Sustenance

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“If we get really lost in here,” Aphra says, “I might kill and eat you.”

“If we get really lost in here,” says Seth, “I’ll cut off your arm and we can roast it over a spit.”

Aphra and Seth are driving through the Angeles National Forest and the GPS lady has no idea where they are. Aphra’s car’s a mess, picnic remains crowding the backseat:  a Ziploc containing three apple cores, two avocado stones, and half a tomato; another Ziploc containing two spoons and a cutting knife; a nearly empty multigrain crackers box and a half-drunk bottle of wine; tomato-streaked plates.  As they watch the sky darken, they are thinking words like “bluff” and “crag,” but they aren’t sure these are the right words.  They only know words like these from stories, but this is close to what they pictured.

“What about your arm?” Aphra says. She says this, but she doesn’t mean it.  Aphra’s never eaten meat before, not that she can remember, and she prefers the idea of eating her own meat to eating Seth. She figures this means she might not love Seth, but she also figures she probably already knows that.

“Fine, my arm.”

“No.” Aphra tosses her shiny black hair.

“Your arm?” Seth’s face scrunches in the middle, confused, in a way that makes

him look like a little boy.

“Well,” Aphra says, glancing over to the passenger seat where Seth has his arms all stretched out, his fingers spread across the dashboard, “My muscle’s bigger. Your arm’s, like, skin.  My arm will keep us sustained longer.” Aphra turns sharply around the curve.   “The muscle’s the part you’re supposed to eat, right?”

“We’re going to die if you keep driving like this,” Seth says.

“Plus, you have those tattoos. You’re probably poisonous.”

Seth looks down at the blood-pumping heart on his left bicep. “This is generous of you. Although now I’ll have to do even more shit for you because you only have one arm.”

“Yup,” Aphra says. “After we’re saved by helicopters, you’ll move in, and I’ll be like, Seth, iron my shirt. I have work in the morning and I only have one arm.”

“How are we gonna get through the bone?”

“I’m worried about that.  But I’m thinking after we cut through the flesh, we’ll just snap it.  We’ll need to use your t-shirt.”

“As a tourniquet?”

“Precisely.”

“But this is my favorite t-shirt.”

“This is my favorite arm.”

“Can’t we use your unfavorite arm?  I mean, I don’t want you to have to learn to write with your unfavorite hand.  I’ll use my favorite t-shirt as a tourniquet anyway.”

“Yes, Seth,” Aphra sighs. “We can use my unfavorite arm.”

“Okay, good. At least you can make grocery lists before you send me to the store.”  Seth starts scratching his elbow.

“How do you think you’ll feel about doing all this extra work for me?”

“I’m not sure.”

But Aphra thinks she is sure.  She smiles a closed-mouth smile, as though she has a secret.  Seth will love having to blue-lacquer the nails of her remaining hand.  He’ll love having to hold the jar of hearts of palm in place as she twists its lid. He’ll love fishing through her bag for a cigarette because she’s holding a whiskey neat in her only hand.

“Why are you making your devious face?”

“I’m just thinking about the joy you’ll feel upon having to fold my laundry neatly and then drive me to the Thai place for pineapple-cashew fried rice.”

Aphra would never fold Seth’s laundry or apply kohl to his lower lashes, she knows, is another reason they can’t saw through his arm. After you saw someone’s arm off, she figures, you’re kind of bound to them.

They turn under a rocky overhang that seems almost falsely textured in the weird twilight, as though someone painted its shadows and sun-streaks.

“I think it’s possible that all the scary teen movies where kids get murdered were shot on this road,” Seth says.

Aphra doesn’t answer.  She is busy thinking how this arm meat will be the first meat she has eaten and this excites her. Mostly she doesn’t eat meat because it belongs to other creatures. Dead creatures. Dead creatures who may have had uninteresting or insipid or evil souls.  Why would she willingly ingest such things? To allow them to become part of her seemed ridiculous, disgusting.  Plants survive on water and light.  They are self-sufficient, make their own food. Aphra appreciates this. She is suddenly very curious about eating her own arm.  It’s the only way to know the taste of meat and be completely certain it is free of evil, stupidity, laziness.

“What if we saw a dairy truck?” Seth asked. “Would you rather eat dairy or cut off your arm?”

“What, exactly, is a dairy truck?”

“You know, like a truck. Delivering cheese. Or gallon jugs of milk.”

“While it’s unlikely that such a truck would fit on these narrow fucking roads, I would say no to the dairy truck.  I’d rather hike down to where there’s water and eat moss.”

