Prose from the Fall 2023 edition of The Wellesley Review.
In this section:
Aftertaste by Becky Zhong ’27
Spoon* by Nora Wagner ’27
LOBSTER* by Emma Baker ’26
Trail by Nora Wagner ’27
Les Yeux de Sainte Lucie by Marian Picard ’24
*pieces contain content warnings (CW)
Aftertaste
Becky Zhong
The discoloration was beginning to bleed into the core.
That’s what Mama told me last June when she pulled me into her room and said something was growing in her left breast. She described the feeling as rough—like the mid-kiss irritation of a man’s stubble brushing against the upper lip. I’ve never been kissed before, so I didn’t understand the comparison, nor did I understand her diagnosis. By the time senior year arrived, instead of focusing on writing overdue essays, I fell in love with every boy who looked my way. I imagined them thinking about the way my curls framed the sides of my face. I pictured the guys picturing me. I thought about love and the feeling of a boy’s mouth pressed against mine instead of that potential life, exponential, lodged beneath Mama’s skin.
I recall one afternoon pulling open the organizer bin in our refrigerator in search of a popsicle, only to find stacks of Chinese medicine instead. Herbs, dried fruits, and beans, meant to be boiled into healing soup, packed into dozens of ziplock bags. I found a blueberry popsicle hidden beneath it all and when I bit into it, I realized it tasted like medicine.
This particular year, featuring Mama’s chemotherapy and college applications and boys, I didn’t measure the passing of time by years anymore but rather the days till graduation. I thought about leaving for Florence a lot and the way Mama closed her eyes when she danced to “Here Comes the Sun” in our backyard every evening. I thought about senior year and whether or not, like our administration promised, it would be something like a “fresh start.” What is home if not the first place you learn to run from? I ran. I ran as fast as I could until I forgot what I was running towards. Until this year ends in a tragedy like all stories and Mama takes her final breath and they play The Beatles at her funeral and Dad asks me why I haven’t cried yet. Until I am running and running and running out of breath and everything I eat tastes like blueberry popsicles and medicine.
***
When I left for college, I learned to breathe again. Second week of my second year, a boy finally kissed me. We were behind a convenience store and I didn’t know his name and maybe that reminded me of the “fresh start” everyone raved about. He pulled me into an alleyway and suddenly the air felt tighter with his breath so close to mine. Red shadows from the “24 HOUR” neon light flashed over his face every other second so every other second I saw two-thirds of his nose or half of a chin. I tried to piece him together as he leaned down to whisper something in my ear (I like you? Like you? You?). I nodded along to whatever he said—the same way I had nodded to Mama during her explanation about her sickness. And suddenly his lips were pressed against mine. It lasted a few seconds. Maybe more. He walked me to my dorm and said something like “we have great chemistry and we connect really well,” then he kissed me on the cheek and called a taxi home
In my room, I collapsed onto the bed, gasping for air. I felt my lungs heat up and all I could think about was the mid-kiss irritation of this boy’s stubble brushing against my upper lip. And suddenly I’m sobbing on the floor and the room is caving in and I realize I never really learned how to breathe again without her here. I exhale when others inhale and walk backward instead. I do not know left from right and right from left and right from wrong. I do not know how to right my wrongs.
I press my ear to the cold floor, as if every hurt must make a sound.
Spoon
Nora Wagner
CW: Disordered eating, mention of miscarriage
Adrian played the zero sum game like this: I threw out my plums, and he filled the space in the refrigerator with his logs of Soppressata, which had pretty marbling, but also looked like they were sprouting spores. In the compost bag, my plums sparkled. I caught bursts of them between the legs of a stool. This was solace, when Adrian sawed through the Soppressata.
That night, I reharvested my plums. It was masturbation, eating them in the garage, the purple juice squirting onto my fingers. I licked my fingers, opening myself up.
The summer after it ended between us, I considered that game, so proportional and even, and so decisive in its declaration of winners and losers.
I was losing a lot of weight in my stomach; enough that, if I laid on my bed and stretched, I looked like a spoon. But mysteriously, that same weight reappeared on my face. My cheeks were fat and blotchy. I thought that something might have been growing inside of me and pressing against my skin, like pork expanding a dumpling and mottling its wrapper.
I was always sneaking into the bathroom to stare into the mirror. I’d screw my lips together and feel my cheekbones tighten. It was masochistic, watching myself inflate back.
At the office, I was terrified that somebody might try to pinch my cheeks. But that was silly: we didn’t tattle. Nobody mentioned Diane’s miscarriage, even with all the blood she left in the stall.
