Casual Acts of Cannibalism

by Mari Caldwell

Eric lost his virginity to a man twice his age under dull yellow lights and a cloud of the stench of stale beer. It, to him, had become something that needed to be done. A Band-Aid to be ripped off with either infection or healing to ensue. 

Neither outcome bothered Eric—although not yet thirty, he had friends his age who were married with bellies swollen for the second or third time. He was happy to be an uncle of sorts, but a strange twist of guilt and relief hung over him each time he acknowledged the literal impossibility of this future for himself. No one else’s life had factored into his own.

Eric hated that his virginity had become such a preoccupation for him. He knew that it didn’t matter, not really. He could be fulfilled in other ways. And yet, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing out on something, that he was less of a person, less of a man, as childish as he knew that notion to be. He would never admit it, but a piece of him still subscribed to the doctrine taught in his high school’s CPR courses (creating positive relationships, not to be confused with any kind of valuable resuscitation, but instead a wildly unsuccessful promoter of abstinence): He had wanted for the Event to be “special.” Maybe it wouldn’t be with the one, but he had still longed for some connection. 

Despite this conviction, neither himself nor the school had convinced him that this “one true loving relationship” was in the cards for him. He’d go to the quiet weddings in the town hall where his friends would be wearing white dresses, sewn by their mothers and nothing like the lace-ladened ones they’d obsessed over only a few years before, with no real aisle to walk down but still smiling as wide as ever. He’d watch them give up their fantasies for husbands who’d barely graduated, and he’d stew in his jealousy anyway. Afterward, he would go home to sit alone in his room and chew his nails to the bone while his friends began the rest of their lives. Eric could think all he wanted to, but he knew that at the end of the night, they would be happy, they would have someone, and he would not. 

So, Eric went to Craigslist. 

It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried more “conventional” means in the past. He was one of three people from his graduating class who were out (a fact that the majority of the community had chosen to ignore). He had attended a few stray parties, sat on various couches, suffered through forced conversations and not-nearly-drunk-enough kisses that never led anywhere aside from general discomfort and a sobering night of lying on his floor, looking up at the popcorn ceiling. 

Realization struck when his friend, Amir (their strictly platonic relationship having been forged at one of these parties), returned from a trip up to Indy. His neck was spotted purple, and he wore it proudly. He carried himself with a swagger he’d never possessed before. Amir sat across from Eric and looked taller. One of the hickies lay just under the corner of his jaw, almost sharpening it. He described the encounter in a whisper with a gentle shake in his voice, holding back the excitement that seeped out of him and made Eric tense.

“You’ve just gotta put yourself out there, man. Don’t be so coy. Older guys especially love it when you’re confident.” In the moment, Eric had rolled his eyes at this, but he would, indeed, resolve to put himself “out there.”    

He had considered asking someone to look over the post, to see if it read well or if he came off too desperate. He realized the implicit irony in the concern: People who aren’t desperate don’t put out hookup ads. And besides, he didn’t want to give anyone the chance to talk him out of it.  

Though he hadn’t included a photo with the posting, it didn’t stop each email he received in reply from making his heart flutter with the sweetness of validation. He had little experience with the sensation, with being picked out of the crowd. It felt so distant to him. Rarely had he been chosen. 

When Eric was just shy of eight years old, it was decided that he would be the one to crown the Virgin Mary after his class’s first communion. Even now, he could remember the suit he wore, how it reeked of the sourness of his mother helplessly ironing it that morning, the bright white flowers his Sunday school teacher had spent the night weaving together, the feeling of the delicate petals in his small hands and the pricks of the wires binding them in place. His father lifted him off the ground so he could reach her granite head, her blank eyes looking into his. He dutifully set the crown atop her head, though he didn’t know why. If his teacher had explained the significance, he hadn’t been paying attention. Eric just knew that he had been chosen, and that made him special. It made his mom nervous to be on display this way, but outwardly, she beamed with pride despite it, and his family would go out for lunch after Mass. His father would put his hands on Eric’s shoulders and give them a reassuring squeeze as his mother took their picture in the restaurant’s parking lot because “her boys just looked so handsome.”

