We had just put away the breakfast dishes and were nuzzling on the couch when I told him I wanted to crawl inside his skin.
Not in an Ed Gein sort of way, I said. I’m not Buffalo Bill.
But pressing into him, all flesh on flesh, was not enough. I wanted to be so enmeshed in him that we were one. Is that not the goal, to love until it’s all-consuming?
He brushed my hair out of my face with that skewed, sleepy smile and said, All you had to do was ask.
He unzipped his chest cavity, and I gently pushed his ribs aside to make room. I nestled behind his heart, that bloody beating thing, my own matching his steady kaboom kaboom. Stretching, I slipped my fingers into his, shrugged into his shoulders, twined our toes. When he breathed, I breathed. When he blinked, I blinked. When his blood cells and enzymes and stomach acid began to break down my bones, I settled into dissolution.
How lovely, I thought, how comforting. I am not his body, but his blood.
Sydney Koeplin is a writer from northern Illinois. She’s currently an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University and the fiction editor of Mid-American Review. Her writing is published in Passages North, New Delta Review, phoebe, and elsewhere. You can find her work at sydneykoeplin.com.
Image Credit: “Swallowed by Silence” by Sailee Charlu
EDITOR’S CHOICE AWARD
Sailee Charlu is a visual artist and spoken poet based in Orange County, CA. She has spent five years training in an arts conservatory for visual arts and creative writing. As a multi-time National Scholastic Gold Medalist and Region-at-Large American Visions Awardee in her visual arts work, her work has been recognized for its emotional depth and narrative clarity. Her art has been published in Celebration Art and Inkblot Magazine. Working across many mediums, Sailee explores memories and emotions as fluid and fragmented, inherited, and constantly reinvented. Through layered imagery, she challenges her viewer to interpret each piece in relation to their own lived experiences.
