MACULATE is a book i wrote! you can buy it here. short summary:
A closeted trans woman with a traumatic Christian fundamentalist upbringing accidentally summons a demon of lust who looks like Jesus Christ.
longer blurb + content warnings:
Lucy's life is drowning her.
Years after being ousted from her childhood church, she's working in a Hollywood occult museum. Socially isolated, closeted, and unable to put the abuse she experienced behind her, fixing her situation seems impossible. Her solution? Messing around with every new exhibit at the museum and trying to summon something, anything, that will either change things or end it all.
It never works…until it does.
When she lights the candles on a mysterious new altar, Lucy inadvertently summons Az, a demon of lust. This is absolutely the last thing she wants—no matter how hot he is. After her experiences in church, she hates the thought of sharing trust or intimacy with anyone.
But she soon realizes Az isn’t there to change her mind. In fact, after hundreds of years being controlled and exploited by others, he knows exactly how she feels. The fact that she doesn’t plan to use him is a relief. Az's time with her is a break for both of them: a chance to bond over what it's like to be chewed up and spat out by the world.
Being understood for the first time is electrifying, and the longer Lucy spends around Az, the more she feels herself coming alive. She's falling in love, and he's right there with her, fascinated by her metamorphosis and desperate to see her reach the life she's always wanted for herself.
The only downside? Az has just one year with Lucy before he'll be banished and bound to someone new, repeating the same cycle he's been stuck in for four hundred years.
And as badly as he wants to stay with her, the clock ticking down to his end won't wait.
***
content warnings:
past csa/sa, psychological/religious manipulation, transmisogyny
***
the book is 2.99 on most websites, but if you dm me and ask nicely, i'll give it to you for free đź’‹
watched rhrn yesterday and it got me thinking maybe cardi could be a straight trans woman...i wonder if anyone has ever had this thought before. #newthought #thinking #wondering
on many levels i want to actively seek out more people who think cardi is a woman but on another level oh my god the takes were actually wretched last year and i do not want to come within a stone's throw of that same tumblr niche again.
my hardline stance is that cardi is not under any circumstances going to top anybody and that a large portion of the folks who weigh in on this topic are beholden to an ideology colloquially known as "kidding themselves"
i'm lucky to be alive both in the sense that i have found a lot of happiness and genuinely enjoy how i live, but also in the more intense sense of "holy shit i'm lucky i made it." not because i had any specific near death experiences lately, just more the combined impact of it all.
i'm lucky to be alive both in the sense that i have found a lot of happiness and genuinely enjoy how i live, but also in the more intense sense of "holy shit i'm lucky i made it." not because i had any specific near death experiences lately, just more the combined impact of it all.
maculate is too antichristian to be demon romance because az isn't an actual demon. maculate is too dykey to be het romance because az isn't an actual man.
Maculate is a weird, angsty, horny romance novel about a closeted trans woman accidentally summoning a sex demon who looks like Jesus Christ.
The first two chapters will be posted here on Tumblr, but you can also buy the ebook here for around 2.99 if you're interested in reading the whole thing.
~~~
I don’t know how to smile at people. There’s something my face does, where my forehead crinkles up and my eyebrows raise all scared-like, and however my mouth moves, it always looks like I’m baring my teeth to defend myself. And I do feel like I’m defending myself. Every single day. Every interaction, every customer I ring up at the museum gift shop, no matter how many times I do it, there’s still that little twitch of panic. My heart jumps up. My hands shake. I sweat until I have to rub my hands dry on the front of my apron.
It's not fun for the customers, either. None of them are ever kept long under the delusion that this is good for either of us. The full face of Halloween makeup is the only thing saving me, even if I sweat through it and let it crease on my forehead. I could never work like this, be like this if I was a barista or something. I couldn’t work in a department store selling shoes or blazers to businesspeople.
Or I could, but I’d be a creep. It’s hard to pin down why I know this with so much certainty, but I can tell from the way people look at me, interact with me. Adam, for example, doesn’t seem to have this problem. He wears the same drowned-corpse makeup, sells the same stupid Baby Baphomet plush toys with machine-embroidered eyes as I do, makes the same amount every hour. He’s not even that much younger than me—thirty-five, maybe.
But Adam isn’t me. Adam has a girlfriend he’s been seeing for three and a half years now. Adam goes bowling on the weekends with the guys he knows from college. Adam clocks out and leaves.
I clock out, and I go upstairs. There’s nobody I’m seeing. I never went to college—I’m not sure if what I did counts as high school, even—and I don’t know how to bowl.
I had a life before this one. I have this life now. I don’t know which is worse.
#
“See you tomorrow, buddy,” Adam says, waving as he shoves the side door open. He always salutes me when he goes out, and I always salute him back, even though I feel like an idiot doing it.
