CW: none.
The videos show people kissing. They press their mouths together and open their lips. Their tongues move, wet and intrusive, less like they are tasting each other than like they want to lay eggs in the protected throats of their lovers.
That makes so little sense; human throats are vulnerable, easy to break or crush. They lack any sort of exoskeleton, nothing to curve down over the thorax to keep tender organs safe from predators and accidents.
It’s not a kind world. Accidents do happen.
But the videos show people kissing and now that I am a person, I want to try it. I want that shared respiration, carbon dioxide flavoring the air around us with just a little bit of slow and suffocating death. I can hold my breath for a long time, even in this body, with all its unprotected skin. If the expanse of this skin breathed for me, I would understand the point. But it doesn’t breathe, accomplishes almost nothing.
You do want to touch it; I can see the muscles of your forearm shift.
This is what the witch promised me when I burrowed my way into her cottage deep in the forest. She did not like the look of me, my carapace glinting like the slick surface at the bottom of an old well, leaves slick with water and rot. Her eyes were too sharp to glimpse her own reflection without seeing her future.
She had avoided that vision for a long time. She could not avoid my mirror.
In the end her grief made her eager to deal with me. She set her price high—but I have lost my wings before to lesser causes. She plucked them from my back and pinned them to a board. They sparkled in the late afternoon sunshine.
It was very warm that day.
You would want me. The witch swore it. When I found you, the weight of your attention proved her bargain kept. My silence drew you in.
My sisters and I used to sing such harmonics to the encroaching night. Better to keep this clumsy shrillness to myself as the dusk falls. You were so easily enticed without it.
I put my mouth parts to your mouth parts, and you part your lips and let me enter the softness of your oral cavity. I slide this human tongue into the hollow where your human tongue once resided before you bartered it away for a set of wings. Those are my wings; I recognize that jagged tear, that ragged ruffled edge.
To find my wings again is an omen, I think. You were already tempting without them, could have trapped me in the silks of your bedchamber.
One golden afternoon, I chanced upon your open window. I saw you and I watched over your shoulder, so many videos of people kissing. You made a wish for a companion more substantial than your own hands.
I will stop up your unsafe throat with my eggs and then I will protect them. Our children will nourish themselves, will grow strong on the gift of your body. These human teeth are not so strong, but they will consume you as efficiently as any other mandible. In that way we will be together no matter what comes.
Your wish became my wish. I will grant it.
Author’s note:
This story is a soup of influences and thought digressions: a mashup of insectoid compound eyes, the Little Mermaid, the strange inefficiencies of the human body when taken out of human context, the power of wishes—and also a little bit of O. Henry. Sometimes you write the weird soup down and it is delicious.
