by Jaym Gates
Chad’s head snapped around. “I’m sorry ... I’m dying so you can have a mid-range sedan?”
Ingénue reached out and smoothed his hair absently. “Come on, don’t be a baby about it. Don’t you want me to be able to live my life to the full? Not be bound to the worship of a giant snake? Not that it wasn’t an amazing experience I’ll always treasure,” she added hastily as the Serpentine Goddess’s eyes flickered in her direction.
“I made you a necklace!” he shouted. He flipped from side to side like a beached fish, making one last effort to get loose. “My best piece of fordite! It’ll look great on you!”
“That’s a lovely gesture but … I always thought your work looked just a little bit garish.”
That ended his resistance. He crumpled.
“I don’t want to die …” Chad whimpered, his eyes fixed on the impossibly long, forked tongue. It seemed almost shy, tentative, as it caressingly explored his ankle.
“But I want to live,” Ingénue replied. She turned away, ignoring the sounds behind her — she’d heard them all before — and began to climb the ladder to the trapdoor leading to the outside world, to her freedom. She left the embroidered robe behind, happy to abandon it. Upstairs, a powder blue tracksuit and Crocs awaited her.
If Chad had somehow survived to see her walk away, he would not have even recognized her.
The Refrigerator in the Girlfriend
Adam-Troy Castro
My girlfriend Amanda surprised me by installing a personal refrigerator in her abdomen. I didn’t even know such a thing was possible. Amanda said, oh, sure, lots of people are getting them. It’s the latest thing. Don’t you remember Verna? I didn’t remember meeting Verna. Amanda reminded me of a party we had been to. I remembered the party. She reminded me of a woman who had made a mortifying spectacle of herself there. I remembered that, too. But the girl who had made the mortifying spectacle of herself was not Verna, just somebody who had been standing next to Verna.
I never ever succeeded in remembering Verna, whom I know nothing about except that she had her own belly fridge before Amanda decided to get one for herself.
By that point Amanda and I had been a couple for nine months, living together for seven in a cramped little apartment we’d chosen only because it was acceptably close to the part of town worth being in. Beyond that, the place was classic micro-living. Its bathroom, a toilet and a sink and a tiny stall shower, was set off by a translucent sliding curtain instead of a proper wall. The clothes closet was not a closet but a rod stretching the length of one wall, that when laden with her hanging clothes and mine, filled up half of what we laughingly called our living room. The shelf above it, stretching the same length, was our pantry and our library and our storage space and our TV stand. On the opposite wall, our bed occupied a loft hanging low over her drafting table, but not low enough below the ceiling, and while acceptable for sleeping, was way too cramped for any but the most cautious sex, meaning that we had to cover the narrow patch of floor between clothes and loft with our comforter whenever we wanted to get frisky, which was pretty often. Even our kitchenette was barely large enough to qualify for the -ette suffix, to the point where we sometimes called it a kitchenette-ette, and made a habit of draping plastic over the pull-down ironing board in order to have a sufficient food preparation surface on those rare occasions when we did any but the simplest cooking at home.
To do anything in the space we had, we had to shift objects around to create empty space in whatever part of the apartment we wanted to occupy, an exercise in determined organization that would have descended into chaos if either of us ever operated out of synch with the other. We used to joke that every new couple should live this way, that if we hadn’t killed each other yet, like rats in some crowding experiment, we were probably meant to be together for life; but the truth was that we were young and the glorified closet we lived in was much of the time not much more to us than a place to store our bodies while unconscious, in between forays into a world that offered us more room to breathe. But there were tensions, in that there was never enough space to put anything, and bringing anything new into the house became a cause of serious protracted negotiation.
In that context, the belly fridge had major symbolic value, as far as commitment was concerned. Whoever she got to do it had done a superlative job, making room for the soft-sided, collapsible chamber inside her without any obvious physical deformation of her anatomy. Whenever the fridge door was closed, you couldn’t even see a seam, let alone feel it (and I must admit I tried because there were plenty of reasons other than mechanical curiosity to run my hands over that flat, tanned midriff of hers). But a little depression of the switch hidden in her navel and that door swung open, revealing a sterile insulated space capable of maintaining a constant internal temperature of 37 degrees.
The space was unfortunately not large enough to accommodate a true abdominal six-pack that would have made the device a fervent exercise in the literal realization of a pun. There just wasn’t enough room in Amanda, a svelte and elfin girl, for that to be possible without doing serious physiological damage. Her fridge was, however, large enough to store about half that much, in practice three aluminum cans or the equivalent in mini water bottles or sandwiches and snacks if we were up and about and didn’t want to stop somewhere for provisions. And then it sealed up, becoming a secret compartment every bit as invisible as it had been when its existence was still unsuspected: a little additional personal space, inside her personal space.
