I clean the gore from the monster's teeth. She needs me to— or her gums will rot. In exchange, she doesn't bite down.
Gingivitis plaque from bacterial fauna line the root of her incisors. In her molars are bits of ground intestines, muscle sinew knotted and strung around the gaps. Strands of hair, fingernails, veins. The small stuff gets stuck. Her canines are redder than the rest of her teeth, stained from blood. The blade flicks, digs, scrapes. The wet sound of old flesh or the dry sound of dental bone. Prey curdles on the metal.
Her claws are too sharp for such delicate work— if she did this herself, she would gash her gums and infect them. She needs me terribly.
My palm is on her tongue, slotted between massive tastebud mounds, the squish horrendous to the touch. I lean into the cave of her mouth. Humid, wet, gross. Hot moist exhales press my face and swing her uvula and it reeks like corpses. Saliva drips in slow motion from the ridges on the roof of her mouth, and thick droplets soak my clothes. She's drooling. I look down the dark cavern of her throat, and don't think of all the lives she's swallowed.
I lean back and exit into the forest. She closes her mouth, and licks her thin lips. I know she loves the taste of my skin on her tongue.
"You're clever prey," she hisses.
Her naked bat-skin wings flutter, a prehistoric claw crosses over the other. I run a handkerchief across the scalpel, gather a bloody lock of hair such a similar color to mine, I wonder if me and her victim were distant relatives.
"You're a lucky monster," I respond.
"It's one of the great tragedies of life. I think you're the tastiest morsel I've ever had."
Her canines glimmer a wet brilliance as she speaks. A slit pupil narrows and expands, an orb bigger than my head, and blinks with a clear sideways eyelid. Her irises are veined with gold and turquoise and glow luminescent. It sounds crazy, but I find them pretty.
"You just want what you can't have," I say.
No one else would dare get in the mouth of a monster. The villagers rightfully loathe her for eating children who wander too far from home. This is the only act of kindness she will ever receive.
When on a hunt for foul, a low rumble emanated through the thickest part of the forest, and I followed with cautious stride. Past thorn bushes and century old aster trunks I came upon her. She pawed her snout, wailed, underbelly to the sun, scales glinting as she writhed. It was the perfect opportunity to kill her. I would've been a hero. Her hide could've been used for chainmail armor. Her claws as daggers. But my hand could not reach for the quiver. I felt something stupid instead: pity.
Wise from millennium alive, tooth infection from millennium alive, she pleaded for my help with renaissance latin words I'd never heard before. Tears welled in her crocodile eyes. I thought it barbaric to kill something so fantastical and rare with my dull mortal weapon.
She rewarded my betrayal to my species. She told me about the early earthly realm, when there were only jellyfish and anemone in the atmosphere. She told me where the fire sprites hibernate and taught me how to use them for torches. She taught me that before clever humans she used to feed upon gold horses with three horns, but we hunted them to extinction. I sleep on moss with her slick tail as a pillow, and not even grasshoppers climb across my pigskin vest, or mosquitoes bite my bare neck, because they fear her. All fears her. Except me.
I enter her mouth with a clean scalpel, bare knees crooked over her incisors, the flavor of my skin a temptation. Her jaw trembles, but she restrains herself. She needs me too much to eat me. I flick, scrape, clean.
"I 'an ta'e i'."
I grab her tongue as it throws me around and thunks my head against the roof of her mouth.
"Don't talk with me in your mouth!"
Then I realize what she's said: I can't take it.
"But you need me," I scream, as my shins are severed of flesh, but still hang limp from fragments of bone. Her tongue pushes me towards her molars, and my skull cracks. Before she swallows me, I wonder if it tastes better to eat someone who loves you.
