Human Mummy Confection

Heather Parry

Eligible Bachelor Trait 1: Opens doors for others

You were studying classics, which I considered a frivolous use of ten thousand pounds, and you were brought up Catholic, which excited me, because all the lapsed Catholics I knew were total perverts. I knew these things because I’d asked someone about you, someone you’d had a brief dalliance with several months before. They said you had a bit of a hero complex, being the oldest of four and obscenely handsome, but that you had strong thighs and a willingness to humiliate yourself for the pleasure of others. You cried slightly too earnestly at a stage version of The Elephant Man and were prone to using terms like “dalliance”. You appeared to like women too, as I watched you flirt with several freshers across the union bar one night, but after an hour you grew bored of them and gravitated back to the men. You were the subject of my fantasies for a few weeks before we made contact; you held the door open for me and kept holding it for the length of time it took me to get my wheelchair through—unlike most people, who hand the responsibility off to the nearest stranger at the thirty-second mark. I said thanks and you said no worries and I, with characteristic confidence, said so, drink after class then? and you smiled and said sure.

Eligible Bachelor Trait 2: Takes pride in the way he looks

You were tender, and giving, and happy to receive; you were patient with the necessary issues around my mobility and listened to the list of things you could not do to me, lest my bones break or the blood pool under my skin at a heavy touch. You let me take the lead and afterwards you checked me for any signs you might have damaged me in the throes of it; a few cuts and my back ached but that was me on a good day. You had three tattoos in hanzi; I chose to ignore them. I thought we might be a one-time thing, but the next day after class you were lingering at the place we’d met, sucking on a bar of Kendal Mint Cake, and insisted on walking me to my next seminar, though it was all the way across campus and would have made you late for next period. You did not push me, instead walking beside me and speaking in excessively loud tones and unnecessary details about the previous evening. You came over unannounced that night with flowers and ran me a bath. You helped me in, read poetry to me from the toilet seat (lid down) and exfoliated my face with a mixture of baking soda and honey, which is meant to close the pores and keep you young, apparently. You massaged my feet and pumiced my bunions even though you were not asked. Later we played Bomberman to your obvious disdain and I made something Indonesian, which you declared the best thing you’d eaten in years even though you only drank the broth and left all the vegetables. In bed you placed yourself beneath me not one time but three. Afterwards you put a face mask on, as semen, you told me, is drying.

Eligible Bachelor Trait 3: Has fantastic communication skills

The first time you said “boyfriend” we were at the pub with your classmates, who’d all come from private school and saw me as some sort of interesting folly, the sort of thing you might keep on the edge of the grounds in a small house and show off to the neighbours when they came to visit; look, darling, isn’t he quite so different. You’d stopped drinking your very occasional gin and tonic, considering alcohol an assault on the body, but as the rest of them grew more tawdry they leaned in to ask me about maintenance grants and sharing the bathwater and you, gently, pushed them back; be careful with my boyfriend, will you, he bruises easy. I was ready to scrap the whole thing, to kiss you goodnight and goodbye after the torture of their company was over, but you let the word so easily slide out of your mouth that it pulled me back in, made me ignore the condescending nature of the sentence as a whole. We got a cab home on your credit card and you got on your knees in the stairway, ignoring my entreaties to get inside before someone saw us. You changed your social media status before we slept, and took me out for breakfast at the fancy gluten-free place, the place I’d have previously said was full of twats, and read to me from Baudelaire, which I found tedious at best. You ate nothing, drinking only cup after cup of hot water and lemon, adding honey in amounts that made my teeth ache at the sight of it.

