The Devouring

By Annaya M. Baynes

Faced with systemic oppression, two lovers choose a ritual called The Devouring and a world made from love.

My lover and I decided to consume each other. Despite how it sounds, this is a rational decision. Have you seen the world lately? Maybe you’re one of those people who can choose the life of the veil, the life of willful ignorance, the life of joy at the expense of distant pain. Here, our eyelids stay peeled back to spot the constant barrage of threats before they reach us. So, many have chosen The Devouring.

No one knows for sure who was the first. Just that one day whispers started creeping under doors saying someone had devised a way to go somewhere completely and utterly safe. There were rules; otherwise, the whole ritual wouldn’t work. You’d just be left with a mess of flesh and bone and blood.

1. You and your partner for The Devouring must love each other truly.

My lover holds my beating heart, and I have no fear because I know she would never hurt it or me. Her love for me has soaked into the marrow of my bones.

2. The two of you must both want this with no doubts in your body or mind.

Over our morning coffee, we discussed going through with the ritual. We giggled over which body parts we’d eat first. I always chose her hands because they hold an immense wealth of power. One finger trailing down the curve of my neck sends shivers down my spine to the tips of my toes. A carefully placed palm can stop the complaint racing out of my mouth dead in its tracks. The woes of the world disappear if I just close my eyes and focus on the warmth of her hand. She always chose my butt. Her reasoning was simpler: it looks like it’d taste the best.

3. You had to maintain eye contact for as long as possible.

That was no problem for us. Many an evening we spent lying in bed staring into each other’s eyes and tracing blind constellations on the skin that we could reach. Those conditions met, we were ready.

Love is giving someone the power to destroy you, and they never do.

So we decided to strip down bare. Naked of the defenses we learned to put up, the constructs we built to make an unacceptable world acceptable. I held her gaze in mine. We weren’t scared. The true horrors were everything outside of our two bodies. Maybe you don’t know that, but we did. And anyway, they say that once the ritual is complete, you’ll join the rest of the Devoured and Devouring.

Wordlessly, she presented her right ring finger. It went down smoother than you’d think. We went back and forth, offering our body parts on the sacrificial altar of our love. I could feel the parts of me in her stomach. It was warm and wet and calm. It felt like a returning.

Love is giving someone the power to destroy you, and they never do. You can’t help exercising any power in your grasp, huh? You maim and hurt and destroy people, animals, the planet. We cannot accept that, so those of us who can turn to The Devouring. Maybe we want to revert to the wombs that held and cared for us, nourished us, imprisoned and shielded us. Maybe this is a last-ditch effort to escape the pain that the world has tattooed into the skin of our destiny. Maybe we just wanted to be loved.

Instead of letting ourselves be destroyed by those who have never cared for us, we created a world of our own that only accepted those who know of love. Parents, children, lovers, and friends are all welcome here. You may believe that we chose escape, but you’re more wrong than you’ve ever been. We chose a life full of richness and care. We chose a place where people can imagine beyond harm in the name of profit. We chose to love and be loved.

Process

I was inspired by how often we talk of all-consuming love in a negative fashion. That prompted me to think about what if that wasn’t true and what if I made the consumption literal. Sometimes it can feel like the world is eating me alive, parsing out portions of me for profit and power. I wanted to imagine giving that power to someone who loves and cares for me instead. I wanted to create a story where people who know what it means to love could create a new world away from the dominant society by engaging in a grotesque act of love. I imagined The Devouring as this sort of cannibalistic act for the reason above and because queer love or love by BIPOC can be seen as monstrous and grotesque. I’m a fan of leaning into these ideas and saying, “Yes, I’m a monster, and I love it. Now what?”

The piece is also a little antagonistic. It’s directed toward someone who has bought into the white supremacist, cis-hetero-patriarchal, capitalist, and ableist ideals of this world. The narrator holds a mirror to the reader and asks them to face some hard truths about what they may be upholding in society. On the other hand, I made this piece in the first-person because, if you’re someone who is marginalized, you can choose to identify with the narrator instead of the “you.”