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The cold is bitter, a teething toddler gnawing at any exposed skin. It’s snowing, early morning dusk white blanketing grass slowly, blades drooping under the melting weight. It smells. Sticking to Daniel in spiraling tendrils. Rot.
The church doors are blocked off, bright yellow tape that reflects their flashlights like summer sunlight. The wood is old, rotting and peeling, but stands still. The sign out front promises the coming savior, salvation. The stench permeates the air, the birds sing nonetheless.
“Come on,” a hand is on his shoulder, not pressing, a comfort maybe. “Let's go in.”
Max’s hand leaves a scorch on Daniel’s shoulder when he removes it and in the frigid air Daniel starts to sweat. He trails behind Max up the crooked steps, footprints muddy in the dusting of white on them. They’re cement, solid, but Daniel shifts his weight at a lopsided feeling.
His side is itching, the pink skin catching on the inside of his shirt. He can feel a stray thread snag on a stitch. Max lifts the tape and holds it steady for him.
“Found him only a little before we called you, figured it was more your guys’ type of situation, had our guys check it out though,” Daniel can see a dead fly in the dish of holy water when he crosses the threshold, it’s not any warmer inside. “He’s only been dead a couple hours.”
Max walks with purpose, a strength in his step Daniel can’t match, following the sleep-strained cop ahead of them. Daniel stares at the pinching fabric over his thighs when he squats, tight, stretched, warm. His blonde hair is pushed back, gelled and finger-combed. Nothing gets in his eyes when he tips his head to stare up at the drying blood on the altar. Daniel’s curls go damp with melting snow. It sticks to his forehead and streams into his eyelashes. His vision blurs when he looks, snow-water kaleidoscoping the broken body strung before him.
“He was dead before they hung him up?” Max asks, blue gloved hand poking at the inside bit of the body’s flayed chest. It comes back red and Daniel watches Max lick his lips. He’ll offer him chapstick when they leave.
“Maybe, but it doesn’t actually seem very likely,” the cop huffs as he shuffles towards Max, Daniel hears him gulp when he looks at the blood in his hand. “The injuries from the rope and the cuts look fresh, but doc says they’ve been there longer than he’s been dead.”
“He died while they carved him up, then,” Max says with a nod, factual, unmoved. Daniel stares at his fang tooth, the one that always catches on his lip when he closes his mouth. It leaves a circle of white in wet hot pink.
Daniel blinks. Blood drips. Leaky faucet, he needs to call his dad, ask how to fix it. Max might know. His stomach is rumbling.
“Do we know who he is?” Daniel’s voice is rough, sleep slowed and cold dry. He clears his throat and swallows a bit of phlegm. He didn’t brush his teeth before he left. His molars feel fuzzy.
The cop looks at him now, pale, “not yet, but we’re sending prints back to the precinct and checking missing persons records, so we should know by the end of the day.”
“Daniel,” Max’s voice rasps, echoing in the stained-glass light. It makes him bright red, as the sun rises.
When Daniel looks he’s standing, trousers straight and unrevealing again. The tips of all his gloved fingers are red, or maybe that’s the light too. It drips onto the wooden floor and Max stares at Daniel.
“Look,” he says then, fang tooth pointing down at the blood on the floor and hand beckoning. “He’s empty.”
Daniel steps closer, through the center aisle of the straight backed pews. There’s a bible on the floor in front of one, face down, pages wrinkled. The rest sit perfect and straight in their wooden cubbies.
At the altar Max is red as the bloody angel that flutters above them. It makes his blue eyes black. Then, Daniel looks.
White male, probably mid to late twenties, black hair, big straight teeth. His chest is carved wide open, flayed. Flaps of his skin, what used to be his abdomen, are strung up on the rope around him like clothes out to dry. His arms are pulled tight, tied, a crucifixion. His stomach is carved empty, just bones and the inside of his back straight through. Cleaned up like a jack-o-lantern, scooped dry and carved silly. His legs are strung up too, ropes connected to the overhead sculpture of a crucified christ child. He’s flying, flayed, red and still warm. It smells like iron.
“You think it’s our guy?”
