to lead you through landmines. The walls don’t close behind us. They absorb. The hallway re-forms as we pass, erasing the path like skin sealing over a wound. He stops at the edge of the lair. “This is as far as I go,” he says. I turn to face him, half-expecting him to flicker out, or dissolve, or say something cryptic like remember who you are, but he doesn’t. “I told them I’d bring you in,” he says. “I told them you’d come.”

I nod. “And now I’m leaving.”

He shrugs. “Maybe that’s what I told them, too.”

Then he’s gone—not vanished, just absent. Like a light you forgot was on, suddenly out.

I climb alone back through the cartilage tunnels and the service corridor that smells like mold and formaldehyde. I come out near the river in a warehouse district I’ve never seen during the day. My legs ache, but not from running. From tension.

I call Pace and he doesn’t answer. I don’t blame him. I sit on the curb until morning watching a single rat pick apart a slice of pizza from the inside out. When Pace finally texts, it’s just a pin drop.

The address is a café in Long Island City pretending to be a co-working space. I find him in the back corner stirring a cup of something too thick to be coffee. He’s dressed like a scarecrow now. Layers of old club flyers and band tees. His eyes look like he’s been reading in the dark for a year. “I saw Marcus,” I say.

“I figured.”

“He’s still in there. I think they’re planning something big.”

He raises one eyebrow, finally looking at me. “Bigger than luring half of Chelsea into foam parties and curated orgies? What could be bigger than that?”

“A harvest.”

He goes still.

I lay it out. What I saw. What Marcus didn’t say. The architecture that was breathing. The shapes on the tables. Pace listens, his fingers twitching against the ceramic like he’s counting down something in his head.

“I’ve heard things,” he says. “People disappearing in groups. Not just the usual. Whole orgs. Health collectives. HIV advocacy projects. Anyone too public.” He opens a folder on his phone—screenshots, event pages, private invites. Most are gone now, deleted. But a few remain. A flier for something called Purity Function. Another: The Unblooded Hour. All at the same location. Same date. Three nights from now. “Warehouse in Bushwick,” he says. “Used to be a body modification clinic. Now it’s a ‘healing center.’ They’re calling it a queer wellness gala.”

I look at the flier. The logo is a red drop inside a white circle. Come light. Leave lighter. “They’re going to drain them,” I say.

Pace nods. “But not just to feed. To cleanse. They think they’re filtering the blood supply and starting over.”

I ask the question that’s been buried in me since night one. “Why can’t they drink mine?”

Pace smiles, small and humorless. “It’s not the virus. Not exactly. It’s the memory of it. The blood changed. It remembers being hunted. Touched. Altered. It became something they can’t digest. It’s not poison, Devon. It’s truth.” He pulls something from his jacket. A vial. Dark red. Opaque. “This is mine,” he says. “From before the meds. From when I was still detectable. I keep it cold.” I stare at it. He adds, “They can’t stand it. It hits them like sunlight through a locked casket. It burns from the inside out.”

I ask the only question that matters now. “How do we get it in?”

Pace grins. First time I’ve seen him look human. “I have ideas.”

---

We don’t call it a plan. Plans are things people with time make. What we have is a sequence of tasks strung together by fear, hope, and a shared willingness to fuck everything up if it means even one of them dies screaming.

Pace has the vials—sixteen of them, stored in a box meant for insulin. He kept them hidden inside a storage locker behind a shuttered Planet Fitness. When he opens the cooler, the smell is copper and rot and something else I can’t name. Not foul. Not clean. Just old. He says, “These are all from people who didn’t make it. I saved them anyway. Now they get to finish what the rest of us couldn’t.”

We rent a van. Not a black one, too obvious. White and windowless. Looks like someone’s sad catering business. Pace wires the ventilation with a makeshift dispersal rig—plastic tubing, a cracked humidifier and an old CPR mask. It shouldn’t work, but when we test it in an empty parking garage, I cough blood-mist for ten minutes straight and feel like I’ve been baptized in rust.

