She moved through the world like a hagfish. Skin so loose nothing could get a hold of her, and anything that tried would get a mouthful of slime for its trouble. Of course, she was never caught in the fallout: she could tie herself in knots to scrape off her own offal as well as she could lace her boots. She feasted on the dregs, the coffee grounds left behind when the world had been brewed. No teeth, just a gullet and determined plates that could imitate a bite barely well enough to tear. She lived on the bottom, writhing in the muck, and loved it. I asked her once, how do you stay so shapeless? She didn’t respond. She never did. I only ever heard her speak when it was to clients. Her voice always reeked of cigarettes, and her lungs crackled like muscle fiber tearing whenever I got close enough to hear. I was always trying to get close enough to hear her heart, but I never could. She took everything from me, same as she did all the others. A fax or two, a half-dry Bic signature, a call to the bank, and it was down her throat. Scavengers are one of the only living things in this world that aren’t predators, only because they eat the defaulted. The table scraps. The ones who don’t need digesting to soften them up. I think I knew her name once, maybe a half-second after we met, but it slipped from me as quickly as it oozed into my brain. When life is one long intestine, names seem… superfluous. I knew her by smell, as I hope she knew me. Smoke, faded almost to nothing, and plain soap. She never used anything except bar soap, I imagined, to smell like that. I imagined a lot of things about her. I knew almost nothing. She wanted it that way, I imagined. I once tried to follow her home, only to find that she lived in one of the apartments above her offices. All rented. Ephemeral. Colorless. The curtains were white and always tied shut. I would have given anything to smell the smoke I was sure saturated them, to plunder her closet for every identical brown sweater she wore, to reach into her mouth and unravel that staticky voice, to get close enough to finally taste that slime. She was gone last week when I visited the offices. Nobody knew anything. I dream of smoking Bic pens in a muddy foyer every night now.
