Short story: Slick, by Isabelle McNeur

ReadingRoom

“This wasn’t the only case of someone inserting an eel into an orifice”: a medical-sexual mystery by Wellington writer Isabelle McNeur
I heard about the eel on the train and couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks.

This was during that stupidly still summer. Weeks without wind, the air hanging thick and motionless. A few seats down a woman with a single vein of black in her hair was talking to her husband, their hands a jumble between them on the cramped table.

Back during her nursing internship, a man had checked into her hospital. He’d been sweating. Squirming. She had pulled down his pants to find a slimy tail.

“Now,” the woman said in a cold, smooth voice, “I worked there for a year and three people came in with something stuck up there. But those were a dildo or a hammer handle. The eel was new.”

“Oh,” the guy said weakly. He untangled their hands to wipe his palms on his shorts, then returned to the hand-hold.

“Now,” the woman continued, smoothness turning oily with excitement. “you might be wondering how an eel can possibly fit. The rectum can be 15 to 20 centimeters long and five centimeters wide. But you see, the tissue stretches-”

The guy hunched into his wide shoulders. “Babe, can we talk about something else? You know I don’t like your gross hospital stories.”

“But this is -” She loosened her grip. “Right. I’m sorry, I know.”

My mind raced, strobe light thoughts chasing each other around my head. Was the eel alive? How did they remove it? What was she going to say about the rectum stretching? How did this woman sound like a 50 year old socialite when she looked around my age?

I was still conjuring questions when my stop came up. I got off the train, feet protesting every step away from the air conditioning. When I glanced back up the steps the woman’s grin was gone. She nodded politely at whatever the husband was saying, her gaze drifting towards the window.

I stood on the platform, armpits dampening in the heat, craning my head towards her. Something about her voice, that strange uncomfortable oil. Those mysterious grey eyes going dim.

My stomach clenched. Look at me.

She turned, that vein of black hair flashing across her face. Our gaze met through the glass. It wasn’t for long, maybe two seconds. I think I smiled. She definitely did. We were both in mid-blink when the train began to pull away.

She turned back to her husband.

I went home to Craig.

*

I Googled it on the walk home, tripping over my own sandals and walking into poles, scrolling furiously.

This wasn’t the only case of someone inserting an eel into an orifice. One man was the victim of a hazing incident gone wrong. Another did it to relieve constipation. He had to get it cut out of him when the eel squirmed up into his intestines. I closed the tab after getting to a woman who put a condom on an eel, masturbated with it and had to get surgery to get it out.

Poor eels, I thought as I stared at an image of the eel being lifted out of a man’s sliced-open stomach. Eels don’t have facial expressions, but this one looked pissed off.

When Craig came home he dumped his workout bag in the corner and came to sit next to me on the couch. He smelled faintly of sweat. He was always moist after he biked home from the gym, but moreso in this bell jar summer.

I was in the same spot I’d been in for hours, writing my thesis (White Whales And Green Lights: An Ever Spanning Look Into Different Breeds Of Unattainable) and determinedly not clicking over into my tabs about eels.

“Have you moved,” he asked, and leaned in for a kiss. His mouth was big and warm, all-encompassing.

I kissed back fast. “I went to talk to my supervisor. Did you know people put live eels inside them?”

Craig blinked. “Please tell me they put them inside their – their mouths or something.”

I shook my head.

“Shit. Really?”

“Yeah,” I said, bringing up the tab and pushing the laptop at him. He got through the first paragraph before turning to me with his moist face all scrunched.

“Why.”

“Why did they do it or why am I looking into it?”

“Both.”

“Dunno the first.”

“Second?”

“It’s interesting!”

Craig snorted. “Not the word I’d use, babe,” he said, He pulled his shirt up from his stomach and wiped it down his face, redistributing the damp. Then he got up and turned on all the lights. I hadn’t noticed it getting dark.

We made stuffed chicken. I pushed pesto into cold crevices and thought of eels. We used the rest of the pumpkin – it was about to go off. Craig set out a pair of plates. I emptied the frozen peas into a bowl and put it in the microwave, stepping back to watch it bubble and rotate under the bulb. Had anyone ever put a live animal in a microwave?

Craig came up behind me and put his big arms around me. I put an absentminded hand on his elbow, pulling at the fine blonde hairs. The sweat had dried tacky against his skin.

“This is gonna haunt me,” he said.

“Mm,” I answered. If people put eels in butts they must’ve put them in a microwave.

“Seriously,” Craig continued. “This is gonna make the fishing trip so weird. Wait ‘til I tell the guys.”

“Mm-hm.”

He nudged his stubbly chin against my head. “Quit it.”

“Not doing anything.”

“You’ve got that face.”

