foraging
There is a phenomenon that occurs whenever I leave the house and enter nature, or sometimes just the company of lots of people. It is called Walkies.
You’ve seen it before, and in fact you’re the one who pointed it out. You smile indulgently now as I veer from the path to inspect the berries on an unusual bush. We left your car more than five minutes ago so I have begun growing more excitable.
“You’ve missed the pa~ath,” you sing, looking down the little embankment I skidded down.
I hold up a purple berry by way of explanation. “It’s a pheasantberry! Only berry that tastes like caramel! Want one?”
You wrinkle your nose and scan the path. There aren’t too many people around this far into the country park. Couples, families and older folk tend to keep near the main house. But ones or twos stroll by, often accompanied by dogs. Proving the rule, a young couple, man and woman, smile when they see you looking at them. You nod greetings.
“Suit yourself.” I pop it into my mouth and chew thoughtfully. A pause, and then… “You made the right decision. It tastes like if you dipped a trainer in caramel, then burnt it.”
“If I’m going to pick up dinner on the go,” you say, brushing your long hair back after a gust of autumn wind whipped it around your face. The couple have rounded a corner out of sight. “I tend not to look at the bushes.”
“Spare a thought for prey. We have to make do. My God.”
“What?” You look back down at me to see me looking away from you, flushed a little with embarrassment.
“Nothing. It’s silly.” I look back to you, smirking heavily with deep irony. “Just… this is going to sound corny, but I looked up at you, and you’re wrapped in that lovely dress, and your figure is just to die for, and you’re wearing boots, and you’re backlit by sunlight in golden hour, and the trees in the distance are beginning to change, and— it was all a bit much. You’re beautiful. Just then, you were so beautiful I forgot to be cool about it.”
You give me your what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about smirk, then crouch to offer me a hand.
I take it. You told steady and I pull myself out of the hole I dug for myself.
Walkies strikes. For a while you were dignified, enjoying the perfect embrace of new boots you got yourself and a coat I had tailored to your form; all while browsing passers-by with the discerning detachment of a connaisseur perusing the wine list. But that’s all now gone to hell…
… Three chatty women waking a single dog stop talking to stare up at you. You’re seated on my shoulders, ramrod stiff, reaching up for the spiky green shells that dangle at your new shoulder height.
“Just a bit to the left,” you say to me, though you’re glaring at the women, daring them to say something. I have a string bag open containing a couple of dozen chestnuts you’d already retrieved for me.
“Here?” The trio walk past and start giggling among themselves. I don’t seem to notice.
“No, more to the… look, follow my lead.” You grip my ear and steer me. It’s perfect. I position is precisely where we need to be to collect chestnuts.
Maybe Walkies is infectious. Another dog-walker marvels as we cross his path, me breathing heavy controlled as I bear your curvaceous form aloft. Gripping both my ears you have gunned us into a run max-speed along the path. I veer left or right according to how you twist. You giggle as I respond to your commands.
“Stop, wait, back. Missed some.” A backwards twist and we are reversing. You make truck-reversing sounds: beep beep beep with your mouth until we’re in place. The dog walker shakes his head and walks on. Neither of us notice him.
You’ve just filled my little bag when you notice someone through the gappy canopy. Two someones, possibly on their way to trying to merge into one. The couple from earlier seem to have paused their walk in a clearing a hundred yards from the path. They’re pressed against one another, him pinning her against a gnarled old oak.
You look down at my chestnuts, then back up at the couple. Well, if I’m allowed to forage…
We’re twenty steps into the forest before you remember you’re sitting on my shoulders and piloting me with my obedient ears. It will not do to stalk your prey in this manner. You squeeze your thighs to indicate you wish to be let down, then tell me your quarry…
Things have progressed a little. Her top is unbuttoned and untucked but she has turned the tables and is pressing him against the oak tree. His hands roam her back and flanks while she buries her face against his neck, kissing voraciously.
It takes a little while for him to notice me standing there with phone upright and plausibly recording.
In his shock and outrage he’s gentle, putting a halting hand on his lover’s shoulder. She gets the message and looks around drunkenly.
His voice and words aren’t so gentle. “Oi! What do you think you’d doing, pervert?”
I ignore him the first time, making him angrier. When he repeats himself I lean out from behind the camera. He looks furious; she looks more spooked.
“Don’t mind me, mate! As you were! I’m a fan. She was chewing your ear off like it was a pork cho—”
“The fuck you say?” he says, and I answer back, mildly making him angrier and angrier. It’s not long before he pushes away from the tree and his lover and storms over towards me.
