The Source

Ecclesiastical Psychoflesh Fiction by James Worth

This story is one of five featured in SUM FLUX, V.3: “Plumbing.” Our mission is to spotlight the finest writers on Substack, curating a dynamic collection of original fiction. See the full contents page here.

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Brother Julius observed–reluctantly, as though someone else had put it there–the milky seed which pooled in the puckered divot of his stomach. Instantly stagnant. The hot knife of shame twisted righteously in his chest, eking out one lonely tear which hurried to escape him while the rest of the tears were swallowed with a force. The salty fluid crept, hotly, back down his throat toward The Source and settled there. He wiped his stomach clean and dressed for the day.

Soft-soled shoes dully thump-thumping down the done and dusted road, echoing off the cracked window panes of defunct storefronts, pale eyes peering through doors left ajar. Ghostly, ashen clouds chewing up the sun. His robe swept his ankles. Dull pulse.

Brother Hewitt greeted him at the door to the sanctum. He told Julius of his prescription for the next moon: less water intake, a bloodletting after dusk, broth for his next five meals; small adjustments. He appeared pleased, and they embraced briefly before Julius swept inside.

The wide cavern of the sanctum yawned above him, the rotted ceilings high and mossy, rusted rafters groaning, dust motes flirting with shafts of dancing, piss-hued light. The scent of coffee and damp concrete was in the air. His mouth was dry and his tongue smacked against the roof of his mouth but he could not yet drink. He avoided crafting his own prescription in his head. He was always let down.

As he waited in the meandering line of robed figures, Brother Julius closed his eyes and attempted an internal recalibration, turning toward the Source which pulsed and grimaced, distant as a star. It appeared in his mind’s eye as a misshapen, throbbing thing not dissimilar to the anatomical heart but lower in the body, somewhere in the stomach. From it, hundreds of yellowish arteries sprouted and vined off toward its other facsimiles in hundreds of other stomachs. He rotated the mass inside of him, trying to peer at it with the handsome, discerning eye of Speaker Klein but this sort of clarity always escaped him. He could not be sure at all what Speaker Klein would see.

By the time his turn arrived, a thin sheen of sweat had begun to pepper his pores and he wiped it away quickly with the linen sleeve of his robe. Sister Laura swept through the curtains looking pleased with herself and held the curtain aside for Julius, smirking haughtily. She did not have to say that she’d been prescribed wine with each evening meal. This was her reward for perfect balance and she was always receiving it, never seemed to struggle with the rhythm of intake and expulsion, which the Source required to balance the whole network. Julius loathed her almost as much as he loathed himself.

“The Source sustains you, Brother,” she intoned.

“The Source sustains us all,” he replied, voice cracked down the middle.

Sister Laura did not embrace him as he hurried through the curtain and all the imagined fluid inside of him slipped within an instant. The curtain settled and he stood, as though surprised, under the pliant and simple gaze of Speaker Klein who sat with simple regality upon his stony dais. Klein made a small gesture with his slender fingers and Julius fell to his knees before the humble man and kissed, tenderly, each of his lightly haired knuckles.

Finally, Julius sat back on his haunches, shins pressing into the cold concrete, and peered up through heavy lashes at Speaker Klein. The marbled face watched him without pleasure or disgust and yet Julius felt, instantly, the foul nature of his self in the rotted pit of his heart which cowered from the Source that fed it life. He knew there was nothing to find in him but emptiness.

The Speaker placed his strong hand on Julius’ shoulder. He shuddered in spite of himself and swallowed. He would not cry. Speaker Klein peered inside and saw all that Julius could not see himself: his mistreatment of the Source, the ways in which his own rot threatened to rot the network on a whole, the impure, disobedient, excretory creature he’d become and could not stop becoming. How his chest went so hot with shame but he shivered as a wet leaf licking the wind.

When his looking was done, Speaker Klein went on for some time about his disappointment, the sorry state of his Source management, the ways in which his untempered ejaculations threatened to spoil the network and poison the Source. Klein offered his prescription then. Julius would be forbidden from all excretion for the three days. No drop of sweat nor string of spittle nor puddle of piss must escape the confinement of his flesh. He would drink down all that was presented to him and all that he came upon. If he could not manage this, and if by his next prescription he’d further dehydrated the Source, then he would be cut off from the network entirely. Julius accepted his verbal lashing as though he was thirsty for it. He took and took and uttered nothing in response.

When it was over, Speaker Klein grabbed his face so hard he felt his jaw quiver and he kissed Julius hard, hot and wet.

“Do not become her,” he seethed.