I was appalled at first. I demanded to know the medical realities. She assured me that everything she’d had beneath the skin before was still there, if a little shifted about; and the side-effects would be few, among them increased farting as the only possible way to get rid of the heat buildup. Someday, she said, when we moved to a bigger place, it could be removed without leaving a scar. But until then the extra storage space would come in handy. And until then it would serve as reminder that for us there would always be enough space.
I remained skeptical until later that night, after we’d gone out and walked the streets and listened to the music coming out of the clubs and stopped by the river and watched the lights across the water for a while and went back to where things were happening and run into some friends and talked with them for a while and come back to the space that belonged only to us. She hauled the comforter down from the loft and covered the floor with it and we made love in that tiny place between her work space and our closet space, her on top, warm as always, soft as always, the constant hum of her belly fridge somehow not at all distracting between the sounds I made and the sounds she made, even as the slyest possible look came over her face and she opened her belly long enough to touch the back of her coldest place and emerge with fingers that felt like ice against my chest. She closed the door and warmed what she had just cooled with her lips, and teased me with sly questions: do I feel cold to you, hmmm? What else do you want to keep in me, hmmm? Do you think you can keep me hot? Hmmm?
I had honestly never known myself to be the kind of man who makes love to a woman with a fridge in her belly. Up until this night I had never suspected that this was even one of my possible categories. But the climax, when it came, was historic, and as we lay together afterward I found myself aware that it was no small part to that extra added vibration inside her, that revved up to another speed as we neared the moment and the fan had to labor harder to keep the environment in the refrigerator at the same constant temperature. It was Amanda plus. And that night as we slept spooned, something we pretty much always had to do because of the tiny loft we shared, I lay awake aware of that constant whir inside her, the motor that was now as much a part of her as her heartbeat, or her breath, or the way she laughed.
#
I went crazy about Amanda within about five minutes of meeting her. She was funny, funky, unpredictable in most of the good ways and fortunately not in many of the bad ones. I was always a harder sell, not a turnoff but not an immediate sta
rter either, and so her crazy trailed after my crazy by about two weeks, after which the two crazies sped up like comets and spiraled around one another like bi-planes. For a little while, until we realized we were doing serious damage to our respective wardrobes, we ripped the clothes off one another like lunatics. Then we calmed down, moved into this place, and buried ourselves in domesticity. Passion didn’t ebb but it did become a harnessed force.
The addition of a fridge changed her in small endearing ways. She became a belly-shirt kind of girl, for one; long partial for black tops and distressed clothes worn in layers, even when it was so hot outside that it was impossible to understand how she remained cool under all of that, she now favored skimpier outfits that exposed skin and made access to the fridge convenient for both of us. Always outspoken, always uninhibited, she had also always nurtured a paradoxical shame over passing wind, blushing and stammering and apologizing over those occasions when she could not manage to flee somewhere out of earshot before letting fly; now that it happened about ten times as frequently as before she became almost arrogant about it, calling it the price for living with modern conveniences and explaining to total strangers that she had a fridge in her belly; see? She became less a girl who took care of snacks and soft drinks when she got to a place and more one who seized the opportunity to pull out a can of soda, raise an eyebrow, and say, with a little odorless poot, nothing like a good pop on a hot day. Once upon a time, she’d delivered hilarious riffs about the kind of people whose tattoos or piercings were the most interesting things about them. But she loved her fridge. She loved being the girl with the fridge in the girl.
We had access to a car we could borrow from time to time, and on balmy weekends liked to head out of the city to places where there were trails to hike and waterfalls to see. She packed her fridge in secret, and from time to time opened up to reveal whatever treats she had stored for us: grapes, wine, sometimes a little cake. When we didn’t have the car we went to the park instead and she brought the treats that were many times more expensive if purchased on site; even more so when we went to the movies, and her belly proved the perfect way to avoid refreshment-stand prices (but only as long as we unscrewed the interior light bulb first because if we didn’t the sudden glow had a way of alerting management). Other times, when we had to travel in sketchy neighborhoods, it proved useful in ways that had nothing to do with the storage of food and drink; it was a personal safe, keeping our valuables secure even as we pretended that we really did have nothing of value on us.
A few times we found ourselves in dark places without a flashlight and she opened up her door, revealing the light that always came on, to reveal what was now, by default, her most private place.
“I’ve always been bright,” she said.
“You’ve always been cool,” I replied.
We joked about the little man who lived inside her refrigerator, making sure the light turned on and off, and I affected great jealousy over his literally moving in on my girl, threatening to wring the little fucker’s neck if he ever tried anything funny. We made up stories about him. I made Amanda laugh a good long time by bringing home a little fashion model doll and offering it to Amanda as a blind date for the refrigerator man. She slipped it into the fridge and much, much later, when I’d completely forgotten about it, produced the doll, its clothes ripped, its hair mussed, its feet missing one of its two detachable high-heel shoes. Amanda told me, “Look. The poor dear’s been ravished.”
