The Last Bite
I'm on a diet now.
What distinguished the “big bad” from all the other wolves? What made him so terrible… so repulsive, so ferocious, and dangerous? It was a question you had asked yourself that evening you first stepped into the thick tangle of green pine coating the rolling, chocolate-brown dirt blankets. Kicking up the crumbling clay material beneath your shoes as the straw basket bumped your hip, humming along a tune you’d overheard your mother mumbling to herself as she squeezed out the last of the water before hanging up the linens next to the garden; however, it was when you met the soft eyes of the man whose gaze alongside complexion matched the earth as though he’d come from it, was molded from the trees themselves, with lips sculpted with a pale pink curve from cream skin, you began to get a sense of the answer. And it wasn’t until under the glow of the crackling fire, with wood turning to a charred black under its heat just as your skin seemed to melt under the tender paw of this wolf’s, that you came to full realization of why he had such a title.
My fingers would move over the keyboard, searching for the antidote; the perfect thing to say—the fix-all phrase. My fingers would weave together a tapestry of unclear images, mostly colors, indiscernible meanings; try and decipher them only to leave with pin pricks and fresh tears. I remember writing about grief, specifically… this new thing that was coming rushing at me, the way a cold wind blasts against your face and seems to seep into your bones, or an angry, frothing white and dark blue wave rises up before swallowing you whole in a storm. Grief was a violent, numbing thing. This grief specifically. One you could see coming, a dark shadow, the murky cold depths of a lake you can feel slithering up your legs, tightening, just about to pull you down. Desire was hot, stuffy, sweltering, sticky. It’d melt the cold.
Grief severs at the tongue, not a clean slice but a yank, and leaves a child screaming and gurgling, sputtering its own blood. I wanted him to gulp me down at the stem, pluck the nerves out, and taste this. Know this truth. That even though I was grieving, that grieving was barreling towards me like a bear in the woods or possibly an angel, and all I could do was stand there and watch its jaws open and spew drool everywhere, licking its chops like some perverse butcher grinding his crotch against tender, beaten and sliced flesh laid out on cold steel, standing there and screaming, no, crying, begging for it merely just to slow down—I always knew this day was coming, of course—I still wanted him. Strangely, desperately, downright pathetically. I still craved.
I always felt hunted by him. On the run from his desire—that if it caught me, if he ensnared me in the reflection of my own need for him like a warped reflection, it would result in some grotesque consequence for both of us. The hunger I had for him was never filling, though it possessed me, flooded me, hollowed me. Dug through me tooth and nail so I was empty for him, ready to drink him in with each glance. I thirsted for him as much as my gums ached, and my belly throbbed for the nourishment of his tenderness. My mouth grew dry, and I saw his lips glisten and the blue running just beneath the surface of his pale pink skin, and I thirsted so deeply that water could have never sated it.
Writing about anything else but him became an act of trying to make sense out of something I couldn’t see. Churn out words, yank them free, disembowel myself. And when I cut myself open like any artist does, expecting the foul pungent smell of the different colors inside me to reveal themselves… yellow, black, pink, white, grey, red, purple, blue, orange… well, the smell was there, but nothing came out. So I would reach my hand in, sift around the silken darkness, trying to grasp for anything, my fingers wriggling around in the humidity of the cavity and pushing between muscles, occasionally grabbing onto bone, waiting expectedly for anything to slip into my palm, breathing in the aroma of past ideas like old perfume, inhaling deeper, sucking it in harder, and typing, then deleting, then typing, then deleting. Rinse, suds, rub, rinse, repeat.
If I could make meaning out of it, it would give purpose to the emotions. I just needed to tear it out of me, get a hold of it, put words to it.
Amongst these efforts, I contemplated a great many things, including the dispositions of my Pilates classes (or rather any guided exercise class) with “Pilates tueur psychopathe: qu'est-ce que c'est? A culture of adding tension to lose it,” wherein I was also going cold turkey for the hundredth time on the butcher and his crude, grotesque shop. I was figuring out he didn’t own a single knife. Not a single one to his name.
Isn’t that ironic?
Hold it in, ladies! That’s it, hold it. Squeeze. Now pulse, pulse, pulse. Remember, precision, control—don’t lose it!
Don’t lose your control. Don’t ever lose your control.
