flash fiction by margaret smith

How Lovers Beat the Heat

Tonight is hot. I know this because the thinning bed sheet beneath me holds my warmth like an expectant mother. 

It’s the kind of heat that knows you, too, in an unforgivable way. Incessantly and perversely cataloging my motionless body. A heat that conquers a once foreign anatomy with sudden familiarity. A heat you wear better than your own flesh. 

Gara waited for nights like this one. She said this heat was like company. She said this heat was a visitor and one we owe submission to. She said—especially as we lay wide awake, biting our nails and kicking off blankets—that heat was a very good thing.

Her voice came through the darkness of the room and approached me. Her voice was as present as her body, omnisciently in that space that was ours. We saw each other plenty in the dark—even more so, she’d say. 

But this darkness that swims in heat is not the same we’ve shared before. This heat lays silent inside me, void of what makes it real: the exhale of hot air, the yearning of cicadas, the friction of cotton sheets.

I no longer confuse visions of Gara with images of pleasure. I no longer return to thoughts of her as if they are waiting to comfort me. I’ve released her, in that way. 

*

My lover speaks of my skin as if it were their own

My lover touches flesh as if it were sacred

My lover knows that it is

I wish no agony upon her, I could not bear to witness it myself.

And so I crack the delicate bones that constitute her neck before I go further. These bones, like the shoulder blade of a feline, surrender to a strength far greater than their own.

The spirit can be forgiving, but the flesh cannot—mutilation is best saved for the ones who won’t enjoy it.

With her arms outstretched, she welcomes her new form. Wordlessly, I look on, an exquisite heat rising inside me. 

Then, on the floor, with Gara in my lap, her face to God, I begin to needle my fingers into her chest—pressing, then scratching, then digging, then ripping.

My lover cuts deeper than they ought to

My lover grits blood between their teeth

My lover disembowels me with their hands

I unravel my lover's hair one last time, searching for excavating tools. To my delight, a single auburn curl has held tight with a hair pin—a durability I will put to good use.

My tool and I begin.

This skin—once blemished in its own way, but intact nonetheless—starts to lose its composition in my hands as I shred her epidermis with the tip of the metal instrument. Narrow strips of lacerated flesh lay loose against an otherwise taut body—like ribbons woven through a wicker basket.

I weasel the tool back and forth and in, in, in. Feverishly in, in, in and taking mealy parts of the flesh with me.

My tool carves through marble

My tool whittles at wounds

My tool opens the locked door

With my fingers, I pull her rind further from its fruit. I slip my hand into the wound, pulverizing what is beneath it—I enter her chest cavity in this way. Has she always had this warmth?

My Lillith, my Anne, my divine one laid out like sacrifice.

And lo! I am anointing myself in the font of your blood; I am feasting on the spoils of your cadaver; I am entering into your kingdom just as you leave it.

I deftly caress the curvature of your lungs like I’ve traversed them before. I am submerged up to my elbow in your entrails, they constrict against me like the foreign object that I am. 

I could swim in an ocean of your blood flow. I could banquet on the congealed fluids of your host. I could fester inside you like the worm you invited in.

I retract my forearm from your cavity and the air kisses it cold. I hiss. 

I glide it back in once more, the bald wetness of your organs luring me into my temptation.

I heave in and quack. I heave out and shudder. 

I lean in once more and gasp as it all gives way—your innards swimming in their own flood waters.

This remnant of horror, this collection of wounds, this motionless meat lies like waste to be discarded—these scraps not fit for a dog.

And the heat that arose inside me—a heat I had not yet known—began to drain from me all the same.

*

Tonight is hot, and I seek to prolong it no more.

Beside me, Gara fidgets. She told me, after the darkness stole away our inhibitions, that she would find me in any lifetime.

From my bed of heat, I already begin to mourn her. For with tomorrow comes a reckoning that is beyond me.

But tonight, in anticipation of all things primal, I wonder: What will come first, my arresting breathlessness or the dawning of my ecstasy?

Margaret Smith is a Chicago-based writer and editor with a passion for storytelling—from the whimsy of fiction to socio-political reporting. They are a graduate of Columbia College Chicago.