Sugar Monster

“Just put it on your tab, Arissa,”

He calls himself my boyfriend,
Marcus
Yet I wear his ring.
Gifted from my mother when she was passing as I turned eighteen.
Now how many years? He still calls me his girlfriend Issi
Whining as he unloads unpaid racing slips across the counter of my fruit stand.

Midnight in the unrelenting summer of this tropic market. Liquor on his breath from no doubt bought-off tabs that he could never cover.

Was it curse that brought me here? My father lost to soldiers’ bayonets.
Was it fortune that brought me to him, someone to forever pay his debts?

“Come on, Issi, don’t you love me?”
“I know you sell the ripest fruit, won’t you be a doll and cover it?”
“Or those loan sharks, don’t you know they’ll break my legs and then where will we be. No child ever for you to bear, can you imagine how the village will speak?”
“And don’t you know it’s only twenty—
thousand in our currency.”
“You’ll cover it because you love me dear. I’m out for one last final drink.”

Can I keep my stomach down? The way it churns and wrestles from me.
These fourteen hours I work by hand
In the chaos of the Midnight Fruit Market.

In the buzzing of the paper lanterns I hear a long and distant whisper
Something in the trees it hungers

A sightless maw that seeks and stumbles and as I sort and chop and cut, plucking what the customers demand I dream within my waking nights that it would come for me and take my hand

The Sugar Monster so it’s called
A faceless head with widening jaws
Something that consumes and takes
A thing to fear a thing to hate

But what I know of this jungle
Is how the Village whispers is never proper
For fear is what the gambler knows
And fear tells stories that grow and grow

In the night I’m blessed by this heat, for all my tears they mix with the sweat that seeps down from my forehead to my feet.

And then it comes this night I hope as the crowds fall silent and those predatory footsteps heavy thumping coming closer know

And as I feel the air grow hot and thicken to suffocate the flock, I watch them all turn and flee for in this intoxication only one answer may there be.

I watch them storm and trample
Over each other
As they press our wooden floorboards.

But me, I watch the tree line of that jungle trail and hope he comes for me, gripping close my rosary I pray.

And there he stands across the forest line
Not eye-less but the fire burns a red the moon cannot deny.
Not a monster but a man, black veins pumping dark auroras in the air.

He comes to me, my fruit the ripest, and rips the melon drinking from its flesh
I see the walk, his muscles spike and ripple as the sugar fills his mouth with zest.
And he locks his eyes with me as he eats from every tasting.

I slice and carve and hand him pieces
Tenderest flesh that I was saving
For just the sort that he envelopes and intends to be

A sugar monster truly it’s his name and when I ask he nods at my claim.

“And is this all that you seek?”
“Sugar Monster, just the plums I place before thee?”

I feel my heartbeat rush and tickle, my eyes dilating, my tongue loose and free.

“Or is there something more you seek?”

I watch his eyes lock into mine, the juice seeping down the corners of his mouth radiating in the moonlight.

“My Monster? Is there something more you seek?”

My finger takes from the dripping juice and I take a taste. I let it take from the spilled melon flesh upon his chest and let myself eat my fill.

He does not move to fight with me
Accepting of my touch
He only seeks to meld with me
And gift me freedom, if only for a night it is enough.