KISSER

It pisses people off when the groom's prettier than the bride.

A ceremony of bitten off questions. All that chewing. Notions caught between teeth. A man can be funny but--was she rich? Was he disabled? No, that was never how it worked. It's the beast and his pretty saint not the other way ‘round.

“She must be a really good cook.”

Looking womanly enough, shrink-wrapped into that dress, slip-cast in makeup. A happenstance reflection in handsome, dewy eyes. Clutching paper daisies as she went. 

“Hold onto him,” a friend (likely dead by now) had said, “He thinks you’re gorgeous.” 

He was just supposed to show up suited and act happy. And he was the happiest man alive. His curly hair clean-cut for the first time in their lives. His lips a bow, pinched up at their corners, smiling that entire day. He planted one on her mid-sentence, impatient, giddy. A juvenile vow of eternity pressed into her upper lip. Kissing him on their wedding day will be the highlight of her life.

The end of that kiss is her apocalypse. 

There was a photo on the mantle, back when fire was a vanity. Back when a house was more than open doors to run out of. In that photo he looked like a prince and she looked like a cupcake. Her groom drew eyes wherever he went. Maybe his bride would've noticed, had she taken the time to look away. So caught up in each other that they'd missed the ship for kids. Never did get around to getting a damn dog. 

It's why they survived. 

He still grieves The Kids Thing. So she keeps notions like that to herself. He hasn't spoken in weeks. She leads him by the right hand he still has. Two silver bands on her finger are now too tarnished to glimmer.

A setting sun carpets broken, neglected asphalt in orange light. The couple hides behind an overturned car to watch a beast up the road hunt down a dog. This beast began its chase with only front legs, a lower jaw, some horns. Now, watching it chow down on a mutt’s rear… she appreciates her own apathy. 

Beasts don't chew, even the ones with teeth. Instead, they suckle at chosen limbs and slowly swallow bones whole with dumb stubbornness. Some have figured out that a hand or hoof can spread a body out into smaller, more manageable bits. This one hasn't, so it'll be a while. Wife pulls her husband away from the scene. No need to be near when it graduates to four legs.

Click. Click.

It's still so warm out. The two could spend their night in the lush grass if it weren't for what lived there.

She doesn't look like a cupcake anymore. But if her husband would just eat a little more, he'd be back to himself. The crutch under his left arm clicks like a metronome as they walk. She keeps him balanced, her soft grip on his hand ready to tighten at any moment.

They've built a rhythm; a marriage, a home out of the tent on her back and three sneakered feet.

Click. Click.

They haven't spoken since he lost the foot, but they aren't fighting. Domesticity, isn’t it? They pass trees, he looks over his shoulder. Which tree could it be behind? There's no way Little Brother slipped ahead of them. She’s keeping an eye out for a broken gas station or an open car to spend the night in when she spots something else.

At first, she thinks it's the sun glaring against a speed limit sign. But it doesn't disappear when the sun sets. 

There is a light up ahead. That's never good.

A porch light set aglow, with a silhouette at home beneath it.

There had been a photo in their foyer... back when they had people to welcome. That photo was just of her husband. It'd disappear at night in the glare of the porch light. His graduation greeted everyone.

Trees inch higher and the sun hides. These woods house a constant scuffling. Brush reaches up towards her waist. There have never been more birds. Starlings have replaced the clouds. At dusk, they consume the sky. Seeds used to fall this time of year. Now the birds eat them. Persistent pop of growth underfoot [like chewing cartilage]. Chittering of birds above [like grinding teeth], fighting for space across too few branches [like maggots between ribs]. Forest is so much more alive since the world ended.

Click.

It's impossible to hear the approach against the noise of life.

It's insulting. She's one of the last people she knows with both ears.

Click.

This carcass has two hands [both rights] that reach out of dense grass. It grabs her backpack and pant leg. So many of them have hands. The hands of stupid people reaching out to save themselves. She raises her hands above her head.

The skull is human, but too small. It stole the skull of a child, wedged too deep into its neck. No eyes, no nose, just twin cavities down the center of its face slipping down into an open, flabby, jawless throat all red with exertion.

