I remember, as a child full of boogers and shit, feeling changed at the soul-level after playing the web browser game Dark Cut. The brazen surgical sim, and other flesh harvesting games like it, make me feel completely powerless to the Devil. 

I am 10 years old. Dinosaur chicken nuggets and Capri-Sun consummate a harmonious marriage, swimming in my stomach acid. My palms are sweating on the family computer keyboard, since my friend and I have decided it's time to play Dark Cut. The Capri-Sun starts to feel like a storm in my belly, but I open up Addicting Games as if my small hand is being pushed by a strong wind. And there it is — the medieval doctor game I'm always so shamefully eager to play. 

There are green pustules growing up and down my patient's neck, Dark Cut tells me. After disinfecting the area, I nervously guide my cursor over to each abscess to slice it open. Pea green coagulate bursts onto my computer screen and trickles down my patient's collarbone. Electricity prickles up my arms as I make a mess and save my patient in the process. My friend and I giggle and exit the browser. Time for brownies.

OK, it's not about the Devil. It's about what I feel, intrinsically, is diabolical — excess, excessive desire, lusting for flesh. I deny these things about myself until they grow bigger in the basement of my heart and fill me with sick thrill. "And suddenly I don’t live here," Louise Glück writes in the poem "Dream of Lust," "I live in a mystery."

Like I did as a child playing Dark Cut, I was occasionally disturbed by my eagerness for carnage while playing Wrong Organ's 2024 game Mouthwashing. 

In moments, Mouthwashing turned me into a Roman spectator at the Colosseum, greedy for martyrdom and its smell of blood; the game is about mutilated trust and dismembered bodies. Curly, captain of the Tulpar space freighter, gets flayed during a crash that Jimmy, his crew member and personal Judas, causes intentionally. While trying to rectify his fuck-up and pretend to be ship captain like he's always wanted, Jimmy fails in miserable ways, at one point slowly slicing Curly's remaining stumpy limbs to serve them like birthday cake. 

Sawing through defenseless Curly's raw and spoiling skin made my blood freeze into crystals. Still, I carved him like a pumpkin. "What monster could have done this?" Mrs. Voorhees asks in Friday the 13th (1980) after dicing up all those teens herself. 

But there is sense in the slaughter, as much as I hate to admit it. Strange Scaffold's Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator — a casual game in which you strategically buy and sell things like small brains and throbbing gallbladders — proves it. Divorced from life, where they serve a methodical purpose, flesh and organs have a more unpredictable fate. Creative mediums like video games and movies, then, provide a safe baby crib for us to suck on our toes and also discover what it's like to cut them off. 

Pamela Voorhees has an infinite need to avenge her son. Jason was young when he floundered in Crystal Lake — unnoticed by horny camp counselors too preoccupied by each other's curves — and drowned. It's been decades since then, but Pamela still sees Jason on the low, gentle waves of the sparkling lake, and it makes her want to kill or die. 

Eventually, she raises her machete at a blonde by the water. She misses, and she struggles for control, but the blonde chops Pamela's head off in a red flash first. More like a decapitated chicken than a mother, headless Pamela reaches her hands up to her exposed neck and grabs at the air like it will save her. 

I imagine it might. Without that anguished head in the way, Pamela's soul has enough space to travel up her spine and out into the stars.  

Artistic depictions of body harvesting and bloodletting can be depraved, yes, but they also represent acquiring esoteric knowledge. "For we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones," says Ephesians 5:30. Where do lungs fly off to when they're deflated? What purpose do breasts have when they are unmoored from a chest? These black mysteries of the flesh might help me see the multicolored truth of God, if we don't get so embarrassed about peeking. 

Now, as an adult, I pull up Dark Cut to investigate my childhood craving for forbidden knowledge. Anxious and 9-years-old, I'd wanted to find out what it was like to extract an arrow from a leg, to see the blood dripping. As I yank and hammer in the browser game today, I realize that its unconvincing cherry-colored pixels had been enough to give my child self more confidence when I scraped my knee, or when my papercut started to ooze. My most antisocial wishes make sense now. It's difficult to be afraid of something you've dissected.