Posted: “What Is Tamed”

A Submission to the Midnight’s Garden event from Erotica Abyss

This was something so different from what I usually write and I’m so glad I did it! I’ve never written folk horror (and even the ‘horror’ isn’t so bad) or a main character transforming into something else or breaking down mentally. It was a challenge but it was also really fun??? I’m looking forward to doing more!

The theme was “Midnight’s Garden,” which centered a dark and corrupted version of spring. Think like untamed transformations, forbidden desires, things that are dark and dangerous while also being beautiful.

Here are some of my thoughts as a little behind-the-scenes moment.

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At first I was going to write a historical scene of a boy forced into prostitution, hired by a rich guy to attend his midnight garden party and offer his body to the guests. A dark twist would be that the MC was once formerly a regular attendee of these parties before disaster struck and he became destitute and desperate.

But the rich preying on the vulnerabilities of the poor? It felt a little obvious.

So what if the attendees weren’t rich, but poor, small town men? Perhaps still powerful, but not wealthy.

And further, what if it wasn’t a sex party, but a sex ritual? What if the small town had a deal with a demon for protection in exchange for a sexual sacrifice?

Still a bit of a common theme, but I liked it a lot more than my original idea. I continued to play around, and I wanted to subvert the theme more. (At the risk of the plot getting confusing, which it might have been, admittedly.) Rather than the men choosing the sacrifice, the entity (or demon or spirit or whatever) did? And that chosen person’s body would transform and corrupt as it became a physical manifestation of the land? And as such, if the men wanted their land to be fertilized, they’d have to make sure the entity’s vessel would regularly fertilized.

This was the world I decided upon, and of course I had to make it gay. So in this story, the main character, Caleb (named for the biblical spy who saw heaven), was the first man chosen by the entity. The town had to wrestle with that. Luckily Caleb’s corrupted form was strangely compelling (and with exposure, irresistible) to the men of the small town.

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I think if I wrote it all over again, I would remove the rhyme:

Waste nothing to tame your need

Share freely to tame your greed

Know what to nurture and know what to weed

And pray what is tamed will never be freed.

I was really happy with it when I wrote it, but I ended up really just forcing it into the story in order to avoid removing it. But I’m not sure how much it added.

The crux of the twist at the end is that everyone thinks the ‘Root’ (i.e. Caleb) is imprisoned by the entity as a sex slave. But really, Caleb’s form serves as a conduit for the entity to experience a new sense of freedom and a corporeal form. He’s the only one not rooted or stuck in the town.

What I am glad I added (though it stil feels awkward at times) is the short prologue. I wanted the reader to know who Denver was early into the story, and know a bit about a sexual undertone to Caleb’s and Denver’s friendship. As well as that there would be a sexually explicit scene.

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Before I wrote this story, I watched a video from Bookfox about writing short stories and some tips for doing so. One of the last tips was just to experiment with new things. What I did to accomplish this was narrate Caleb’s corruption and transformation in his thoughts, which became more plant-like, intrusive, and non-sensical as the story went on. I threw in some plant-related verbs in between some dashes. I made Caleb able to sense the feelings or thoughts of the plants nearby. I made him crave soil.

But what was way more fun was giving Caleb a kind of impossible synesthesia. If Caleb’s body was a vessel for a supernatural entity, it made sense that it could sense things we couldn’t. Like the taste of colors, the sounds of textures, the feel of dreams on your skin. I loved some of the sentences I wrote with those descriptions.

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I hope you enjoy the short story! And check out the other submissions to the Midnight’s Garden event in the collection on AO3.