Pet store pompano beach

So my hamster, which im guessing is over 1.5 years old and comes from a pet store, has an eye infection and I've tried treating it with some weaker medications like Euphrasia etc. but it's not been getting better. I want to take her to the vet but I'm very scared of her having a heart attack from the stress because she hates being handled and when I tried holding her to put eye drops into her eye once she froze and started shaking and stuff (now I hold a treat and while she gnaws on it I'll quickly pop in some eye drops into her eye) . Does anyone have any experience with easily stressed hamsters? Btw she live in a detolf with a lot of bedding, a sandbath, and a nite angel wheel. I don't think she's not frightened of me but she likes chomping on fingers. Any advice is muchhh appreciated!

Hello fellow Redditors,
My company operating two stores in the pet services industry. As our business experiences growth, we have reached a critical point where we are seeking valuable advice from this community on valuations and financing opportunities.
I recently opened our latest store in 2023, but unfortunately, we faced significant challenges during the construction phase. Key components unexpectedly disappeared from the market last summer, leading to substantial delays of nearly six months. As a result, we incurred cost overruns of approximately $300,000 to $400,000, along with an estimated loss of $200,000 in revenue.
At this juncture, we are seeking advice on valuations and potential financing options to help us recover from these setbacks and propel our business forward. I believe our track record of success, combined with the strong market demand for pet services, makes us an attractive investment opportunity.
Question valuing a new business. What about build out costs?
Say we are a newely opened store that is making $100k a year EBITDA. You obviously need to find a multiple for your industry that works. However, what about the costs of opening that store? Construction and everything else was 1 million. An EBITDA valuation of 3x is only $300K, but the store cost $1.3M to build and open. When trying to sell or get a valuation for an investor, can you include those costs into the picture somehow? I am trying to understand how those build out costs are handled in these valuations.
If you have any insights, recommendations, or suggestions on how we can navigate these challenges and secure the necessary financing to replace the capital used for construction, we would greatly appreciate your input. Whether you have experience in valuations, connections in the pet industry, or expertise in securing financing for service-based businesses, your advice can make a significant impact.
Grateful for the collective wisdom of this community.

All non-tradeables to store in Diango. No way to purchase with Oddments or even RuneCoins? Presumably earned at random against the odds of about 100 event tokens at about.... 1 an hr from skilling and sometimes from Clawdia?
​

Some older Summer themed Cosmetics have also made their way to the beach this year!
Hear-no-evil monkey hat
See-no-evil monkey hat
Speak-no-evil monkey hat
Monkey mace
Summer sun ring
Summer storm ring
Ice cream cone hat
Sunbathe emote

I'm at my friend's home base (they're a human main) and they have SO MANY cat players in their party. While they were grinding through the morning dailies one of the cat players came up to me and was clearly trying to initiate the [Petting] minigame, using the cutest emotes -- I've heard cat players only use mic with human players, so I knew they wanted some [Happiness] buffs and the bit of XP that normally come with minigames like these. And let me tell you. When I started [Petting] another cat player came up. And it was double [Petting] action, y'all. My favorite part of the minigame is definitely how different players have different preferences. The two cat players both quickly got the [Purring] status effect -- definitely one of the best parts of their build imo -- but one liked being stroked on the cheeks while the other liked being stroked on the back. Wow. It sucks that cat players grief other players so much, espcially when human players don't moderate their own parties for toxic behavior, but the buffs they give human players are OP. Love and light and bliss etcetc
I also love the [Berry Picking] minigame, the rewards have way better XP output when you collect them yourself rather than at a human resource hub like [Grocery Store]. You can really tell when plants players have multiple accounts with human players and speedrun the Domestication quest while playing both because it's a faster way to dump a lot of stars into somethin rather than the Evolution quest. And the genetic modification quests! Insane amounts of stats in just one trait... but why put all those stats into Charisma??? Just so human players encourage the growth on a mass scale and they can see numbers go up.... I have SO MUCH more respect for fruit and vegetable players that keep their stats in [Taste] rather than the ones that sacrifice [Taste] for [Size] and [Color] like you see at the store. But yeah that's one of the reasons I love the [Berry Picking] minigame, it gives more XP and rewards to every player involved.
[Swimming] is also a classic player action, it's not a minigame but rather a Movement action but it gives my player enough XP and stat boosts that it counts in my mind. [Drawing] and [Writing] are skill trees, I know, but they give me similar boosts to many minigames.
What are some of your favorite minigames?

Has anyone bought Fancy Feast from different stores and noticed a difference in ingredients? I bought the top can from Walmart yesterday and the bottom can from PetSmart about a week and a half ago. The order of the ingredients is different and I’m worried that the new cans are going to make my kitty’s belly upset 😩

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
https://preview.redd.it/1irxm74xty2b1.jpg?width=2409&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=00a98cf83d0a5ae887b9d1e9f0238008682e3d91
"Inside the Unholy Womb" music track
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.

What's the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen in a pet store?

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Designed for convenience and sensible travel, the TrunkTrapper can hold sandy items from a day at the beach, sports equipment from a day game or even equipment from your camping trip! It's size is approximately 47" wide and 27" deep. The large pleat in the back of the bag allows for ample space to store camping items, beach chairs, umbrella, toys, sports equipment and more.
Color variance happens from screen to screen, depending on what device you are viewing on. We try to do our best to display and describe the color as clearly as possible.

What's the most ridiculous thing you've ever done to save money?

They say people take the most photos of the people, pets and places they cherish the most and most fear losing.
I take 500 million photos of my parents, my cat (and both of my cats when I still had two), and places I love, like the beach, or travel places like Honolulu, New York, etc. It's like I'm trying to grip on to these people and places and cling so hard to them so I don't lose them.
When I'm away travelling and I love a place, I always get very mournful the night before I have to leave, and always go out on the balcony, look out the window or take yet another photo..."just one more look". Before I can't see it anymore.
When I say goodbye to my parents, we always hug and kiss several times. It never feels quite enough... "just one more cuddle". In case it's the last.
For my dearest loved ones who I've lost, I touch and kiss their photos at least 2-3 times each day and tell them I love them. Because I can't tell them in person anymore and I worry if I don't tell them and do this compulsion (yes, I have OCD), then they won't know I love them.
Is anyone else like this?