Eating Him

Eating Him

I’m not a day sleeper. I have to be almost dead to have that luck.  On New Years Eve day, 2015, I was indeed almost that dead. We were at a dinner party that should have led straight into tipsy, midnight countdowns, yet today, a wisdom tooth was making the calls. Specifically, tooth #32, lower right molar. After I arrived and took my coat into the bedroom, the host was showing us her ice cream machine and explaining that she’d made gelato with crushed nuts in it. I was standing there, a thirty-two year old woman in a long mesh, bejeweled tutu of sorts, with a younger boyfriend, and a primordial tooth throbbing its slow death at the back of my skull. 

Somehow I made it through salads and the beginning of meats, before I leaned over and started to whisper into Max’s ear the only thought I’d had for the last two hours. It had played in my head like the last dumb, out-of-place song they play at a dance club. The DJ increases it’s volume, intensity and speed, as its only purpose is to make every single person want to leave. “I fucking need this out! I’m not gonna’ make it through this-” I blurted out, and tears were already falling as all the faces turned toward me, just another crying woman at a party running into the bedroom. Max came in, all glassy eyed drunk, joking, empty handed. The usual. The host with her creamiest voice, brought in a Vicodin, a glass of stout beer, and a small ziplock of frozen nuts. I swished down the pill best I could with the head of the beer, then slumped down into a writhing ball with the baggie of nuts sticking out of my gaping mouth. “Please, God, just turn me into a squirrel,” I thought. Squirrels don't live with people. Squirrels don’t need surgery. From the divine grace of dark aloneness, I heard the vibes of the party gear up as I went unconscious.

“Are you hungry?” I asked some stranger, a man with absolutely beautiful lips who sat across from me. My stomach was grumbling with hunger. We were the only people in my childhood basement, which the previous owners had turned into a slick, swinger-type bar. The walls were fully covered in small, square mirrors, and the ceiling pressed down low with red lights. I heard the sound of someone breaking at the pool table, although I didn’t see one. That was my cue. I began talking, to him, and all my reflections, hundreds of them in all angles. My hair was dark brown again, and from beneath thick bangs, my words came out like a purr. 

“I like bowls. You know those heavy glass bowls with intricate feet? Candy bowls. My grandma always had coffee candy. Oh, also those Tupperware bowls, mint green, sunny yellow. How their lids snap down. My mom has big silver bowls upstairs, from her wedding, you just have to polish them for Christmas and stuff. I like turning bowls upside down, then they become pedestals. What would you put on there?” I waited for his thick lips to move, and right when they did, I interrupted.

“I like to try to balance bowls on their edges. I did that in a dance once. Put this big wooden bowl on the floor between my stretched out legs and kept hitting it, following with my bobbing head the way it sped up its bounce, righting itself to a stop. I always fill bowls too full with soup, and then I walk to the couch, and it spills out. I hate that. But— I just love bowls. I guess what I’m saying is— I need more bowls in my life.” 

   I laugh. “I really just love eating. The act of it. The final act. Curtains.…that Elvis Presley song, remember? God, sexy. Our stomachs are like bowls, right? Mouths are like two bowls, aren’t they? I don’t know if I could resist just trying—-"

“What?” He says nonchalantly, but looks scared. Over his shoulder, I see the word, “Intrigued!” written in dripping red lipgloss on the mirror. 

I lean way forward, and I begin to talk in whispers into the narrow space between our faces. “Not fast, but really slow. Might take days. One dinner, a breakfast, lunch, another dinner, breakfast, lunch again. Maybe that long. Maybe the eating is over when we are inversely alive…..Do you know what that means? Look here.” I press my fork on my cheek and then tap it a few times. His lips are parted, and he’s breathing through them. I can hear it. A mouth breather. Just like Max.  

I’ll show him what I mean. “It begins with the narrowing of space and the soft, invisible atoms of me and the soft, invisible hairs of you intertwining, thousands of interlocking infinities in a matter of moments. These moments matter. A lot. Then my lips are on the tip of your finger, not one, but then two, and then more. My tongue, with it’s wet brain, thinks your fear for you as it swallows your wrist. Its awakened pulse echoes, and you feel it double, which increases the speed and vacuum of the widening space. As my mouth reaches your shoulder, your head seems to break off and fall sideways to rest on your shoulder. Your eyes move opposite of that, they change colors from mint green, to ice blue, to paper white. You want to be my food, right? So, you stick your other arm in kind of fast, and my face opens. My face dives back over my head, its inside is milk glass and river shale and seal skin. My head is a mouth, my mouth is a bowl, and your arms are like long sticks of salted candy. I've never seen a tall, skinny bowl. Have you? You begin to dive inside of me now, your stomach is a dolphin, and my stomach is its joy and everything in me untangles and bursts apart. Your legs become my arms, and I am suddenly as tall as this room, and our two heads, one in and one out, are the moment that two pearls formed together a billion years ago. We exchange our pearls from the inside of our ears. Our whispers are pearls that roll out onto the body we’ve formed, roll into three days ago, before this happened and fall into next week, when we are alone."

(Dear reader, please insert for yourself a thought or two on what he does in response, how he moves.) Does he blush? A nervous laugh? A scoot back? Goosebumps? Does the High Life he’s drinking drip over his lips and down onto his shoulder? Is he embarrassed? Does he lean back and straighten one leg? Reach forward to grab her wrist? Or, does he do it all? 

I grab a small clam from a big, heart shaped, metal bowl that had appeared out of nowhere, along with my cat, Neptune who was now sitting on the table, facing me. I stick my teeth into the thin, salty, black crevice between the two sides of the shell, widening it, look up at the stranger to finish prying it open with my fingers. The stranger has disappeared, but inside the shell, I see a tiny Max curled up sleeping like the Max who had no problems passing out after he placed a blaring speaker of hideous music into our bedroom while I tried to nap, or the Max who used to woke me up in the middle of the night to call me an idiot.  I take tiny, blacked out Max, with his hand still resting on his crotch, and he’s so slippery it’s hard to keep him in between my fingers. Neptune’s eyes widen as this gristly morsel hangs there in the air.  My cat will eat just about anything I offer. He snaps his head forward, and I quickly throw this maxed clam inside a mouth of incisors, and I’m pleased as his predatory incisors gnash down, up, down, so instinctual, no savoring, only survival.  

I explain to Neptune’s funny, blank eyes, “I’m a sucker for things that are covered in shells, too, you know, like jewelry boxes from the 70’s.” My cat says in the plainest voice of day, “Who’s the greatest?”