By Kelly Heyen
Everyone told me not to feed them. Everyone said they would grow, change, that stale dinner rolls and rusted apple cores wouldn’t be enough after a time. That in the end they would come for more. Despite the warnings, I couldn’t help it. I found them adorable; fleshy sightless things, sweet in their fragility, their otherworldliness, though of course they’ve been here as long as humans have, perhaps longer.
They came the day of my first bleed, wriggling under my mother’s padlocked garden gate even before I found the slick in my underwear, drawn by the soil-sharp smell. Their pale bodies jostled as I scattered morsels: flakes of deli meat, sardines drowned in briny syrup, olives with the pits gouged out.
They won’t be happy with leftovers, my mother said. They never are.
Even back then I wondered how it would feel: their tiny mouths nuzzling my hand, nipping hard, then harder.
My mother resigned herself to chasing them from flowerbeds with a broom. She pretended she didn’t notice when I folded cubes of steak and potato into my napkin at the dinner table. One evening I caught her watching from the kitchen window as I fed them, relishing the way their fingers coiled eagerly around my ankles, how their pointed teeth scraped my skin without puncturing it. For a moment her expression seemed wistful. Jealous, even. Then she saw me looking.
I used to feed them, too, she said when I came inside. You won’t feel the same when you become a wife. A mother.
Most of the girls I knew had played with the creatures at one time or another. Fed them, even. The others had given it up by the time our bodies were in full bloom, each of us a daisy aching to be plucked.
Aren’t you afraid no man will want you? my friends asked.
But a man did want me, years later, even when I brought him home and took him out back first thing. He stared at them for a long time. They crept closer—but not too close—leaving slippery trails on the clover.
Mother told me not to, I said. Grandmother told me they’ll eat me alive the minute they’re big enough.
Women make up stories, he said, waving a hand around as if nothing could be more obvious, as if nothing could matter less.
We bought three acres in the next town over. Roy didn’t say a word when they came along too, mournfully trailing the moving van. They spent the first week wandering the property, settling beneath bushes like lumps of abandoned modeling clay. Like things curdled, left to rot. There was a tearing-away in my chest whenever I looked at them, crisp and surprising, and for a time I stayed inside, kept the blinds lowered so I wouldn’t have to face them.
But the house was small, even smaller when Roy was traveling for work, and I soon spent most of my time outside. I tamed the sprawling garden, recreating the tidy, practical layout of my mother’s: zinnias confined to window boxes; herbs standing sentry around the back door. In the late afternoons, when I was tired and sweat beaded like honey on my skin, I would lie down and let them come. They nibbled at my toes, the tips of my fingers, cautiously at first, and I stayed completely still. Waited to feel something.
When the baby came, I bled. They pressed up against the windows and I screamed at them to go away. I was animal, alien, more than they had ever been.
They were content for a time after the birth. Perhaps they knew I was preoccupied with the filling of another bottomless stomach. They scrounged in the compost bin, the dumpster, writhing like grubs exposed by an overturned log.
Up with the baby early one morning, I saw one crouched in the farthest corner of the yard, pawing at a patch where the dirt clotted black. It looked over at me indifferently, one of Roy’s chickens dangling from its mouth. The hen’s neck curved at a severe angle, beak bisecting the torso, feathers festooned with her own innards. A fierce surge of pride left me breathless.
I knew they wouldn’t harm the baby. In the early days I spent most of my time alone in the house, intoxicated with exhaustion, with joy, parading him in front of the French doors that connected our bedroom to the patio.
Other times I shut them out. I locked the doors and let him latch onto my cracked nipple, grinding my teeth together until he dozed off mid-suckle. I arranged his limp body on the bed. He would yawn, the air rushing out of his pink mouth sour with milk and sleep, and I would inhale greedily, not letting a drop go to waste.
In those moments he looked just like one of them. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them; moving behind the blinds, lips parted hungrily, opening wide and closing around nothing.
