Souls are for Swallowing
Every touch feels like a kiss when your body is a gravesite. Zora knows this intimately. The dark will hum, the semi-sweet scent of rot will smother their senses, and another soul will find its resting place in the marrow of their bones.
They know this—have known it since they woke up sixteen years old and buzzing, with a girl lying cold in the bed beside them.
It was epilepsy. Aimee's body shook and undid itself in the dark beside Zora—but Zora remembers the kiss, the soft pink brush of it an hour after the suspected time of death, when Aimee had rolled beside them and slid her mouth along Zora's cheek. It felt like a kiss, when her skin touched their skin, both fraying away at once, one body tucking neatly inside the other like shaking matryoshka dolls. Aimee passed and then passed through, into the gentle undoing of Zora, and Zora did not tell anyone about the warm flush on the swell of their cheek.
Aimee was the first, a slipping thread in a funeral dress, a comforting tug of childish grief Zora tucked into their pillow and cried clean away.
But then they turned eighteen, and an older woman tapped at their window like an expectant sparrow, the room flooding with the scent of rotting lilies. Zora's skin prised apart like a beaded curtain, and the soul tucked itself cleanly inside.
After that, the visits became epidemic.
Most often, it's strangers that come to them. That's easier, in some ways, the shuddering touch of an old man's chapped mouth on their cheek a horror they can articulate. The hard, sobbing drag of auntie Manassah's mouth on Zora's forehead, stained red from her lipstick was not so easily swallowed. Zora replayed it within themselves for weeks, like the woman was sinking her shellac nails into Zora's bones and clinging on.
So, the dead touch Zora like the gentle brush of a mouth, curling up inside of them like infants tucked into cots. The living touch Zora like a poisoned spindle.
They did not mean to unfasten the sweet girl in the night club bathroom, her dark hair slipping through Zora's fingers as she stiffened and slid to the ground. They just wanted a touch of wildness, the two of them dancing with hardly enough room to breathe between them, the girl's thigh easing between Zora's in a rolling rhythm. But when they had stumbled to the bathroom, the girl's face tipped up to the buzzing yellow light, something shifted inside them. Zora leaned in to kiss, an exchange of heat and hunger, and instead felt warmth suffuse their body as the girl went cold in the circle of their arms.
They didn't sleep for a week, after, their insides shifting uneasily as though trying to make room.
Zora did not stop wanting, but learned to make the ache curdle inside of themselves. Intimacy belongs to the dead, the urgent quiver of two souls becoming one, boundaries slipping easily past one another. They dream of their bones being cleaved open, the insides thick with rot.
So Zora submits to being a conduit, nerves lighting up when death scents the air, when their skin begins to thrum with the tension of undoing. There is the shaggy haired boy with the heart defect whose mouth is clumsy and wanting, the older woman who crushes Zora's cheeks in her wrinkled hands before she disintegrates, the singer whose single is still slinking up the charts when she comes apart in the dark of Zora's bedroom, still glowing faintly when she unfolds into pink flesh and effervescence.
That’s when the redhead drapes her long legs over the windowsill. "Are you the washer- woman, then?"
It's different—for one thing, daylight still colours the edges of their bedroom. For another—"First of all, I'm not a woman. Second of all, how can you talk?"
The girl laughs, bright and dirty, and that carries too, just like the vibration already rolling across Zora's bones, hollowing out to make room.
"Not a woman," the girl says, her tongue poking between the gap in her front teeth, her body translucent in the waning light. "Washer-woman, like the myth. Straddling the river and washing the blood from the clothes of the dying as they pass through."
Zora purses their mouth. "Not that woman, or any woman, thank you." They uncurl themselves from the bed and edge a little closer, watching light cut the girl clean through. "And I would still like to know how the hell you're speaking to me. This isn't usually a small talk kinda deal."
The girl kicks her legs soundlessly against the wall, a childishness that clashes with the sleek pencil skirt, the buttoned-up womanliness of her. "They couldn't shut me up when I was alive," she says, skull flashing beneath her skin. "Why start now?"
She smiles, then, the red lipstick giving way to pink gums. "I'm Isla," she says, warm and firm. "And I'm not going anywhere."
And she doesn't. True to her word, Isla edges around the bedroom, curling into the corners and sometimes sinking from sight, but she does not draw near Zora's body so that they might intermingle. She laughs and sings, mutters Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night from her perch on the windowsill. She stubbornly, steadfastly refuses to pass on, even as life erodes from her with every passing moment.
She burns. Her presence sets off Zora's hollowed bones rattling within them, like a swarm of flies scenting honey.
