The Harrow

Written By: E.K. Larson-Burnett

1.

The taste of raw meat, sticky and gummy and too warm, lingered on Mara’s tongue. Blood still trickled down her throat like a melting blade of ice, sharp and tangy. She wasn’t trying to savor it, but it was a source of strange pride; it had been easier to consume the steak this time than the other times before. There was gagging, of course, and watering eyes—but she had managed not to retch, and it took her only ten minutes, a new record.

And at least she was prepared for the worst. The more carnivorous the demon, the better.

When prompted, Mara stepped onto the circular platform in front of her, the polished stone strange and earthy in the sterile, modern space. She kept her shoulders down and back and stared at the cameras dotting the walls and ceiling, lenses glistening and goading. Aside from the host of the show, she was alone in their glare.

She knew, from the comfort of their homes all over the country, the audience watched. The viewership would be high tonight for the Summoning, though less bloodthirsty. Come tomorrow, however, they would be eager for the moment a Bindling’s hunger would tear a Bearer apart.

Mara wanted them to like her, wanted them to remember her, so she lowered her chin and grinned coyly. She hoped there was still blood in her teeth.

The host, Ven Rosse, standing just to the side of the platform, began crooning an introduction, but Mara’s ears had started ringing, heat creeping up her jaw. Excitement had dominated her every waking moment since she’d been cast as a competitor on The Harrow such that she had brooked no room for nerves—now, though, disbelief shivered through her.

She was here. She was on national television. She was about to summon a demon.

“…begins tonight’s trial. Welcome to the Summoning.” Rosse stepped forward, rounding the circular platform to position himself closer to the cameras, front and center. His voice dropped to a theatrical hush. “Each Bearer will call forth a Bindling, tether themselves with the graft, and prove they can endure the hunger to come.”

He paused, his dramatically lined eyes flicking to Mara. “And here is our first would-be Bearer: Mara Gorrick. Mara, tell us, why are you here? What would winning The Harrow mean to you?”

Mara’s insides fuzzed with static; her mouth flooded with rank-rot saliva as her practice steak churned up toward her esophagus. She hadn’t prepared for such a question. She had only prepared to win.

“Um—” Her voice snagged against the rising bile. She swallowed hard, forced her jaw loose.

She considered lying, making up some sob story. But no. They want truth. They want charm.

“For the chance,” she said. She wet her lips with a dart of her tongue and steadied her voice.

Chin lifted, she made her eyes blaze with want. “To become something more than ordinary.”

Ven Rosse made a noise of what Mara hoped was approval. “And something more than human?”

The grin that curled her lips was a slinky, sinuous thing. “Should I earn it.”

A hum crawled through the empty room. The stone beneath her feet thrummed.

She had seen this part a hundred times at home—knees pulled to her chest on her futon bed, streaming episodes late into the night, unblinking even when a Bearer attempted a Summoning and failed or, worse, called forth something that refused to be bound.

Most people claimed they watched The Harrow only because everyone else watched it. But the truth was more feral than that: they wanted to witness hunger powerful enough to consume a person whole.

The Summoning was only the overture. The days that followed were the real show.

But none of it matters if you fail here, Mara reminded herself.

Rosse stepped back, out of the spotlight so it could fall on Mara, alone on the platform. His voice again slipped into that reverent hush he saved for the moments just before a life tilted permanently off its axis. “Then the stage is yours, Mara. Let the Summoning commence.”

Mara’s salivary glands were working overtime, filling her mouth so fast she could scarcely swallow in time. Perhaps she should not have practiced for the Consuming immediately before being broadcast live all over the world.

She could almost hear her mother’s voice, pinched with disappointment: “You chase fame like a starving animal. There is no dignity in reality television.”

Maybe not.

But there was immeasurable power in it, when it came to The Harrow. She could leave with demon-granted immortality, along with fame and wealth beyond measure.

And people would remember her—Mara Gorrick.

