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By Athena Nassar
It is the night of my consumption. I look at myself in the mirror and weep, not because I am scared, but because I wish my face could always look like this— stripped of its features. My supple cheeks slowly withering into their organic shape like fingered heirloom tomatoes after a harvest. My body slowly withering, but then I remember: snap, digest, breathe, and I have forgotten the mechanics of lungs. I am breathing like a newborn child that has just been thrown into a swimming pool by a neglectful father, and suddenly I am swimming in my own asexual reflection. Vegetation leaks in from the bathroom window as a sort of witness, so I shut the window. Lock the door to my lover who waits outside in the dining room with cold food on the table. I unscrew the flap on the back of my neck and remove my memory card, caked with dust. Do I wish to continue?
Snap.
He picks on me because he likes me— bends me over a toilet bowl with his hands pressed to my mouth or maybe he folds me like a dish towel and folds me again. Fills me with “I love yous” just to wring me out in the kitchen sink (after dinner of course). I call it a date, because Frank Sinatra is playing in the moonlit dining room, and his “fuck yous” are muffled with the voice on the radio. The forecast seems to be the same old shit tomorrow, so I grab my rain boots and step out into the same old shit, because he speaks a language that nobody understands except for me. Every “fuck you” was a joke lost in translation, but I laughed anyways, because guess what! I am fluent in fuck you. When my mother said “boys will be boys,” I laughed, even though the joke slipped right through me. Through him, I see the heart of a boy pumping with blood gone sour.
We sit at the dining table chewing overcooked beef over the sound of Frank Sinatra. Chrysanthemums sit like a cinder block in the center of the table. I stare at them blankly and imagine him walking down the grocery aisle, picking the bouquet that stood out to him the most.
Do you like them?The chrysanthemums? I ask, knowing that he was talking about the chrysanthemums.
They’re lovely. There’s a pause.?The landline rings, but neither of us move to pick it up.?Ungrateful bitch.
His words taste expired. I slosh them around in my mouth to make up for the silence. The cicadas mating outside our window. The garbage disposal gurgling, but never spitting. The washing machine churning. The heel of his tapered dress shoe tapping the tile, and I wonder what the leather would sound like in the garbage disposal. I hate chrysanthemums, especially the ones whose ovaries have already been pollinated by some foreign body. I imagine a man with yellow gloves plucking them from the earth, shaving them of their character. Rolling their extremities in sheets of plastic and packaging them with automated love letters.
In Botticelli’s painting, The Birth of Venus,Aphrodite stands erect in her most natural form: deep within the bowels of an abnormally large scallop shell. A handmaiden attempts to cover her with a fuchsia tapestry. She emerges as the fruitful result of bloodshed like many other gods and goddesses. The story is this: Cronus barbarically overthrows his father, Uranus, subsequently throwing his genitals into the ocean. The water is fertilized by the organs of Uranus, and Aphrodite then rises from sea foam with no maternal figure involved. She is carried to the island of Cyprus by the breath of Zephyrus, god of the west wind. Men are meant to dissect this painting, to inspect Aphrodite in her outright nakedness, and acquire some ethereal intellect about the female body. They cradle this painting in their breast as if it is the meat of the stars.
Aphrodite is beauty, and I am her mother. Dionaea Muscipula. The Venus fly trap earned its name from its flesh like leaves that possess a pinkish center almost like a yawning vagina. I open my jaw wide, secrete a nectar so sweet that insects claw at the window screen, begging to be swallowed in my scent.
Digest.
My purpose is to attract, so I attract. A simple machine, I only have one function. I release a fluorescent blue glow from my eyes. Open my jaw wider and wider until sap drips down onto the table cloth. The silverware is saturated in my own mucus. I wet him before the consumption. Strip myself of my clothes and stand, held captive by the death grip of the chrysanthemums. They bundle me tight in rubber bands, leaving purple marks on my swollen hips. Still, I open wider— grow fresh skin over my cuts and scrapes. I grow and grow larger. My legs shoot up through the floorboards, and I wear the house as underwear. Wear his organs as an old dish towel. He is quiet now, because I have just swallowed his tongue.