For a long time we hauled down the comforter even more often than we had before, driven by the new ritual Amanda had come up with: the secret post-coital snack surprise, unveiled without the need of any special exodus to the more conventional mini-fridge only a few feet away. Sometimes she made me close my eyes so I didn’t know what to expect, before feeding me whatever she’d been storing inside her: cherries, grapes, jello, a gooey éclair. A couple of times it turned out to be champagne or soda so agitated by our lovemaking that it erupted on opening: a mock orgasm in and of itself, that somehow seemed a crucial part of the joke.
Then, one night about four months into her life with a belly fridge, Amanda asked me when I was going to get one.
We were streaming some zombie film on the tube when she popped the question with the too-casual air of someone who’d been hoarding it for far too long. I didn’t have enough context to understand what she was asking and for several seconds wondered why she was asking me if I’d be willing to get a zombie.
“No,” she said, punching me in the arm. “A fridge. Or something. Make your own contribution.”
I confessed that I hadn’t even thought about it, not even a little bit. I had never wanted to carry a little fridge around in my belly.
She said, “Well, something else, then.”
I asked her, “Like what?”
She said, “Forget it.”
It was the kind of “forget it” that women utter only in arguments like this one, where the man has given some kind of irredeemable offense and the only offense even worse than that is his failure to understand what it was.
“No,” I said, “tell me, seriously.”
She said, “You haven’t even thought about it at all up until now?”
I had to admit I hadn’t. The fridge had struck me as a weird, sweet, little eccentric gesture, something that added a little welcome strangeness to lives that could always use a little welcomed strangeness, but it had never occurred to me, even for a moment, to consider it the kind of romantic gesture that needed to be reciprocated. It certainly hadn’t struck me as the kind of thing that she might have been waiting for: something that had turned my silence on the subject into an exercise in unmet expectations. But the look on her face revealed that this had also been the wrong thing to say, and so I backpedaled and said, “But we can go to wherever you went, tomorrow, and see what else they have available, okay?”
She sniffed. “Don’t do me any favors.”
I said, “Come on, Amanda. I’m trying here.”
She looked away, but by now I could tell she was in the phase of the argument where she was actively trying to remain mad. She’d already gotten the concession. It was victory.
The zombie movie ended. It was a warm night so we opened the window and went out to the fire escape, and from there to the rooftop opposite our narrow alley, where we sometimes went if we didn’t want to go anywhere else, but where we didn’t go too often because we could reach it only if we braced ourselves on the railing and then took a giant step over a gap that promised a truly fucked future if we ever slipped and fell. It was just a roof and it was better than our own, where we went rarely, only because it had one side that offered an almost unobstructed view of a neighborhood we liked; not much of a reason to court crippling injury. But tonight we bridged the abyss and crossed the pigeon-crap minefield to the overlook, and stood there for long minutes enjoying the breeze and the lights and the quiet that comes after a tiff.
She asked me if I was thirsty.
I said I was.
She opened her belly and pulled out a bottle of my favorite hard cider, so hard to find locally that we greeted the discovery of any store that carried it an occasion for genuine celebration.
I took it and said, “What about you?”
She said she wasn’t thirsty.
“Are you sure? Because I can go back downstairs and get you something.”
She said, “If you had a belly fridge, you wouldn’t have to.”
I tried to think of an acceptable reply.
She said, “I’ll take a slug of yours,” and guzzled a third of the bottle. At my momentarily aghast expression, she grinned and bumped her hip against mine. We drew close and watched the lights for a while, saying nothing, the silence between us growing relaxed as the blowup was rescheduled.
#
Life did what life does and intruded. I had two double shifts at the steak house and she had to hit her drafting table to complete an illustration by deadline. The argument faded into the back
ground and we talked about other things, heading downtown on the third night to be with friends, including the friend of a friend who had had a church key imbedded on one palm and a can opener imbedded on the other. Everybody complimented him. I said it must make jerking off difficult. He said, yeah, I get that a lot. The conversational possibilities of this were now exhausted, but then some latecomers joined us and the guy ended up showing off his church key and can opener a second time. Then an hour later some new folks came around and he brought them up to date with iteration number three. I noted out loud that the chief drawback of imbedded equipment like that seemed to be the necessity of explaining it. Folks who just carried a church key on their key ring didn’t have to point it out to everybody who passed within earshot. The guy grinned and said, really.
Later, as we made our way home, Amanda said, “Why do you have to be like that?”
I said, “Be like what?”
“The way you were with whatshisname.”
“He didn’t seem to mind it.”
“He said he gets that a lot. Which isn’t the same thing.”
“What do you expect me to say? That I’m impressed? Because I wasn’t. It was one of the fucking lamest things I’ve ever seen.”
She said, “Like my fridge.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”