She bent to pick up the knob of chalk in front of her. Her nerves dissipated as she centered herself on the platform and dipped to one knee. She’d practiced this, too, and had perfected the motion; with her other leg stretched out behind her, she pressed the chalk to the stone and pivoted a full three hundred and sixty degrees, drawing the Summoning circle. When the line connected, closing the loop, she felt it lock into place like a jaw clamping shut.

A flawless, unbroken invitation.

Every Summoning required an offering of blood and an invocation of intent; if the demon was displeased with either, it may refuse to show up at all—or it could appear and refuse to be bound. It could take the prospective summoner as a meal.

But Mara wouldn’t consider that possibility. She was too hungry herself to make a decent snack.

With a deep breath that failed to satisfy her lungs, taut as they were with anticipation, she began her summons, words she had honed without ever speaking them aloud:

“With blood offered and will asserted,

I summon not as a servant, but as a partner.

Come forth to ambition sharpened,

to a vessel that does not flinch from appetite.

Bind to me—and be fed.”

She traded the knob of chalk for the bone-handled blade at the edge of the platform and sliced her palm without hesitation, then submitted the smear of blood to the stone.

The air turned cold, sharp enough to sting the lining of her lungs, and a pressure gathered behind her eyes.

A presence crowded the air around her, yet-unformed, testing for seams in the pall between worlds.

Mara prostrated herself. The want within her was so strong that she bent to it and whispered, so only the presence could hear: “Whatever you hunger for, I will devour.”

Watching past seasons of the show, she’d always wondered if the competitors could feel the moment the world thinned at their command. In her ratty, bare apartment, leaning toward the television and looking into their eyes, watching the subtle twitch of their fingers and the shapes their mouths formed, she’d imagined that feeling to be like breathing a black ocean in and rising like the tide.

She felt it now, and it was even better than that.

Rosse’s voice rose above the rush in her veins, above the tearing of the veil. “And here it comes. A Bindling answers her call.”

Mara exhaled, trembling.

And as the circle darkened and the air rippled like heat over a corpse, she knew there was no turning back.

Not for fame, not for hunger.

Not for anything.

2.

The demon, Mara’s Bindling, coalesced in the circle like breath on glass, smudge to shadow and then to a shape that leaned too long in its angles, joints an afterthought, ridges surfacing beneath dark flesh.

It was tall. Very tall.

Mara had seen demons on The Harrow before, broadcast in high definition, freeze-framed into reaction videos, but nothing had prepared her for the proximity, for the heat of it. For being the reason one crawled into this world at all.

Its head formed by degrees—first the slant of a predatory jaw, horns carved from the darkest part of night, then too many teeth blooming in a smile—and tilted toward her with the dreadful curiosity of a creature smelling something rare and ruinous.

Mara’s blood on the stone sizzled.

Behind her, Ven Rosse’s voice shimmered with delight. “And there it is: a willing Bindling. Very rare to see such immediate manifestation! Our first competitor has drawn quite the appetite.”

Just as Mara had seen demons before, she had seen competitors’ reactions to them, and had always wondered which category she would fit into—the tremblers, the laughers, the screamers, the fainters…

She didn’t feel inclined toward any such response. She only wanted to gorge herself on the power oozing off of the ancient creature; only wanted to crawl into its skin and wield its grotesque glory as her own.

The Bindling hovered, an ichor-slick scar in the sleek Summoning hall, scenting her. A single filament of its form unspooled toward her, slick and gleaming. It hovered in front of her face, patient as famine, as though waiting to see if she would flinch.

She didn’t. Wouldn’t.

A ripple passed across the demon’s skin, an image that evoked in Mara’s mind a cat’s fur bristling with interest. Its maw widened, wet tendons stretching, but still it waited.

In her awe, Mara had forgotten this was a transaction. She needed to convey to the demon why she had summoned it, needed to convince it she was a worthy mouth for it to feed through.

She lifted her hand to the filament—

The audience would be roaring at home, jawing with gossip, setting comment threads to boil. A woman choosing ambition over sense, who knew? … Dumb blonde doing anything for fame. Her mother would not be watching, yet would without doubt still be jeering at Mara more than any internet troll.

—and threaded her fingers through the pulsating fibers.