Four other cars were in the parking lot of the Rodeway Inn: a dark blue pickup with tinted windows and the engine still running, a rusted Volvo, a cream Oldsmobile, and a red Mitsubishi with two deflated tires. He held the key against the ignition even after he had parked, staring down the options before him. He could turn the key back into place, put it into drive, and go on like nothing had happened. VDebbsDowner66 would be inconvenienced, but he’d ultimately be fine, and Eric could escape unscathed. He weighed the option, giving himself the illusion of choice, though the encounter felt inevitable. He asked himself what he had to lose and could come up with nothing that compared to the hollow feeling he had maintained for over half a decade. 

“Are you over eighteen?” The lines around the front desk clerk’s mouth deepened as she spoke. 

“Yes,” Eric said in a voice that shook and he himself could only half-believe. He felt like a child. The woman didn’t look up to confirm this, and Eric couldn’t tell if her apathy was a welcome relief or not.

“Forty,” she said, her tone flat and annoyed, like he was inconveniencing her by breathing on the other side of the glass. He passed two twenties under the gap in the window, each of which she held up to inspect, pulling the edges taut. The corner of her lip tugged upward, satisfied, and she slid Eric a set of keys. “1-C.” This time she looked up at him, a half-hearted grin appearing on her face. “Enjoy your stay.”

Eric was grateful to find that the room was on the ground level; he couldn’t trust his body to steady itself enough to get him up the stairs. Instead, it was just one step upward onto the cracked sidewalk lining each of the doors, a window on either side with the thick white blinds pulled tightly shut. Some effort had been made to make the place more inviting: bushes grew alongside the walkway, sporting white buttons of flowers whose petals littered the gravel below. He found 1-C to be in the middle of the complex, and the only real evidence of the motel’s attempt at modernization, a key card reader, had all but been pried from the door handle, so Eric jammed the manual key into the lock, fighting with it for a moment and pressing his weight into the door before it opened with a crack. Part of him had expected a cloud of dust to greet him, but rather, chips of navy-colored paint that he suspected had been sealing the door shut rained down, catching in his hair and his eyes.  

The blinds withheld any sun from reaching the room. It was only light from the open door, seemingly the first to enter 1-C in some time, that revealed the space to Eric, and his shadow blended with the stains in the carpet. The walls in the room may have at one point been white but age had turned them a pale shade of yellow. The description of the Rodeway online had called the rooms “unfussy” and “pared down.” A queen bed sat in the center of the space, a wooden nightstand next to it, and a small desk in the corner. Sketches of birds on canvas were framed on the walls, the comforter red and quilted, adorned with a vaguely floral pattern. 

He sent VDebbsDowner66 the room number before closing the door behind him. He went to sit on the bed, his fingers finding the switch to a small tabletop lamp. The corners of the duvet were folded in neatly and precisely to the point where he almost didn’t want to disturb them—the bed seemed as if it had never been slept in, only having been the recipient of various nicotine stains and others. He eventually allowed himself to settle into the mattress, its creaking reminding him of his own presence in the room. 

His hand reached for the pack of Reds in his coat pocket. He wanted something to steady himself, ground himself. A touch of familiarity in the room he was sharing with strangers. He ran his fingertips over the smooth sides of the pack while his eyes moved from the “No Smoking” sign nailed into the door to the helpless nightstand littered with burn marks. It was much too late for the room now anyway. 

Either the Gideons or someone passing through had left a copy of the New Testament in the nightstand’s top drawer. It, like the room, had endured substantial abuse. Several pages had been ripped out. He was sure to hold his cigarette away from the book, flicking ash onto the nightstand as his other hand thumbed through the still-intact pages. Watermarks obscured some of the words, but Eric could make out some of John 6. So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

A knock on the door broke Eric from his head. 

Through the peephole, he could see the other man standing on the opposite side of the door. He was dressed in a gingham button-down, his hands set deep in the pockets of his slacks. There was a stiffness in how he held himself; his shoulders hung in a straight line even as he stared into the ground. As if to slouch would cost the man his dignity. Eric ran a hand through his hair, his limbs feeling more like static than of flesh, and reached for the doorknob.

