doormaker 02
Speculuceps is strange to walk with. It—you can determine no obvious gender in the razor-thin, high pitched voice—seems willing to humour your request to explore. You get the impression it wishes to use you as a tool somehow. You’re on guard but simply can’t pass up the opportunity to explore.
Exploration is like walking through an art gallery after night, where the pictures are portals casting light on a parallelogram of indistinct stone floor. The gallery does not admit waking in the darkness between the pools of light. Stepping out of one, you find yourself instantly arrived in the next.
The world is a series of screens through which you pass unnoticed. Bedrooms, offices, swimming pools, changing rooms, car interiors. An eighties office block gives a tinted panorama over a familiar street full of shops.
Tell a lie. Some notice you. The inattentive or sensitive tend to glimpse you out of the corner of their eyes. You linger for a few whom you find interesting, letting them stare dumbfounded at the vision that has just appeared. The connection is faint but for some, lasting. Your smile, your eyes will haunt their dreams. Some might even invite you unwittingly.
Just as often you step away, a tourist.
Like a tourist, though, you take a souvenir. The mirror demon watches mute as you reach out and touch a computer screen, warping it as you did your vanity mirror. The young man on the other side scrambles away and would avoid your grasp were the screen not lensed. But your fingers can touch every wall of his doll’s house bedroom at once. Blindly you scoop him up wriggling into your palm, then still his struggles in a firm fist. He slips through his monitor and the game is permitted to snap back to some jungling scene.
You open your palm and look down. He sits back, thedeathly pale, mouth opening and closing like he’s trying to speak but not finding the words.
You lean down till your face fills his whole field of vision: his whole world.
“I told you that, if I could, I’d eat you. I wanted you to know that.”
You look a little smug as you sit down at the table. I jump, clearly still deeply affected by what I’ve seen in the mirror. My left arm is still bright red from the impossible love bite you gave me. I handle things with it a little gingerly.
“It’s like,” I say, staring at you like you’re some miracle I’m afraid will disappear if I take my eyes off you.
“… ‘It’s like?’” you prompt, after I fail to even blink, nevermind speak. You sit back and let your legs cross. You slide aside a rosewood box you brought down from upstairs.
“Sorry. Um. You’ve kind of blown my mind a little bit.”
“Just a little bit?” You say. “I’ll try harder next time. I wonder how you’d like if I slid a makeup mirror down my—”
“I have spent,” I interject pointedly, “about an hour trying to get my head straight and another two finishing up cooking. Unless you want me to ruin your dinner, please keep the teasing to an absolute minimum.”
“I wonder if I could actually give you a heart attack,” you say, smiling brightly behind steepled fingers. “I can hear when I’m giving you missed beats, you know. It’s cute. It happens a lot.”
“My heart is in your hands,” I say with a courtly bow. “Only, please let me serve you the sodding quesadillas before you squeeze it. Please.”
You favour me with a regal wave, ‘so be it’, and I bring in your dinner.
I know nothing about Mexican but I’ve given it a go. Your drink is San Miguel, a lager that might owe more to Spain than Mexico. I seem pretty excited by it, and you seem significantly less so, so I grin and reveal the tequila sunrise I have painstakingly fractionated for you.
“It’s so crashingly inauthentic I couldn’t resist.”
The promised quesadillas start the meal. Cheese oozes among little bullets of spiced beef. I have made an art form of cooking your meat charred but not dry, and the end result is soft corn tortillas wrapped lovingly around cheesy, ashy, juicey, spicy beef.
You’ve wolfed down one of three by the time I even bring the accompanying salsa or patatas bravas. You pick up the next and fix your eyes on me as you bite into one side. Cheese stretches in lines and you maintain that eye contact as you gather each strand with skilled, indelicate tongue and teeth.
I have the best life.
That’s all you need do by way of acknowledgement or thanks. Your clear enjoyment is everything I need. Everything else is focused on you.
A meal’s worth of cheesy calories sinks into your grumbling tummy like a starter. Tomato and potato receive the same fate.
“God, you seem ravenous, my darling.”
“I’ve been working hard.”
You grab your cocktail and lean back in your chair, a clear invitation. I wipe my hands on the dishcloth over my shoulder and kneel by your chair to spread one large, sensitive hand over your tummy. Under my slow, firm ministration you knock out a low ~guh-rwooOurp~, which only serves to make me knead your billowing belly fat and the faintly-perceived firm chamber beneath with greater diligence. Together we produce two more belches before a timer goes off on my phone.