I’m always buddy when he’s talking to me. I’m not buddy to most people when they look at me, but I can’t think of anything else someone who’s trying to be nice would call me.
I don’t know what I am when Adam talks about me behind my back. Maybe he never talks about me at all.
“See you,” I tell him, raising and lowering my salute like an animatronic, and then he’s out the door.
I’m off to wipe the fingerprints off the display cases, sweep, and hit all the lights.
I sold six Baby Baphomets today. They’re popular, but they’re not exclusive to our museum’s gift shop—they’re just a trendy plush from a gothic accessory company. The rest of our merchandise is half tourist crap, half occult crap. Not much of it is unique, but then again, there’s not that much in the museum to begin with.
We have the collar Elvira’s dog wore in Mistress of the Dark. We have one of the machetes from Jason Takes Manhattan. We have a couple of props from Argento’s Phantom of the Opera. We don’t, to put it bluntly, have anything that anybody comes to Hollywood to see. As my mother puts it, we’re so far off Sunset, we’re practically in Inglewood.
Mixed in with all the real-but-disappointing movie props, my mother has filled the exhibits with her own strange finds from garage sales and online auctions. Pentagram carpets, tapestries with depictions of medieval torture woven into them, black candles dripping off altars that came with free shipping, the odd grisly photograph she’s pulled from Wikimedia Commons and framed in something from IKEA.
By the time I finish wiping greasy fingerprints off those IKEA frames, she’s standing at my register with a wad of twenties in her hand and a frown on her face.
“The register’s a dollar fifty short,” she says, glancing over her shoulder at me. She doesn’t wear the Halloween makeup like Adam and I do—just a normal dark eye, red lip, tight bun. It’s better, she says, if it looks like at least one of us takes it seriously. I think she likes to look like the human mistress commanding her zombie cashiers. “Adam didn’t have extra.”
“I’ll—uh, take it out of the tip jar, then.” I peer into the jar, decorated with paper bats and skulls. There’s only a little over a dollar fifty in there, and I’m surprised it’s that much.
“No, don’t worry about it.” She waves a hand at me, sidestepping past to poke through my register. Her voice drops to a mutter. “I’ll take care of it.”
She doesn’t like this place much more than I do, but she runs it on spite, and I guess that gives her some joy. She grew up a fundie, so I grew up a fundie, and until I was nineteen, I really did believe the earth was about six thousand years old. That’s not the reason I have all the issues I do. It doesn’t help, but it’s not the main reason.
She and I left the church eventually, and she tried to force it all out of both of us. I don’t resent her for that. She was right, but in practice, it was sort of like drinking bleach to cancel out hydrochloric acid. I didn’t mind getting all the wrong stuff sorted out, though. I like knowing how old the earth is and how to do algebra. Maybe not for the right reasons. I get a weird, sick little zing in my brain when I call up another piece of foundational knowledge I didn’t get before. It’s wrong, it's bad, it’s something that shouldn’t make me grin to myself when I’m alone, but it does.
We had no reason to care about anything but the word of God. And God never said anything about long division. Now, whenever I think about it all—long division, pH, the age of the earth—it feels like my own dirty secret, like I’m staring up at Jesus on the cross and feeling a buzz inside, a hum, a warmth where it shouldn’t be.
Now, that—that didn’t start until I was out of the church. We weren’t Catholics, so he was never hanging up there on our church wall, bleeding out and mostly naked. I was introduced to that depiction of him later on, when I was torturing myself by stopping in for services at the ugly, ugly churches of the greater Los Angeles area. But I’m sure if my childhood self had seen his crucifixion on a regular basis, it would have made all the wrongness about me more obvious sooner.
I gulp at the memory, shifting in place. My hands are sweating again.
“The new display came in,” my mother says, pushing my register drawer shut. “Will you give me a hand?”
She leads me around back, where the delivery truck that arrived this afternoon dropped off a massive cardboard box with edges that are double-triple-taped and beat to hell.
“It’s from Prague,” she says, grabbing one end of it and gesturing for me to take the other. “Lift with your knees.”
I lift with my back because I can’t tell the difference, and I walk backwards to help her guide it in through the door. There’s stuff rattling around inside. Based on every other new exhibit we get, I guess that it’s candlesticks. And if it’s not candlesticks, it’s bones.
“Pink room for this one. Watch your step,” she instructs, and I step up when my heel knocks against the threshold.
The pink room is a small part of our museum, which is otherwise mostly black. It’s on the nose, maybe, but it’s meant to be about women and the occult, with some old Hollywood fluff and feathers. It’s got a lot of speculative info boards guessing who was out making deals with the devil, and we have some old trinkets on display, but there’s substance to it, too. We have a CRT playing Häxan in the corner on a loop, and I like to watch that sometimes. Or maybe I don’t like to watch it, but I can’t always tear my eyes away from it.