I kissed him, then turned my face away and waited for the peas to finish rotating. We spooned them onto our plates and went back to the couch, sitting with our backs to the armrests. Our feet bumped comfortably.

“I’m gonna keep an eye out for them,” I told Craig.

“Right. The fancy old-sounding lady who’s actually our age and her husband. What did you say he looked like?”

I thought about it. “I’ll know him when I see him.”

He nodded. He’d let me tell the story while we were waiting for the chicken to cook.

“You do that,” he said. “I’ll make sure to keep an ear out for a nurse talking about that time she fished an eel out of a guy’s ass.”

“Ha,” I said. “Fished.”

Craig finger-gunned at me. I kissed him for it, making a mental note to Google whether eels were fish or not.

They were.

*

Two weeks later I hadn’t seen the woman or her husband. I’d taken to walking up and down the train before settling into my usual seat, then doing another check halfway through the ride.

“You gotta find another way to wrap this up,” Craig told me on the second week of my search. He’d found me crouched over my laptop at four in the morning Googling eel species.

“I will,” I said, with the idea that I’d post an ad asking for information on the woman or her husband the next day. I’d already scripted the most normal-sounding ad I could think of, which was pretty hard.

I didn’t post it. That morning we ran into the husband at a garage sale.

*

It wasn’t a decision we thought through. I saw the sign and three seconds later we passed by a sprawling lawn filled with all manner of crap, some of which was kitchenware. Craig and I had been looking for cheap kitchenware after we broke our last potato peeler.

“We hate peeling with knives,” I reminded him.

Craig tried to look stern. “We’ll be late for the movie.”

“Knives take half the veggies off with the skin. Remember Thursday, when we tried making chips?”

“I said we should just leave the skin on.”

“Potato skin is disgusting.”

“Potato skin is great,” Craig said, but he grinned and made a dubiously legal U-turn in the direction of the garage sale, the beginning of rain dusting the windshield.

We parked and then started towards the kitchenware, hunched against the cool misty rain. Still no wind, the water falling straight down from the sky in one long uninterrupted line.

The garage sale kitchenware was unspectacular: tarnished cutlery of varying sizes, chipped plates, stained tea-towels slowly growing damp, a strainer with a plastic handle that had been left close to the stove once too often.

“A-ha,” Craig said as he lunged for an old potato peeler.

A-ha, I echoed him as I spotted the husband over his shoulder. He was alone, but very definitely there. I left Craig and ran over. He didn’t see me coming, which I was thankful for – having someone sprint at you is only okay when you know the person doing the running.

I came very close to slapping him on the shoulder, but reigned myself in at the last minute. I tapped instead.

He turned. He was skinner up close, everything bulbing out – nose, ears, even his eyes. He had kind eyes, like Craig. He was wearing a cardigan, which almost made me like him, but he looked deeply uncomfortable in it, which made me not like him.

“Hi,” I said. “I overheard you and your wife talking on the train a few weeks ago about a man putting an eel up his butt and having to get it removed at a hospital.”

“Oh! Oh…kay?”

“I know this is weird,” I said, which I didn’t think was needed, but I said it anyway. Craig was coming closer and he cared about things people were supposed to say in these situations.

The rain was getting stronger, solidifying out of the mist. A drop hit my scalp and cut a line down my cheek.

“I just wanted to know details about it. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. Did she tell you more about it?”

The guy stared at me and then at Craig, who was now at my elbow. I didn’t have to look over to see his apologetic eyebrows. He did this sometimes when I was being weird. He wouldn’t ever come out and say sorry about my girlfriend, but he always did the eyebrow thing.

“Um,” the guy said. “She didn’t say much else? I think we got onto another topic-”

“How do you just move on from that?”

“We just… did,” the guy said, now looking more at Craig than at me. They were still having an exchange via facial expressions. I tried not to pay attention.

Craig took my hand. His hand was big and warm, all-encompassing.

“We totally get it,” Craig assured him. “Don’t we, sweetheart?”

I made a noise that could’ve been a yes or no depending on what people wanted to hear.

As the guy started to walk off I stopped myself from grabbing his arm. I yelled, “Could I ask your wife about it?”

He turned. Water dripped off his nose.

“She’s not my wife,” he said, and electricity zipped up from my big toe straight into my heart.

“She’s not?”

“No,” he said. “Girlfriend.”

“Can I-”

He gave me her number. I turned to Craig drenched and grinning. “We get the peeler?”

He stared at me. His hands were up over his head, shoulders hunched against the rain in a way that reminded me of the husband – boyfriend listening reluctantly to an eel story on the train. Craig could sweat all day and be fine with it, but cold water made him run for cover.

“Yeah,” he said eventually. “We got it.”

