family
I don’t respond to a text you randomly send, which is unusual enough to stand out. While driving back from some engagement you’re in my neighborhood and a little peckish, so you nip round to check up. My car is in the driveway. It plinks as it cools down: I must not have been home long.
You let yourself in with your key. I’m in the living room, and today the smile I give you when I first see you is uncharacteristically faint. I seem glued in place on the settee. Normally I’d be up to give you a hug.
“Andrew, are you—”
“I just got back from my parents’. My grandad passed.”
“Ah.” A beat passes. You dither in the doorway, filled with genuine sympathy but thrown off balance by my unusual reaction. “I’m sorry to hear it.”
My smile deepens as I look up at you, till I’m beaming. It’s very confusing. “Are you hungry? I’d love to make you something.”
A squirrelly little gurgle from your tum makes it difficult to deny that you could eat. You don’t bother to ask if I’m sure. I seem pretty sure. “What do you have?”
“Comfort food. C’mon.” I go to you then, animated and excited: no longer leaden. You accept my kiss with pleasure, especially the way my body squishes into yours. I hug you so suddenly that your butt jiggles. Then it’s to the kitchen we go.
I pour you wine and we toast. Then I begin to cook: mashed potatoes, sausages, gravy. Toad in the Hole for variation. I serve you and feed you where I can, acting in the manner of someone occupying previously the role they were made for. And as I cook and serve you and feed you, I talk. You let the words wash over you.
It was his time, he wanted to go, he had lived a full life, and he missed his wife. His kids around him when he went. No suffering: just sleep.
Thank you. Would you like seconds? Heh, only joking, don’t look at me like that. Open wide, my love.
I was looking at my dad. It was his father, see. The last of my grandparents. Anyway. We were laughing and joking because it’s kind of how we all cope. But he kept staring into space. He was… very sincere. It’s clear just how much this hurts him. He’s become warmer as he’s got older. It was kind of heartbreaking.
And I was aware that… I mean, I’m sad. I’m devastated for my parents, and my aunt and uncle. But I was aware of a sense of something completing. My grandad made no sense without my grandma.. He never really became a separate person.. Just waited. And so this is what he wanted and needed.
I’m going somewhere with this, I promise. But thank you. No, I just want you to enjoy eating. Want to fill you up.
Where was… Okay. So, sometimes, your hunger can be cruel. You take lives, you leave behind people to mourn. But in it… I feel the same sense of completion. By dint of what you are, by the fact that you feed on us, I feel like… the cruelty transubstantiates to proof of this natural order. We owe you our lives and when you leave someone to wonder what happened to their son or whatever, that’s not your fault. It’s… like, it’s the fault of a world that hasn’t figured out how to let you consume us all, every one of our eight billion people, one after the other.
So the world is a broken and painful place. That makes it feels right—so right–when you take one of us away from it. We die in you, we even lose every part of ourselves to you. It would be a tragedy but you remain. You, my perfect, transcendent Raven. Taking and taking, but giving us meaning and taking away the pain.
Heheh. Better out than in.
… I don’t know why I feel this way. I just know that I do. The world didn’t make sense till I knew that you existed. That there was a soul capable of compassion and tenderness, but which craves every other body and soul. That would siphon off the best of us, perfect is in its image, and let go the rest as waste. I didn’t dare hope you were real, but you are.
So you feel like the ultimate goal. The thing humanity is building towards. A way to make everything right, even if it seems cruel on the face of it, how you convert a living being into part of you. I guess existence is painful, right to the end. But you’re there to catch us.
That’s it. You’re there to rescue us. One after the other after the other. And I will dedicate my life to helping you. For as long as you don’t— don’t rescue me.
I shake my head. “That wasn’t as clear as it seemed earlier. But here, love, open wide wide for me.”
Batter with its freight of sausage (and light on gravy because I know you’re not a fan of too much sauce) finds its place, occupying your mouth for the moment it takes to chew it sufficiently to swallow. Kilos with down in your middle. This newest morsel’s passage into your stomach tips a delicate balance and provokes an eruption of gas that makes you blush.
“Shy?” I ask, with a smile.
“Feels disrespectful when you’re talking about your family,” you say, shifting uncomfortably. I notice quite how uncomfortable. You keep straightening like you’re in pain.
“Yesterday was a lot of food: child, pizza, cupcakes. Raven you know every aspect of your body thrills me. You are perfect.”
You smirk uncertainly but take me at my word. You unclench, and the knot of discomfort unrolls from your bowels. The attempt to make it silent is foiled by the walls of fat that make the cleft it must escape. Your blush causes me to laugh and kiss your cheek. Any scent doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
“Perfect. Okay now, you have a lot more to eat. Open wide…”