ONCE BITTEN
The first time I was bitten, it was my fault. Bad workday, bad life day. I watched true crime in bed, devoured a packet of cherry chocolate cookies. Fell asleep side-slumped, arm dangling, fingers sticky. I didn’t feel the bites—he was strangely gentle—just a sensation of heat in numb fingers. I did feel when he found my mouth still slick with cherry, grazed my lip with his teeth. Felt it all down my spine. Pain red and shiny as the fruit. I woke to him hunkered on my chest, cleaning his whiskers. His eyes black pearls winking. I tasted blood and cherry on my lip. His whiskers brushed my cheek.
You’re not afraid of me. I whispered, smelling dank places on his fur, chocolate on his breath. I’m not afraid either.
I worked mushed cookie from my teeth, offered him my tongue. He licked frantically, yellowed incisors prising the fruit from me. I felt the scrape of them, the bite of his nails as he held onto me. I rubbed my cheek against the hard nub of his head and then he was gone, tick-tick down the stairs.
I felt exhilarated, aroused. Longed to follow him into the stinking shadows of back alleys and bins, on the hunt, rent flesh leaching. Instead, I closed my eyes, kept the lip wound open so I could taste him until morning.
-o-o-o-
You’re a worried child, mum would always say when she found me gnawing the inside of my cheeks or snipping at my lips with small teeth. I’d be watching cartoons or reading a book, seemingly unaware I was “mutilating myself” as dad called it. Your brothers don’t bite themselves like dirty animals, he’d say. My brothers were far worse than animals most days, but dad wouldn’t hear it. I couldn’t tell my mum that my only worry was being trapped in a home like hers, a life like hers, with an angry husband and too much beer and sons who hid vile thoughts behind angelic smiles. I bit myself because I liked how it felt. The lemon-sharp sting, teeth and flesh in a battle of tension and intent: I could leave jagged furrows or tear deep. I got to relishing the salty taste – my meat, my body. I got to relishing the red release of it all.
-o-o-o-
He returns nightly. Cold fur reeking of detritus and wild things. I feed him marshmallow, shredded beef, crispy potato. I feed him with my mouth. He grows gentle, more pet than feral beast, more tongue than teeth. I snarl, drag the tender flesh of my lip along his incisors. He washes his face, settles into the space between my breasts, tail across his back feet. I think he is beautiful.
At work, I tell people I have ulcers. My manager stares at the purpled scabs on my lips, the weeping. I can refer you to someone, she says. My colleagues jerk away from me like mice horrified by the bloodied maw of the street cat. I smear ointments to feel the burn.
I read about a woman who bred the biggest rats in the world. When I call, she’s delighted to share her secrets, time having made her inconsequential. Be careful, she says, the dosage must be precise or anything could happen. Terrible things even.
Terrible things.
I whisper this as I shop for ingredients online terrible things, terrible things, chew the inside of my cheek until my teeth ache.
I wait until he’s sated and sleepy. A sedative in his chocolate pudding. He twitches and snorts and I wonder what rats dream of. I inject him fast in his neck-scruff. He squeaks, stares with wet-ink eyes. I hush him, sorry, so sorry, it’ll be OK. He settles in the crook of my elbow and I rub my fingertip across his teeth. It’ll be OK.
When I wake, I’m sure he’s left me. That the rat breeder was demented and there’s no metamorphosis possible. I stare at my ruined mouth in the mirror.
Then the bed creaks with new, substantial weight and I fall back into him. My face in fur smelling of my perfume, and deeper, down at his roots - rotting vegetables, old meat, animal urine and dank earth. His curved nails comb my hair, gently abrade my spine. He is muscle and teeth and I lose myself in the unrestrained wildness of him until my blood spots the sheets and my flesh sizzles. He sniffs between my legs, nose and long whiskers a beautiful torment. He flips me over and I grip the headboard as he mounts me, his thick tail thumping the bed like a drum and in its relentless beat I feel a release unlike anything before. I bite the back of my hands and he chatter-hisses into my hair as he fills me.
He quietly offers his neck for the injections that keep him from shrinking. From going back. I kiss the beads of blood from his fur, feel his muscles growing under my lips. Our nights straddle the line between pain and pleasure until there is no line. Like a rat myself, I squeal and scrabble and curl into a ball as he uses his teeth and tail to thrill me and I think, this can’t last. It’s only borrowed. So I give all of myself to it, not caring that I may have leashed him.
It can’t last.
As time passes, he stays away from me more and more. I watch moths and spiders flit and hunt, wonder what their bites feel like. My mouth is healed-pink and empty. I press my tongue to the tips of my teeth – leave a weal, no penetration.
When he finally returns, he’s brackish with the lost places only he knows. He lingers in the shower, brown water swirling at his feet. I help to dry him, offer him my tender hollows, the blood just beneath the skin, waiting to bloom. He turns away, says, I have eaten.
His own kind reject him; fearing his size, his otherness. My kind can never know of him, so he is trapped between worlds. His pain – so unlike that which I crave – is present in the way he shrugs from me, shows shame when I ask for his bite. I press against his shoulders, wrap his paw in my hands. He speaks softly, let me go my love.
Terrible things, the breeder said, and now I know.
It’s a hot night, the last one. I feel him like a heavy blanket. When he braces for the syringe, I shake my head. He takes the torrent of grief and gratitude, turns it into bestial passion one final time. Claws-teeth-tail and I bellow my love for him through an open window so it echoes in the alleys and towpaths and drains.
Absence wakes me. The sun just up and he’s in the doorway. Small enough to curl on my chest. He lifts his nose, taking my scent. I think he’s beautiful.
Go now, I whisper and he tick-ticks down the stairs and out into the birthing morning.
#
I choose not to give into my loss. I find new excitements in a private club, meet a couple who show me how to bite discreetly. When we’re spent in one bed or another, like nest-mates with legs and arms enwrapping, the burn of bitten flesh on breasts and inner things is red and cherry-sweet.
After, I often find myself seeking the night’s fragrant shadows. Summer cooks the alleys and I hear them chittering as they find things to eat. I imagine him there, unleashed and thriving, fur slick-stinky. I imagine him teasing threads of chocolate from a wrapper. Pausing in a blurred memory of a time when he was worshiped, when he was loved, and I think, maybe, just maybe, that’s what rats dream of.