Biological Proximity

When we first met, I convinced you to let me probe your molars with my tongue. You’d tilt your head back and I’d push the wet muscle along your ragged ivory crowns, linger on the metallic iron fillings. I used to sink two fingers deep into your belly button until my hand was buried inside your roll of flesh, until you said it hurt. I tried every night to press my eyeball flush against yours but you could never keep your eyelid from closing at the last second. You wanted to get inside me sometimes, too, but it wasn’t the same. You never went deep enough and you only stayed there for long enough to express your everyday, commonplace kind of love, or lust. No further. It wasn’t that I loved you more, just that I loved you more forcefully.

You were a huge man, and I could slip inside your cavernous coats with you. But I wanted more. The weight came off easily, and you seemed to like it. My cheekbones emerged, collarbones, rib bones. I got so small that I fit under your arm against your torso like another sliver of your own flesh. I could get inside trousers and t-shirts with you. Still, I wanted more.

The day after our wedding, I took you to get our wills made. The lawyer said most couples make mirror wills, and you were happy to go along with whatever. You’d be dead, you said, so. I told the lawyer what I wanted and you shrugged your mountain shoulders. Fine. He said it was a bit unusual and it might be expensive. The healthcare service would be unlikely to cover it. Fine, fine. And then, I said, when we’re both dead, cremation. Put all the ashes into one urn, or box, or dirt hole, whatever. Mix us together like sugar and salt. Make it so the tiny black particles of me are indistinguishable from the tiny black particles of you. Make us into one thing. Romantic, said the lawyer.

The next thing was raising the money. I tried everything, but it still took years. I made fraudulent benefit claims, gambled, stripped, got into banking. And then you only wanted to spend it on holidays and expensive furniture. You couldn’t understand. I was impatient. We argued, but you hated arguing. It was always forgotten by morning.

Finally the time came when there was enough money in the bank, plus a little extra just in case. I couldn’t be sure of the exact cost, of course, but I did my research.

The act itself was anticlimactic. I didn’t want you to have to clean up anything so I took pills. It didn’t hurt the way they say. It was like a dull headache everywhere except your head. The life rose out of me gently, the way a puddle evaporates on a hot day. I wasn’t ending but transitioning from something half to something full, like the moon.

When we woke up after the surgery, I could tell right away that everything was perfect. The parts of me that they scooped out lay nestled against the innermost parts of you; I’m inside your skull, inside your breastbone, your rib cage. There is nothing in between us, not even light. I thrum happily, slippery inside you, against your wet flesh. I see everything the same way you see it, feel everything the way you feel it, even down to a twitch in our stomach, a rumble in our intestine. We share your body like a home with walls and windows. We push the blood around our veins in unison. We pass through every second together, perfectly together. One whole and beautiful thing.

Emily Ives-Keeler lives in Aberdeen, Scotland with her husband and cat. She works for a charity and writes short fiction whenever she can. Her work has previously appeared in Déraciné and Flash Fiction Magazine, and has placed second in the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize.

A Song for Emily