Loose skin sagged over tight spandex that bunched above the hips and pinched between the thighs. Hips settled against plastic as metal springs slapped and flat glutes squeezed together. Fat squished together, the lumpy adipose with primaries and pastels melting over it, jiggling with the springs. Aside from the shaking of thighs, the squeezing of shallac nails, and the pursing of bubblegum lips.
In a program that advertises itself on reducing stress, why are group workouts so stressful? Why, in a culture that is so fixated on the reduction of assumed daily stresses, also fixates itself on borderline neurotic levels of high-strung activities? The thoughts nagged at me while I drove the reformer in my pilates class back with my foot, gripping for dear life onto the bar your feet are supposed to rest on. Instead, my knuckles turned white as I clenched my booty and pulsed to the appropriate tempo of David Byrne’s equally high-strung vocals as he throttled out WHAT IS THIS? in quivering French. I don’t know, David, a group of upper forties to fifties suburbanite mothers in outfits that cost them more than $500, surrounded by mirrors, each of whom can’t stand their reflections, trying to feel at least twenty years younger, trying desperately to
TIGHTEN UP!
The instructor’s voice pierces over Byrne’s in a squawk. My back twinges and my knee pinches while I survey the rest of the girls. Some of them let out a swift whoo! As if what we just did resulted in any muscular exertion. I remember the grating edges of steel digging into my palms, the feeling of hundreds of pounds cradling pink flesh that crackled and swelled beneath it. The way my heart would thrum and slam against my ribs in a way that reverberated through my ears like the bass of an EDM song. And his voice, melting the strain, his hands near in case. Just in case.
But like anything, my mind couldn’t peel itself free of the meanings he gave me. The face of emptiness and absence always led to an inclination to find ways to fill it. I’ve always found this tendency to be filled with pain. These last 3 years have taught me it’s easy to become a masochist. What’s difficult is to become a realist, despite them being rooted in the same displeasures.
I had another guy tell me once, while we were supposed to be… flirting, I guess: “You seem to be really stuck in the past.” I threw up a little in my mouth. Where the hell else am I supposed to be? The past is all I know.
Relieving one stress, a source of tension, but adding another. But masochism never means anything when it’s unnoticed, left without witnesses. The butcher was mine. And I was his.
I drew my eyes down the jagged white line that curved down the length of his forearm and cut through his palm. I feel my fingers twitch as my shoulders lean forward, itching to reach forward and drag my touch across the risen flesh. The creeping desire to touch him where it hurts starts to bubble up inside me. The scar is clean, curling around his elbow and ending in the center just beneath the soft pad of his middle knuckle. When I meet his eye next, through the silence, I can almost hear him whispering for me to run my finger down it. Press into the knots, see if he can feel anything through the damaged nerves. In previous ruminations, I would always put tongue to teeth and pronounce his name and describe his being with a metallic twinge and a silver chill. But now, through the pale underside of his arms, the pink blush of his elbows and fingers, the pinch of his cheeks, standing so close to him to feel his warmth coming off in waves, I realize this boy is made of meat and bone. When I asked to see it again, it felt like I was asking him to undress right there and then. The question was choked out of me by desperation, and for some reason, I couldn’t stop it. I hadn’t ever felt hunger like I did wrapping my fingers around soft skin and hard muscle beneath, inspecting the damage and wanting to open it back up again. He always wanted me to look. Always gave up a wince, a cry, a whimper, a limp.
My morning pages, therefore, naturally, began to smell like him, taste like his name. But also the shame that would follow. My writings, this page, centered around me, projectile vomiting the residue of this new fixation I’d become addicted to the cycle of, day in, day out, the potential of the hurt. The danger, the masochism. That rush of pain he offered. But other than his eyes, away from his attention, I was left in the cold tundra of reality, white and grey and blinding. So I would keep my eyes shut.
The morning winks at me with a pale golden light. I suppose it should be beautiful, but ever since I caught the glint of your gaze, like espresso percolating from the dark granules of ground coffee, frothing over around the rim and pulling me deeper, scalding me as I drowned, the eye of the world only threatens to burn me. Its heat seemingly glows from within. I pass a thicket of trees where the bark has scowled into various expressions. They have eyes, too. Eyes that sink into the soil and reach out to tangle you in their sights. I lower mine, hastily, too ashamed to be looked at with such knowingness.
