Should ‘av

The monsoon had finally broken, a fat, wet curtain that turned Chiang Mai’s streets into rivers of brown water and red clay. For a week, I’d been trapped in my bungalow on the outskirts, listening to the frantic drumming of rain on the corrugated iron roof and the ceaseless, manic chorus of geckos. It was this auditory assault, more than the heat, that had frayed my last nerve. I was a man on the edge of a breakdown, and all I needed was a cold beer and five minutes of quiet.

That’s when Mel found me.

I was huddled under the awning of a roadside noodle stall, the owner’s ancient, fan-backed radio blaring a tinny Thai pop song. The rain was a solid wall of noise. She didn’t speak. She just slid onto the plastic stool opposite me, her own clothes soaked through, her long black hair plastered to her skull like dark seaweed. She had the most startling eyes I’d ever seen—pale, almost translucent, like river stones. She ordered two bowls of khao soi in a voice so soft the storm almost swallowed it.

Her English was hesitant, a sweet broken melody. She told me she was a weaver, from a village near the Burmese border. Her stories were of silk worms and natural dyes, of grandmothers who spoke to the spirits of the trees. I was a fifty-two-year-old Englishman, a retired structural engineer from Slough, my marriage a distant, dusty memory. I was a man of steel beams and load-bearing calculations. She was a woman of myths and monsoon rain. For a man who’d spent his life believing only in the tangible, she was a revelation.

We began a strange, silent courtship. The rain kept us indoors, in my rented bungalow. She would cook, meals so pungent and complex they filled my lungs and made my head swim—gaeng hung lay, with its deep, earthy spice, or laab, tasting of burnt rice and blood. She’d tell me about her village, about a long-necked tribe and their ancient rites. I’d listen, mesmerised, the scent of lemongrass and fish sauce clinging to her skin. She was a balm to my sterile, Western logic, and I fell into her orbit with the giddy recklessness of a man half my age.

That’s when the first shock hit me.

I’d been watching her sleep, the faint moonlight illuminating her silhouette through the mosquito net. Her body was a masterpiece of supple grace, but the sounds she made were not those of a woman. A low, guttural snore would rumble from her chest, followed by a high-pitched, almost-piglet squeal. It was animalistic, primal. I put it down to a sinus problem, a childhood malady. I didn’t want to shatter the illusion.

The second shock was far worse. It was the smell.

One sweltering afternoon, she returned from a walk to the local market, her baskets laden with fresh herbs and glistening cuts of meat. The humidity was suffocating, a blanket of wet wool. As she passed me on her way to the tiny kitchen, a wave of odour hit me. It was an overpowering, cloying scent of fermentation—a sweet, sickly rot that was at once foul and strangely addictive. It was the smell of durian, but far more intense, a scent that seemed to emanate not from her clothes, but from her very pores. It was the smell of something buried too long in the jungle earth.

“Mel, what is that?” I asked, my voice sharper than I intended. “Is it your cooking?”

She just smiled, her strange eyes glinting. “Spirit smell,” she whispered, her voice like dry leaves. “My grandmother’s blood is strong. She was… not wholly woman.”

I laughed it off, a brittle, hollow sound that echoed in the humid room. I forced myself to believe it was some local delicacy she’d been carrying, a pungent shrimp paste. I wasn’t just ignoring the warning signs; I was actively erasing them, desperate to preserve the fragile beauty of this strange new world I had stumbled into.

The final shock was not a sight or a smell, but a feel. It was the moment I understood that the story she’d been telling me wasn’t a myth. It was her autobiography.

It was the night after the rains finally stopped. The air was clean, sharp with the scent of wet earth and jasmine. For the first time in weeks, the world was silent. The desire that had been simmering beneath the surface of our strange relationship finally boiled over. I had wanted her for so long, had dreamed of feeling her cool, pale skin against my own.

She led me to the thin mat on the floor. Her movements were fluid, hypnotic. As I reached for her, she stopped my hand, her grip deceptively strong. Her face was a mask of serenity as she slowly, deliberately, began to unbutton her loose cotton shirt.

I had seen her in a bathing suit, had glimpsed the smooth, flawless skin of her back. I had noticed the faint, shimmering scars on her inner arms, like the marks of a serpent’s fangs, but I had dismissed them. I was a fool.

“I should have told you,” she breathed, her voice a low thrum of power. “We krasue are forbidden to love outsiders. But my heart… it longed for you.”

As the shirt fell away, the air in the room seemed to thicken and congeal. Her torso, her beautiful, slender torso, was wrong. It ended below her ribs. There was no stomach, no navel. In its place, suspended by a thick, ropey tether of glistening viscera that pulsed with a faint, ruby light, hung a loose, sac-like organ. It was her internal network, her stomach and intestines, a tangle of wet, pulsing meat that swayed with her every breath. It dangled in the air, free and independent, trailing a faint, misty glow that smelled of iron and rotting flowers. This was the source of the scent.

She wasn’t a woman. She was a predator. A krasue. The creature of Thai legend I’d dismissed as a ghost story for children.

She reached out, her hand cupping my cheek. Her touch was cold, cold as a river stone. Her intestines, the secret part of her, rustled and undulated, reaching out toward me, a pale, questing tentacle of flesh. It brushed against my arm, and it was impossibly soft, yet I could feel the faint, hungry peristalsis of it, the churning of its internal acid.

“Do you not love me, James?” she asked, her pale eyes searching mine. It wasn't a question of romance, but of a far more fundamental need. I saw the monstrous truth in her gaze. I was not a lover to her. I was a source—a warm, sheltering host for the part of her that could not be integrated. My body, my internal heat, the simple comfort of my presence—that was what she craved.

The life I knew, the ordered, rational life I had painstakingly built, crumbled to dust. All my rules, my logic, my understanding of the universe meant nothing. The woman who had cooked my meals and soothed my frayed nerves was a disembodied digestive system that needed a living, breathing man to nestle against in the dark.

She didn’t want to harm me. That was the most terrifying part. She wanted to be loved. She wanted to curl her horrible, vital, internal organs against the warmth of my living body. She wanted me to accept her, to hold her while her stomach churned and her intestines pulsed in the humid night air. The beast was a child seeking comfort.

I couldn’t scream. My throat was closed, a fist of primal terror.

Her dangling organs drifted closer, the wet, slick sounds filling the room. The scent was overwhelming now, the smell of the deep jungle, of decay and life intertwined. She was the most beautiful and the most horrifying thing I had ever seen. She was pure, raw Thailand, a land of ancient spirits and visceral truths that my Western mind could never comprehend.

That was my mistake. I had tried to understand her with my heart and my head, to categorise the exotic and the strange neatly. I should have known the stories were real. I should have known that in this ancient, steaming land, the monsters didn’t just hide in the shadows. They prepared your dinner, they lulled you to sleep with gentle stories of silk and spirits, and they offered you their love in the dark.

I held out my hands, not to push her away, but in a gesture of surrender. Acknowledgment.

She smiled, a heartbreakingly human smile, and her internal organs nestled against my bare chest, a repulsive, intimate warmth that was both a torture and a strange, unwanted comfort. And as I felt the slow, rhythmic pulse of her forbidden stomach against my heart, I finally understood.

I should have known better.

The END