Flesh Tunnels and Honey Roads

They say the roads under the city used to be for mail runners, then smugglers, then something else.
Not trains. Not cars. Not even footsteps.
Just... something else.
The first time I saw one, I thought it was an animal burrow — a hole in the alley wall, just wide enough for a child to crawl through. It glistened in the moonlight, slick and warm-looking, like the inside of a throat.
It pulsed.
That’s when I knew it wasn’t made of stone.

Three nights later, I returned.
The mouth of the tunnel had grown teeth — not sharp, but soft and petal-shaped. They trembled as I approached, parting as though the tunnel were sighing me in. I hesitated.
Then I heard the hum.
Sweet and low. Like bees inside a cello. It filled my chest and whispered beneath my ribs. I knelt down, reached into the tunnel with a trembling hand—
And felt honey.
Not real honey. Something like it. Warm and golden and wrong.

I was sixteen then.
My brother was missing. So was our neighbor. And the milkman. No one cared — or worse, they pretended not to notice. My town had a way of swallowing the inconvenient. That’s why I went back every night.
That’s why I entered.
The tunnel was alive.
The walls flexed. Fleshy, veined. I crawled deeper, dragging myself through a throat that did not gag or choke, but welcomed. The humming grew louder — not in volume, but intensity. It coated my skin, sank into my spine.
After a while, I stopped crawling.
The tunnel began to move me.

I don’t know how long I was inside.
There were no landmarks. No up or down. Just a strange rhythm in the walls and the honey that coated everything — sweet, cloying, almost addictive. I drank it when I grew thirsty. It tasted like summer afternoons and rot.
Then I came to a hault.
Two paths.
One hummed with voices. The other... with music.
I chose the music.

The Honey Road was lit from within — soft amber light glowing beneath translucent membranes, revealing silhouettes of things walking above. I recognized none of them. Long-legged things with lanterns for eyes. A headless woman whose hair floated behind her like smoke. A man dragging his own skin in a wheelbarrow.
No one looked at me.
I walked until my knees gave out. Then I crawled. The honey grew thicker.
And the walls began to whisper.

“You taste good.”
“Will you stay?”
“You have your brother’s smile.”
That’s when I knew.
My brother had come this way. Maybe years ago. Maybe days.
Time was thick here — like the honey. Things moved differently, breathed differently. The tunnel remembered him. It wanted me because of him.
And yet, I didn’t turn back.

Eventually, I reached the chambers.
A vast hollow in the belly of the road — a cathedral of flesh. The walls beat like a heart. There were others there, kneeling, their bodies fused to the floor with golden tendrils. Some whispered. Some screamed.
And one of them was my brother.

He opened his eyes when I touched his face. “You came through the flesh.”
I nodded.
“Do you understand what this place is?” he asked.
I didn’t.
He laughed — honey dripped from his mouth. “It’s not a tunnel. It’s not a road. It’s a vein. We are inside something older than cities. Older than stories. It feeds on memory and offers sweetness in return.”
“You chose this?” I whispered.
“I chose to be remembered.” He pointed at the others. “They begged to be forgotten. You’ll see them in dreams, not in obituaries.”

I wanted to scream, but the honey was in my throat. My brother pulled me closer, and for a moment, I saw the world as he did.
Endless roads beneath every city.
A network of mouths and arteries, pulsing beneath our feet, hungering.
And above — people building homes on top of sleeping people, never asking what lay below the stone.

“I can take you home,” he said. “But you’ll always feel the pull. Once the honey touches your tongue, it remembers you.”
The tunnel behind me had closed. Ahead, another door of flesh opened, revealing moonlight, trees, wind.
A way out.

I left him there.
Half-sunk, half-smiling.

Back on the surface, the world was loud. Unkind. Sharp.
I vomited honey for weeks.
Sometimes, I wake up in strange places — alleys, drains, under bridges — with it on my hands.
Sometimes I hum without knowing why.
And sometimes, late at night, I see new tunnels forming in places they shouldn’t be — behind mirrors, under beds, between cracks in plaster.
They’re always warm. Always sighing.
And always remembering me.



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