The filament latched onto her with hundreds of microscopic teeth, and alien senses swarmed Mara’s head and gut. It felt as though someone had taken hold of her insides and squeezed them like ripened fruit.

Ignoring the discomfort, she closed her eyes and showed the demon The Harrow.

She knew she was asking much of this creature that did not know anything of her or her dreams. She was asking it to fight other of its kind to the death in the Crucible, a sealed arena of man’s design, all for the world’s entertainment. She was asking it to trust her, a woman of thirty years—a fetus in its eyes—to sustain it from outside the Crucible while it did the bloody work, the clawing and the tearing and the rending. She was asking everything of it.

But she was willing to give everything in return.

A strange sensation, a gentle press at the seam of her lips, startled her eyes open.

The demon had moved closer, so close, and she felt like a shadow at the peak of the day, blank and blinded, everything else flat, and the moment unfurled infinitely, she staring into the infernoed, bottomless wells of its eyes and it bringing her closer, its black-tendrilled tongue nudging her lips, encouraging:

Open.

Oh, Mara had watched this part before, of course—but where it had seemed wrong and gruesome happening to others, it felt impossibly intimate now, holy almost, a sacred joining, and her pulse kicked and her veins fizzed with heat and her insides turned to liquid.

She opened her mouth, and the demon’s tongue speared down her throat.

Distantly, as though from underwater, she heard Rosse exclaim, “We have acceptance!”

Yes, she thought, shuddering with pleasure, yes yes yes.

She gagged and choked. Her jaw cracked and her lips split. Her vision whited at the edges. It was a pain like she had never before experienced, but it was an ache so ravenous it bordered on ecstasy.

The tongue’s tendrils spread, spidering down her esophagus and stretching sinewy fingers into her stomach, and though her lungs seized and her throat swelled to accommodate the demon’s reach and a chill sweat pebbled from her every pore, she had never felt so victorious, so saintly and whole.

Acceptance.

“…strange as it may look, the graft you’re witnessing here is the core concept of our program,” Rosse was saying, explaining to an audience that already knew well what was happening. “The graft synchronizes appetite—”

The demon showed no restraint; its tongue filled Mara so thoroughly that there was no room for breath. She felt drunk on the sensation and suffocated willingly. She felt the graft seat itself deep, a root thrust directly into her core, tethering her to the demon, two halves of a starving beast.

“…the Bearer takes the Bindling’s hunger, and in return, its strength and capacity for violence increases. It will fight for her in the Crucible without needing to worry about its baser needs. A union…” Rosse allowed for a dramatic pause as Mara’s body bent backward, feet lifting off the ground, “…of survival.”

When the demon abruptly retracted its tongue, Mara fell forward, boneless and breathless.

For a moment, she keened without sound, feeling so terribly, achingly empty.

Then, hunger tore through her like barbed wire dragged through soft earth.

She looked up to find the Bindling coiled close by. Its presence pressed against her skull like a hand dipped into the pool of her thoughts, tasting them, sorting her desires and fears and sharpening the hunger to a merciless point.

Then the demon dissolved, but not before Mara heard its hissed plea.

Feed me.

3.

Cold washed through Mara’s veins, followed by a feverish throb. On her knees, alone on the platform, she pressed a fist to her sternum with one hand and clutched her stomach with the other, dizzy and heaving with need.

The graft pressed against her ribs from the inside, a phantom weight settling like a new organ stretching her gut tight. The tether writhed within her, spreading feelers into her veins.

For one suspended second, there was silence, and she relived the moment they had accepted each other, she and the demon. The ghost of the Bindling’s tongue lingered in her throat. It hadn’t felt like an invasion, as she’d anticipated, and she flushed to think of the nation witnessing such a private sacrament of hunger and promise.

Feed me, it had said.

And Mara had thought, I will.

Sudden fluorescent violence scorched away the remembered sacredness in an instant, light exploding throughout the hall.

Doors hissed open and The Harrow’s crew swept in: makeup, medical tech, and production assistants, all of them warm-bodied and ripe with excitement.