“I think that’s why they called us,” Max says, radiating living heat from beside Daniel, his broad shoulder brushes his and Daniel shoves his gloved hands into the cavern of the man in front of him. It warms his fingers like a campfire, the blood like a hot shower in January. So hot it stings, pins and needles, numb until the sweat starts. He wants to ask if this is how he felt.
He hopes he was warmer, softer, wetter. He wonders if his ribs were tighter, if Max had to scissor his fingers to take, like he does to open him up when he gives.
He thumbs around his ribs, has Max shine his flashlight inside to look up his esophagus. His fingers slip, peeling back a bit of sliced flesh along his inner back and Daniel gets blood on Max’s cheek. It drips almost to his lips, just a centimeter away, before Max shifts and rubs it off with the back of his glove.
“You see anything?” Daniel asks him, prodding now at the vertebrae of his spine, the bone wet and glistening.
“No,” Max sighs, standing. “Let's check the building and see if anything stands out. If it’s our guy we’ll find something.”
They didn't have a name yet, it was possible still that Daniel could imagine the body was his. Would Max have let the dripping blood roll further-- into his lips? Down his throat? Would the dry curls on the dead-eyed head feel like Daniel's if Max reached out? Could his eyes, warm honey brown and unblinking, mirror the potted ember gold of his own? Did they too dilate when Max lowered himself before them, did they crinkle and yearn and flutter?
“There was a bible,” he says, still looking at the dead eyes. “In one of the rows, on the floor.”
“I’ll go look,” Max says, “check his clothes.”
Daniel wants to watch Max, so he looks away from the eyes. They follow him, and when he looks back they’re staring still. Max is deliberate, scans up and down the pew aisles efficiently. He crouches when he finds it and Daniel can see the stretch of him, the barest bit, trousers swollen around the curve of him and the stretch of his tucked-in shirt. He fingers at the body’s pockets, but he knows.
“Daniel,” Max calls from his crouch, the word reverberates around the holy space like gospel. “This is it.”
Daniel removes his hand from the pocket of the body’s jeans and swaps his gloves out with a fresh pair the cop offers him. He’s standing awkwardly in the middle of the aisle watching them. He looks sick, tired, the shape of a wedding ring presses against the latex on his fingers. Daniel tries to smile at him.
“Second Corinthians 5:8,” Max says, “you know it?”
Daniel shakes his head. He’d never read a bible verse until they started this case. He thinks Max had, he’d seen his father once at their promotion. Black shroud, white collar, heavy hands.
“We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord,” Max reads, wrinkled bible in his hand. The line is highlighted, smeared and yellow.
“Did he leave a card or just the bible?”
“Just the book,” Max says, standing. Daniel was leaning over him and his chest stands in Max’s way on his ascent. The impact makes his hair skew just enough that one stray piece flops onto his forehead. He doesn’t push it back, though he’s changed his gloves too and no more blood stains them.
“Well, agents, we’ve gotta wrap this up and clean up, the church still wants to do service tomorrow,” the officer says from behind them. “We have pictures and we’ll send over the case once the reports are filed into the system.”
“We’ll come back to the station with you, the other victims we’ve seen like this have all been within about twenty miles of here so we’ll be staying to investigate if you have the space.”
The officer nods at Max’s words and Daniel watches them exchange the bible. The leather cover tugs at Max’s gloves and his wrist shows. His veins stand out, purple and blue on pink pale skin.
“We’ve got a room we can let you all use, do you have a place to stay? I’d suggest Rosa’s down the road just a bit, I know it's close to here but she’s the nicest lady you’ll meet and it’s the safest motel we’ve got.”
Daniel nods when Max does, matching his wide legged stance in the threshold of the church. The sun has risen mostly now and bathes him golden, but the light of the stained-glass still sits in the shadows of him. Red under his nose and fat bottom lip drips down his shave-burned neck.
“That’s great, thank you,’ Max says, shedding his gloves and extending a hand to the officer. “We’ll try to stay out of your hair.”
“Thank you, agents, let us know if we can be of any more help.”
The cop doesn’t turn back to look at the body as he leaves, just walks out and straight to his car through the small crowd of other personnel. A redhead has a camera and a short mouse of a boy is a doctor. Daniel watches them gossip while they work, listens a bit to learn nothing. Max’s hand finds its way to the small of his back and he looks back to the body. The blood is drying, dripping less, forming crusted stalactites clinging to the walls. Max’s hand is firm, blood pumping in his palm and warming Daniel’s spine.