Whose hands are those? Were those two people already dead or defending something? It has the skull. But no eyes. Did they succeed? It drags a purposeless hind leg, scavenged from a deer but without a pelvis. Dead weight, stuck in the mud. It has not a body but a bag of incongruent bones built to hide a stomach.

Hands are cold and soft as butter as it grabs her jaw and pulls. Fingers lodge into her cheek and hook behind her jaw-joint. The beast tries to drag itself up or pull her down into itself.

Wife presses her own fingers between its palm and her face, her nails scratch her own skin. She kicks it; which is a mistake, gets her foot too close to its mouth and it doesn’t have one of those. Forget her jaw, it grabs her foot with both hands.

Her husband’s right hand comes into view and she yells. 

“Get back!” 

She kicks forward, swatting her husband back and falling forwards. Her shoe catches into the pocket of its ‘mouth’ as they tumble down. The beast is euphoric, both spindly arms around her leg and it doesn’t have teeth, doesn’t know how to chew, it just pulls her foot deeper inside itself tearing and cracking through its own skin to accomplish it. 

Husband falls to his knees and starts pulling free her foot from her shoe. She lands with a knee in the middle of its bloated abdomen and her trapped leg crooked. She unsheaths her machete; chops. 

Her foot slips free from the shoe. Her husband holds the beast down as best he can with one hand, his fingers pressing into empty sockets, akin to a bowling ball.

The beast bleeds lazily: brown and borrowed, cloying and blocking her path to the stomach. It contains bodily junk, fat, mucus and oil. When the stomach is extracted it still won’t die, but it becomes preoccupied. The stomach contracts, convulses across the scant space from its newly discarded body to re-consume it. This process would take hours. If another beast doesn't intervene and swipe up the good bits first. 

The stomach writhes like it wants to fight back. It's the only part of the body with any survival instincts. She cuts it from its holdings. It stings in her grip. Jagged ends of the esophagus and beginnings of the bowels twist themselves to nurse her fingers. As always, she hurls it as fast as she can, as far from anything faunal as possible. It lands in the middle of the road, far from any bones,  splat. It immediately begins to undulate, seeking out meat. 

She shoos her husband away from the mouth, now lifeless and floppy like some prop and pulls out her sneaker, bits of meaty pulp still tangled in the weave. She tries to help him up but he shoos her right back. While he shakily stands, she hovers. She pushes the stomach's previous body back into the brush. Skin so delicate, it spits when she shoves. Every inch buys them time. Eventually, it's not worth the calories, not worth closing the gap with what's behind them. They walk.

“Thank you,” she says.

He stares at the road ahead, his effort put into keeping balance. Every time he looks back he trips, shakes.

Most beasts are aptly named. Mindless amalgamations of roadkill who climb their way up the ladder. They've got four different legs, or maybe two and two. One antler, one cat ear. Lots of them have hands. Often two right hands. Rarely a left.

A man with two of his own hands is harder to trust nowadays.

Night sneaks up on them. Still walking towards that light. He steps past her and points, his ring catching in the electric glare. There's a shadow on the porch, begging for help.

“Please!” The shadow calls. “My baby, help my baby.” 

But there are a few not-so-mindless.

There are picky eaters.

He looks back at his wife. “A baby?” he says.

He steps up onto the porch. In health, she follows.

The mother is skin and bones. She hugs strangers. Husband allows the embrace; wife does not. Mother is tattered, she's tear-stained. Skin hangs from her cheeks the same way her dirty dress runs down her sharp shoulders.

The house is shockingly clean, with exceptions. There are two rooms. What must be the bedroom is hidden around the corner. And then everything else. Mother's life exists in piles. A pile of sticks that was a coffee table. A pile of trash once a kitchen.

The couple can't fault her. Where are their piles?

“He doesn't cry,” the mother says. 

Mother turns the corner, every step creaks. Wife is slow to follow, but refuses to let her husband slip out of sight. The bedroom rots. The bed itself is a knot of beige sheets, brown blood. It smells like birth. Saccharine with yeast and tallow.

