On a Tuesday night, I hang the lamp on the hook beside my front door. When I light it, the oceanic darkness that surrounds the house steps back, away from my hands, away from my face.
For a moment, I stand on my porch and look down the long driveway, and I guess what creatures might exist out there, circling around me, living invisibly.
I don’t know, though, and guessing can only keep the mind preoccupied for so long. I go back to my kitchen, and I fill the sink with water so I can do the dishes. It seems silly to use so much water on so few dishes. But when I do them one at a time, under the running water, trying to save time, I rush and hate it. If I fill the sink, stick my hands in the warm, almost clean water, then I enjoy washing the dishes. I take my time and do them well.
When I am done with my plate and am washing my single fork, arms come out of the emptiness of the kitchen behind me and wrap around my waist. A stranger. I go rigid. A man. His breath is murky on the back of my neck. Hot as it hits my nape, cold as it recedes.
I turn around to face him. As I turn, he kneels, his arms sliding down to wrap around my waist. He looks up at me. He is young and strong, handsome, placative. His chin digs into the top of my thigh, below the hip, nudging, nudging hard.
I stare at his throat and swallow. I move my eyes up to his jaw line. If I was going to eat him, that’s where I’d start. At the laryngeal prominence in his throat, that chewy cartilage, and I’d work my way up his thin skin parts and make my way over the hard edge of his jaw, swallowing his fatty tissues, his commissure of lips, my hands roaming over his clavicle and finding his jugular notch. I like to see the face moving, making expressions. I’d work my mouth over the tricky landscape of his teeth, those bone kernels clenched right now in proposition and fear and dim hope. I think of his stubble, how the small, hard hairs will prick me so that my gums have little incisions in them, bloodless but still painful for a few hours, like when you eat bread with a hard crust. I think of this, and my gluttony finds the tipping point, then slips into desire. I feel the plunge and pull in my belly.
I do not eat him. I take him to bed.
As I drag him through the house, he never gets off his knees. Just slides along, his arms around my waist, his face tilted up to me, his expression pleading. I think he can guess which decision I have made, but he does not want to make the wrong move, he does not want my mind to change.
The only lights on in the house are the ones in the kitchen and my lantern. When we leave the kitchen and enter the hallway, the darkness swallows us. But once we are in the bedroom, the moon comes in through the open window and lights up his face, whitens it, makes it glow.
My bed is a mattress on the floor. Not because I am so poor I can’t afford a bed frame, but because I like the simplicity of sleeping on the floor. I like to be far from the ceiling when I stare up at it. I like largeness of space.
I plop down on the bed. It startles him, and for a moment, there is a gap between us. But he clings hard to me, again, and lies down next to me, against my left hip, his legs down the length of me. I stare at the ceiling and not at him. As he clings, his hands roam over me. I give in to the approaching waves; I give in to his nudges, getting harder, more persistent. He makes mollifying, appeasing bleats.
The opening of my body is my favorite part. I savor the numb pleasure. He licks the skin of my hip. He licks and licks. His hands slide over my thighs, my knees. His saliva opens a hole in my skin. He hooks his fingers between my toes as the hole in my skin widens, and he slides his face into me, pointed chin first.
Now it is my turn to enter him. I close my eyes and concentrate. I ease inside. He softens and whimpers. Oh, that soft yield.
I explore him, widen into him. I become a more expansive being. My bloodstream travels new routes, finds the wonder of new passageways in his body, then returns to me a new temperature. All night, all reds disappear from the room, and a blueness fills in the empty spaces. I sigh and sing.
On a Thursday, I light the lamp again. My left leg is heavy now, and I walk tilted, off-kilter, dragging my husband along.
In between washing my plate and my fork, I pause and tilt toward him. I touch the back of his head fondly. I feel the pliability of his skull there. He has already started to atrophy.
When I look up, I notice a shadow has fallen over me. I turn. A new man, standing in the doorway. He is hesitant and afraid to enter. But on seeing my face, he drops to his knees, crawls toward me, moaning low. A smell of salt and exposed tidepools exudes from him. He crouches at my feet. He is less young, less handsome than my first husband, but he is more plaintive. His whimper has a desperate whine to it, one fine-tuned by long years stretched in loneliness.
When I take him to bed, he finds a place against my right side, his mandible cradled against my hip.