The meal proceeds! I serve you little crab and avocado tostadas, tiny flatbread bombs of flavour that disappear in one bite each. These you can eat at will beside roasted corn spiced with paprika, all accompanying a smoky, indulgent chipotle chicken stew thing I’ve loaded with black beans and served over rice. When we’ve clinked margarita glasses I lean back against the table and delight in feeding you. It’s your pleasure to sit back, sigh, then open your mouth and simply gobble down the fruits of my labour. The stretch in your slowly expanding stomach and the loving attentiveness with which I proffer morsel after morsel to your perpetually-chewing mouth affirms the joy we both take in satisfying your urges. It’s awkward for me to hold your corn so you handle that yourself, white teeth shaving off row after row of little yellow sunbursts while I reprise my role as tummy attendant, drawing lazy circles that ease your belly and stimulate your gut for the work ahead.
The plates empty, I’m about to head to get the next course when you stall me with a hand on my wrist. I stick around and watch you lean forward to pop the lid on that rosewood box I utterly failed to notice. ADHD, plus you melted my brain earlier, so sue me.
You reach within. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. There’s a man in your hand.
You hold him in your palm with a curled thumb on his chest. When he struggles too much you simply squeeze and watch the terror and pain on his face. You can steal away his breath at will.
He says something that rises into a scream as you unceremoniously insert him head-first into your mouth. It’s a casual two-part procedure: first, half of him disappears as you engulf him like you were rather overdoing a banana; then, with him secured between tongue and hard palate, you release your grip and push him in with a simple index finger on his butt.
Very quickly we can’t hear a thing: either his head is squished wetly against yielding flesh by your tongue or is crammed into a throat barely flexed enough to take him. His squirming feels oddly satisfying in your mouth, drawing your attention to the plane of your tongue, the glassy ridges of your palate, the sensitive sculpture of your gums behind your teeth. It’s like a tiny oral massage.
His tiny feet are still between your teeth when his head is first kissed by your oesophagus. You take a moment to enjoy the sensation of prey held wholly within your mouth; then, with a lift of your chin, your bucking tongue squeezes him whole into your throat in two or three gulps.
Spices and food smells linger on your breath. I wonder what it felt like, being irresistibly devoured by you in the thick of a meal?
Two or three clenches of your throat and then, honestly, he’s gone. Out of sight beneath your chubby belly and immersed in a hellish cauldron of caustic juices and a high tide of pasted food. Your stomach is so busy with your meal that you never feel him again.
He’s in there, though.
I’m looking at you like I want to kiss you, and possibly sing. You smile and shoo me away to the kitchen. “Hungry.”
Despite the adrenaline I barely shake as I set down the crowning piece: three long plates of tacos, in pork, smoky cauliflower, and chicken-and-Mexican-chorizo.
You stare at the offering. Then you begin.
I watch you as you eat. You’re so focused. It’s not like you’re mechanically eating for the sake of it, but it’s not wholly like you’re doing it for taste alone. It’s like you’re focused on the act of consumption, of taking-in. Like you’re performing a rite as constant as breathing, as sacred as prayer.
You start to slow half way through. I sit beside you again and this time take a more active role. You flash me a smile that is interrupted by a spasm of discomfort.
“Full.”
“I know, love.” I select apork taco and raise it to your lips. “You can take a little more? Clean your plate for me?”
You continue your prandial prayer, cajoled and encouraged by me. Your stomach is painfully packed, a tight and roiling coffin for the man you consigned to it. Half way through a cauli taco you feel a little pop as he suffocates or drowns or melts or is crushed. A small, matter-of-fact reflex of your spirit squeezes his soul precisely where it needs to go.
You give a huge belch and hide your blush with your hands. “Hurts.”
“Just two more, sweetheart, and that’s it, I promise. Let’s take a moment, rub your poor belly. But she’s nearly done. And you’ll feel and look so good…”
With gentle pressure I massage from crotch to breasts, focusing on the space in between. Rolling pressure eases the warning stretches inside and chyme is encouraged deeper. Another belch helps make space—I kiss your forehead afterwards—and a sudden fart helps below. I chuckle and stroke your hair.
“Okay, open wide, and you get massaged and loved and adored all evening. Okay?”
You nod, eyes closed, but mouth opening.
With kisses and cheek strokes and belly stroking and when all else fails a firm voice, every last scrap of what I have spent half a day cooking has found its proper place. Stretching your belly, enough food to feed eight, plus the deliquescing remains of one human being, cruelly snatched.
The chair scrapes as you stand. I hold your hand and you get to your feet. You’re always very vulnerable and shy when so stuffed.
I squeeze your hand.
“Look how beautiful you are, Rey.” From my dreamy voice you can tell I really mean it. “You’re such a gorgeous shape.”
“Couch.”
The evening is spent innocently. At first you can’t do anything but groan and my touch is light on your abdomen. But as your guts do their work, your feast is distributed. Your stomach becomes merely fascinating, a side of the warm glow that seeps into your bones and makes you want to touch yourself. The grinding, grumbling, gurgling march spreads throughout your body as your intestines suck down the meal. And all the while I’m there, pampering your greedy belly with kisses, rubs and hugs.