The Minotaur
by Michael Nagle
Kirk Read, The wolves run the fastest, analog collage with vintage children’s books on watercolor paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
The Minotaur
Michael Nagle | SEPT 2024 | Issue 37
No one ever told you the Minotaur was hung.
You’d heard whispers, but always wondered if that was a little racist, like “all monsters are hung,” that kind of thing.
But when you saw him for the first time?
You gaped. You stared. You felt small and you felt…was the reddening from shame, or from sex?
You felt turned on.
You’d struggled your way through maze after maze, a labyrinth of cold stone and silences, to suddenly find yourself birthed into the center. The last narrow hallway opened to a chamber vast and spacious. Sunlight crashed in from the ceiling. It smelled like a farm: earth, hay, manure. Heavy snorts and breaths reverberated off the walls.
When you entered, he didn’t stop stroking. He was spread like a Playboy Bunny, naked atop a bed made of woven sheepskin. Smiling a smile that said he really couldn’t be fucked to do any differently. Locked eyes with you. His were violently beautiful. You felt like you were having your first wet dream again. Was your wet sweat or precum? He didn’t take his eyes off of you. He didn’t take his hand off his genitals. He just looked at you, smiled, stroked.
You stammered, heart rate clamoring. The tingling in your own genitals felt embarrassing and childlike. You knew he saw you.
He didn’t stop grinning.
”Wh,…where’s your axe?” you said.
This wasn’t the confrontation you were expecting.
“Oh, Theseus.” His smirk was irrepressible. Predator enjoying his prey. “You’re going to learn a lot tonight.” He thought a moment. That fucking smirk again. “And for the rest of your lives.”
*
I had been ready to write off strength as an idea.
Strength had always been presented to me as a holding in, a repressing, a suffocating. A message in a body-made-bottle to a future self or a future generation: maybe you can deal with this, but I can’t.
And then I started meeting other folks in the lost tribe of cancer.
R was sitting in her house, smiling. She radiates a simple, easy, unassuming friendliness. It was Thursday Zoom support group. She liked to wear scarves with so many colors on them, happy pieces of exuberant. She would sit on Zoom, typically not taking too much of the group’s time for her own support. She’d reached remission after a journey across multiple years. She genuinely wanted to offer positivity back to a group who had held her through her own hard times.
One day she was recounting a trip she’d taken to Central America. Her chemo (my chemo) is notorious for causing abdominal cramping.
“My poor cousins,” R said, “they had no idea what to do, I was spasming for days, just from eating some green mangoes!”
She smiled while she said it like, “that’s life! What else can you do?”
Later she said in passing: “My sisters made me bone broth, because I couldn’t keep anything down.” She was leaving so much unsaid. Like: I’d been vomiting up any possible solid food I could even stomach trying.
Instead, she just talked, plainly and honestly and openly, with no trace I could hear of rancor, or resentment, self-pity, or even just unadorned sorrow. It was clear she was so grateful to be alive that she wasn’t hanging on to the hardships of her treatment.
And she said it with, of all things, a smile.
She would become someone I would start to imagine when my treatments got hard. “I can do this,” I would think, “because I’ve seen someone else do it, too.”
*
“Come here,” the Minotaur said, gesturing with a flick of his wrist.
It felt inevitable.
His brawn, the unspoken trump card.
Metal clattered on stone as I let my sword and shield fall by my side, onto the floor by the chamber’s entrance.
He ripped off my loincloth. He ripped off my jockstrap. My cock shriveled, tugging itself beneath my legs, hiding there alongside my dignity. Every swipe took from both my body and my heroic pride. Like tearing off shriveled, time-worn Band-aids that had been glued to me so long I mistook them for me.
All that remained was a gold chain hanging from my neck, an azure pendant of protection from my grandmother. My body glistened: slick, pulsing, nervous, scared. Alive.
I couldn’t stand how red the tip of my cock was. How obvious I was.
“This?” he said. (He meant the pendant.)
“You don’t need this.” He broke the chain in half.
“Your ancestors can’t help you here.” He smirked with a slight, cruel upturn of his brutal mouth.
…
“They can’t hear you here.”
…
“It’s just you and me.”
*
The first time I got FOLFIRI, I thought it was a miracle. Gone was the crushing fatigue of FOLFOX. The fatigue where you can’t brush your teeth or shower or even just escape the prison of gravity. I’d spent days and days flattened on my bedroom carpet.
