burnsall 01
After you came to visit me, whatever devil had been driving me seemed to dissipate. We spent the next day together, it being one of those long lazy mornings that turns into evenings, with you appreciating not being required to move your newly acquired bulk too much. Talking, playing games, watching things on your phone—these all were interspersed with long, luxurious tummy rubs, helping ease the growing digestive discomfort as your body worked on the previous day’s meal. Silences would be filled by the grunts, squeals, gurgles and general borborygmi of the hidden maze inside you.
We’d talked of the ink, but I’d left Grey’s Anatomy at your place. “We should really study it. My cousin was fat. I know bile ducts here would drain into your duodenum, around… here?” My fingers poke soft depressions beneath your left ribs. “But I haven’t a clue about how that helps your intestines absorb h— her into your body, make that fat your own.” My hand had traced up over those ribs to cup your breast. Was it larger for the two beings I’d sacrificed to you so recently?
“She was your cousin?” I nodded, still looking at your breast, then back to your belly. With a finger under my chin you brought my attention back to your face. Eyes on mine, your jaw half-opened. A belch like slow thunder signalled the final emptying of your stomach’s bloody contents into your gut. “Got any more?”
That was a couple of weeks ago. I’m thinking about it as we drive. You skip radio stations, hunting for something to match your mood.
“I can’t choose music until you tell me where we’re going.” You sound a little petulant. I glance at you and smile. You are overwhelmingly cute when you’re petulant.
“It’s a surprise.”
“Clue.”
“You don’t know it. But you’ll like it, maybe.”
“Shit clue.”
You turn to look out the window at the green landscape rolling by. I take the opportunity to glance at you. You haven’t eaten anywhere near as well, having been busy with your inscrutable life recently. The fat had melted mostly away, leaving you sharper, a little more prone to fierceness.
Sheep ignore us from their fields. The country road winds through little Dales towns, the houses mostly stone, though there are yellow brick newbuilds clustered together in modern developments. In the distance, hills begin to rise and fall.
“I know we don’t talk about family much,” I begin. You look over your shoulder at me, your black hair falling over your face. I long to brush it back and kiss your cheek. “But I wanted to show you—”
“You’re going to introduce me to your parents?!”
You actually made me physically gasp. I’m so shocked by the danger of bringing you to my family that I nearly lose control of the car. With a jerk I pull our left wheels off a grassy verge.
You cackle. Smelling blood, you press on: “You can trust me, I’ll be gentle—”
“The place we’re going,” I interrupt, pointedly ignoring your teasing, “is a place I used to visit with them and my brother. It felt magical back then.”
I nod out my window. Outside, the road is descending alongside a steep incline down to a grassy plain. Beside a meandering river squats a little village, similar to several we’ve passed, where a beautiful stone bridge crosses the river.
“Burnsall. A little piece of me.”
We pull into a car park that is just a field by the river. We’re not terribly early so there are quite a few families and couples already playing on the banks of the river, or sitting on benches and blankets. The pub nearby is doing a roaring trade. Middle-aged men sit outside, peering at the world with mild suspicion and drinking later or stout.
I buy you an ice cream. Extra strawberry juice. I bite chunks out of my cider lolly as you lick your 99, an act that makes it very hard for me to carry a conversation.
The air is fresh and clean out here. You inhale deeply, feeling it deep in your lungs. The sun is growing warm on your pale skin. In the background, excitable squeals of children, chatter of adults; under your feet, soft grass. Cinnamon comes on a breeze from a tea rooms, served with sugar on toast.
A bit of a break.
I take your hand and squeeze it. You squeeze back and see me smile. Wider than I have in a while.
We go walking. I tell you about the time I abandoned my brother in a dinghy on the river, convinced there was a waterfall around the bend, and the time my dad got drunk and managed to slip in cow muck, somehow getting it all up his back. Every turn in the path by the river has a memory.
A sandy bank is the perfect place to stop for a picnic. I unload what is clearly ritual food: chocolate hobnobs, egg mayonnaise sandwiches (though I have packed chicken and bacon for you, knowing your aversion to egg), Babybells, crisps. We sit and eat, hip to hip, looking over the narrow, swift-flowing water and the wall of trees on the other side.
