Encore

Cancer opens his lunchbox. There is a nice meal inside, separated by plastic compartments, packed by his foster mother like specialized tools or military ordinance. White bread crushing mayo and green tomato, pressed down by maternal fingers until white goo drips from the edges, and a side of chopped-up hot dogs with banana ketchup. It is one of those special holidays that won’t matter when the sun is obscured by flies and there is a reason for those flies. But for now, consumer electronics.

His scout uniform is a dark flower on the green picnic area, which has a wonderful view of the pink ocean. A path of desire has been worn up the hill.

He takes the durian from his backpack. He eats this fruit to train himself to be around the man, who sweats shamefully with an inner poison.

The man, who is not a man at all, but a parasite, sits at the very edge of the picnic blanket, watching as Cancer takes small, dainty bites, sensitive about his prominent teeth and his repaired cleft. Yellow lobes of durian spice the air, creamy in his mouth. The ancestor of the durian is the cacao plant, and he likes cacao very much. He takes a big gulp of chocolate milk.

The man continues to stare, looking increasingly ill and resentful.

Cancer says, what?

Why should you have a nice meal, and not I?

(Soft outrage, feline heartbreak.)

— Can’t you just buy your own? You have money…

A devastated, stupid silence. The man doesn’t look like he eats at all, or if he does, it fattens not his flesh but his bones into a crueler voluptuousness, or goes right to his shadow. He flaunts his shadow bold, with italics, and this is the softest part of him.

The last bite goes down Cancer’s throat, collared by a bloody pink ribbon tied neatly at the back in bunny ears. The swell of the bolus disappears like a performer behind a velvet curtain.

Throw that up, the man says softly.

— What?

Throw that up, please.

Cancer looks at him, exasperated. Their brown eyes reflect each other. The man, called Riparian, has long lashes, sick with lashes, and he wears them like he wears his name. An empty eggshell, yolk perfectly extracted. His hand cranes into his chest, thumb playing with his collarbone. A superfluous, mammalian gesture, which he blames on Cancer.

The smell of durian is strong between them. Rotting fruit rolled in sweating cheese, and drunk on onions. Cancer’s foster parents never allow it in the house. It is covered in thorns and it hurts him to hide it. If opened up, it has an aggressive smell. It is his secret, like the man is his secret. He has come to love the flavor, because it is a place others will not go. It is something all his own.

He lifts two fingers like a double-barreled finger gun. Under them, his ring finger kneels, thumb planted on it like a dominating boot. Nauseated smile. Defiance and nerves. Scout’s honor!

Cancer sticks his fingers down his throat, working the back of it. The wet pink drop of his uvula quivers and jumps. His eyes get big, then slip around, tearing up, clenched like teeth.

(Below the hill, girls solemnly confer on some great secret. A pair of adults, bassy and baritone, pass them curtly.)

The man says, if you keep gagging like that, someone will get the wrong idea.

Lunch comes up. That last bite, fresh and nearly recognizable. Then pureed, pre-fecal masses that nearly made it to the small intestine. Cancer leans forward, gasping, then wipes his mouth. A curious fly is already crawling toward the mess on the blanket. In ten seconds, there will be another. In another ten, that number will have doubled. In a minute, it will be black and saturated, with glints of iridescence, like tar with diamonds in it.

Your mother made that for you, the man says.

Are you going to waste it?

— I thought you wanted it?

How disgusting, Cancer…

— I’m going to class.

Please, Cancer. You ate it so well the first time. I only wanted to see it again. To see if you really, ah. Have it in you.

— I ate that durian for you.

(A painful, open admission. Does it mean anything?)

It’s not enough, the man says.

(He’s not joking. The ice in his voice hurts his own mouth.)

If you eat it again, it might be.

— Ughhh. Are you serious?

Silence.

Cancer sticks his finger in the durian slime, working up a nugget of caustic custard. The pungent smell is from ethanethiol. Ethanol, but with sulfur instead of oxygen. He’s not old enough to drink alcohol, but he is old enough to taste hell, and be drunk on it, and suck it off his finger.

Encore, Cancer! Encore!

Cancer is very sick, and very proud at the look he is given.

The man says, you’ve really been eating durian for me?

No reply except the gagging of Cancer’s throat, and the gurgle of his cheated stomach. Whatever he feels is messy as the puke he swallows. His abdominal muscles have only a slight ache, because he made himself throw up so efficiently. He is proud of that too. The dark tunnels of him, the source of so much confusion and nausea, no longer feel impossible to map.

(Voices in the distance. Other scouts coming up the path.)

He eats faster, trying to block out the cloying remix of durian mixed with regurgitated mayonnaise and white bread, watery green tomato pulp with the seeds in it, the shitty sequel of banana ketchup, and the pink slime of hot dog, which has been returned to its original form, the ooze on the floor of a slaughterhouse.

A familiar dread fills him, like the first tingle of a psychoactive leaf. His stomach seizes, contractions warbling his slender waist, the horror of a runaway machine that might rip open the delicate frame of itself and leave only the strong parts behind. He wonders if the time he has spent with this man has changed his body, and broken the act of eating.

Come on, Cancer.

I believe in you.

(The crunch of hiking boots, nearly here. And some supervisory figure, and tourists with their loud voices, like flies to his—)

There you go.

(The man touches him for the first time this week, if a napkin held by a glove can be touch, if it means anything for warmth to spread through his face as the man wipes it clean.)

What’s wrong, Cancer?

(Crunch crunch of the boots, and laughter—)

You look a little…

Cancer covers his mouth. His throat kicks and he sways as if bumped by a bully, chest knocking forward. His fingers squeeze tight, digging into his cheeks, shoulders bunched up. Puke shoots through his nose.

AGHHHHHHHHHH. He gasps for air and it punishes him, circulating the stinging reek of his interior. His tongue hangs out, eyes sick and waterblind.

(The pack of scouts comes up the hill. To his horror, he hears the voice of the boy he has a crush on.)

He puts his head down and pretends to be napping. Which means he has to be very still, with chunks of puke still caught in his sinuses. Flies nest in his hair and crawl up the dark holes of his shorts, drawn to his sweat. He can’t scratch, can’t slap them. Trapped with the blended sum of his lunchbox, and a durian exploded inside his face.

His thighs burn. He’s going to get a sunburn. His stomach hurts, still empty.

Bravo, Cancer.

Bravo.