When first he spies her, his jaw slackens, drooping open, leathery lips curling back over rows of jagged teeth. Strings of sticky saliva like thick glue hang from his chin as he watches her from across the plain devouring a dead creature, ripping ravenously at the blood-warm flesh, mashing bones and gristle between her teeth and swallowing. Slowly he begins to slither over the grass towards her – not gracefully like a snake, but with the torpid one-foot advance of the snail, leaving a trail of vile mucous in his wake that kills the grass and salts the earth.
From a distance he can smell her, putrid pollen drifting towards him, caught up on the evening breeze as the sun sets on the other side of the island. And with the darkness the plants bow down for the night and rest; and with the darkness he comes to life, mutant as he is, in search of blood—but finds her. She reeks of something that he knows he must have, and he doesn't know how he shall have it, but he'll figure that out when he gets there.
When he reaches her she lifts her bulbous head from the chest cavity of her victim and grins, bearing her cavernous maw, saturated with Persian indigo, tendons and ligaments caught between her teeth like dirty red floss, blood pooling to the brim of her bottom lip and spilling over the lacquer of drool coating the skin beneath her mouth.
There is silence for a moment as they recognise each other blindly. Eyelessly they stare, but they can still see each other in the tremors of the ground, the shapes cut out of the air by the wind, the rotten stench that pervades the space between them.
With an octopus slink he covers the ground that separates them, tentacles spreading out around her to ensure that there is no escape as his dripping tongue splits a gap between those hog-hide lips and moves towards her. At first she holds back as something surges through the shoots—bloodless veins—in her body. It is not the same sensation that comes with flesh and sated appetite, but rather like the opening of another channel within herself through which something bursts like water through a broken dam and yields to him.
She teases, though. She pokes her thick, calloused tongue like a loaf of raw, dry meat through a small breaking in her crimson razor teeth and draws back. Her tentacles ripple with sensuous delight as the uncontrollable feeling of sexless lust takes hold of her, mutation fighting with genetic coding, blood-sap, roots and tentacles-like-fingers coalescing inexplicably as he draws towards her with his tongue, which is coarse like a pumice stone licking the bloody-spit around her mouth. She gurgles throatily, widening her oral cavity as teeth gnash on teeth, tongues scrape against each other like stone dragged across tarmac.
And the vital, unknown areas awaken on her body, pulpy flesh of softened yellow where her belly might be, his tentacles rubbing over her, oozing sap and slime as his tongue trails down her chin and up to the side of her bulbous head. Where the head meets the rest of the body there are rows of blisters packed into the folds of soiled-green flesh, rolling and unrolling with the subtlest of movements, almost sensual. He licks the throbbing pustules on her chin to the point of bursting, puss and sap spitting forth into his mouth so that he can taste her – a sweet-savoury taste, like lemon juice dribbled onto fish.
She runs her teeth mercilessly along the line of green-black boils leading up the side of his face and sucks on a spore – one of many which crowns his head like a wreath of serpents. And they are here in sexless unanimity, androgynous copulation – "he/she" interchangeable between the two of them, defined only by their stance and fervour.
But it is she who comes first, climaxing somewhere deep within herself – no outward release. Her jaw hangs open for a long, throaty moan as he continues to rub his slimy finger-like tentacles in hers, and those oh so vital areas until he reaches that peculiar sensation as well, slowly – an inward release.
There is an afterwards in which they rest side-by-side, upright in rest, almost-romantic in the twilight. Sexless love, a tangle of slimy feelers and spit, slime and sap on the ground beneath them sticking to their slimy, sappy skin as they as two amorphous monsters lie on the comedown of their hideous passions under a dome of dark foreverness sprinkled with lights that they cannot see.
In the morning she's not there when the dusk comes around, because he can smell the sun rising on the eastern side of the island. He feels for her on the ground, traces her trail of mucous over the grass and dirt until he smells her – a horrid and strong, pungent version of her wafting in the wind. She is dead, with her beautiful bulbous head sawn in two by an unnaturally straight cut, the residual smell of gunpowder and smoke festering in the wound. Black chlorophyll spills from the gash, poisons the earth.
You were mine, he thinks in a strange sort of way. A strange sense of natural possessiveness mingled with an odd feeling of loss that rebels against the substance of his composition. Mine, he thinks to himself again, and opens his mouth.
The jaw unhinges, the thick, sticky drool flowing out and splattering onto the grass as he takes the crown of her dissected head into the entrance of his mouth and shifts forward until she rests partially on his tongue. The mouth snaps shut, crushes the soft skull, plant-flesh mashing between his teeth as he advances, swallowing, swallowing. She tastes glorious – sweet strychnine pouring down his throat like spoiled ambrosia. He remembers the taste of her from last night, only now it mingles with bitter tang of gunpowder which is distinctly not-her. Blisters burst between his teeth as she is sliced into a thousand pieces in his mouth, flaps of yellow and green skin caught in the gaps of his jaws. The tentacles are last, and they are tender and chewy, wet with thick slime.
And when he finishes he sighs, and smells her on his breath.