clean girl routine
a vignette of filth
Mint saliva smears against cold porcelain while rigid fingers cup the edge of the toilet. Curved ribs indent the thin cotton of a white baby t-shirt. The powder blue stripes of her pajama bottoms spill over the bleached tile as her toes press into it, and another shockwave of tension ripples through her elongated spine. It sends her hips forward, her quads shaking, her buttocks tensed, and her scapulas pressing together.
Chunky green splatters the interior of the toilet, a mix of basil, spinach, and bits of raspberry, resembling furry mold floating in the previously clear water, followed by the thin acidity of yellow bile. Her tongue hangs out from scrubbed lips like dead eel meat. She gags again, her throat burning, her tanned, lean limbs trembling, her hair messed, and sits back, her knees remaining spread, core throbbing. She wipes a string of saliva from her chin and closes her eyes. Numbed, hollow, clean.
The throbbing gets worse, the pang of pain in her stomach trickling lower. The act of vomiting was the ultimate form of control; like an everything shower that leaves you raw with caramelized exfoliator, smooth with butter yellow lotions, and cocooned in white silk satin sheets. Control through submission—a ritual of masochism embedded in absence.
She brushes her teeth again, flossing between sore gums and scrubbing over the white shiny enamel of each tooth till pink suds of foaming paste pool around the silver drain. She washes it down with cold water, rinses her mouth out, then swishes with melted coconut oil that glosses her lips once more. She can still feel the churn and twist of her gut, the bubbling of nausea that seizes the base of her throat. The emptiness within her, aching, demanding to be filled.
Instead of getting to an empty bed, however, calloused, sturdy fingers slipped around her waist and pulled her across the mattress, and she felt like she was floating. After being peeled back, stripped of the delicate fabric stretched over her body, she felt as though he was holding her stomach itself, bare, kneading the tender mulberry, slick tissue, and squeezing his fingers into its rubbery texture just enough to massage the swell of sloashing fluid and sense its emptiness. Not empty enough, however.
Skin melting over each other, sliding, tacky, like mucous, warm leather. More shudders, this time from euphoria. The feeling of a jalapeño stuffed green olive stuck in her sternum, her chest tightening over itself. He squeezed again, as if drawing it out of her, urging—prodding, stiffening, ribs hollowing, and widening as her pelvis wriggled over the sharpened splinter of pointed wood.
Compared to the cool sharpness of the tile cradling the edges of her figure, she was now enveloped by the cushioned beige of coarse black hair and a steel blade covered in meat. The sickness continues to rise, a feverish chill coursing through her body. Then, his fingers were between the hard white of her teeth, pressing into the velvet of her tongue, spearing through her middle and opening her up like slicing open a lemon and tearing through the thin, translucent skin and picking out the seed. He moved through her with the same sawing motion. And in response, she trickled over him, felt herself open up, both between her thighs and from her mouth.
More yellow to coppery bile covered his knuckles as she widened her jaw and lurched herself onto him. He kept poking her uvula, circling the pad of his finger against it until retracting his saliva-covered digits and latching his own mouth to hers. He wanted to taste the sickness rising from her, pull it out on a string, and observe its shiny, grey scales and slits for eyes.
When she threw up again, her spine arching, falling, the heat and writhing contractions in her core suddenly popping like yolk, the insides of his cheeks began tingling, and his tongue burned with the venomous bite before he swallowed it down like gummy cough syrup medicine. The thin fluid splashed over onto the pillow when she lifted upward slightly, and stained the sheets at the same time that the salty milk of his discharge erupted from hot pink and mauve tones—the exchange of one release for another, for the control of giving it up.
Pushing her breasts into the palms of his hands and wincing as his nails embedded around their swell, soon, his cheeks hollowed and followed his hands. Nipping at the pucker of her buds and swirling his tongue around them in the same way he’d tangled it previously with hers. Like it wanted something more.
She threw her head back, panting heavily, taking more from him while her tongue swept from the parched dryness of her mouth over her lips and tasted the zest of her sweat. Covered in filth, despite feeling it spilling out of her, she found herself full again, ready to give, this time of sweet sugar and a different sickness: desire.