I invited the office men to my apartment and pretended that I was them, grasping my own long, flat stomach. I could’ve fucked myself, but I liked that their floppy bellies pinned me, and how I could squish my face into their gut when they came.
More than the sex, I wanted to watch the men eat. Salty things, I was desperate for. I kept a bowl of pistachios on my nightside table and curled into a ball as the men sucked the green stones. This time, they ate well.Even when I became too tired to have men inside of me, I still invited them over. I took them into my bathroom to show them the hair that had come out of my head and into the shower drain. It preened there, like a pet. The men hmmed in a way that made me think they were sad.
LOBSTER
Emma Baker
CW: Murder/death, body horror, vore/cannibalism, implied suicidal ideation, sex with dubious consent, extreme/unbalanced sexual power dynamics, body image, lobster imagery
Bee was born a girl, and a girl is born wanting one thing.
Well, multiple things actually. In no particular order, a girl is born wanting:
- Antennae, the tactile organs, giving a precision to her sense of touch never before seen by mankind.
- Chelipods, two of them, one crusher, one ripper. Massive claws for crushing prey and ripping her delicious meal into bite-sized chunks.
- Pleopods, with tiny delicate beautiful hairs. For swimming, mostly, but also so her eggs can attach to her body and have a safer place to grow and develop than the human womb.
- Abdomen, telson, uropods — colloquially known as “the tail.” To be carried by the water, sure, but also to propel herself forward, towards the shore, where she can be scooped up, and taken away.
- Exoskeleton, to protect against the harsh tide. To be cracked open when all’s said and done. A thing built to be split.
In essence, Bee was born wanting one thing.
To be a lobster.
“Why do you do it, Bee?” Her mother asks.
Bee’s mother is an ugly woman. Fleshy nose, big eyes, spit expelling from her mouth with every word she speaks. It’s not like Bee’s any better. Her horrible humanness holds her back from being beautiful. Dark hair, pale patchy skin dotted with red and pink, unsmooth curves in all the wrong places.
“Good money,” Bee replies, slinging her purse over her shoulder.
Her mother scoffs. “You could be makin’ good money any time of year with a high school diploma. Get hired by Mr. Henson, do honest work for once in your life.”
“I have no interest in working for Mr. Henson.” Bee is pulling her sneakers on, leaving them untied, heading for the kitchen screen door. Mr. Henson is the town mechanic, and he has too much skin for his own good.
“Nothin’ wrong with trade school,” her mother mutters. “Nothin’ wrong with a GED.”
“Don’t care.” And Bee flies out the door.
Bee is carrying out another thick stack of folding chairs. It’s a menial task she takes much pleasure in doing, because she knows that it will get her the results she wants. There will be asses in every seat she sets out, each person swallowing an endless stream of lobster meat, only rising from their places to wait in line for more.
Bee knows she’s a seasonal hire, and she knows that isn’t very sustainable. The only job she can stand to work lasts about one week out of the year. But she can’t help it. Her heart swells at the sight: hundreds, sometimes thousands, of worshipers weasel their way out of the woodwork to stand in line for hours, just to taste the creature they deem holy enough to celebrate.
The only downside is the protestors. Freaks. She dreads those bastards, but they come, without fail, every goddamn summer. Sweating and screaming, they run up and down the long lines of tourists handing out flyers claiming that lobsters experience an agonizing 35-45 seconds of white-hot pain in the pot of boiling water before eventually dying. But no one understands how lucky the lobster is. Going out like that. Being consumed, coated in melted butter and lemon juice. It’s divinity. It’s the highest form of love. It’s the only beautiful thing Bee has ever seen.
She continues her task. Each chair she unfolds is a prayer.
“Why do you do it, Bee?” Scott lights another cigarette, then bends down and lights hers.
Scott is her boss, and Scott has a face like a human man does. Patches of dark stubble. Rough, textured skin dotted with ingrown hairs. Overgrown mop of curls on his head that he doesn’t know what to do with, besides stuffing it all in a baseball cap that’s practically crumbling with age.
Bee and her boss are both on break, and they’re taking it away from where their co-workers are putting up posts for the main eating tent. Their backs are leaned up against the Giant Lobster Cooker, a marvel of a machine kept in a little brick booth that, when turned on, heats and steams and pumps out over a thousand pounds of lobster in just fifteen minutes. Bee stifled a moan the first time she saw it.
Bee breaths in, deep, then, in a cloud of smoke, replies, “Good money.”
It’s not that she’s in love with Scott. Truthfully, no grand gesture or display of affection that two human people exchange could ever compare to that exchanged by the consumer and the lobster at the annual Lobster Festival.
