her death begins
Her death begins when she kisses you, though she doesn’t know it.
She was the one to take your face between her hands, pull your lips to hers, explore your mouth with melting, decadent strokes. I think you liked her forwardness because you decided to keep her around. Though she started the kiss, you didn’t let out end until you were satisfied.
She didn’t know—how could she—that each touch of your own tongue teased apart the bindings between her flesh and her soul. Perhaps she felt vertigo, but put it down to a pounding heart. You really are a very good kisser. Soon, with every nibble of her lips, every deep plunge, you drew out more of her, gathering her spirit in an unwilling astral projection that trapped her irrevocably in the very jaws of your own astral form.
But you didn’t bite, chew, swallow or sever. When you finally released her body from your grip she was flustered, breathless and wet as fuck, but she was whole.
You declined her invitation and walked away. Her disappointment and confusion tasted bitter in your mouth.
She finds somebody else to take home. Sweet but somehow insipid, you tast the peaks and afterglow of their hasty hookup. You, on the other hand, take a bath. I greet you at the door and you smile but neither speak nor kiss me; only mime turning on some taps then point at me. It’s a mark of how long we’ve spent together that I don’t question the sudden mutism, merely confirm what you want out loud, flash you a what-are-you-like smirk, then disappear to run you a bath.
As you luxuriate in the scented waters you taste her essence. She is someone you could be friends with, you think. Perhaps more. Her spirit imagines it lives the life her body is experiencing even while your own laps lazily at it.
She dreams about you. You feel her cum twice in the night.
In the morning she goes about her day. It being a school night her lover left in a taxi. A morning routine is mostly bland on your palate, leavened with pops of enjoyment. She loves her new coffee machine. The newspaper on the bus reminds her of her grandad and his newspapers. She sees a co-worker she is friendly with on the way to the office and they talk. He’s so cynical he makes her laugh, which tastes like orange syrup in your mouth, more satisfying that her perfunctory lovemaking.
Through the day, while performing some calculation written in the appendix of a grimoire, you can’t help taking a little suck. In the middle of a meeting she loses track of words entirely, coining word-salad that confuses and amuses her workmates. Embarrassment plays in your mouth like spice and keeps your mind on your task.
Late afternoon, she splashes water on her face and stares at her reflection in the office loos. All day she has felt not quite there.
Are you a spider in the aether, my love? Your pedipalps gripping her spreadeagled as on a St Andrew’s cross? Are you something more morphic, wrapping her up in inscrutable spirit flesh the shape and size of which is yours to mould as you wish? Are you a red-skinned devil strutting fat and misshapen by the shape of the woman crammed into your gizzard, your mouth hanging open to loose the shining thread that connects soul and body? Perhaps you are just yourself, and you have convinced her she is small, so she lies and soaks in exquisite danger under the vaulted palate of your mouth.
I long to know.
Fizzing with excitement and energy like sherbet, she meets with friends for a drink. Joel has moved out of his boyfriend’s and is turning the end of his relationship into an extended skit that has his friends in stitches.
You beckon me with a hooked finger to where you lounge in the armchair. Your uncrossed legs widely parted are an invitation I will never turn down. As my mouth begins to explore your womanhood you sigh, lean back, and turn inwards.
This is how her death catches up to her. She is laughing with friends when the pedipalps cram her into your mouth; the flesh knits shut around her; sharp fangs snip the cord and acid drools onto her; or you knock back your chin, pulling her down deep inside you where there is never any light again. It’s all the same. Her spirit is a squall of a storm engulfed and ripped apart by a hurricane, her eddies and currents becoming yours. She’s still screaming and fighting inside you when her face cracks into the table, upsetting the drinks and interrupting Joel’s story terminally. Bar staff perform CPR as I bring you to orgasm, and as you cum you wring her soul dry. You finish what the kiss started: her voice is an echo beneath your own voice; her face joins the ghostly choir patterned into the thick walls of your bowels.