CWs go at the beginning in italics

On Friday nights we watch laser beams from the couch, popcorn scattered over our blanket, my tentacle draped over Mia’s shoulders. At the climax of the galactic battle a well-developed supporting character, a techie with dreams for her robot sister, decides to sacrifice herself against the galactic minion horde so that the main lead can reach the headquarters of the head honcho. I start getting gooey. 

“You big baby,” Mia coos. She pats my head, her fingers coming away sticky with slime. My viscous sludge is more conspicuous than tears, so she always knows when I’m sensitive. The techie dies. Mia laughs. I gush harder, mostly out of embarrassment now. 

The first time I entered the apartment I trailed tracks all over the kitchen tiles. I had gotten fired that day, got caught talking to the fish again as I butchered them. Mia worked the crabcake sample across the aisle, and we had built a friendship on nuanced eye contact, making a game of guessing which customers would be rude. After five rounds of “fuck-it-all” drinks she hauled me up to her apartment, where I had truly broken down. Seeing the snail sludge behind me made me melt further but she said it was fine, that it smelled like fresh ginger, actually. 

I had never had ginger, which grew so deep into the dirt and away from the sea’s salt. As Mia rooted drunkenly around her cupboards she told me about her mother back in China, how she drank ginger tea with dates every morning, how she thinks it will cure her cancer. 

After all the rummaging Mia could only uncover a singular dried nub, the peel a flaking mummy’s wrapping. 

“I like the fresh ones more,” she pouted. “I’ll have to get more, to show you.”

She filled a kettle with water and heated it up, plopped in the last of the ginger and black sugar cubes. She found styrofoam cups leftover from the last holiday party, and as she poured me a drink she smiled sadly.

“Might not cure cancer, but it's a great hangover cure.”

Then I kissed her, brushing her mind as I did. She pulled back, said I was practically Lovecraftian. I said that she was close, but that I’d never really liked him, ratty bigot that he was. She kissed me again. 

As far as couples go, we’re pretty normal. Even our sex life is pretty normal, despite all the hentai jokes we can’t stop ourselves from making before foreplay. The real shabang is simply this: she takes off her clothes, I wipe off my slime with a Kleenex. I get on top, she gets on bottom. When I reach completion I turn into pixie water, which she has to wring out of the sheets and drip into a stoppered bathtub until I congeal again.

We can afford a coffee table but no chairs, so sometimes in the afterglow we tangle on the floor. I am reading Vogue’s Fall Issue, she is reading Milton’s Paradise Lost. There is only the rustle of pages, punctuated by “what the shit!” exclaimed in a carnival barker impression. We are both racing to find something more absurd. 

“What the shit!” I exclaim. It’s a contorted woman on all fours, crouching in a green jumpsuit. Gelatinous tubes cascade off her ass, swarming the floor like worms. 

“What’s the concept?” she asks. I flip backward, skimming through pages of faux tinfoil hats gilded in platinum, bugged-out eyes encrusted with rubies. I finally land on the collection’s front page. 

“Extra-Extraterrestrials,” I reply.

“That model did look kind of like you,” she giggles. I sigh, not needing to remind her that I am not an alien. I am a primordial kraken who has slumbered in the cracks of this earth’s crust longer than humans have been on this Earth. 

“What the shit!” Mia slaps me with glee. She points to her passage, intones that Satan was “cloth’d with transcendent brightness.” 

She gets more excited. “Did you know that this is the first time in history that the Devil was depicted as appealing? Milton’s Lucifer — the OG Sexy Satan.” Mia had gone to UCLA for humanities for two years before dropping out to work full time.

She has won. No jelly cucumber skirts are beating the revolutionary idea of a beautiful demon.  

She flips to the front cover. 

“Written in 1663,” she intones. She hums.“One-thousand-six-hundred-and-sixty-three years after the birth of Christ.” 

I nodded, not adding that at that time I was just a fledgling up North near the Vikings. I had heard about the Jesus boy from them, but back then I just thought it was another one of their silly little ideas, like how I wrapped around the world. I keep my mouth shut. Mia doesn’t like reminders about my age, says it turns her off. 

A week later she comes back home, slams the door, yells, “I got fired!”

I slink to the doorway. “What happened?” She was employee of the month in February. 

“My fucking racist boss,” she mutters. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Want to go out for drinks?”

She sighs. “No, let’s stay in.”

Later that night we’re on the couch, her head cushioned by one of my suction cups. 

“Now we’re both job hunting,” I say over the screaming on-screen. Mia’s thinking about how to pay for her mom’s meds. 

“How long do you think this’ll take?”

“For what?” I ask.

“For us to find a nice job. One where you can talk to the fish. One where I can call Ma in Chinese.”

“One-thousand-six-hundred-and-sixty-three years,” I reply. 

She snorts. “I won’t make it that long. You’ll have to tell me how it is.”

I turn an antenna eyeball back to the TV. Someone’s being beamed up to the UFO. “Why do you like these so much?” I ask. “You’re so stressed — doesn’t this stress you out more?”

“It’s just CGI,” she whispers. “All those aliens are fake.”