“This is a relatively common anxious behavior,” he said to Mom with his gentle-pat-on-the-shoulder voice. “It’s just a way for Elliott to relieve some of his big feelings. Keep an eye on it, but he’ll probably grow out of it.”

I didn’t grow out of it. I learned to hide it. When my parents found fresh bite wounds on my forearms, I started biting my biceps. A knot of tension, red-hot glowing wires, swelled in my chest until I sank my teeth into my own arms. I’d bite to untangle things, to assert control on my world in the only way I knew how. All the rules, interactions, and expectations around me were too confusing. It was too much.

I took antibiotics for the infections. The human mouth contains more bacteria than most animal bites, except Komodo dragons. I liked to imagine I was one of those big-ass lizards when I bit down so hard I had to use floss to get my skin out from between my teeth. Then I’d imagine watching in tingly fascination as the wound turned necrotic. Black veins snaked outward, radiating toward the extremities. Eventually the infection would reach my heart, which would beat faster and faster, trying to make up for the loss in pressure until my blood backed up too much and my heart gave out completely.

I’ve bitten myself so hard I ended up with stitches on six different trips to the ER. Each time, my mother drove me, her lips pressed into a white line. By then she’d given up trying to figure me out. I never knew what she told the doctors and nurses about why we were there.

“I truly don’t understand why you do this to yourself, Elliott,” she’d say. A close look at her forearms, though, revealed faint scars. Dental impressions. Clipped and precise little matching C-shapes. Once on the way to the ER, a dish towel tied around my arm because I’d torn a vein, I reached over and traced Mom’s scars with my finger.

By a genetically codified and silent agreement, we didn’t really discuss it. To her, I didn’t have to try to explain how small obsessions would infect my thoughts, like how the little plastic zipper on the bag of deli ham would last forever. I’d unzip the bag for a sandwich and then I’d imagine mountains of plastic in landfills, never breaking down. Landslides of polystyrene and urethane and PVC choking out all the marine life and plants and even bacteria. It would get so bad, I’d feel the microplastics in my brain until eventually I could hear nothing over the whooshing and crashing of particles in my blood.

And then I’d bite, and the noise would go away. I’d strain my jaw and resist the urge to keep biting past the point where the salty warmth of my blood flooded over my tongue. It never hurt, but I had to practice restraint; I lost the ability to move my left pinky because I tore something and never told anyone.

When Dad grilled chicken, I would chew on the tendon and gristle in the drumsticks, gnawing the bone to splinters. I’d always wanted to bite my leg the same way and one day, not long after I turned eighteen, I did. I held my ankle, my foot resting on the opposite knee, and pretended it was a giant chicken leg. Chew, tear, and gnaw. That’s how I ended up in the compulsive behavior support group. The Courage to Stop. It was either “get help” or move out of my parents’ house. The support group was where I met Claire.

Claire and I decided we’d eat each other.

***

“I’m Claire. I pick. And bite my nails, obviously.” She held up her hands, displaying the ends of her fingers with their crescent moons of gore. Scabs covered her forearms, some older and some still glistening with fresh blood. Claire’s bottom lip was missing a little divot on one side, giving her the half-sneer of a Disney villain. She wasn’t especially pretty; aside from her hair, which was dyed bright red in spots, there was nothing eye-catching about her. She was plain-faced and brown-eyed like me. What drew me to her was that she might understand me. She shared my same frenetic energy, like when I couldn’t shake the idea that every time I ate an almond, I wasted five gallons of water. Like the certainty that every time I watched Netflix, I inflicted irreparable damage on delicate ecosystems.

The world was literally burning, but I’d met someone with the same scars as me. We wore the same disguise, recognized each other, and fell into the exact same rhythm.

We had no awkward, beating-around-the-bush conversation. The first time we were alone together, we didn’t kiss, and we didn’t talk. We didn’t flirt. With her, I could be who I was, and we didn’t have to ask each other, “Is this okay?” In our initial moments of intimacy, I chewed on the heel of her hand and she gathered my nipple between her teeth and slowly, slowly, clamped down.

“I’m Catholic,” she told me one night as we sat on her bed. “I have to go to Mass with my parents every Sunday morning, but sometimes I’ll sneak out my window and go to midnight Mass by myself.”

“Do you believe in God?” I was intensely curious about this dimension of my new friend. My parents weren’t into church, so I’d never really gone.

“What difference does it make? I think there’s something out there, sure,” Claire said. “But if it turns out to be a white-bearded accountant in outer space, we’re all in big trouble.” She closed her hand over mine and curled all my fingers down, except the bum pinky. “Mix flour, oil, water, and salt together in a bowl and all you get is flatbread.”

As if in supplication, she lowered her mouth to my pinky and took it between her incisors. My heart thrummed like a hummingbird as she continued speaking, her words muffled around my finger. “It’s just bread and wine when you go to church, but there was a big schism over transubstantiation about a thousand years ago. What if you bit into the bread and it was a finger, though?”

Claire’s lips pulled back and the intensity in her eyes stopped my heart. My head swam; all she had to do was bite down and my useless pinky would be chopped in half. Would she eat it? Excitement I’d never known surged through me. “Do it,” I said, breathless. “We can go to the ER at Baptist East. They know me by name there.”

