Some Delicacies You Can Live Without / The Intermediary
by Laura Hemmington
Some Delicacies You Can Live Without
I lost my boyfriend to a cult, but really, he was insistent. They promised him great bounty—a gastronomic high, no less—if he would just swim down to the abalone.
A self-titled connoisseur, he didn’t miss a beat.
I should be the one to dive, he announced, being the better swimmer and all. I tried to tell him otherwise, but he wouldn’t listen. Never did.
My boyfriend had to swim a way, from the island of the pines. And he flailed long before the cult thought possible. Even in the apocalypse you should take care not to overstate your abilities.
No, you should be more like the salmon. The salmon here can really swim. But they didn’t help him when he gulped beneath the petrol sky. In fact, they were complicit. They met him in the turgid swell, and took him to the hidden places of the abalone.
Salmon have good noses, you see. Or whatever it is they use to smell. That’s how they know where to swim to spawn and spawn to swim. It has always been, I am told.
So they pulled him down and he sucked from their mouths. They pulled him to the depth at which a diver’s eyes will rent and form a little plume for the tiny, waiting mouths.
Awakened, the abalone shifted in their sands. Blushing, agape. They took their fill of my boyfriend’s blood and the salmon let his body go, a pickle of the sea. He surfaced as a man of many parts, for once, his skin a drift of kelp.
The cult tells me that the abalone will be ready when the moon returns. But I think I’ll pass; I’ve had my fill.
The Intermediary
The paper of old books smells good when it’s warm and dry, all sand and terracotta. Tome time, Bisky called it. One of his better frivolities.
The paper of old books does not smell good in the damp. It unfolds in spores. I do wonder how it is with the lungs, but like the rest of me, it’s hard to get a grip on any certainties. It was the first thing I noticed, the smell. It lingers, despite the high winds. Despite all of it.
My awakening was something else, though, a rip of shears on cotton. And I awakened on an unknown shore. An unknown shore is a hard thing to settle on, even more so in a consignment of books. It has its own vibration, you see, like being lost in the night while doing your taxes.
But it’s what I requested, and as I had hoped. I imagine my hands fluttering up to my face in surprise, or squeezing your thigh. I’m not sure if it’s only my hands that flutter, though, or all of me at once. Like all dust, I’m sure I’ll settle.
I chose the headless pigeon, in the end—for the intermediary? I guess it was the orchard that did it; all that time spent lazing under their fat loving calls, seeping into me like a damson tide. The damson of your fingers.
There were other choices—an oversized moth (too much like Taco, somehow, all eyebrows and nuzzle), and a grounded flying fish (flapping ghoul). The pigeon, at least, is mostly silent.
As for the books themselves, I’m still not too sure how it works, seeing as we’re all flicked to ash in here together. But somehow, on arrival, you sort of spread out again. Book parts. Me parts. Me parts reading the book parts on this black and windy crag.
But it’s a popular choice, apparently, ‘Great Blusters’. The blurb was something catchy, irresistible, like “Finally! Wrap up your winter reading project in peace. All the Russians you said you read with a blast of tundra and ice.”
The thing is though, there are other books in here too. Ones I didn’t order? There must have been a mix-up, which irks a little when—when this is the time to really get inside a book. This is the time, and yet it still gets interrupted.
So for all its claims, I find myself distracted from the terms of my original choice. I wonder anyway if it was just too… much. Now that I’m here, what need do I have for the souls of others? All these brothers and bog hovels and urchins at the gate.
Bulgakov and his feline aside (a keeper), I’ve turned fully to the stars.
The stars. Now that I’ve had the time to look—really look—they’re not stars, they’re storms. Living storms, like us. Sulphuric storms. Comets and glinting and rocks and gas. They’re a comfort, really. Sometimes I pick the pieces from my hair, and blow the dust from the pigeon’s neck. Poor thing, they didn’t fix him up at all. You’ll see.
I’m sending him now as I’ve blistered a little around the edges, and I’m not sure how long I can stay. I probably should have told you something about the end? I should have answered your questions, I’m sorry.
I think I’ve done this all wrong, haven’t I, but at least you know you really knew me, to the end.
Laura Hemmington is a writer and freelance copywriter from London, and the author of some off-kilter tales. A walker of landscapes real and imagined, she lives at the forest's edge with her husband and their senior cat.