Released, and aching, Julius hurried from the room like the rodent he was, past the cold and disemboweling glares of those still waiting to be prescribed. All could see his perversion. All knew the imbalance he leveraged upon them all.

In his lonesome room, Julius curled up like a roach on the floor and bit into the palms of his hands and growled until he could be sure that he would not cry and then he laid unmoving for some time at the edge of the slanted sunlight which he did not touch. Warmth would remind him only of things had and lost. Arms, comfort, safety.

He remained on the floor until Sister Laura made her rounds in the evening and left a tray holding water, steaming broth, and a carafe containing some cloudy liquid outside his door. He waited as long as he could then drank it all down greedily, one vessel thing at a time. The first two sat well but the carafe broiled in his gut and when he laid down to sleep he could not rest for the feeling of his stomach ripping and splitting and squelching up through his skin, buzzing in his ears, the pressure already weighing on his bladder like a foot pressing down on his pelvis, everything threatening release. Yet no matter how much bile rose up his throat and teased the bitter back of his tongue, he swallowed it down. He slept with the window thrown wide to the prying cold so he would not sweat. He did not cry.

The Source was quiet. It offered no guidance. He began to wonder if he’d ever heard its voice before.

In the morning, Sister Laura gathered his empty vessels and though he was tempted to ask her what had been in the carafe he knew she would not tell him and the same liquid would be delivered again tonight and he would suffer the same fate each evening until his next prescription. He felt somehow both emptier and more swollen than the day before.

He carried his discomfort from the bed to the floor and back again, but he was obedient and he took pleasure from it. In the evening he drank again from the carafe and again he pressed his head against the rough grain of the floor and groaned through the pain that wracked him. Raucous gut, aching bladder, he filled and filled until he threatened to burst. Rubbing splinters into his forehead, he tempered his desire to betray the Source and let it all spill forth from every end. It seemed impossible that he would ever fit entirely inside himself as he was expected to. But he would be good and he would let the pain cleanse.

The muddy light bleeding through the window lit the many lines etched into the floorboards beneath him. He remembered with his child’s ears her desperate carving with sharpened fingernails before the network severed her. Pain shuddered through the tubing of his body. He gripped the floorboard and pulled and groaned until it splintered and came free in his hands.

On the morning of his next prescription, after days of consumption, the sharp swelling traversed the full length of him so he could hardly see or think beyond the pressure of his piss, the taut stretch of his stomach, the bile lining his throat. He woke cradling the broken floorboard and could not recall ripping it up. He could not recall the smell of her, the sound of her voice, the way she soothed and guided him. He could hear nothing over the ceaseless demands of the Source which no longer seemed to connect him to anyone or anything. Isolation inside and out. Whether he followed his prescription or defied it, whether empty or full, there seemed to be no room for Julius inside of Julius. The Source claimed all.

He put his robe on backwards. His shoes seemed to no longer fit his feet as they had days before. He staggered blind down the beaten road toward the sanctum. The Source hummed with distant pleasure.

Julius pushed wordlessly past Brother Hewitt, grumbled past those lined up disciples, their complaints never landing on his tender, bursting ears. The curtain seemed to sweep aside just for him or his hand was disembodied or it was larger than the world as all things connect and disassemble in a million tiny ways.

Sister Laura rose from where she kneeled, ever pious, before Speaker Klein, her face flushed and cruel. Speaker Klein sat indifferent or perhaps expectant as Julius took the shard of floorboard from beneath his robe and wielded it before him like evidence. Sister Laura staggered backwards–as if he meant to hurt her. Even in his swollen blindness, Julius knew himself incapable of hurting anyone but himself.

The Speaker was unperturbed. “You are a blockage in my network, Brother,” he said, evenly.

Brother Julius felt his big bursting cheeks balloon into a grin wide as his stomach. He had hardly anything left to give yet he dredged it all up against the dam of his pursed lips and spat it at the feet of Speaker Klein. Sister Laura gasped.

“Your network has been a blockage in me,” Julius said.

Guided by nothing but his own instinct, Brother Julius held firmly the imprint of his mother’s pain pointed toward The Source and toppled forward onto it so the jagged thing splintered through his stomach and out the back and all his excess went leaking and pooling onto the sanctum’s floor and The Source sighed with relief to have his shame excised from its glorious network, only the sigh sounded so much like Julius wheezing through a punctured, leaking lung, the name of his mother who he could finally feel again. Her touch soothing the violet wet of his back. Her gentle hum against his sweet ears. She welcomed his final excretion from his body as nothing else had ever welcomed him before. And he was freed.

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Artwork by:

Jon T

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