When we’ve eaten I ask if you’re full and you say yes. I stare at you for a second then burst out laughing. Red-cheeked, you angrily demand to know what’s funny.
“You’ve never said yes to that question before—not once. Why now?”
You feel the blush settling in, shake your head to try to dispel the heat of it. “This just feels like your place. I don’t want to intrude.”
My laugh turns to a fond smile, touched with the intensity of the other day. I take your hand again.
“If it is my place, then it’s wide open to you. There’s no place or thing or person I don’t want you to touch.”
I can’t read your expression. You speak eventually.
“Good. Because I’m starving. I mean I’ve been starving myself.”
“There’s a place,” I say, rummaging through the backpack I brought, “just up the river. A bit of a cliff. People are always jumping off on dares. I think the undercurrent is dangerous, though. Could easily pull people under.” Finding what I was searching for I flourish it: your bathing suit, a black two-piece I bought for you a Limerick ago. “Fancy a swim?”
Cold British rivers aren’t your first thought when hunting, but the idea of being the most Gothic mermaid kind of amuses you. You nod enthusiastically, and are surprised when I hold your cheeks in my hands and kiss you deeply. You melt into it and for a while there’s only us anywhere by the river.
Hunger stabs you to purpose, though. We agree that you’ll walk at the foot of the cliff to the plunge pool, while I’ll walk the path up the cliff and make sure there’s prey.
In the shade of the cliffs, with the fine spray of the water over rocks, you begin to regret the decision. It’s cold even in summer, and the bikini doesn’t give you a lot of cover. You find a little rock ledge to sit on, by the pool, and have no choice but to wait or turn back. You wait.
No sound but the running water for a while. Your teeth begin to chatter so you stamp around and wave your arms to keep the blood flowing. Where the hell is lunch?
Ah, you hear my voice at the top of the cliff. A couple of youths were daring one another to jump. I’m encouraging them.
Voices are rising to a bravado-crescendo. There’s a terminal shout and then an almighty splash. Water and foam fly into the air.
You slip into the water like a knife.
Beneath the surface you swim towards where the bubbles are clearing. Metallic pings and pops of running water fill your sinuses in the way that underwater noise does. Ahead, two legs kick, treading water. Your meal has made it to the surface. He’ll regret having the oxygen once he’s in the chemical hell inside you.
You play a trick, stroking his legs with a finger and swimming around him. The paddling becomes a thrash, now alert, looking for what the opaque surface of the water hides from him.
Another stroke. He wheels again to face it, and this time scuds his hands through the water, blindly trying to ward off whatever’s touching him.
This time, when you touch his leg, you’re waiting for his hands. In one smooth motion you grip him and pull, hauling yourself out of the water and pulling him nearer.
You breach the water’s surface like a Kraken. The last thing he sees is you, mouth yawning wide, hair turned to ink mapping smooth curves on your porcelain flesh.
Tasting prey, you no longer feel the cold of the water. By piling your weight on top of him you force him under and in. The face that did lie upon the broad expanse of your tongue quickly finds itself channeled into your throat. He is a minnow, water-slick and wriggling, but you are an eel, a water dragon, smoothly transferring your prey from one body of water to another.
Gulp, gulp.
Thank God he goes down quickly. Your lungs burn almost as much as the stretch in your oesophagus. He kicks and fights but he’s already gone, the lengths of his calves already sliding after his body into the killing cauldron of your stomach.
Your inhale, open-jawed, showing the sky the poor boy’s grave, is matched only by the peal of displaced air from your gut: graaAAOOooork.
Shouting from the cliff, but you don’t care. A human life is struggling inside you, growing closer and closer to yielding and acknowledging you as its master, giving up everything to you.
You float lazily on your back down the river towards our picnic spot. The two strips of jet cloth match perfectly the sprawling constellation of your hair, all of it framing the enormous bulge of your belly. By the time you reach the sandy spot he is long since quiet but for the burps his last breaths force on you.
I’m already there with a towel, wading through the water to meet you and place it over your shoulders. I stroke your belly, cool on the outside but violently hot inside.
We fall together in an embrace. You leech body heat from me and I love it. We kiss like we never stopped.