“We’ve cut to commercial!” someone yelled over the sudden din of voices and movement. In a daze, it took Mara a moment to pinpoint the producer, Gale Wendry, a short woman with cropped hair and thick eyebrows. “Back to air in three minutes. Crucible crew confirmed Bindling was successfully teleported to arena holding. Medical, speed it up so makeup can get in there. Jesus, is her jaw broken? Can you fix that?”

Someone helped Mara sit up, only to start fiddling with the mic pack taped to her spine. A man in white knelt beside her and began checking her reflexes, shining a pen light in her eyes, probing cold fingers below her ears, speaking with a casual, clinical professionalism that felt jarring following the Summoning.

“Mild subluxation,” he said, more to Gale than to Mara. His thumbs pressed into the hollows of her cheeks. “Pretty standard post-graft strain. It’ll be sore. She’ll want to ice it. She should hydrate slowly.”

“Great,” Gale said with a dismissive flick of her hand. “Makeup, get in here!”

Cosmetic-wielding hands fluttered around Mara’s face, powder erasing the sweat haloing her brow and concealer patching her already bruising jaw. She held still until someone brushed her lip, at which point she snarled and jerked away before she could stop herself. The makeup artist shot her a sour look but shrugged and moved on.

Mara breathed through her nose, slow and deliberate, prompting herself to control, to poise.

She would not let them see how close her composure sat to the knife-edge.

If her lips parted, she was certain she would scream or beg or bite; her mouth would not close until it found something she could swallow. Something the Bindling desired. Something bloody and steaming-fresh.

Her throat spasmed around absence, saliva lubricating her teeth as her stomach seized. She had never felt so starved, so hungry she could hardly see or hear—she certainly couldn’t speak.

All she cared about was eating.

Fuck them for making me go first, she thought. They wouldn’t allow her to eat until tomorrow.

The whole show was filmed live. Tonight, every competitor’s Summoning had to be broadcast; then, the anticipation had to build. All Bearers were forced to experience the ripening appetite of their Bindling before the first Consuming—this was reality TV, after all. The producers wanted the nation to lean forward, wondering whose dignity might crack first. Many competitors broke before The Harrow had really begun in earnest, before the demons were even released into the Crucible. The pre-Consuming hunger was often the most violent part.

“Mara!” Gale emerged from a blur, snapping her fingers in Mara’s face. “Cameras go live in ninety seconds. Ven will recap, then you’ll answer some questions, okay? You’re here to win The Harrow, right?”

Mara blinked, wondering if people had always looked so delicious.

“Mara?” Gale glistened; her stress-scent was intoxicating. Rich, adrenal, animal. “Shit, let’s get her some electrolyte broth. Hurry!”

A warm paper cup was placed in Mara’s hand. The woman who brought it encouraged it toward Mara’s lips, saying, “It’ll help with nausea and post-graft neural fog—”

Jaw clamped painfully tight, Mara groaned and hurled the cup across the hall. Flares of white and black burst across her vision. She was woozy and panicking.

Fourteen seasons of The Harrow, and never had she seen a competitor refuse to speak for their post-graft interview; it was a prime opportunity to show viewers what they were made of, to position themselves as early favorites and get more screen time. She’d seen some vomit, or blabber incomprehensibly, but never go mute.

Yet Mara would not—could not—open her mouth, lest she devour the world itself.

“Mara!” Gale was snapping her fingers again, and the friction released such a sweet, hot smell that Mara moaned. “Jesus. You got a hungry one, huh? Well, this is the show, honey, so get used to it. We’re back in fifteen seconds—if you blank out, viewers will get bored and we’ll have to cut you, got it? Don’t get cut. Talk about what you’re feeling. You’ll be fine.”

That was easy for her to say; she only had one stomach the size of a fist. Mara had two—and one was the size of Gale herself.

The crew retreated all at once and the lights in the hall dimmed so that everything beyond the bleach-bright spotlight on Mara was cloaked in black. She couldn’t see anything.

“Live in five…four…three…two…”

The red tally light blinked on just as Ven Rosse stepped onto the platform with a practiced smile.

Mara could smell his hummingbird pulse, and her eyes rolled back in her head.

