The Appetite Of An Aberration

This story contains frank, clinically-grounded discussion of schizotypal personality features, maladaptive daydreaming, dissociative states, and paraphilic fixation (voreaphilia) explored through the lens of compassion rather than sensationalism. It includes references to multiple unaliving attempts, psychiatric hospitalization, substance use as a dissociative tool, religious trauma rooted in apocalyptic Christian conditioning, and the particular exhaustion of loving someone who refuses help. Separately, characters discuss the recycling of AIDS-era rhetoric against queer communities, imperial military aggression, and the deliberate erosion of species protections. Strong language throughout. Nothing in this story is gratuitous — but none of it is gentle, either. If you are currently navigating a mental health crisis, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

The condensation on the railing hit my palm before the sound did — bass rattling up through the stairwell like something geological. Atlanta had been sweating all day under a sky the color of legislative indifference, and the basement had absorbed every degree into its brick.

Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Texas Flood" was drowning the room — that opening riff like a knife drawn slow across silk. Monday crowd, three-quarters full.

Miguel had my glass waiting before I'd settled the stool.

Double Oaked tonight, he said, sliding the Woodford across with surgical precision. Finished in a second charred barrel. Tastes like someone set caramel on fire and then apologized to it.

The nose hit first — toasted vanilla over smokehouse sweetness, dried fruit, the faintest edge of char. The first sip opened warm, amber spreading through the chest the way light spreads through stained glass, landing behind the titanium plates where the electric fire lives. Three seconds of sciatic silence. I held that like prayer.

He smiled — exhaustion rearranging into warmth.

Della's got bacon mac and cheese working. Said something about mascarpone.

Keira was at her corner, book open, legs declaring territorial sovereignty over furniture. She'd glanced up when I came down — one look landing in the vicinity of my sternum — and returned to reading.

The argument near the pool table had been running hot for twenty minutes.

They're literally using the same playbook, Leila was saying, cross-legged on the pool table, phone casting pale light across her jaw. Defund the thing, blame the people it protected. Efficient cruelty.

It's not a playbook, Grubby said, and the pit went still. This is just what happens when certain bodies are more convenient as problems than as people.

They manufactured the crisis, Dani said, then gave themselves permission to drill through the solution. Recycled the same blood libel from forty years ago.

We're fucking exhausted, Ezra said. Exhausted is what happens when the same lie gets a new suit every decade.

Eileen stopped pacing. I was thirty thousand feet up today and I could feel it. The whole plane gets heavier.

What I need to understand, Grubby said, is why the response is always to make us smaller. As if the species that's dying isn't the one they decided to stop counting.

The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" crashed in. Dani laughed — Ezra mouthed the chorus at Grubby, who allowed one corner of their mouth to rise.

Della emerged carrying bacon mac and cheese — the mascarpone melted into sharp cheddar, pancetta crisped into shards of salt and smoke. Set a plate near Grubby.

Eat. Being furious on an empty stomach makes you useless.

I carried my Woodford over, settled next to Grubby, who shifted to make room without thinking.

The machinery doesn't distinguish between the whale and the queer and the country they want to hollow out, Dani said. They look at a living thing and see raw material.

Both, Grubby said when Ezra added scapegoat. They extract from you and blame you for being empty.

Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain" started — that bass line colonizing your sternum — and Keira looked up from her book for two seconds. She's always listening.

The door opened at half past eight. The woman who came down moved like someone who'd learned to enter rooms without disturbing air. Medium height, Black, locs pulled back with a burgundy wrap. Leather messenger bag worn soft from years.

Keira saw her first.

Well, holy shit. Micky-goddamn-Chen.

They embraced — real embrace, the kind with duration and weight. I'd stood up before I realized it. Micky and I go back eleven years — clinical psych resident at Grady when I was holding my life together with surgical tape. PhD, private practice, dissociative disorders. One of five people outside this basement I trust with the ugly parts.