*

The phone rang an excruciating eleven times before she answered.

“Hello,” came that cold, smooth voice.

“Hi! Hello.” I cleared my throat. My stomach was a sea of sharp points jarring against each other. “Your boyfriend told me she’d call you to explain the situation, he gave me your phone number today so I could ask about the eel.”

A short silence. Then, “Ah, yes. Go ahead.”

How old are you? What’s with the elegant accent? Is that black streak dyed or is it a genetic mutation? Do you want to come over?

I stuck to the questions on my laptop.

“Was it alive?”

“Not when they pulled it out.”

“But when he put it in?”

“Oh, yes.”

“How-”

“Not nicely!”

“Did it cause damage to the guy’s-”

“Oh, yes.”

“Did he get charged with animal abuse?”

“Hmm. I don’t know.”

“Did he put it in headfirst?”

“Yes!” She seemed pleased. “I got fired for sharing a picture of it. Can’t share those kinds of things about patients.”

“But it was an eel up a guy’s ass! How can you not share that!”

She laughed. “That’s what I told them! They weren’t too happy about it.”

I laughed with her. It was nice. A relief of cold in a breezeless heat.

“Now,” she said. “I can’t remember the man’s name, and I don’t know how you’d get in touch with him. But I still have the picture, if you never tell another soul I didn’t delete it. Should I come over sometime?”

My voice startled me, an aching sincerity I usually tried to hide.

“There is nothing,” I told her, “that I would love more.”

*

When I told Craig about the call, he smiled and said it was great. Then he paused for a long time, watching the TV with blank eyes. This bothered me, so I went to kiss him. He leaned back and took my hands. He held them hard, like he did when he wanted to talk about something serious. He’d only done it twice before, once to tell me his friend died and once to ask him to move in with him.

“Honey,” he said. “I – things are good with us, yeah?”

This struck me as a strange thing to say.

“Obviously,” I replied.

His face didn’t smooth out. He squeezed my hands, picked hair off my cheek. It hung oily down my neck. I’d forgotten to wash it this week.

“I,” he said, and hesitated. “You’re always looking for this stuff – this faraway stuff I can’t be a part of. I want – for once, I want to be the person you’re looking for. Y’know?”

I blinked. Opened my mouth. Closed it again.

“Craig…”

He shook his head. Kissed me quick and warm and went back to watching TV.

I didn’t pry. I could hear a stray comment and get propelled into a research spiral that consumed my life for weeks or months, but with Craig – I didn’t pry. And not because I repressed it. I simply didn’t want to, the same way I didn’t want a fancy dinner on our anniversary or rose petals leading me to a bubble bath. I didn’t want the things girlfriends were supposed to want.

For a long time he’d told me that was his favourite thing about me. But I couldn’t remember the last time he’d said it.

*

With the visit looming, my research spiral continued to gain momentum. I kept trying to find this guy, but wherever he was, he was hidden deep. The Youtube woman who masturbated with her eel didn’t reply to my message.

Meanwhile, life went on. My supervisor started sending me increasingly stern emails about my thesis, which I continued to ignore. I started having dreams about sitting on a speeding train, trying to work up the nerve to speak to the woman with the veined hair. She’d be in the seat across from me. When I woke I was always on the verge of opening my mouth.

Craig went off on his fishing trip. I drove with him to the meeting point, windows down to simulate a breeze. It felt like the windlessness would never end, we’d live forever in this bubble of still, wet heat. Our shirts stuck to our spines as we climbed out onto the shimmering asphalt.

“Catch a lot of fish,” I told him. “Love you.”

“Will do,” he said. “Love you too.”

He gave me finger-guns and a blown kiss as he got in his friend’s van.

I caught the kiss and tucked it into the depths of my pocket.

*

The woman came over that night.

“Call me River.” In the excitement of the eel call we’d forgotten to do introductions. River had two veins of grey in her hair now, definitely dyed. On closer inspection, she could’ve been even younger than me. She wore no makeup and sweat gleamed on her forehead. Our air conditioner had broken the day before.

I told her my name and took her to the lounge. Handed her an icepack, which she took.

“Lovely place,” she said as she sat on the good chair, which we weren’t allowed to touch. It was Craig’s grandmother’s, painstakingly embroidered for a whole decade. A swamp scene stitched into the white fabric: frogs singing on lily pads, marsh birds perched on branches, heads tucked serenely under clean wings.

It was sweet. I didn’t like it. Except for the patch of water damage around the back, staining the chair ugly brown. Real marsh muck, cold and wet. Maybe River’s ice pack, wedged between her back and the chair, would form another marsh scene.

River continued, “You mentioned you were doing research?”

“Kind of,” I said. “Not on this – I am doing research, I’m doing my PHD thesis, but that’s on – something else. This is just for fun.”

