The Third Body
The red room keeps heaving, swollen with its own breath, its walls sweating, its curtains dragging the outside night down into folds of crimson that pulse and twitch like muscle, the air thick with iron and smoke and the musk of our bodies already working against each other, already wrecking each other, and I can’t tell if I’m lying still or if the bed itself is moving because my chest won’t stop rattling and every nerve is lit like it’s wired directly to your pulse, your face in the lamp glow breaking me into fever, my body peeling open with mouths and claws and new anatomies born only for this hunger, and I lean toward you like there’s no other direction left, no opposite, no counterbalance, just the pull of you across the red air and the ache that has bred its own creature inside me, a thing pacing my ribs, snarling at my spine, a mouth opening in my stomach, wanting, wanting, and every time you shift your weight or tilt your head that thing claws harder, it pushes at my skin from the inside, it wants out, it wants to eat, and your breath brushes my jaw and I taste it before I taste you, the sharp static of your skin already flooding my mouth, salt and smoke and iron like you’ve been carved from the city itself, and when your hand catches my wrist I split open, I spill, I don’t care if I’m bleeding out onto the sheets, I don’t care if I vanish into the air, I want to go under in the heat of you, I want to drown in the red that drips from the ceiling, and the books stacked against the wall tremble, their spines bending like vertebrae, their pages rustling as if they’re alive, as if every writer trapped in there is pressing their hands against the paper trying to break free because words aren’t enough anymore, grammar isn’t enough, the neatness of metaphor collapses in the face of your weight on me, your teeth on my throat, your tongue cutting into my mouth like a blade of smoke, and I grab you and drag you down harder, I want to weld us together, fuse us until there’s no way to separate what’s mine and what’s yours, I want your blood in my veins, I want your spit in my lungs, I want the sound you make when I bite your shoulder etched into my bones so even when they dig me up centuries later the archaeologists will hold my skeleton and hear your gasp ringing through the marrow, and I press until the bruise blooms, I rake until your skin shivers with welts, I kiss until the mirror across the room cracks into spiderweb fractures and I see a thousand versions of us inside it, all of them animals, all of them open-mouthed and starving, and the hunger doesn’t end when I touch you, it multiplies, it breeds more mouths, more need, the wanting eating itself and then spitting out bigger hungers, and the sheets knot around our legs, red fabric twisting like rope, pulling us down, swallowing us, the mattress groaning like it’s exhausted from trying to contain this, and the smell of us rises thick, musk and salt and something like blood, the smell of ruin, the smell of sex turned feral, and you grind into me until I feel my own skeleton begin to crack, and I press back harder, my hand in your hair, dragging you open, pulling you against me like I want to crawl inside and stay there until morning, until months later, until death, and your teeth tear my lip and I don’t care, I want the iron taste of it, I want to taste everything, your body is a book I’m writing with my tongue, with my nails, every stroke a sentence, every moan a stanza, and the pages tear as soon as I make them but I don’t stop, I don’t care if the book burns while I’m still inside it, I’ll write us in smoke if I have to, I’ll write us in spit, I’ll write us in glass shatters across the floor when the mirror breaks, and you move harder, you push down until I’m gone, obliterated, erased, love as erasure, love as obliteration, and I want that, I want to disappear into you, I want to be nothing but your fingerprints and your teeth marks and the wreckage you leave behind, and still the hunger keeps climbing, keeps multiplying, the third body of it, the animal stitched from both our appetites, roaring in the red air, shaking the walls, splitting the plaster, pounding in rhythm with us until I can’t tell if it’s the house breaking or us breaking or the whole city collapsing under the weight of this fever, and I hear my own voice rising, half-growl, half-scream, something raw that doesn’t even sound human anymore, and your body jerks against mine and I lose it, I lose everything, I come like I’m being torn in half, like my spine has been pulled through the top of my head and set on fire, like I’ve vomited light and I can’t breathe but I don’t need breath, I only need this, I only need you, and you break too, your mouth welded to mine, your heat flooding into me until I’m full of you, until I’m nothing but you, until the air collapses in on us and the ceiling moans and the silence hits, ringing and endless like the world has stopped, and we’re collapsed in the wreckage, twitching, twitching, sweat-slick and wrecked, the sheets dark and sticky, the books broken, the mirror shattered, the room dripping with the aftermath like it’s been through war, and maybe it has, maybe this is war, maybe this is love, and I kiss you softer now, my lips bruised, your face glowing with exhaustion and beauty and hunger still not gone, hunger never gone, hunger stitched into me now forever, and I know when I walk outside the city will smell it on me, strangers will see it in my mouth, in the tremor of my hands, in the twitch of my jaw, they’ll know I was devoured, they’ll know I burned, and I want that, I want the world to choke on it, I want every bus, every alley, every stranger to feel the fever we made here, to know the red room is alive, to know love made itself a body in us and tore everything down to feed itself, a holy ruin, a violent tenderness, an infinite hunger with no cure, and I hold you tighter, your breath steadying against me, your mouth still open like it wants more, like it’s never finished, and I close my eyes and feel the fever still moving, still breeding, still writing itself across me, and I know I’ll never be clean, I’ll never be whole, I’ll always be marked, always be burning, always be yours in the red wreck of this room that refuses to stop breathing.
WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE
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