I’ll be fine.
She on the other hand, calls out a plea for restraint—“leave him, Darren, he’s not worth it—“then says nothing else ever again. Your grip around her throat is like iron and your thumb crushes her larynx just enough to cover her shout for help into a rough sigh.
She falls the half-step backwards into the oak when you push her. Any hope of struggling fruitfully is snuffed when you take that same half-step, smothering her body with yours. The backwards lean of the oak trunk overextends her back enough that she can’t use her legs to help push you off, and her arms are no match for your trained strength. She stares up at you mute, mouth opening and closing like a fish. In your embrace she’s helpless.
You maintain eye contact with her right until your lips settle on her neck. Her struggles redouble, serving only to remind you of my tummy rubs these past few days. Except all that food is long gone, and the gut she’s caressing with her whole body gurgles and groans for satiation that she will provide.
You can’t help but give her a lick then suck her skin to redness, in a little homage to their lovemaking scene before. Then your fangs press dimple her skin, deeper, deeper, till pop! It’s like her skin suddenly gives up and splits itself on your teeth. Scarcely a millimetre further you feel the pulse of her heartbeat wrapped in tough artery. This, too, resists until it doesn’t.
Your lips are sealed against her throat so the sudden spurt is wholly captured. From the chambers and pathways of her body her blood eagerly rushes into the chamber of your mouth, pouring over your tongue as intimate as a lover’s kiss before that same tongue bucks up and seals it into the first of many new passages.
You taste her raw and hot. Salt makes you salivate, mixed instantly into the stream to begin digestion. She pours like liquid meat into your maw and is devoured.
Dimly you hear the escaping-stream sound of her silenced cry, but all you’re hearing is her heartrate rise with every gulp. All you’re feeling is heat pouring into a stomach pressed against its source. As you drink past eight pints she can surely feel it, hidden sloshing boulder submerged beneath the enveloping fat pressed against her. By that point her eyes are glazed. She has the look of an animal that knows it is dead.
The heart that has been feeding you knows it too.. It needs help. Like creeping vines, your tendrils extend from your flesh. Protective of your dress they emerge alongside your arms. Slow loops around the tree further crush your body into hers. Blood pressure rises as your body and tendrils crush hers, serving to keep her alive a little longer and to keep your throat in motion.
She dies with your teeth in her throat. For a moment, the bobbing of your throat is not solely for blood.
When you let her go she falls like long thin firewood.
Ten hot pints gurgle inside your stomach, rhythmically massaged. The stretch is glorious, making you cuddle yourself around your middle. A slow belch, released beneath your breath, is like a eulogy. Here lies kissing girl: not gone, but forgotten.
The sounds of a scuffle bring you away from meditation on the way your full stomach makes your breathing shallower. The guy is on the ground staring at you, outstretched like he fell in place. I’m grimly trying to consolidate a choke, but he keeps twisting and fighting to throw me off. The beginnings of a black eye blossom on my face. Looks like he’s good.
It won’t help him. His eyes flick between you, to his dead girlfriend, and back to you. The tendrils manage to hold his attention, especially when they push without apparent effort through the muscle of his lower back. You feel your blades skirt fascia and bone to locate arteries hepatic and renal. He holds stock still, viscerally sending danger, so I release him and stand.
To keep him there, and perhaps for giving me a black eye, you lower yourself over him, pressing his face into the dirt with your arse. When his time comes you will suck his spirit right up there, and he and his lover can try to meet in the middle of your twisting guts. If either of them makes it.
You beckon, I kneel beside the man and in front of you, eyes roaming over your swollen, blood-fatted form. I see immediately when your tendrils cut: they twitch and pulse, he struggles then stiffens, your eyes close with pleasure.
Fullness redoubles. One whole person is a huge quantity. A second is decadence bordering on depravity. He drains as you shift your hips, bleeding into your sucking tendrils as you grind his face into the dirt.
You grab my hands and bring them to your belly. I can feel it growing with each captured pulse. But my job is clear and adored. Once again I show my love to your body by massaging deep into your hard-working guts, though remain delicate with your poor stretched stomach right now… Even when your current meal is through, safely locked away in chamber (and filthy passages), you rock as my fingers chase their mingled blood through your system, easing the discomfort and washing your insides with crimson food.
It’s almost dark by the time you’re relaxed enough to go back to the car. You still walk like you’re packed.
When we get home I’m going to worship your body top to bottom; really spoil you. And when you inevitably become peckish, I’ll make you roasted chestnuts.