The past is where I make my meaning, like a bubbling and boiling witch’s brew in an iron cauldron, puffing purple sparkly smoke. I conjure images from the past, crack it open, slurp it down, chew its meat, spit it back out, and feed these scraps of my memories to… you.
Isn’t that what being an artist is? Isn’t that what everyone wants me to be? Isn’t that what I call myself? So why, when I do that, is it so shocking? Vile? Why do I get tomatos thrown at me and a rope around my neck?
— I ask, my feet dropping back to the wooden platform. The crowd goes silent, dark, and the lights dim overhead. Then, a voice from this darkness: “You’re being dramatic, we never did that!”
God forbid a girl wants anything.
I recently read an article on male versus female masochism in horror films; the author distinguished the two by stating that male-centered monstrosity (where the monster is male) is often the result or catalyst of self-directed masochism. Meanwhile, female monstrosity lacks pre-monstrous masochism, and an act of self-mutilation/injury/metamorphosis does not usually cause a woman’s monstrosity. Instead, the woman is actively victimized by others and, as a result, turns that injury outward into sadism—thus becoming monstrous via her trauma, rage, and grief. We very rarely see masochism embodied by the female horror character uncorrupted. The author also touched on the significance of female menstruation as the representation of corruption or comorbidity to monstrosity within horror, referencing The Exorcist’s infamous self-mutilating and blasphemous masturbation scene with the splattering of blood against Regan’s thighs as alluding to a period alongside the corrupting act of self-pleasure. With this, it’s not difficult to reason that blood, especially erotic blood, has always been feminine. The woman is constantly bleeding. Maybe that’s why women also absolutely adore horror as a genre—we get to see others bleed, too—but compared to the male body, blood on the feminine is seen as evidence of corruption. It’s representative of violence, and in that violence, sex.
I’ve been mulling this idea over a lot, not because, as an avid horror lover nor film student, I hadn’t made the theoretical connection before, but because in the way it was proposed, this sentiment of female corruption via external forces/pressures/evils has wormed its way through my thoughts, especially in connection to the postulating of my own archetype of the Carnivorous Lamb and Rotten Girl, conceptualizations and projections of perversion.
True masochism is when you search for the suffering. Use the past as a knife that comes from within you. Pull it out, wet and shiny, and show it off. Mangled and deformed. Stab yourself again. Create new wounds. Let people stick their fingers in you, deepen those wounds, spread them open, look at how pretty they are. Always at the core, no matter how spoiled, just a girl, looking to feel something.
Pearls are produced within the mantle folds of oysters when irritants, parasites, or foreign substances invade or become lodged within them. To protect the rest of itself from the object, a pearl sac, then the materials used to create its shell, covers the invader until it becomes fully enveloped.
Long lashes grazed the rose-stained cheeks of a young butcher who stared down at the strange object he found cradled in the center of his broad palm with beady eyes; upon finding the specimen, he examined the bivalved shell’s coatings of glossy, kaleidoscopic growths and found they encased something warm and beating in the center, hidden behind a thin seam. He stroked gently until blunt nails scraped against the rocky edge of the shell while thick fingertips attempted to push inside. Veins branching over the blushing roundness of wide knuckles, dark brows tugged further together, and a pale tongue swept over chapped lips with frustration following a few more attempts.
Matted fur and stuffed busts look downward at the newest addition with a curious tilt of the head or a sneer of the lips, baring bleached and polished canines. At the same time, blackened, beady eyes reflect the gentle yellow glint of the dim light overhead, making them look almost alive again. I feel them mocking me, in a way, judging my stature and rating the effort of the kill, the quality of the meat, even before he’d made the first cut. I wanted to beg and plead with the faces all around me, but my insides are so pretty! But I knew I wasn’t just another animal that had crossed his path in the woods at the wrong place, wrong time. No, I’d practically laid myself at his feet. His greatest game yet. I could hear the scoffs. But I also knew that once I got myself under his quivering knife, I would be his forever. And of course, he would first take my teeth.
The blade fit snugly between my gums, the edge slicing the pink upward until the roots of each tooth were carved from the holes, the horned ends snagging and nerves popping, such as slick, delicate bases of tiny trees being yanked from deep in the soil. In that way, my mouth would be his grave. Each tooth was a stone with his initials carved into the back of them, his meat dissolving and melting against the back of my throat, filling my stomach and bubbling with salty-sweet milk to mist the fresh flowers. Nevertheless, blood gushed from the fresh wounds like overflowing cherry syrup from a slushie machine, sputtering from my lulled tongue while his hard-knuckled, long finger craned my jaw open wider, and I gave him my hunger to wear around his neck.