It's a weird little movie. Even when I’m not watching it, I’m thinking about that hundred-year-old footage of actresses having fits and conniptions. It’s the kind of physicality you don’t get in acting after the end of silent film. The nun whose eyes widen as she grabs the knife, poor Apelone, the torture of Maria the weaver. The reminders on the title cards of why this happened to them, why it still happens. I know they had it worse than me, but I can’t help envying them sometimes. At least witch is something that comes with sisterhood.
We set the box down near the CRT. It’s shut off for now, so I can focus on taking the box cutter to the taped-up cardboard edges, pulling up the folds and trying to parse the contents.
It holds a round carpet, a wooden altar, and a pair of candles.
The carpet isn’t much bigger than a shower mat. It’s black, and it doesn’t look handmade, even though the stitching all over it shows that certain creative liberties were taken later on. There’s a bunch of gold thread embroidery, but the gold isn’t a constant. Whoever was stitching it ran out of gold and had to replace it with yellow, then brown, then a mishmash of other colors to finish the symbol in the carpet’s middle.
It's some kind of sigil. I don’t know what I’m looking at—most of the other junk in the museum is just pentagrams. Sometimes the sign for brimstone. This one isn’t like any of that, but that’s all I can say. Too many lines and circles.
The wooden altar is small with sturdy legs, and in the middle, the same sigil from the carpet is painted in gold. The symbol pops up again on the candles, carved into the wax and lovingly drawn on the underside of the candlestick bases. I stare at the candles a little too long, rolling one back and forth over my palm before I set it in the candlestick.
There’s something special about things like this. I don’t like most of it—I don’t believe in any of it, either—but I can tell when someone cared about it. Here it is, the proof that someone cared about something and believed in it enough to trace it in thread and paint and wax. I’d love to believe in something so strongly.
“She disappeared,” my mother says.
“Who?”
“The Czech woman who owned this. I bought it from her family. She’s gone,” she continues. “Apparently, she left with some clothes, her documents, cleared out her bank accounts.”
“Not kidnapping?” There are always kidnappings. If there’s a disappeared woman mentioned on the walls of our museum, it’s a kidnapping. Or murder. Those overlap frequently.
“No. Not this time.” My mother clicks her tongue, and when I look at her, I catch her smiling. “What do you think about that?”
“I don’t know,” I say, eyes drifting back to the candles.
She looks at me for a moment, sideways through the shadow of her false lashes. I know she’s disappointed when I don’t say more. I don’t stay quiet to spite her—I really don’t know these things. At least, I don’t know them right away. Maybe in a week, in a month, when it’s settled in my head, I’ll know how I feel about the missing Czech woman who loved this altar.
My mother shrugs.
“Well, help me get it set up, then. And we’ll watch Moonstruck after.”
#
I love Moonstruck. It’s completely foreign. It’s more fantasy than anything else I’ve seen, but it’s realer than my own life has ever felt. My mother and I sit down to watch it two or three times a year, laughing and sighing at the same parts. Watching it is like seeing my reflection in a hall of mirrors, with tears in my eyes as I watch Cher-Loretta watch La bohème with tears in her eyes, too. And that perfect, convenient ending, where none of the lies end up mattering at all, where it all gives way to everlasting love that ties up every loose end.
Nothing else ever makes me feel like that. And so I love it, at least while I’m watching it, but I never feel hollower than I do when it’s over. I always end up wishing I’d loved and lost someone. It would make all the plodding around I do feel like it means something. If my heart was broken years ago by my husband’s death, I’d become someone with meaning, with tragic purpose, someone who’s making the most of it despite the pain and walking down the streets of New York City to springy Italian music.
But my heart’s fine.
When Moonstruck finishes, my mother leaves the living room with a sigh, padding down the hall in her slippers, two inches shorter than she is when she’s clicking around the museum in her heels. I sit on the couch in silence for longer than I should, swallowing the ache in my throat. Eventually, I can’t take it any longer, and I force myself up so I can rewind the tape.
I don’t like sitting with myself alone for too long, and my mother is already showering, so there’s not going to be any more conversation this evening. Some nights, I might try to get her to have a cup of tea with me, might try to tell myself I’ll talk to her about something real. Most nights, I’ll go to my room with a handful of sandwich cookies and eat them icing-first while I watch the street under my window.
Tonight, though, I find myself thinking about that missing Czech woman and her altar.
#
The museum is less threatening in the middle of the night when I’m there in my sweatpants, face clean and walking down the hall with a flashlight in one hand and a lighter in the other. No visitors. No messes to clean up, no one to talk to, no questions to answer.
I do this sometimes when we get a new exhibit in. Not always, not with the movie props. But any time there’s an altar, a spellbook, something that looks like it’s been used, I can’t help myself.