On a Saturday, while I am eating my meat, I look up and see a man crouching in the doorway of the kitchen. I stare at him, and he stares back. He keeps staring. He does not drop his gaze, and he does not move toward me. I find it rude. I turn my back on him as a warning. I can hear him biting his fingers, worrying his nails, knowing he messed up, not knowing how to fix it. I ignore him steadily, the beam of my ignoring centered on him while he backs away, moves from room to room of my house, his call an echo of desolation.
Once he leaves the house, I feel a lift of mood. It is fun to cast off a suitor.
My first husband has withered much. He is mostly just skin and a faint thudding. His muscles, limbs, organs, most of him, have dissolved deliciously inside me. All except his testes, which are still plum-plump, sperm inside pumping. When I want to, if I want to, it’s there, ready for me to take.
My second husband, though, still has a little muscle left in his face. He feels my elation and a lopsided grin smears over his chin.
In the morning, when I go to my closet to change, I see what the intruder has done.
He has stolen my favorite body. He has taken the hanger out of the spine and left the hanger in the closet, swinging empty now because I have opened the closet door in such a hurry. I rage, I growl. I am insane with remorse. It wasn’t my most beautiful body, or my fastest, but it was my favorite. And the intruder stole it.
All day I am stricken with grief. I think of my body, and it hurts so badly I have to stand in the middle of the room and hold my face until the pain passes. I think of my stolen body and how the throat stretched and collapsed. I made music out of some of the holes. The fingers were long and iridescent. Bless you, dear heart of a body, bless you wherever you are.
I have one neighbor who lives in sight of my house. I have always ignored him. I do not want friends. But sometime in the afternoon, I notice a change. When the sun hits his lawn, I see a new sign has been put up: NO TRESSPASSING.
If my anger was not so high, I would pity him. We are all losing trust in the world. It’s sad; it’s pitiable.
But this newness cannot be a coincidence.
I have never really known what he looks like. I have not paid attention before. Like I said, I do not want friends. If he had entered my house, I would not have recognized him.
That’s when I see him in the window. He isn’t staring at the street, the natural place for enemies to be.
No. He is staring out the side of his house, at me.
At twilight, I can hear him on the roof, screeching red. Like a bat, he loosens his sound into the world and waits for it to come back to him.
For the first time in my adult life, I leave my property. I take my husbands and wade into the surroundings, into the sounds of insects and rain and the ripple of breathing.
Inside, his house is eerily similar to mine. I do not like that he has the same kitchen sink, the same floorboards, the same unpainted planks for walls. I want to find some sign that he is lonelier, poorer, that he is living worse off in some way, but I don’t. I see the one TV, the one armchair. I see his bath mat, aged into the same color as mine.
I go into the basement and see what he’s been doing with my favorite body. He has laid it onto the stone floor, in the middle, where the grate is. He has been lying with it, his ginger membrane expanded into a halo. His hair, an aura, sealing them both against the cement as his breath fogs up his membrane. He has been whispering something into the ear of my body and not minding that the body has no senses to hear.
I stand there, seeing this, remembering it like they are my memories, when he comes from behind me. He wraps his arms around me. I go rigid, and he pulls me down. He whimpers, a lonely song, erupting out of him.
On the cold floor of the basement, he wraps my favorite body around me. He takes the head and folds it and cradles my head onto it. He must have tried it on, it’s so stretched out. He wraps it around us like a blanket.
He holds my second husband first and first husband second and then he looks me full in the face and holds us all.
I give in. I let him hold us. I don’t mind that he tricked me to be here, that his signals were not the right signals. They were still signals, nonetheless. We all do what we can to find love.
The throb of being a new being lasts all through the night. His heartbeat is strong and pushes, pulls, a deep tide that my heartbeat can submerge into. Sometimes even a strong woman likes to lose control.
But not for long.
When the dawn comes, I have had enough. A sliver of orange light slides in through the crack of window, picks up dust and brushes over his face, and I eat him.
He doesn’t want to be eaten. He thrashes and struggles and whimpers in supplication.
It is his own fault. After he made his mistake, he put everything on the line for love. I admire his creativity, but admiration does not mean I must succumb to him. He did not play the game right.
When I am done, I pick up my body and go home. We all do.
Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson
First Reader: Austin Dewar
Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department
Accessibility: Accessibility Editors