FOLFIRI felt different. I could get up. I could clean myself. My relief carried me through walks in my peaceful hometown of Woodland Hills, suburban Los Angeles. I oriented to sunsets and flowers and did all the things you’re supposed to do when you’re hanging on by a thread, surviving by medically necessary traumas.
Then the fifth night descended on me.
An ambush from my insides out.
A dark night of the body with no warning.
A bronco bucking from inside of me, kicking his way out, unresponsive to pleading or prayer.
All heat no warmth.
I threw up into one bucket, the vomit recognizably purple: the berry-flavored supplement smoothie lovingly made for me hours earlier.
Then I threw up into a second.
Then I threw up into a third.
My retching filled the void of the night, sounds echoing. My mom was two rooms down, bed-bound with Parkinson’s. She heard, but she couldn’t help.
The episode went on for four hours until Mercy descended and let me sleep my way out of the ordeal.
The second time I did FOLFIRI, it wasn’t the vomiting that ambushed me. It was the punching. I woke up at four in the morning, the unmistakable sensation of being so viscerally hurt. It felt like someone was attacking me in my guts, over and over again.
Again, sleep was the only possible exit, after hours of wrangling with an incorporeal demon — my body unhinged by chemistry. When I woke up a few hours later, I was sore, raw, and ravaged. You could have told me I’d been in a fistfight the night before and I would have had no doubt.
R had done thirty-two cycles of FOLFIRI, and she could talk about it with a smile. I admired her for this greatly.
I was at two and I was struggling harder than I’d ever struggled in my life.
How on earth did R manage this? I knew she had pulled off something amazing, but I couldn’t fathom how.
*
It was more like an invasion than a fucking. His cock was too big to make sense. It was so much sensation, it eclipsed pain and it eclipsed pleasure. It crested to form the architecture of an unholy temple. The only penance on offer was my limp, dribbling, forced surrender.
He threw me on my belly before he invaded me. I made eye contact with the walls of stone, brick and mold while he snorted and panted and huffed. When he lubed himself up with his own thick, choking, sour spittle, it wasn’t for my safety. It was for his own satisfaction. He didn’t check if I was ready before he entered me.
His cock grew and grew inside me. Girth pounded on rectal wall, length on sphincters. I saw the glint of my gold chain in the distance, broken on the floor. This wasn’t a realm where “he’s hurting me” was a thought you could formulate.
This was a realm where you prayed to the gods and wondered if you were going to die alone.
*
Michael Nagle’s Pathology Report
Colonoscopy, 11/16/2023.
Providers’ Notes.
Patient has a large lobulated pelvic tumor (9.2 cm x 8.5cm x 8.1 cm.) Appearance is more like a set of globular mashed potatoes than anything resembling a phallus or prostate wand, despite patient’s insistence. Radiologist noted that the mass looks like something out of “Alien vs. Predator” but could not decide if mass was more Alien or Predator.
According to webmd.com, average flaccid male length is 9.16 cm (3.61 in) and girth is 9.31 cm (3.67 in.) When coming off of fentanyl post-colonoscopy, patient exclaimed “I knew I was getting fucked!”
Patient’s mass is in his ascending colon. Provider notes that even the most beautifully curved cock which can hit G-spot after G-spot does not reach past the rectum. The ascending colon is only reached after the anus, rectum, sigmoid colon, descending colon, and transverse colon have been navigated. Provider declined to respond to patient’s “genius idea” that he could just “bend over and get fucked by a Roto-Rooter with chemo-lube on its tip, right?”
Patient experienced 0/10 erotic pleasure from the colonoscopy.
He expressed disappointment.
*
When Minos wouldn’t sacrifice his best bull, Poseidon got pissed. He cursed Minos’ wife, Pasiphaë, with unstoppable horniness for the bull Minos wouldn’t sacrifice.
Jonesing, Pasiphaë sought out inventor Daedalus’ help.
“Please,” she said. “I can’t live like this. My clit is so swollen it —”
Daedalus put a hand up. He didn’t want to hear it. (That’s ancient Greece for you.)
Pasiphaë didn’t know what Daedalus would do. She was hoping for a Grecian vibrator. Instead, Daedalus made her a hollow wooden cow, covered with real cow-skin, a kind of bovine cosplay deal. An OG furry.
Pasiphaë sighed. She just wanted to get off and be done with being the bitch in Minos and Poseidon’s squabble. Still. The Cretan bull was hot. His skin was whiter than the youngest Olympian’s.
