You never told me she’d be so human, so sweet. Marzipan bones and caramel hair, latte skin stretched taut over a face still new to wanting. Just a mouthful, really, a morsel, her eyes brittle as she watches us flit by, heartbeats sliding between the ribs of time.
In Europe, no one believes in kismet, but who needs faith to author fact?
Later, you joke about serendipity. I nod in silence, my fingers still glazed with her cells and her atoms, the taste of her bitter with ghosts of Sunday afternoon pasts. How many street corners have you kissed on? How many does she remember? How many times has she sat coiled by her phone, waiting, waiting, thumbing through pictures of you together, a patchwork of possibilities that should have spelled out a future?
I don’t sleep that night. Instead, I sit and watch the Parisian skyline, dreaming of penanggalans in waltz.
Pontianak, huli jing, rakshaka. You called me from a country of monsters, serpent-haired, dagger-teethed, skin hot as kiamat. Nothing like her, nothing like the women that slither through London, Berlin, Paris; their bones Abrahamic, their minds agnostic, mouths full with the gospel of Apple. Was it the novelty that enticed you, or the reflection of teeth? Because I can smell it on you, your flesh, your smile; ocean salt, hydra blood, a thousand ancient wars in a thousand new molecules. We’re monsters, you and I.
But her?
I can tell she’s a good girl, always has been, always will be, even though her dreams cup a fading memory of black leather and black lashes, whiplash-promises on her skin. Not a monster, even though she sometimes pretends, armoring herself with lipgloss and suits cut sharp as suicide.
Delicious, darling.
Langsuir, jiangshi, ngu tinh. I pull myself onto the window sill, feel cartilage bulge and vertebrae give. The air burns cold. Egui, preta, desire, hunger. My blood is singing, so loud that it amazes that you can sleep. I wonder what you’d say if you woke and found me framed in the moonlight, flesh and bone turned protean, amoebic.
I wonder what you’d think if you saw my wings: knucklebones strung together like rosaries, membranous skin, tendons to tether. Nothing like your angels, darling. Nothing so sweet.
I wonder what you’d do if I told you I’d chased her scent across the city, her a ghost, me a knot of entrails and superstition, invisible to rational men. Because under her skin, I tasted the salt of your old desires, coiling with hers, an ouroboros of mouth and grasping hands and moans. And nothing, darling, displeases me more.
I wonder, I wonder.
Would you beg me to stop, darling? As I stole across the skyline of her sleeping body, over hip and thigh and sternum, to stop a breath from her mouth, would you shout out no?
I imagine not. Women break like surf on the hearts of men, foam and whispers, frothing to nothing. You remember us for as long as we are there, stretched like cats in your beds, our flesh warm, our arms patient. No more, no less. And when we are gone, you write us into an inventory of conquests. Another notch, another monster taken by the smoke in your smile, the teeth in your eyes.
Darling, can I tell you a secret?
It would be so easy. To sip chi from her lips, to empty her like a broken heart, to leave her skin and only skin, like gauze or yesterday’s drunken lovemaking. Until all that is left is the instinct to walk, to breathe, to hold on, hold on, hold on.
But should I?
All monsters must eat, whether they are men or myth, fabrications of fear or consequences of nurture. We find our prey where we may. You in the unguarded, I in the broken, the worn-down, the street-side prayer, the alleyway fighter. But if you still cared, still held her wellbeing suspended like a prize in your consciousness, I might consider mercy.
Maybe.
If you were awake, darling, if you were standing framed in the moonlight, your lips stitched shut with veins, your eyes closed with red string, I would come to your ears and whisper, “What do you think will happen next?”
Will I write my hurts into doa selamats, a hundred invocations against a thousand new anguishes? Will I graze my tongue across hers, calling the monsters in her blood? Douen, Jumbie, Loogaroo. Will I tell them to keep her safe, keep her safe from men who only have eyes for themselves, who keep their hearts locked behind doors while they hold out their hands for yours?
Or will I dig through spine and brain, guzzle blood and lymph? Will I gorge myself on lung fibrous and vein intricate, on intestines still warm with animal heat, on a brain still shuddering with a memory of you? Darling, do you see me keeping the best parts of her for myself, those things that made you love her for more years than you’ve known me? Or do you see it pulped into energy, into fuel for flight, inconsequential as the names of all the women you never loved, only lusted for?
One wonders, but it does not matter. When you wake up tomorrow, you won’t find me slathered in gore, throat bulging, belly heavy with meat and muscle. Instead, you will see me as you’ve always seen me, a fascination, a novelty, a hope.
When we kiss, when we trade affection like tokens of power, it’s possible that she will just be awaking, lungs inflamed with myth, and confused, move to sit at her parents’ balustrade, wondering why she had ever wasted time on you at all. Tomorrow, it’s possible too that her parents might awake and find her ribs in her bed, cracked open for marrow, licked completely clean, her finger-bones rattling like dice in her ribs. Tomorrow, they might scream and all of Paris will wake, wondering, wondering how this disaster came to be.
Who knows? You’ll never ask, and I’ll never tell.