roadside
By now it’s fair to say that I need you. If you disappeared I would… actually I haven’t got a clue how to end that sentence. I’d keep the faith, though. Know that you hate waste. I’d be wasted if you went away and didn’t take me with you in one form or another.
You don’t need me, though. We both like it this way. I spoil you and feed you, but you’re a hunter. If I disappeared I hope you’d care—in fact I know you would—but you’d be okay. I just don’t necessarily know about the times you hunt without my knowing.
Here’s a time you told me about.
Your car has just enough space for your curvy form. The driver seat must be cranked back pretty far so your belly doesn’t mould to the steering wheel, though.
When I asked what you were driving for you just gave me that mysterious smile, so let it stand: this happened not long ago, I don’t know where, in the middle of the night. You were driving down some steep hill. Cars, especially those driven by the young, have a tendency to speed, because it’s fun to feel your heart drop into your stomach. You didn’t drive like that, though. You’re sensible.
At the foot of the hill you drove past one of those regrettablely common urban sights: bouquets of flowers tied to the railings of the crash barrier. So far so mundane: you breezed right by it. But as your eye skipped on down the road, it caught a glimpse of a young woman crouched near the makeshift shrine. Something in her posture told you that she was mourning. Your empathy—I know you suffer from it, you don’t hide it well—kept showing you the image for a good half a mile. Eventually you turned around.
A little way down the road you pulled in and turned off your headlights and engine. Despite being quiet central, at 3am there aren’t many cars on the road, so you didn’t see anyone till you reached the crash site.
Despite your build you can be stealthy but you didn’t try to hide your approach.. The young woman looked up slowly as your boots crunched through the frosting leaf mulch on the courseway. She didn’t seem particularly alarmed. Her eyes were dull.
“Hi,” you said, clear and receptive like you were once trained. “I’m Raven. I noticed you by the side of the road. Are you okay?”
She sat on a boulder placed by the road builders as a deterrent to gypsies setting up camp, or whatever. You could see her hands shaking by the light of a streetlamp, clutching a phone whose screen was dark. She didn’t answer right away so you stopped a few steps back and waited. When it became clear she wasn’t going to answer, you made a show of looking around.
“Who was it who died here?”
“My brother,” she answered immediately. The phone came to light at a tap. The lockscreen showed a picture of two grinning young people with similar bone structure, cropped from a larger family photo. The gesture seemed to be reflex at the thought of her brother. She didn’t turn it to show you: your eyes are just very good in the dark.
“Your twin?” you guessed. You’re quite good at guessing age, too.
That got an appraising look from her. Still no fear at the appearance of a curvaceous larger woman in the dead of night asking questions. “Yes. Did you know him?”
“No,” you answered simply, taking that as your cue to come a little closer. You stood by the traffic-block boulder and looked over the assembled bunches of flowers. Some had begun to wilt, but but much. It was recent. “You’re still coming to terms with it, aren’t you.”
She flinched bodily. Wearing far too little for the weather, the poor thing was frozen and simply ignoring the fact. Black jeans and a too-short puffy coat over a simple band T-shirt. Hozier?
“‘Coming to terms.’ What are you on about? There’s nothing to come to terms with. He’s dead. Silly idiot.”
“What was his name?”
“Jim. James.” She released a shuddering breath. “Jim.”
You pursed your lips. “I’m sorry you lost your brother.”
Silence for a little while. You leant against the block, now, staring in the same direction she was staring. A rare car came bevving down the hill, sensibly lowering its speed before the turn at the bottom. Headlights illuminated you and the girl before darkness flooded back in. You were getting a little chilly yourself.
“How are you coping?”
“Peachy-keen, yeah,” she said, but there was no bite to the sarcasm. “That’s why I’m out here at silly o’clock, looking at flowers.”
“Why are you here?”
Her sneer fairly collapsed, drooping into an expression of exhaustion. Physical and emotional.
“I just… wanted a sign. I kept thinking, he had his last moments here. I didn’t want him to be alone. I wanted him to tell me he is okay. That he didn’t suf— suffer.”
It’s second nature now to allow your mind to wander paths parallel to the material world. It’s not clear she even noticed you unfocus and sweep the area for spirits, messages or impressions.
“Jim isn’t here,” you said, and the simple conviction with which you said it got her looking right at you. “He’s moved on.”
“You a mentalist?” she asked, a little shaken.
