Lupus in Fabula

Lupus in Fabula

Briar Ripley Page

Cursed Morsels Press

Copyright © 2025 by Briar Ripley Page

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Book cover by Sadia Bies. Cover text design by Alan Lastufka.

Critical Praise for Briar Ripley Page

"You’re the monster, and you’re human after all — all too human, yet something else. You have a special eye. It’s not a way to see, but an emblem of what you’ll do. Crave a meat that’s yours and not yours. Bury the evidence. Befriend the dead. Itch to jump into your own abyss. Briar Ripley Page is grinning at us with this artful flesh-havoc. Their mood is contagious, and they send us into premeditated disarray. 

To read Lupus in Fabula is to be seduced and shocked, and then to become. Your breath becomes a whirr: plaintive, howling, splatter-Gothic. Try to explain yourself, and others will reply: That’s incredibly fucked up. So what will you do, body horror fans? Briar Ripley Page gives up thirteen tales that squeeze and sway us, we who have 'never been pure of heart.'

-Tucker Lieberman, author of Bad Fire

Lupus in Fabula is a gripping collection that will make you squirm with its unexpected and delectable discomforts. Page deftly crafts characters that are as alienating as they are relatable, and the results are astounding.

- Eve Harms, author of Transmuted

Contents

Notice of Content Warnings

A Sign

1.Biological Reality

2.Appetites

3.Swallow Me (W)hole

4.Therianthrope

5.Leavings

6.The Witch's Wife

7.Close Encounter

8.The Holy Incubus of West Virginia

9.Desire in the Flooded World

10.December Story

11.Gorgonland

12.The Mood After All

13.Lupus in Fabula

14.Content Warnings

15.Acknowledgments

16.Publication History

17.About the Author

18.Other Books from Cursed Morsels Press

Notice of Content Warnings

Content warnings for each story are available in the back of the book.

A Sign

Hi. It’s me, the author.

In lieu of a dedication, I want to say that if you’ve been looking for a sign that you should transition, or make any other major change in your life (get divorced, move out, move in, have a kid, get a cat, switch professions, cut off your abuser, take up the violin), this is it. Go do it. There’s still time. You’re alive until you aren’t.

Biological Reality

I can feel the creature curling in me like a worm. I can feel it sucking the vitality from my limbs, a great maggot stuck in the swollen meat of my belly.

I don’t exactly feel revulsion, but it’s very uncomfortable and inconvenient. What will happen when the little beast tears itself free, I don’t like to think. I try to ignore its writhing, its sucking, as I push my squeaky janitor’s cart down the hallway.

Everyone at work thinks of me as a man; they can’t know about my little hitchhiker, my parasite. The nature of the parasite. I can’t even tell people I have a tapeworm, white lie to explain how sick I’ve been. That begs the question of why I don’t just go to the doctor, get some pills, flush it out. Well, I would if I could. I would if that were still allowed, still possible.

My coworkers think I’m getting fat. Or, possibly, that I have some kind of cancerous tumor that can’t be removed. Possibly they think I’m dying; I haven’t asked.

Possibly, I am dying. Sometimes I feel like I’m dying.

It doesn’t matter. This is a mostly solitary job, and I can’t afford to take any time off. My untucked uniform shirt, a faded blue and gray striped button-down, billows loosely over my abdomen like a circus tent. Come and see the bearded lady! Come and see the pregnant man!

Nausea tears through me like a gust of foul wind screaming down a tunnel. I retch and stumble, leaning on the plastic push-bar of my cart for balance. The surge passes quickly, and I recover. Only the pale, sparkling dots peppering the edges of my vision remind me that I am weak. Weak and sick.

This is the next to last room on the last floor of my assigned block for tonight. I prop open the door, get out my equipment, and begin mopping the laminated tile.

During the day, college students learn about geology here. There are rocks lined up along the windowsills. One is bulbous and marble-white, with chunky yellowish incursions that remind me of pus, snot, or vaginal discharge. Beside it sits the polished gray whorl of a small ammonite fossil.

Inside me, the creature writhes. I can feel its feet pressing on my walls. Its mouth sucking hungrily, toothlessly at my flesh. It takes everything. My own stomach growls as I make the geology classroom floor shine like the polished ammonite.

It’s not like I haven’t tried to kill it.

If anyone found out, of course, I would go to prison. Still, it’s a risk I’ve been willing to take, at times. When I’m not in denial. When I’m not hoping the parasite will simply go away on its own. Hoping my body will re-absorb it somehow, clean and evidenceless.

When I first suspected, I drank heavily. I poured whisky down my throat like it could burn out the infection. I ate tissue-papery, poisonous flowers from my neighbor’s garden. They made me vomit and had me hearing voices and music for a night and a day—terrible voices and harsh music, sounds that weren’t really there. Only the creature and I could hear them. I wept, and the creature throttled my spine. 

I didn’t stop taking T until the prescribing doctor saw me a few months in and wouldn’t give me a renewal without a pregnancy test. Nothing helped. It swallowed the liquor, the petals, the hormone injections. It swallowed everything, and it grew strong and wild in my guts.

My hands on the mop handle are all bone and vein. They’re the hands of a crone. My arms are both too soft and too thin, though there’s still enough wiry muscle left in them to slosh the soapy water around the linoleum. To scrub stains from windows and walls.

