I Will Be Seen
by Theodore Hill
He called it a “meet cute,” the absolute ass I’d been seeing all year. He said it over and over again, told the story to anyone who would listen, squeezing my hand with an affection so tender it barely registered.
He never told it right.
When I went to the Natural History Museum I wanted to be disturbed. I’d grown complacent at MoMA, the surrealists no longer showing me their teeth. Even on the brisk, fall weekends when I rented a car and drove myself to Storm King it felt too simple. Plaster and steel couldn’t feel the hurt of the world around them. I wanted to walk among exhibits that had suffered and died.
But this warm, loyal dog of a man saw beauty in me that wasn’t there. Or if it was, it didn’t matter.
He was crawling around inside the preserved heart of a blue whale, which weighed 400 pounds and had veins and arteries wide enough that he could fit his broad shoulders through their passages. He squeezed his way out of the aorta like he was being born out of the death of a mammal fifteen hundred times his weight, and then he looked at me and grinned in an unguarded way that baffled me so much I couldn’t help but wait when he asked me to, either out of curiosity or an impulse of self-destruction.
I met eyes with the security guard, who smiled tolerantly. I suppose he was not the only adult who wanted to force his body through snaking tubes that no longer pumped thousands of liters of blood on an endless circuit through mass nearly incomprehensible to something so small. I wondered if it had occurred to him that, in being dead, the whale could no longer consume him like something living could.
When this man got to his feet, he said I was gorgeous and asked me if I wanted to have coffee.
The idea made me want to die, so of course I said yes. I had come seeking discomfort, and it appeared to have found me in a man who didn’t know how to be uncomfortable. The date was agony in its simplicity. He talked about himself and asked about me. I didn’t dim myself for him, but he took my monstrousness for dark humor and sardonic wit. What should have sent him running made him laugh.
I felt invisible.
The whole train ride back to his apartment, he assured me he never did this.
He was blisteringly normal in bed, panting and moaning cloyingly in my ears as he laid on top of me and thrust for a few short but interminable moments.
I’d have been glad to assume selfishness of him, but then he finally rolled off and kissed my brow and whispered in my ear: You did, didn’t you?
In four words, I understood that this was something worse.
He had assumed that his graceless rutting was all I needed. He thought my pleasure and his were the same, and he never offered a chance for me to expose this lie until adjustments were no longer possible.
The presumption in his voice made me glance at my own skin to see if I’d gone transparent. I don’t think the idea that my desires were disparate from his own ever crossed his mind.
I put my number into his phone before I left. My real number, not the fake I typically give to more banal bad lays. I had to see him again. I had to know what it would take for him to see me.
I survived on this simplistic suffering for six months. Tonight, I would be seen.
He knew I was an artist. I wondered if the only reason he knew that was because people more attentive than him had asked.
What does she do, your girlfriend?
She paints, I think.
I was a sculptor, which he would have known if he’d ever come to one of my exhibitions.
Though he never had the chance, because since we’d been together I hadn’t raised a chisel to stone or a wire to clay. His placidity, his perfect comfort, consumed me with absolute dread.
I tried everything I could think of to ruin this. My every destructive trait was glossed over. My ugliness, sin, and rage became eccentricity under his gaze. I came to dread that gentle press of lips to brow as he professed how tenderly he felt toward me.
This tenderness was torture. I needed teeth and claws.
If he refused to see me, I would have to make him look.
I asked him if he’d model for me. I imagined this phrasing, though rife for misinterpretation, would be more likely to have him agree. People would always rather be seen as beautiful than as raw. They would rather I be the one to suffer in the act of creation.
Of course he was flattered. Of course he asked me no questions about the nature of his contribution to the piece.
He arrived at my apartment just after nine. He was late, as always, but he never apologized. I had been expecting this. My studio was arranged as I required it. Tarps were spread and my step stool was in place. I had purchased a spool of stainless steel wire, less than a millimeter thick. It had arrived the day before. It weighed slightly more than two pounds and would be more than enough.
He asked me where I wanted him.
I stood him in the center of the room, and his eyebrow quirked when I asked him to undress. Perhaps he saw a different trajectory to the evening than I did. I asked him to stand, to spread his legs.