River laughed. “Well, I should air my nurse stories in public more often! It was great to get your call. Most people aren’t interested in this kind of thing.”

“I don’t see how they aren’t,” I said. “It’s so-”

River nodded, grinning. That mysterious light was starting up behind her eyes. I wanted to climb into it.

“Like, how,” I said. “And why? What, specifically, enticed him about it? The eel itself or the feeling of it? Was the pain a part of it? And did he put lube on the eel before-”

“He must have! Eels are slimy, but not-”

“-not slide-easily-up-inside-you slimy,” I agreed. “Did he have help? It can’t be easy to-”

“We think so! There was a man who brought him in. Well, sort of – he left him at the hospital doors, then took off. That’s what I heard, anyway. He might’ve helped, but our questions didn’t get a lot of straight answers.”

She adjusted herself in the chair. It looked uncomfortable. She brought her ice pack out from under her and began to press it to her arms, her chest.

“As for why,” she continued, holding the ice pack to the hollow of her neck, “who knows? I would expect a man to be drunk if he did that to himself, but he was stone cold sober. Curiosity? Humans are known for doing things just because they can. Maybe he was suffering from psychosis and only an eel up the bum would satisfy his burning mind.”

She pushed the ice under her thin necklace. It was deep grey, like her nail polish. Almost black. The colour went inwards, on and on.

“Or,” she continued, “maybe his wife told him a dark fantasy and he made it happen.”

I laughed, my icepack growing sticky in the crook of my bare arms. I was clinging to it.

“He did it out of love? That’s what we’re going with?”

“Who knows,” she said again. “So, any luck finding our man?”

“I have feelers out,” I said. “There’s this one landlord who thinks his tenant might be the guy. I’m waiting on a call.”

“Godspeed,” River said. “If the opportunity comes, I’d love to meet him again. He was an interesting chat, even with an eel up inside him.”

I laughed. “I bet he was,” I said. “Hey, um, would-”

She talked over me, saying, “So you live-”

“You go.”

“You live here with your boyfriend,” she said, gesturing at a photo on the wall. An overexposed picture of me and Craig back in undergrad, mid-blink from the camera flash. The light narrowed us down to the only two people in the swarm of partiers. Almost. We’d bonded over a TV show neither of us watched anymore. I talked while he listened. When he made a joke with that dry, simple wit, I laughed. Later he admitted he didn’t even like the show that much, but he wanted to keep talking to me. At the time I’d found that very sweet.

“Craig,” I said. “He’s in IT. He’s great. How’s your boyfriend?”

“Gavin? He’s great.”

“That’s great.”

We stared at each other. The icepack dripped into my lap.

“Careful,” River said, and got up. She unfolded a fancy tea-towel from her purse and started to dab. Her hand stuck to the tea-towel, which stuck to my pants, which stuck to my thighs.

She sat down next to me and got out her phone, handing it over with an apology: “It’s quite blurry, unfortunately. Had to be speedy about it.”

I took the phone. It was smeary with sweat and ice-pack residue. At first I couldn’t figure it out – what part was the eel and what was the man? It was a mess of thrashing black and pale skin and I couldn’t make out where they came apart or for that matter, squished together.

“Huh,” I said.

River grinned again. A rivulet of sweat arced from her forehead to the corner of her heart-shaped mouth, which she opened.

My phone rang. It took me a second to realize why that mattered.

“One second,” I rasped, reaching to see the caller ID.

“Oh, is it the-”

I sighed. “No.” I put the phone to my ear. “Hey, Craig.”

“Hiii,” Craig said, and he even managed to slur that. In the background there were a few panicked voices whisper-screaming.

I started to ask what was up. He cut me off.

“Just letting you know,” he said, his voice a pained, tight knot, “I’m going to the hospital.”

“What?” I straightened. My knee brushed River’s knee, her bare knee, ice-pack cold. “Are you okay?”

“Probably.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Incredibly,” he said. There was an odd sound in the background, under the white noise of his friends’ panic. “Is your girl there yet?”

“River is here. What happened?” Something had already started forming in the back of my mind, alive and long and dripping.

Craig paused long enough for me to hear the blur of his friends whisper-screaming. Under it, the strange noise continued. It was tangled and slick and much closer to the phone.

River asked, “Is everything okay?”

I didn’t answer. I was looking into my lap, down at the screen. By now I’d stared at it long enough that it was no longer a hazy mess. It was the man and the eel. Parts of them, anyway.

When I looked up River was staring at me, her eyes all glittering dark.

Craig grunted in my ear.

“Babe,” he said. “I think you’re gonna be really happy about this.”
Next week’s short story: “The Island” by Elspeth Sandys