Confession

I never thought of bodies as smorgasboards until I met you. A corpse was just a body, a client, something to be measured and quantified, to ignore jokes about 23 grams and look for causes of death in the hollowness of flesh. There were no secrets from me; dead men tell tales their vacated owners would wish they were silent about, from love to sex to drugs.

I thought I knew them all, or at least of them, until you. When you first touched me, cold and clammy, my scream the only warmth between us as your teeth came down, raw and broken, tearing into placid flesh like waking from a dream of falling.

Two of my fingers remain missing. It makes some things difficult, like doorknobs and peeling maggots off you for snacks. But I do not mind because I love you, because you love me, because we can complete each other when our flesh sides together to create a new odour as chemicals and meat. Our love is a poem without words, sharing the choice bits of brains, tug-of-war over a liver with the loser always winning the next time.

When sight fails we have scents. When that, sounds. And always touch. The first sense and the last, crawling over each other to explore rats and mice and insects as they burrow deep and we tug them out, playing guessing games for colour and taste.

But there is truth behind it, even though we eat them. I do not want to share you with anyone, not of any who burrow or rot or live. When the men comes with fire and guns I will defend you. When creatures in the ocean try and eat you, I will be there. fingers are nothing to what else I'd lose for you, in sickness and health, for edible or inedible, til undeath do we part.

I never knew how much I loved you until it was too late, the first time you bit me and truly meant it. now I cannot get enough of me when we lie enfolded together and I let my fingers speak my longing and what is left of your tongue responds.

In the end, all we have is each other.