“Let’s head to the station first and set up, I brought down all the files from HQ so we can drop them off and start working,” Max leads them down the concrete steps, Daniel feels more solid with his hand on him. “I’ll book us the motel while we’re there and we can go after lunch to check in.”
“You wanna look back at the other sites today?”
“I think the photos are enough, we can put them up on a map here, they’ll have one of the county at the station,” Max drops his hand to find his keys, Daniel can see the shape of them in his front pocket. His thighs press against the fabric when he walks, strong, thick. Daniel picks a hangnail until it's alive with blood in his mouth.
“How long do you want to stay?”
“Why, you have Christmas plans?”
Max uses the physical key to unlock his front door, veins twisting in his hand as the key turns the lock.
“No,” Daniel peels another nail, red pools at the cuticle. “Do you?”
“No,” Max flicks a button inside the door and Daniel hears the other door locks click open. “We stay until we find him. I’ll get us a tree for the motel if you want.”
Daniel laughs at that, as much as he can at a crime scene, and he watches Max revel in it like a good meal. Max loves making people laugh, but he doesn’t try to be funny. Daniel envies him sometimes, he’s always trying. Max laughs easily though, so his ego isn’t too bruised.
The roads through Appalachia are terrifying to Daniel. He watches Max drive. His hands are relaxed, pink around the wheel, not squeezing. The radio is on, some early morning country station, and Max turns the volume down when ads come on. It snows more, but not like in the north. Southern snow, fluffy and gone the second it hits the ground. The snow hides nothing here, just makes searching all the more miserable.
The snow does stick to the roof of Max’s car, parked outside the station. Daniel watches the black exterior disappear beneath blinding white. The sunlight makes it burn his eyes until they water.
“Five bodies, all male, emptied and strung up in five different churches in one county,” Max’s voice comes from behind him. “Officer confirmed they’ve all been members of the churches, grew up altar boys, pastors’ kids.”
Daniel can see Max’s reflection in the window, makes eye contact with it while he nods. He thinks briefly about Max’s father and the starched collar around his neck. He wants to ask questions about that, but he can’t, so he turns around and thumbs at the bible verses thumb-tacked over the victim's pictures.
“Jeremiah 19:9, what was that one?”
“I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh because their enemies will press the siege so hard against them to destroy them,” Max repeats automatically.
“Jacob, twenty-one, son of Father Moore,” Daniel says, “he’s eating them.”
“You will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you,” Max says, memorized and smelling of the coffee in his hand. “Judah, son of Father Jones,” he pauses, turns to look at Daniel. “He’s eating them, yes.”
Max stops, swallows, but Daniel waits. He watches his Adam's apple bob, licks the spot where Max’s freckle would be if it was on his lips instead. Max’s eyes are blue, they beat against Daniel’s brown irises like the ocean opening a cave.
“Why?” Max asks, but not wondering aloud, direct. He’s asking Daniel.
The fluorescent lighting flickers, buzzing like flies and drip drip, dripping onto Max’s face like drool, like blood. He opens his mouth to smile, like he can taste it. Maybe he can, his lip is chapped and splitting down the middle from the cold. Daniel left his chapstick in the car.
“Bible verses,” Daniel sounds out, shifting his weight on his feet under Max’s gaze. “Churches, preacher’s sons, atonement maybe, repentance, baptism.”
Max nods, humming low in his throat. Daniel pictures his vocal chords, wet and thrumming. It’s almost lunch and his stomach growling harmonizes with Max’s sustained note.
“We should go to the families, see the houses,” Max has stepped away, sorting through stray papers on the wobbling desk they’d been given. “They all still lived at home, college kids.”
“Who first?”
“If we start with Jacob, we can follow them pretty much up to where our motel is, they all lived around here, he was the closest, today’s was the furthest.”
Daniel’s shirt is scratchy, ironed and flat, itching at his chest. He tugs at the buttons to peel it away from his skin, but it’s too tight. He watches Max stare at the sliver of skin at the base of his throat that he exposes when he undoes his top button. He scratches his neck, loosens the collar around it. His nail snags, jagged, on his collarbone and Max’s stomach echoes Daniel’s previous roar. A conversation, almost, between their hunger.
