Miss Mosquito
- Aug 18, 2021
- 3 min read
by Celeste Sea
content warning: mosquito death
I like Ethan but Lily turns me on. I try to hide it from Ethan because I still don’t know how to explain it. We’re all supposed to be good friends. Why would it matter if Lily makes me hungry? She has a skin tag on her neck that looks like a yellow skittle when she stands in the sun. Sometimes if I look hard enough, I can taste the sunshine-lemon taste of it, and the thought makes me imagine my mouth on her mouth. Would she taste like her lip gloss too? Champagne and strawberries. This isn’t something roommates should do, I imagine her saying, and I’d laugh into her smile and then we’d eat ice cream together. Our secret would sit sweet on our tongues as we licked at each other’s cold, spit-sogged lips.
Ethan though. Today, Ethan is fingering me in the single-occupancy bathroom, the one across from the burrito place where Lily is waiting for us to join her. It’s June, and the three of us are supposed to be doing groceries after lunch. It’d been Ethan’s idea. I’ll drive us, he’d said, and yet here we are, his chest against my chest in a public restroom. A mosquito sweats alongside us, and I wonder if she knows what we’re doing. I think she wants in on the action because she’s been kissing my ankles the entire time that Ethan’s had two fingers curled inside me, wormlike and wriggling.
Next time you should let me eat you out, he’s saying. My stomach growls, and he laughs.
How long have you wanted to do this? I ask. Ethan doesn’t respond. He’s too busy sucking on my neck, and so I try to entertain myself by thinking about my hunger. I wonder whether my mouth would fit around Ethan’s fist. Would I choke on the crooked bones of his wrist? And what about Lily? I think about her feet. Her toes. How would they go down? Maybe I’d have to wash them down with tea. Or maybe I’d have to be careful and use my tongue and my teeth and my lips to peel the nails from the fleshy bits. I wonder if she’d get stuck along my gums, the way that sunflower seeds do, their shells making my mouth drip copper.
It’s too hot to wonder for long. The air knots itself around my throat and soon I open my eyes and watch as my mosquito sister freckles herself along Ethan’s bicep. She looks pregnant, heavy and dark from kissing me. I’m hoping that she finally feels full—that maybe one of us can walk away from this exchange feeling full—but then Ethan senses her. He shivers, and she hangs on amorously, bulbous in her hunger, until Ethan slaps at the spot where she tries to love him.
She splatters.
Fuck, Ethan says immediately. I tangle my hand with his, and together we wipe away the crime. It takes several passes to erase the memory of the mosquito’s kiss. Her guts cling to our fingers and stick to the undersides of our nails, and we end up spending so long running the faucet that the janitor begins to bang on the door.
We pretend nothing’s happened when we finally rejoin Lily. Still, she smiles at us as if she knows. She’s eating tacos and she offers me one. It’s fish, she says. They’re having a special. A bit of tartar sauce hugs her bottom lip, and when I smudge it away, I feel Ethan’s eyes on us. I try and guess his thoughts. Is he thinking of me? Is he thinking of me and Lily? Because I am. I’m thinking of my spit dripping down her hands, clear and clean, like hand soap or the fancy face wash she lets me use whenever I run out of my own. I run my tongue along my lips and try to imagine strawberries and champagne.
Would it have been better with her?
I wince as I watch Ethan eat. Cholula runs down his wrists in messy veins. I’m starving, he explains, reaching for a napkin, and I nod because I am too.
Celeste Sea lives in Washington, DC. She is knee-deep in student loans and her living room smells like turpentine. Her work has appeared in Sine Theta Magazine and is forthcoming in Maudlin House and SmokeLong Quarterly. She’s Always Online and sometimes on Twitter at @celestish_.
