“Open that hole. Wider .”
My eyes bulge as I struggle to obey.
“Watch the teeth. How are the cuffs?” His gritty hand smacks my face, drawing tears. “Don't speak.”
“But how can I—”
His hand slides along moist lips as it presses tightly over my open mouth. “Don't. Speak .”
I nod. My nose is dripping snot. He removes his hand, wiping it on my hair.
“Now. Cuffs. Tight enough?”
I jerk my arms, cowhide biting into dough.
“Good. Good Fatboy.” He rubs my check with the back of his hand, whatever had dried on there flaking off in the process. “I'm puttin' it in your mouth, now. Don't do anything. Just let it sit there for a minute. Let it roll ‘round on your tongue.”
He glides it in, slowly, teasingly. Taunting me.
“That's it. That's a good Fatboy. Feel it in there. Taste it. Imagine that cream sliding down your throat.”
I grunt to breathe.
“Now. Go ahead and chew it.”
The soggy Oreo is reduced to crumbs in seconds.
“That's it, Fatboy. Now swallow.” I love when he calls me that, ‘Fatboy.' His teasing just makes me hungrier. Hornier. Happier. All those words starting with H.
He's straddling me, riding the waves of my stomach.
“Another. Take another.”
He moans a little as I chew. His tongue traces the curve of my stomach.
“Open.”
He shoves in another before I'm done with the second and leans his flushed face towards me.
“That's it, Fatboy. Eat.” He's breathing heavier now, so full of pride and awe.
Then he dies.
* * *
I wake up in the same room I went to sleep in. Which, when you think about it, is how it's supposed to be. I don't remember falling asleep. Though I suppose that, too, is normal.
The lamp by the bed is still on from last night. Clothes are piled on the floor by the door, which is shut. Force of habit, even though we don't have to worry about privacy. From when I was a kid. My mother was always shouting at me:
Ray, we don't live in a barn, shut your door.
Ray, your TV's too loud, shut your door.
Ray, if you really need to jerk off, shut your door.
My briefs, worn in the seat, fabric stretched everywhere but the pouch, had somehow landed on the computer monitor last night. There's the corner of a message box on the computer screen behind the briefs. Someone had sent a note. Maybe for me. Probably for me. Jeremiah hates the computer.
I stare up at the ceiling. Water stain from the floor above. Keeps growing. I just know one day we're going to wake up in sludge.
What'll I have for lunch today? There's still a pizza left, I only got down two of them last night. Will that be enough? No. Probably should warm up that pie I got at the bakery yesterday too. But what about dinner?
I look down at Jeremiah, lying on my chest. He's still dead, of course. He won't be much help deciding what to eat today. Which kind of sucks because that's sort of his responsibility. His face is still buried between my tits. As my mother always said: If they bounce when you run, Ray, they're tits, don't matter if you've got a cock or not.
My arms are a bit numb. I'd tried tugging and pulling to get them out of the cuffs. That hurt. Didn't work, obviously, otherwise I probably would have called an ambulance by now. But these cuffs are pretty strong and the keys are on the shelf by the window. No help over there.
So. Dinner. I could throw together some pasta. I think there are a few boxes of medium shells in the cupboard. But I'm not a big fan of pasta. Jeremiah is always pushing me to eat it because pasta's so high in calories, but I can never really stomach more than a box, box and a half. Then he gets mad. Still, if I'm only having one pizza for lunch, I'll be hungry enough, probably…
Jeremiah is getting a bit heavy.
“Fat lot of good you are. You're supposed to be making all these tough decisions,” I say to his head. He doesn't answer, but I do see that he's got a bald spot. Strange I'd never noticed this.
“All right, if you're just going to lie there, I'll have to do something about this.” I start to thrust my hips up and down, gyrating against his lower half. I curl my toes around purple cotton sheets and plunge harder, faster, faster, harder. He bounces a little and his head comes off my chest for an instant. I hold my breath and continue to gather my momentum, harder faster faster harder .
Finally, I thrust upwards with my hips at an angle. It's enough to drive Jeremiah's body into the air. It bounces onto the mattress next to me and continues to bounce onto the floor with a wet papier-mâché sound. I lick my dry lips. Somehow I had bitten my cheek, so I suck the blood until I have a mouthful and swallow. I start to breathe again and my chest is rising up and down in fast, shallow gulps.
I have a hard-on.
I haven't seen my penis for three years. It's still there, of course. I mean, I can feel the piss running down my leg in the shower. And every time Jeremiah's on top of my belly, naked, with food, it'll make itself known. Sometimes it doesn't take food, though. Like right now. So, I'm intact. Really. I just haven't seen it. Sort of just a big opening surrounded by fat. Sometimes I catch Jeremiah gazing in admiration as I'm doing chores—my near nullification a thing of beauty to him.
A scuttling from under the bed tries to distract me from my erection. But, I tug on the cuffs again, even though I know they'll hold, stubborn. Like the animal they're made from. No, those are mules. Cows aren't stubborn, but they are delicious . The cuffs still hold and I'm still stuck. I really want to wrap my hand around it right now.
