by Keeley Young

Tummy Pangolin

 

You have a pangolin in your tummy.

It is okay, the pangolin can only hurt you, not kill you.

In case you are unaware, and think an alien might be occupying your stomach, a pangolin is a scaly sort of mammal from Asia that sometimes looks like an anxiety-ridden teenage boy asking the most beautiful girl in school to go to the dance with him. Or, even, just to save one dance.

The pangolin does somersaults inside you. Backflips, frontflips.

One right after the other.

Sometimes there is a pause, an indistinguishable amount of time where you think the Pholidota has taken a leave of absence, a good proper snooze. You figure at this point the sensation of housing the creature is frequent enough those absences aren’t noticeable. As in, you do not sit with the knowledge your little tummy friend isn’t there—you sit with him when he is, the endless hamster wheel so unamusingly fast there is no true moment at all. The scales cause every inch of your stomach to writhe, almost simultaneously.

Sometimes it nibbles near where your belly button is.

When you first met someone—he isn’t your partner, but you frequently feed the pangolin with his kisses—there was some pain to be felt. Attempts to feed yourself with the chopsticks as you sat in a Korean BBQ restaurant with the creature an ignorant third wheel. Pain, painful.  

All you can do is acknowledge the pangolin. A squeamish bub, wailing from the oblong crib.

He wonders what he can do to subside the pain, and you groan, or you plaster on the same happy mistake of a grin and take an internal vacation to an isolated cabin in the snow-drifted woods.

In front of a wood fireplace, set into the wall, you cradle the pangolin in your arms.

Its tail tears a flesh wound from your stomach.

You are going to bleed out on the planks.

Tomorrow morning you will be none the wiser.

But the tummy pangolin always wants to keep you company, like the lapdog sent from Hades’ underbelly. Amusing, underbelly, where the Pholidota holds a razorblade to the throat of a nobody, someone’s son from a working-class family. Gone, really, is the anxiety-ridden teenage boy whose ambitions felt tied strongly to asking Alexis Newsome out to the spring fling dance. The theme, aside from flinging into spring, was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

Too thin-stroke of a theme.

With a talon, the pangolin makes a thin stroke up your torso towards the cavern of your heart.

You’re the anxiety-ridden one now, anticipating which meal will be left barely eaten, which dinner date with this handsome fellow will be interrupted by an excuse me and a shuffle into the bathroom.

Curse yourself out on the toilet, go on.

This is all your fault. Somehow you invited the tummy pangolin inside, because something so blood-thirsty must be vampiric, must be of the night, of the no-longer-living.

You have a pangolin in your tummy, how absurd is that.

It doesn’t want to kill you.

 

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Noggin Pufferfish

 

You have a pufferfish in your noggin.

Not a poisonous one, not an if prepared incorrectly, you will die variety.

Although the implication is perhaps there—if the brain becomes too unfunctional, the pufferfish will be sacrificed in the process. A few last gulps. Balloons getting popped in a sealed-up vacuum.

Pufferfish hyperventilate, shrink and expand, their tactic to strike out against danger.

What is so terrifying up inside that head of yours?

There is not supposed to be any empty space in your noggin, and the science is limited on how a pufferfish could both survive and occupy room in the corridor. But if it fits, it sits.

Expanding, shrinking, an adjustable box controlled by a secondary player. Constantly in flux.

On a late shift, the pufferfish expands and splits your brain halfway down the middle. You attempt to blink out of it, headlights on a startled deer in the woods. Move, move, you unfortunate thing.

The pufferfish slams against a divide of its own making. Creating the wall. Shaping it, for more blinking, for more moments where you close your eyes and rub your temples. Your form of religion—believing little movements, little moments, can impact upon the agony caused by the bloated Tetraodontidae.

Take the medication, the aspirin, because he says it might help if it isn’t something you haven’t quite tried before. You want to kiss him for trying, for being considerate. When the heat makes you all the more exhausted, and your own insecurities make you tense and inflate, too.

Like father, like fishy son.

