Page 8 of The Secret Shape of Worship
“Aaah!” Mina doubled over, cocooning his stomach with his hands. “Fu…Jesus Christ,” he hissed through gritted teeth. Slowly, Mina straightened to inspect himself. Already, three bright stripes flared across his pale white belly. “What the hell was that?”
“I see your desires. They do not match your words. It is not good for a man to split himself in this way. Say no to your heart enough, and it will eventually cease to speak. You’ve heard it said that before you can love someone else fully, you must be able to love yourself? In the same way, before you can feel the fullness of desire, know the completion of joy in the perfect natural beauty of flesh, you must first feel the flames of desire for yourself.”
The god stepped forward, pressing a warm knuckle to the underside of Mina’s jaw, tipping his head to look up. His voice grew soft, the blazing eyes cooling to a dull red. “I will help you. Because I am your shepherd now. I will give your heartwhat it wants, even if your clouded mind attempts to rob you of happiness. And of pleasure.”
Mina eyed the flail. “I really don’t understand what you want from me.”
“I want you to see yourself for what you are.”
Mina swallowed. “Which is?”
The god stooped down so that his massive face completely consumed Mina’s vision. “A flame,” he growled. “A small one for now—choked nearly down to an ember—but still a flame. You are a sensual being, wild and dangerous and mesmerizing. Let yourself feel the heat rise up from within you.”
The god stood and stepped away, a few seconds later bringing back what looked like a large mirror, tall and oval-shaped, framed in gold and held up by a wooden easel. In it, Mina could see his whole body reflected back at him, still shining and bright red across the stomach.
“You must be brought out into the open. Exposed for your barest self and most primal parts so that you can build yourself back up into the blaze you desire to be. I sense that potential within you. You want to burn. To rage. To become a conflagration. Look at yourself in the silver. Love yourself.”
Mina looked at his body in the mirror. Too pale. Too thin. Not strong enough. Not man enough.
Not pure enough.
Notsonenough.
Mina’s cheeks burned, and his neck grew red and splotchy. He crossed his arms across his chest, hooking his hands on his shoulders.
“Give me back my clothes,” he said, barely more than a whisper.
The god struck again with the flail, the narrow exposed strip of his belly. The room echoed with a crack like thunder.
Mina tensed his stomach at the pain and cried out, the lean muscles of his abs rippling.
“Why are you doing this?” he cried, even as a black, unbidden thought from the needful thing inside him came to him:
Do it again.
A deep throb and pressure against the soft fabric of theshendytaround his waist. He closed his eyes and soaked in the burning. His skin ached, raw with want. He felt like a flint waiting for the strike. Despite himself, Mina continued to throb and grow, his hips almost involuntarily rolling against the soft friction of the fabric.
Anubis pulled back and looked into Mina’s eyes. Mina remembered the first time he’d tried touching himself. The whole time, all he could picture was every dead relative and Jesus himself sitting on a cloud right above his room and watching from heaven, shaking their heads in embarrassment and shame. Every time since then, when he’d tried to masturbate as a teen, it had been halfhearted, and he’d only done it when he couldn’t stand the ache any longer. Like letting out a sneeze you couldn’t hold in. Mina always assumed people could read the scarlet guilt on his face like a burning bush because of the images he had to conjure to get himself there. The dark places his mind had to go.
Mina could feel the heavy gaze of the god and broke out into a cold sweat. Looking again at himself in the mirror, Mina’s arms traveled back up to his chest, covering the parts of himself he hated. His concave breastbone, his hips that jutted sharply. Mina squeezed his eyes, wondering if this god had the power to remake him into something more suited to the life everyone expected of him.
A guttural growl rumbled through the darkness. Mina looked up, and the god’s eyes flashed red.
“I will say it again.” Anubis came in close to Mina’s ear so that he could feel the prickle of the god’s canine teeth along the nape of his neck, “Touch yourself, boy.”
No.He was trying to do better.
He was trying to be better.
But,Mina wondered,what if?
What would happen, Mina wondered, if he let his mind go to the dark places he always avoided because he thought God was watching? What about this god? And after all, wasn’t that what he was here for? To test the boundaries of his religion? To find its edges?—
Here?
Orhere?
To put himself right under the nose of the God of his youth and see if He even noticed him? If He ever even knew Mina?