A bassinet sits beneath the window. Clean, pristine and cared for. True to the woman’s word, there’s not a cry. Wife expects a dead baby. She lingers in the doorway.  Mother leans above the crib, doting. She glows with blind love and new sweat across her face.

“But he's so strong,” mother says. “He's survived so much.”

Husband freezes. Seems he wasn't prepared, even after everything. 

Wife leans forward. 

A stomach lies in the bassinet, contracting and expanding as if sleeping. The crazed mother croons as she grabs husband by the hair. She drags him into the crib’s open maw before he has a chance to shout.

Sound catches up with the room. Husband screams, pitched over the bassinet.

“He must eat,” mother says, pressing him down with both hands, “He's gonna be beautiful, just like his daddy!”

Wife grabs the woman by her matted hair and knobby shoulder. Mother's skin sags, giving to pressure like a mix between wet paper and rubber. Wife throws her to the ground. She scrambles back to attack, dedicated but still weak. It makes things worse that the mother is so weak. If only the stomach were the bitch’s own, still connected to a long hole in her belly. She balls her questions up into a fist in her hair. 

Did she pick it out of a ditch? Or did she supplicate to a gaping hole that was dressed as a man, letting one in and birthing one out? Did she open a door just for it to open another man's mouth to smile? Mismatched hands feel much the same when grappling at a back. Bet she loved a pretty face… let it within a shabby house. 

It ate every inch of that man, didn't it?

It must feel like birthing a bag, [slick, spongy], sliding free. Did she scream as she looked down, believing she'd birthed a skinned infant, a sack of blood heaving between her legs? An egg's cracked innards seeping into new, lower places. Peristalsis propels it like a worm from her body. Hidden in sheets, having reduced her motherhood to torn fabric. Screams echo within an empty house full of trash. Stolen shoes walked out on stolen feet long ago. 

Is he waiting in the woods?

Suppose her uterus ruptured, running out of her in shame. Does a woman like this have the fortitude to cut open her prolapsed uterus to save her baby?

A woman like this can wish that's what lies beneath her.

It doesn't cry, it can't breathe, it heaves, it contracts, angrily digests in a groan against nothing. It mewls. All stomachs speak without lungs. It isn’t novel. A stomach from a bag of snakes, dressed in feet and teeth and an Adam’s apple.

There's a scream. And it's not the woman beneath her, now bloody and crumpled. Wife kicks her. She's already kicked her stomach. Kicked her lower, in Eve’s belly, ‘til she's rewarded with blood. 

Wife turns back around to find she's indulged herself too long.

It has eaten through his left hand. Gets his left ear by the time she pulls him away.

The stomach won't come off. The membrane spreads towards his eye, and she can't think of anything else but to take the small machete from her belt and cut it off. The ear goes easily. 

The hand does not. 

She tries to cut just the stomach, peel it back to save him. It doesn't work. It doesn't cut, it just pulls like the skin of its mother. Until it stretches so far that it's got his entire hand trapped. Skulking up his wrist the longer she avoids the inevitable. It takes seven chops to sever his hand, anchored against the rim of the bassinet for leverage.

He’s screaming at her. He can't believe she'd do this. She'll mourn the ring more than the hand.

She'll have the rest of him.

The stomach flops back into its doily abode. The membrane of its esophagus stretches over his hand as it consumes. It eats his hand, silver band and all. Her husband is crying into her neck. She clenches his wrist to slow the bleeding. Behind them the mother wails. Wife watches as the stomach, with its newly robbed hand and ear… tucks itself back in. And she can see. She can see it listening. It seems soothed. Satiated.

In sickness, she pulls him out of the house. 

Mother lies crying on the floorboards, new blood seeping into her dress from between her legs. 

“No, please! Please, please, something's wrong!” she babbles.

Wife hears one last wail through the screen door. 

“I don't understand… his father was so beautiful.”

She doesn't know how it chases them. It has no eyes. It has no nose. It has one of his ears. How does it know, with only his hand? Maybe the hand knows where the rest of its body ran to.

When passing the next porch light, they keep walking.

