The Eater

A year to the day Steven left her, Kristen stood where he’d proposed when they were eighteen. An overgrown dell in the woods of Walnut Hill Park, just a few blocks from her apartment where she’d left her son Jake sleeping. The wisteria hung heavy as melancholic bells, marring the air with over-sweetness. She stood there, half wine-drunk and remembering, when she heard his voice:

 “Back again, huh?” 

Steven sat crouched in the hollow of a nearby tree, the same tree upon which he’d pressed her, kissing her, the night he’d slid a cheap ring on her finger. 

“What’re you doing here?” Kristen asked. 

“Waiting for you,” Steven said, standing. "Thought you might be here.” 

“Why?” Kristen asked. 

“’Cause I’ve seen you here before,” said Steven. “Plenty of times.”

 “You’ve been watching me?” She folded her arms as if to shield herself: slumped there, tousle-haired, a little mustard on her T-shirt from making Jake’s hot dogs for dinner. 

“Yeah, a while now,” said Steven. He pointed to some vague non-location off in the woods. “Took me a while to get the kahunas to come meet you.” 

“I can’t fucking believe you,” Kristen said. “You know you missed your last child support payment? Not to mention alimony…” 

“Look,” Steven said, stepping forward, shadow elongating. “I know how you’re feeling.” 

“No, you don’t.” 

“You’re missing me,” Steven said. “And I’m missing you too.”

She could feel her heart, hot and thudding somewhere in her mouth.

“You can’t just—” 

“Can’t I?” 

His hand slid over hers, the familiar callouses from the auto shop grazing her skin. Those times he'd come home from work, wrap his hands around her waist, cop a feel below, then find her hands as she swatted at him.

She pulled her hand away, turning on her phone’s flashlight. Its beam shone on his face, revealed his pale skin glowing moon-white. He didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink. Jake’s eyes, exactly Jake’s: blue, but near-lambent in the phone's light.

“Don’t,” Kristen said sharply when he reached for her hand again. His eyes scanned her face, then dropped to her neck, where a necklace of plastic beads hung to her chest.

“What’s that?” he asked. 

“Jake made it for me,” she said. “Birthday gift.” 

“Sweet kid.” 

“Last I heard from you, you called him ‘fat kid,’” said Kristen. 

“You know I never meant that,” he said.

“You meant when you left.”

“But I’m here now.” 

“You don’t have the right to come and go whenever you want.” 

“But I won’t go again. I can be here now. And as long as you need me to.” 

“What does that even mean?” 

“If you give me something,” said Steven, “I’ll come back. More than just tonight. I’ll come back again and again.” 

“Give you something?” Kristen asked. 

“Yeah,” said Steven. He pointed at the necklace. “That.” 

“Why the hell would you want this?” said Kristen. 

“Our kid made it.” 

“You can’t have anything of his.” 

“Well then, Krissy,” he said, his fingers tracing the length of her forearms, and how many times had she imagined this very scenario? How many times had she woken in the secular black of night from pastel dreams of this very rendezvous? “How about this, for now? This’ll do the trick.” 

He’d found the ring on her hand. Her wedding ring’s replacement, a cheap garnet stone at its center. A "weaning ring," her mother had called it. Kristen didn’t say anything as he drew her hand up first to his chest, where it rested and she felt the pulse of his heart, only it was much too slow. It beat like the sluggish bubbling of boiled molasses. 

He drew her hand to his mouth, placed her ring finger between his lips. She looked inside his mouth, past his teeth—too white—and saw fathomless black. 

“What are you?” she asked.

He bit down. There was a sparkle-bright crackle as his teeth broke the garnet stone. Then he slid the ring off her finger with his teeth and swallowed. 

“Now I’m yours,” he said. He kissed her. She fell into black.

***

“You’ve gotta eat, kid,” Kristen said the next morning. Jake swirled his cereal with his spoon while Kristen swirled her coffee with creamer.