Eligible Bachelor Trait 4: Is not afraid of his spiritual side

You moved in bit by bit and with no announcement. You had few possessions and what I thought was an overnight bag was in fact your entire wardrobe, library and assortment of knick knacks. Your ex-flatmate told me he’d been instructed to throw everything else away when you had stopped paying rent several months before. When I tried to talk to you about it you claimed that it was to make my life easier and that I ought to appreciate the help, given the situation. Soon you were waking up at the crack of dawn to clean the pristine flat and lay my clothes out on the end of the bed, having ironed them and hung them from the radiator so they would be warm when I put them on. You served me a cooked breakfast every morning, stuffed a packed lunch in my backpack and if you didn’t cook in the evening you took me out for dinner, making a big deal about accessibility when you phoned to make the reservation. You were warm and comfortable when we got into bed and night and the attention was flattering and patronizing in equal measure, so I didn’t mention the strange sweet smell in the bathroom, or the fact that you tasted odd during sex. It was a letter from the university that alerted me to the fact that you’d given up your course, and when I tried to talk to you about it you said that I should really try yoga, waxing lyrical about how it had sorted out your bad hip alignment and the wonders it might make to my “condition”. I slammed the door as I left but you were meditating when I got back, chanting obnoxiously and stinking the place out with cheap incense. I put on The Cure but you still murmured on. I kicked you over but you did not respond; you just lay on your back letting the guttural whining grow louder and louder. When I opened the kitchen cupboards to find the scotch I realised you’d taken one over and filled it with jars of honey.

Eligible Bachelor Trait 5: Displays consistency

Your first excuse was a sore throat, and you brushed off the suggestion that gargling with salt water would be better for you. Your second excuse was that you needed to gain weight and it was heavy in calories, being almost pure sugar. There was no third excuse, for every time I brought up the empty jars in the recycling you just stuck your head in your well-worn copy of a Chinese medical book from the 16th Century or, worse, started meditating again. You drank cups of it morning, noon and night, sometimes mixed with warm water, sometimes not. You stopped seeing your arsehole friends and wouldn’t come out with mine. I tried to call your family but didn’t know if they even existed. If you weren’t running around after me, listless and clearly weak yet stubbornly dedicated to completing tasks I could have easily done myself, you were in the lotus position on the bedroom floor. We stopped having sex the day I came home early and found you hunched over the toilet, golden shit running from you like treacle, you clutching your stomach and moaning (or was it chanting?) in agony. I called an ambulance; you wouldn’t get in it. Alexander the Great’s sarcophagus was filled with it, you said, and I refrained from mentioning that he also named a fucking city after his favourite horse.

Eligible Bachelor Trait 6: Is not afraid of commitment

I tried to move out but came back after a day, terrified for you, and found you semi-conscious on the carpet, still sitting, still making noise, having reached an apparent state of semi divinity, or at least according to passages you’d highlighted in one of your books. You came back to down to earth when you heard me talking to the mental health ward, and crawled, molasses-like, to unplug the phone from the wall. I held your face and called you an idiot; there was crystals at the corners of your eyes and you stank, but still you were smiling. Over the next two days we didn’t move from the bed, me holding you and trying to force you to sip hot tea, or lick a spoonful of Marmite, and you babbled on, mostly incoherent, about how everyone could eat you, later, take bits of your body and consume them and get all the goodness out of you. You grinned throughout. In a rare moment of clarity you told me it was all for me, poor me, poor handicapped me. I’ll heal you, you said, and I said I’m fine, you narcissistic motherfucker.

Eligible Bachelor Trait 7: Will die for you

You fell asleep and I could take it no longer; you had started to violently purge by the time the ambulance finally came. As they entered the flat they approached me, confused, but I pointed to you, saying look, you idiots, he’s covered in his own puke. You told the nurse at the hospital, in the short periods of respite from your endless throat-singing, that you wanted to your casket to be filled with it. That night you fell into a coma and no amount of stomach-pumping could bring you back. Your corpse stank liked burned sugar. The nurse told your parents what you’d said and like fools they concurred. The process cost a fortune; they used manuka straight from New Zealand and, as per your scrawled will, put you in the ground with a copy of the Bencao Gangmu and a portrait of Alexander the great. As the others drank hot toddies at the wake, I lit a small fire and burned the letter you’d left for me, telling me to dig you up in a decade and eat your sweet, sweet remains and think of how much you loved me.

Originally published in Issue #20

Heather Parry is a Glasgow-based writer and editor. Her debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. She is also the author of This Is My Body, Given For You and Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism. Her next novel, Carrion Crow, will be published by Doubleday in Feb 2025.