A scene that could’ve been from Takatsuki Sen’s novel Black Goats Egg based on the snippets we have of it from the manga/calendar?

I like this prompt! Thanks for asking it. TW for abuse/serial killing/disturbing content. 

“In this room, you must not love anyone.” Mother grips The Boy’s chin. “Even me.”

She shoves him in, and he’s not ready, and he’s panicking, because there’s a man with half his intestines falling out, and he feels so bad for the man. He wants to help him, but saving him would mean killing Mother.

“If I die in here, you want me to die. You want whatever happens in this room.” 

I don’t really, he thinks. 

But is he still in that room? Is he still seven years old? Is he still weeping as he promises himself he will never be like her?

Or is he twenty-five years old, weeping because he has done something like her after all, because violence is in his DNA? Because all his life he’s been trapped in that room? 

“You can be free,” says the woman before him.

She’s not Mother.

She’s his fiancee.

He loves her.

I don’t even know what love is.

“Is love killing myself?” he whispers. If he reproduces with this woman, he could carry on Mother’s legacy. Goat after goat. 

“I don’t want you dead,” she whispers.

“But I do.” If he stays alive, he’ll be alive for Mother. Because for some reason, she never killed him.

Why? He wants to run to her, rotting in her prison cell, and demand. You never killed my body, but you’ve killed everything that ever mattered to me. You killed my peace. Why didn’t you go easy on me?

“We never go easy on them,” she said, and he’s once more in the room. “Killing is the easy part, Boy.”

“Life is the scary part,” he echoes. Would he care as much about the man before him if he were a corpse? Undoubtedly no.

To choose life or death, that is the question. 

“What if it’s not? What if ‘what kind of life’ is the question and death isn’t a factor yet?” A voice presses in, and he wonders if it’s true, if maybe he can escape the room.