Kristel Chua
Day 681
My tummy tells me to be hungry. I read somewhere-someplace-somewhen that “we will always be a slave to our bodily needs.” So I obey. Hunger pangs sting like barbed whips, and my greedy little tummy-flesh whip-stitches the welts with thick, red thread. I know I’m lucky, and that many don’t live in a Cornucopia like I do and instead have to cope with empty, and therefore more abusive tummies. Outside, bread is harder to come by than flesh, and not everyone likes raw meat.
The meat-man my tummy requested is curled up beside me, his pale back dotted by brown starry-fleck freckles. I trace constellations on them with my tongue and, for a moment, imagine that he is shivering in erotic anticipation. But he is far too cold and rigid and gone, and it’s been years since that old pleading hot moisture between my legs came to play. This foreplay fails to arouse, and anyway everything down there chafes and aches. Get on with it, my tummy demands.
Though impatient, my tummy is terribly sensitive. I can’t eat quickly, or it will all rumble back up again, horribly vinegar-y and disappointingly inedible. I nibble instead. I had organs yesterday, so today I will have thighs. After much work, I am congratulated with the femur, which is very pleasant to suckle on. As I suck, my tummy broadcasts frequencies of swelling joy throughout my nervous system. “One day, one day,” my tummy sings, “I will suckle on your breast.”
I’m looking forward to it, I hum back.
I’ve never finished a whole man, and I don’t think anyone expects me to. When my chewing slows and I start burping and patting my cooing tummy, they enter, dressed in black ponchos and thick hoods, and wrap the floppy man-remnants in a tarp. They slither away. A snail-trail of juicy blood follows. They scoop leftover fibrous bits into a bucket, and then everyone stomps and sloshes away. Then the sprinklers activate and I wash my hair, collect droplets of water in my mouth, and watch the man’s red ribbons as they swirl into the drain. Come dinner-time, my tummy will angrily squeal, and they will bring a new man.
There may have been something before the Cornucopia, but remembering anything is fruitless. Interpreting my tummy’s kick-code, rubbing it, singing to it, feeding it — after all that, nothing remains to fuel memory. I am fed, kept warm, and have a safe place to sleep. So it doesn’t matter. The men-bringers tell me that when all is ready, my tummy will morph into a Savior, and we will all go to heaven. Heaven has green plants, fat pigs, and water that runs clear.
“We will always be a slave to our bodily needs.” Maybe my tummy said that? Or was it one of the black-clad men?
Now, my tummy commands me to sleep. So I obey.
#
She’s due anytime now. I stop scribbling (wrist hurts) and switch to gnawing anxiously on my crumbling pencil. I watch her lovingly dry her engorged stomach with a towel. She is due anytime now. As in, please fucking burst open right now, you pathetic, disgusting aberration. Nine months was almost two years ago, but my labor contract stipulates that I remain in the Cornucopia “until birth.” Watch. Wait. Record. Hover over this strange pet. Say nothing.
Religious types, at least, pay well.
A masked nurse enters to relieve me for a too-short lunch break — as if I could eat after that sickening spectacle, as if I could afford it. Eight ounces of stale gruel for twenty dollars? Instead, I opt for ten dollars for a one minute call home. “Ma, it’s me. The money should arrive later today. Make sure the numbers match, okay? I miss you so much. But listen, I’ll be home real soon. It’ll be over anytime now.” Ma gargles unintelligibly. Ever since that last storm, the telephone lines barely work anymore, but I still call. I let the full minute elapse, wordlessly hanging on to every variation of discordant fuzz.
Left with nothing, I wait out the last minutes of my break in the phone booth. Everything is so goddamn fruitless. Everything, except for her — plump, juicy-red, ready to burst with the gentlest puncture, sweet-cheeked, soft-skinned. Even in her ugly and unnatural proportions, despite or because of her dark enclosure, she glows. My stomach grumbles.
I return to my eye-searing panopticon of monitors, my windows into obscenity. She’s cocooned herself in a nest of down pillows and plush throws, already fully submerged in a post-meal slumber. I curl onto my creaky metal folding chair, knees to my chest, balancing on my sore tailbone. To deflect the whip-cracks of hunger, I grab my pencil (more like a splinter of graphite) and write. Today’s entry: Day 681. May it be the last.
#
Since coming here, I’ve always had the same dream. I dream of angels, little flushed flabby cherubs. The rosy creatures sing, O joyful day! as my tummy weight slides out of me like viscous goo. The newborn will cry-cry-cry, and I will be let out, out to heaven. Prickly grass on my cheek. An uncontaminated breeze. A gentle fire. In my dream, these faraway sensations (memories?) flash between fluttering wings of the cherubs. The idyllic slides and their corresponding sound effects project onto the inside of my eyelids and vibrate the walls of my ear canals.