You gave her a smile that contained depths of experienced and handled pain. “Trust me. If his soul were still here, I would know it. He’s moved on.”
She stared into your eyes a good long while, trying to work out your angle, and you looked back peacefully. Emotions built up—suspicion, anger, uncertainty, sadness—that last one bubbling up and spilling over into something just shy of tears. “That’s almost worse.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well then he’s _gone _, then, isn’t he? He’s left me behind. On my own.” She wiped her dry eyes furiously with the back of her hand. “I mean good for him, getting into heaven or whatever, but I’ve got years without— decades without—”
Suddenly she pushed herself up and away from the boulder, angrily beginning to pace. She walked the length of the shrine behind the crash barrier, arms wrapped around herself, close enough to you that you could hear her chattering teeth.
“You miss him?” you asked, a gentle prompt.
“Yeah, I miss him! He was my— we were twins, and now I… God damn it, why can’t I cry?” She drew herself up facing the road with the heels of her hands pressed tight into her eye sockets. “It doesn’t feel real.”
“Take your time,” you said, your voice gentle as you stared at her posture. “Everybody mourns differently.”
“No it’s, like, that’d be admitting defeat. I don’t wanna cry. A part of me doesn’t wanna cry because that means I’m not going to see him again.”
“I can help with that,” you murmur, quieter and quieter as she works herself up louder and louder. Unseen, you push yourself away from the boulder.
“Seeing him again?” She laughs bitterly.
“No. Help you let him go. Make it hurt less.”
“Pfah. You some kind of counsellor?”
“No,” you murmur, from right behind her. “Nothing like that.”
She barely had time to register you hands seizing her upper arms before her whole world went dark. With your lips wrapped tightly around her neck you forced her staggering to the ground with your weight alone. It’s a strange feeling, hearing someone else’s voice or scream from within your own throat, but a by brute Pavlovian conditioning you now anticipate and adore it. You could trace her voice that screamed for help as it traveled from behind your teeth to the back of your throat; feel it muffle as her mouth slipped within the confines of your oesophagus.
Each swallow crushed her jaw closed and silenced her for a second. Swallowing wasn’t enough to get her in, though, so you bowed forward and walked her into your body.
When her head crowned into your stomach you heard that scream pick back up somewhere under your ribs. You held her there while you fought off her jeans. Nothing gives you heartburn like denim.
In the end this was her first time being prey and you have devoured literally hundreds of struggling souls. The trick is not to lose yourself too much in the orgasmic feeling of her sliding bodily deeper into you, but to take advantage of her fights and lulls. Soon, her bare calves were sliding along the length of your tongue and being claimed by your throat. She had curled up obediently in your fleshy hell of a stomach. As the last of her was chased down by a final wet swallow an answering gust of stagnant displaced air rushed out to report her capture:
~guh-bwoOoOAAauUuurrpp~
She fought like a demon against your internal walls. Through your deep layers of fat you could barely make out that she was speaking, but you could feel her little the heaviest butterflies in your stomach. The rocking and frankly the pleasure made you unsteady on your feet. Rather that kidnap her to the car as you had at first intended you ended up having to lean against the boulder and just breathe.
“That’s it,” you murmured, mostly to yourself as she began to slow down. Burning through her air supply. “Settle— oof— down, pet. I’ve got you.”
As you stroked your groaning, swollen belly, you felt her struggles change. From violent kicking and muffled screaming, to a rhythmic shaking, and… Ah, yes. Weeping. Full-throated, nothing-held-back crying, as earnest as a baby. Inside your belly she wept for her lost brother, for herself, for the cruelty of a world that makes of most of us prey. You stroked your belly and made soothing, cooing noises, tender as a mother, as her strength slowly failed and she succumbed to your digestive process.
When she was only slightly struggling you carried her squirming to the car and wedged yourself in the driver seat. Three massive belches were required to conjure the space to slip your belly back in place before the steering wheel. Heat began to trickle into your system, most obvious in your frozen fingers. Your body had worn through her defences and her blood was now pouring into your juices, trickling over the hungry walls of your intestines, and being claimed as rightfully yours.
Who can blame you for forcing another burp to enjoy her taste?
You wait until she is truly gone before turning the ignition. In the meantime you ponder how you might find the brother and catch him. You make a point of not leaving behind spirits who might be vengeful, and as her soul slips like the yolk from a cracked egg into your stomach acids, you wonder if it might not be a good idea to reunite them after all.