Oh look I wrote a thing.
Bibliophile
breathless, the corners of her mouth reaching slyly toward deep dimples:
"I ate Dickens today." Her eyes fluttered at the author’s name and she sighed.
"You ate him?"
She didn't answer me at first, she was somewhere else. She was so content with herself, so proud of her accomplishment.
"Oliver Twist,” her tongue grazed her top lip, as if the name of the orphan boy was a savory dish, “I read it, but I wanted more. I needed it to be a part of me." I envisioned fangs on her canines as she smiled, red from tearing flesh. It seemed almost cannibalistic that she’d ingest a work of literature.
“Couldn’t you just see the play?” I asked her. She rolled her eyes and told me that I didn’t understand. That night when she lay beside me she radiated a heat I’d never felt before. Though she turned away I wrapped myself around her, my palm across her stomach. It surged like a beast and I wanted to turn away, but eventually fell asleep. It couldn’t hurt me.
This is how Nessa began eating books. At first I wasn't afraid, her love affair with Literature was one I knew well. Dickens, Austin, all the names of the past were in her heart first and always. I could only come second, and that was okay. I thought the side effects of paper and ink on a woman's body would be harmless, minor, and as the saying goes "words can never hurt me."
Nessa was devouring books long before she started eating them. We met in a bookstore, fresh out of college, before the novelty of learning and higher education had begun to wear off. She was halfway through Anna Karenina, sunk deep into one of the armchairs with threadbare seats. She was turning the pages frantically, searching for something. She saw me stare.
"I can't read it quick enough."
She had only been in the chair an hour. I took her out for coffee that night, after patiently waiting for her to read her fill. We discovered that neither of us drank caffine at night, and laughed over café cookies. A week later I tried to woo her with Shakespeare. She wasn’t impressed. "It's not literature, it's theater," she said, as if I was comparing diamonds and coal. We made love anyway. Our six month anniversary I gave her the collected works of the Brothers Grimm, leather-bound. She grabbed me and pressed me to her, perfect, she told me, you're just perfect. My heart leapt and I couldn't have fallen further. A year later I presented her with Robert Frost, though I should have known better. "Literature, dear," she reminded me, and I sunk. "I need a story." Next year, it was Twain. Memories were tallied by books. As our library grew so did we.
Dickens didn’t scare me, not really. If anything, I was merely startled when I came home to her chewing contently on the corners of Tolkein.
"How's it taste?"
"Didn't think I liked fantasy," she said absently.
Soon it wasn't just classics. She moved on to contemporary works: Proulx, Cheever, even Rowling, though I protested. She knawed on paperback Harlequins as she browsed the asiles of the grocery store. I held her hand and took the brunt of the stares. She didn't care. She told me she was broadening her literary tastes, as she wiped a spot of drool from her chin. There was ink on her face, but I didn’t tell her so.
Another night I thought I'd surprise her with dinner. I slaved over a spiced talapia recipe I found in my mother's old cook book, aging in a cupboard above the fridge. When Nessa came home that night she sat down at the table with a dictionary and tore out a page. I gave her a plate and tried to take the book away.
"I'm not very hungry," she said, reaching for it. She ripped the page into shreds and placed one on her tongue. She couldn't see my distress.
"What?" she asked, "I've always been partial to Q."
A few nights later she was nibbling pages from Anna Karenina. She didn’t understand why I was upset.
I saw something in her that night. It was the first sign she was losing me. It would be long before I realized I was losing her as well.
I kept remembering the nights we'd stay in bed and talk until it was light outside. Even her voice was different now, throat coated in words that weren’t hers. She was pale as a page, dirt under her fingernails, her pupils were the period at the end of a sentence. When her long, silk-black hair began to fall out in clumps I insisted she see a doctor. She ate the pamphlets in the waiting room. This terrified me--before, she'd refused to eat any sort of periodical, claiming they weren't true works of art, unworthy of words. I wondered how long before she would eat newspapers, or grocery receipts.
"She needs to stop," the doctor told us, though he was only talking to me. The ink and paper were sitting in her stomach, refusing to go through. They were suffocating her, poisoning her, and it was only a matter of time.