“This is pathetic.”
I nod my head in agreement.
“I mean, really, look at you. You can't even take care of your own dick without my help.”
My eyes tingle as sweat drips down my forehead and into them.
“Who's there?”
I hear a laugh. Deep, masculine. Empty.
“Fatboy, have you forgotten ‘bout me already?” The voice is coming from the floor, by the bed.
“Jeremiah? What are you doing on the floor?”
Ten fingers worm up the edge of the bed. They dig into the purple cotton and Jeremiah's head rises from below.
“You knocked me on the floor, Fatboy.”
“Yeah, but you were dead then.”
He's pulled himself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. One of his fingers starts swirling around my nipple.
“Still am.”
“That sucks. Can I have another Oreo?”
He stops circling my nipple. “Nope. Not gonna happen, Fatboy.”
I stick out my bottom lip and scrunch up my eyes. “But I'm so hungry.”
“Do you think you deserve one? I mean, you did throw my body to the floor.”
That wasn't very nice of me. “That wasn't very nice of me.”
He shakes his head. I laugh. When he stops shaking his head, his eyes keep spinning around, only the left one doesn't quite make it all the way and so it's backwards now. There's only white there. And it's glowing.
* * *
Jeremiah's still sitting next to me when I come back. He's pointing at something, a big smile on his face. I look down. There's an eyeball in my bellybutton and it blinks. “Why won't you feed me?” my stomach gurgles in a high-pitched whine. The tiny bellybutton eye starts to cry milky tears and my whole belly shakes. “I'm so hungry, Ray. You have no idea. Please, give me something to eat.”
I want to reach down and pet it, tell it everything will be okay. Jeremiah used to stroke it, but I know he won't caress it again even if I ask him to. And I can see him shaking his head. He knows what I want him to do. His eyes still keep spinning when his head stops, so I can't help but laugh again.
“It's not nice to laugh at me, Fatboy.”
Unused stomach acid has worked its way up the back of my throat while I was out. I swallow it back down, tasting the burn. “Sorry, Jeremiah.”
He slaps me across the face. “Don't do it again, Fatboy.” He jumps out of bed. “Damn, Fatboy, this place is disgusting. These pizza boxes are from three weeks ago. Damn! You don't got to do much around here. All you got to do is what I ask, and I pay for everything.” He turns to me. His face is purple like the sheets.
“Jeremiah…can…can you feed me something? I'm awful hungry.”
He smirks and one of his teeth falls out. He picks it up and sets it on the shelf by the keys. The sun reflects off it.
Jeremiah walks across the room to the phone by the computer, putting his hand on the receiver. I blink and it's in his hand, and he's about to dial. Then he sees me staring at him, and he winks before sliding it back into the cradle. He always does this after he ties me up, likes to pretend he's going to leave me this way.
“I wish you wouldn't,” I'd said to him before. He laughed those times, too. I'd tried to tell him about Freddie, with his big, mean eyes and rough hands, how he'd tie me up naked in the showers at gym class and leave me for the teacher to find.
"You can't leave me," I'd beg Freddie.
"Sucks to be you," he'd say, turning the cold water on.
He's just jealous of you, Ray. All those little fuckers at school'll regret not being nicer to you, ‘cause you're gonna be somebody!
But Jeremiah only laughed about Freddie. He'd slammed his fist into my gut, which was way smaller then, and told me how much he knew I probably loved what Freddie did to me. That's what Freddie had said too, his hand on my boner in that shower stall. Then he shoved his own in my mouth and threatened me with a beating if he felt teeth. After, as I dripped dry, shivering, he ran his hands over goose-pimpled flesh, pulling me close. Then he kissed me through tears of his own. We dated for most of high school, until Freddie died in a car accident.
“You're a natural sub, how else'd you explain ending up as my pig,” Jeremiah had said, hitting me again. Then he licked my cheek and shoved half a Milky Way in my mouth.
He got his jollies off watching other guys get fat. Now tell me, what was I to make of that? I mean, mothers warn you about guys who will take advantage of you for money, who will use you for sex and then dump you flat—I don't mind you're gay, Ray, but I'm just worried about AIDS and people beating you up— but never once do mothers tell you what to do when the guy you're dating wants to double your ass size.
Jeremiah's circling the room. “Please let me go. I'm just so hungry.” He's staring at the computer now. The briefs are still covering the screen.
“Don't think I realized just how big you've gotten. These things cover the whole screen.”
“You did this to me, Jeremiah. You shouldn't be surprised by how big they are—you kept encouraging me along.”
More deep laughter. “I didn't do anything you didn't ask me to.”
