Written By: Chris Thomson

Squelching.

I wish I had a better way to describe it, but that was the noise I heard. Squelching. Loud and grotesque and truly unappetising. As dulled dinner knives sank deeper into my flesh, hands ravaged through the opening they’d already cut into my chest, all I heard was that unending, nauseating squelching.

If it’d hurt more, and believe me it already hurt far more than enough, perhaps that pain could have drowned out the noise entirely. But no. Instead, I get to be slowly eaten alive as the most revolting white noise possible plays in the background.

They’d started slow. Slight incisions, prodding bones gently, until they finally removed a full piece. It was nothing much, truly the least I had to offer to them. A chunk of muscle and fat from my thigh, bloody and slightly burned from the hot leather seats in the car I drove here in. The first bite seemed to have sealed my fate. From then on they got less careful, less precise.

Hungrier. They went from small slices to big fat carvings, gingerly prying teeth from my gums to snapping my fingers off of my hands. It’d seemed the more they devoured the more they wanted to devour. A starving ache that only grew the more it was fed.

In some ways, I could almost relate. It was why I was here at all.

A life of inadequacy had always been such a great fear of mine. To float through the world without leaving a mark, without truly doing something, anything. I grew up comfortable, middle-class. Married parents, white picket fence, endlessly loyal and loving dog. It was all so correct. Everything a person could want. Everything I should have wanted. All I felt was unfulfilled. From the day I was born it seems, there was something missing. An empty, hollow space in my chest just waiting for something to be placed there. I tried every extracurricular I could. I did crafts, I played instruments, I sang, I danced, I kicked and threw and hit every kind of ball there was. None of it worked. As a teenager I began to go out for runs, and I felt so light from the nothing inside of me. It began to feel like I was running from something, then it began to feel like I was running from myself. And slowly, but surely, I stopped running. When I graduated I didn’t know what I wanted to be, to do. I had good grades, mountains of skills and experiences. I had been accepted into every university I applied to. I didn’t want to go to a single one of them. I did a year of biochemistry at one school. Then I dropped out, and tried a fine arts major somewhere else. I tried business, I tried philosophy, I tried trade schools. Nothing worked. Nothing I placed in that hollow slot fit quite right. After years wasted away in school with nothing to show for it except piles of debt, I decided to just begin work. I had a couple different jobs throughout high school, all basic summer teenager work. Cashier, fry cook, delivery driver, barista. Nothing worked. Nothing fit. I had managed to get a job as a graphic designer, despite me never finishing the degree for it. I quit after two months. I moved onto a server for a restaurant I used to frequent when I lived in a different part of the city. Quit after a week. The longest job I had was eight months, and it was working in a warehouse at a grocery store. I had gotten forklift certified. It didn’t help.

It’s been years. Not just since I left the safety bubble of my suburban middle-class home, of high school and homework and going to the mall with friends. I cannot recall a time I did not feel this empty ache. I long for a memory I do not have that feels like a holiday morning, full and happy and warm. Content. The thought disgusts me more than any sounds my body could make as it’s torn apart. If anything, it makes everything slightly easier to handle.

I had found out about this place, these people, a few months back. A flier, left on a bulletin board I’m sure they had no permission to put it on. Haphazardly scribbled out with little information and a phone number. I normally wouldn’t give it the time of day, years and years of trying every event and club and tryouts advertised on these sorts of boards has drained any and all curiosity about the things posted on them. But something about this one spoke to me. One more try, is what I told myself. One more try to fill the hole.

