Three Stories by Ryan Habermeyer

The Swallows

I prefer a man with an appetite. My second husband was always putting things into his mouth. Grass. Pennies. Baklava. When visiting friends he never failed to lick their wallpaper. It was repulsive, but after he told me he kept a pet butterfly under his tongue as a boy I had to kiss him. On the night he proposed we roamed the docks, my nervous, not-yet-husband shucking oysters and slurping out the brine. We escaped to the library where he read census records like poetry and chewed the pages. He couldn’t remember something, he claimed, if he didn’t put it in his mouth.

Mom took me to all kinds of doctors, he shrugged, but my mouth has a case of the swallows, a tongue beyond science, then he smiled, an insatiable thing.

I didn’t meet his mother until after we were married. On Sundays they busied themselves in the kitchen, just the two of them, lost in a perfume of saffron and nutmeg, chittering in some strange speak. Cinnamon flaked from her bird’s nest of hair onto the countertop and more than once I saw him dab it with a finger and lick indiscreetly. You never have a meal quite like mother, he said, taking her hand and mine to say grace. Later, in the dark of his childhood room, his fat tongue traced my hips, my ribs, like it was a picnic and I the rack of lamb.

One night he phoned late. In his voice I smelled ginger, clove, deceit. I’m with mother, he said, don’t wait up, but warm the leftovers.

The great Italian chef, Martino di Como, who wrote a recipe for kangaroo brains, says soup is the only way to a man’s soul.

I cooked with a vengeance, simmering down the beef bones with the viscera until it was gelatin. Strained the broth, simmered again. Sang hymns while skimming fat. About Calvary, about the virgin of the lake. Onions. Potatoes. Beets. Grated dill. It needed more flavor. I baptized it with a touch of phlegm. Three drops of pus from a blister on my knee. A trickle of piss. Watched an old bandage wilt like a basil sprig. My fingers grasped wildly for what they knew. Cum. Tears. Earwax. Bile. The body is an abyss. I took the old tampons from under the sink and added them to the broth with the condoms saved from the trash. Sweated out the juices. With a spoon scraped the blood between my thighs, the elemental me, stirred until the soup was a red, frothy swirl.

Just a spoonful, I reasoned. How could I refuse? Hot. Salty. If there is a soul this is what it tastes like. Then another. Not a sip but a swallow, a sacrament. Licking drops off the floor, breathless, the soup pirouetting inside me like a caged ballerina. I wish I saved him a little of this abyss of me. I wish I saved him, a little. But I—I could not stop.

§

Cryptids

He has a tattoo on his shoulder of a snake swallowing its tail. Every time he comes up for air I’m afraid it will steal off his body and slither away. Bathhouses are as old as the lost city of Mohenjo-daro, he says. This is his fourth. Russia. Japan. Finland. Banya. Onsen. Sauna. Across every border the tongue dreams differently, but water is the same everywhere.

Hülegü, grandson of Genghis Khan, razed Damascus in 1240 but left its nearly two hundred baths unscathed. Matsuo Bashō wrote all his haikus while bathing. This is the last bathhouse built by the Ottomans, he continues, an ode to cleanliness before the Victorians waged a war on bathing and the Medical Society of London warned the Turkish bath was an oriental science producing strange metamorphoses on the human body.

I pretend to ignore his rambling, pretend to admire the ceiling frescoes and arabesques spiraling across walls. He smells unpleasant, but the night is cold and sometimes a strange man is a good blanket.

Later, I thought it was vanity when he washed his hands at every opportunity—public fountains, restaurants, the thunderstorm—as if there was some invisible dirt only he could see. I imagined him cycling through religions the way other men used prophylactics, seeking ablutions from priests, rabbis, swamis. Having spent my childhood at the edge of a forest climbing trees and digging for bloodworms, it felt as though I had missed a rite of passage. I knew very little of the proper hygiene described by Al-Ghazali in The Mysteries of Purity. I shit. I fingered. I vomited. I bled. Filth was a mask orbiting the edges of the unknown, like the rings of Saturn. I had gazed long enough at stars to know light doesn’t clean anything, forever interested in passing through you, afraid to pause, to soak in all this life.

Can you hear that? he says, inviting me into the medicinal pool. I don’t hear anything, I tell him. No, underwater, he says. Floating there I did hear something, not the whine he heard but a ripple, a murmur, a hum, like stepping inside someone else’s dream.

The concierge tells us there are strange noises in the hotel. It used to be a factory producing fur coats. All the animals were skinned downstairs, he remembers, the sewing machines on the top floor. The concierge was only a boy when it caught fire and doesn’t remember what kind of animals they were, but he’ll never forget the screaming.

Unable to sleep, we wander kaleidoscopic streets full of bodies, spices, vapors. In cafés we ask people if they remember the old factory. Have you ever heard an animal make this noise? he asks, cupping his hands to his mouth. It sounds more like this, I say, pursing my lips together. No, he says, more like this. A small crowd circles us. They listen to the awful noises we make, but nobody can tell us what kind of animals we might be.

§

Sleight

It goes by many names. The Russian Rabbi. Elephant in a Nutshell. The French Drop. Make a coin vanish then have it reappear from an ear, a nose, a mouth. It’s always good to begin a show with a sleight of hand. Especially at the nursing home. The elderly always clap, even if they’re not fooled.

That afternoon I had done the trick five or six times when I reached behind the old woman’s ear. When a coin snaps into my fingers it is electrifying, never mind I’ve done it ten thousand times. I can taste the magic in my mouth, like burnt water. This time, however, it felt rubbery, sticky. I held it up for the geezers to see. Voilà! But there was no coin. Just my fingers damp with blood so red it was almost blue. The old lady’s ear was missing. She smiled, blood oozing down her neck.

It happened a dozen more times. Whenever I went to retrieve the coin—voilà—something went missing. Ears, tongues, lips, noses. I thought about giving up as a magician, that in my small way I was contributing to the madness of the world.

What I didn’t expect was to be loved. Kids. Geezers. Fathers. Housewives. They stopped me in the streets, on trams, in cafés. They crowded into basements and dingy theatres waiting for me to crack them like a bunch of eggs. They wanted phantom limbs. They wanted to be mutilated, unreal, elsewhere.

I was on the balcony one night with a girl. What I can’t figure out, she said, is where you hide them. Naked in the moonlight she was like a cold, oily fish. I could see where she was dark and came to center, where my gravity could sink into hers. Every night there is a new girl like this, nameless, admiring my hands, whispering things in my ear. This one leaned close, her voice warm and vinegary. Make me your humpty dumpty tonight, she said.

Maybe she slipped. Maybe she jumped. Maybe there was a nudge. Does it matter? The heart wants what it wants.

There are two kinds of magic tricks in this world: the vanishing and the transformation. People are one or the other. I am the exception. I walked past the crowd huddling over her crumpled in the gutter like yesterday’s newspaper. She had fallen awkwardly and little pieces of her were found half a block away. The one piece they never recovered was just below her cheek, where I had kissed her goodnight. Sometimes I wander the streets looking for it, pursued by shadows and reflections, disturbed by the magic that I exist.

Ryan Habermeyer is Assistant Professor at Salisbury University where he teaches creative writing. His debut collection of short stories, The Science of Lost Futures (2018), won the BoA Short Fiction prize. Find him at ryanhabermeyer.com