I tried. I held her in my arms as she ate crumpled balls of paper. I made all of her old favorite dishes, trying to make her remember. I begged her to stop. It didn't matter that I was right here, that I was giving her words to find from my own mouth. She wanted more.
Nessa wouldn't leave the house. The weight of words, of endless pages of text moving around inside of her distracted her from work. I removed every book from the house and took her keys. She screamed, she begged me to give her something, anything. She began to scrawl sentences on paper towels and toilet paper, shoving them into her mouth with such force as I watched, helpless. Often I came home to an empty apartment and would search every newsstand, bookstore, and library. Once I found her in the next town, seated in a bean bag chair tearing apart children’s books like an animal. She had walked for three hours to get there.
I scribbled notes in secret places, hoping that maybe she’d see it before gobbling up the paper. “I tried,” I wrote in the telephone book. “You were beautiful,” I said in the refrigerator manual. “Maybe, someday,” on the last paper towel sheet. I don’t know if she ever saw them.
"Where are you?" I said one night as she slept. I brushed a piece of paper off her cheek. It stuck to my finger and I saw a single word: “seek.” I stared at the letters, memorizing every curve of the font. What was she trying to tell me? I said it over in my head, then out loud, seek. Seek. Seek. I repeated it until the word became nonsense. I wondered how she could enjoy this, why she needed it so badly. I put the tiny scrap in my mouth and rolled it around with my tongue. Nothing. I spit it out, afraid that if I left it there too long I might end up liking it too.
Eventually, I stopped trying to find Nessa, stopped clearing our home of literature. I moved my things out slowly, little by little. She would come home with take out menus clenched in her fists and grunt at me like an animal. I doubt she realized she was losing me as I removed pieces of myself from our home. Newspapers piled up in places where my things used to be as her eyes glazed deeper and deeper. On my last day I saw the corner of a leather-bound book peeking out from under the bed. Grimm’s. I pulled it out, the spine only slightly chewed. She’d kept her addiction at bay for this. Maybe there was hope.
“I love you,” I wrote on the last page, at the bottom next to the old English text that said “The End.”
Oyyy how it needs work and how I need suggestions.
breathless, the corners of her mouth reaching slyly toward deep dimples:
"I ate Dickens today." Her eyes fluttered at the author’s name and she sighed.
"You ate him?"
She didn't answer me at first, she was somewhere else. She was so content with herself, so proud of her accomplishment.
"Oliver Twist,” her tongue grazed her top lip, as if the name of the orphan boy was a savory dish, “I read it, but I wanted more. I needed it to be a part of me." I envisioned fangs on her canines as she smiled, red from tearing flesh. It seemed almost cannibalistic that she’d ingest a work of literature.
“Couldn’t you just see the play?” I asked her. She rolled her eyes and told me that I didn’t understand. That night when she lay beside me she radiated a heat I’d never felt before. Though she turned away I wrapped myself around her, my palm across her stomach. It surged like a beast and I wanted to turn away, but eventually fell asleep. It couldn’t hurt me.
This is how Nessa began eating books. At first I wasn't afraid, her love affair with Literature was one I knew well. Dickens, Austin, all the names of the past were in her heart first and always. I could only come second, and that was okay. I thought the side effects of paper and ink on a woman's body would be harmless, minor, and as the saying goes "words can never hurt me."
Nessa was devouring books long before she started eating them. We met in a bookstore, fresh out of college, before the novelty of learning and higher education had begun to wear off. She was halfway through Anna Karenina, sunk deep into one of the armchairs with threadbare seats. She was turning the pages frantically, searching for something. She saw me stare.
"I can't read it quick enough."
She had only been in the chair an hour. I took her out for coffee that night, after patiently waiting for her to read her fill. We discovered that neither of us drank caffine at night, and laughed over café cookies. A week later I tried to woo her with Shakespeare. She wasn’t impressed. "It's not literature, it's theater," she said, as if I was comparing diamonds and coal. We made love anyway. Our six month anniversary I gave her the collected works of the Brothers Grimm, leather-bound. She grabbed me and pressed me to her, perfect, she told me, you're just perfect. My heart leapt and I couldn't have fallen further. A year later I presented her with Robert Frost, though I should have known better. "Literature, dear," she reminded me, and I sunk. "I need a story." Next year, it was Twain. Memories were tallied by books. As our library grew so did we.