Pasiphaë fell pregnant by the bull’s cock. The child was awkward, because being half-bull, half-man, and coming out of a whole god vs. king squabble, he only ate human flesh.
His name, Minotaur, was for being “the bull of Minos.”
*
Before I was six, I was my mom’s and she was my mine. My favorite place in the world was her.
My mom immigrated from Sri Lanka first to the U.K. — for a lifesaving operation from a neurological disorder — and then after meeting my dad and having me, to the United States.
She knew no one here.
I keep a photo of her and I in my bedroom now.
I am two, maybe three, and just beaming in a bowl cut and a white buttoned down shirt. I’m in my favorite place, sitting on her lap. Mom!
She has shoulder-length wavy hair, a smile, a slight, distant look to infinity. She used to go to Sears and say she was interested in a photo package. She couldn’t afford anything then, and she knew it. She would just leave with the free sample picture of us.
She is, as always, beautiful.
She knew no one here.
I can’t really understand it. I always grew up with two parents, who as strange and damaging their parenting could be — particularly Mom’s once I hit adolescence — loved me unequivocally.
I was raised by wolves, but they’re my wolves.
*
“Why do you think I want to hurt you?” The Minotaur whispered in my ear. His spittle slathered itself across my neck.
I breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t think I could get harder. My blood kept on bursting.
“Oh…” I trailed off. Was I wrong about the Minotaur all along?
“No,” he said, a grin audible beneath his heavy, equine panting. “I mean, why would you think
I’m even thinking about you at all?”
He stayed inside me, unbothered, unperturbed and growing.
*
I can’t imagine what it’s like to live from your late twenties onward in a place where you don’t know anyone. Family thousands of miles away. Speech marked by an unmistakable accent. Skin by a brownness seen as beauty in some parts of the world and otherness in this one.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to have no perch in society beyond a high school degree from a foreign country no one takes seriously. What it’s like to have rent due and no one to turn to.
What it’s like to have a baby you love, you are responsible for, you are committed to — and no one else.
What else could it mean to be strong?
*
Usually he fucks me to death. He explodes my intestines from the insides out. Then he butchers me into a fine delicacy. He prefers to eat me raw.
When he strokes with my flesh in his mouth, he is unusually satisfied.
One time I manage to grab my own cock, mighty by Grindr standards and puny by his, and quickly jerk out a spate of Minotaur-antigens before he can stop me. He got lost in his swelling, and I knew I had an advantage this time. I smear them all over his hairy belly before he can react.
For once, I am the one grinning as he dissolves into a puddle of cells, puddling like the zits of teenage boys, pus, blood and bile, all mixed together.
The next time he has mutated. When I reach for my sheath, ready to pull it back, he smacks my hand so hard I think he breaks a knuckle. This time his snort is singular as he puts my trusty cock inside of a bronze chastity cage. Then he flips me and fucks me to death again. He eats my cock last (naturally.)
Then he fucks me to death seven more times. I get used to the way the cage forces my legs apart.
But the next time, another adventurer comes and slays him in the back. When I realize I am slathered in blood, and not spit or bull-cum, I am elated. The first time it happens I use it as lube to finish myself off.
The cycles go on for a while. One time the adventurer pulls the Minotaur’s cock out and inserts his own in. Sometimes the adventurer kills me, too. Usually though, he frees me. A half-mage half-twink scores a kill on the Minotaur, and, gloating, pulls the Minotaur off of me. I smile and point down to my caged cock, a pout that all but screams “pretty please?” He winks, and as he leaves, I see the glint of my key in his knapsack.
Eventually the Minotaur mutates past this. He learns to put pine needles down in the entryway. The rustle alerts him in time that more fresh food has arrived.
The Minotaur and I cycle on in a plane somewhere past heaven and hell, a cosmic stalemate.
Every time he kills me, I face a choice. Go into the void, or go back to the Minotaur.
“Can’t I just sleep?” I ask the Universe. The void looks so comforting. The last lifetime, the Minotaur didn’t kill me quickly. He saw me squirm from the internal anal bleeding he’d caused and decided to slow his thrusting down.
The Universe was silent. It communicated with me telepathically.
“You know the deal. Annihilation or another round.”
I sigh and wander towards the light, steeling myself for another cycle of rebirth.
*
These days I think strength is about commitment. It’s about shooting roots into the ground when life blows like a hurricane.
