Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (20 page)

“She got out about three months ago,” I replied.

“Lindsay on the loose.” Todd laughed, not understanding. “It’s only right. You can’t cage a beast like her.”

15 So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging.

 

16 Then the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the LORD, and made vows.

 

17 Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

 

—Book of Jonah, The Bible

 

15 And lo, motherfuckers, for Jonah did karate-chop the last of the sailors and burp and say LATER BITCHES and just went ahead and threw his own ass into the sea: and the sea was like DAAAAAMN.

 

16 And the sailors were all messed up with broke clavicles and dislocated wrists and shit and they were all NUH-UH NO WAY at Jonah.

 

17 Now the frigging SUPER LORD had prepared WHAT ELSE God-fucking-zilla to swallow up Super Jonah. And Godzilla ate his ass and Jonah was in the belly of that dude for three days and three nights.

 

—Book of Super Jonah, The Super Bible

 

“I
t’s not about being killed,” said Ruby Dupuis. “I’d say it’s about not being killed. About being eaten and then being alive.”

Ruby and I were sitting on the front porch of her dad’s North Texas ranch in old, creaky rocking chairs. We were looking out across her father’s two hundred plus acres of inhospitable pasture. There was as much red dust and rock as grass for the skinny-looking cows. It was a hot day and Ruby’s stepmom provided us with tall glasses of iced tea and a plug-in fan blowing air across our legs.

“Being inside the snake?” I asked.

“Or whatever.” She slapped her meaty thighs. “It doesn’t have to be a snake.”

Ruby was a vore, short for vorarephile, and she wanted to be eaten.

“Not just eaten either,” she said. “Digested.”

I looked at Ruby and thought that might take some time. She was a big-boned gal in her early twenties, largely made in every sense.

Her tree-trunk legs barely crammed into her denim shorts and she had an upper body that was all bulges, good and bad. She was like an R. Crumb character come to life, but the results weren’t necessarily working together very well as a cohesive whole.

It was a cliché, but Ruby did have a pretty face. It was heart-shaped and her features were perfectly scaled to the size of her head. She had sparkling green eyes and a full-lipped smile that was warm and honest. She smiled a lot, but her smile was self-conscious, her lip held awkwardly to cover her small top teeth and big gums.

And she smelled like baby powder. Quite strongly.

“Dissolved,” she said, her mind far away. “Slowly dissolved by the digestive juices and moving through the digestive tract…until you’re nothing but some bones.”

“And you’re alive as a skeleton?” I asked.

“No.” She laughed. “No. I guess death does factor into it somewhere, it’s just not about death, if you see what I mean. It’s about…the process.”

“Can I see your artwork?” I asked.

She nodded, but was in no hurry. She sipped her tea and rocked slowly, watching the cows out in the pasture picking languidly at the forlorn patch of the Texas Panhandle.

Ruby’s room was a shrine to her vore artwork.

Vorarephilia is the technical term. Everyone comes at the fetish differently, contributes to the subculture differently. Some people like to fantasize about being a monster devouring tiny men and women. Others like to imagine themselves being consumed by a creature or person, often swallowed whole. Furries in particular cast themselves in a predator/prey relationship with an anthropomorphic version of their predators or preferred prey.

The concepts are usually sexualized, involving nudity and pain or pleasure, or a mixture of both.

Ruby was the sort of vore who liked to imagine herself as the object of consumption. Her bedroom walls were covered in drawings depicting her being swallowed by various animals and monsters.

“These are the tame ones,” she said.

Most of them were fairly tame, even comical. In many, the Ruby character was dressed as a princess in a pink frilly dress and she wore a pink conical cap and veil. The drawings were childlike in their style, obviously influenced by Japanese anime or manga, but they all demonstrated a substantial degree of artistic talent.

In some of the drawings she or another woman was a morsel about to be devoured by a giant. Several featured her held between chopsticks or in a raised spoon and looking straight across a giant man’s tongue and down his throat.

In other drawings she was running from monsters chasing her with open mouths. Dragons and giant trolls opened their mouths to swallow the princess as the dainty character fled or, in many cases, had tripped or fallen.

“Please, don’t eat me!” read the speech bubble in one.

“Is it about the chase? The fear of being eaten?” I asked.

“That can be part of it,” she said. “Yeah. I like the idea of being pursued.”

“Overpowered?” I asked.

“Swallowed,” she said.

“But not chewed up?”

She showed me a drawing of a crocodile swallowing a character that resembled Lara Croft from
Tomb Raider.
The image was like the others, except in this version Lara Croft had been pierced by several of the crocodile’s teeth. These had created red dots of blood on her stomach, but Lara Croft appeared to be alive and still struggling halfway into the crocodile’s mouth.

“I don’t do those like that much,” Ruby confessed. “Only when people request it now.”

“Do a lot of people request it?”

She shook her head.

“No, mostly they want the digestion drawings,” she said.

These she kept tucked into one of several binders, well out of sight of her parents or sisters. She closed and locked the door before sliding them out from the bottom of a box of tamer sketches.

She placed the binders on her bed. We knelt down together and she began to open the binders and show me her graphic vore artwork.

“These are the more realistic ones,” Ruby explained, and pointed a chubby finger at several sketches that were quite detailed and graphic.

Her “realistic” style revealed her technical inadequacies: poor shading and shadows, poor perspective, and occasionally poor anatomy. These faults only made the drawings more disturbing.

Grim-faced and tortured women dissolved in the cavernous bellies of monsters, their flesh sloughing away to reveal muscle and bone and organs. She drew all of the breasts the same style, quite large areolas and freakishly long nipples that usually were catching droplets of steaming digestive liquids.

These sketches lacked the cartoonish speech bubbles. A few were labeled beneath the image.