We hugged. She smelled like cocoa butter and hospital-grade sanitizer. Miguel had already poured her a ginger ale — Micky doesn't drink — and set it on the bar.

Everyone, Keira announced, Dr. Micky Chen. Psychologist, trans, known Mom and me forever.

Micky settled next to me. Heart's "Crazy on You" was building through the speakers, Ann Wilson climbing octaves like someone scaling a wall of her own fury. Then she set the ginger ale down and the air changed density.

I need to talk to you about something.

Keira materialized — sonar for conversations she needs — and pulled up a stool. The three of us formed a triangle at the bar's end. Miguel moved to give us space.

I saw her last week, Micky said. Not a name. Didn't need one. She came through a referral. Many sessions. I can't tell you what she said — but I can tell you what I'm seeing, and some of it maps onto things you've described over the years.

Keira's drink stopped halfway to her mouth. Her eyes went flat — not cold, but the particular stillness of a sixty-year-old woman who has watched someone she cares about refuse a life raft so many times that her hope muscle has atrophied.

The retreat, Micky said, her voice shifting into clinical register — precise, measured, warmth still running underneath like a heating element through the floor. What I'm observing is a pattern of ideation that's progressed past escapism into something structural. She's not daydreaming to cope anymore. She's built an architecture. A whole interior world with its own logic, its own physics, its own significance. Every external stimulus gets routed through that architecture first. The real world arrives to her pre-interpreted, already assigned meaning it doesn't carry.

Impossible Thinking again, I said, and my voice came out flatter than I intended. She thinks that just by imagining things, that makes them materialize.

Yes. But more than that. Micky turned her ginger ale on the napkin, a slow rotation. The boundary between what she believes and what she fantasizes has become permeable. Things you and I would recognize as imagination, she experiences as signal. As incoming data confirming a reality only she can perceive. Her pattern-recognition runs constantly, finding connections in noise, and each connection reinforces the system. It's self-sealing. The more you challenge it, the more evidence she generates to defend it.

I took a long pull from the Woodford. The char note hit different this time — sharper, less comfort, more cauterization.

I know, I said. I've been inside that loop with her for years, Micky. I've sat across from her while her head has shook so hard she couldn't keep it together. I've watched the twitching — the little ones first, the jaw, the fingers, and then the full-body ones where it looks like something's trying to climb out of her nervous system. I've gotten the calls.

My throat tightened. The crushed windpipe — John's gift, seventy percent closure, permanent souvenir — made the tightening worse, turned it into something architectural, a hallway narrowing.

Four times, I said. Four times she's tried to leave permanently. One hospitalization. One seventy-two-hour hold where she told the intakes what they needed to hear to get her out.

Fuck, Keira said quietly. Keira never says fuck quietly.

And every single time she stabilizes, she walks out. Out of treatment. Out of follow-up. Out of medication management. She nods at the discharge plan and never fills the prescription. Three months later I get another call at two in the morning and her voice is doing that thin, reedy, underwater thing, and I'm in my car driving across town in my fucking pajamas because she won't call 911 because she thinks the ambulance lights carry meaning too.

The bar noise had receded. Or maybe I'd stopped hearing it. Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" started threading through the speakers — that opening guitar line, the one that sounds like anesthesia feels — and my hand tightened on the glass. Gizmo and I used to sit in the driveway after grocery runs, engine off, windows down, listening to the whole thing without speaking. She was twelve. She didn't understand the lyrics yet but she understood the sound — the way it made a space for not-feeling that felt more honest than most attempts at feeling. Her small hand on the gearshift. Grocery bags warming in the back seat.

I blinked. Too long. Keira's eyes found mine from across the room. She didn't move. The steadiness was enough.

Micky waited. That's the thing about her — she knows how to hold space the way a levee holds water. Not by pushing back but by standing exactly where she is and letting the current decide what to do.

