Chew, Chew, Chew by Z. M. Asafzah
3200 words, ~16 minutes reading time
Issue 7 (Spring 2025)
Sometimes, they screamed. The sounds of their screaming could not pass through the concrete walls, but I knew how they sounded. Because some days, when the hunger was too much, and her anger was too nuclear, she started before I was able to leave. Some days, she was done before I was even able to lock the gate to her floor. I would look up as my hands pulled the lock to check its security and she would be gazing back at me, her smile sated and her hair bloody, and I would see in her eyes a kind of hungry thoughtfulness that pimples the back of my neck. And sometimes, I wanted to scream.
I thought it would get easier with time. She had made it look so easy. When I was younger, when we were a family, I still remembered that time. She used black seed oil for her ankle-length hair instead of coconut oil; she smelled sweet, and she was fair, dark facial hair sprinkled on the side of her cheeks and upper lip; she used her hands to cup shami kebabs so gently that they turned out perfect and round every time; she cried only behind closed doors. The neighbours remembered her. They sometimes came to my house and rang the bell in hopes of seeing her. They looked curious when I came to the door, but they didn’t say anything. No one would ask where my father was once they stopped seeing his car in the front. On new moon days, I bathed her and sat her in the verandah for some sunlight and they were content with that. No one bothered us because they remembered who my mother was. They talked, but no one ever said anything.
Over time, I figured out a routine that worked. I hired a weekly maid who cleaned while I was home on the weekends. I went to classes. I found a job writing for content mills that paid for dates and personal expenses. My father had been a smart and careful man and what he left behind sustained the rest. I wondered often if he had known. Sometimes I think he did. It was just that he chose to love, really truly love, a selfless endless gushing kind of love that he poured into her, choosing to give even up until the end. She was so beautiful. I remember that.
But a child’s love isn’t the same. There is no freedom to choose.
So I lived the life I was given, getting by and bringing home lovers to fill my time. When I kissed my lovers, I kissed with teeth. The men liked it, responding with clumsy ferocity, reading desire in violence. The women moaned and their soft lips blossomed and split under the give of my incisors. All the blood spilled like liquor on my tongue. Sometimes, they tried to kiss me sweetly, moving their lips across my chin, neck, shoulder with care, treating me like glass and enjoying the rush of protectiveness. I knew I had a type. I didn’t psychoanalyse it but I let them pretend to fall in love. It made them gentler, more malleable, and more inquisitive. I wait until the third date to invite them to see the rest of the house.
The house was built in the eighties and passed on to my father. It was old and draughty. With its red brick exterior and stone grey floors, it was also old and beautiful. My type was intrigued by the past and they followed me wherever I led them. After showing off my room and my father’s study and the kitchen that I barely touched, I led them down to my mother’s floor. They commented on the artwork on the walls, the vintage vibes of the ornate wall-lamps, the quaintness of such a well-tended basement floor, and they walked in first out of politeness. I left the gate open before going out for my date, so it happened quickly and I could avoid watching. I didn’t like watching. I felt as if I might be looking into a mirror.
I had been watching when my mother ate my father. It was in the kitchen and the grout retained its ruddy stain ever since, the tiles yellowed like teeth going bad. My mother had eaten up my father tenderly. She started with an index finger, gently chewing the finger pad with her molars, licking up the blood that squeezed out like sauce, cracking the nail bed for the textured nerves underneath. She savoured him. She licked and sucked and hummed with pleasure. My mother finished off my father and saved her favourite piece for last. She chewed his tongue right out of a clean skull.
She told me, Don’t hate me, Drishti. You don’t know how long I waited for this.
She told me about the hunger. It was an animal inside of her. It had awoken inside of her with her first menses. For a long time, she had thought it was the simple evils of womanhood. Everyone complained about belly cramping, exhaustion and pain. Then one day, a lover had sliced his finger open on a knife, and she had kissed it, a demure and doting act, his blood on her lips. On her tongue, down her gullet. Rich, metallic red but it didn’t taste metallic, no, it tasted like meat, it was meat she needed, his meat and his moist flesh so juicy and fragrant and delicious. She killed him, she told me, her head empty but for the hunger.
I wanted to ask her if it was love that made her hungry.
I wanted to ask her, when Jivan came into my life. It was always on the tip of my tongue when I brushed her hair out, or cleaned her room, or took her blood pressure. The normal parts of her caretaking made me fall into a fantasy that I began building when I met Jivan. He was a bookseller but he had put down “31, book dealer, avid Arsenal fan” on his dating profile, which he called nerd bait. It guaranteed that the bookworms would knock him for a conversation, if only to make fun of “book dealer.” He asked me, in our fourth conversation, why I had so little information about myself in my profile, when I read so much, learned so much, knew so much. I told him that I lived an unglamorous life and that I was a caretaker for my elderly mother. I painted a Beauty without a Beast for him and he was charmed. I was charmed too. Jivan was a simple and unassuming man, with a softness in his words. I felt that he was a coward, at heart, but that was also charming, for I too was a coward.