The light stretches a little too far to hide from. Their bad luck is harder to wash off nowadays. They find themselves beneath a walnut tree. Someone's hung deer and dog skulls in the branches. To scare people off, to keep out of evil’s reach, or just to sacrifice to the birds? Who's to say?

There's no freezing to death this time of year. So there's no fire. They eat sunchokes. The things basically grow out of her filthy backpack. He stares at his missing pieces. She stares at him. By the time he's scarred over, they're living off dandelion greens.

They sleep surrounded by bulbs of ambrosia they just can’t reach. Until she finds a big enough rock. They're far too fed, she's much too smart, and he's taken to smiling again. He's not putting on weight, but it's as if he could be. He picks apart the broken shells to feed his wife morsels. It takes him ages… he's left-handed, after all.

They stay beneath that tree too long. Until a stranger with a wheelbarrow brings with him a shrill, squeaking sound that drives away the birds.

There's a disintegrating tarp draped over his parcel, “Keeps ‘im out of the sun.”

Stranger slips his left hand into his pocket as he approaches. He steps over walnuts like they're gravel and not gold. He wears two different shoes, one black Wellington and one laced boot. He smells like death, but don't they all?

“I'm carrying my little brother to Nevada. I hear there's a doctor. There's not much of him left,” stranger says. His damn left hand is still in his pocket. She can't hear a word he says. And he keeps saying them.

He's handsome. His eyes are the same color. But the corners? The corners of his eyes don't match. The left one opens wider, hangs lower. Not everybody's eyes match. Not always. That's being human, isn't it? He runs his hand through his hair. She can't remember the last time someone had vanity. He's too handsome to be so mismatched. Or is she a cynic?

Little brother’s still hidden in the barrow.

“How old’s your brother?” she asks. 

The thing scowls. 

It can't count.

A hand creeps out from under the tarp. It wears a tarnished silver ring.

Little brother has a whole arm now, a different skin tone from the stolen hand attached. It's off-kilter, but comes at them so fast. It's found half a collarbone, connecting to its amalgamated arm. The other half of its chest looks like a deflated balloon, with nothing to hold it up.

It has no head, no neck and it lunges towards them with an empty cavern for a face. Brings to mind a goddamn butchered turkey. It wraps that saggy, twisted little arm around her husband's left leg and starts to swallow it up to the knee. Like a shark, it eats his sneaker too.

Stranger is weaker, all fat and four-limbed. It's not driven by any hunger, only some novelty to complete what it has deemed 'little brother'.  

Stranger doesn't fight to eat her, but to get to her husband. To hold him down to let little brother finish its long-awaited consumption.

Her machete’s handle is now scratched up from walnut shells. This one's the most emotive and upset of these monsters she's ever seen. It is especially upset when she lobs off its head. She spatchcocks the little bastard from her husband’s leg, it slips free but there is no leg left to reveal. The shin bone has already begun to grow out of the beast. That backward, second right hand of the headless beast catches her wrist and she has to let go of her blade to slip free.

Husband in hand, they flee. She doesn't turn around. She just keeps dragging him. But she can hear it. She can hear that monster swallow the skull of its companion, now reduced to free parts.

She prays this means it'll stop.

It'll be finished, won't it?

Regardless, mealtime gives them a head start.

They've been running from Eve’s little monster for months.  It got faster after it took the foot. And they got slower. It has her husband's leg on the left and the leg of a furred, cloven-footed animal on the right when it catches them.

Two arms, a torso, and a skull. What else does it want? 

It is a smudge rapidly gaining detail. Already halfway down the hillside as the couple looks down the barrel of a ravine. Bridge is gone, so they slowly trip into the depths together. Husband is slow, bending to balance the end of his crutch between rocks. He tosses aside the crutch in frustration. She picks it up.

Little brother has likely trailed less than a mile behind them for days. This is just the first time there hasn't been trees or a bend in the road to hide the monster trailing them like a duckling. Face blank with skinned over eye sockets, one chewed-up ear, a delicate nasal septum. With the empty mouth of an infant, all gums. Worse, it doesn't have lips. 

“Run,” he asks.

She tries to hold his hand. He won't let her. 