You like to stand in the walk-in freezers and let the cold, frosted air set the lure and trap for the pufferfish. Your arms shiver, legs tremble, the longer you alienate yourself in the polar bear’s domain. Softens, shrinks. With eyes closed, things are somewhat more peaceful, or rejuvenating. Day at the arctic spa. Beads of sweat once upon your forehead are melting down into your pores, into your skin, or otherwise trailing down your face and making it onto the collar.

Then. You step back outside. Sweat again, pufferfish expanding again, irritated, malcontent.

Nothing lasts forever, baby, and one day you will wake up to a new truth that the Tetraodontidae has been overcontrolling and manipulative over everything. Sorry, I can’t, you say, or you think you will say, more likely, because the prisoner of war in your noggin is a real-life pufferfish. Some little kid’s dream for a pet. Expand, contract. Breathe in, breathe out.

He lets you lean against his shoulder and there’s comfort, a semblance of it. While one sweet man cannot extract the ache from within your skull, he can alleviate some of it. Whisper sweet nothings directed at me, but comfort the little freak of a pufferfish inside too. Kiss my forehead and tell me it’s okay to not be okay.

The overcoming could be impossible. Drab and bleak. A brain full of sloshy-and-salty water, the sorry excuse for an aquarium for some little kid’s dream of a pet. Repetition like expand, like contract.

Breathe in, breathe out.

There is no tumour the size of a humpback whale in your head.

You have a pufferfish in your noggin, how absurd is that.

It doesn’t want to kill you.

​

 

Throat Goliath Birdeater

 

You have a goliath birdeater in your throat.

Pause, for a moment, to assess that the birdeater has not come to devour you.

A goliath birdeater is a species of spider with a deceptive name.

They typically do not eat any birdies.

The expanse of this creature, the long limbs and the beady eyes. The fear of a squeamish bird caught between everything—between a beginning, an end, and the in-between. In a morose way, that would be your throat.

The middle. No man’s land, for nothing can stay, except the intricate webbing of a goliath birdeater somewhere in the middle of the middle. Invisible thread.

Itsy bitsy the spider climbed in through the mouth and lodged itself in your throat, because where else should it find itself? Like a drainpipe, like a hollowed-out shell, there is room to breathe quite literally in the passage from above to below. Little friend. Gargantuan spider-of-its-kind.

At a doctor’s appointment, they ask, describe how the inner of your throat feels?

It is like an unseen blockage, but paper-thin, or not even. Thinner than thin, unreal, these are the things you coin in the moment, although the unreal is a projection as you await another misdiagnosis. This feeling you possess is an extension of your feeling. Not another doctor, you think, please, like sitting out in sunshine begging for as little rain as possible. To drown you, is its intention.

At an ear, nose, and throat appointment, they feed a camera down into your nostrils and see the half-a-cauliflower-sized fellow. Your theraphosa blondi. Wave for the camera, bud.

Drink this once a day. Then, a whisper, hopefully it will be poison to him.

You no longer understand what a version of yourself looks like without the constant scratching of the goliath birdeater inside your throat.

Sometimes you cough out because the tickle reminds you less of the legitimate spider and more of the illegitimate goliath bullfrog you should be imaging. Frog in your throat, toad in the hole.

Croak, croak, the sound your voice should make if the illness was an exact illness, if the webbing in the place in-between vanished miraculously after a cold or flu vacated. Spidey senses not so strong.

The goliath birdeater must be ravenous for not birds, not flecked, miniscule insects, but more water. No. The water is to wash out the spider, drain him down, like the medicine. Unsuccessful medicine.

When you kiss the man you want nothing more than to kiss, you briefly, for a moment, think the goliath birdeater will crawl out of your throat and into his. Only for a second. Long enough, time enough, to lay a silk sac of eggs. He will be a carrier anew.

When you kiss the man you have wanted to kiss ever since you teased your fingers through his long, dark hair, you feel poisoned not by the medicine, but because there is a goddamn goliath birdeater sitting in your throat, and a pufferfish expanding and contracting in your noggin, and a pangolin clawing its way out from in your tummy.

You have to make peace with your inner exhaustions. As animal as they perhaps may be.

Cease the regret of not valuing so much of the youth without the angered companions.

You have a goliath birdeater in your throat, and that is absurd.

You are not deathly allergic.