“And then cut off your arm?”

“Sure,” Aphra said.  “Seth, cow’s milk is for baby cows.  Not for humans.  I’d rather just get pregnant and wait a few months until I start producing my own milk and drink that.”

“You would let me impregnate you?”

Aphra doesn’t answer.  Instead she imagines boring two holes, one into the bicep and the other into the wrist of her severed arm. She is not sure what she’d bore with; she has no drill, but she’d figure it out.  She imagines stringing up the arm. She could use the drawstring from the red hoodie she is wearing. She’d hand a string to Seth and twirl the arm over an open flame. There is an orange lighter that Aphra keeps in her front right jeans pocket. They could use this to light some fire-scorched pine needles. She wonders if, during the twirling, the hand would flop down, dangle, or if it would remain erect, a parallel extension of the rest of the arm.

“I can’t believe there is no service anywhere in this place,” Seth is looking at his phone again.

“It’s a forest.”

She wonders what it will taste like.  Will it be all sinewy? Or will it be tender and melty, loosen easily from the bone?

“Will you start kissing me?” Seth asks. “After you lose your arm and I start doing everything for you?”

Aphra waits until the supernarrow part of the road ends before she answers. “You don’t want me to kiss you, Seth.  You just want me to spank you really hard.” She shrugs, “And to fuck you once in awhile. You know this.”

Seth puts his feet up on the dashboard, sulks.  “Yeah, I know. Kissing is a false social construct.”  He sing-songs this, under his breath. “Fuck etiquette, yeah, I know.”

“Spanking only takes one arm, Seth. You’ll be fine.”

“Maybe we should just camp.  Maybe this will be easier in daylight.  There will be hikers.”

“I don’t like camping. Check the lady again.”

“The lady is dead.”

Aphra thinks that, yes, if you saw off someone’s arm, you’re forever bound to that person.  Aphra knows she will leave Seth eventually. Maybe even soon. She feels a little bad.  But Aphra needs to be loved, in an unrequited way, by others. She worries that this might be a character flaw, but, Aphra thinks, there are two kinds of character flaws:  the kind that can be corrected, like not doing dishes directly after you’ve finished eating, and the kind that are central to your being. If you try to undo the second type of character flaw, many smaller character flaws will emerge. If you try to undo the second type of character flaw, your character will crack somewhere, engendering hundreds of tiny character fissures until eventually your entire character is spotted with holes and you are no longer one hundred percent you and probably not even one hundred percent human.

Aphra has had boyfriends before. Every boyfriend Aphra has had is still in love with her.  Late at night, all the boyfriends stay up thinking about Aphra, silently worshipping her obsessive indigo stare, the right side of her lip that curls when she exhales cigarette smoke, the way her ears look like tiny sea animals. Aphra can feel these boyfriends worshipping from Nashville and Chicago and Vermont. There is a constant trickle of energy traveling to Aphra from each of the boyfriend’s beating hearts, their hearts that if you listen really closely sound like aph-ra, aph-ra and that combine into a rushing stream of sustenance. Aphra senses this collective worshipping, feels it moving blood through her veins. She feels it less and less though, like some of them have gotten married or died, forgotten her.

She vaguely wishes she didn’t need this kind of worship-en-masse; she feels a little bad about needing others to live in a state of perpetual longing. But she wants to be whole, not fissured, so.

There is a look-out point, and Aphra pulls over into it and stops.

She looks at Seth and feels jealous of her worshipping boyfriends, that they have this love in their hearts, have hope for a true and lasting connection, something greater.

“Seth do you believe in God?”

Seth’s toes nudge the dashboard one by one.  “Um,” he says.  “Do you?”

“I want to,” Aphra’s voice sounds suddenly decisive. “I want to feel there is something greater than me.”

“But you’re the greatest,” Seth says, not entirely sarcastically.

Aphra sighs through her nose, a frustrated, not unattractive sigh.

“I’m bored.”

“Do you want me to drive?”

“Let’s just stay here.”

“I don’t want to sleep on the side of a cliff, Aphra. It’s not safe.”

“No.  Let’s just sit on the side of the cliff.”

“Right now?”

Aphra stops the car, looks at Seth.  “Yes.”

“You can’t stop here, Aphra.  If another car comes, we’ll die.”

“No cars have come this whole time.”

“Please keep going.”

“You have no interest in possible death?”

“Not tonight. And I especially have no interest in killing someone else.”

Aphra’s eyes light up as she looks at Seth. “But,” she says, “You might want to see blood.”