Of all the men who’d reached out to him, of which there were surprisingly many (a fact that Eric still felt giddy about), he’d chosen VDebbsDowner66 because of his username. It had made him laugh, but most importantly, it suggested a locality. He had been subjected to the same peculiar education that was both conservative and desperately attached itself to a socialist presidential candidate for sharing his birthplace. The man was surely from in town and thus would want to maintain the same degree of anonymity as Eric. Beyond that, it was far more personable than Jim8765 or hotguy20. 

The door didn’t open easily. He had to pull with both hands, and the door let out a painfully loud screech that he feared could be heard from the desk clerk’s office. 

“Some place you’ve got here,” the man said with a chuckle as he crossed the threshold. His grin was wide and revealed teeth that were white in the sort of way that made Eric uncomfortable. He ran his tongue over his own, nicotine-stained and rotted by a Coca-Cola habit he’d never been able to kick. 

“You suggested it, didn’t you?” Eric’s tone was light.

“My mistake, I guess.” He looked older in the way that life had aged him rather than time alone. His hair was still mostly dark, with only small sections turning grey in long streaks throughout. The lines along his eyes made him look like a cracked doll. His attention turned toward the bed, the tattered bible lying face up atop the covers. “You’re not here to try to save my soul, are you?” Eric couldn’t tell if he was serious.

“No.” He tried to laugh, but it came out more like a cough. “I just got bored, and it was here.” 

He nodded. “I’m Eric,” VDebbsDowner66 said as his mouth widened into a smile, once again revealing his uncannily white teeth. 

He felt his heart begin to pound against his ribs. Eric blurted out the first name to come to his head, “Peter,” outstretching his hand to the other “Eric,” whose own twitched nervously at his sides. 

“Peter is—Peter is the name of my—” he shook his hands as if to rid them of something. “Can I call you something else?”

Eric stared at the man before him. It comforted him to see him so out of his skin. He imagined this Eric on his way over to where they stood now. His quiet day in the office, stressing over effectively meaningless concerns, the places on his head where he tugged on his hair and how he must’ve smoothed them down to look good for him. The smell of his cologne was so out of place in the room—cypress came to mind—but he seemed to fade into the wallpaper, the dimness holding them, to be another facet of the wreckage. Every name seemed to escape him.

“Who says you have to call me anything?” The man grinned at this, and Eric felt a warmth swell inside of him, tangling with the anxiety staking claim in his gut. 

While Eric was growing up, his family made a point of attending Mass together each Sunday. He would be dragged out of bed at six in the morning, a time that felt far earlier on Sundays than it ever did on a regular school day, still under the haze of sleep until the morning cacophony of slams and subsequent hushes that resulted from the kneelers being pulled down for the start of Mass. During the weeks leading up to Easter, their priest would start by walking down the rows of pews, sprinkling holy water upon them. It was on these days that Eric would stand as tall as he could, arms outstretched and face pointed up, hoping to feel the blessing against his skin. 

In the morning, Eric found himself in the embrace of his other. Strangers, wrapped in a quilted blanket smelling sweet and pungent, a mixture of stale detergent, dust, and sweat. He woke up, confused, to the sound of the other Eric’s snoring rather than the morning light. The sun hadn’t risen yet. The man’s arms weighed against him, pressing him down into the mattress. Eric began the process of sliding himself out of bed, slow to keep from disturbing the other. Once free, he looked back at the bed. He stared at the indent his body had made in the sheets, the peculiar way Eric’s arms now curled, holding a ghost instead of a man. He found it difficult to believe that he had been there at all. 

In the bathroom, Eric took in the sight of himself in the mirror. He hadn’t expected there to be any change in his appearance; his round soft features still round and soft, his face only slightly swollen from sleep. The gentleness of his own face surprised him. He looked young. 

As the sun was starting to come up, Eric stood outside the door to the room, his back pressed against the chipped blue paint he knew he’d find in his clothes in the coming weeks. He lifted a hand to his face, inspecting his nails bitten raw, still smelling of the cigarette once held between them. 

Published January 25th, 2024