A hungry one, indeed.

4.

“And here she is,” Ven Rosse purred to the cameras, to the nation. He stepped closer to Mara, and her immediate thought was Mistake. “Mara, who has just concluded our first successful Summoning of the season. Wow.”

The silk in his voice did nothing to soften the jitter in her bones. She pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth in a trembling barricade. A poor defense against the hunger that had not just stirred within her but churned with hurricane force.

“Your brave acceptance of the graft—that was really something,” Rosse continued, the reverent tone from seconds before replaced by a bright crow like a trick of stage lighting. He beamed at her, unaware of the blood-heat he radiated so dangerously. “Such a terrific start to the season. Tell us, Mara: what are you feeling?”

You don’t want to know.

Mara swallowed hard, feeling as though she might drown in the continuous deluge of saliva frothing over her tongue.

What was she feeling?

Ven Rosse waited with a champagne-bubble smile, eyebrows lifting slightly to prompt her—

Turn on the charm, Mara. It was the perfect moment for a sound bite: some polished line about courage and ambition followed by a determined grin and backed by a dramatic sting. Maybe a feminist take; they loved to spin that angle.

Something. Anything.

But all Mara could manage was a humid, sealed-lip growl.

Rosse laughed, unaware of the danger he was in. “Indeed! Your soul has been stitched to hunger itself. Take a moment if you need it.”

He pivoted slightly toward the cameras and wiggled his eyebrows. “If you’re new to the show, you should know Bindlings have very…refined tastes, which the Bearers, once grafted, experience in their stead. Competitors in the past have run the gamut of cravings—bitter roots, beetles and worms, slabs of animal fat, even rotten fungi…” Shuddering exaggeratedly with manicured fingers pressed to his mouth, he shook his head. “And, of course, the Bindlings that crave meat, the carnivorous types, are the most powerful and tend to dominate in the Crucible.”

The ache in Mara’s belly twisted sharply, as though tugged from afar, gnawing inside her ribs. It was a desperately wanting thing—no, demanding. She was not a person right now; she was a vessel. Bottomless.

She offered a taut smile, just a thin line of discipline keeping her lips sealed.

Don’t lose it. Not here.

She had chased recognition her whole life: laboring over paintings that nobody saw, writing stories that went unread, performing on unlit stages for empty chairs, posting songs and sketches online that vanished in the scroll of strangers’ feeds… Every effort burned in silence, every failure another mouthful of emptiness. It had left her so hungry.

And now—with the cameras on her, the world watching, the Bindling’s demand to be fed stirring like fire inside her—she could finally be known. Remembered.

She would not let a craving, no matter how insistent, take that from her.

“Tell us, Mara.” Rosse was good at his job; he had been watching her carefully and had noticed her steel herself. “What do you crave?”

Mara dragged in a breath. It scraped like knives. Engaging every iota of willpower she possessed, she opened her mouth to speak. “I think I—”

A tremor racked her, violent enough that she doubled over. The graft became a red-hot thorn, eager to unmake anything soft enough to swallow, the Bindling insisting satiation: Feed me.

And drool sluiced a river down her chin.

Rosse was only human—he could not hide his amused shock. His laugh burned across her cheeks like a whip, and it all flashed before her eyes: the slow-mo replays, the riotous laugher across the globe, the talk shows poking fun at the blonde girl who made a fool of herself on reality television, the memes immortalizing her as a dopey-faced drooler.

No. This was not how she wanted to be remembered.

Rosse expertly smothered his laughter and flashed a bright smile at the cameras.

“Enthusiasm! That’s the spirit, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, waving a hand as if to dismiss the incident. “Sometimes the intensity of the graft shows in the most animated of ways. It truly demonstrates the human element of the Harrow experience.”

He leaned closer to Mara with inflated cordiality. “But let’s get back on track, shall we? Mara, this is a perfect opportunity for you to tell viewers what drives you. You said you want to become something more than ordinary. But what do you want most right now, in this very moment?”

Mara closed her eyes as the hunger continued to unfurl like smoke, filling every corner of her mind. It converged with her composure, her ambition, her desire for fame, and she realized something.