The bellybutton eye is still crying. It's getting dark out and shadows make funny shapes on Jeremiah's purple skin. The one eye of his, still backwards. He's right, of course. When I saw how hot it got him after that first feeding, how hard it got him, I'd asked him to keep doing it. I'd even signed the contract to prove how much I wanted him to do it. That first night, I must have finished off two pizzas then, and that was a lot for me three years ago. But the way he looked at me, I could see the glowing in his eyes. As he slowly brought that first piece of pizza to my lips and told me to chew, he was fighting back the biggest smile. He rubbed my bloated belly after the first eight slices were gone, and he couldn't stop that little shudder from escaping. He'd even leaked a little from his cock, and he massaged it in with the sweat on my belly. I must have been feeling the same feelings he was, but all I can remember is him.
“Why won't you let me go?” I plead with him.
He walks to the pile of clothes by the door. He kicks aside my size 46s to get to his own jeans underneath. He pulls out a wrinkled square from one of his pockets, tossing the jeans back into the mess. He unfolds it slowly, using just the tips of his dirty, grimy fingers. Three years I've lived with him. Belonged to him is a better way to say it. And this paper is why.
“Five years, Fatboy. You agreed to be my slave for five-fucking- years. And you asked me for this. This is all you.” He holds the unfolded paper in front of me, pointing to the signatures with a muscular finger. “See?” He rubs the paper in my face. “See?”
I nod my head up and down. Three years, three amazing years of food, and sex, and his approving—even loving—smile. I hadn't realized how I'd let him corrupt me, transform me into something pathetic, servile. My mother recognized it though, the moment she saw me after three years apart. Her face fell, and she pointed out all the things that were wrong with me, with my life, with my body. You're letting it happen again, Ray. You're letting a no-good loser pull you down and squander your potential, just like that Freddie tried to do in high school.
Jeremiah pulls the paper away, folding it up again, and I notice that one of his fingers has fallen off and is still on my face. Meat is meat, so I wriggle my tongue, licking the tip of it, but I can't get it closer to bite. I suck in my cheek between my teeth to create a slope, but it does no good. The finger is not budging. Jeremiah slaps it away and it smacks against something I can't see with a wet thud.
I turn my head and vomit a little of the stomach acid that has made its way back into my throat. My gut clenches tightly, and the screams it is screaming must surely be loud enough for the neighbors to hear. They will come and help save me from Jeremiah. No one comes, of course. They never do. My three eyes are all crying now. Purple Jeremiah is sitting next to me on the bed again.
“No good crying, Fatboy. You know that. Just sit back and take what you have coming to you.”
I lick my lip again, drinking snot and tears. He really isn't going to feed me. Or free me. “You're supposed to be dead,” I say.
“I am. I told you that.”
“But why'd you have to go and die before you'd untied me?”
He shrugs. He grabs one of his arms and tears it off so I can see inside the hole, all the strings and tubes that make up the body.
“Bet this would be real tasty, wouldn't it?”
I nod, and my breathing gets faster.
“Jesus, someone likes what they see,” he says, poking my sudden erection with the arm. Then he tosses the arm into a corner. “Thought you were real smart, eh, Fatboy? Thought you could pull a fast one on ol' Jeremiah, didn't you? Them fancy brains of yours aren't much help now, though, eh?”
“I didn't mean to.” The rolling pin had felt light in my hands, though. And the pills weren't that solid. It had really been so easy to grind them up every night and put them in his beer. And as long as it wasn't his first beer of the night, he couldn't taste them.
“Yeah, well you did it anyway. But what a fucking geek way to kill someone! Overdosing them on pat-asseum ?”
“Potassium.”
He slaps me again. “Don't fucking correct me, Fatboy. It's pat-asseum if I says it is. And it's a damn faggoty way of killing someone. Hyperkalemia? Shit, Fatboy.”
“I just wanted out. I didn't know what else to do!”
He looks at me. Then he breaks off one of the fingers on his remaining hand and jabs it into the bellybutton eye. I scream out of sympathy. The shards of white bone are left sticking out of it, blood and pus dripping down the waves of my belly. Jeremiah's getting dressed as I watch the blood ooze.
“Well, now, seems to me you done made your bed, it's best you lie in it, Fatboy. You wanted your freedom, you got it.”
He's opening the door to the bedroom, kicking aside my clothes. The right sleeve of his shirt dangles, empty.
“Wait, where are you going? You have to help me.”
He shakes his head. The right eye is now facing backwards, too, when the spinning stops. “Don't gotta do nuthin'. Thought you could take care of yourself, Fatboy, but you didn't think it through.”
“I didn't know it would kill you when I was tied up!”
He shrugs his left shoulder, his right one having nothing left to shrug. He shuts the door on his way out. Then I hear his voice, from the other side.
“Sucks to be you, don't it?”
Then even his voice was gone, and I am left alone. Free. I tug again at my restraints, feeling the edges slice into my wrists like a knife through butter. My arms, wet with sweat and blood, twitch even after I have given up, refusing to quit. Because I'm not a quitter. I always find a way out, a way to escape those holding me back. I was able to break free from Freddie. And now Jeremiah. I have so much potential ahead of me now.
Free. I am free. I am…
I am hungry.