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“Delivery,” called Baekhyun.
The bus had taken him only so far; the road up here was asphaltless, framed by summer-rusty pine needles blending into dirt. He’d tucked his pants into his boots, and given the grass reaching for him a wide berth. The solitude that filled his lungs unasked with every breath seemed to extend to the house that lay still and content before him. He knocked again, blew out a breath when nothing moved. Another four knocks, a don’t waste my time under his breath.
“Over here,” it came from somewhere.
Somewhere was somewhere over to the side, between trees. The further he was from the house, the more it looked like it rested in the forest’s embrace rather than cut into it.
Briefly, the thought of the chore of distance anchoring him here, in a forest acquiescing in his miserable existence, brought him delight: he pictured filling cupboards and cabinets and drawers to their brim, only venturing downhill for fresh fruit and medication refills and inconsequential conversations, otherwise forgotten by the world. He’d once been told if everyone were to be confined to their homes, he’d welcome it as an extended holiday. And Baekhyun fondly recalled the shrinking of pressure points whenever he got to stay home sick; so contained, with the weight of expectation lifted, a calm settled over him that not even a lung-splintering cough could taint.
He wondered if this was what was missing from his life: times when nothing stood between him and the slow drip of his thoughts down the back of his throat. Something ran along his back, light as an ant, and Baekhyun dared not smack at it. He’d only brought one life, nothing to trade off.
“Right here,” it came from somewhere again.
Gaze pinned to the ground where his steps roused grasshoppers and a bug so noisy and plunging in its flight his hands flew to shield his face, he only noticed the wooden walkway as he arrived before it. It lead upwards, into the trees.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Baekhyun said when he spied the treehouse, sitting just as drowsy with sleep as the house that didn’t deem him worth an invitation inside.
He lost all apprehension between the walkway shaking under his steps, his hands all too quickly sore from gripping onto the wooden rails, and finding the door—more block than passageway—ajar. Still, he knocked again. “Your food is here.”
“Never heard that one before.”
It sounded insincere. Like they might have laughed, if Baekhyun wasn’t both parcel and obstacle, and also a stranger. Baekhyun hesitated for a moment, reluctant to find the face fastened to a voice as light as egg white.
Then someone ducked out of the depths of the treehouse to pull the door open to more of the last moments of afternoon light, Baekhyun on its tails. Cotton pads stuck to their face, two of which required fingers to keep them in place. “Come in, you must have been waiting.”
“It’s not like it’ll get cold,” said Baekhyun, in lieu of turning on his heels and convincing a friend to force the praziquantel tablet into him, and distracting him from the thoughts of his own body that had provided life digesting it. His next breath got stuck halfway, and he stilled in the low doorway. It took him a moment to place him, but—often seated with several chairs between them, not unhappy to be present yet keeping to himself, rarely involving himself when a game ended in punishing hits: “Minseok hyung?”
Minseok’s smile took on a flustered edge. “I always hoped I’d see you again one day.”
It flustered Baekhyun in turn. He couldn’t say he’d thought of Minseok often; the day he quit Baekhyun noticed his mouse clicks going from laborious to smooth, long before he saw the vacated desk in the corner of the office, his own mouse with its rubbed-off frog sticker sitting abandoned, cord curled around itself. It, too, was soon replaced by a complaint, and someone whose liveliness frightened away what little of Minseok’s impressions had lingered. He wondered why his had stayed with Minseok, why Minseok had cared to tend to it over the years.
“I never knew you were . . .”
“Oh,” said Minseok, collecting the cotton pads in one palm like shells, “family secret. Someone on my father’s side—I wouldn’t have told you had you asked. You wouldn’t have needed to know. Why don’t you take a seat?”
With no chair in sight, Baekhyun tentatively laid a hand on the tree the treehouse enclosed, its bark rough, until he remembered it was still rooted in soil, might host creatures still.
Minseok had his back to him, now rustling through a small cabinet. “I don’t feed often, so I apologise for any—it won’t hurt, unless you’re allergic to my spit, so we’ll make sure you aren’t first. Sit, Baekhyun,” he insisted, and Baekhyun understood it meant the bed.
Pillows and sheets glowed as white as the curtains, fabric bunched up on a string, tied back to give view to tree tops, dark green with late summer. Baekhyun remembered the attachment he’d received, all steps laid out for his convenience, and felt a dull dizziness taking hold of his head. He could still go back on it now, search the same forums he’d found this offer on for mention of an area where he’d be likely to be cornered into this, not paid and politely fussed over by someone so elusive they’d never even gotten around to exchanging polite nods in the bathroom.
