by Melanie Tem
A man with a narrow face, or maybe with only a penis for a face, stared at her from a narrow passageway when the bus stopped for a light. His long pale tongue slid out of the shadows and down his coat, down one leg and across the sidewalk, leaving a slick, steaming trail. The tongue was wiggling its way toward her when the bus pulled into the intersection. Charlie hugged her and whispered a soft alien language into her ear.
In Charlie’s bedroom she took off her clothes, forcing herself to move slowly, holding her breath, hoping the bile in her stomach wouldn’t rise into her throat. Charlie watched her adoringly. “You are so beautiful,” he kept saying, and Melinda flinched that he would say such a thing out loud. “You are so beautiful.”
Melinda could barely let herself hear such nice things about her body, but she liked hearing them, was relieved each time that he didn’t say how ugly she was, how pale, how skinny or how fat, how wormlike smooth or how hairy. If she didn’t trim her bikini line her pubic hair would just keep growing, would spill out of her crotch and rise above the waistband of her shorts, would wrap itself like monkey tails up and down her limbs.
A woman was never safe. Like all women, Melinda had a wet, hairy hole in the middle of her body. A hole in the middle of her life. Where awful things might enter.
Charlie invited her to stay the night. Melinda said no, she wasn’t ready, and Charlie didn’t push. He insisted on accompanying her on the bus all the way home. He was so sweet. Gratefully, she kissed him goodbye at her door, although she really didn’t want to touch him anymore. She didn’t ask him in.
Alone in her apartment, she sat naked in the dark, all the bedclothes pushed well away from her. Cloth would burn her; her bare flesh was already aching with nothing touching it at all. It hurt her to be exposed like this; it would hurt more to try to cover herself up.
Then she waited until she was too tired to wait anymore. She waited, as she did every night, for something to break her door down or to seep in under it. For something to drag her or coax her into the sticky dark outside.
Safe. Safe at home.
“Mindy, Mindy, you are so beautiful.”
That July the annual invasion of miller moths was the worst anybody could remember. They bred somewhere in the South and would go up into the mountains to die, Melinda read, or maybe it was the other way around; when she was afraid of something she tried to find out as much about it as she could, but often she had trouble keeping her facts straight and that just made her more afraid. It didn’t matter anyway; the truth was, they came from everywhere, bred everywhere, and they would never die.
Miller moths were monsters, and she was terrified of them. They swarmed so thickly around the lamp on her bedside stand or the hood light on her stove that they looked like clots of curly hair. They got stuck in her food, drowned in her coffee. They flew into her face, into her mouth, into the hole in the middle of her body, leaving everywhere the dust from their wings. The dust from their wings was poisonous. It was also what enabled them to breed.
They were in her bed. When Charlie wasn’t there she felt them all night long, flicking against the back of her neck, kissing the insides of her thighs, crawling into her vagina.
Finally, after three virtually sleepless nights, Melinda danced around her bedroom in a frenzy, with a rolled-up newspaper in one hand and a flyswatter in the other. She smashed every moth she saw or thought she saw, until the paper was tattered and the flyswatter was covered with pulpy wing dust and she was faint with exertion and fear. But in the end she was helpless against them. There were miller moths everywhere.
And they would get their revenge. They would pass stories on from one generation to the next about what she’d done to their family, or tried to do, and someday when she thought she was safe at home—in the winter, say, when there weren’t supposed to be any moths—one or a dozen or a million of them would lay their eggs inside her.
Monsters were everywhere. Great hairy things with eyes and teeth, miller moths with poisonous wings, squirmy creatures with tentacles that caught and held. All the monsters communicated with all the other monsters—the moths with the beasts, the caterpillars with the men. They spoke a language Melinda frequently understood but could not quite use herself. They talked about her. They watched her every minute of every day and night.
Everything was a monster, monstrous and magical. Everything was family but her. Everything talked.
“If you tell, they won’t understand.”
“If you tell, they’ll be mad at me. And at you.”
“If you tell, you’ll get us both in big trouble.”
“If you tell, you’ll tear our family apart.”
“If you tell, Mindy, I’ll go to jail, and then I won’t love you anymore.”
Charlie lay back in her arms. He was so sweet, so patient and good to her.
He was watching her. He watched her all the time. Even when they made love he didn’t close his eyes; she’d open hers during a long breathtaking kiss and find him looking at her, his eyes so close they didn’t look like eyes anymore but like dark pools out of which anything might rise. Even when she let him spend the night (at her place, at home, never at his where she wouldn’t know where the monsters had bred in the night) and she woke up from her habitually fitful sleep, she knew he was watching her in his dreams. Every minute of every day and night.
“Sometimes you’re such a little girl,” he observed. “Like when we go to horror shows and you get so scared you have to run to the bathroom and throw up.”
Melinda hadn’t realized he knew about that. She felt her face and neck go hot.
“And other times,” he persisted, “you’re like a beautiful wise old woman. No, not old. Ageless. Like you’ve been alive forever. That’s how you seem when we make love.”
“Sex is older than we are,” Melinda said. “It’s older than anybody. It’s so old and so powerful it’s like a god, or a monster. People will do anything, tell themselves anything to make what they do all right, just so they can hold onto it for a split second.”
