By James Callan
Our noses smash while your tongue unfurls to probe far beyond the nubs of my tonsils. We perform our animal lust in a public setting—a food court in the airport, a city bus, the serpentine queue leading to a garish roller coaster. No one takes any notice.
This time, you’re an Asian girl, but no one I know from real life. Asian, most likely, because I watched a Kore-eda film last night—the one with the mother who abandons her children. Your face is different, but I know it’s you. We are kissing in public with a hunger that verges on panic. You stifle my airways with your cartoon tongue. I am powerless, like a child, neatly folded and stored in a traveling bag. I am carried away, going who-knows-where.
In these dreams, the taste in my mouth is awful, and when I wake, it lingers. I blink in the dark and fish a hand into my underwear. Sometimes I require a new pair. This time, I do not. I groan, knowing what’s to come next, knowing from experience and repetition that when I wake from these invasive kissing dreams, my mouth tasting like I’ve gone to town on a hyena’s asshole, you will emerge and render me your plaything. You seep into substance from nothing, clouding my room like squid ink ejected in water. You will bond my flesh to the mattress, singing in high notes, low notes, a drone that makes me nauseous and yet receptive to its sonic violation. You will hover over my useless limbs, ejaculating your cold aura.
On occasion, you gyrate, shedding your skin. More commonly, you remain perfectly still. Eventually, you press inward against my immobile body, your non-face opening up to unravel your tape-measure tongue. This is the moment when my dreams take on a new foundation. No longer dreams, they become nightmares; discarded fragments dredged up from forgotten realities.
The Big Red that we chewed in the car cannot purge the rot of our open faces. Your song is sweet, but hot and sour on your lips. The storybook that we read seems a world away on my bedside table, falling to the floorboards as a tremor ruptures the world and everything in it.
You cover me like a weighted blanket. I resist, but part of me opens up to you. No longer a woman—no longer a human—the shadowy mass in my room enters me, tasting me down to my core.
James Callan lives and writes in Aotearoa (New Zealand). His fiction has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, Burial Magazine, Reckon Review, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Those Who Remain Quiet, is available from Anxiety Press.