What I need you to hear, Micky said, is that the refusal isn't defiance. I know it looks like that from where you're standing, having driven across town at two a.m. four separate times. But what I'm seeing is a person whose interior world has become more rewarding than anything the external world offers. The neurological feedback she gets from the fantasy architecture is stronger than help. Stronger than love. Stronger than you.

So she's choosing the dream over the people who are actually fucking here, Keira said, and her voice had gone surgical — the GraySexual lesbian who weaponizes discomfort had dropped every weapon and was standing in the room unarmed, which was more terrifying than any sarcasm she'd ever deployed.

She's choosing the only thing that matches the scale of what's broken, Micky said. Ordinary rescue — a friend, a therapist, a good day — registers to her as impossibly small against what she's feeling. Her brain has calibrated its need to a magnitude nothing real can satisfy. The fantasy can. The fantasy is exactly as large as the wound. That's why she goes back.

I stared at the bourbon. The liquid caught the light and held it the way certain memories hold you — not by being beautiful but by being exactly the right temperature for whatever ache you're carrying.

I've held her hand while she shook, I said. I've talked her down from ledges that weren't physical but were real enough that her body was already grieving. I've watched her describe things she sees — things that aren't there, Micky, but for her they're more solid than the chair she's sitting in. And every time, I think this is the one. This is the hospitalization that changes it. This is the therapist that reaches her. This is the medication that quiets the machinery long enough for her to hear herself think.

And then she walks away from it, Micky said.

Every. Fucking. Time.

The silence held. Della set a bowl of mac and cheese between us without a word — the Della comma, the pause that says I'm here but I'm not interrupting.

What am I supposed to do with that? I asked, and I wasn't asking Micky the clinician. I was asking the woman who'd known me eleven years and understood that my entire operating system is built on the premise that if you love someone hard enough, if you refuse to stop reaching — it works. Because if it doesn't, then what the fuck is any of this for.

You're supposed to grieve it, Micky said. Not her. She's alive. But the version of her that you keep reaching for — the one who accepts the help, who fills the prescription, who stays in treatment — you might need to grieve that person. Because that person might not exist yet. And you can't love someone into existing before they're ready.

That's a shit answer, Keira said.

I know, Micky said. That's how you know it's honest.

Keira put her hand on mine. Cold from her glass — grounding.

The magical thinking, Micky said, leaning forward. It isn't stupidity. Her brain's pattern-recognition is miscalibrated — she finds signal in pure noise. Every coincidence becomes confirmation. She scans public spaces not from paranoia but from genuine neurological conviction that the universe communicates with her through arrangement and proximity and timing. From inside, it feels rational. Because her reality-testing hardware — the part that checks perception against probability — is compromised at a fundamental level.

So hope has hijacked her perception, I said.

Micky looked at me the way she looks at me when I've said something accidentally clinical.

Yes, she said. Hope — or something shaped like hope — has rewired her perception so completely that the fantasy doesn't feel like escape. It feels like home. And everything outside it — including the people who love her, including treatment — feels like exile.

Micky paused. Rotated the ginger ale again. The condensation left a wet ring on the napkin, a circle closing on itself.

There's something else, she said. And I need you to hear it clinically before you hear it emotionally, because the content is — specific. The fantasy architecture she's built isn't abstract. It has a shape. A very particular shape.

She looked at me. Then Keira. Checking if we could hold what was coming.

The fixation is on enormity, Micky said. On being consumed. Literally. She's constructed an interior world organized around figures of impossible scale — colossal, feminine, maternal. Forty feet tall. Larger. And the desire isn't metaphorical to her. She doesn't experience it as symbol. She experiences it as prophecy. She is waiting — with the same conviction you'd wait for a bus you can see coming down the street — for this to arrive. For the enormous body to appear and swallow her whole.

Keira's glass stopped. Just stopped, suspended between the bartop and her mouth, like her hand had forgotten what hands do.

Swallow, Keira said. Flat.

