by Valo Wing
(1000 words)
To be fed is love and I eat her as one starved: smeared with figs and honey, red chili flakes a constellation scattering over winter skin, paired with effervescent rosé that goes down like a mouthful of gravel. It doesn’t take long for her to digest, malleable and soft as she is. My stomach acid devours skin, devours hair, devours the faintly pulsing muscle of heart and starbursts of alveoli. All but her teeth decimated in a matter of minutes; honey still stuck to my gums long after she’s gone.
The kitchen is a riot of lit candles clashing against sterile bulbs.
“That’s demented,” my current girlfriend huffs, mouth stained red from pinot noir. “People care what you have to say, Sav.”
Cooking—my mother taught me—is the only safe way to express your love. Let the food be your voice. No one cares what you have to say, but everyone appreciates a beautifully prepared meal.
Melo gesticulates wildly with the wine glass. Droplets of ruby splash over the rim. “In fact, I argue you could get away with saying more. I’d love to know what’s marinating in your brain for once.” A pout. Then, accusatory: “You never let me in.”
I orbit two fingers around the base of my wine glass, mostly undrunk. “You don’t want that.”
“No?” Sarcasm; a symphony.
“Trust me.”
A carving knife glimmers diamond-bright on a walnut cutting board; marble countertops devoid of crumbs. I always clean as I go, anything else is unacceptable. No one wants a mess looming in the back of their mind; the agony of full stomach and wine-bruised veins twisting with the guilt of: I should offer to help, it’s only polite seeing how she cooked, but fuck I don’t want to, why couldn’t she have been a better host and handled that before I arrived? Rude, honestly.
The oven timer agitates the silence rolled thin between us.
Melo inhales the rest of her wine. Says, grim: “Can’t do it anymore, Sav.”
Her voice a familiar melody of regret and condemnation; it duets with the opening squeak of oven door, the grate of a metal sheet pan on a long suffering oven rack, the sizzle of perfectly amber Cornish game hens leaking rosemary infused au jus.
“Do what?”
I’ve spent all afternoon in the kitchen, transferring affection through my fingers into the braised brussels with prosciutto, the potatoes au gratin, the crusty sourdough.
“Can’t be with someone so fucking closed off. So mechanical. So damn—” Her mouth, opening and closing in staccato frustration. “You know you never eat with me?”
“What?” The hens; set lovingly on a cooling rack to rest, Melo in my periphery, ferment-stained lips pulled back over teeth red, red, red and dripping candlelight. “I do.”
“You don’t.”
And there she is: my mother; a ghost trapped in the liminal space between dining room table and kitchen counter, never fully present, never solid enough to touch.
Melo’s voice, desperate now, foamy bubbles of vowels and consonants between tongue and roof of mouth: “Please, Sav.” She falls to her knees before me. Palms splayed skyward and steady. Says: “Let someone feed you for once.”
To be fed is love, after all. Prepared and given away.
I wipe my hands on a dish towel, needlessly. In my stomach, old teeth. They’ve gnawed me raw, inside-out, growing more desperate as I continue to wait, almost at the surface, ready to explode.
A human in decrescendo, a faded scream, an empty thing.
“Please,” she repeats.
I sink to my knees. She places one finger reverently between my lips, salty with sweat, sweet in its taboo. A crunch, a swallow. Bliss. Melo’s eyes flutter shut, an inhale jagged in her throat.
“Happy?” My voice, shards of glass.
“Yes,” she insists, albeit shallowly.
And at that word, the teeth within burst through muscle, through skin. She is unblinking in the face of my transformation, eyes wet with amber light, fierce with affection. Tracks of gold over cheeks, leaking into the slices of dimple and mouth. I hesitate; swipe their ambrosia with the pad of my thumb, swallow nectar and adoration.
My body roars, soundless, while the game hens scream on the counter, fully panicked about growing cold, all that preparation and time wasted, my love for her left unexpressed, unconsumed, and that’s more important, I need her to know, to—
I stand, violent. Lift the carving knife. Face the meat.
Melo clutches nine fingers to her heart. “I won’t eat that,” she says, low. “So don’t even bother.”
The bone handle is cold in my fevered hand. Rosemary steam fogs my sight. “What you want from me, I—don’t know how to give. She only ever taught me this. I am only this.”
A sigh from the floor. “If that’s what you wish to believe. I won’t force you into anything.”
Footsteps in fading pianissimo, an abandoned kitchen, her untouched plate.
And—
My mother’s ghost, a haunting in the corner of my vision: wandering back and forth, back and forth; full hands, empty hands, full hands, empty—
I catch Melo in the hallway, my front door not yet opened. “Fine,” I say, breathless. “But we do this right.”
She smiles and all I see is blinding white. “Excellent.”
Melo extends her palm skyward. The knife is still clutched in mine. She takes the blade.
I sit at the table motionless, wracked with self-loathing and disgust until her warmth flees my veins. Until I’m left with nothing but a stomach of fresh, undigested teeth. Hers should last awhile. Give my body time to heal before I’ll need someone else to consume. Before her molars lightning through my muscle and skin, devouring another willing to feed me, to make me less sad, to make me feel loved if only for a moment.
Still haven’t learned, my mother laughs.
I follow her ghost away from the table, but the kitchen is spotless. Melo cleaned as she went.
END
A professional operatic soprano turned funeral singer, Valo Wing is a Pitch Wars 2021 and
Futurescapes Writers’ Workshop 2022 alum. They enjoy indulging an obnoxious velvet blazer
obsession, drinking too much champagne, and writing about unapologetically unhinged lesbians. Find them on Twitter @valo_wing.