“Good money,” Scott repeats, blowing out a breath that’s half-smoke and half-air. “Materialistic bitch, aren’t you?”
Bee hums, considering this, flicking ash. “Yeah, yeah, maybe. But don’t I deserve it, after all the hard work I put in for you?”
She’s flirting. She knows she is. To her dismay, she’s only human.
Scott looks her up and down, then tosses the cigarette aside, the flame flickering out in the dirt. His hands are around her waist before she can protest, and she recoils at the touch.
“Oh, you deserve more than just that.”
“Fuck, Scott, really?” Bee whips her head around, trying to scan for onlookers, but all she can see is the Giant Lobster Cooker, the feat of technology that still makes her heart skip a beat. “Now? Here?”
He chuckles low, and presses her against the brick. “C’mon, baby. You want to, too, see?” He gestures vaguely towards her hips, bucking up, and Bee doesn’t tell him it’s only because she made physical contact with the Giant Lobster Cooker.
Instead, she closes her eyes, nods, and he grows antennae. He’s tugging off her jeans with ripper claws, and pushing her harder against the brick with crushers. Bee imagines his hairy arms melting away as they grab her and take her, hard exoskeleton pushing against her inferior human flesh. She tosses her head back, writhing against the Cooker, letting herself feel human, and after what couldn’t be more than five minutes, it’s over, and she’s getting put back together, zipped back up. Hot shame and disgust washes over her. She’s never cracked open and cut into the way she wants to be.
Scott kisses her, smoke on his breath. His face is wet and sweaty. She wishes he didn’t have a tongue.
“So good, baby. So good. Back to work now.”
He turns to go, but Bee grabs his arm. “Wait—”
Shaking her off, he whips his head around, vitriolic gaze burning hot into her. She flinches. “Come on. Don’t be a fucking bitch.”
And he walks away, and Bee is standing there. Men and women love her within particular time frames of five to ten minutes.
She thinks about devotion. She goes to get another stack of chairs.
When Bee first got her job at the Lobster Festival, her coworker Andi said that the best thing about working the Festival was people watching.
“Besides the $15 an hour,” she had said. “Nothing beats pay above minimum wage.”
It’s the end of the day before the Festival, and Bee’s hands are shaking as she’s setting down the final few chairs and fold-out tables. The cooks are testing out the heat on the Giant Lobster Cooker, and the cool summer night air is growing hot and sticky with steam. Human sweat is horrific. Bee wipes a bead of the stuff off her brow, shuddering.
There are no people to watch right now, but there are always lobsters to think about. Lobsters are invertebrates, meaning they have no brain, and they have an infinitesimal amount of neurons in comparison to humans. But wouldn’t that make things easier? Less chemical processes and sentient actions to worry about? Bee starts to wipe down a folding table and muses about the simplicity that she lost by being unlucky, born in a mammal’s foolishly conscious body, forced to have thoughts and experiences too big for her own good.
“Bee.”
She jumps. But it’s just Scott.
Tossing the dirty wet wipe on the table, Bee folds her arms across her chest. “Hi.”
“Look, doll, I wanted to say I’m sorry for yelling earlier.” His hands are back on her waist, their favorite place to be. Bee silently imagines they’re claws, ripping into her and crushing her dead, preparing her for consumption. “I like this. I like what we do. I’d hate something so stupid to ruin it.”
“Yeah.” Bee tries to pull away, but Scott’s holding her hard. He leans in close.
Breath hot on her ear, he whispers, “Anything I can do to make it up to you?”
Bee thinks about her chemical processes, and that her attraction to Scott — however small and insignificant — is too complicated for what she was meant to experience. She thinks about worship, and the rows and rows of guts that will be stuffed with meat in one day’s time. She thinks about devotion. And love.
Bee draws in a breath to answer, and Scott nibbles on her earlobe. Grimacing, she spits out, “I want to be a lobster.”
Scott pulls back. “What?”
Bee says nothing.
“I must’ve misheard you,” Scott tries again. “What’d you say, baby?”
“I . . .” But now that Bee’s mind is set on this track, it’s set. There’s only one true end to her life that makes any sense, that will give her aimless existence any sort of meaning. “I want to be a lobster. Please, Scott. Make me a lobster.”
“Wh—”
“I want to be boiled,” Bee starts, mind running wild with her darkest fantasy, that she is just now allowing herself to verbalize. “I want to die in a pot of seawater. I want to be cracked open and slathered with butter and lemon juice. I want to be celebrated, here, at a festival entirely dedicated to the consumption of my kind, knowing that my pointless stupid fucking lifeless body is feeding a population that loves me. Please. God, please.”