Yes. Micky's clinical register held, but something underneath it strained — the professional dam holding the friend's horror at bay. In clinical terms, we're looking at macrophilia — the fixation on enormous bodies — fused with voreaphilia — the desire to be consumed, ingested, taken inside another being completely. In most people, these exist as paraphilic interests. Fantasy material. Controllable. Compartmentalized. But in someone with her particular neurological wiring — where magical thinking has already dissolved the membrane between desire and belief — these fixations have been promoted. They're not fantasies anymore. They're expectations.

Jesus Christ, I said, and the words came out as exhalation, not speech.

Here's what I need you to understand about why, Micky said, voice dropping to the register she reserves for truths that cost something to carry. Being swallowed — being engulfed completely — represents annihilation repackaged as rescue. No more decisions. No more failing. No more separateness. The enormous maternal body promises total containment. A return to pre-birth safety. A friend can't hold all of that. A therapist can't hold all of that. A pill can't hold all of that. But a forty-foot goddess? She's exactly large enough for the wound.

The maladaptive daydreaming keeps it alive, Micky continued. Hours dissolve. She enters the fantasy and it's neurologically rewarding — her brain releases the same chemicals it would for actual safety, actual being-held, actual home. The daydream is warm. It's narcotic. It's consistent in a way that real relationships never are, because real relationships require vulnerability and showing up as a whole person, and she doesn't believe she's a whole person. She believes she's a fragment waiting to be completed by something enormous enough to contain every broken piece.

She also uses THC gummies, I said, and the words came out heavy, like things I'd been carrying in my pockets for months. Not recreationally. Not to relax. She uses them to go there. To her world. She told me the edibles open the door — her exact words — and once she's through it, the Goddess is waiting. Not passive. Not just present. Commanding. Directing. Expecting things from her. Tasks. Obedience. Devotion. She described it like — like an audience with something divine. Like being given instructions by the only authority that had ever actually seen her.

Micky closed her eyes for a beat. When she opened them, the clinician and the friend were occupying the same face at exactly the same depth.

That's what I was afraid of, she said. The THC isn't just enhancing the fantasy — it's chemically lowering the threshold between ideation and immersion. Cannabis at those doses destabilizes the already-compromised reality testing I described. It doesn't create the architecture — the architecture was there — but it removes the last friction between her and total habitation of the interior world. She's not getting high. She's emigrating. Chemically booking passage to the only country that will have her. And the Goddess commanding her — that's the architecture generating its own authority structure. The fantasy isn't just refuge anymore. It's become a relationship. With hierarchy. Expectations. Reciprocity. Everything the real world offers, but in a form her neurology can process without the pain of actual vulnerability.

She loses time, I said, because now the dam was open and everything I'd been cataloging for years was flowing out. Not hours. Days. I called her on a Sunday and she asked me why I was calling on Wednesday. Not joking. Not confused the way you get confused when the week blurs. She genuinely, completely did not know what day it was. Three days had disappeared inside the architecture and she hadn't noticed them leaving. I've watched it happen in real time — she'll go quiet on a Tuesday and surface on Friday with no memory of the gap. Like someone pressed pause on the external world and she just — wasn't in it.

And she doesn't sleep, Keira added, and her voice had gone flat as a blade. She told me she hasn't slept in a year. Not insomnia. Not just trouble falling asleep. She said sleep doesn't happen for her. That she doesn't experience it. That her body doesn't do it anymore.

Micky's hand tightened on the ginger ale glass.

She's sleeping, Micky said carefully. The body requires it. What she's describing is a dissociative state so continuous that the boundary between waking consciousness and sleep has dissolved for her. She doesn't register the transition. The fantasy architecture runs in both states — awake and asleep — so there's no perceptual shift, no sense of having gone somewhere and returned. To her, it genuinely feels like one unbroken stream of consciousness. A year without sleep isn't a year without sleep. It's a year without ever leaving the interior world long enough to notice that the external one has a rhythm.

So the wanting is the wound speaking, I said.

