Matthew Klane, Exclusive Artistry
The Pleasure of My Company
He drank bone broth because he was hungry and I gave him my body because I was, too.
It wasn’t hard to give myself away, just a saw and some absinthe. The green swirled in my glass, all phantasmagoric, the ceiling like the cosmos, the slugs in the garden speaking to me, which is how I know it wasn’t real, because I hated slugs and their soft sacks of skin.
Hurt was nothing new, the dull ache and throb, places I stitched the narrative shut. Sometimes he shouted, like when my mascara ran or the TV commercials showed too many carbohydrates, which he said were the reason he couldn’t build muscle. I blended protein shakes and pounded steaks thin with a mallet, boneless and pure.
I made myself the same, had been giving up on my body for years—first a few pounds, then a few bites of breakfast left in the bowl, later a whole lunch surrendered to the toilet. The only thing I liked about my body was the gap between my thighs, the triangle of nothing, a place to curl like a fetus or the bottom of a semicolon, my head perched on top as if to string us together, because we shared the rent but rarely a bed. That’s why when he said he wanted bones, I gave him mine.
First a finger, the one where an engagement ring would be if I weren’t so insistent, he said. It made a weak broth, nothing special, but I added mushrooms and thyme, sauteed onions, added caper brine. When he tasted it, he said he could feel his muscles grow, the kind of gains he couldn’t get at the gym and wasn’t I sweet.
Next he took a rib, just a small one, the kind you hardly need, except to hold in your spleen, which is vestigial anyway, something left over from when we still swam in the filth of the sea. I could see how my rib was made for him by the way it arced towards him like a smile .I added a splash of citrus for brightness and felt the sting where my finger once was, the hurt where my hands were chapped from gripping the knife.
I felt like Eve, of course, returning myself to my maker. He made me taller with his reminders about posture and his insistence that I shave because “What are you, an animal?” He reminded me to smile when he said, “Where are your manners? Missing like your lipstick?” if I cleared his bowl too soon. He liked to lick the last of me, savor the bone broth and manifest his triceps. Collagen, he said, sucking my salt from his fingertips, keeps you vital.
He drank the broth of my thumb, my wrist, the broth from a vertebra in my neck. The hip joint was mellow, he said, the ankle full of umami. I couldn’t try it because I wasn’t a cannibal, he scolded, before asking me to pass the pepper.
We saved the bones. He liked to look at them. They were bleached and leached, like a cow skull shining in the desert. When the pile got unruly, I assembled them into a partial skeleton. Suddenly, I was doubled there in the living room.
In summer the wind whistled through my ribs like a chime, and in the fall I carted me out to the front lawn to amuse the trick-or-treaters. I’d never been so bold or popular. Even I started to want to spend time with myself, like when he said I was selfish for keeping my index finger and pelvis, and I held my own hand afterward to feel better.
I began to enjoy the pleasure of my company. I was a good listener and birds of prey were attracted to me, circling overhead as if I were a great sorceress or woodland queen.
When he complained—I was never around, he was lonely and hungry, if I wasn’t concerned about his quads then what kind of partner was I?—I threw him a bone. My kneecap. It was spiteful, I knew, but I so wanted to hang it later from my earlobe, make a broach at my throat, put the patella on my pinky like the world’s largest diamond.
He left after I served him my liver. He couldn’t stand the taste, he said, of what I’d become. Organs were off-limits, all that flesh and purpose. Bones, he wept, were the reason he’d wanted me, the subtle architecture, the way I was small as a child and he could wrap his hands around the cage of my body. Was it so wrong, he said as he packed his things, to want the very marrow of me?
After he left, I danced. I was so beautiful there in the living room, the lights flickering off my sternum and pubis. The wire I used to hold me together shined like silver.
I walked up and took me by the hand, our distal and proximal phalanges fitting like they were meant to be together, which they were. We drank the leftover absinthe and the whole world was green and shimmer as we waltzed and swayed, the slugs in the garden joining the birds of prey at the window to watch as if we were something special.
I rested my head on my shoulder like in the movies, umami wafting everywhere. I kissed my scapula and the birds shuffled and the slugs squelched and someone’s mandible said, “I love you.”
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press, 2022) and Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) as well as three poetry chapbooks. She is an assistant professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery.