swimming 03

After a meal like that your whole body shunts its resources into digestion. You are lulled into torpor by the ebb of blood from everything except brain, heart and guts. I am lulled into a sort of fascinated waking trance by the sounds your body kicks out.

Even over the car engine I can hear your guts purring around their denaturing contents. It took a lifetime for those two bodies to build themselves. Won’t take a lifetime to destroy them, but even your honed predator’s body will take hours and hours to reduce then to chub.

As we cruise along the nighttime streets I’m thinking about your body.

Your stomach is patterned with glands of a hundred varieties. Nerves in the lining detect stretch—God, but they must be firing right now—and stimulate those glands. There are chemical sensors in your stomach. All together, the girls are kept in the perfect environment to simmer away into soup.

Let’s not forget the stomach walls. Perhaps your legs are stronger in terms of brute power. But whatever your stomach exerts its strength on is already pinned inside it, like a shell in a nutcracker. Even as I think of this, a femur cracks inside you like a gunshot. I thank goodness that you are a little too sleepy to remark on the whimper this draws from me. I refocus on the road.

By the time we are home and I’ve helped carry your handfuls and handfuls of glorious flesh upstairs and into the bed, more than just your stomach is involved. The expense just beyond your pylorus is particularly interesting. Liver, gall bladder, pancreas. I have them too, but yours are adapted to a very different challenge. Are they larger? Do they work faster? They didn’t look too different on the X-Rays lying in a folder under your bed. But your prey couldn’t tell, even if they were alive as they passed through your duodenum. All they would know is that bile, alkalines and enzymes drool out in an exquisitely tuned ratio, intermixing with the mulch and breaking it down further.

Did you know you have a sort of second brain in the gut? Of course you do, you’re as interested in this stuff as I am. Its job is to handle the processing of food. I wonder if you can feel it working.

When I start my massage I can feel the last vestiges of Chloë’s body, swallowed entire, as a caramel-wrapped hazelnut in your stomach. Harriet, except for bones left in the pool, is a smooth red paste eager to feed itself into your bloodstream. Though eaten last and at leisure, she overtook her sister on the race to your bowels.

I imagine your intestines feel like velvet. Deep pressure with the heels of my hands helps shunt the girls deeper and deeper. We both know the lay of your internal maze. The parts of your dinner that you claim for your own flow on your blood through the mesentery, that folded canvas structure supporting your guts, and then through your liver. Living alchemy performs the final conversion from broken-down swimmers’ flesh into whatever your body needs in order to grow fat and happy and healthy.

And as the night wears on and my hands work deeper, we come to the end of the line. You, my beautiful, graceful, clever, silly, sexy Raven, contain a cess-pipe into which the remains of Harriet and Chloë charge like dogs impatient to be let out. Your body sips back the water it flooded them with. I fancy my fingertips can make out the thickening of your colon as it fills with exhausted flesh. It will be some time before you are ready to evacuate them.

As you sleep, I place a kiss on your belly: stomach, small intestine, large, thanking each part of you for its work in feeding you. And for the result: a body which, though casually splayed in repose, grows ever more beautiful with each life absorbed.