Porcelain dust swirled in the air following the drilling of holes into each of the teeth, which he polished and coated in a protective gloss to prevent damage. Then I saw how he showed them off and how pretty they looked sitting atop his clavicles, the chain resting below his sharp Adam’s apple, and how their bite marks still indented his soft skin elsewhere. The bruises painted the contours of his musculature in translucent lavenders and baby blues. Me giving him my teeth to wear, just as I gave him my bite, only made my stomach rumble louder when he bore my violence proudly, brought others’ attention to it, and flaunted it as if I were some predator he’d been conquered by, revealing his injuries with a grin before telling them of my devotion—such a refreshing tale of survival. I giggled even now as he recounted the events. Acting bashful and embarrassed over how we battled while pressing my tongue into one of the holes in my mouth, causing the nerve to flare up and make the entire gum throb naturally. It was a familiar sensation.
The salty brine stings my tongue as the vodka cleans my breath and burns my throat. I feel it swirl thoughts and throb thick in my temples. The chilled glass tips between my fingers while the stuffed olives—two to be exact, stuck on a wooden pick—swirl along the rim. My lips wrap around the bottom one, and I let the plump green split between my molars. It has soaked up some of the vodka, adding to the bitterness. But nothing is as bitter as his eyes. His gaze was as dark as dark could be, as blue as the night sky lacking in stars, as black as rotten, wet soil beneath heavy blankets of old trees. They reminded me of a cow’s eyes, and in this darkness, I could always hear the swarming buzz of flies landing amidst dark lashes. I chewed the last of the olives and swallowed while thinking these morbidly lustful thoughts; at the same time, my eyes trailed from the thick brown burls that had begun to grow out since his last hair cut down his throat, over the ridge of his Adam’s apple—never ceasing to enjoy the idea of apples just a little more because of it—down to the broadness of his chest.
There’s never any point I can’t indulge the sight of his shoulders, how his chest rises and falls in heavy puffs that flare his nostrils and redden his cheeks more. How his stomach rounds out before sturdy hips lean out to solid thighs and round glutes. Everything about him is an animal. From the way he looks at me to how he holds himself. How he moves. I lick the salt from my lips and nibble on my cheek, my heart rate increasing until I feel myself quivering like a rabbit. I try to recall the tone he’d used to describe me as such once. I try to cling to any memory of his voice until every nerve in my body pinches. I hold myself still, despite the urge to run away, to cower away from his eyes and my urges, the vodka burning from my stomach to my veins and worsening this dizzy feeling.
How does anyone stomach their desire? How does anyone swallow its vulgarisms and not cry out in pain from its vigor? How does anyone not bury their teeth and nails into it? I can’t get caught up in it. All I see is red. Red and green from this dirty martini I’m gulping down too quickly now. All I can see is him—towering over me, hunched and ready to grab me, but he doesn’t. Why doesn’t he? I’m always right here, ready, waiting, terrified but ready, needing him to just grab me—I bite my lips raw and taste the copper smear and wish it was his. Is that why? Because I would enjoy him in such desire, it’s indistinguishable from hunger? How do I tell him I’m scared, too? I’m terrified of what my need has turned me into. I’m scared of what I might do to you—how intensely I’d love you. I’m petrified of my own adoration for you. I take another gulp of my drink until the last drop fails to fulfill its empty promises and I realize the aching of my fingertips aches to press themselves into your flesh, in those chocolate curls and to tug till they melt around my knuckles, to bite the apple of your throat so the core crunches and red pours out as hot as wax. I realize I want your teeth on my shoulder, on my hip, on my rib—I want to devote myself to you in the most biblical ways. I want to worship you, I want you to put the fear of god in me. I want you as an angel wants divinity, as the devil craves sin, so deliciously, so dangerously. I put the glass down and swipe a hand over my forehead. What am I even thinking? Is that why you hesitate? Is that why you leave me gnawing and snapping at my leash, growling at strangers who look my way? I’m yours, I’ve always been yours—but when will you have me as yours? When will you see it?
