sometimes a girl has some weird ass thoughts driving across country anyway here’s this.
“I need to go to the store,” Henry called out to Mabel.
“Okay honey!” Mabel waved before turning back to her task of underwater basketweaving under the kitchen table.
Henry grabbed the handle of his pick axe from Gompers’ mouth, straddled it and launched into the air a respectable 25-30 feet from the ground, clipping along at a steady pace until he got to the grocery store. He took out a pink ribbon from his breast pocket, and tied his axe to a post before walking in to the grocery store.
Initially, it was pitch black, but as Henry walked in candles began to light on the one object in the room, a gigantic table made of roughly hewn pine boards. Strewn across the table were goblets full of something a little too thick to be wine, gold and silver plates laden with fruit verging between fresh and rot, broken strands of pearl necklaces, ham hocks and turkey legs, butter dishes with a huge thumbprint gouged out in the middle, excess upon excess upon decay.
At each place setting was a severed sheep’s head, the blood still fresh and dripping on the floor, not yet discovered by the flies.
In the middle of it all was Dipper, lying supine on the table.
Henry dropped his reusable shopping bag and got out his grocery list he wrote on the back of a business card for a psychic in New Jersey.
Henry’s brow furrowed for a second. “We can’t start our lives without it.”
“If you want it, then you’ll need to come and find it.” Dipper sat up, and dug his hands with their short stubby human nails into his stomach. His arms shook and quivered as his hands, quickly becoming covered in gushing blood, peeled open the skin of his stomach, parted through the meat curtains of his abdominal wall, and finally opened his ribs up far far far past what they should expand with a sickening crack.
He flomped back onto the table and said “Come and find it, if you can.”
The tongues began to loll out of the mouths of the sheep’s heads, lapping up the fresh blood on the table.
Henry came to the side of the table, awkwardly shoving a Laz-E-Boy out of the way. There was a spark at the top of one of Dipper’s exposed glistening and broken bones but it quickly went back inside of Dipper.
Tenatively at first, Henry reached a hand in. It was fetid and hot inside, like a jungle, and he almost recoiled. But there- there was the spark again.
“Go on,” gasped Dipper, “grab it.”
Henry began to delve slightly deeper in. He could see the glow of Mabel’s soul it was so tantalizingly close but then it flew out of his grasp. He reached again and again, hands fluttering as gently as they could inside but gentle wasn’t doing it gentle wasn’t-
Dipper’s hand grabbed his, grabbed it so hard it cut off the circulation.
Henry forced his hand inside as fast as he could, and suddenly he was elbow deep inside of Dipper, his funny bone scraping a spine bone. Goosebumps raised on Henry’s arm as inside he was kissed by the flutter of lungs, the coils of intestine that fun fact do have a tendency to wiggle around when exposed.
And still Mabel’s soul eluded him.
Now it was resting on Dipper’s heart and Henry needed a better angle to get deeper, deeper inside. One hand still in the chest cavity, Henry awkwardly clambered onto the table, and straddled Dipper, to better support himself as he looked.
Mabel’s soul leapt away from his searching hand yet again and now Henry was frantic. Under him, Dipper’s back arched Henry’s arm scraped against ribs and torn muscle, under him Dipper thrashed and writhed as Henry worked faster and faster, increasingly headless of taking any care.
He began to rip out organs and toss them aside, his sweat flying onto Dipper’s face, the cavernous hole of Dipper’s torso. By now Dipper was keening, a sound that made Henry’s ears bleed but it didn’t matter he needed to find her soul, his hand scratching with muscle fibers and viscera under his nails, reaching inside of the trachea, squeezing the lungs and making Dipper begin to pant, he needed he needed he needed-
Henry woke with a start. Uncomfortably, he shifted his lower body around in bed until he was able to lay comfortably again, Next to him, Mabel snored.
That, Henry knew with bone certainty, was not a dream from the Dreambender.
No, Henry realized as he crossed and uncrossed his legs, that was just his good old unconsciousness.
He didn’t want to think about what it meant.
He fell asleep and by the morning he had completely forgotten about it.
Dipper made everyone pancakes for breakfast.