One day the boldest among them followed me to the grocery store. I stowed the baby in a shopping cart and they trailed us through the aisles, casting longing looks at the packaged steaks marbled with fat, the tubs of margarine. The older women glared at me. The younger women paled. One mother—hair coiled tight, lips calcified in peach—rammed her cart into mine and didn’t apologize. She fussed with a baby not much older than mine, but her blouse puckered over a swollen stomach, a badge proclaiming she understood much more than I did. I wondered if she had ever fed the things that slither out of the forest. If she had given them up when she became a wife, like I was supposed to.
Then I saw the other mother. The one like me. Her baby was strapped to her chest, its copper-fuzzed head wedged in the hollow of her throat. She carried the creatures in her basket. They gorged themselves, tearing into packages the way mine ripped apart rodents who wandered through holes in the fence. Their distended bellies were glazed with yolk, sticky with juice drained from plastic cups of oranges. I was fascinated by the casual excess, the wordless permission to hunger, to satiate.
How do you manage? I pulled my cart alongside hers, forced a knowing laugh even though my heart was thrumming. It gets so much more difficult once you have a baby.
The mother turned, looked first at me and then the salivating things at my feet. Their nails needled my calves, sending ecstatic tremors of pain up through my thighs, my abdomen. I had a sudden and feverish need to thread my arm through hers. To flatten my palm against her chest, hold it there until her pulse stirred against my skin. But when she bared her teeth it was polite, pitying, and the impulse shriveled up inside me. She sped off toward the deli, cooing, to her baby or to them I couldn’t tell.
I stood stupidly in the middle of the aisle, shopping carts swarming around and past like leaves caught up in a breeze. My own creatures left the shelter of my skirt. They emptied a sleeve of crackers, a carton of chocolate-studded muffins, eating tentatively at first, then rapturously.
I let them feast.
I stumbled into something resembling a rhythm: feeding them while the baby slept; cooking extravagant meals so there would always be leftovers.
In the mornings Roy would kiss my cheek before leaving. It was a utilitarian ritual, quick and rough, like scoring bread. I pretended to be asleep until the dry rustle of his khakis swept out the front door. Then I tiptoed to the nursery and back, nestling our son into the still-warm divot in the mattress. When he asked for milk, I gave it, though I knew Roy would admonish me for ignoring the crisp timeline doled out by our pediatrician: long enough to convince everyone you’re a good mother; not so long that you make strangers or husbands uncomfortable.
In the evenings I would slip outside and they’d come straightaway. By then, some of them were level with my hips on hind legs. Their bodies had stretched, thinned, the meat of them suddenly too small for its casing. Skin hung in jellied folds around their shoulders, their waists. Ribbons of flesh unspooling from the bobbin. I ladled fat from the pan into their berry-stained mouths, crumbled bread on their tongues like a sacrament. Sometimes I laughed at the sight of them, delighted by their delight, and they would mimic the sound, a stuttering ripple lacing through the garden. Sometimes I cried and they tugged my sleeves, bringing me close enough to lick the brine that gathered in the pockets above my cheekbones.
I cherished these moments that bookended each day; self-indulgent habits twined with gluttony and martyrdom both, impossible to separate.
They grew restless. We couldn’t eat on the patio without them scaling the table legs, their jointless limbs now nimble enough to make it to the top. I couldn’t even nurse the baby on the sun-soaked porch swing that eased my claustrophobia during those serene and stuffy weeks Roy was away. The smell of my milk drove them into a frenzy.
Roy invited a coworker and his wife over for dinner to celebrate his latest promotion. I set the table, rocked the baby to sleep, opened the windows to vent smoke from my frying pan. Roy sent me to the cellar for the bottle of wine we’d been saving for our tenth anniversary. When I returned, our wedding china was in pieces on the dining room floor. The creatures still small enough to fit had vaulted the windowsill, hurling themselves against the screen until it burst. I watched them root around for scraps in the rubble, bloodied tongues striping the hardwood.
I expected Roy to bellow. He just shook his head. This is your mess, he said.