The wanting is the wound speaking, Micky confirmed.

I took a breath. The next part had been sitting in my chest for months, and I'd never said it out loud because saying it out loud meant admitting that I understood something about this woman's destruction that went deeper than symptoms. That went all the way down to the foundation someone else had poured.

I've met her mother, I said. A few times. Acquaintance-level. Enough to sit in the same room and watch her operate.

I turned the empty bourbon glass on the bartop.

Her mother is — devout isn't the word. Devout implies faith. This woman runs on apocalypse. Every conversation I've been in with her loops back to the same place: the end is coming. The rapture is imminent. You need to be vigilant. You need to be ready. You need to be watching for the signs because Christ is returning and only the prepared will be taken up. She raised her child inside that — inside a worldview where every single day is the potential last day, where the sky could crack open at any moment and the faithful would be swept up into the body of God. Where scanning for signs wasn't paranoia. It was obedience. It was love. It was survival.

Micky's hand had gone still on the ginger ale. Completely still.

And she rejected it, I continued. Violently. Absolutely. She doesn't just not believe — she is a refutation machine. Christianity in any form, any flavor, any softened progressive version — she burns it on contact. She's a nihilist about it. Furious. The kind of fury you only carry when the thing you're rejecting used to be the thing you were built out of.

Oh, Micky said, and the word was quiet but it landed in the room with the weight of a clinical revelation dropping into place. Oh. That's the template.

What do you mean? Keira said.

Micky leaned forward, and something in her face had shifted — the clinician who'd been holding steady all night was now looking at a puzzle whose last piece had just been turned right-side up.

The mother installed the operating system, Micky said. Not the content — she rejected the content, Christianity, God, all of it. But the architecture? The scanning? The vigilance? The absolute conviction that an enormous transformative event is coming and you must be ready? That's not content. That's infrastructure. That's neurological wiring laid down in childhood, reinforced every single day through repetition and fear and love — because the mother believed it with her whole body and taught her daughter to believe it the same way.

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So when she threw out God —

She threw out the tenant, Micky said. But the building stayed. The scanning stayed. The vigilance stayed. The bone-deep expectation that something vast and divine is coming to take you — that stayed. And the Goddess moved into the vacancy.

Nobody breathed.

The rapture is being swallowed, Micky said, and her voice had gone almost gentle, almost awed, the way you sound when you finally see the full shape of someone's suffering and it's so structurally perfect it makes you want to weep. Think about what the mother was actually teaching her. An enormous being — God — descends from beyond the visible world. The faithful are taken up. Swept into the body of the divine. Removed from this world of suffering and transported into total safety, total containment, total care. The self dissolves into something infinitely larger. And all you have to do is believe. All you have to do is watch for the signs. All you have to do is be ready.

Jesus fucking Christ, Keira said, and the blasphemy was unintentional, which made it worse.

She replaced the rapture with the Goddess, I said, and the sentence came out of me sounding like something breaking. She swapped the content but kept the machinery. The scanning. The sign-reading. The absolute certainty that the enormous body is coming for her. Her mother trained her — from birth — to live inside that expectation. And when she tore Christianity out by the roots, the roots were still there. Shaped exactly like a forty-foot woman who swallows you whole and calls it love.

The schizotypal wiring means she can't distinguish between the template and reality, Micky said. Every tall building, every shadow becomes a potential herald. She reads the world the way her mother taught her to read scripture — every sign divinely intended, every coincidence personally addressed. The mother gave her the lens. The trauma loaded the film. And the Goddess is what developed in the darkroom.

I thought about the phone calls. Two a.m. Her voice thin as wire, describing what she'd seen — not hallucinations exactly, but interpretations so dense with private meaning that the ordinary world became unrecognizable beneath them. A bus advertisement that was a message. A cloud formation that was confirmation. And underneath all of it, the constant hum of the fantasy — the enormous body, the promise of total dissolution, the end of the unbearable project of being a separate self.

