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You have no pretenses with me.
I meet you deep in the woods hidden from prying eyes by a fiery canopy of maple leaves, burnt-orange and vermilion starbursts hanging in the air. I peek at you through the underbrush, but you don’t mistake my hesitation for timidity. You know me better than that. This is as much a business partnership as it is a friendship, and I want to make sure you actually brought something.
“I have a corpse,” you say, an inviting lilt to your voice. You open the trunk of your car and I bend low to the ground, watching a limp jumble of gangly limbs fall with a muffled thump to the forest floor. You drag it around the car by the ankle and it leaves a deep red smear on the leaves. You meet my eyes as you set it down between us. Then you go back and lean against the hood of your car, arms crossed over your chest, waiting.
Slowly, I step out into the open. I feel your eyes on me, and if I were anyone else, I would be afraid.
But you never come to me hungry. You only come when you’re already sated. I see the body on the ground in front of me and glance back up at you once, finding you smiling.
“Go ahead,” you say, “check him, if you want. He’s still fresh.”
I don’t have to check, but I will anyway. I used to settle for anything I could find but you’ve trained me to have a taste for soft, warm flesh. This is for your benefit rather than mine, a display of your influence.
You want to know that I only eat what you bring me, that I am starving when you are gone, and that I gorge myself when you return.
When I get a little closer, coming out of the shade and into the last dying gasps of light at sunset, you speak up.
“Picked him up on the highway a little ways from here,” you say idly. “He was hitchhiking. Unlucky.”
I touch an exposed forearm; still warm. The mouth hangs open to catch flies and the eyes gaze at the sun; glassy, empty. The nose is crumpled and bent at a strange angle and the face is half sagging flesh and half a mess of mottled bruises. The body leaks from a wound on the underside and blood seeps between fallen leaves into the grass. My tongue darts out; a pleasant mix of sour and sweet, like overripe fruit.
“Good, right?” you ask.
I flinch, tensing defensively when I notice you’re standing closer, hands at your sides. You’re wearing gloves that are red at the fingertips. You like to watch, I know that, but it always makes me self-conscious.
You notice. You see the way I shrink back, legs bending, fight-or-flight, and you smile like I’ve done something amusing. You crouch down on the other side of the corpse, knowing that’s as close as you can get before I’ll want to leave.
“It’s okay,” you say. “Go on. I won’t touch you.”
You’re a liar. I don’t care; your fingers feel nice slick with blood.
I start with the hands, just like you taught me. I start with the one lying on the ground in front of me, bending to prod at limp, cooling fingers. I lick them and shiver. Warm flesh is not the same as cold. It’s better, so much better, richer, more tender. I lick again and my open my mouth wider, take in more of the taste. All the blood is pooling at the corpse’s back, at the undersides of the arms. I want that, too, but when I try to get at the reddening skin beneath, I hear you click your tongue in disapproval.
“The hands,” you remind me, and though I’m impatient, I do as you say.
I tear at its thick fingers, struggling to rip them loose from the hand, shredding the skin and greedily swallowing anything I can rend free.
(“You see this?” you said once long ago when I didn’t even let you sit this close, when I watched you from far away and just wanted you to leave. You held up the pale hand of a woman, fingers slim and delicate. I kept waiting for her to get up and ask you what you were doing but she never did. “It’s important to deglove the hand if you can. At least the fingerprints.”
But why? I wondered. Aren’t fingers supposed to have fingerprints?
My mother said you were strange but nothing new. People like you came here from time to time asking for favors because you knew we were here and knew we could help. She told me to stay away from you. Eventually you learned to come when she wasn’t around.
“You can try, if you want,” you said. You kept your voice soft and you smiled warmly. You made it sound like something appealing. It wasn’t such a jump; I just wasn’t used to being given things.
With a bit of reluctance, I came closer, inching across the forest floor and watching you carefully. You stayed perfectly still, the only movement the widening of your smile when I leaned in for a taste.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” you asked. “Probably better than anything you’ve had before.”
I don’t know if I’d make such a bold statement, but it was good. I remember doing a sloppy job, splattering blood all over my face as I ate her hand one tiny, shy bite at a time. I started plucking her bones out and leaving them in a pile because I thought you might want them, but when I nudged them towards you, you shook your head.
“You can keep them,” you told me, and you touched me gently, ran your fingers down my back, and I felt the contours of your hand even through your gloves. It felt nice. “You did a good job. It can be your reward.” You smiled as you stroked me and I remember being completely infatuated. “I’ll bring you more if you want. You just have to do me little favors, like today. Is that fair?”
I nodded. I didn’t think about it too hard, I just liked how it tasted and I liked that you let me keep the bones. I took them home and put some in the walls and the rest in my bed, and I slept on them, dreaming of the next time you would come see me.)
Muscle slides down my throat, thick and meaty and wet, still glistening, still warm. Ants and beetles are crawling all over the body now. You flick a few away when they get close to me but you get bored of this, and eventually you just sit back and watch. I don’t care; I eat them too, and they go down wriggling.
“One of these days,” you tell me, “I should teach you how to take the teeth, too. Give me a little less to do.” You smile. “I don’t think you have enough of an appetite for that now. But maybe someday.”
I take bones as I go, gathering them in a neat pile, little, glistening fragments. Some of them are fractured, cracked down the middle or broken in two but I still want them. I go over to you, moving over the body and feeling it satisfyingly still beneath me, and start on the other hand.
I feel your fingers gentle on my head and relax into the touch. It makes me greedier, hungrier, and I eat faster, pull mouthfuls away with each bite, gulping down blood, snapping tendons. I collect more trophies, pebble-sized carpals and elegant phalanges. I see you eyeing them, fingers twitching; you want to run your fingertips over them, scrape off clinging bits of flesh and blood.
But they’re mine and you don’t dare.
I hear you speaking but I don’t pay attention. It isn’t to me, anyway; you’re holding your phone in your other hand, talking distractedly to someone. Your eyes never leave me. I feel them at my back as I eat.
Secretly, I am very happy.
“No, I’m not home yet,” you tell whoever’s on the other end of the line. “Yeah, I have to stop at the store real quick. I’ll be back as soon as I can be.”
They don’t know you the way I do, after all. You keep secrets from them and you lie. They don’t know about the bodies and the bones. That’s just for us.
Just for me.
“Yeah, I know. I like this side of town a lot, though. It’s nicer, quieter. I’ve never taken you walking out here, but the woods are really pretty.”
When I’ve eaten my fill, I raise my head and look up at you, blood and muscle smeared all over my body. You wipe a pink, fleshy clump off of my side and hold it in front of me, and I eat out of your hand. You smile and touch me affectionately.
“The woods are kind of famous, you know,” you say, words heavy with fondness. “They say the birds that live out here are really smart.”
I nuzzle into your hand. You get me a little dirty with the blood coating your gloves, but I don’t care.
Laughing, you say, “Huh? Oh, I dunno if it’s true or not. That’s just what I’ve heard.”