It's strange—Zora has spent so long haunting the graveyard of their body that being haunted back is almost a thrill. Isla drapes her half-made body across the bookshelf and Zora's pulse picks up in wanting.
They tease the word crush out from between their teeth. Imagine crushing Isla's body against the wall, their boundaries slipping past one another and blurring into simple, satiated warmth.
"You can drag it out if you want," Zora tells her after three days of flirtatious haunting, flicking their eyes up from the book clutched close to their chest. "But you can't stop it. You're already dead, babe. Look at you, you're rotting."
She truly is. Isla raises her hand up in the lamplight and Zora sees the translucent bones poke through, flesh peeling away like withered petals.
"Sure, I'm dead," Isla says, her tongue flicking out again. Zora's bones begin to buzz. "But I'm not tired yet. And I don't sleep over on the first date, anyway." She wilts against the windows, her hair streaking white.
"What makes you think it's restful?" Zora asks, smiling, showing teeth.
Isla tosses her hair over her shoulder, that bone beginning to show, too, round and moonlike. "You don't seem like the dancing type."
They waltz around it for days. Zora goes out to work at the bookshop and comes home at night to find Isla waiting, toeing off their shoes under the weight of the woman’s heated gaze, only one eye still whole in the angles of her face. Zora scales the edges of the bedroom with coy smiles, and Isla slinks back just as coyly, wasting as she goes.
She hovers over the bed as Zora lies down to sleep, just far enough to stay held together, waving her bony fingers, her jaw curved, her throat arched back.
"You'll be whole, when it's over," Zora whispers in the dark.
Isla sings them into sleep.
Two weeks after her arrival, Isla is more ghost than girl. Her bright red hair has rusted and dulled, her flesh trailing from her bones like old lace. Zora feels crazed. They’ve never wanted anything more. Like a teenager desperately in lust, they feel the hairs on their arm prickle and rise whenever Isla ventures close to their side of the room. Every fleeting look is like Isla were breathing, hot and wet and alive down the back of their neck. Their body knows Isla is supposed to melt into them, and it almost hurts to not be whole, a terrible, beautiful aching. “I need you,” Zora breathes, chest tight with desire. “You know that, don’t you?”
“But what happens to me when you’ve had me?” Isla’s voice is a watery quiver, barely a sound at all.
Zora swallows. “You’ll be somewhere better. But you’ll also be here, with me. Part of me. You’re supposed to be part of me.”
There’s a loud crack, bone splitting, dry and hollow.
“Please.”
Isla is suddenly everywhere, close and shivering, bigger than the bedroom. It is not her red mouth she brings to Zora's lip, but her slick red heart, warm and weighty, and Zora could moan from the heat of it. They touch it with their lip, with their tongue, with the sharp edges of their teeth, and let the warmth suffuse slowly through them. Zora devours, fingers dripping with the obscene redness. It's thick, a little sour, edges blackened with decay. They swallow deep and feel their chest grow solid and stable. For one beautiful, vulgar moment, Zora feels whole, full,
not wanting for anything.
Isla seeps into Zora, blankets their body at once solid and ephemeral, slides down until they tessellate, slick with shadowy gore. It does not feel like a kiss as Isla takes her place within Zora's unearth of a body. It feels like a bite taken clean out of them, something that cannot help but leave a mark.
Now, Zora's hair shines red whenever the sunlight hits it.
They start to speak, softly, with the spirits who rap at the door. It bruises more than they could admit that since Isla, none have dared speak back.
Beeper Peddle is a writer and healer living on the East Coast. She lives with her partner and their beloved soul puppy. Beeper writes about sorrows, lies, and deep loves. When you read her work, you will dip down into her heart and end up in all manner of body parts. Should you find yourself reflected in these words, it is merely coincidence; however, it does not surprise her you share the same heart. Find her at bethpeddle.com and @beeperpeddle on Twitter and Instagram
Lucy Hannah Ryan (she/they) is a poet, fiction writer and essayist. Her work often concerns gender, sexuality and complex relationships with the body inspired by lifelong chronic illness. They also have an affinity for the strange, magical and macabre. They have had the pleasure of being featured in various publications including Gay Times, Pink Plastic Press, and in Arachne Press‘s annual Solstice Shorts collection. In 2022 Ryan released her first chapbook, Death and the Maiden: Odes to the Dead Girls of Pop Culture, and in 2023 she released her first full length short story collection, You Make Yourself Another, a magical realist meditation on transformation with Half Mystic Press. Outside of writing, she is a mental health worker and disability advocate. She lives in London with her cat, Nova.
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