Carefully, so carefully, I began to wrap.
At first, he laughed. He cracked jokes as I manipulated his body, climbing on and off the stool to cover him in spiral patterns of sparkling wire. I had been designing the layout of my designs for a month already, and if I had it right, he would understand at last the kind of creator I was. Which is to say, I was not a creator at all.
I was an artist, yes, but my art was destruction. My art was not gentle lovemaking. My love was calamity.
The last thing he asked me before my wrapping reached his head was if this was to be a photography project. A different artist, one who dealt in irony, might have smiled at this. I slipped a finger between his lips and began the arduous task of wrapping his jaw.
He made a few sounds as I slipped the wire between his teeth and under his chin, fingers probing the opening of his mouth. Someone else, a dentist perhaps, might have understood what he meant. I might have understood as well, if I had tried. I paid no attention to his little sounds, nor did I pull out the handkerchief I had in my pocket to blot the spit that dribbled down his chin. Let him see what it is to be ignored. Let him see what it is to have his needs left unmet by someone who was probing digits at his opening.
When I finished, there was not much wire remaining. There were only a few short feet on either end, my calculations without flaw. My work stood before me, as still as a pillar of salt. I wondered if he had the sense to look back and if he could see the patterns I had been showing him all along, if he would still consider himself my boyfriend.
He made a small sound—the first in several minutes—when I rolled the winch into the room. It was a wondering sound. It almost could have been a laugh. I slipped the two ends of the wire into the mechanism and powered it on.
At the slowest setting, it took several minutes for the winch to wind the wire back in. I rested my hand on his chest, holding his gaze as the wrap grew tight enough to hurt. When I saw the first drop of blood on his cheek, the first spark of recognition in his eyes, I broke the stare.
He saw me. He understood. That was all I needed from him.
The sound he made was desperate, but brief. It was unintelligible, but it contained more information than a million words could convey. A million words were a thousand pictures, if the adage was to be believed. I was not an image maker. This annihilation was my art.
As I watched the wires slip into his skin, I heard light clicks from the floor. I imagined that those noises might be the snapping of the bones in his feet, but when I looked I saw that his teeth had begun to tumble to the ground like a light hail of bone. They were whole, white tinged with the red of what I imagined now pooled in his mouth. I stooped to pick some up and stared at them as they rested in my palm.
I doubted he was still aware of me when I slipped the first tooth between my lips and swallowed it like medicine, but I didn’t care if he saw anymore. In the moment the wire snapped taut and he came apart completely, I knew he had seen more of me than any other human being had.
I stood in the silence of my apartment for a long moment before I realized what I was feeling. More than the satisfaction of creation, I was feeling pride at my act. More than content, I was elated.
This bastard, this absolute bastard had satisfied me after all.
I crumpled to the floor, let the blood soak into my linen pants. I stared at the blood, the mess I had made of this man. Had he been trying to bring me to this point all along? Had I missed the signs that he had shown me?
I thought back over what he had shown me, and realized that he’d been telling me what he really needed all along. The answer was unmistakable.
He had come from inside the whale.
My fingers squirmed in the pile of meat and bone in front of me. I lifted a small chunk of him in one dripping hand, then shoved it into my mouth. Yes, the iron taste of blood was there, but it also tasted of him.
I shoved another piece of raw muscle between my teeth, followed by a jagged crunch of bone.
Was this what he wanted? Had he always meant to start and end this love story consumed by a greater power?
One of his eyes, still almost blue, lay in a puddle near the arch of my foot. I lifted it between two fingers and placed it reverently on my tongue. You’ve seen what I wanted to show you, I thought. Now I will show you the inside of the beast.
Theodore Hill (he/him) is a writer, librarian, and queer horror who lives in Toronto. He spends his non-work hours maintaining his recreational spreadsheet collection and crafting deeply worrying story pitches. His work has appeared in The Book of Queer Saints Volume II, Escalators to Hell: Shopping Mall Horrors, A Coup of Owls, and others. Chances of him devouring you on sight are always low, but never zero. He can be found online at theodorehill.weebly.com and on Bluesky and Instagram @probablyharmless.bsky.social
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