Scott takes a full step back. Bee’s heart is pounding, blood rushing in her ears. She’s slightly embarrassed, sure, but she also feels her veins thrumming with life, an intensity she’s never felt before. She looks up at her boss, with pleading eyes: like she’d go on her knees for it, like she has so many times before.
Slowly, Scott begins to smile.
“Okay,” he says. He takes a step back in, closing the gap between them.
Bee’s eyes widen. She’s scared to hope. “Okay?”
“Okay. First human lobster at a lobster fest. Could be good, could be interesting.” He pauses for a moment, thinking. “It’d certainly be a draw for tourists.”
“Please don’t lie to me, Scott. Don’t play with my heart like this.”
“I’m not lying, baby.” He grips her waist again, rough, fingers digging in. “I’ll do this for you. ‘Course I will.”
Bee lets out a deep breath, trembling. Lets Scott pull her into him. Leans forward, presses her forehead to Scott’s chest.
“Thank you,” she whispers, voice shaking. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Bee goes home. She goes to the bathroom, and locks the door shut. And for the first time in her admittedly very short life, she wants to look in the mirror.
Her reflection is cloudy — a symptom of peering into a very old mirror that no one’s ever bothered to wipe down, in a household of two women who never want to look at themselves. But Bee is looking. And she is smiling.
Her skin is breaking open; she can see it. Slowly revealing itself is the exoskeleton she knew was beneath her epidermis all along: dark and hard and slightly slicked with seawater. She shivers, euphoria pooling warm in her stomach. Bee reaches up, awestruck, to touch her freshly moist face, and startles. Her hands are no longer hands at all. The skin of her fingers are sealed together in sections: thumb to index to middle, and ring to pinky. She lifts what used to be her hands up to her eyes, and sees the inner flesh of each of her middle fingers changing shape, the skin serrating, morphing upwards from beneath the surface into tiny sharp teeth.
Bee’s eyes widen, and with delight, she whispers to herself:
“Claws.”
Trail
Nora Wagner
I host a book club on alternate Thursdays. This week’s heroine punches a cocktail fork through her own cranium. But sexy Melissa make-believes meaner. She hatches the details of her husband’s death over gougères: his red truck whining hysterics at exit I-580. Her mourning process conducted in stubbly furs. His mistress turned pruney in her bath water, kept waiting. She winks at me. The trail of gougère crumbs smearing Melissa’s breasts looks like the procession of hairs from Melissa’s husband’s navel to pelvis. The moms cry into a kitschy ashtray until we’ve forgotten the book and the sun rehangs itself.
Les Yeux de Sainte Lucie
Marian Picard
We first met in the school courtyard. I was twelve. She introduced herself by asking if I had seen her lost cat.
“T’as vu un chat roux dans le quartier?”
“Non.”
It turned out she lived across the street from me in a tall skinny house with the upstairs shutters always drawn. Her living room window was tinted. The mirrored glass attracted passersby heading further downtown in search of an afternoon coffee or cigarette. Women peered at the silvery surface to apply lipstick and men exiting the one-seat barbershop next door brushed little slivers of hair off their shoulders as they inspected their fresh trims.
Every day we walked home from school together under broad plane trees that flaked papery scabs of bark onto the sidewalk. My strides matched two of hers. Tread. Onbeat, offbeat. Tread. Onbeat, offbeat.
One weekend her family drove me to the seaside. With espadrilles full of sand, we searched the beach for hours scanning for les yeux de Sainte Lucie, smooth white shells that could be mistaken for pebbles.
Saint Lucia’s eyes. In Corsica they’re thought to be good luck charms.
“Do you believe in that stuff?”
“Pourquoi pas.”
She got back home in a lurching car. I only realized later that I had left at the worst time.
A year passed before I saw her again. My tongue was thick and heavy, tripping over itself like feet tumbling in shoes too big. My words didn’t sound like they did in my head. The cadence was gone, the rhythm lost. She walked faster than me—said it had become a habit.
I rummage through the souvenirs that remain: a photobook, folded-up notes slipped back and forth during class, a tarnished ring that leaves a green copper bruise and smells of dried blood.
“Tell me your address. I’ll send you a postcard.”
A handful of les yeux de Sainte Lucie stare at me incredulously. White cataracts, corroded by affection and worn by waves of time, wait patiently, uncertainly.
And on the longest day of the year, friendship and reunion revive the luster in Lucia’s eyes and allow blank spirals to see again. But the sand is too hot and the water too cold for our wandering feet to cross the wide expanse. We only look at each other and say,
“T’as pas changé”
“Toi non plus”
before parting ways.
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