When I think of her, I imagine wet chewing.
Marumi has gnawed a hole in me, and my guts are spilling out, and an unspooling rope of intestine tethers me to her sticky mouth. Disoriented in the narcotic tangle of limbs, I hear the moist smack, from somewhere, of teeth on flesh.
Marumi chews vacantly, without pause, on what should have stayed inside.
I try not to remember Marumi. But she’s like tentacles. She’d cling to my elbow in public. Her jealous arm circled my waist when we bumped into Ichiro, my colleague, at the bar near her place. I was angry. Do you want them to know?
And she said: Yes. You’re mine, after all. And I struggled, I swear, but it was useless; my body plunged into her embrace. The next morning, when I tried to leave for work, she dragged me by the hips back to bed. My stomach lurched; I shook her off and ran for my
Train.
I blocked her after that. But Marumi left a residue—a mucus I couldn’t rinse from my skin.
I got wasted at my company’s bounenkai; my highball was sloshing everywhere. A clammy touch probed my wrist momentarily. But it was just Ichiro, reaching out to steady my hand.
Walking to the station, Ichiro’s steps propelled him forward in a firm, straight line. Mine kept veering off to the left. Muscle memory: I suddenly realised that Marumi lived nearby.
“Hey, careful,” Ichiro said. “You OK? My place is near here. How about you rest there for a while?”
I let Ichiro lead me down that cold, straight line, right to his apartment door. When his mouth moved from top to bottom, latched on beneath my navel, and suckled—I was relieved to find
I felt nothing at all.
– Maggie DUGUID