“Run, let me do this.”

No.

It doesn’t get to have all of him.

He pushes back as she tries to return the crutch. She doesn't know where he hid this strength from her. He snatches his crutch back and in that moment of imbalance he allows himself to fall before she can reach him. 

“No!!” 

He crumples to the bottom of the valley, bent yet content with himself. She cuts her hands and skins open knees against rocks on her way down to him. Blood on the rocks, rings shimmer red. Blood on his pretty face as she holds it, bracing herself more so than him.

“Let me, let me,” she babbles, pulling at his shoulder. He cries out; his back lies twisted.

“I’ll get you on my back and we’ll make it out of here,” she says. She takes off her pouch, pulling at his leg already. 

“Let it mean something…”

“You mean everything to me.” She clutches his hand to pull his fractured frame closer.

He shakes his head. 

“I want to save you,” he says.

“No, no, that’s not how it works. We save each other.” 

He lays his head back.

She screeches at him as she pulls him up. He won’t budge. He bites his lower lip to not cry out. It's uphill both ways. Or over the rocks for miles on either side. She drops to sit and screams again with her head between her knees. Her husband stares up at her with starry, reddened eyes as she watches the beast come crashing over the ridge. 

He stretches his only hand out to hers. He rolls his thumb across the red rings on her finger. He lets go. If she waits longer, it won’t mean anything, will it?

She begins her climb out of the ravine, alone. She doesn’t breathe the whole way up. When she hears the beast reach the bottom, she turns. Her hands sting from cuts of sand and salt.

Beasts can’t chew and they're supposed to go slow. They gain four limbs and become satisfied. Despite that, this beast has eaten her husband's leg already. It does something she's never seen. It breaks and twists off its hoofed leg. The limb hangs limp and the creature keeps twisting. Its newly eaten leg then pushes the old entirely from its body.

It blindly gapes towards his hand next. He lifts his right hand, holding forth a rock. His wrist shakes, he can barely hold the stone. The beast takes it from him, swallows. An illusion of childlike trust as it tries to pass through the rock to eat his hand. He snatches another rock, feeds it again. It sags down from the weight in its belly. But it is persistent. She climbs. When she turns back again, his arm is gone. She slips. She freezes. 

She watches the beast, hunched above, looking for the first time like a man with two arms and legs. It holds his face between his own hands and leans in for a kiss. 

It suckles at his face like a bat does to fruit, as if bones, skin and muscle are as delicate as raspberries. It cranes its face up, breathing through its mouth for pleasure. It doesn't need to breathe. She hears a wet click. The creature discovers it can suckle new front teeth between its tongue and half-lips. Still with no eyes, it looks up at her and smiles. 

She screams for her husband.

“I made a vow!” she screams at the beast.

It doesn't reply.

Without lips, without a tongue, he can't tell her to abandon him anymore.

She crawls back, yelling and gasping as she regresses down the valley. She's slowed more by the tears than she is the beast. It clings to him with both hands like a babe, but she kicks and spits back like a drowning animal.

She finds his crutch, snapped in half and sharp at the break. Her husband watches her. All he has left are the eyes. He uses them to stare her down as she takes his broken crutch and stabs the beast. From its open maw through the back of its head, she stakes it to the ground.

She can't place the look on his face, there's so little face left now. 

He used to feel heavy, draped across her. Now he’s the weight of a child across her two hands. He used to feel virile, biting her knuckles. Now he feels like a man made of wet cloth and only half-finished. She doesn't feel as though she can cry in front of him. Even though he was once the one man she was supposed to feel comfortable crying in front of.

So she stands up instead. 

He won't walk anymore, so she'll carry him. The harness that held the tent now holds him. He's strapped to her back, silent. She finds a little shack, surrounded by torn-up wire. Inside, small slats and rungs hang wherever they are best in the way. A chicken coop. 

A coop. There are no more chickens.

It's a quaint place, feces now hardly more than dust. There's a small window at the top to let in light. She crawls inside a door too small for grown men, a new luxury. She piles her husband beside her. They can be happy here for a few hours. 