 “Ok, Mom,” Jake said. He spooned five soggy Cheerios into his mouth like he was trying to swallow thorns. He looked a little thinner, too. 

“Look at me,” said Kristen. “What’s wrong?”

Jake gulped and just stared with his eyes like Steven's. Kristen reached out and placed a hand on his forehead. Clammy, dewed with sweat. She took his bowl, grabbed a thermometer, slid it under his tongue. All the while, morose and deflated, he said nothing. The same way he had the night Steven had left. 

 The thermometer beeped. Kristen stared hard at it a while: ninety-six-point-six. 

“What’s wrong? Jake asked. 

“Too cold,” said Kristen. “No school today, alright? We’re headed to Dr. Marsh. Grab a jacket, kid.” 

“Where’d you go last night?” Jake asked while Kristen tossed his bowl into the sink. Kristen paled, kept her back turned to him.

“Just for a walk, not far,” she said. “How’d you know I left?” 

“I heard the door,” said Jake.

 “Ah,” said Kristen. “How long have you been feeling bad?”

“Since last night.”

***

“Aside from the slight dip in temp, his vitals are otherwise normal,” Dr. Marsh had said. His reflexes? Normal. His somberness and taciturn disposition? Normal… for Jake. 

But was it normal, Kristen wondered with hot-hearted misgiving, that she found herself traversing the off-trail path of Walnut Hill Park again that evening, having given Jake a hot bath and an early bedtime? That she felt, for the first time in years, a teenaged giddiness while her child was so ill?

Steven was waiting for her.

“Figured you’d come back,” he said. She saw the birthmark on his neck, that cherry-colored splotch just above his collarbone. It hadn’t been there the last time. She recognized, too, that his teeth had yellowed, no longer unnaturally white. Goose-flesh embraced her, tight to her uncertain bones. 

“Don’t be an asshole,” said Kristen. 

“I’m not,” said Steven. “I’m back here too after all. And I was waiting. You left me last time.” 

“You told me I had to, didn’t you?” asked Kristen. It occurred to her she didn’t fully remember. Just that feeling of free-fall, of his arms around her. 

“No, I’d never say that,” said Steven. “But… well, I mean.” 

“What?” 

“I can’t stick around unless I get something,” he said. “That’s just how this works.” 

“Well, what do you want now?” Kristen asked. 

“You know what I want.” He was staring at her neck with near-vampiric restraint. She saw, in the faint light of near-dark, vermiculate blue veins running alongside his temples, which in the light of the waning moon had achieved a near-pellucid look, like that of fish eggs. 

“I told you… no,” Kristen said.

“Then…” his eyes roved her body, stopping only when they saw her wallet poking out of her jeans pocket. “Hmmm.” 

“You want money?” asked Kristen. “You're kidding.”

“There’s something more than money in there, I’d say.”

 Kristen blanched. 

“What, you want my old gym membership card? Expired coupons?”

“Open it for me?” Steven said, almost cooing. 

The words affected her like hypnosis: Kristen opened it. It was in the backmost card slot, what he was looking for. She understood what he wanted, as instinctively as she’d known her mother was dead before the police called. Too many sleeping pills. Possibly an accident. But how long had her mother spoken of loneliness? And could loneliness be inherited? Powerful enough to force something unwanted down her own throat?

Steven just smiled. 

Kristen removed the note. Crumpled. Water-stained so the blue lines blurred like the veins she’d seen at Steven’s temple. The ballpoint lettering was blotchy too, but the words were sharp in Kristen’s mind: words she’d written to herself to combat the loneliness. A back-pocket record of small gratitudes, heartfelt wishes, water-stained hope. 

“It’s as simple as handing it over,” Steven said cloyingly. “Then you can have me.” 

It felt as if a magnetic force guided her hand as she extended it to relinquish the note. Before it disappeared into Steven’s black mouth, she saw one phrase written in earnest: 

“I wish my heart were colder.”

***

“What’s wrong, kid?” Kristen asked that very same night.