R’s stories usually featured her family. Sisters and cousins and nephews. I can only imagine they are returning a love she gave freely her whole life. I can only imagine being a treasured Tia in her family was what let her find her own strength. I continue to be in awe of what she accomplished for herself, for her family. In finding a way to survive.
My mom used to tell me stories about raising me as a baby. I was in my early twenties when she told them, and I couldn’t understand parenting then. The shit cleanup and the lack of sleep — it just seemed so, so unpleasant.
And then my mom would talk about how between my Dad kicking her in the middle of the night, a kind of incompetent foreplay, and me looking sad in my crib — she would always pick me. She would take me out of my crib — the crib was Dad’s idea in the first place — and have me come spend the night in their bed, Dad’s protestations be damned.
Once, when I was a toddler, she got a new job nearby. And halfway on her way to the job she just said to herself “god, what am I doing — I could be playing with Michael!” She turned the car around and drove home. She never bothered to give the job notice.
It’s a kind of bond, strength. A bond that says: I will do literally whatever I can for you.
Those are the metaphysics of my universe.
You.
You are the metaphysics of my universe.
Me loving you.
What you need and I can do, I will do.
Always.
*
I’ve lost track of how many cycles it’s been when I hear the sharp, distinct whistle of an arrow. The blood gushes out like a Las Vegas fountain from the Minotaur’s neck.
The rebirths have worn out my spirit. I’m too tired to finish myself off. I close my eyes, and collapse. I’m grateful when the adventurer pulls the Minotaur’s hairy, crusty cock from out of my anus.
The adventurer starts fucking me. I groan. I’m not in the mood. But I’m not about to be Minotaur food either. My mood hasn’t been the universe’s consideration for a while now.
And then I hear a giggle. A familiar, feminine laugh breaks through, like an SNL cast member breaking character. It’s irrepressible.
“Theseus, you stupid twink.” The voice is coming from a mouth that grins, but no menace like the Minotaur’s. Just teasing.
“Ariadne?”
“Yes, Ariadne, who else, dumb ass?”
“Wait, who was fucking me?”
She waves a fascicle of sticks wrapped up into an imitation of phallus, covered in sheepskin. You have to admit the sheepskin felt good. You touch it. You realize you actually didn’t want it to stop.
“Daedalus finally got over himself and made us a cock.”
You feel like you’ve been sleeping for centuries. Your joints creak like clocks. You are naked, covered in the Minotaur’s spit, your sweat, and a vague film of animal fluids coats your rectum.
You smell like fermented cum.
Still. You’ve never been happier to hear Ariadne teasing you in your life. She stands tall and proud before you. It looks like she didn’t break a sweat. The quiver on her back is still full of arrows. She picks up the pieces of your broken necklace and pockets them to repair later.
“Thank you.” You two have fucked for lifetimes — usually you ditch her on an island. It’s not a big deal for you to be covered in monster fluid with her. You look her right in her twinkling eyes.
“So how do we get out of here?”
You look and see a glint of gold. You know it’s not your necklace. It’s…pubic hair?
Ariadne rolled her eyes. “Okay look, I ran out of thread. I wasn’t re-running this maze a second time to save your ass. So I used my golden pubes to lay out a path back to the entrance.”
You’ve never been more in love. Your erection squirms against its cage. You look down at your crotch, and then you look at Ariadne. Her eyes sparkle impishly.
“Oh hell no,” she smirks. That fucking smirk. “You’re not leaving me this lifetime. I’m going to put this key on your grandmother’s chain and wear it on my neck.”
You shrug. You don’t think you’re going to fuck again for a long time anyhow, after what the Minotaur did to you for cycle after cycle, lifetime after lifetime.
“Okay, deal. Can we get back to Crete? I’m hungry.”
Ariadne laughs and takes your hand, and pube by pube, you find your way home.
Michael Nagle is a queer, Sri Lankan-American writer living in his hometown of Los Angeles, where he’s undergoing treatment for metastatic colon cancer. He is deeply interested in writing as a vector for raw, messy, vulnerability that slips under our collective defenses and wakes us up to the more beautiful lives we know in our hearts is possible. And doing this with humor, joy, and wit. Portland, OR and Cambridge, MA both feel like second homes and if he had a choice he would take rebirth as a well-pampered cat.
Kirk Read is the author of How I Learned to Snap and is working on a novel. He co-leads the Pacific Northwest Collage Collective and lives in Portland, OR.