Soul Fillet
20 September 2025
(translation of a short story called “Filet de soul” written in French on 8th March 2011 – See the original here or copy and follow this link https://geethabalvannanathan.com/2011/03/15/filet-de-soul/)

She struggled, but it seemed useless, as the net enclosed her on all sides, fitting her body like a glove. The antimatter of its braiding was of the same ilk as her own immaterial body, and so she was unable to go through it. She watched helpless the ectoplasms of the ghost ship slowly hoist her towards them. She remembered the advice of her grandparents, who had been her guardians since her parents' death, and told herself she should have listened to them and not ventured so far from her sweet native soulitude.

It was all the fault of that cursed spring, of that nutty unicorn illusion, and of her tightrope-walker nature, which never resisted the urge to swing in the air between two equally deep chasms. The black holes of the fiery soular system she had entered by mistake or stubbornness—she no longer remembered—and which had finally disembodied her after a burn a thousand times more intense than unicorn fever had struck her down.

Yet all the signs had been there: the panicked looks of those who had just learned the rite of passage from the customs officer, the biting cold escaping through the only window to the other world—placed so high that it was impossible to look through the glass, the smell of sulfur that accompanied each explosion of the beings passing through the door, of which only a pyrography remained, each aligned alongside the others made before it. In short, a spectacle that would have dampened the fantasies of even the most ardent pioneer, but she had carried on, drawn by the idea of this stellar discovery.

The snub-nosed customs officer who sat counting his money at the edge of the two worlds had kept making her fill out so much paperwork that she almost ended up with the wrong papers. "What are all these delaying tactics?" she had exclaimed, exasperated, to which he replied that this was the price—yes, one always had to come back to the price in this world—of passage to the other world. They had to think carefully, and these weren't so much delaying tactics as preparatory tactics for a decision that would be final.

As a good intermediary for the overlord of this world who transmitted his orders to him through the hollow horn of a unicorn of other times, he took it upon himself to tire out those determined to pass into the other world so that only those who could no longer be malleable puppets would finally take the plunge. In any case thought the lord, looking at his navel, which needed a lot of vassal care to keep it from detaching itself from his body, this kind of people would be of no use to him because they would not be obedient vassals. For it took blindly obedient beings to caress the motionless body of the lord, which was becoming more and more flaccid and incapable of containing this quivering bit of flesh in the middle. The massage had to be done in concentric circles starting from the extremity of the body and in tighter circles to get closer to this purplish navel and the task became not only more exhausting but also more repugnant. Indeed, through immobility the lord became an enormous fatty mass whose deadly effluvia were exacerbated by the arrival of spring and reaching the extremities to attempt to execute at least one circle became an increasingly impossible task during the lifetime of each vassal. Suffice to say that the overlord was very difficult for any being to grasp, and she told herself that any other fate would be better than being condemned to grasp this monster, especially since spring was fast approaching.

The manoeuvres continued for quite some time, and the bitter retorts from both sides almost put her in the bad books of the customs officer with the snub-nosed face and the dead eyes, but in the end she managed to finalize her efforts. All that remained, the customs officer had told her at the end, was to get rid of the rest of the sinful confessions in order to complete the rite of passage. Turning to him to ask what that meant, she saw a sadistic glint finally rekindle the dead fish gaze of the customs officer who told her with a grim smile that she was going to be burned with a blowtorch so that the sinful and the flesh would detach from her and she would return ethereal to the other world leaving her remains as an ornament on the wall of the "lament asians". She had a moment of panic but it was too late, it was the price to pay she told herself, resigned, and moved forward towards the door made of blowtorches.

She remembered an unbearable burning sensation accompanied by a deafening explosion, and the next moment she was floating weightlessly in a hushed space whose silence and thick darkness were broken only here and there by gentle lapping and rays of intense luminosity that strangely illuminated nothing but themselves, leaving the rest of the space in darkness. She barely had time to feel, or even see, other immaterial beings floating near her before a mass of ropes had been thrown over her and she was being pulled inexorably toward the ghost ship. Once hoisted aboard, she was roughly lifted, and what was her surprise to come face to face with a now-familiar face—a rhinopithecus, she thought, before losing consciousness.

When she came to, an ectoplasmic version of the overlord stood limp before her and beside her the ectoplasm of the customs officer was slowly and deliberately rubbing a huge blade against a black hole. As she stared at him, dumbfounded, he turned to the overlord and asked him.

"How would you like your soul fillet?"

"Blue," was the reply.

Nina Blaze – Ain’t Your Fool No More