Jivan had a strange talent for asking the right questions. He began to know more of me, almost by accident, things that I never chose to divulge before, because what was the point? He knew my favourite shade of nail polish and the way I took my coffee and tea. He knew the exact number of years I had gone without graduating university, an embarrassing number that did not embarrass me—for obvious reasons—and curiously, did not embarrass him. He teased out inconsequential details of my life and it felt like I was a real person to him. I fed my mother two other dates before I realised that I might be stalling… but for what?
My monster mother was fading deeper into her hunger and I was fossilising. I wanted to ask her lots of things. I wanted to know if her hunger had blossomed from trembles in her belly. I wanted to hear her voice again. This childish desire made me stay away from her. I did the bare minimum and kept away for days, sometimes a week. I stayed away long enough, sometimes, to linger in my fantasy of normalcy. I let Jivan take me out and I followed him to his home and his bed. The way his building’s nightguard eyed me made me nervous but Jivan passed one hand over my back and I turned my face into his. He kissed me as we stepped into the elevator. He kissed me as I sat in his bed fumbling with the belt buckle, pressing his hand against my neck until he could have choked me. He kissed me with teeth.
Something deep throbbed in me in response. When I lay in his arms afterwards, Jivan slowly stroked my hair and asked me to tell him about my father. For my other dates, I usually sketched out a quick image of the genteel and somber man that had been my father; the workaholic who devoted himself to his family; the reticent patriarch whose death had shaken the fabric of my life apart. But I told Jivan about a day when I was fourteen, when my mother and I took ill with fever, and my father carried me in his arms to my bedroom after I fell asleep at the dinner table. I came to with my father’s fingers in my mouth, prodding gently around my tongue, before he put the thermometer under it and stroked my head with demonstrable affection. He said, Drishti, are you still hungry? and I said, no Baba. I had eaten all the rice and chicken at dinner, while my mother sat sick and dazed, only sipping water to take medicine. My father felt my forehead and then he, for the first and only time, embraced me, pulling my head into the warmth of his neck. I told Jivan, You know what was strange? My mother always smelled so sweet to me, but my father, he smelled like blood.
When I returned home, my mother was at the gate, straining at the end of her tether, the chains that kept her bound to her room. She was chewing on her own hair, which I had braided for her, sucking the ends as if they had juice. I was frightened by the lost look in her eyes, enough that I couldn’t force myself to approach. I could only watch my mother wail, strain towards me, scratch her own arms until she broke skin, lick up the blood that beaded up like rubies. She had stopped being able to speak proper language a while ago, but she muttered groggily, “Hungry, hungry…” until she passed out. I had fed her only three days ago but neglect had made her rabid. My mother could feel only the hunger, taking over everything that she was. Guilt eclipsed whatever was inside of me in the aftermath of Jivan.
I took a break from Jivan after that. I spent time with my mother, brought my father’s old CD player to her room and played her favourite Bollywood hits. I kept her clean and oiled her hair. She hummed tunelessly to herself when I massaged the oil into her scalp, rolling the balls of my palm across her temples, her neck, like she used to when I was a schoolgirl. I took her out for the sun and studied beside her. Her bloodthirst became almost manageable, which only served to feed the guilt in me. My mother needed me.
My lovers found me aggressive and impatient. Sometimes, this only improved the lovemaking, making them eager to close the gap between us more quickly. They began to smell like blood. But sometimes, they grew quiet and frightened before I could even charm them into bed. They ghosted me after the first meeting, something about my new smile unsettling an animal part of their brain. I forced myself to be more careful, more adjusted. One of them told me, You need a heart-to-heart with your God, which made me laugh and laugh until she left the restaurant without waiting for the bill.
I wanted to ask my mother what led her to make this life for us. Why choose to be a wife, a woman, a mother, when she had known she was a curse? She had known what lay beneath the beautiful veneer, had known what was bursting to come out, only time would have shown. But she had fallen in love with a man and chose not to eat him alive. She wrestled with her monster self and hid that part of her away; she was warmth and kindness and bright, the star around which we orbited, and she only let the monster out in the darkness of the night when she thought we wouldn’t know, her pain expressed into a pillow when she thought we wouldn’t hear her screams. I wanted to ask her how she lived with the hunger clawing up her insides, if it clogged up her veins like heart disease, if it always pulsed inside her when she was near her love. If my father had smelled like blood to her before he had taken that butcher knife and carved into his ribs on the kitchen floor, his insides spraying out like a vivid waterfall, pooling the richest darkest red around his feet, while he fell to his knees and smiled up at my mother, an invitation and a forgiveness.
