First, he took both my hands, so that I could no longer touch his body. No touching allowed, he said. Only looking. He demanded to see my face, my eyes, the soft begging whimper tinged with fear because it turned him on. And then he took both my feet so that I couldn’t get away. I was only his, he said. Everything belonged to him now.
I let him take those pieces because I wanted so desperately to be touched.
I watched him pace around the bedroom with a nervous energy. He worried that the neighbors might see him coming and going. He stopped to peek out of the blinds, grinding his teeth, afraid they might recognize the irises in his eyes, and then he finally leaned down to give me one last kiss on the mouth before he took my lips. And I know I shouldn’t have been surprised when the next thing he took was my dick, but it was something that had only ever been under my control, so its sudden disappearance sent a shock through my body. He took it for his pleasure, he said. Only his pleasure mattered now.
No more seeing, he said as he took my eyes. Only sensing. The black loss of vision heightened every minor touch of his fingers until the surprise of contact was something like pleasure. But maybe he saw that—my back arching as his hand touched my chest—because he then took my skin.
Better to get inside you, he said. Where the real you lives.
And it wasn’t long before he’d taken my heart, which I’d always thought was just a muscle for pumping blood, but it turns out it’s just like in cartoons from when you’re a kid: the heart is where your love and passion and feeling lives.
Then I was just cool logic, and I know it should have made me see who he really was, but my brain, even without that intoxicating heart, could only think: Christ, he’s so close to me that I can hear him scratching and know that it is the sound of the fingernails of his right hand in the coarse black hair on his stomach. That was how much he needed to be with me, to be that close.
But the problem of not being able to feel is that I couldn’t tell how much of me was being taken away, and I just listened to the sound of him moving back and forth, back and forth, until he took both ears, with the last bit of my mind, and he whispered into them that it just couldn’t work out. My neighbors were goddamn spies, and the walls were so thin that they would hear us fucking or talking or sitting next to each other not even touching. And he hoped I didn’t mind, but he took the last of the beer from the fridge and the twenties from my wallet. And then he walked out of the apartment, taking even more along the way to the door, and all he left of me was the shinbone.
I know it seems odd that that long, strong bone in the leg can think, let alone feel, but it was still part of me, and as it lay in the bed, night into day and day into night, all it could wonder was, with so much of me gone, why hadn’t it been enough? Maybe, just maybe, if he had taken this last sliver of hard tissue, something so unessential that the dead just left it lying around, he would have stayed.
Time moves strangely for the nearly unsubstantial. Hours bled and repeated and almost came to a complete stop. And then it was as if the whole of geologic time flashed by, and the planet turned to nothing but dust, and there I was, still just a small part of myself, white and hard, resting in the dust, the only thing left.
Then the clock ticked, minutes moving by with normal order, and sinew grew, and fat and skin. Blood, hair, and cartilage. White matter and enamel and vitreous body. All the parts and feelings of our meat-based existence. I felt my teeth, new in my mouth, clumsy, so I bit a little cheek and it hurt. It tasted like metal. My hair, greasy, stood on end where it had smashed into the pillow. And the softness of my belly made me feel shame, but only a little. Under the layer of fat, my stomach growled because I hadn’t eaten since the extinction of the tyrant lizard.
Hands. Lips. Soles of feet. Hairs along the ear lobe. Abdomen skin tags. It was all, just, average. But it was me. And it was new, learned, grown from mere cells of my old self, incubated in stardust and caustic gases, and it was all right.
Two months later, he would text, with his messages of dominance and confidence, like nothing had transpired, like we were meeting for the very first time, and I would have to decide if I was going to give him all the newness of myself, all the skin yet to be touched, all the parts yet to be used, all of me that still wanted to be embraced and accepted. He’d take again, no question, but for a brief moment all those new parts would rest in his impossibly soft hands.
My fingers would type: YES. COME. NOW. PLEASE.
But in that moment before pressing send, the held breath on the sharp inhale when time could grind to an end, I would remember the strength of the shinbone.
Thomas Price is a writer living in Los Angeles. His fiction has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Barcelona Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Other Stories podcast, Arkansas Review, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. For more information, please visit his website.
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