I glance back over to him and imagine he can hear all my thoughts, he can see the desire burning off of me, oozing from my pores. He can smell it coming off of me in waves—surely—I look away just before he can make eye contact with me, keeping my head low as if I would get punished for daring to look up as he ponders my presence, takes me in. But I like the feeling of him looking at me, the way he drinks me in, the way I can’t help but lay myself across at his feet and mutter over and over again, I’d let you do anything to me. Do anything you want to me, please. Kill me, if you want, I just want your hands on me.
I feel the pressure of his hands on my hips, the strength of them pinning me to his lap. I can hardly pull myself up any farther before he snaps me back down. I tighten my hold around his neck as he buries his face in my chest and nips at the delicate, flushed skin. I arch my spine in an attempt to bring myself higher up on his palms before he seethes and pushes me back. There are tears in his eyes, and he can hardly let out an exhale without it turning to a grunt or growl. Animal. He’s shaking, too, holding me as close to him as possible as our breaths mist one another’s cheeks and our tears sting our tongues and our teeth clink together in their hurriedness, our kisses turning quickly to bites. I bite him because merely kissing him isn’t enough, and it will never be enough. I tug at the skin until he winces and buries a hand in my scruff, yanking me away like a misbehaving kitten.
Desire sloughs off of me in ways, oozing from the open wounds and gashes—my need for him, and by proximity, was like radiation poisoning. Everyone could see its glow, a warm tint to the space around me, toxic and contagious, the way my eyes darted nervously back and forth, the way blood beaded at the cuticles of my nails and beneath the beds as I tore them from the thin pink skin. I would look down at the blood, smear it against my tongue, and suckle at the tip with a huff at the sting. It was as if a spotlight had begun to shine down on me, the aisles flooding with curious shuffling feet while people took their seats for the show, their molars grinding the naked kernels and tongues scraping the salt off popped corn, their lips becoming oily the more they shoved it in their faces and reached for more before grabbing the perspiring cardboard of their soda and washing down the bitterness with the crisp bubbliness of a cola or Pepsi, strawberry or cream soda, artificial and quickly dehydrating them even further, demanding them to suck more up through the transparent plastic straw bitten between their teeth. Sweat breaking out on my brow from the harsh white light blinding me from above, I can’t help but fulfill this role for them, give them the performance they’re looking for, because the very performance their seeking is that of me—they seek to humiliate me, catch me in my natural state and pluck and poke and grab at whatever they can to make fun of me. I stand there under the spotlight and try to look out onto the crowd with a furrow in my brows and my eyes squinted against the harshness, but all I can see is the vast darkness that fills and pulses from the other side of the room. I cling to the sight of him from my peripheral, half in the spotlight, a small portion of it, dim, but there, keeping him in their sights, too, but not enough to make him the spectacle. They don’t notice his glances. They don’t see his eyes sweeping over me, lingering on me, because they don’t care. Everyone cares, though, to see how desperate a woman can get. Desire is pathetic, dirty, slick, slimy, and disgusting. It’s foul and debased. It’s clingy and needy and grotesque. I lie on my back, stiffen my legs and arms in the air, crooked and dying, and allow my plump, hairy body to be split open so my green bug organs can be extracted and observed in morbid curiosity. The goo and mucus stringing between cushioned organs dribble over my sagging skin, and all they can do is gag and howl at the obscene, and I’m already dead.
I’m a dead bug on the concrete they purposefully smash under their foot and smear into the grey so my blood seeps into the grout and trickles down the stems of weeds, and they can scowl at the mess I’ve made. I’m just a girl, I would say. I’m just a girl, and you seek to destroy me. You seek to smear me, crush me, extract everything I have, chew it up, and spit it out, and tell me to scoop my insides back up from the ground and shove them back inside and apologize for getting my blood and viscera on the floor.
But here I am, re-spinning, re-chewing the same materials, throwing my scraps to the floor, and grimacing at how gruesome they’ve become. They used to be pretty, you know. And this post used to be about grief. Maybe this is part of the process, digging up what’s buried and emptying the grave and refusing to keep any skeletons. Ones that aren’t mine to keep, at least. I still have the locket.
I always thought it was about losing control—that I could lose control with him. But it was always about taking it, wanting control where it could never exist. That was the pain. The root of all suffering. I needed something he didn’t have in him.