When I turned 30, I was surprised to find the ticking of my biological clock grow insistently louder. Thoroughly a millennial, I’d anticipated neatly sidestepping that particular trope of womanhood, and yet just like generations of women before me, I found myself pondering an ineluctable choice: Continue enjoying my life, unburdened by the exorbitant cost and stress of raising a child, or offer my body up to the Beast as a fertile vessel for his demonic seed?
As I thought about the future, idly browsing online for chic maternity clothes and researching the price of Montessori preschools, I realized there’s a complicated moral calculus would-be parents today have to perform that would’ve been unfathomable to earlier generations. We must consider exactly what kind of world our Dark Lord’s son will be ravaging.
My mother or grandmother could drink from the slashed neck of an unclean mammal, cover themselves in viscera and lay their virgin bodies atop a pentagram as cloaked figures surrounded them to chant from the Book of Lies — confident that the world their unholy progeny would bring to ruin would be much the same as the one they grew up in.
You need only glance at the news to know this is no longer true. The Earth is circling the drain, and humanity is hastening its own demise, which would seem like a definite check in the pro-throw wide the gates of hell column, right? What riper time for the Prince of Flies to rise from the hot dust of the fallen West and with a quill dipped in a sea of blood, pen mankind’s final chapter?
But I wonder… after my cloven-hooved princeling tears his way out of my womb, what will he make of his new home?
Twenty years ago, our order would’ve placed him with a powerful senator so that he could grow up surrounded by wealth, privilege and influence, the better to weave his lies into a rope the world wouldn’t even realize was a noose until he pulled it fast around its fat neck. Now that masterplan feels a bit much. A Lucifer reborn today would require, at most, a verified Twitter account.
I picture the scorched Earth my little bundle of hate will inherit, and I worry he’ll grow up aimless and unchallenged. What if he looks around at humanity choking on a feedback loop of senseless, self-inflicted suffering and thinks, “Does anyone even need me?” It’s enough to break a mother’s black heart.
Seeking guidance, I recently drank a powerful tannis root tea. In the ensuing vision, I saw a woman on fire inside a cave and a man pouring gasoline on her and another man, farther back, hurling Molotov cocktails at both of them and then a woman with a flame thrower torching Molotov-cocktail guy and so forth and so on, unceasing and without end, and at the mouth of the cave, illuminated by this lurid conflagration, was a slumped-shouldered little boy with a goat’s head and a baffled “What the actual fuck?” look on his hircine face.
I awoke certain it would be wrong to bring the Son of the Serpent into this pitiful clusterfuck. If I’m being honest, I resent older generations. If only my dark prince could’ve come of age when college was the price of a rusty used Corolla, you could buy a house with a job you landed out of high school, and the coasts weren’t about to sink into a poisoned, stinking ocean.
To take such bounty and render it ash in the mouths of those smug sons of bitches before they squandered everything and salted the ground behind them? Now that would’ve been a gift worthy of our Lord Satan.