Daniel’s nail gets caught, again, on his belt loop when he slides his finger into it on Father Moore’s screened-in porch.
“The police came by a couple months ago, right after,” he pauses, a voice crack making the graying man sound young again. “What are you all looking for?”
Max is nodding, professional, tall under the drooping roof, “we just want to sweep and see a few more things, just to make sure they didn’t miss anything.”
“The cops in this county are some of the best in the country, son,” Moore says, hands on his hips and throat red under the collar.
“I don’t doubt that, sir, we just need to do one final sweep through for our department,” Max is straight, broad, standing like a military man, eying a cross behind the father’s head. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but we’ll be out of your hair as quick as we can.”
He’s clinical, apathetic. Daniel sees a framed photo on the mantle, through the door, a smiling little boy in muddy overalls. A candle burns beside it, drooling wax and flickering.
“We’re sorry for your loss, sir, and we just want to do everything we can to find who did this to your son,” Daniel says, relaxing his shoulders and offering the man his best sympathetic smile. “There might be a few details to help us figure out why Jacob was targeted that the officers missed, since we’ve seen the other victims. We just want to help get justice.”
“He was good,” Moore says, cracking, slumping. “There’s no reason, he was a good boy.”
Max nods, Daniel can see him wiggling his toes in his shoes.
“I know,” Daniel says, offering a hand to the pastor who holds it steady between them. “That’s why we want to help.”
Father Moore sniffles, snot drips onto his lips and he licks it. Max’s toes still in his shoes and he shuffles slightly closer to Daniel, biceps brushing. Max’s is bigger, wide and dense. Daniel doesn’t think about it.
“His room is upstairs,” the father says, pulling Daniel by his hand through the front door. “Take your time.”
“Thank you, sir,” Max’s voice is quieter now, but lacks no force, everything he says makes space for itself in the air. It makes it harder for Daniel to breathe sometimes. He coughs on their way up the carpeted stairs.
The top of the stairs greets them with a slanted hallway, yellowing wallpaper and framed baby photos turn sick in the dim light. A cluttered bathroom hums to their left, a door a few feet down is half open.
“This one, I think,” Max says as he steps towards it. His footsteps are quieted by the carpet, but shake Daniel in his shoes.
“Divide and conquer?”
“I’ll check the closet first,” Max says, turning to the scratched-at wooden doors in the back of the small room. There’s a desk beside it, tucked into the corner, stacked with books and a laptop, plugged in. The bed is along the right wall, opposite corner to the desk, blue sheets and fluffed pillows. There’s a stuffed lion laying in the middle, face down. The ground is covered in unfolded clothes, a heap at the foot of the bed and a hamper beside it. Daniel doesn’t know if it’s from the cops or the kid. He starts there.
The bottom of the heap holds nothing except now, also, the bottom of the bed frame in view. Pale wood in a long ribcage bows under the mattress. There’s something stuck in one of the ribs, a note, maybe, a magazine. Daniel scrapes his elbow reaching for it and stands up with it and a drop of blood in his hand.
“You find something?” Max asks from half inside the closet. He’s holding what appear to be swimming goggles and a pair of women’s underwear.
“Magazine,” Daniel says, flipping the cover over to an image of a broad oiled man. The image cuts off at his v-line, a trail of hair curling just above the lip of the paper. He opens it to more spreads of the same. He can feel Max at his side now, looking too. His breath makes Daniel’s neck damp and when he flips the page to a faceless blond man biting another man's neck he has to shut it and pinch the webbing of his thumb.
“Do you think he knew?”
“The killer or the father?”
“The kid.”
Max is still holding a pink pair of panties in his hand, but Daniel can see they’re not made for women. Wider in the crotch, no inner lining, a slit in the front.
“He was about to,” Daniel says as he surveys the rest of the room, there’s a shelf of baseball trophies and a taped up photo of the kid kissing a prom date, a girl. “I think he was just figuring it out.”
Max pulls a plastic evidence bag out of his pocket and slides the underwear into it. He pulls another one out and helps hold it open while Daniel slides the magazine inside.
