Oh to Love With Soft Teeth
the last date with the butcher.
Maybe my work won’t taste like his name or stink with my affection for him someday, but today is not that day.
To eat something, you have to kill it. To entirely consume something, you have to destroy its previous form. Our affection, desire, and need for one another have always been about hunger. Because of this, I thought that would mean destroying one another. I was sure our love would be rooted in the horrors of our desire. The violence in which we spoke about each other or looked at each other. The way we stalked and prowled around each other, me imitating him and him reacting to me, each twitch of the muscle and curl of the lip threatening a much-needed release. In my dreams, he clawed at me with such ferocity his blunt nails sliced into my skin and tore me open. His affections always twisted and shattered bones, mangled me under the weight and force of impatience and greed. He would crush me simply without knowing his strength, chew me up, and choke on the pieces, not knowing his own hunger, at least until my blood would crust around his maw for weeks to come, and shards of my bone would be left between his teeth until his gums healed around them. I would rest at the pit of his stomach, dissolving and sloshing in the acidity, continually being loved as I became the very material of his being. Only then would he recognize the potential of carnality and, with that, his love for me—and my devotion to him.
Until then, I would quiver and shake under his dark eyes like a prey animal pressed to the corner of its cage; all the while, the door remained open for me to leave any time I liked. But I would stay there, feeling his gaze travel around the perimeter, clacking my teeth while he licked his lips until the wait was nearly as unbearable as the fear of the pain to come. So intolerable that I had begun to find a way to make myself bleed for him, wanting this cruelty and roughness. As if that would draw him closer to the cage. But he would sniff the air, and at the coppery taste of iron hitting the back of his tongue, his mouth would go dry, and the hunger in his eyes would be replaced by something I couldn’t then recognize. So, when he shook the snow from his fur and joined me in my cage, only to falter and fall to his knees without much of a growl or glint of any teeth, I almost recoiled—especially from his touch when it met mine with warmth and softness, as for so long, I had come to expect roughness and harsh cruelty akin to his desperation: bared teeth, clenched knuckles, and a bruising need.
[To utilize the symbolic image of the pomegranate—popularized due to its connections between the ripeness of fruit and its ruby red and blushed pink resemblances to meat—I would lay myself open, seeds bare for him, expecting him to scoop clumps of them from their roots with the skin still attached, crack open the shell and slurp the remaining fluids with too much impatience to do so correctly, only caring for his satiation. I imagine him licking the juice from my skin, gulping it down as it pools from the center, smearing it across his mouth, and massaging the fibers from his molars before his teeth melt back into the red and purple the same way they would tear into the musculature of a piece of meat. Yet, now, he took to cupping the shell and plucking each seed as if I’d laid my head in his lap and he was caressing my cheek, two fingers pushing between my gums to pull each tooth from their depths and polish them clean as if they were porcelain, he does so, so gently I hardly feel a thing. I try to think of other meat-like fruits and come up with raspberries, strawberries and plums.]
But I imagine he found me as one does after a long night of endless darkness. While amongst the trees, away from the meadows of flowers, I came to him as golden, buttery sunlight could have drawn the deepest bat from the jagged rock. And he met me in sweetness, in gentleness, curiosity lifting his fingertips into my light before he seized it, followed it into the crisp, blue skies of the morning, and felt me kiss his cheeks with my breath. Because it wasn’t him who entered my cage—there had never been any cage—only me seeking his darkness and luring him from it into the seasons between us. Yet, despite the blue melting from his lashes, the last frost of December wherein the date he came to being passed, the heat from his touch proved strong enough for me to doubt I’d ever known warmth, that the sweltering sun of my endless summers had become dull. Each pressing of his fingers to my skin made me feel a chill where they lacked, and when I couldn’t even bring my eyes back up into his to gauge his expression, instead, I watched our hands move around each other. I noticed where and how he was willing to touch me and found myself no longer wishing for the roughness I had yearned for before—in exchange for this.
Suddenly, there was a soft animal inside me. For so long, I thought I had gone completely rotten, blue, green, and purple with rot. I was worried even if he did sink his teeth into me that, the middle part, the sweet spots, the ripeness would have eroded into emptiness, and his teeth would fall through a black pit worse than cracking them on any seed. But then a spotlight flickered on, and there was still the lamb—always the lamb—with a pink nose, long lashes, curled hooves, and a look on her face like she would have sacrificed herself within a heartbeat if it meant anything to him. God knew she would. And because she was such a perfect little lamb, well, there was no way he could kill her… even if she begged him to. She lay in the center of the rot, blindfolded with a heart of fruit and preserved sweetness with his initials carved into her ankles.
His words guided me through, with nods of approval, a watchful eye, and then undoubting praise, and I now placed myself between his softened teeth, with no doubt he would bite down just enough for me to feel the pressure of his jaw, yet not hard enough for me to feel any pain. Only to hold me… I knew how much strength and force he was capable of but never how much gentleness. So, when I curled up and nestled closer, I would prick my finger upon his canine and let him suckle at the cherry red trickling down to my knuckle. With a soft purr, I would remind my beautiful boy of his appetite and the viciousness of our needs until, through my body, he learned to taste the difference between fruit and meat.