In the yard, I threw one rock. Another. They shrieked and ran, leaving a gruesome splatter on the grass which a few of the larger ones returned to lap at, though they watched me warily. I wanted to rush over and gather them up, let them drink from my blue-webbed wrists, the pulsing spot beneath my jawline. But Roy was watching from the window like my mother had years before, and there was nothing like wistfulness in his eyes when I looked over my shoulder.
In the end the others went out, and I stayed home with the baby. I sat cross-legged in the garden, hands outstretched, a pad of butter pooling in each palm.
Most days we maintained a sort of peace. We spent long stretches of afternoon in the yard when Roy was away, my son tottering around in giddy, looping circles, chasing but never catching them. They were—surely, I thought—full grown. Their skin was taught, translucent, all stitched through with greenish veins. Sometimes they floundered at our feet, presenting their underbellies. Other times they showed their teeth, and we’d find oblations arranged on the doorstep the next morning: amputated butterfly wings; the fossil-like whorl of a snail’s shell. A sparrow’s nest, still intact, cradling speckled eggs.
Roy began to talk about having another baby.
I have enough mouths to feed! I tried to say it like a good sport, carefully weaving the words together with gratitude. Roy pretended he didn’t know which mouths I meant, and those were the moments I loved him most.
He went on breathing the word in my ear anyway. Baby. Like it was foreplay, a mercy, a gift.
Whenever his hands found my side of the bed, clumsy with sleep, I would burrow under the duvet and take him into my mouth instead, and in that way reassure myself that a man’s desire isn’t as insatiable as most men believe. After, I’d hold still for as long as I could and let my relief turn the air stale.
Their hunger wasn’t as easily sated.
I was late with their supper one evening, and even before I opened the door, I could hear them congregating in the garden, their bodies moving restlessly between the beds. The porch light was busted. There were clouds, heavy and low. Trees, lush with late summer leaves, blotting out large swaths of sky where they bloomed. I didn’t see them until I was upon them.
They pushed their faces into the bowl, not waiting for me to offer, and when the larger bits were gone they began to nudge my hands, my forearms, their tongues smooth and warm as spent sandpaper where they dragged across my skin. I lost my balance, dropped the serving dish. It splintered on the aggregate. When I bent to collect the pieces there was the feeling of pricking my palm with a sewing needle, of something freshly mended opening up.
One of them began to lap at the webbing of my hand. It hurt, and the hurt felt right somehow, a receiving and not a relinquishing.
Then the rest of them surged forward. I realized with a start how large they’d become, some nearly as tall as Roy when they drew up to their full height. A sensation came over me like being doused with a pitcher of cold water. I tugged my hand away. Ran inside and latched the door. When I squinted through the screen a breeze shifted the clouds and for a moment the yard was illuminated. They were staring at the mess of fat and blood and porcelain—my mess—like it was a carcass arranged atop an altar. Like something owed.
The day arrives soon after they taste blood. The day my women told me stories about, stories that weren’t supposed to matter.
They surround the house during the small, still hours of the morning, when I’m the only one awake. I can hear the skimming of bare feet over grass, of damp fingers against the windows. I stand barefoot in the kitchen, and I look at them through the glass and I realize with cold and violent clarity that we aren’t so different. Matted hair. Hungry eyes. My own reflection indistinguishable.
They look back without blinking, the whites ringing their irises stained scarlet with morning light. And then they’re moving. Clustering around the back stoop. Shouldering the door until it strains against the frame.
Overripe sweetness pools beneath my tongue. I feel a gag pulse up in my throat, but I swallow instead, forcing it down like a tonic.
I reach for the lock. Suddenly I’m there again: the old garden path, my body leaking blood for the first time. I pretend I don’t know they’re watching—my mother, my grandmother—that their eyes are soft, wistful, and they stay that way even when I glance over my shoulder.
It isn’t a choice, not really. I’ve always known I would let myself be consumed.
It’s the thing that makes me a good mother and a terrible one; the impulse to give and give until you become inseparable from the thing you’re giving yourself to.
Kelly writes speculative fiction in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work can also be found in The Stonecoast Review.