There's no mantel. She'll keep an eye out the window. They used to watch TV shoulder to shoulder as they sit now. She picks at splinters in the rungs, taking her fingers for granted. She looks at the pulpy hole that's now her husband's upper lip. She doesn't remember the last time they kissed. 

She doesn't know their last kiss. 

She stares at him, in her banal entirety. He looks back, the sum of such fewer parts adding up to something far beyond herself. The touch of what they used to be. Man and wife, two mouths, four knees, the double-backed beast.

She inhales so deeply and holds it for so long that it feels like the vacuum of her lungs will tear down her collarbone. She's given no relief, only dust congesting in her body. She'll get a headache if she doesn't do something. So she feeds him. He can't chew, but it's all right. She'll find him something softer to eat. 

They are conned into sleep by closed mouths and stoned-down stomachs. She wakes with her back to the door and birds scratching at the roof, her husband's arms around her. He begins to pull, fingers pressing through her clothes to bruise her belly. It will break her back trying to pull her through that tiny door.

She reaches for something to hold onto, her husband has nothing to reach back with. He stares, he cries. He'd begged her for children, after they got married. Only if they look like you, she'd said. She doesn't know what he begs for now, his fragmented mouth agape and silent.

It drags her out, bent at her waist and her cheek is rubbed open from the friction of splintered wood. The vertebrae of her spine catch and catch and catch until something gives. She screams out, a piece has bent too far inside her belly just as dry-rotted boards crack open. She is left discarded in soft grass and tangled wire as the beast lunges headfirst inside the coop. 

She grabs at the beast to pull it away. Her fingers sink right through the skin, into soft muscle. Understudy skin schloffs off its shoulders, sliding away wet and dead between her invading fingers, to reveal familiar creases and freckles beneath. She pulls more and more, until the husks of many someone-elses have fallen away and the beast cranes its neck around to look at her. Still no eyes, but now possessing a full, displeased mouth and flared nose. It curls his lips at her and she boils with her indignation, it is eating her devotion.

It drags her husband out and across the ground like a child with its teddy. Sits itself down on his knees that still pop against hard ground and consumes.

There's less of him with every bite.

More of it. So slow but never stopping. Starving, but still so picky. She claws and kicks it away, puts her hands in the mouth it stole to free her husband. She tries to pull his lips free, to drag him back tooth and nail, hand and ear. The beast won't even bite down against her. So single-minded. 

Gulp. 

Gulp. 

A throat contracting around a skull. Its gullet breaks open to be swapped anew with his. Liver picker, heart eater. The first real gasp she hears leaving its distorted, rosy lips after inhaling the first of his lungs is wet and wheezy. It learns to laugh by the second lung. It sounds just like him. [He laughed at himself and burnt his tongue on coffee on their first date.] It’s joyous as it eats through his bowels. His spine gives it trouble. [He’d pop his back in the bathroom most mornings, groaning like a dying man, she’d mock him from the doorway.] Ribs are swallowed one by one until the love of her life lies between her feet. 

He looks down at her, newly ragged-haired and handsome-faced. A rawboned kind of beautiful. She hasn't seen him without dirt on his face in years, wiped clean by teeth and saliva. He was once so beautiful. As she looks up at him--at it, she has her nose pressed to the glass of an old life.

There's meat on his bones once more.

Arms wrap around her as they’ve done before, three rings on two hands: one silver two brown. She feels the tendons of his wrists tense as those arms pull her closer, breath from his mouth a slow steady comfort. They sway together as she leans away and hands pull her back. She is shaking and heaving and his body is like it was before, unhurried, hers to hold.

His warm left hand touches her face; she bats it away violently. It has taken near everything. Stripped every inch of skin. Each eye is licked out reverently from their sockets. It enjoys owning lips, smacking them again and again throughout the meal. Curly hair is twisted, stuck in his teeth. It’s stolen the freckle beneath his ribs, the soft skin between his shoulderblades that he never saw but she did. Everything but--

She falls forward over her husband, so small, now fragile. He fits cupped inside her hands now. She's sobbing and he contracts, making a gurgle. Is he hungry?

She'll find him something to eat.