“I feel really bad,” Jake said. He stood in her moonlit doorway.

Kristen sat up. She hadn’t been sleeping, not really, but dreaming in her restless way, the raw, waking world clawing at her. She switched on her bedside lamp, then gasped. Veins. The same she’d seen at Steven’s temples, but black and purple. Poison colors, wicked colors. But only for a moment. She blinked thrice and they faded, leaving only her pale-skinned child standing there in the dark.

“Come here,” she said. He shuffled to her bedside where she felt his brow, cold again. Out came the thermometer. Ninety-five degrees this time. He was shaking, too.

“What’s it feel like?” Kristen asked.

“Like falling,” said Jake. 

“What?”

“Like I’m being pulled down while I’m standing I guess,” he said. “And cold.”

She got him a cup of water, bundled him in a jacket, kissed his head. She remembered the first time she’d kissed his head, how it had felt like a magical imprint, a contract.

She drove him to the emergency room. His temperature rose back to ninety-six. His vitals? Normal. All else? Normal. Except, Kristen noticed as they lifted his shirt to listen to his heartbeat, his ribs were showing. His belly, milk-pale, small nipples the color of illness, and his arms, too, looked thinner. They took his weight: sixty-eight pounds. He’d been eighty-two only days before. Eighty-two. 

“Is he eating enough?” the doctor asked.

“Plenty,” said Kristen without telling the doctor exactly how much weight he’d lost because what would that say about her? But it couldn’t be her, simply couldn’t be, she’d practically been forcing the spoon down his retching throat.

They got home and she slept beside him in her half-sleeping way, and in her dream she saw the Steven in the woods. Skin the color of bone, worms and slugs tracked viscous slime over his body. He smiled with teeth that glistened like the pincers of stag beetles and said, “It’s cold where I’m from and that’s what you’d like, isn’t it? Because the colder it is, the less you feel. They say when you die by cold, you go sweetly to sleep. Yes, it’s cold here but I stay warm so long as I’m fed. I gobble the warmth and it’s so delicious, Krissy, my baby, my wife, and you can be with me and keep me fed with your s—”

***

She felt she was back in the woods of Walnut Hill Park before she’d even decided to be. What had even happened that day? Jake had warmed up enough by morning. He hadn’t been shaking and when Kristen had asked about the cold, he’d only shrugged, he’d only kissed her cheek, he’d only slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked, head down, to the bus stop where she’d watched him stand by the stop sign while the other kids chased each other and squabbled. (When Steven was around, before he’d resigned to calling Jake fat, he would’ve said, “Head up, kiddo.”) 

After that, she’d gone to work, put on her tech support hat. She’d answered phones, she’d told a woman it was “her pleasure” to assist in troubleshooting defects with her meal planning app. She hadn’t planned her own meals, had eaten sparely and without tasting. (When Steven was around, before he’d found other women on his phone, he’d bring her takeout.) 

She’d picked up Jake after school, had asked how his enrichment program had been, the one she’d enrolled him in so she wouldn’t have to find a sitter for him after school.” A teacher had commented on Jake’s weight loss, asked about his diet. Kristen had snapped at her, Kristen had said, “My kid eats more than enough,” (When Steven was around, he’d pick up the kid, put up with passive questions, drive Jake to McDonald’s and make him chubbier, but happy that his two parents were together and perhaps not always loving but solid and sure.)

Just like Steven was right then: solid and sure, staring down at her while he pressed her up against that tree. (And oh God, my arms are around him, oh God, he smells just like he did that night when I told myself I was in love, tire rubber and earth and Axe deodorant and oh God why do we have hearts at all?)

“Rough day?” Steven asked.

“Don’t talk,” said Kristen. “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

“Just feel?”

She nodded, this time into his chest. Felt herself go weightless.

“I can make you feel the best you ever have if you give me what I want.”

