Widow

By Keith LaFountaine

The morsel is always freshest on the ride home from the funeral. That is when the pain garners a sludgy quality, like bloody steak. Squelching and warm, just so, not hot, but warm. It is a beauty to feast, those tears like a salted white wine, the cheeks sunken inward. Perhaps I rendered that meat into something more…succulent. Something more divine. Though I know many would consider such a supposition perverse.

There is something different about you, there, in your black dress and your beautiful veil. The tears sparkle on your cheeks all the same, but when I taste of that divinity I find a sour reproach. Something brutal and compelling, something that drives me to hunger, but something that produces a warning bell, clear as clarion.

It flares in you, the pain. And it flares in me, my hunger for it.

You stand over the stove. You haven’t cleaned it since he died, and now water stains and spatters of dried oil stare up at you like shining eyeballs, refusing to blink.

Can you feel me wrapped around you?

You wipe at your eyes, and you go to the pantry, and you retrieve a package of dollar-store ramen. And you microwave it, because…mmm, yes, I can feel it now, there on my tongue like a bit of salted pork…because using the stove that you used to cook for him on is approaching sacrilege.

Why is it sourness that I taste? It’s such an odd flavor. Usually, the sadness is so sweet, so delicate, bordering on bitter, like a dark chocolate. Yet drinking you is like drinking chalk.

No, like charcoal.

Bitter. Clogging my pores.

What are you?

You look up at the stars every time you take out the trash. Do you think you’ll see him lingering up there amongst the heavens? Humans do have strange thoughts, and you often allow thought to lapse into conjecture and conjecture into law. I’ve never quite understood how you start with an impossibility and turn it concrete, but you do it every day, often to your own detriment. It’s as amusing as it is haunting.

Weight has run down your legs and arms like water. The last time you stepped on a scale, you were 120 pounds; today, it reads 102. The fleshy bits are turning to gristle and sucking the bony protrusions is like trying to draw blood from a stone. But there is always something there for me to enjoy, some crumb for me to sniff out. Like a pig seeking a truffle, I will find it. And when I do…the resulting ecstasy is not something that can be bottled and sold. Far from it, in fact.

You stop when you bring the trash to that blocky building that holds the dumpsters. Above, lingering in the light, scuttling about, is a fat spider.

Would you believe me if I told you that I sourced spiders, too? Black widows lend the most complex flavor. They are kind things, not predisposed to anger, but they can be a draught all the same, just as you can. And yet there you stand, in terror of something not even the size of your palm, holding the stinking trash bag as it droops to the paved ground.

Odd. That web makes you think of him.

I cannot miss this moment. The meat is full and good, and the bone is waiting.

Ugh. This sour taste. I cannot define it, but I cannot stop once I have started.

I must stomach this pain.

You like to cry in the shower. I suppose, in a petulant way, it makes sense. Those hot needles hide your tears. They ravage your cheeks, cutting lines through the sweat and filth like knives slicing waterlogged dirt. I lick them up. My blackened tongue snakes down the crow’s feet in the corners of your eyes. I grimace as they slide down my throat.

This should be a nourishment. This should be a blessing and yet, the more of you I devour, the more I feel like something is growing within me. Something heavy and fat, like a cancerous tumor clotted with hundreds of bulbous cells, staring out and blinking from the pit they dwell in.

Why do you taste so rancid? What is it that is driving you to brown like bananas left out too long, clouded in a haze of fruit flies and stinking up the kitchen?

I have never felt fear. Not in the way you would, at least. But there is something in my being that flashes red lights and clangs on crystal bells.

There is something wrong with you. Something devastating. Something mortal.

And it is being transferred to me.

I have come to the assumption that you are digesting me. I arrived at this idea when I saw you eat lobster.

It is a violent process. You cook the lobster alive, listen to it scream in agony as it is ruthlessly boiled. I feel no pity in you as this happens. You are too busy melting butter.

When it is dead, you begin a dissection.

Back, broken and ripped apart, meaty strings clinging like fingers desperately scrabbling to be one, to be whole. Meat, picked at with a fork, scraped and pulled. It reminds you of being at the dentist, having your plaque chipped away with a razor-sharp scaler, one that sometimes slips and cuts into your gums, spilling blood into your mouth.

When you eat, you dig your teeth into that tender meat and your eyes close and you savor.

Maybe we are not all that different after all. Perhaps, as I gnaw at your kneecaps, you are chewing me in return. Aware of me. Using me. Laundering your grief like a drug dealer launders their illicit cash.

Yet here we are, trapped in this dance, this death spiral.

I cannot pull away, even if I want to.

As you eat your lobster, you think about messy dinner dates and jazz music and lofty aspirations and shitty one-bedroom apartments.

There it is again, those bits, dripping, begging to be chewed.

It would be a crime of spiritual proportions for me to resist.

But I can feel the tumor growing, swelling inside of me.

I am dying. And I cannot stop feasting.

You talk in your sleep. This is quite common; I have sourced hundreds of humans with this affliction. They all have peculiarities. One man sang songs about kiwis. Another woman begged for forgiveness. Still another had conversations with imaginary septuagenarians, as if she was clocked into her dead-end customer service job.

But you…well, we know you are different. But this is especially odd.