“Off with Her Head!” was scrawled beneath the image of a headless princess in a torn dress toppling over. Blood and viscera connected the stump of her neck to the crooked beak of some avian monster.

“A Bubble Bath,” was written beneath another, depicting a cutaway of a man’s stomach. Inside the stomach, a nude woman, partially dissolved in a pool of stomach acids, her face frozen in an expression somewhere between pleasure and pain.

“And this sort of stuff, it, what? Is it erotic to you?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

Images of dismemberment, unbelievable violence, and cannibalism followed. The multipanel digestion comics done in the childlike fairy princess style of the art on her walls were probably the worst of it. The comics depicted, sequentially, the cute princess version of herself being overpowered and consumed by wolves, snakes, and dragons. Then, in the following panels, the princess writhed in the bellies of the creatures as first her clothing and then her flesh dissolved.

“Do you ever worry about drawing this stuff?” I asked.

I closed the third of the binders and opened the fourth.

“I know I’m not right,” Ruby said. “I know it’s crazy.”

I withheld judgment or comment. It was definitely weird.

“When did you start thinking like this?” I asked her as I pored over the fourth binder. “When did the drawings start?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged, almost nonchalant. “I guess I’ve just always been like this.”

I paged through several more drawings. Pictures of more normal erotic art, but still with an undercurrent of lurking violence. Two women embraced at the foot of a demon with a huge fanged mouth. A man and woman had sex in the palm of an immense dragon.

“We had some chicks,” Ruby blurted.

“What?”

“We had some chicks,” she said. “My dad bought them at the feed store. Little yellow ones. They were soft as could be. He put them in a pen in the barn.”

“Did something happen to them?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “No, well, some of them. Some died. And when they grew up some wild dogs killed a few of them before Dad shot one of the dogs. But no, that’s not what it was. It isn’t that.”

She seemed to grapple with revealing this to me. She spoke as if she was working through her thoughts as she spoke them aloud.

“I used to go out into the barn—I was only about five or six—and I used to reach in and pick them up.” She held out her palm as if she had a tiny chick in it. “And I would pet them. And then I started thinking about squeezing. Just squeezing my hand around it. And smooshing it.”

She made a fist.

“So I stopped going out to hold them, but I didn’t stop thinking about it. And I thought about swallowing them whole and hearing them peep inside my belly at night. I guess, I don’t know, at some point I started to think about being the chick. Being in a belly.”

“And it became sexual?”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said, and embarrassment showed on her face for the first time. “I mean it did. And, I did normal things too, you know. It wasn’t just this stuff. But, yeah, I…well, you know what I’m saying.”

I stood up and thanked her for showing me her art. Beneath the strange drawings plastered to the walls of Ruby’s room there were the pink and white traces of a little girl’s bedroom.

A Sloppy Joe Dinner

If you search the Internet for vore videos you will eventually come across a number of graphic 3D-rendered clips of monsters and aliens devouring naked women. You may also encounter clips taken from a series of grotesque Japanese live-action videos that include a woman being swallowed by a snake monster. As the helpless warrior woman struggles, her clothing gradually dissolves.

Narrowing the search for the word “vore” on the popular video-sharing website YouTube turns up thousands of clips. These videos are mostly culled from various horror and science fiction movies and cartoons and feature non-erotic clips of monsters devouring people. Half of this list is devoted to clips taken from weird, no-budget SciFi channel original movies about giant sea serpents and giant snakes. Clips from less obscure movies like
Deep Rising, Little Shop of Horrors,
and
Termors
are joined by dozens of videos taken from children’s cartoons like
Pokémon
and
The Wild Thornberrys.

There are also a surprising number of original vore productions. The Internet original Bugmen series features an attractive woman, the use of a fiber-optic camera that can be placed in the mouth, and a number of tiny plastic figurines.

The trailer for
Bugmen 2—A Vore Movie
begins with a series of green text messages displayed on a black background.

It’s a nice day for a picknick.[sic]

The sun is shining—the birds are singing…

…and there’s only one little problem…

 

A lid is lifted away from the camera and you can see a pretty woman looking into the camera, her hand reaching forward and seeming enormous in the frame.

…you are part of the lunch!

 

The hand pinches closed in front of the camera and…cut to the woman picking up one of the tiny man figurines, examining it, and then dropping it into a container of yogurt. Subsequent footage uses the fiber-optic camera to simulate the perspective of the tiny yogurt swimmer disappearing down her gullet.

One of the most prolific of the Internet vore video makers is a man who goes by the name of Redd. He is better known by the names of his two comical characters: Chompps and Sloppy Joe. Chompps is an alligator and Sloppy Joe is described by his creator as, “basically a strange creature from parts unknown.”

What distinguishes the work of Redd from that of other vore video makers is that Redd works purely in live action and he has a sense of humor about his work. No grim bloodshed or dismemberment. No gory digestion sequences.

Redd sticks to the basics. An attractive woman caught unaware by a monster that slowly swallows her whole.

Redd’s monsters aren’t exactly the scary sort of creature, either. They resemble two giant sock puppets, with huge cartoonish eyes and an awkward movement that would seem to be easily escaped. The two clumsy monsters are often responsible for dealing out some sort of comeuppance to the women in the videos. They may sneer at the idea of being eaten by the monsters or they might take unnecessary to taunting risks.

Redd was a difficult man to track down, but I located him through his now-defunct spinoff of an adult pay website. He was happy to get in touch with me through instant messenger and discuss his creations.

When describing his videos, he admitted that they were erotic in nature, but was very clear that the videos were playful rather than violent. He insisted that the female characters didn’t necessarily like being eaten, but it was more like a prank. A little joke played on them.

“Imagine the Roadrunner and Coyote,” he said. “The Coyote creates a plan, it backfires, and he is blown up.”