It seemed to Kristen she remained there a long time in the concave pit that was Steven’s chest. Then she began to sob and his hand found its way to the back of her skull, long tattooed fingers clutching her hair into tangles, and she felt the forcefulness, even the discomfort of it, but she felt the tenderness too. 

And with the same tender, stubborn force, her fingers found the necklace. Undid the string at the back. She didn’t look, only listened, as the beads clicked together, falling slack into the palm of her hand. 

“That’s my girl,” Steven said. He tilted his head back like a man about to eat grapes from the bunch. Into that black-tunnel mouth went the beads: hearts and flower shapes (you cried when Jake gave this to you, but Steven? Oh, he would’ve laughed, would’ve called Jake a queer for making something like that, so put it back around your neck, Kristen, put it BACK). 

Kristen would hear the snapping and chumble of Steven’s teeth on that necklace for the rest of her life. But it went silent, if only for a moment, when he said,

“Next, I want you to bring me the boy. We can be a family again. But for now…” 

He kissed her and it felt like a swallow.

***

Hours that felt like days later, she found Jake slumped over the toilet, his tiny body retching and heaving. When she looked into the bowl she found mud and earth. Crawling worms. And beneath them, a series of sparkling plastic beads.

She felt she ought to be screaming, but she didn’t. Instead of pushing the air out of her, the sight clogged her, prevented her from exhaling anything at all, and the cold was an illness, certainly. Maybe even a choice. One that grew. She needn’t a thermometer or a check-up to know that. 

“Are we going to the doctor?” Jake asked. “Why are there worms, Mommy?”

“Just a minute, Jake,” she said. (Dead things inside him. Her own dead things). “Just a minute.”

She flushed the toilet. Instructed him to rinse with water. She sat slumped on the bathroom floor like she had the night Steven left. The night she’d confronted him about the texts. The video files. The pills under the mattress. The ring he’d taken off his finger. The way he spoke to Jake. The night when, after he told her he never loved her, had only married her because he felt sorry for her, she’d found herself pointing a kitchen knife at him. She hadn’t meant to, had only been cooking and gesticulating wildly, but how had it looked to Jake? She’d gone to the bathroom instead of comforting him, she’d turned the light out, she’d slumped to the floor, she’d told Jake, “Just a minute, kid, just a minute…”

She’d called her mother, six months later and three months before her own death, who’d said she was glad the marriage was buried, to never unearth it again. Yet she’d gone back to that place where the ground was pregnant, not with Steven’s memory, but the shallow love of him. She’d gone back again and again, felt that fecund earth beneath her sneakers where she’d stood at eighteen, when she’d felt pretty as fresh spring grass and had thought with tickling pleasure that memories could be like seeds, could grow into flowers, into families. But what had come from that ground?

“I need you to come with me,” Kristen said turning to her son.

She looked at him like she ought to have the night Steven left.

***

The park was closed so they had to hop the automated gate. No street lights. A starving moon waned to a sickly crescent. 

Their feet whispered on the butter-cup-and-wildflower grass. It smelled like youth there. And sweat. And new life. The sounds of parks & rec games hanging in the air, inaudible but somehow tactile. Happy memories had buoyancy, a tendency to rise while the others got absorbed into the earth like so much heavy, cold rain, down, down, down with the worms.

“I’m going to make you better,” Kristen said to Jake as she steered him. “I think it’s my fault you feel bad, but I’m going to fix it, okay? I’m going to make it right.” 

They stepped into the trees. Soft grass became dead leaves. Their path narrowed. Things scuttled and slithered and watched unseen. Kristen turned on her phone’s flashlight. And soon they were paces away from the dell. Her right hand tightened around Jake’s lax one. Her left hand tightened around the hilt of the kitchen knife she’d brought. A knife she wouldn’t simply brandish tonight.

“Just one thing to do here,” Kristen said. “ Then we’ll get you home safe, and you've gotta eat something.”

Through the yawning darkness ahead came Steven’s voice:

“Krissy? That you?”

If only for a moment, the knife slipped in her hand.