“Having second thoughts?” asked Minseok, crouching before him.
“About my life choices,” Baekhyun said, eyes getting stuck on the red marks on Minseok’s knees. One was perfectly circular, the other just so holding on to the edge of a kneecap. The treehouse was three times the size of the coffin of a room he’d had to rent after quitting university, had more windows than his current apartment.
Something gently pitying befell Minseok. “Oh, this. Let’s say someone owed me a favour, and I thought you might appreciate a place that’s out of the way so it won’t haunt you.”
“So you’re planning on traumatising me?” asked Baekhyun.
Even going unacknowledged, his left hand did not need persuasion to slip into Minseok’s steadying one. Sat on the edge of the bed, he held his breath when Minseok lowered his head to lick across his wrist. Before he could offer an apology for the sweat on his skin, Minseok grasped it with both hands, brought it closer to his mouth. The prick came so fast he couldn’t register it before Minseok’s tongue was on his skin again, soft with intent.
When Baekhyun touched it, he could barely feel the brush of his fingers, watched the fine slit Minseok had made knitting itself together.
“Lie back, we’ll have to give it a few minutes.”
The treehouse kept Minseok busy so Baekhyun threw himself into the pillows, legs extended over the edge to not dirty the bed, held up his wrist and tried to find memories of Minseok in its pulsing—until he decided Minseok had designed himself to escape Baekhyun’s attention, until his skin began to feel his own touch again and the slit faded into a thin pink line.
The extraction began with the stripping of Baekhyun.
Preemptive obedience had him ruck up his shirt, one hand on his stomach, as if he could feel the burrowing of the worm inside if he pressed close enough, as if his smaller intestine hadn’t struck up a pact with it to not give its presence away.
Minseok, however, arrived before his feet. “You might want to take these off, for comfort.”
Baekhyun nodded to it, and more pleased than startled went pliant in Minseok’s hands when he unlaced his boots to pull them off at the heels, then held him by the ankle to roll down a sock.
“Pine needles,” he explained, shaking it out.
Baekhyun, at this point, was convinced that the worm felt its end nearing, and regretted not inquiring about its ability to wind its way into his stomach, and from there into his oesophagus. The attachment had not mentioned it either, so with his feet bared by a man whose touch lingered more than his presence, he tried to conjure up comfort by observing the eyes in the light wooden panelling, connecting them into the faces of foxes thin and thick.
Minseok returned when he’d made out his favourite one, deep eyes with a delicate snout, with his hands washed and thankfully not one question about Baekhyun’s wellbeing. He held out a sleep mask for Baekhyun to take, and set a metal bowl onto the bed. “I’d prefer not traumatising you. Some do like to watch, but it can be . . .”
It looked handmade, sewn from a wildflower pattern, not a quick purchase. “I do like my violence fictional,” he said, slipping it on and trying not to pry into which other sights it had absorbed for whoever wore it this soft, and flattened himself against the mat. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
The bed dipped near his hip, the bowl pressed up cool against his arm. His hand yielded its position to Minseok’s. Baekhyun’s skin did not flinch under the touch; it concerned him in a way he had never liked to think about. Soon, after some careful exploration, it settled and warmed his stomach, to the left of his navel. “This will leave a scar?” he asked.
Minseok breathed out. The pressure against his stomach increased briefly, as if he’d lost balance. “A very small one, in the shape of a crescent moon. Could you . . .”
Knees pressed into Baekhyun’s side for a moment before he shifted again, hand firm on his stomach, rearranging their small breathless universe around it. Baekhyun drew his left leg up, and soon found himself between the pliers of Minseok’s knees.
“Hold on to something,” said Minseok, softly.
The warmth disappeared from his stomach, and was replaced with the brief heat of a tongue; reminded of how he’d long wondered what having his navel licked felt like, Baekhyun felt the heat creeping up into his cheeks, and for a moment the image of everything beneath his skin turning into worms swam in his head. Minseok’s hands were gentle in guiding his elbows into the pillows, gentler and then with the indifference of a tool one pressed into the numbed skin.
“Can you feel this?”
“Yes,” Baekhyun said, mildly irritated, “why wouldn’t I?”
“Those are my nails,” Minseok said, sounding satisfied. “Take a deep breath, and then hold still for me.”
Baekhyun breathed in: the air rushing in from one of the windows and out of the door, a warm breeze of little comfort, the scent of wood and clean sheets and disinfectant, Minseok’s appetite. Baekhyun breathed out, and then he felt it: something reaching into him, where nothing should go. He bit down on his lip, tried not to think of the daydreams where instead of the tapeworm he’d watched his entrails being removed, something of a wet, strange beauty, until his entire being had been unravelled and smoothed out.