Dickens didn’t scare me, not really. If anything, I was merely startled when I came home to her chewing contently on the corners of Tolkein.
"How's it taste?"
"Didn't think I liked fantasy," she said absently.
Soon it wasn't just classics. She moved on to contemporary works: Proulx, Cheever, even Rowling, though I protested. She knawed on paperback Harlequins as she browsed the asiles of the grocery store. I held her hand and took the brunt of the stares. She didn't care. She told me she was broadening her literary tastes, as she wiped a spot of drool from her chin. There was ink on her face, but I didn’t tell her so.
Another night I thought I'd surprise her with dinner. I slaved over a spiced talapia recipe I found in my mother's old cook book, aging in a cupboard above the fridge. When Nessa came home that night she sat down at the table with a dictionary and tore out a page. I gave her a plate and tried to take the book away.
"I'm not very hungry," she said, reaching for it. She ripped the page into shreds and placed one on her tongue. She couldn't see my distress.
"What?" she asked, "I've always been partial to Q."
A few nights later she was nibbling pages from Anna Karenina. She didn’t understand why I was upset.
I saw something in her that night. It was the first sign she was losing me. It would be long before I realized I was losing her as well.
I kept remembering the nights we'd stay in bed and talk until it was light outside. Even her voice was different now, throat coated in words that weren’t hers. She was pale as a page, dirt under her fingernails, her pupils were the period at the end of a sentence. When her long, silk-black hair began to fall out in clumps I insisted she see a doctor. She ate the pamphlets in the waiting room. This terrified me--before, she'd refused to eat any sort of periodical, claiming they weren't true works of art, unworthy of words. I wondered how long before she would eat newspapers, or grocery receipts.
"She needs to stop," the doctor told us, though he was only talking to me. The ink and paper were sitting in her stomach, refusing to go through. They were suffocating her, poisoning her, and it was only a matter of time.
I tried. I held her in my arms as she ate crumpled balls of paper. I made all of her old favorite dishes, trying to make her remember. I begged her to stop. It didn't matter that I was right here, that I was giving her words to find from my own mouth. She wanted more.
Nessa wouldn't leave the house. The weight of words, of endless pages of text moving around inside of her distracted her from work. I removed every book from the house and took her keys. She screamed, she begged me to give her something, anything. She began to scrawl sentences on paper towels and toilet paper, shoving them into her mouth with such force as I watched, helpless. Often I came home to an empty apartment and would search every newsstand, bookstore, and library. Once I found her in the next town, seated in a bean bag chair tearing apart children’s books like an animal. She had walked for three hours to get there.
I scribbled notes in secret places, hoping that maybe she’d see it before gobbling up the paper. “I tried,” I wrote in the telephone book. “You were beautiful,” I said in the refrigerator manual. “Maybe, someday,” on the last paper towel sheet. I don’t know if she ever saw them.
"Where are you?" I said one night as she slept. I brushed a piece of paper off her cheek. It stuck to my finger and I saw a single word: “seek.” I stared at the letters, memorizing every curve of the font. What was she trying to tell me? I said it over in my head, then out loud, seek. Seek. Seek. I repeated it until the word became nonsense. I wondered how she could enjoy this, why she needed it so badly. I put the tiny scrap in my mouth and rolled it around with my tongue. Nothing. I spit it out, afraid that if I left it there too long I might end up liking it too.
Eventually, I stopped trying to find Nessa, stopped clearing our home of literature. I moved my things out slowly, little by little. She would come home with take out menus clenched in her fists and grunt at me like an animal. I doubt she realized she was losing me as I removed pieces of myself from our home. Newspapers piled up in places where my things used to be as her eyes glazed deeper and deeper. On my last day I saw the corner of a leather-bound book peeking out from under the bed. Grimm’s. I pulled it out, the spine only slightly chewed. She’d kept her addiction at bay for this. Maybe there was hope.
“I love you,” I wrote on the last page, at the bottom next to the old English text that said “The End.”
Oyyy how it needs work and how I need suggestions.