When you are asleep, you repeat his name. As if you are going to forget it. As if you are afraid that Alzheimer’s will strike and the memories will come spilling from your ears, a gray, clumpy porridge.

You utter it for hours…Eric, Eric, Eric.

Perhaps this is how you digest the horrors of grief. That is what I tell myself while I suckle at you like a cat nursing its mother.

But the truth is, I sense something sinister under there. Something you are hiding from the world. Something you are hiding from me.

I realize steadily, trapped in this suicidal embrace, that you are not saying his name in grief, but rather in bloodthirsty joy.

You meet Thomas in a coffee shop. He regards you with a certain wonder that’s uniquely dopey. Nothing is a sure thing, but this approaches certainty. You offer to buy him coffee, and he accepts, and when the date ends you are tangled together in bed, both a little confused about how it happened.

Now I recognize this sour flavor; my pallet has not deceived me. It sensed a like-minded soul. Perhaps, in some perverse way, that is why I was drawn to you. Perhaps that’s why I desired your warm, rendered fat.

Because it is like mine.

But, as any human who has cannibalized their own kind (of which, I have sourced a few), that hunger cuts as much as it feeds, like different blood mixing inside a vein, the A and the O fighting for supremacy, only for both to die out in the end.

You and Thomas would be a fairy tale. Cupid strung his bow and flung an arrow, skewering you together, and now you are messy and sweaty and wrapped in bedsheets while twilight peeks through the curtain’s edges.

Just don’t go looking on her computer, Thomas.

If you do, you might see the reams of tabs listing your Instagram, your TikTok account, your dead Facebook that you only use to stay in contact with your grandparents and a great uncle on your father’s side. You’d see maps and triangulations. You’d see pictures of yourself in that very coffee shop, sipping on your blackberry latte – your favorite. You’d see notes about your hair style, your shoes, your passions, your idiosyncrasies. You’d see it all, bared to the world, a stalker’s compendium. But you are too wrapped up in newness and post-coital bliss to consider that this woman in bed with you is an eater. That, much like her lobsters, she splices and dices and dissects her partners. And after she has sucked all the life from them, she puts an end to their miserable experience, sticking them in the proverbial pot, listening to them whine and whimper.

She is an expert at this. Eric was not the first, and Thomas will not be the last.

I cannot do anything more than feed on this bile, than suck down this sour taste. Because that is what I do.

Apparently, this is your trade.

Is this what it is like when humans drink saltwater? My insides roil with fire and my mind begs me to stop. But I cannot. For the past six months, you have pulled open your chest and allowed me to clean your ribs.

This is your game. You love the attraction, the desperation, the way nails dig into your back and texts blink on your phone with redundant cyclicality. You love the chase because you are a wolf, ravenous for a meal. But every hunter knows that fear toughens the meat, that suspicion produces adrenaline and, much like a tattoo, that simple, minute addition sours the meat permanently.

So, you must lull them. You must entrance them.

I am almost in awe of you, and you are serving me nothing short of a four-course meal, presented on platters with recipe names that sound like their own languages, with hard consonants and rounded vowels.

I want to scream. I want to beg you to let me go.

But my hooks are sliced into your skin, spilling blood free, and when I see that delicious concoction, deep crimson and thick, I cannot help but swallow the might of your draught, even as the tumor grows and swells and distorts my body. Even as I feel that I will burst, much like a mosquito that has sucked too much from your arm.

You are good at this, and Thomas has no idea.

You serve him dinner, and when he steps away to go to the bathroom, you slip poison into his rice – one of your own concoctions. An amateur would opt for something like cyanide, but that can show up in blood reports. Others may consider allergens. A dollop of peanut butter and boom – anaphylaxis. But no, again, that’s too obvious.

You have guarded this recipe your entire life, and when I try to prod at your mind, you shut me out. It’s become so acutely obvious that you are aware of me. And it infuriates me that I cannot see anymore, as I have seen for millennia.

When he returns, he eats the chicken first, and you watch, prodding at your rice. You make small talk, and you share gossip, and you flirt.

Thomas eats his meat before turning to the steamed asparagus on the plate. I can see the hunger in your eyes, the desperation. You are practically salivating, drips of crystal spit spilling from a lipstick-laden lower lip. But you keep your calm, and you wait. You wait for the moment when he digs his fork into the rice.

And there, you watch it hover in the air, watch it stall like an old Toyota on the highway, and finally, finally, the ecstasy of excitement and pleasure as he puts the fork in his mouth and eats.

It is so delicious; I cannot help myself. I savor the rendered edges of your elation as you stand and watch his eyes roll into the back of his head. As he falls back in his chair, hands pressing against his chest.

But I feel my mind spiraling. Slipping. It’s almost as though the tumor has finally consumed me.

Who are you?

Who am I?

No matter.

I must eat.

10.

There is something different about you, though. You, there, in your black dress and your beautiful veil. The tears sparkle on your cheeks all the same, but when I taste of that divinity I find a sour reproach.

Something brutal and compelling.

Something that drives me to hunger.

Something that produces a warning bell, clear as clarion.

Keith LaFountaine is a writer from Vermont and an affiliate HWA member. His short fiction has appeared in The Vanishing Point Magazine, Tales to Terrify, and the Nightmare Diaries anthology. Other work can be found on his website, www.keithlafountaine.com.

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