Belletristic Lover
There are 206 bones in the human body.
You count each one in order to keep your mind from unraveling (melting, pooling in cranial hollows).
Glazed eyes take in the sputtering light, dim like a dying star above you. Straps bind you to a freezing table, stiff against the curve of your spine. You force yourself to focus on anything but the wintry chill of her scalpel along the stitches that thread the insides of your thighs. It traces the curves of your body, hidden valleys and crevasses rough with burn scars.
The doctor hovers above you, her gloved hand cradling your skull with gentleness befitting a vulnerable species. You are not so vulnerable a species, but there is an existential threat present—and she stares down at you in wretched adoration.
“Belle,” Maxine says softly, muffled behind a once white mask; the red spatters have turned to rust. “You're almost done.”
You drag your gaze up her pale face and hazel skin, dark hair spilling in coils from a messy bun as she adjusts her glasses with two fingers. Her colourless eyes crinkle when your cracked lips part—to please, to plead, to ponder. Delusional air rises in your throat. Falls.
Maxine tuts, placing a firm leathery grip around your throat. Her thumb presses into the pockmarked but tender flesh beneath your wobbling jaw.
“Ah, don't. I haven't given you a larynx this time. But no fear: there's just one thing left. This is the part I look forward to with each of you."
How many others are (were) there? How many versions of you has she manifested with the aid of voltaic forces and indomitable will? Is there an image of your ideal self tattooed onto the back of her eyelids, a shadow on the wall she turns from the yawning cave to see?
She must notice the agony on your mismatched face. The cornered animal inside you watches her, for there is little else to do.
“Your heart. No belle is complete without zir heart. It’s always been the one step that, in all my attempts, has never failed. Even if your original perfection is hard to capture.”
If you run far enough from your mind, you wonder if you'd remember anything before this. You wonder if the original lies inside you like a cone wrapped in rings of bark and tree-flesh.
But all you can catch are mere flashes of memory—your own, or maybe that of the brain swimming in your skull—like dappled light through leafy fingers reflected on stagnant pondwater. Always moving, unsteady, changing.
You are pupal, wet and screaming (silent), the grotesqueness of metamorphosis interrupted by the act of creation that brought you here. On this table, alive and afraid, as a mad god caresses every inch of you.
"Are we ready, belle?"
The doctor places the scalpel beneath the scarred flesh of your remaining breast, where staples gleam harsh. She doesn’t wait for an answer.
Lead lines your frozen veins, unable to cry out or stop her as the thin blade parts your chest like wings. The imago bursts free in a rain of mucus and white cocoonase. Red spills in tearful waves down the sides of your twitching thorax.
Numb, you force yourself to watch as the doctor pries your rib cage apart like ripe fruit, peel of bone and muscles dripping sinew. For fear of unspooling entirely, you admire the extreme precision which she pinions parts of you to the table with a sculptor’s grace.
And when she reaches in, you cannot look away.
You force yourself to handle the enormity of what she places inside the precious cradle of your vulnerable cavity—thick, ripe, bleeding, (stolen).
“You’re alive,” she says, sewing more stitches along your joints, hewn from disparate pieces into something no less fractured. Thick black Xs mark the spots on your limbs where she pulled you together.
“You’re alive,” she says, wiping crimson dots from the apple of your cheek before pressing her mouth to yours. Her warmth feels like maggots festering from a fresh corpse. Through the mask her lips, greying brown, are a pair of rotund larvae, wriggling beneath the slant of your jaw and burrowing into carrion flesh.
You stare at a smudged mirror, a single, cobweb crack shattering a face that isn’t yours—a simulacra looks back. You tilt your swollen head, tendons in an elongated neck straining. You blink, translucent folds of skin over discoloured irises. You trace the cicatrice across your chest, the truest sign of Maxine’s unending devotion. The topography of the knotted scars stirs desire in your sewn up belly.
Awed, Maxine whispers from a place of worship between your misshapen legs. “How do you feel, my love?”
The lover’s mouth opens and glass eyes widen to gaze upon the woman on her knees. You say what she wants you to say: “Alive.”
But are you really alive in all your gestalt glory, belletristic most beloved? Are you truly anything, if you’re hers?
© 2025 U.M. Agoawike
U.M. Agoawike is a queer Nigerian-Canadian author of short stories with vibes for plot and SFFH novels featuring everything but the kitchen sink. When not writing, they can be found reading fanfiction, watching horror movies, or playing video games. Their work has been published by Augur, Saros, Contrarian, and midnight & Indigo, and their debut novel, Black as Diamond, releases 2026. Find them online at nebulouswrites.com.