Hunger ties elaborate knots within me. I think of the old urban legend about tapeworm removal, how a patient would be starved for days and then have a raw, dripping chunk of beef waved in front of their nose and mouth. The worm, starved too, would leap straight up their esophagus to reach the feast, spooling out of their mouth like uncontrollable speech until it was free to die in the open air. Until it could be thrown upon the fire and burned to ash.

The creature kicks. It bears down on my private parts. Something thick and clotted spurts out of me, warm in my underwear. Cramps wring me like a used towel. I bend over and hold myself very still until this episode passes, which it quickly does, and I hobble my cart out of the geology classroom and into the next one. The last one. Thank all the gods and monsters.

This one’s a biology classroom during the day. Things I can’t name float in cloudy jars of fluid, their skin wrinkled and pressed to the glass. A poster on the wall shows the evolutionary history of whales, from delicate hoofed creatures to baleened behemoths and sharp-toothed seal-killers.

I remember Peter’s weight on me, pressing down like the rock of his name. We were both so drunk. I was amazed he could get it up at all. In the dark of his parents’ garage, lost in a damp haze of beer and Jack Daniels and early summer humidity, I could imagine we were lying deep beneath the sea. Ever since the new legislation, I’d only had sex with my mouth, hands, and anus. That night, though, when he pushed himself questioningly against my groin, I parted my legs and let him enter my body through the front hole. It hurt for a moment, the tissues unused to stretching, and then it felt good. Familiar. Waves lapping upon the shore of my insides. Nothing would come of it, I reasoned. It was just once. I was probably infertile from six years of testosterone, anyway.

But then the creature, quickening. The swell and the kick. The withering of my limbs as it sucked me dry to grow its own body. Peter long gone to other flings; I never told him. I’ve told no one.

Another spasm folds me in half before I can even start mopping my final floor.

A dark stain spreads over the crotch of my pants. The creature is slipping down, down, trying to tear its way out of me. Sooner than it should, but nowhere near soon enough.

Piss and shit dribble down my thighs without my consent. The whales and semi-whales on the poster swim through stifling, quiet air. I bite through my lip to keep from screaming and, delirious, lie down right there on the dirty floor. The mop clatters beside me.

I tear off my clothes and push, and push. More urine spurting over the linoleum. More black, earthy-smelling shit rolling out of me like a series of stones.

Nausea. I bring myself up into a crouch, swallow the vomit in my mouth, and push again. Again. Is anyone else on this level of the building? Can anyone hear me? Do I want them to?

The creature slides out from between my legs in a bloody mess. It’s blue and tiny under all the filth, but it’s alive. Its tiny fists wave feebly, and its gaping mouth moves. It’s still attached to me by a long, fleshy rope.

Without thinking, I grab the rope and gnaw through it with my teeth, like a rat. I taste myself, and I taste terrible. Old pennies and latrines. Then I look down at the creature.

Some animals eat their offspring. The thought drifts into my mind as if broadcast from somewhere else. I look around the classroom for a radio, a projector. There’s nothing.

Some animals eat their offspring. Like rats.

It’s true. Nature isn’t kind or sentimental. An animal can always make more babies, but sometimes it needs meat. Sometimes, an animal can’t take care of its children. Sometimes, an animal is starving.

It’s an elegant solution in its logic, its circularity. The infant subsumed once more by the body from whence it came.

My stomach growls. I have been so hungry. The creature on the floor writhes. My little worm. It lets loose a tiny, raspy cough of a cry.

It has been feeding on me for months. It has taken so much.

I could take it back. I could make sure there was no evidence, no little body for a snitch to discover in the trash. No chance of arrest.

Perhaps it tastes better than I do. Surely its flesh is more tender. It’s ugly and filthy, but so are lots of things people eat.

Dizzy and gentle, I scoop the creature off the floor, which I will need to clean much more intensively than I initially planned. I bring its blue, bloody belly up to my face. My mouth floods with saliva. I open wide.

I bite down.

Appetites

I.

The madness grew first in him as a series of fleeting, inexplicable impulses, unbidden images like those glimpsed on the edge of sleep.

He thought of biting the butler, the new one his brother had recently hired, when the young man smiled stiffly at him. Red lips and ivory teeth, unmarked and unlined flesh with a glow about it like life itself. Pale, smooth. It would tear open easily.

And when that thought was shaken off, folded and put away, he thought of biting one of his brother’s collies, parting its long silky hair and rending the skin. Dog’s blood welling up in his mouth.

And when he shuddered and banished that thought, he saw a spider crawling up the wall in front of him and he imagined grasping the creature and tearing off each of its delicate legs, then shoving its plump body down his gullet.

The thoughts were, in a way, like the thoughts about men that had come first when he was young. When he was twelve and thirteen, staring at the veins in the back of the Latin master’s hands. Staring at the gardener’s dark member protruding from muddy trousers as the laborer covertly pissed behind a tree. The boy Renfield sat in the bushes as though entombed. Looked out through a frieze of branches that scratched him whenever he chanced motion. Was entranced by the arcing stream of urine, the gardener’s bruised knuckles, the almost purple head from whence the urine came.

Renfield knew what he was, then.

He knew both that it was evil and that it was natural, that there was a sense and rightness to the thoughts