liver n onions 03
You can tell in the morning that I’m going to wind down at some point today. My brightness after having stayed up even later massaging your poor hardworking tummy is a little brittle, and you catch me frequently staring into space.
Still, when I ask you, a little bashful, if I can be there when you release the three you ate, you give me a shy smile of your own and accept my embrace. While my arms, long for my height, just about manage to encircle your girth, you murmur, “you can listen this time. It’s my space.”
So you know I’m leaning back against the bathroom door when you relax and take your time. Naked, you examine yourself in the floor-length mirror I installed in my bathroom, just barely wide enough to display your whole frame. You file your nails. You do a few little self-care tasks in the mimosa-scented room, all the while relishing the building pressure inside you, bladder and back. It’s like they’re screaming to be let out, and you’re too busy plucking your eyebrows.
In fact they are screaming to be let out, but those cries are fading.
Eventually, when the discomfort has made you wince one time too many, you take the throne.
There’s a moment between abandonment and their actual emergence when nothing impure is happening but all tension melts away. Within you, coils shift immediately, beginning a deep scouring sensation as satisfying as it is filthy. Your pucker, conscientiously displayed by the way you sat on splayed cheeks, yawns open…
A torrent of what was once human flesh pours from you. Stripped of anything useful it is identical at a glance to the aftermath of, say, a hundred kilos of fish and chips. At least until a set of kids’ braces pluck your tight rim like harp strings.
“You okay?” I ask, having heard your yelp. You murmur some affirmation and settle back into the sensations.
At some point, pressure differentials switch and you burst a wave of piss over their piling remains. The now guaranteed-smooth train of waste joins with the relief of a hard, hot rain. This most basic of human acts brings with it heat, relief, gratification, and pleasure.
It’s your space. Do you touch yourself, hands digging beneath the heavy curve of your newly enhanced belly? If you grind your fingers into your abdomen, do you feel yourself becoming lighter? It will take a while. Your hypertrophied colon stretches smooth around an awesome weight of the stuff, which must squeeze through a far more demure opening.
The sounds ring back at you, tile-amplified. You know I’m hearing the same thing, even if the sight and smells don’t reach me. How does it feel, knowing someone knows what you are doing and what it means?
Eventually you flush the high-capacity toilet and catch your breath. Sweat sheens your brow and your hair is somehow in disarray. When your legs stop shaking you stand and begin a luxurious shower. You drain the cylinder of hot water as you touch and caress and relearn your body, finding smooth, heavy traces of your prey all about your form. They look much better on you.
When you come downstairs in a dressing gown that actually is getting a little small on you, I’m on the couch. You lean over to see what I’m looking at. Three smiling faces look up at you from shiny photography paper.
“It’s pretty clear they loved one another,” I say. My voice is a little shaky. You curl up by the couch and drape your arms a boob across my knees and I stroke your drying hair with one hand.
I continue. “When you came into my life it was like I was listening to a hundred radio channels all at once. You took this whole world of uncertainty and meaninglessness and you crushed it all down to one signal. One melody: you, my Raven. You feel so right.”
The photograph curls as I shake it. “That’s why I feel about you the way I feel. But they don’t get that. To them, you’re a terrifying end. Minutes of horror as you devour them and their families. A living grave that melts them down alive. They don’t know how to worship you yet.”
You can tell I’m worked up. The hand in your hair becomes a claw, unconsciously combing furrows in shiny black soil. “They had lives. They loved one another. And you ate them up and shat them out. Where does the good go?”
By way of wordless answer you pluck the hand that holds the photo and place it upon the dome of your belly. My fingers sink in like you’re snow and I’m making an angel. The photo itself drops unheeded to the carpet and I only have eyes for you.
I’m quiet for a little while. Your face is impassive as you watch me roll through my emotions, giving me space. “You soak it all up. Everything physical you take.” A tightening of my jaw and spike of my heartrate. “And inside, you become their whole world. They learn to worship you.”
I lean over to place a kiss on the crown of your head. “Oh Raven. Do you think the world will learn to worship you? All of us?”
You flash me a smile and then unilaterally solve my existential crisis. By leaning over and sinking your brutally sharp fangs into my inner thighs you do me the favour of collapsing down every stray thought into one. There is only the melody of your throat as you gulp, noisily, a pulse of red life straight from my heart.
By the sensation of falling I remember that I can fly. You have taken my life, my time, my mind, arguably my soul, and now you empty my veins into your roaring furnace. The challenge and joy of it bubbles up in me. I could sing. Instead I laugh, and plant kisses on your back, because I can’t lean enough to kiss your head. Your bite heals me as it reminds me: good things flow into you and become yours.
I hope you stop drinking before my heart stops, because I still want to know you. But it’s yours. You get that, right? The beating of my heart is yours and I would want it no other way.