Soft Opening

Kacy drives us home. We stop at a gas station to buy 40s and a pack of cigarettes to share. I get the key from the attendant, go into the bathroom, and puke the sushi up as quickly as I can. Run the hot water, drink, rinse my mouth and hands. I wipe my eye, smear a skid mark of mascara down my face. 

Kacy is in the candy aisle, holding a bag of potato chips, a protein bar, a bag of chocolate candies. 

“I don’t think I’m going to get all this,” she says. “Maybe just the cigarettes.” 

“I want a honey bun,” I say. “A marshmallow cookie pie. I want both.” 

She meets me back at the car. Hands me a cigarette.

/

Halfway home, I feel something weird in my butt crack. I hand her my lit cigarette and pull three squished honey buns from the back of my jeans.

“Oh my god,” she says.

“I forgot,” I say. 

I open up one of the packages. 

“Oh my god,” she says. “Don’t.” 

I bite into the package, the plastic, all of it, and suck the bread into my mouth. 

“You’re going to get caught one of these days,” she says. “You could lose your job over a fucking honey bun. What would Jess do?”

/

Jess is asleep when I get home. I climb in bed next to her, on our wide, expensive mattress. Do certain words affect the body? The desire inside me ticks and ticks and ticks. I feel it start at the center of my forehead and move outward, a tiny pulse. I know where it is operating. A quick, light throb down to the edges of my fingertips. I am awake and then asleep again within myself. I reach out for Jess and her back curls away from me like rolled paper. My mind is merely looking for something to engage it. I cannot disengage with myself. I can’t sleep, so I look at my phone.

/

A list of search terms I’ve used include: 

Bulimia 

How to tell if you have bulimia 

Artificial intelligence development

Sex drive too low 

Sex drive too low long-term relationship forum 

How to live without a body

Other women fantasies

Big tits

Big tits forum 

Girlfriend masturbating alone what do forum 

80s porn

/

A woman’s body writhes on my smartphone. The woman removes her shirt and her scapulae flutter from her back. The shirt falls to the floor, the screen pans down her back, muted grey bruises dot her spine. 

Something in me stirs, some want. 

The screen pans back up from her hips. A dichotomy pushes through my head. I think, not that thin.

When her body bends over, I look for the two most beautiful words in the English language: iliac crest.

/

I wake up and Jess isn’t in bed. I pad to the bathroom door. The fan is on and I hear the murmured sounds of porn. Their moans sound vintage and digital. The swish of her breath fills the room. I walk back to the bed and lay down. 

She comes back to bed and I’m still awake. I put her inside my mouth and she lays still and stays that way. I move my mouth around but she doesn’t move, and we are quiet for some time. I hear the soft sound of her snore.

/

I go shopping. I put things in the cart I want: white bread, fig bars, butter, steak. I get what Jess wants, which I consider the necessities: purple potatoes, rye bread, a block of tofu, 1 calorie spray olive oil. I walk around putting more things in my cart. I walk up to the check out desk, then turn around. I’m doing math in my head for how much it will cost. The fig bars are six dollars and I know I won’t keep them down so I put them back. I get kale instead. I put back the steak and the butter. I place the bag of white bread on top of a tub of apples in the produce section.

/

Jess comes home smelling like the perfumes of other women. I enjoy it, not my own perfume or hers, the smell of others more novel. I am trying to remember the last time I felt truly lost in the abandon of my youth. The sound of a jet overhead. A large, empty feeling of danger. The wild eye of a cat in the dark. 

My greatest sexual fantasy is she holds me down and filets the insides of my wrists open with a fish knife. 

I touch her breasts, the crease of her eyelid pulses. I breathe in, she breathes out like she’s been running. My lungs dry inside like hay. We are all shopping, all of the time. 

I go to sleep and dream of her. Wearing blue, feeding me coins. 

The usual. I can never get to her, for whatever reason.

/

No one has come through the drive-through at the liquor barn for an hour and a half. I turn on the light in the bathroom and examine my body in the mirror. The girl in the mirror bends her hips back slightly. A gap widens between her thighs. 

