BY SAM MARTONE
He’s a scavenger. He waits for the sad-sack status update, for the profile picture switch, for In a relationship to sliver down to Single or molt away altogether. He appears like clockwork. I count down the minutes until my phone buzzes. A buzzard’s message. I can always count on him.
He texts me How are you? even though he already knows. He texts me I miss you. He always does. I’ve seen the impressions he’s left like footprints at all hours of the night: photos he likes, tweets he favorites, posts he reacts to, with laughter or sadness, but never hearts that could be mistaken for love. He texts me at two in the morning. Are you up? A complete sentence, punctuated, the words spelled out. He prides himself in verbosity. Words should speak for themselves, he says. Words should be unambiguous. I tell him I’m up. Then he says, This is what I want: and after he tells me, he asks Do you want that too?
And I do. I like this choreographed tradition. I like that he acts as though it’s the first time he’s asking. I like to let him think he’s being smooth. Maybe he is. If he played coy, turning him down might be easy, but I’m bored or horny or sad or some Neapolitan combination of the three. He texts I’m on my way. He only lives a few minutes down the road, but he drives around my block a few times. I watch his car, the great talons of his hi beams as they tear through the dark. He loves to build suspense, for us both.
When he parks in the carport, I open the door before he can knock. He has a smirk like a crooked beak. I take him by the hand and pull him into my bedroom, push him flat on the mattress. He knows what’s next. I pin him down. I tie his wrists and ankles to the bedposts. I pick up the sharp scissors from my desk and cut open a pillow. I grab a fistful of down, pluck feathers from the flock one by one. I press my tongue to the pointed calamus of each like they are tiny writing quills, and then, and then.
The next day, when I’m ordering new pillows online, when my sheets dotted with blood are tumbling in the washer, I’ll imagine what it’d be like if we saw each other in daylight. Maybe we’d go on a road trip. We’d wear sunglasses and drive from this dry desert basin up into the evergreen mountainous north. We’d see a bird in the distance, turning circles in the air like a kite, never flapping its wings. He’d call it a condor, because it’s regal in a way, because it makes it sound like it’s not just a vulture. I’d reach across the center console to hold his hand and wonder what the condor was watching beneath, on the distant ground obscured by trees.
It’s the same thing I wonder when I’m straddling him, and his eyes flutter up and down the length of me. What does he see under the canopy of my body. What does he corkscrew around. One by one, I take each feather between my index finger and thumb. I stick them into the undersides of his arms, the fatty parts of his calves. He winces with pleasure. His muscles tense and quiver with each puncture. I stick more feathers into him until his limbs are covered, until it almost looks like he might tear free of my restraints, take flight.
My secret: those relationship statuses, those status updates, I post them as a signal. He thinks this is all his idea, but part of me knows I only upload the coupled-off profile picture, me sharing shaved ice, me swooning and happy, so I can take it down when it runs its course, so I can call out to him. I don’t know which came first anymore: his circling overhead, watching me for any sign of vulnerability, or me, intimating desire through a modern Morse code, a predator playing possum, a shadow of something that is in truth above him—a satellite, a moon, something that cannot be devoured or digested, something that can fall, crush.
I look down at him now, more feather than skin. What do you see? he says, looking at me looking at him. I’m wondering what you see, I say. I remember what I knew before this was all we did: him quiet in the back of a class where I never shut up, him dropping out the next year without explanation. His relationship status blank. His feed, starving for posts. I remember the first DM he sent me, years later, and think of all the messages I typed but then deleted, never sent, all the unambiguous words I might’ve let loose on his screen. My carcass, my carrion. Show me the open wounds, the cage of your ribs peering through. Show me the rot in your heart. Let me gnaw your bones to marrow. Let me bring you back to life. He shifts his weight in such a way that some of his feathers tickle my feet, and I scream and collapse into laughter beside him, where he, too, is laughing.
After this, we don’t know when we’ll see each other again. We never do. I’m already downloading the dating apps again, swiping left and right. Another man will perch himself upon the limbs of my life—another always does—and we’ll do all the normal things. But late at night, when that man snores beside me, I’ll rise and go to my desk, open my laptop, and lean into the glow of the screen, willing myself to see him on the other side, waiting for the endorphin rush of his thumbs up, his exploding stars, the pecking on a trackpad. If I strain, I swear I can hear it, him clicking away. I’m still here.
Sam Martone lives and writes in New York City.