If she remembered his kisses still.
The night before the next full moon, I crept into my mother’s room while she slept. She rested in a foetal curl against the links of her chains, her wrists thin and pale, and her hair fanned around her head like rope. When my mother had woken, slaked and sated with my father inside of her, she gave up. I saw it happen in her eyes. She watched me trembling as I came to her, wanting to climb into my mother’s arms, wanting an anchor, but the realisation was glazing her eyes even as I called for her. My beautiful mother held me, but she was gone. The horror of her hunger finally overtook her the day she ate my father. I stroked the hair of my monster mother, which still smelled sweet, and called for her under my breath. She stirred under my fingertips and turned her face into my hand. I saw the tears leak out under her lashes, trailing down her temples, wetting my hand, and that small warm wetness broke me. It was unfair, it was unfair, she was my mother and she needed me, and he was my father and he could not bear her pain with her, and I needed them and I was alone. They left me alone with this curse and with questions I would never have answers for and they sacrificed everything for the sake of love, even me.
In the morning, I messaged Jivan. Even after so many months, he responded. He asked me how I had been, how was my mother? I asked him if he wanted to meet me for dinner. He asked when and where.
I wore one of my mother’s saris. I braided my hair, which was not quite waist-length, and wore my mother’s bangles and my mother’s kundan. When I saw myself in the mirror, I felt a quick sadness. I was my mother’s age when she got married. Whoever she was on the cusp of becoming, she had been full of hope and desires. Whoever I was… felt encased in the mercury of the mirror.
But when Jivan saw me, his gaze turned dark and stormy, and he whispered that I looked beautiful. You are a vision, he said, and he said that he wanted to kiss me. I let him. It felt so good that the heat of our mouths burrowed into my bones. He told me that he had missed me, and it burrowed deeper until it reached a part of me I had never let myself look at. The hunger rose in me in a slow swell, like the beginning notes of a symphony. He said that he wanted to take me home, and I said, no. Come home with me.
The house was unusually cold when I brought him in. Jivan filled the space with his chatter, catching me up on his life, probing about mine but leaving it alone when I gave vague answers. I had forgotten how seductive his normalcy was, how easily I was pulled into his orbit. He kissed me so easily, but every peck made me hungrier. So I pulled him through my house, kissing him with all of my want, his moans thrilling me and making me feel like a predator. We left doors trailing open behind me as we moved in our passion towards my bedroom. The hunger was awake and wild inside of me. It strained against the chains I’d muzzled it with, rushing like an explosion in my ears until I could hear nothing but the thundering of his blood. When I pressed my thumb into his carotid, I felt the floor shake, as if my foundations were breaking open beneath me. I imagined I could hear my mother scream.
Jivan kissed the top of my head and told me he loved me.
I took him to my mother’s floor.
The descent was quiet with anticipation, but it was too much for me, so I filled it. I gave the histories of the paintings on the walls, artwork selected by my father over the years. I told him how my great-grandfather commissioned the lamps from an actual ironworker to show off his wealth and status. I spoke about the difficulties of keeping spiders out of the basement. And right before I opened the gate, I kissed him with teeth and drew blood.
I followed Jivan into a room with broken, empty chains. Panic slammed into me at the sight and I gasped, wheeling around to search for my mother. No sign. Jivan called my name and when I saw the confusion in his eyes, the panic crystallised and I threw him to the ground before slamming the gate shut and locking it. He threw himself against the gate, calling my name, his tenderness evolving into fear, his voice turning into screams. But I could only think of my mother, running through the house and calling for her like I was the one lost. Where could she be, where could she be? I thought in blind horror, until I heard the sounds of screaming and yells coming from outside.
Under the night sky, my mother sat elegantly in the street, eating the heart and lungs of a dead body. With her poise and her unbound hair running like black ink down her back, she was my beautiful mother again. With her hands full of organs. Her mouth incarnadine and glistening. A crowd of my neighbours surrounded her, simultaneously disgusted and entranced by her. She reached into the chest cavity and pulled out the sternum, licked it clean and continued gorging. I could see more people approaching, lights and sticks in their hands. My mother turned her face to the moon and laughed and laughed and laughed, her sound so weightless and free…
I fled back into my home, empty now. The house was a ghost and I, in it, unmoored. What would I be now? My mother, gone; my hunger, unsated; and I think, for a moment, of Jivan locked in my basement. Jivan, who no longer screamed, but only wept and called my name. Jivan, whom I loved.
