Sarah Therio: ANIMAL • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Sarah Therio
ANIMAL

The woman lies in his bed, splayed on her back like a starfish. The man is sucking her toes. She feels the warm, wet vacuum of his mouth take each one whole—then the traction as he extracts it from between his lips, slowly, with a satisfied smack, like a child savoring a popsicle. She hadn’t much considered her feet previously, save for the pedestrian trivia of the many bones within them. Now, unable to recall the answer to the question—how many bones exactly?—she wonders, also, Are they called phalanges? Like hands?

The woman watches him from the bed, peering down from what she suspects is a double chin, while the man is knelt at the foot. He has removed his shirt, exposing the rose tattoo on his left pectoral, over his heart. The rose is smaller than it seemed in photos, but it is indeed proportional to his chest, tasteful. She’s considered a similar design for her right shoulder, but too often, she is embarrassed of her arms. At this age, she thinks of herself as too big, at the same time as she considers him possibly too slight, as if this is any way to evaluate a person. And so what, if she could answer yes or no to such questions; later, she will miss how well he held her.

Before him and after, she has a habit of spending late nights perfecting her dating profile, in her best moods believing herself equivalent to her online persona. She has grown accustomed to tricking herself—in the way others have tricked her, who falsely advertise, who are lost and scavenging, at best, despite the stories their pictures and words tell. But here, she should feel lucky; the man has proven more than one could hope for. While she worries she has not. And yet, he is very much enjoying sucking her toes.

The woman remains clothed, though the man’s hands did already root around under her shirt, happily foraging, while they were kissing, which was definitely her fault. After all, she had pushed him up against a wall in the narrow hallway, in a put-on show of sexual prowess, only feeling the desire that should precede this move after she had done it, once she felt him respond enthusiastically—just as surprised, she noted, as she was. In truth, she enjoyed this feeling, that she could excite him, so much that she wasn’t thinking of what she’d invited next: the inevitable slurping like dogs in and around each other’s mouths.

The woman hopes it was like a movie, how they spun around in approximate circles as they approached the bed, connected by their faces, but she has a feeling it was hardly cinematic. A comedy, if so. As she stares at the opposite wall, his tongue slick along her arches, she thinks it somehow apropos: the velvet floor-to-ceiling tapestry of a life-sized tiger rushing toward her lying supine, the beast displaying the same ferocity with which the man attacks her feet. A bold choice in interior design, sure, but this is a man of passionate displays; he is not embarrassed. He, with a courageous heart, she thinks, as though a Brechtian narrator of some strange play. She, a woman in hiding. How easily she can turn anything into a joke.

The man occasionally looks to the woman and smiles wickedly—assessing her response—looking like he is eating a roast, devouring a kill, and is determined to leave no meat on the bone. He is definitely handsome. She likes his five o’clock shadow, meticulously groomed if slightly uneven; his sharp jawline; the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows his own spit. The animal of him. She likes much less the gold chain around his neck, its extravagance reminiscent of the tiger. She tries to return his smile.

Still, in fairness, she considers her own attire, her denim-encased legs the part of her she can see best from this angle. She is likely the only woman he has dated recently who still wears this style, and she knows she’s outgrown them, these jeans she got on sale at a sad department store before it went out of business, never sure of what she would still like once she got it home, if anything could truly make her feel beautiful. She only wore them because they seemed more feminine than other options and because they matched the blue in her floral top, which she realizes now, she despises. It is too bright in color. It is nothing like her. She is not the woman she advertised, she is thinking.

“I can’t tell what you’re thinking,” the man says, and the woman feels caught. She could never tell him her thoughts. Such as how unfair it was, when he serenaded her with a Bon Iver cover, fingers nervously fumbling the strings of a guitar, that she took his hand and led him upstairs, like she knew the way, despite knowing little at all. And how, happy as he is with her, she can’t find it in herself to meet him, couldn’t take what she needed if she even knew what it was. If anything, she is wild in the worst of ways, for the lengths she will go to avoid being seen, for the fear that rises inside her when someone gets too close. If she understood the truth was kinder, she might have told it to him, then: she is an animal too starved not to bite a loving hand and run. Even now, she is thinking of fleeing, wondering how to get out.

Sarah Therio practices medicine and writes fiction in Tucson, AZ where she is an Advanced student at The Writers Studio. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in swamp pink and Peatsmoke Journal and was chosen for its originality of form as a finalist for Grist’s ProForma Contest. Instagram page: @sarah.therio. Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/sarah.therio/