Seth shifts in the passenger seat.  It’s dark now, and the whites of Aphra’s eyes are the brightest visible things.  “Aphra,” he takes his foot off the dash, meets her eyes. They’re big and dark in the center, her eyes, the opaque indigo contacts blending with her pupils.  “We’re not cutting off your arm.”

“But I want to.”

“That makes no sense.”

Aphra turns her whole body toward Seth.  “It does to me.”

Seth takes his other foot off the dashboard, breathes audibly, looks around. “Okay, we’ll cut off your arm, but pull over to a safe place first.”

Aphra nods.  She drives, grinning, along the curves of the road until there is a shoulder, a look-out point.  They can see the shadows of the tall pines below.

Aphra turns off the car and looks at Seth, beaming creepily.

“Aphra, we’re joking,” Seth says. “You know that, right?”

Aphra looks puzzled, her eyes weirdly glazed over.  Seth looks at Aphra’s puzzled face and sits up very straight.

“We’re not really that lost, Aphra.”

“But I want to know what meat tastes like,” Aphra says.  “And I want you to eat my arm.”

Seth puts a hand on Aphra’s arm.  She glances down at it, as though it is a curious-but-uninterpretable object.   “Well, we could eat your arm,” he says, “or we could sleep in the car and in the morning we’ll be able to see, and there will be other people and we can ask them how to get out of here and we’ll go to the Olive Garden.”

“Ew, ” Aphra says, twisting her keys out from the ignition. She opens the driver’s side door and walks around the front of the car. She grabs the handle of the cutting knife in the backseat.  Then she opens the passenger side door, backs into Seth’s lap, sits with her legs hanging outside.  “Cut my arm,” she says, firm, pushing the little wooden handle into Seth’s hand.

“I don’t think this a very good idea.”

“I said, cut me. Seth.” She looks at him with her threatening eyes, the eyes that mean he’ll be punished severely if he disobeys.

“It might not be sanitary.”

Aphra pulls the orange lighter from her jeans pocket and watches the flame spread and blue against the knife’s blade.

Her eyes burn into Seth’s.  “Now,” she says.

Seth nods.  He runs the blade shallowly along the outside of Aphra’s right shoulder.  Aphra is pale and smiling as blood begins to dot and trickle from the thin white line. Her face relaxes.  She looks receptive and blissed in a way that scares Seth.

“Good.  That’s a good start,” Aphra says, using her babying voice now, the one she uses when Seth is whimpering in pain. “Now cut deeper.”

Seth held her gaze. “Aph-”

“Cut deeper, Seth.”

Eyes locked with Aphra’s, Seth places the blade on the bleeding line.  He traces the cut with the blade of the knife, running the knife slowly across, about a half-centimeter deep.

Blood begins to spill.

“Mmm,” Aphra mmms.

Seth’s hand shakes. “Aphra,” he says, holding the edge of the knife in place.

Blood spills from the slit in Aphra’s arm-slowly first, and then in drops.  Seth moves his hand away and curves his neck over the consul.  He licks the fallen blood from Aphra’s skin, sucks the open seam.  He is sucking audibly, until the opening is dry for part of a second.  Then the blood seeps again.

“Seth.”  Aphra’s using the seductive voice now, but more childish, and a little drugged-sounding.  She reaches out and runs her fingers down Seth’s forearm.

Seth sets the knife down and removes his t-shirt, wraps it tight, tight around Aphra’s arm.  He pulls hard on the loose end, ties.  Red soaks through the clean cotton. It seeps slowly, making heart-shapes and dune curves.

Aphra begins to shake.  Her teeth are chattering.

“Aphra,” Seth says, keeping his voice soft, but mustering all the authoritative quality he has,  “I don’t need to eat you.  You’re already in my body.  I’m digesting your blood and soon it will be in all of my cells.  It will be part of me.”  He holds out a hand like he might do to invite a cat to nuzzle, and Aphra rubs her cheek against it.  Then, she gathers her legs from outside and wraps her arms around them, rests her forehead on her knees.  The bloody rag drips onto Seth’s heart tattoo, making it look as though it’s really pumping blood. “If you really want to eat meat,” he says, “We’ll raise some chickens.  We can pick the best and smartest one, the one you love the most, and kill it ourselves.” He holds his hand wide against her cotton back, surprised at how pronounced the notches of her spine feel, how small she is.  “Anyway,” he says, “you were in my cells already.” Aphra nods, feeling the skin of Seth’s chest rub a pleasant burn against her face.