She saw Charlie’s eyes widen, heard him catch his breath, saw an appendage with a searching eye and clinging membranes slither toward her as he started to say, “Love’s like that, too, you know.”
She stopped him with a kiss. The tentacle went into her mouth, into her throat. She sucked. The hole in the middle of her body filled up with viscous whitish fluid, and she ran to the bathroom to vomit it away.
“You’re growing up now. You’re becoming a woman.
“Why do you treat me like this? Why do you hate me?
“I don’t understand why you want to hurt me. We’ve been so close.
“I don’t understand.
“I love you.”
Charlie sneaked up on her. They were in her bed and she was relaxing in his arms, feeling pleasantly hungry, thinking that even if that furry shadow in the corner of the ceiling was a moth it wouldn’t hurt her, it was as afraid of her as she was of it, when Charlie said before she saw it coming, “I love you.”
She was going to throw up. She struggled to get up, to free herself of him, but he wouldn’t let her go.
“Melinda, wait. Please don’t go. I love you.”
The miller moth elongated and swelled and inserted itself into her mouth. Its poisonous dust was making her choke. It pushed its way down through her body; she felt it circling her heart, winding among her intestines, nudging the inside of her vagina, but it didn’t come out.
“I know you’re afraid. I know somebody has hurt you. But I won’t hurt you. I love you.”
The monster was godlike; the god was monstrous. It had a single wet eye and a bifurcated heart. She would do anything she had to do to keep it away from her, anything to make it forever her own.
But not now. She wasn’t ready now.
“Mindy. I love you.”
“No no no!” She pulled away from his wet tongue, his hairy hands, his single eye. She sprang from the bed and ran, the monster who loved her stumbling af
ter her.
She ran down the hall, painfully aware of her nakedness, of the hairy, wounded hole in the middle of her body, that wanted to be filled, that wanted to be protected from the crawling, slimy vermin that filled the world. Even as she ran she frantically considered what she might use to plug it up.
She ran into the bathroom and slammed the door, locking it. Outside the monster panted, out of breath. “Mindy, Mindy … love …” And then fell silent.
She crouched on the cool tile in the corner, her head pressed against cold porcelain. It was too late to vomit. Too late to escape. Under the edge of the door, black hair was spreading toward her.
Melinda tried to pull herself into the hole in the middle of her body, the hole in the middle of her life, the hole she had become. She knew she wouldn’t die there, although sometimes that’s what she wanted. She hoped she wouldn’t have to eat there, that nothing would have to enter her body ever again.
There, she knew she could be the monster who never needed to love. She could be the god.
Safe. Safe at home.
THE MARRIAGE
He had chosen her as his mate because of her ability to renew her emotions again and again, however thoroughly he might deplete her. Even after long periods of hysterical grieving, she would come to him and he would be surprised by her ability to smile, to love, to rage and to endure serious pain. From the start he had known, of course, that it could not continue forever, for she, like all the others, was mortal, and sooner or later would die. He had thought that most likely he would kill her with his need, all the more ferocious because it would not be satisfied, and then he would be forced to find someone else or to content himself entirely with strangers.
Not that the variously-flavored emotions of strangers lacked attraction, not that the surge and substance of their bodies were any less sweet, but even he liked someone familiar to come home to.
She knew, of course, of his predilections, what he did with his days and most of his nights. Sometimes she would request a particular detail, worrying the painful morsel in order to expand her passion in interesting ways.
“We all need our daily tickle and rub,” the guy next door was fond of declaring coarsely. He wouldn’t have been so cheerful about it if he’d known about certain late-night and mid-afternoon visits to his sad-looking wife and his brittle but equally sad-looking daughters.
Not that he had been the cause of any of this sadness. The neighbor himself with his anger and his appetites was sufficient cause for any degree of sadness. He had only found the well and chosen to drink there. Taken a taste of the family’s miseries by way of blood and vaginal secretions. And—when he finally got to the paternal source—by way of semen.
But the passions of that particular family, the passions of all the mundane sorts he met, sorted through, and tasted each day, paled in comparison with those of his wife. For this part of his life, for the last eighty-four human years, she was by far the most intense person he had met.
Just now, on her deathbed, she was in considerable pain, and her pain was his for the taking. Nearing a hundred in human years, her body was frail, the pain very close to both the surface of the flesh and the marrow of the bone, and he could have sucked it out of her with scarcely any effort, relieving both her and himself in a single easy act.
Instead, he lingered. He teased. He kissed her gently, his lips and teeth closed, all over her aged body, while she moaned and writhed under him in the titillated passion of her suffering. He bared his penis, entered her dry vagina, and probed, curious whether he could increase either her agony or his arousal, seeing that he could. She cried out, begged him. He waited as long as he thought he dared, then drew the pain out of her and into him in one swift current.
She was spent, crumpled against him like a used paper sack. He was, as always, disappointed. He should have waited longer. She could have held more suffering for him. She could have given him more.