“So, why?” Max asks, pulling his phone out to take a photo of the prom picture and another photo behind it Daniel can’t see.
Daniel doesn’t know what Max is asking, really. His stomach growls again. They never had lunch. Daniel thinks he can smell the father in the kitchen.
“Regret, maybe,” Daniel steps around Max to check the desk. “The killer probably didn’t know.”
“Maybe.”
Max is running his fingers through the lion’s hair, his lip is starting to really split. Daniel finds nothing in the desk, nothing on the passwordless laptop. The father must have checked it. The boy is otherwise pure, a saint, Jesus hung above his bed frame and a rosary in his dresser.
The Jesus statuette is crooked above Judah’s bed, coming off the cracked drywall. Jacob’s had been a framed photo, the spear going in to make sure he was dead. Crooked Jesus’ feet are chipped, worn. Must be an heirloom.
“I’ll look in his bathroom,” Max suggests as he steps through the room to the en suite, though the word was probably too fancy to what was just a toilet and an exposed-pipe sink.
Max is too big for the bathroom, bumps into the walls every time he turns around. Daniel watches him until Jesus falls off the wall and makes a plume of dust jump down Daniel’s throat.
Judah was the first one they found, almost a year ago. The bureau hadn’t picked up the case until the second one, their next house. When they saw Judah’s body it was in a frozen basement, the rest were still dripping when they met. Jesus is facing up, staring at Daniel when he walks over to pick him up. A splinter from the cross gets stuck in Daniel’s pinky and makes his eyes sting.
“You alright?” Max asks, suddenly beside him. Daniel still has elbow scrape blood on his hand, wet. The splinter is in deep, stings like a snake bite.
Daniel sets Jesus down and pokes at the injury with his opposite pinkie, tries to pinch it out and fails.
He knows Max can, thirsts to watch it this time. When he cut him before he hadn’t been able to stay awake, had barely made it past the sensation of Max’s long fingers poking between his ribs before he fell under. Max lets him try, every time, to watch. He always wakes up sweaty and hard and hungry, not remembering anything. Max always has dinner ready before he can even sit up.
“Can you get it out?”
Max laughs a little and it makes Daniel’s ears hot. Daniel is suddenly aware he is made of blood. Blood that spills from his hand, that rushes to warm his ears, that fills him up when he’s hot with need. He licks his hand and rubs some of the wet blood off his palm when he gives it to Max.
“Hold still,” Max orders, focused. His hands are massive, pale and wide. Almost comically large, but they match the rest of his gangly limbs so they don’t look out of place. They do make Daniel’s hands look all wrong, tanned and tattooed and bony. His veins stick out, painted faces in a haunted house. Max’s are rolling under his skin like wind over fields, smooth and tempting. Daniel blinks and stares at the ground instead.
“Fuck,” he bites out when Max manages to extract the wooden chip. “Thanks.”
Max is staring at the little bloody piece of wood, dwarfed by his massive hand. It felt bigger in Daniel’s.
“Anytime,” Max answers, still staring at the splinter, his lip split gets worse when he bites it. “There’s bandaids in the bathroom, if you need one.”
Daniel just shakes his head and sucks his pinkie into his mouth. Red tastes like iron and makes his still unbrushed teeth stain. Max stares, shoves his hands into his pockets forgetting the splinter. Daniel just sucks and swallows and turns his tongue red. It’s almost sweet.
“Anything in the bathroom?” he asks once he frees his pinkie from his lips and licks the sweet off of them.
“Nothing really, a bottle of lube and a pack of condoms but the kid was 21 so that seems pretty straight forward.”
“Let’s check the rest of the room then,” Daniel asserts as he spins in place. “Be careful of Jesus, he bites.”
It’s under a gun box in the closet in this house. Shoebox with a pistol on top of an ancient VHS porno with three men on the cover. They bag it up and put the box back. They lay Jesus on the desk when they leave.
The evidence fits in Daniel’s pocket so he hides it there, the father doesn’t need to know, and shocks his fingertip with it when he pulls it out back at the station. Three magazines, one VHS, one burnt DVD, a journal, and one pair of pink underwear lay in a line on the lopsided desk. The back right leg is shorter than the rest so one of the magazines is about to slip off. Max nudges it into place with his little finger and sighs.