Next: outfits. Can’t go in looking like revenge. We need to blend. Pace finds us both matching jumpsuits with minimalist logos—VitalGlow Wellness Collective. Too clean. Too beige. Perfect.

The warehouse is already being staged. We scout from the roof of a neighboring condo building, pretending to vape and look lost. Inside, workers unload crates of silk cushions, latex recliners, walls made of fog. They’ve got security. Not guards—hosts. Too symmetrical. Too still. You can spot them by the way they never shift their weight.

We memorize entry points. Ducts. Side doors. Emergency exits that haven’t been tested since the Reagan years. If things go wrong, we burn it all. If things go right, we still burn it all.

Back at Pace’s place—if you can call a storage unit with a cot a place—we sit and drink Gatorade like it’s wine. He’s quieter than usual. Not solemn, just distant. Like he’s already halfway to whatever comes next.

“You could run,” I tell him.

“I ran for years.”

“There’s still time.”

Pace shrugs. “Not really. Even if we leave, it keeps going. The parties. The feeding. The forgetting. They win when no one remembers.”

I ask him what he wants most out of this.

He takes a long time to answer. “I want someone to be scared of me. Just once.” I understand that more than I should.

That night I dream of Marcus. Not the one I saw in the lair. The one from before. Laughing in a cracked leather booth. Eating pickled eggs with his fingers. Daring me to kiss him in a bar full of people who’d rather not know we exist. I wake up with the shape of his name in my mouth.

Pace is already up, packing the last vial into a holster under his shirt. The sun isn’t up yet, but it’s coming. You can smell the light in the air. The city shifts slightly, like a beast in its sleep. Tonight’s the gala. And we’re bringing the plague.

---

They call it The Function in public, The Unblooded Hour amongst themselves. No real address—just a location ping and a confirmation QR code with a pulsing white dot at the center, like it’s alive. Everyone invited is told to wear white. Some show up in linen robes. Others in harnesses and mesh. The dress code is “ritual purity.” No phones. No jewelry. No metal that could reflect.

Inside the warehouse, the lighting is soft and pink. Fabric walls breathe gently with hidden fans. The floor is padded, muffling every step. It feels like walking through the inside of a lung. The scent is a neutral and warm synthetic calm. The kind of thing pumped into wellness spas to keep you from noticing you’re being observed.

Pace and I arrive early wearing our jumpsuits, each of us wheeling a case. No one stops us. No one looks twice. We nod. We smile. We blend. The creatures are here already but they don’t stand out. That’s the trick. They dress like us. They act like hosts. But you can spot them if you know what to look for—too still, too symmetrical, too clean. Eyes that don’t dilate. Lips that move before they speak.

A voice over the speaker welcomes the guests. It’s genderless and medical. It thanks everyone for “offering themselves to the process of undoing.” People clap. Some giggle. Everyone thinks it’s a joke.

In the center of the space is a shallow pool ringed in mirrors. Around it, lounge chairs and IV stands. Beside each: a porcelain bowl. It’s not a party. It’s a collection site.

We set up the humidifier in the back, inside what looks like an aromatherapy diffuser. It clicks once when we turn it on. Nothing obvious. Nothing dramatic. Just the sound of mist beginning to hiss. I watch Pace as he opens the first vial. He doesn’t flinch. He pours it into the reservoir like it’s water.

The effect isn’t immediate but it builds. The guests start to sweat first. Not the creatures—us. The humans. Like we can feel it in our skin, something uninvited. Something pressing back. Then the creatures start to shift. Subtle at first. A blink that doesn’t reset. A smile that freezes too long. One of them cracks his neck and it doesn’t stop cracking. A woman in white begins to convulse in her chair, eyes wide, mouth open. Her tongue begins to split down the middle.