So he left her, though she tried feebly to hold him back, and in a bar full of dark music and dim light although it was mid-afternoon he came, without warning or foreplay, upon a woman who almost at once asked him to tell her he loved her. Readily he took her away from the eyes of that place, out onto hot asphalt and into heady automotive perfumes, where he professed his love for her with perfect, borrowed sincerity. She nodded, licked her lips. “Bite me,” he whispered. “No, there.” He experienced only a distant discomfort, no true pain, as the tiny mouth-shaped ovals of skin disappeared from his arm.
“Now, my turn,” she insisted, too eagerly. She did not care that he had not received pleasure. She did not feel for him.
So he took too much from her too quickly, gorged himself on the pain he had spared her, a mercy which she did not deserve. “Love me,” he urged, and shook her. But by now she could feel no more than he could, so he left her in the parking lot and went back home.
Tonight his wife was afraid of dying. She was not always so. Sometimes she approached death with a giddy sort of readiness that he found insubstantial, difficult to hold onto, and utterly unsatisfying, like spun sugar. At other times she seemed not to be aware at all that the end of her life was near.
But tonight she was profoundly frightened, and fear was among the sensations he savored most. He surrounded her with arms and legs, tongue and teeth, anxious for the fullness of her fear to descend upon them both, and when it would not come fast enough he found himself nibbling at her dry skin, licking every orifice for any available secretion. She’d been incontinent for years, and to allay any suspicions he had accepted the doctors’ prescriptions for catheters and adult diapers, but of course he would never apply such ugly contraptions to her flesh, insisting instead to clean her in his own way, and to keep her clean with his appetites, several times each day.
Tonight he lay in their marriage bed with her in his arms, waiting for her fear to ripen, and he reflected that, although it went without saying that he did not love her, he would indeed be sorry when she was gone.
Which was not to say that she was or ever had been enough for him. Nothing was ever enough, no one could keep him full. Strangers had provided him with some memorable experiences, however. Vivid enough that even in his long life they might make an impression he could dessert on. Just last week, was it, or last month:
“You don’t have to tell me you love me,” the man with the crooked teeth had assured him magnanimously.
“Maybe I will anyway,” he’d said with a borrowed feminine smile.
“You will,” the man had agreed, stroking his woman’s cheek, gliding a hand down under the lacy collar and pulling away the blouse, unhooking the satiny brassiere to expose his woman’s nipples.
He’d wrapped his female arms around the man, who had assumed, no doubt, that the scratches in his back were being made by long scarlet fingernails mining for passion when in fact the fingertips themselves were sharpening and lengthening as his famished body and soul realized the imminence of a meal. “Love me,” he’d begged the man in his breathy female voice, with his woman’s shortness of breath, and pushed himself into him until skin interpenetrated. Disoriented by his own paltry lust, the man had perhaps thought this some strange undergarment when actually it was a thin layer of his own skin peeling away. The man kissed, sucked, thrust, struggling to remove all real and imagined barriers between him and the object of his desire, all the while causing himself to bleed. Ultimately, it was pain which made the man’s erection rise, fear that thrust itself past his labia, lubricated by the man’s free-flowing blood as they writhed together. The man’s passionate desperation probed and scraped until tidal spasms of horror washed both their minds clean, so that they could feel nothing, for once again he had taken and used it all.
But he always came back to her, and she was always waiting for him, welcoming. Willing, eager, often frantic for him to siphon off the emotions that were too much for her and never enough for him.
“Hold me,” she pleaded now. Thinned and cracked with age, it was still the im
portuning and caressing voice that he had been hearing for what now seemed like such a long time but would reveal itself, once she had died, as only the most fleeting instant of his interminable existence. “Take it. Take the fear. Death is a natural part of life. Everybody dies. Everybody has always died. I don’t want to be afraid.”
Through her toothless kiss she spat in a hot stream into his throat the acrid roiling broth of her terror. Though she was more than willing, and he was expert, and their give-and-take had been the core of their marriage for more than eight decades, it took a deliciously long time for him to get it all. By the time they had both achieved a transitory calm, he was already not thinking much of her anymore but of his next foray.
Rather recently he’d discovered the accessible pleasures of hospital emergency rooms. Even the most commonplace passions were magnified within families, and in an emergency room a family was opened and left bleeding, especially when one of its children was hurt or ill, dead or nearly so. He would go again tonight, when his wife was asleep. He could tell by the way she breathed against his shoulder that she was nearly asleep now, and his mouth began to water in anticipation of what this night was likely to bring.
“Noooo!” The mother wailed her denial. That sort of hysteria was filling, to be sure, but hard on the finer nerves if taken by mouth, so he’d developed a method of taking it in through the nostrils. He’d dallied pleasantly with images to describe the particular odor of frenzied despair: Vaguely, it smelled like a child’s soiled shirt, and also like the kind of sunlight that can be trapped only in a child’s hair.
He’d seen the teenage daughter, the older sister, hovering around the edges of the knot made by the rest of the family. She obviously wanted to be part of the high drama of grief, but—so typical of her age—could not quite permit herself to join them. Her grief was tinged with embarrassment at her mother’s noise, with resentment over having lost the center of attention, with fear that her father might grieve himself insane.