When her teeth closed around my finger, it made a popping sound. A wave of silence flooded every corner of my mind. It was pleasure and pain and the answers to every worry that plagued me. Everything faded in the pulsing thrum of my heartbeat as my blood sprayed down Claire’s chin. I grabbed my wrist and squeezed while she chewed slowly. And swallowed.

***

When we left the ER, Claire told me we could make it in time for Mass. “Midnight service at Our Lady of Hope. You want to go?”

I nodded, still euphoric, but not from the drugs. As I turned this new thing over, this belonging, I understood that wasn’t all of it. My thoughts had slowed since Claire ate my finger. A calm had descended on me, lingering in every word and action. And confidence. “Do you feel different?” I asked.

Claire hadn’t chewed her nails, or her lip, since we’d left her room. We spent four hours at the ER, and she sat with me through all of it, glassy-eyed and whispering with me, both of us giggling. “Yeah, I think I do, Elliott,” she said after a moment. “I don’t know what to call it, really, but I guess I feel…hopeful?”

At the sanctuary, we held hands as we walked in. The priest stepped up to the lectern and immediately disappointed me. I’d been hoping for a New England whaler’s sermon, like in Moby Dick. Instead of a powerful, soul-stirring liturgy, the priest rushed through the words with emphasis in all the wrong places. He reminded me of a birthday party magician going through the motions, pulling a lethargic rabbit out of a hat with no flourish. Before I knew it, Claire was grabbing me by the arm and pulling me up front.

“Come on, this is the best part.” She smiled at me with her half-sneer, and I yearned to lean in and kiss her deeply right then, clamping my teeth down and taking a divot out of the other side of her lip. Symmetry.

When we got to the altar, a bored-looking man with sweat standing out on his forehead handed out crackers. I hoped I could get more than one, but he was stingy with them. “Body of Christ,” he said too quickly. The priest who’d given the lackluster sermon thrust a crusty golden cup at us. “Blood of Christ.”

I finished chewing the cracker, thinking about what Claire had said about transubstantiation —imagining the wafer turning into a calloused thumb with the crunch of a gristly knuckle between my teeth. Jesus had been a carpenter, after all.

I tried to wiggle my stumpy half-pinky as we walked out, the mineral-chalky taste of the wine still on my tongue, but the finger was just as useless as before —no miracle there —and didn’t move. When I realized, though, that Claire could eat the rest of it after I got my stitches out, another pulsing rush of clarity shuddered through me.

Claire must have sensed it, because as soon as we stepped out of the sanctuary and into the vestibule, she turned to me and grinned. “Come on. I think there’s a closet over here.”

She took my hand, the one with all the fingers, and led me to a door off the hallway. We slipped inside and the close darkness smelled like bleach and dust and mildew. I kicked a broom that clattered in the corner and Claire shushed me, placing her hand over my mouth even though I hadn’t said anything. I knew what she wanted, though, and took the flat of her hand into my mouth. She gasped when I bit down, hard enough to break the skin. I didn’t care about the blood, but the texture of the small muscle flexing against the tendon and her tender bones underneath excited me.

“Do it again,” Claire said, her lips so close to my ear the breath of her words tickled.

I bit her again and she moaned, low and deep in her throat. She locked her teeth around the lobe of my ear. It stung like a thousand ant bites as she chewed through the skin and fat; there was a pull and the pressure released. She clicked her teeth together and chewed with little popping sounds.

Blood from my ear ran down the side of my neck as the blood from Claire’s hand slicked my chin. The closet had taken on the smell of hot copper and alkaline sweat and a deeper, trapped-animal smell. I wondered if a rabbit caught in a coyote’s jaws smelled this way, and I tugged Claire’s shirt up over her head and pushed her against the closet wall. Something else clattered to the floor and the scent of floral soap, thick and cloying, greeted us. I lowered my mouth to her collarbone, tracing its subtle sweep with my canines before I closed my premolars over it.

“Do it, Elliott,” she whispered before she clamped her mouth over my ear, and I felt more than heard the crunch as she bit through the top of it. A touch of jealousy washed through my thoughts as she munched on the cartilage, smacking her lips.

Her collarbone, clamped between my jaws, flexed and bowed and finally, with a snap like a thick twig, broke under the pressure of my bite. I chewed a few times, letting the smashed bone shift and click, then let go before I got too carried away.

Claire’s voice drifted to me from far off. She sounded different through my half-eaten ear, and I could tell from the slush in her words that we had discovered a new kind of release, a sense of liberation unlike anything before attained.

“We should go back to the hospital, Elliott.” But instead of groping in the dark for her shirt and both of us stumbling out of the closet, Claire raised my hand to her mouth and clipped my middle finger off at the first knuckle. The clicking of her teeth reminded me of garden shears.

When I lowered my mouth to her neck, the salt of her sweat mixed with the taste of my own blood on my tongue. I nibbled, tearing away at the delicate skin over tendons until I found her pulse. It raced like a hummingbird’s wings against my lips and I clamped down, severing something that sprayed hot against my cheek. “It doesn’t taste like wine, Claire.”

Claire laughed softly, pressing the flat of her hand to her neck to slow the bleeding. She lowered her mouth to my neck, cradling the back of my head with her free hand. I wondered, offhand and distantly, whether we’d go to hell for this obscene consummation, especially since we were hidden inside a church closet. When Claire bit and tore, a sharp jolt raced through me, then peace like a river washed away everything —fear, uncertainty, obsession —in a slowing rush.

About the Author:
Galen Gower writes stories and talks to plants.