They never ate so Daniel's stomach is vocal, Max’s talks back again. They ignore it. Daniel is hungry, though, his teeth still taste like morning and he needs something to pair with the iron still clinging to the roof of his mouth. He wonders if there’s a wine for that, or a type of aged cheese. Maybe a brie, something smooth and sweet, to balance out the sharp twang.
“Let’s match them with the victims,” Max says, reaching for the files once they’re back at the station. He pulls out the scene photos, paper wide glossy shots of carved chests and open mouths lay beside their respective sins.
“Was there evidence of rape on the bodies? Did we check?”
Max thumbs through the papers on the floor. They had to move them to make space on the desk and Daniel keeps stepping on a copy of Jacob’s blood records.
“No signs of struggle or tearing, but there were signs that they’d all had been anally penetrated before their deaths,” Max informs as he lines up a stack of records and hands them to Daniel. “They came, too, there was semen still, on it, when they died.”
The words on the page mean hardly anything to Daniel but he sees what Max gave a synopsis of. They were douched when they died, cleaned right up and out and still swollen from penetration that had taken place when alive. No signs of tearing or injuries detected, no signs the victim was tied down or struggled. No DNA under nails, no stray pulled hairs stuck to theirs.
Daniel’s nails are dirty, red clay and dirt. He hands the records back. Max’s are clean, well kept and blunt. Except, well, maybe it’s the light. A fleck of red under his ring finger nail, dark like the pit of a cherry. The sun is setting, the sky is brick burgundy.
“So he’s eating them and fucking them.”
Max nods and slides a photo of a body’s dry rib cage, a note stuck between prongs. Under the photo is one of the magazines, this one doesn’t cut the image off on the cover.
“Why?”
Daniel is so hungry and the red in Max’s nail might be something sweet. Jam from a donut, a pomegranate seed. He licks his lips, they’re starting to get chapped too. His lip balm is still in the car.
“Do you pray?” He asks, quiet. Max doesn’t move, doesn’t look at him. He nods.
“Do you believe?” He asks, quieter. Max doesn’t nod, doesn’t shake his head. His toes wiggle again and he kneels down to the floor to set the papers back.
“Why do you think he does it?”
“Fucks them or eats them?”
“Either, both.”
A fly hits the window with a thud, it dies in the setting sun. There’s a rip in the carpet of the room, in the back corner. Mice, probably.
“It is the same, I think,” Max starts, looking up at Daniel from the floor, kneeling makes his thighs wider and the seams of his pants strain from the meat. “For both.”
Max leads him outside and asks him a wordless question with a hand under his shirt. His fingers are freezer burn on Daniel’s raw skin. He slides his little finger over the stitches, it makes Daniel shiver. He tries not to groan. Max must be hungry, there's some left in the motel mini-fridge. Daniel had thought it looked a bit like Max’s flaccid pink cock when he saw it first, curved and supple and wet. They shared half of it, cooked in the rusted kitchenette oven.
When they get back Max pulls the rest out, thaws it in the sink as they shower. The steam they create makes the plastic wrap sweat and Max guides Daniel around under the stream so that the hot water doesn’t get in his cut when he gets on his knees. Max tastes like sweat, a little, and something else. Daniel swallows, swallows, swallows and watches Max stare at the thawing meat under the faucet when he finishes.
“Who do you pray to?” Daniel asks, after, the sheet sticking to his sweat. His chest hair feels greasy. Max rolls to face him and his knee bumps his thigh. His hair is soft, blonde and fuzzy on his legs. He’s hot, radiating heat, burning. It is good the sun has long set, Daniel thinks, or he would cook alive between them.
“God.”
“Do you ask him things?”
“No.”
Max’s eyes are still bright in the dark, Maldives and evening sky. His lip split when he brushed his teeth and made the toothpaste all red. It’s glistening now, street lights through the curtains. The motel is on the side of the mountain. The church is next door and tomorrow is Sunday. The sign out front asked,
has anybody else died for you?
“Do you tell him things?”