Then the door crashes open, and I am torn from the sweet yellow sunbeams and shoved into harsh, white light. “Far too early for dinner!” my grouchy tummy shrieks. A wild-eyed woman I’ve never seen before enters. A sickly hue pales her brown skin. Her frayed belt cinches her too-large fatigues to her gaunt waist. She is tummy-less. Her eyes are fiery, searing, too bright for me, or maybe it’s the light emanating behind her? I squint back. “Who are you?” I croak, shaking off the crust of sleep. Silently she approaches, so, so close, nostrils flaring with an emotion I can’t identify. Her heat resonates from her flushed skin — very different from the pallid men-food and the slippery-slick-vinyl people that delivered them. It would be nice to hug her. A thirst for passion and fresh sweat that is not mine consumes my initial fear of the unfamiliar. I open my arms, smile shyly. Unquestioningly she accepts my invitation. She mounts me and, with cracked and trembling hands, slowly unwraps me from my garments. As I am revealed to her, body still bloated from a heavy lunch, I see the muscles in her wiry neck work and her jaw slack and tighten. I recognize the hunger, and a familiar ache surges between my thighs. I would like to kiss her, and she is so starved that maybe she would like to kiss me, so I close my eyes, part my lips. I ask her to do it.
Without hesitation, she descends into my neck. My tummy lurches, screams, reams apart from the rending pain. Cry-cry-cry. I sputter juices from old and newly created orifices. The burning hot woman eagerly traces the blood from my throat, then digs her face into my tummy, shoveling, slurping, ravenously probing for the right spot. Suddenly I shed all my weight, and I don’t hear my tummy’s voice, the voice that guided me, sang with me, punished and caressed me. Like they said it would, my tummy slides out of me, encased in fibrous red ribbons.
The woman does not nibble. Instead, she tears and growls and slurps, clutches me until I readily burst in her grip. I admire her. Her tummy must be very strong.
For a while, I am pleasantly warm. I did not realize I was so warm inside. And outside, there’s the friction of her frantic chewing, the frenetic vibrations of body heat. Strangely pleased with her pleasure, I hold her pretty hair from her face as she feasts — or I try to, as the cold begins to creep into my marrow. I am somehow stiffening and relaxing, my pulse surging and retreating, my vulva spasming and numbing.
My tummy fully slips away, no longer bound to me by tendrils or energy or affection. It plops wetly on the floor, disfigured, ugly, powerless. The beautiful woman cups my face and hisses between bloody teeth, cheeks dripping with tummy-flesh: “Your Savior is born. You’re saved. Go to heaven.”
#
My chewed-through pencil snaps with finality. I toss the wretched thing into the bushes. After some deliberation, I tear up my notebook to destroy the evidence — the pages of writing project that occupied me for the past two years scatter like seeds into untenable soil. It’s as if I’m burying her, I think, still unable to swallow my sentimentality. Back at the Cornucopia, they are probably preserving her. Prodding at her. Maybe displaying her. And then, they’ll try again. Even after leaving that godforsaken place, I am still waiting. At least this time I’m waiting at Ma’s porch, unkempt and mossy but otherwise familiar, and not in that concrete and impersonal cultist bunker. After months of planning my escape, days of running and sheltering in caves and dodging sparse settlements and chewing on bitter leaves, I finally made it home.
It’s a far cry from heaven, but it’s home.
And that poor fucking woman, needle-pricked and fattened and stretched to the limits of pregnancy, sustained me through all 700 days.
Ma should be here anytime now. She’s never out past sundown. Unable to pass the time with writing, I start nervously dabbing at the splotches of weeks-old blood that formed a telling brown bib on the front of my shirt. Ma will understand, I assure myself. These days, people eat each other all the time. Still, I rub my cheeks and lips raw-red. Weeks after, the taste of tinny iron still clings to every crevice of my mouth, clogs the alleys between every tooth. The wind kicks up— a storm? I shiver, glance up and down the empty street. Ma should be here anytime now.
Kristel Chua (she/her) is a queer Filipino writer and barista. In addition to writing literary and speculative works, Kris creates and locally distributes zines of illustrations, poetry, Filipino cultural and political reflections, and political and critical articles. Kris’ short stories have appeared in traditional literary magazines such as The Plentitudes, Temporal Lobe Literary, Speak the Sojourner, and more.
Banner Art:
Photo by Milad Fakurian, Unsplash, 2025