It was over before he could shape a word, and Minseok spoke again. “I’ve located it and I’m holding on to it now. We’ll have to wait a moment for the poison to take effect so it’ll detach from your mucosa.” And, more hesitantly: “Would touching you help?”
“Anything will,” told him Baekhyun. It was true; as much as he hadn’t wanted to see, he was near reconsidering, just to not see the images in his head.
One of Minseok’s hands settled tentatively on his hip, stroking along its curve. And it did help: not one of the places he’d touched him in Baekhyun could recall being touched by another man. This map he was making of Baekhyun’s body, he wanted to take it home and let it disappear beneath his mattress, where only deep at night and alone with himself he’d remember. Was this how Minseok had kept the memory of him warm, too?
“I think,” Minseok’s voice came, “it’s ready.”
Baekhyun couldn’t feel anything, so he imagined a small tug, and then the several metres of tapeworm, pulled from the warm home it had made of him. “Stop, stop,” he said, desperate. “Leave it, leave it inside—”
He could hear his name, spoken all too tenderly, and then he felt the bowl, sitting against his arm warmer than it should have been, felt the sleep mask grow warmer around his eyes, too.
“Baekhyun?” Minseok asked, and it was clear it had been done. “Let me seal the wound, yeah?”
“It didn’t even hurt me. I should have just left it—I could have gotten used to the worm pieces, it never hurt me—”
He didn’t know how long he’d cried when the heat of Minseok’s body broke away from his side, and he tore the sleep mask off. The bowl was gone, and his stomach felt tender with sudden loss. He held it with both hands, wiping tears into his shoulders, closing his eyes and hitting his head into the pillows.
When he opened them again, Minseok kneeled on the floor next to the bed, his face soft with sorrow. Guilt, too, Baekhyun thought.
“Your body took good care of it,” he offered. “Now it’ll take care of me.”
Baekhyun found himself laughing at the idea of his tapeworm wrapped around Minseok, his wrist, his neck, and cried some more. “Is it always like this?” he asked eventually, closing his eyes again when Minseok blotted his tears and snot dry.
“You must know they’re rather rare, the Asian tapeworms,” he said after a moment, eyes growing distant. “Extinct, here, almost. Sometimes, if I argue and pay well, someone will host one for me. And with those—some people like to watch, and do think more fondly of them, since they were in control of the experience.”
Baekhyun opened his eyes, looked into Minseok’s. They seemed dark with worry, and it sank into Baekhyun like a buttery stone. “Can I watch you eat it?” he blurted.
His tapeworm, Baekhyun learned, was still alive, inhabiting the bowl again in a dazed, loose curl after Minseok had rinsed it with water first and then vinegar, as per his personal preference. There was debate about which end to eat it from, head or tail, but the head had to be bitten off first, and Minseok hadn’t had one in so long he’d forgotten which end he’d liked.
Baekhyun held his stomach with both hands and tried not to throw up. It was not so much its colour, white with a sheen of yellow that wouldn’t let him pretend it came from the sea, or its three metres of length that somehow had found room in him, or that Minseok, wanting not to upset him more, tried to smother his anticipation at having found an adult but young worm. He’d simply never imagined nurturing life this big, and ending it, too.
Minseok directed him back to the bed, ‘in case you’ll faint’, and sat, cross-legged as Baekhyun, in front of it. His cheeks looked flushed as he lifted the tapeworm’s head to his mouth with chopsticks, and his smile lost some of its shine as he bit the head off cleanly. “Tastes a bit weird, this part,” he mumbled after spitting it back into the bowl.
Baekhyun held on to his own knees and the envelope with money trapped between them and stared. Chopsticks, Minseok’s mouth parting, his tapeworm in Minseok’s mouth—if he pretended it was a particularly broad and long noodle, maybe it would convince his nausea to subside.
Minseok sucked as much of it into his mouth as would fit, bit it off with full cheeks and chewed his mouthful. By the last bite, Baekhyun felt less like crying and more like he should take responsibility for the joy caused. “Do your teeth get in the way of kissing?” wondered Baekhyun out loud instead.
Minseok wiped his mouth with a tissue he folded into a perfect square after. “You wouldn’t want to taste tapeworm mouth. Or did you want a bite?”
At Baekhyun’s vehement denial his wistful smile unfolded into something brighter. His teeth looked perfectly human, thought Baekhyun.
“I shouldn’t offer you dinner, but what about some company?”