My roots curl and twist and bind him to the chair, and for once, he is the one that is bound. A prisoner to my botanical whims. He tries to scream ‘fuck you,’ but he struggles to pronounce the vowels. His words crawl out of his lips in a tangled slur. The hard slap of the ‘k’ never surfaces. He tries to scream ‘I always knew you were crazy!’ He tries to scream ‘please.’ Tries to scream ‘I love you.’ His tongue will never regenerate, and he will never taste strawberry preserves on french bread, a poached egg with runny yolk, buttermilk pancakes. My diet consists of crickets, millipedes, measly men. I break him down until a chitin shell is the only artifact that remains.
In M ortal Kombat,there are eighteen realms that exist in a fictional universe, and we float in the blank space in between. The space that video game developers forgot to fill. Our house is surrounded by miles and miles of pixelated vegetation. Trees that will never collapse from strong winds and bodies of
water that will never be tapped dry, because we live on a fabricated plot of land ruled by gods whom we will never see. I curse the video game developers. Too busy to create another arena, so they left us here to rot in the acid of our own self loathing. We don’t have the luxury of power ups or armor, but in Mortal Kombat 3, new finishing moves were introduced. Animalities. The victor is transformed into a savage beast to defeat the opponent. Soaked in chlorophyll, I have mutated into our surroundings. My lover’s pixelated blood drips from my teeth, and I see our makeshift world for what it really is: a hologram. My hands slip right through his carved out exoskeleton. I see our house in blots of color. Two dimensional shapes. I see the chrysanthemums scattered on the dining table, red with animation. I look out the window to see the sky, a gradient blue with perfectly crafted clouds. Prehistoric creatures with dragging tails shuffle across our lawn. Woolly rhinoceros. Arthopleura. Abnormally large snake skins. Terror birds with hooked beaks pick at a dead boar. The video game developers left them here, because they didn’t fit into the aesthetic of any of the realms, much like us.
The jungle is alive, and I fear it will swallow me whole. It is just me now, only sheltered by the thin walls of my house. The jungle breathes, and I breathe with it to avoid the breath of a million pigs.
Breathe.
There is nothing left of him to bury, so I bury the radio. Unplugged, Frank Sinatra still sings “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Itrytochangethestation,trytoswitchtheoffbutton,butthemusicgoesonas we get deeper and deeper into the thick of the forest. His voice bounces off the cartoonish trees, increasing in volume. The only sounds are his singing, my breathing, and of course, the static oozing from the cassette. Finally, I find a flat space in the forest where there is no growth. This is where the burial will take place.
In the realm of Greek mythology, the deceased pays a boatman to carry them across the river Styx and to the underworld safely. A coin is given in exchange for protection against whatever may lurk in the depths of the river. I place a penny in the mouth of the radio and make sure its lips are sealed shut, so that no soul can escape. The radio consumes the copper like good food— whirs and sputters and licks its chops. With this, the singing comes to a halt, but there is still a faint static somewhere in the distance. A warning cry.
The static gets significantly louder, and the ground shakes. A terror bird comes running in full force. The screeching wakes a nest of infants, and they follow their mother. They all come running. Their tongues hang out of their mouths, and I spot the tiniest red dot at the back of their throats. A camera?
I begin to claw at the dirt— begin to root us deeper into the earth. Our little sketched world. I dig us deeper and deeper, clawing at the speakers of the radio. My leaves are turning a sick black, curling upwards into a cynical grin. Still, I dig us deeper until all I can see is a sliver of the outside. I figure: how
will I be eaten if I am not seen? How will I be consumed if I am already so lathered in pig scum? I figure they will not want to get their hands dirty with my decay.
Somewhere, the video game developers sit in a room with a wall full of screens and laugh.
—
Athena Nassar is an Egyptian-American poet and essayist from Atlanta, Georgia. She is an undergraduate student at Emerson College and Interlochen Arts Academy alum. She is the recipient of the 2019 Scholastic National Gold Medal Portfolio Award, an honorable mention in the New York Times Student Review Contest, Lake Effect National Poetry Competition finalist, and Tom Samet High School Fiction Competition winner. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best Teen Writing of 2019, DIALOGIST, Riggwelter, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and elsewhere. Currently, she is a feature writer for Five Cent Sound and Atlas Magazine at Emerson College.