It sobs wetly and drags itself across the kitchen floor.
Five jaundiced eyes roll asynchronously in loose, gelatinous sockets as it mewls your name.
It congeals around your trembling legs, opens its mouth and bares three bony teeth.
You stiffen as it closes its moist mouth around your leg, and you relax in relief when it doesn’t bite. You look with surprise at the butcher knife in your upraised hand, frozen mid-stab.
It suckles your ankle and massages your Achilles tendon lovingly in its gums.
Your fear fades into your desire to embrace.
You look into its rolling, vacant eyes, and throw your butcher knife across the room in shame and disgust.
You cry at what you’ve almost done.
You bend down and wrap it in your arms. Warm, wet flesh soaks through your clothes.
It sobs, spiders its mouth up your body and sucks at your carotid artery.
You hold it as firmly as its form will allow and cry into it.
Its body absorbs your tears. Your sadness and it are now one. You cry harder at the poetry of it all.
You wonder if this is love that you’re feeling. You decide that it must be.
“I’m sorry,” you say.
Over and over again.
“I’m sorry.”
Jeff Suwak is a science editor, writer, and music journalist living in the Pacific Northwest. Some of his recent fiction publications include Stupefying Stories, Dimension6 (Australia), and the Myriad Lands Anthology by Guardbridge Books in the UK.
Published 8/12/21
Short but effective. You really feel sorry for the poor whatever-it-is.