I hear someone ring the service bell, and leave the girl in the mirror behind. 

/

Jess hands me two branded gift cards. One for Shell gas, and one for Whole Foods. Jess is going away on a business trip for a week. Our relationship, it’s a series of transactions. Any intimate exchange between two people can just come down to this. Give and take. She hands over a card with money on it and stipulates a set of rules. I follow them. 

The first rule is that I can’t spend the gift cards on fast food or junk. 

The second rule is that I must keep the bathroom clean at all times.

/

Kacy’s date has three drinks before the appetizer shows up at the piano bar. 

“I mean, it’s not like it’s a science,” Mark says.

I stay quiet. 

“It’s a soft science,” Kacy says. “Jess does research. Studies.” 

“Sure,” Mark says. “The politics in psychology are bad. They’ll only reproduce studies if it works to get people taking drugs and staying in therapy.” 

We’ve ordered a meat and cheese plate to split. The waitstaff points out each pile of delicacy to tell us what it is, but I’ve forgotten by the time she’s left. I grab a piece of toast, spread some grainy mustard it, add a piece of what I think is goat cheese. 

“She gets to do important work in studying how the brain works,” I say. “She’s very brilliant.” 

Mark laughs with a mouthful of meat.

/

Jess has other rules. 

Every time a dish is used it must be rinsed and placed in the dishwasher or washed. 

There is no eating of crackers or bread or anything that makes crumbs anywhere outside of the kitchen. 

I must keep the fridge stocked with organic fruit and vegetables and tofu. A woman has to take care of herself, not just in body, but in mind. 

Extraneous spending must be approved by her first. 

I must wake up before eight every morning.

In the summer, I must keep the air conditioning set to 68 degrees at all times. In the winter, the heat mustn’t go higher than 71. I live in sweaters year round. 

The most important rule is that I must not gain weight.

/

I push my fingers back farther and farther into my throat but nothing comes up. My stomach feels full and I am unsatisfied. I imagine the remaining bread, coagulated into a large ball at the bottom of my esophagus. I drink a glass of hot water and try again. Nothing comes up.

In the kitchen, I mix baking soda with water. It sizzles and foams. I shoot it like a slutty oyster. Back in the bathroom, I jump up and down, the liquid sloshing in my stomach.

I push harder into my throat. Pressure builds like the terrible crest of a good orgasm. Like if I stop, I’ll lose it all.

The entire mixture comes back up, along with vile, yellow water. Still, no bread.

/

I check my bank account, the one Jess doesn’t see. It’s overdrawn by two hundred and fifty dollars.

/

I sweep up food crumbs from yesterday’s dinner and see a row of ants crawling from under the sink towards the back of the fridge. The faucet pours water into the sink all over the dishes and the sink fills, clogged with food. The ants swim towards each other, grasping arms, making little ant-clumps that float along the top. 

/

When the fans are on and the doors are closed, the house is very big. Everything is so far away. At night with the dark closing in and the doors open, it’s all too near.

/

At what point does it stop becoming a game?

/

I lean into Jess and kiss her hard. I feel like I owe her something. 

“Welcome home,” I say. 

I want her to feel wanted because I want to feel wanted. Slowly I unbutton the fly of her slacks. She moves to the bed and I move with her. My hand floats to her chin, then her neck. I press gently. When I touch her face I enter a new place. I feel forced to reckon with her presence. She wraps her legs around my waist, her hipbones unearth themselves from her stomach. I think of the view from the ceiling, my body superimposed above hers. The places where we are similar double in opacity but around her there is a halo of me.

Elle Nash is the author of the novel Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc Books), which was featured in O Magazine and hailed by Publishers Weekly as a “complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire.” Upon publication of her novel in the UK, she appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to present the work of under-represented voices with Amnesty International, and to speak about sex, death and feminism in literature. Her work appears in Guernica, Adroit, The Creative Independent, Hazlitt, Literary Hub, Cosmopolitan, New York Tyrant and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine. She currently lives in Glasgow, Scotland and will be touring major U.S. cities in October 2023. Her novel Deliver Me is forthcoming from Unnamed Press in October 2023.