He was kind enough to save the removal of my pinkie for the second date. Sitting on the countertop as he boiled angel hair noodles, he slipped the knife just against the tip of my finger and kissed me as the skin fell away, the lonely husk of a snake. Delicate, almost tender. The things he took at first were all small and with grace, and the depths of his smile, how he bent to me, told me I could give myself to him. 

One Tuesday, a coffee. With the draining of the dregs into his throat, he took a portion of my lips, sectioned with the stirring stick. Every time I drank, the skin around it puckered and bled and hardened before softening again. And then, my toes. One every so often. He asked if he could, he folded and unfolded me like a fan, all to his desire. Pit of my arm, the connection between my pelvis and hip, all the little parts of me. 

He laid me bare when it really began. Between the radiator of his sixth-floor New York apartment and a Persian rug whose fibers tasted of rum and sweet pastry, stinging the roof of my candlesticked mouth. My fingertips I found rolled under his armchair, the pinky toe of my left foot lost somewhere under his bed. And my blood, the hair, everywhere, splattering his walls like wicked little red tears, as if color chose his apartment to drown. 

He handled me with care, told me what to become, and I heard. With each removal, I thought of fallen tin soldiers. Would you believe, when he told my skin to give, my bone to separate from gristle, I listened? I was generous and lovely. I gave him what he wanted. 

He told me I was beautiful as a corpse, marked all across his mahogany floor. He said I burst just like a peach, juicy and liquid, bled sweet, and that’s what I became. Delicate-skinned and halfway translucent, waiting for him to pull my stem. 

But for the most part, I was a body and he never left. 

He turned my skin inside out with desire and the skill of his knife, threw me over his shoulder like salt, a wish. 

My body was laid next to dust and spiders, single particles that crawled into my mouth when he went away. Deep into our work, he discovered a cockroach crawling on the pouch of my stomach, brown and slippery, ugly like the rot of a split banana. The roach was kind to me and only traveled over my body. She did not take. When he crushed her against the cave of my belly, took my thigh and put it in the freezer, I understood I had disappointed him with my mess. And still, my eyes watched from where he had pearled them in resin on the bookshelf, floating apart from the rest of me. At once, I wanted the roach to come back, to keep me company as my body slept, disjointed and ugly, in the house of men. 

In the days he took to separate my head from my corpse, my remaining toes and fingers from their sockets, the curve of my waist from my breasts, I believed us to be a singular pair. This man had loved me with his boning knife, his cleaver, his threesome of paring blades. He traced my chin with his petty cutter, gutted me like a slicked up salmon to the hilt. But he was unkind. 

He collected the body of the pizza girl he stole a number from the day he killed me. He flirted with her in the doorway with the stench of my body iced next to frozen peaches, my hairs collected in tapestries and still laid in the pillows of his bed. He stabbed her in the stomach on the same rug he wrapped me in on our first night together, and I knew she was tasting the same rum, the same sweet pastry I did as he crushed my skull with a candlestick. 

And it was not my eyes which moved first, but my mouth. My lips, from their jar of ice in his freezer, greeted the warmth of my thighs and left arm with ease. My fingertips, rolled and tucked away like little daisies, gathered with the apple of my cheeks and sharp collarbone into a rigid necklace around my throat, adorned with the haloed threads of my hair sewn throughout my skin and the staggering mass of my leg. My feet, risen as a spine from my back as the square gummy stump of my ankles dragged along the floor. My teeth painted each nail white, thirty-two, cracked from the heat of the radiator. My waist met my mouth and then, lovingly, socket to socket, as my breasts came to me one by one and joined into a pleasant heap until all of me stood behind him, squeezing the air in a magnificent gaping scream, until he saw me for what I was, monstrosity of monstrosities, phantasmal, and he understood what he made, and I took the chef’s knife from his fingers and opened him up belly to neck and I heard his screams, and for the first time he was aware of me, my newness, everything I had become, and my eyes still watched from their jar on the shelf, opening and closing like gorgeous buds.