He relished the screams, and he drained them into a teacup. Because it had to be fresh for Mommy.
Silver platter and all, Jasper would carry it in with a smile. “Pretty Mommy, look what I brought.”
Pretty Mommy would glow.
On her silk sheets. In the palace I ordered built for her. Where live-in staff treated my erection as a castle.
Yes, that was a penis joke.
There were civilized parties. There was passion. There was a garden tended by the only human on the grounds. One strictly off-limits to our son. Not that he had not tried a time or two.
Jasper was a real devil.
And Pearl knew it… and loved him anyway.
He brought her trinkets, sneaking out of his room while we slept. Amputated fingers, juicy leg bones… three times he tried to impress her with severed heads.
Which even I did not know how he found.
Because, once again, we lived on an island where there was none but us and those I knew were delivered.
Jasper, my beautiful, sweet, angelic boy, was a world ender.
One time, I cracked a joke that he was the antichrist.
Pearl refused to speak to me for almost a week.
She loved and she knew, fawning over her begotten monster as if the human jawbone he dug up that afternoon were a treasure.
I mean, I made it a treasure when I had it dipped in gold and set with diamonds.
I don’t think a more elated boy might have existed in the world when he saw it. When he presented it to his mommy.
Who kissed him for it and playfully put it on her head like a crown.
Unlike our son, I knew she cried after I’d taken the kid for a stroll.
I knew she fretted.
I knew that was why Yeshua sat at our table and smirked at me at least once a month. That was why Pearl asked him to be her tutor so she might no longer be ignorant.
My son, my obnoxious son, agreed.
She bloomed under his tutelage.
She still didn’t like him.
Who would? Her Jesus was a sanctimonious pain in the ass who refused to let a topic go, strangling the argument until there was nothing left but a carcass. He dumped way more dead things at my wife’s feet than the boy she had taken from the pens.
The night Jesus dared offer her his wrist for dinner, I almost killed him. And that was not in the hypothetical sense.
He and I battled for a week, bouncing from landscape to landscape. We rent, we purged, we fought like the truly elemental things we were.
Until I heard my wife weeping from hundreds of thousands of miles away.
Hand around the throat of the messiah, I dropped him to the cracked dust and flapped my wings.
Jesus laughed, careless of the blood that dripped from his mouth. “You deserve everything that is coming to you.”
Instantaneously, I found myself home, where women of my wife’s acquaintance had gathered to cheer her out of the gloom that continued to upend civilization. Our son, Jasper, rested at her feet, his beautiful head on her knee—behaving himself in a way I had never witnessed.
Kicking free of his mother’s embrace, he shot up… the babe stalking me as if I might serve as dinner. Fist in my face, he hissed. His first hiss. “Never leave her this way again.”
His first hiss.
How could I not love this boy?
Eyes wet with unshed tears, Pearl looked up at me and welcomed me home. Proud as the queen she had grown to be.
What need had I of pride? Before the gathering of women there, I fell to my knees at her feet. Tired, focused, sorry. I prostrated where all those of rank in my presence would share the tale of the devil who loved an angel.
The angel who drank me down like wine after forgiveness was lavished on my form.
Dreaming of murder down the hall, Jasper smiled in his sleep. Diabolically entertaining, those dreams held my attention. I reveled in them.
Once, I even made the mistake of telling Pearl the best parts of our son’s intentions.
The world would burn.
Terrified, she clung to me and begged that I might help him change.
Creatures didn’t change, but I promised her I’d try.
That was the first night she felt our baby kick.
In one moment, her attention was on the vagrant. In the next, it was swallowed up by our baby.
Jasper was twice as enamored with what grew in Mommy’s belly and fully in love.
Obsessed.
The ground shook, our son up to his normal tricks when he didn’t get his way should she brush his incessant prodding off. He practically tore down our house when the fetus didn’t respond to his songs.
“This is mine!” he would shout.
“She’s not yours.” Lips service I offered to appease his mother. Because I knew just as Pearl feared that he truly believed she was his.