I’ve said I don’t believe in any of it. That’s still true. But not believing isn’t the same as not wanting to believe. I used to believe in something, way back when. I’d like to again. Not the same thing—I don’t think I can get that back, and I don’t want to—but I always hope I’ll find something new. A new truth. A sigil that works. Some proof that I have a soul, and if I have one, maybe I can bargain it away for something better, because it’s not done me any good where it is now.
As I step into the pink room, I set the flashlight on the floor next to the embroidered rug. Unable to decide if it’s better to kneel on the rug or in front of it, I settle myself off to the side. Flicking the lighter on, I touch the flame to the wicks of the candles propped upon the altar. They’re not fresh wicks—no one will notice I lit them if I’m quick and careful.
The center of the altar is bare, just a flat, painted wooden shelf. With nothing to give and no sense of how these things are supposed to work, I always offer the same thing.
I twist my fingers into my hair, fiddling with the strands until there’s just one squeezed between my thumb and forefinger. I yank, and it comes out with the root.
Gray. A lump forms in my throat, but I lay the hair atop the sigil painted on the altar, then scoot back to my position by the side of the rug. The candles flicker, and dark wax begins to pool at the base of the wicks. My heartbeat quickens as it always does when I’m afraid I’ll be caught, when I think I can hear footsteps in the hallway.
There’s never anyone there.
When I open my mouth to speak, my tongue is dry enough to crack. I fumble my palms together and bow my head. I don’t know how to pray anymore, and I don’t know who I’m praying to tonight.
I don’t care who, either.
“Please,” I whisper, and that’s the only word I say while the rest bounces around in my head. Send me an angel, send me anyone. Send me the worst you have, as long as the worst can look me in the eyes. I can’t go on like this much longer.
I know there’s something wrong with me. I know it’s going to kill me if I let it.
So, please, send me whatever will keep me alive.
As the words run through my head, as my nose stuffs up and my throat burns, the candles snuff out.
I flinch.
There’s no draft. The air is perfectly still.
And then, like a cheap party trick, the twin candles flare up again, flaming higher and brighter and redder. The wicks crackle, wax dripping and running down hotter and faster, like something inside is searing through and clawing its way out. The red-gold light catches itself on the painted sigils, on the metallic flecks in the embroidery thread, and all of it burns.
The heat rushes out, scorching hot, and I shove myself backward across the floor, sweaty hands sticking to the lint in the carpet. The light burns my eyes, so bright I have to squeeze them shut just as an inferno of flame bursts from the rug’s embroidered sigil. My hands sting as the tiny hairs on my skin singe, and as quick as the light came, it’s gone.
The afterimage burns in my vision, and my eyes water as I squint into the dark. The air is smoky, but not as smoky as it should be. I wave in front of my face frantically to clear it, waiting for my eyes to adjust.
My flashlight’s gone out, but there’s movement in front of me.
There’s someone there.
Crouching. Kneeling in the center of the sigil. Head bowed.
Every hair on my body stands on end. My breath sticks in my throat. I’m going to be sick, or I’m going to cry, or scream, or run away, but I can’t make myself move at all.
He moves first.
He lifts his head, slow and easy, dark hair falling over his shoulders in a curtain of curls, and he stares at me.
“It’s you,” he says. His voice is low and warm, and he says it like he’s been waiting for me. Like he’s glad to see me.
i hate getting into anything. "oh any other ghost fans who think cardi needs vaginoplasty?" "anyone wanna read about moira overwatch assassinating ronald reagan?" "anyone who thinks rusty from starlight exprees is a baby butch?" fuck off.
to be honest i can see cardi doing very well for herself in a mutually reciprocal throuple situation because i think she'd enjoy having two huge men doing things for her. and naturally she could fujo out as well. but it's a big enough ask for me to invent even One boyfriend for her and nobody else both believes she is a woman and cares to take up the sword on this issue so it's sort of a truth that will go unrealized in modern society.
something something the whole book is just lucy considering herself to be dead in basically every way that matters and then coming to life. world's first born again antichristian.
my friend was telling me i should do a lucy cosplay for my book promo videos and i was like...so...Woman With Bangs...? and she was like "no like the zombie makeup" and i was like ohhhhh right. the "zombie makeup" lucy says she wears to work. because she's totally a reliable narrator with regards to her appearance. right.
this isn't me being like haha somebody Believed Lucy or anything btw because there's no indication it's not actually zombie makeup. it technically is, but lucy's idea of that is just makeup that looks like her face if she was dead. so she's just kind of a mottled corpsey color and has taken some liberties to make it more femmey. she's just gaming the system so she's as close to wearing normal makeup as possible while still having plausible deniability. because she's morbid and closeted.