The bed dips when Daniel moves and it makes Max slide closer, his knee over Daniel’s dick now and his hand on his chest. It’s the hand with the red flake and Daniel looks for it in the dark.
“I guess,” Max traces a X over Daniel’s heart, his nail pressing the shape in with a dull scratch. “I think with him.”
“What do you think about?”
“God,” Max says, chuckling, blood splashes. “Death.”
Max slides his hand down, wide and sweaty, until it covers Daniel’s stomach. It’s so big, the long fingers reach Daniel’s waist easily.
“Are you hungry?” Daniel asks with a whisper, a sigh. Max’s hand is heavy and alive, wet inside. Daniel can feel it in his gut.
“I love you,” Max says, “you were quiet today.”
Daniel swallows. Max’s thigh presses on him, his hand squeezes his side. He slides down so their faces are level and licks the blood off Max's lip. It’s sweeter than his own, tangy and honey scented. It smells nothing like the rot, the coffee, the snow. It’s cinnamon, sticking to his teeth and making his saliva all brown.
Daniel reaches a hand down to stroke Max’s knee. It’s raw and pebbled from kneeling on the church’s wood, the station’s carpet, Daniel’s shower tiles. The water had made it worse in there, made his skin prune, but he hadn’t complained.
Daniel presses his thumbs into the dimples on the side of Max’s kneecaps, feeling the shape of his bone under the skin. It feels like it could just pop right off like a bottle cap, like you could stick a straw right in and suck all the sugar out. He tugs a bit just to see and he gets a grunt and an iron flavored tongue in his mouth. He sucks. It worked.
His mouth is dry when the sun rises. The incision itches in the car, when the seatbelt stretches on a wide turn. Max’s hands are wide on the wheel, his nails are perfectly manicured, filed down and smooth. He reaches over and palms at Daniel’s thigh, his thumb flexes over a tendon as it twitches. When they pull up to the church the snow hasn’t been cleared, the wheels crunch over snow like bones.
The cop is the same, balding when he removes his beanie to wipe sweat on his brow. Max licks his own sweat off his lips, the sun is harsh, reflecting and blinding. When they walk in, there’s spit-slick ice on the steps, Max holds Daniel steady with a flat hand on his waist.
The boy this time looks slightly older, thinner hair and stubble. Daniel kneels beneath him and looks up. It’s like staring in a funhouse mirror, deep brown eyes and a long crooked nose above him. Open chest, red ribs, missing pieces. He feels the hollow inside himself and wonders if Max feels full.
The metal drips down his neck a bit when he tilts his head and Max brings a gloved hand up to wipe it off. It’s fresher this time, hotter from the tap. The officer couldn’t stand it, he’s waiting outside.
Daniel’s knees ache, at the altar under Max. There’s a window in the ceiling that makes his blonde hair a halo and Daniel thinks he should pray. He thinks about God, the lions and fire and lambs. The curls on his head are damp again with snow and Max’s golden mane drips on him now too.
“Psalm 78:18,” Daniel reads the card off from where it's sewn into the body’s side like an iron on patch. “You know this one?”
Max nods and helps Daniel stand, he keeps his hand in his when he recites, “they tested God in their heart by demanding the food they craved.”
Daniel nods. Sinew snaps and bone marrow leaks on his pants. Max is red again, in the stained light. The rot smells closer this time, like it's coming from him. Max’s lip is swollen and Daniel is starving. He’s craving something when Max asks again: “why?”
“Because he loves them,” he looks at the body, black curls, brown eyes, he sees himself in the pupils and the stench worsens. “And he is hungry.”
“Maybe,” Max nods and leads them out of the church. The wooden stairs here creak something like a scream. Daniel’s side hurts.
When he checks it in the mirror he sees the incision, pink and raised.
Black stitches, perfectly straight. No new blood, nothing fresh. He pokes at the line, feels the ridge under his fingers. He picks at his nails while Max pisses.
“I love you,” Max says when he’s done, washing his hands in the sink as he looks at Daniel in the mirror. Daniel raises his hands to him, palms pressed flat together in prayer, and watches the blood mix. Max’s tongue laps at his jagged nails, he slices his lip on a hang nail.
The sign in front of the church beside them changed that morning, after a week.
Are you willing to let God use you?