My throat closed. The crushed windpipe. John's permanent gift. I breathed through it.

You couldn't reach her, Micky finished. The fantasy is a closed system. It generates its own warmth, its own logic, its own evidence. You're standing outside a door that only opens from the inside. You can knock. You can keep knocking. But you cannot turn that handle for her.

"The Chain" was still prowling the speakers — Fleetwood Mac's bass line patient and predatory, circling back on itself the way this whole night kept circling. Leila, Ezra, Dani, and Grubby had resumed their conversation at the pool table, voices lowered, the earlier fury metabolized into something more strategic. Eileen was pacing again, phone to ear. The bar continued around our grief like a river around a stone.

I cycle, I said. Between being wrecked and being furious and being so numb I can't feel my own hands. By lunch I'm so angry at her for refusing every rope that I want to scream until my crushed windpipe finishes the job John started. By dinner I'm just empty. Which terrifies me because numb is where people go to stop caring, and I refuse.

You won't, Keira said.

She was behind my stool — not touching me, never in public — but close enough that her body heat reached my shoulder blade.

You physically cannot stop caring about people. It's your operating system. And it's going to hurt you, and you're going to let it, because the alternative is being someone you'd never forgive yourself for becoming.

Keira looked at both of us. That was either the most romantic or the most brutal thing I've ever heard in this bar.

Keira went back to her corner. The book was waiting. That's the whole architecture of us.

She gets to live in the dream, Keira said. We get to live in the aftermath.

Yes.

Motherfucker.

Yes.

I finished the Woodford. The ice shifted — one cube against another, a small private conclusion. Miguel raised the bottle from down the bar. I shook my head. One was enough. More would be hiding.

Will she be okay?

Micky looked at me with the exhaustion of someone who knows the answer but understands the answer isn't what's being asked for.

I'll keep showing up, she said. I'll keep the door open. Whether she walks through it is —

Hers, I finished.

Hers.

The bar breathed around us. Ezra sketching on the beanbag. Leila typing furiously. Eileen sitting next to Keira, not speaking, just present.

Micky put her hand on my back. Brief. Warm.

You did everything right, she said. And it wasn't enough, because the thing she needs isn't something another person can give. It's something she has to build inside herself, in the space where the fantasy lives, from materials she hasn't gathered yet.

I know.

Do you?

I looked at the empty glass. Amber film on crystal, the ghost of what had been there.

I'm learning to.

Della brought the mac and cheese closer — because there are conversations after which the only response is sustenance. The physical insistence that you are still here, in a body, among people who will not let you starve while you grieve the things you cannot fix.

I ate. Mascarpone first — rich, Italian-smooth, cutting through sharp cheddar the way tenderness cuts through grief when you're not expecting it. Then the pancetta, crisp and salt-bright, crumbling against the tooth. The pasta underneath held everything together, soft and structural.

That's what surviving feels like, stripped of poetry. You eat. You taste. You stay in the room. You accept that some things you reach for will never reach back, and you keep your hands open anyway — because closed fists are just another wall between yourself and the people who are actually, impossibly, still here.

Muñoz wrote about the horizon — the thing you move toward without ever quite reaching. He understood that dreaming is survival, that imagining a world that doesn't yet exist is how you keep breathing in the one that does. But there's a difference between dreaming toward a horizon and drowning in one. Between building a future and mistaking the blueprint for the building. The woman we can't name was taught from birth to scan for the divine — to expect an enormous body descending to sweep her into total safety. She rejected the God but kept the architecture, and a Goddess moved into the vacancy. The people who love her are left in the real cold, arms full of blankets she won't take, watching her walk toward a rapture that changed its name but never changed its shape. The horizon isn't the problem. It never was. The problem is when someone else poured the foundation before you were old enough to know what a foundation was, and every room you've built since sits on infrastructure you didn't choose and can't see. Muñoz wanted us to feel toward futurity — to reach. But reaching requires knowing which direction forward is.