She didn’t have to wait for tomorrow, for the Crucible, to make her mark on the world. She didn’t have to earn the audience’s attention in some boring, rule-abiding way; she could take it, right here, live, on national television.

She asked the hunger: What do you want?

And it replied:

Them.

5.

Mara’s mind splintered. Even with a dozen glossy lenses upon her, even with Ven Rosse grinning and prattling like a puppet, shaping her into some neat package for the cameras, she could not summon the charm she had rehearsed. She was not a character, not a persona to be molded. She was hunger, real and raw.

The Bindling’s demand was a hot, jagged pulse in her gut, and she obeyed without further thought. Her hands shot out.

Ven Rosse’s face registered a flicker of surprise as Mara lunged at him. “Oh, dear, what—”

Her teeth found the soft curve of his throat.

She bit down, impressed by the strong flex of her jaw and electrified by the warm, slick give of flesh.

The studio lights receded, melting into halos of red and white as her eyes rolled back and her senses closed off to everything but the shock of pleasure.

She had tried many forms of expression in her search for stardom—paint, song, stage, pen—only to be overlooked. But now, with this single act of fine art, she would be seen. She would be remembered.

The first bite was quick, ravenous: her teeth sank through skin and sinew, then met, and with a wet ripping sound she pulled back. Warm syrup trickled down her throat, coppery and sweet, lubricating her gullet.

And she swallowed.

No one, she thought in her bliss, had ever dared such surrender.

No one had ever framed indulgence as power on live television.

This—this raw, unflinching yielding—was spectacle, fame, immortality.

Rosse turned into a trembling mass of rubber, spluttering as viscous sprays of gore spewed from his neck. The scent was heady, metallic, overwhelming. Mara’s stomach roared, her mind narrowed to the singular clarity of consumption, every nerve buzzing with need for the warmth and immediacy of life itself.

Through the fuzz of ecstasy, she heard shouting, clattering, retching. Then, above it all, Gale Wendry’s voice: “Stop! No, don’t cut! Cameras stay live—stay live!”

Mara’s chest rose with a shuddering, satisfied breath. Yes. This is what they want.

Every terrified gasp from the crew only served to feed the spectacle.

Mara had become the show, the star, the headline.

She plunged forth, sucking and gnawing, feeling tendons snap with an elastic pop beneath her teeth. She tasted the warm, salty slip of skin, the grit of bristled stubble scratching her palate.

A glob of vitreous jelly oozed as she clamped onto Rosse’s cheek, sending a shiver of exhilaration up her spine.

This is what they will remember.

She tilted her head, letting the Bindling’s craving take full control.

Fat slid like wet clay between her fingers. Veins burst in her mouth, pumping delicious heat over her gums. Muscle yielded in strands of noodly resistance.

She clawed and tore, kneading the flesh tender, feeling tendon and ligament glide between her fingers. Warm, greasy fluid mingled with spit and the grit of something bitter.

She swallowed greedily, drowning in it.

Every bite drew a guttural sound from deep in her chest; fibers twitched and twined under her teeth, jerking in protest before surrendering. She felt the tremble of bone before it gave, the wet slop of lungs compressed under her teeth, the slick, resilient snap of anatomy she couldn’t name.

A film of gore coated her face, sticky and clinging to her lashes. The Bindling’s unceasing demand made her teeth chatter. Hunger sang through her veins, pure and electric, each nerve afire, sharpening the cruel, intimate joy of the taste.

Fingers coated in blood, mouth slick with flesh, she met the cameras’ gaze through a haze of crimson.

This was The Harrow. This was its logline: hunger, pure and undiluted. It wasn’t shameful—it was art.

The world would not be able to look away.

E.K. Larson-Burnett is an award-winning author and professional editor based in Texas. Her published works include The Bear & the Rose, A Madness Unmade, and Prickle, with short fiction appearing in print and online anthologies. Her work marries myth and melancholy with explorations of mental health and the uncanny. When not writing or editing, she enjoys reading, crocheting, and doting on her rescued animals.
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