I had called the number that same night, my hands were shaking slightly as I typed it into my phone. I don’t exactly know why. I’d like to think it was a gut feeling, a knowing sense that this was a mistake. But I’m ashamed to say I think it was excitement. Hope. The idea of something that finally, finally felt right. That fit just so. The voice that spoke to me on the other end when they picked up was low, scratchy. They sounded weak, desperate, but somehow still persuasive and intelligent. They spoke calmly and clearly, and the part I find the most humiliating is they explained exactly what I was signing up for. No tricks, no manipulation. We will eat you whole, they told me. We will cure what ails you by removing you entirely. It was a sickening, repulsive idea. A truly vile offer to make anyone. But I found myself asking for directions. I found myself following them that very weekend. The whole drive there I waited for everything to hit. The nausea, the regret, the fear. I waited for my hands to spin the steering wheel and sharply turn off the nearest exit. I never did. No feeling ever came. Honestly, the closer I got the more I began to feel giddy. The voice on the phone explained to me who they are, what they do, why they do it. There are many like me, hollow and empty and seeking. They feast and feast until there is nothing left and still they are ravenous. It’s a feeling that claws itself out of them slowly, leaving more and more of themselves scraped out and bare until they feel as if they are one layer of skin standing against the wind. There is no cure, they told me. There is nothing in this world you could devour to fill this void you were born with. A void that only grew with you overtime. They tell me they know the feeling, they understand it. They, too, feel hunger. A deep, primal starvation from their very core. They told me there are others like them, just as there are others like me. They told me that we can help each other. That my aching can cure their hunger, and in turn I will be free. As they gnaw and pull and chew I will finally feel fulfilled. I will feel what it is like to have purpose, to feel heavy and warm and weighed down by my actions. To not float, light as a feather, through the rest of my life.

I don’t know if any of it was true.

In the end, I am laying on a table, surrounded by people I have not met, and will never meet again, being devoured slowly, excruciatingly. I wish I could say for certain how I felt one way or the other. That I could claim they were wrong, liars, that they were murdering me and this was

my tragic end. Or that they were right, that as they pull hairs off my head and bite at my fingernails that I feel wholly and truly full. Instead I feel a familiar, empty feeling. Familiar, but not quite the same. I still feel wrong, I still feel off, but it feels different. As more and more of me disappears into their stomachs and I feel myself begin to fade away, I realize I do not have much longer to ponder on this newfound feeling. I shut my now empty eyesockets, the eyes themselves having been long plucked out, and I think. I think about my life, I think about all that led me to this point. I think about my parents I haven’t visited in months, my friends I left on read and did not tell where I was going, my apartment with the plants that will need watering. I think about what I would be doing right now, if I had ignored that flyer, or hung up the phone, or sharply turned my car onto that exit. Would I be trying a new hobby? Was there one left I hadn’t tried? Or would I be scrolling through job listings, seeing which ones I could apply for without having finished any of my various degrees. Maybe I would have called my parents and planned that visit, maybe I would have gone out with friends and bought another plant to water. All the possibilities in the world, and here I was, feeling the last of my organs be plucked from my insides, skin falling loosely around the few bones I had left. 

Soon there would be no more of me.

I tried to think on what kind of mark I’d left, as I felt my skull being cracked open and my brain lobotomized with a salad fork. I think of the few art pieces I had put up in the local gallery while blood and other fluids ooze out of my pores. I think of all the homes I’ve house-sat, pets I’ve

taken care of for friends away on trips. I think of songs I’ve sung at open mic nights, meals I’ve cooked for family, and meals they’ve cooked in return. Memory after memory I grasp onto and pull myself into as far as I can.

As the last pieces of me are eaten away, as mouths are wiped with napkins and the squelching is replaced with the familiar clink of silverware being placed back down, I think of all the different points I have been in my life, all the different kinds of air I’ve breathed in different places at different times.

I take one last final breath, and I feel it wholly fill me up.

Creating before he was walking, blinking, breathing, talking (and subsequently never stopped talking) Chris Thomson pursues any and all creative endeavours he can find. Between writing, drawing, acting, and drawing on the faces of his friends with sharpie, he'll turn pretty much anything in his life into an art project. Queer with lots and lots and lots to fear, he combines themes of mental health, identity, society, and the little things he loves into his work.

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