The Damn Jar

I am dead only exists in fairy stories.

You have to die a terribly unique death to live to tell the tale.

And such a tale I will tell you, but then I'll be gone. I won't like the ending. Not one bit.

It begins with a box.

A magnificent locked box in a cobwebbed larder.

A vast and beautiful wooden box with a patina to die for, where hands had opened it countless times. The same hands 

Hers. 

Her hands were often cut and sticky. She loved to work in her cottage garden of barbs and thorns, the bright dumb berries teasing her like village idiots from their seeming safes. 

Pluck!

With talons long, out they come like sucked eyeballs straight into her ancient basket and then across the cat-filled yard, the crow-hung kitchen and plop!  - into the pan of boiling water on the stove. 

The pan was huge and battered. A pan for making gallons of jam. A serious pan, blemished from utility, a pan that had cooked ten thousand fruits and sometimes, on special days, other things.

Her pantry was crammed with killers on shelves, sealed and dated. Blackberry and belladonna June 1918, Gooseberry and fly January 1919, Quince and brimstone May 1919 and so on.

So remote was her house that visitors in the dark valley only ever stumbled upon it. They never meant to. It was always unplanned and consistently fatal.

Her most important jam was stored in the huge box. The locked box in the cobwebbed larder. Only she had the key, an upturned charred crucifix, worn and ground, hung around her neck always, along with her shrivelled baby's fontanelle and a bride's unused lips.

Only the devil got this jam. 

And her of course. When he came by to eat and more. They talked of trapping heaven's angels, daubed black butter on cakes of skin and spooned out the glistening jelly from the exclusive jar.

The seal read Lost Male March 1921 and it was I.

I saw the huge box lid rise and her old haggard face again, but this time smiling with a dreadful lipsticked smile and suddenly remembered how her offer of shelter had ended up with me rolling like a lobster in hot sweet water on that hateful rickety cooker. I became a special kind of jam, a gelatinous soul imprisoned in glass, my mind and spirit preserved in sugary damnation in that enormous jar.

I can see them now, feel them at the table, their fingers diving in and scooping me up into their mouths, smiling, licking, dribbling, smacking. 

My delicious tissues make them even greedier and they smear my essence all over their faces until there is nothing left.

They undress and copulate feverishly on the table, my final vessels rubbed in like frogspawn whilst old man Lucifer howls and takes his sticky witch again and again.