Flash fiction by K.C. Mead-Brewer
A Taste for You
"And all they ever found left of him was a single chewed up toe!"
Jade couldn’t remember the idiot’s name, but she remembered the way he’d giggled that line, staggering drunk through the midnight woods on their way to Samuel Rowe’s place, his wet lips grinning like it was just the nuttiest thing he’d ever heard. Another of Grady’s friends from the baseball team. She never bothered learning their names. Names were something you gave to people who matter.
"Shut up already," Grady had told him, elbowing the guy when he started moaning like a cartoon ghost and wiggling his fingers at the group. He and Jade were only fifteen then, but Grady was already canny enough to know what a turn-off the whole thing was for her. What they were doing. What they were about to do. If he’d asked her then why she’d come out with them at all, she wouldn’t have been able to say.
It embarrassed her, the thought of getting caught by old Mr. Rowe, but it plain broke her heart to think of Rat Boy’s ghost seeing her like this. Sneaking up to his father’s house with a bunch of jack-offs to steal roses from his dead mother’s garden.
Looking out at Samuel Rowe’s blue brick house through the moonlight and furry pine branches, alone on the edge of town, Jade chewed her lips raw. His windows were always dark. The man who’d lost his wife to childbirth and then his son to who-knew-what. The boy who’d wandered into the trees one day, still barely kindergarten-sized, and had never come back out. Eaten, most people said. Wouldn’t have made more than a mouthful. That toe. They’d found it clamped between a rat’s thin lips like he was smoking some ghoulish cigar. The toenail upturned from its tiny bed, and nibbled on.
Rumor had it that, when Rat Boy’s mother Alice had originally planted her roses, they’d been a bright Texas yellow. But the day her boy went missing (got eaten), every one of those buttery petals turned a bleak, bitter red. The kind of red that sits in the very back shadows of a child’s closet. The game went like this: If you pricked your finger on one of Alice’s thorns, then Rat Boy would have your scent, he’d have a taste for you, and you’d never be rid of him. If you managed to steal a rose without getting pricked, though, whoever you gifted it to had no choice but to fuck you. Them’s were the rules. That’s how it went.
Jade would’ve screwed Grady regardless, of course, so neither of them said anything when one of those thorns bit deep into her thumb. She’d had it in for that preacher’s boy for weeks, though she knew she didn’t love him. Even then, so young, she could tell. A crush was a crush. Love was something else, something that haunted.
"And all they ever found left of him was a single chewed up toe!"
Jade couldn’t remember the idiot’s name, but she remembered the way he’d giggled that line, staggering drunk through the midnight woods on their way to Samuel Rowe’s place, his wet lips grinning like it was just the nuttiest thing he’d ever heard. Another of Grady’s friends from the baseball team. She never bothered learning their names. Names were something you gave to people who matter.
"Shut up already," Grady had told him, elbowing the guy when he started moaning like a cartoon ghost and wiggling his fingers at the group. He and Jade were only fifteen then, but Grady was already canny enough to know what a turn-off the whole thing was for her. What they were doing. What they were about to do. If he’d asked her then why she’d come out with them at all, she wouldn’t have been able to say.
It embarrassed her, the thought of getting caught by old Mr. Rowe, but it plain broke her heart to think of Rat Boy’s ghost seeing her like this. Sneaking up to his father’s house with a bunch of jack-offs to steal roses from his dead mother’s garden.
Looking out at Samuel Rowe’s blue brick house through the moonlight and furry pine branches, alone on the edge of town, Jade chewed her lips raw. His windows were always dark. The man who’d lost his wife to childbirth and then his son to who-knew-what. The boy who’d wandered into the trees one day, still barely kindergarten-sized, and had never come back out. Eaten, most people said. Wouldn’t have made more than a mouthful. That toe. They’d found it clamped between a rat’s thin lips like he was smoking some ghoulish cigar. The toenail upturned from its tiny bed, and nibbled on.
Rumor had it that, when Rat Boy’s mother Alice had originally planted her roses, they’d been a bright Texas yellow. But the day her boy went missing (got eaten), every one of those buttery petals turned a bleak, bitter red. The kind of red that sits in the very back shadows of a child’s closet. The game went like this: If you pricked your finger on one of Alice’s thorns, then Rat Boy would have your scent, he’d have a taste for you, and you’d never be rid of him. If you managed to steal a rose without getting pricked, though, whoever you gifted it to had no choice but to fuck you. Them’s were the rules. That’s how it went.
Jade would’ve screwed Grady regardless, of course, so neither of them said anything when one of those thorns bit deep into her thumb. She’d had it in for that preacher’s boy for weeks, though she knew she didn’t love him. Even then, so young, she could tell. A crush was a crush. Love was something else, something that haunted.
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K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her writing appears in Carve Magazine, Hobart, Fiction Southeast, and elsewhere. As a reader, she loves everything weird—surrealism, sci-fi, horror, all the good stuff that shows change is not only possible, but inevitable. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.
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