And then it’s chaos. They try to breathe but the air won’t let them. It fills them with memory. With contamination. With lives they thought they could devour and forget. One drops to her knees, skin blistering like it’s been kissed by light. Another tries to run but his feet burst before he makes it to the door. The guests scream, but not all of them run. Some are high. Some think it’s part of the show. One man dips his fingers in the pool and watches them dissolve like sugar. A creature falls into the mirror ring and shatters the glass. His face doesn’t bleed. It peels. Like wet tissue pulled off meat.

The scent of old blood fills the room. Not fresh. Not metallic. Something deeper. Cell-deep. The sound becomes unbearable—like a choir made of dying dogs and opera singers with punctured lungs.

I lose sight of Pace. I don’t see Marcus until it’s nearly over. He stands at the center of it all, covered in blood that isn’t his, and calm. His palms are open at his sides. His eyes meet mine across the chaos and he doesn’t smile—but he sees me. And I know then: he was never completely theirs.

The mist stops hissing. The screaming stops, too. What’s left behind isn’t silence. It’s ruin. The white floor is red. The guests are gone, or limping, or sobbing into the wreckage of what was supposed to heal them. The creatures who remain are twitching piles of symmetry undone. Marcus walks toward me, barefoot. I don’t ask if he’s okay. We both are, and we aren’t.

Outside, the night hasn’t changed. The city still breathes. Taxis still pass. A man walks his dog on the corner like nothing happened. Pace limps out the back exit, dragging the case behind him. He doesn’t say a word. None of us do. Some things don’t need to be spoken to be believed.

---

I don’t hear from Marcus again. But I don’t expect to. He was never the kind of person who lingered after a party ended—he slipped out, took the side exit, vanished before the lights came up. Maybe he’s still out there. Maybe he isn’t. Either way, I carry him differently now.

Pace stays. Not forever, just longer than he used to. He crashes on my couch, leaves clove cigarette burns on the window ledge, drinks my coffee without asking. I don’t mind. We don’t often talk directly about what happened. We talk around it. He tells me about a dream he had where his body was made of glass and someone played piano through his spine. I tell him I’ve stopped sleeping with the lights on.

Sometimes we walk the city late. Not aimless. Just watching, checking corners. Looking for reflections that lag, silhouettes that don’t cast heat. We don’t see them anymore. Whatever we did at that warehouse, it wasn’t just destruction. It was interruption and a warning. A signal that we remember.

It doesn’t feel like we won. It feels like we’re in the echo of something no one else heard. I stop going to bars. The lights are too soft. The bathrooms too clean. Every mirror feels like it might show me something that isn’t there—something behind me, smiling too slowly.

Pace finds a job shelving books in a gay bookstore that pretends it’s a nonprofit. He reads medical thrillers during his lunch breaks and writes things on scraps of receipt paper—words I’m never allowed to see. He lives above the shop now. Says the creaking at night keeps him honest.

The city’s quiet in new ways. People still disappear, but differently. Not all at once. Not at parties. One here, one there. Like the hunger didn’t die—just sank deeper, found a new shape.

One morning, I wake up to find a business card slipped under my door. It’s blank except for a raised red dot in the center and a faint scent—lavender, bleach, iron. I burn it without touching it twice.

There are still parties. Still people who want to be consumed. But now the air tastes different when you walk through it. Now some of them hesitate. And a few even ask questions.

One night Pace hands me a folded flyer for a queer sobriety group that meets in the basement of a Unitarian church. “You should read something out loud,” he says. “Just to see if your voice still works.” I go and don’t read, but I do listen.

Later, I sit on the church steps and watch the sky turn pink like a bruise healing in reverse. Pace joins me without speaking. He pulls out a protein bar and eats half before realizing it’s expired. I take the rest anyway. We’re not redeemed. We’re not even sure we’re safe. But we’re here and something else is too.

© 2025 Justin Taroli

[Issue 2025.74]

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