Swallowing
By Zhiyi Chen
2025/07/10

If I were to trace it back to the beginning, maybe it began with that faint, almost imperceptible swelling in my chest. The weight bloomed slowly, thick and heavy, like bruises surfacing beneath unbroken skin.

It was a morning, sleep still clinging to me, I sat braiding my hair, the dampness from last night’s dream spread through my body, turning into a milky fluid that slowly seeped from my breasts, tracing a warm line across my skin. I frantically rummaged through the storage chest and pulled out the coarse cloth my mother had left behind before she died. Wrapping it tightly around my breasts again and again, praying that this unspeakable secret might be buried like mist among distant mountains, hidden where no one would ever find it.

But the secret seemed to have a will of its own. It wriggled through the seams, soaked into the cloth, and dampened every garment, quietly proclaiming the slow corruption of my body.

At night, I sat before the mirror, watching my body in the flickering candlelight. My breasts were the misfit among unripe fruits, swollen and sagging, they were the forbidden ones splitting open in the wrong season, weeping thick, sticky sap. And the pain was a dull blade, carving through my body, spilling the shame, confusion, tears, and inarticulate cries.

In the deep of night, while the village lay sleeping, I pushed open the door and stepped, uneasy, onto the gravel path, passing one silent house after another. When I saw the stone statue at the centre of the square, a strange quiet settled in me. In my childhood, my mother would often bring me here, holding my hand, whispering in the soft hush of reverence that this was the guardian spirit watching over the village, keeping us safe, year after year.

“If you really exist,” I whispered, kneeling before the statue, seeing its face blurred by years of wind and rain, “please... save me.” My voice barely reached my own ears, but still I begged: “If something must be given in return... please take whatever part of me I do not wish to keep. Anything, anything at all, just make my body stop being... this.” I rubbed my palms together, over and over, hoping the guardian spirit could feel even the smallest ripple of my longing.

Sleep crept in, softening the edges of my thoughts. In that gauzy blur, I saw a soft pink glow gather around the statue. starlight fell like ash, and I heard he whisper close my ear, “Freedom is the price, nothing less, nothing else.”

I yielded. No hesitation. No resistance.

The next morning, guided by the echo of that dream, I climbed the hill where the black house stood waiting. It was vast and heavy, the windows were narrow slits, keeping every gust of wind at bay. Each night, when the sky sank into silence, moonlight slipped through the narrow seams and traced soft arcs of pink across the floor. I often sat crouched at the edge where light me shadow, when I staring the pink glow slowly climbed from the floor to my ankles, the dull ache in my chest would ease, soft and strange.

A vast loneliness coiled at my back. This black house had become my shell.

One evening, in the hush of dusk-light, the boy knocked on my door for the first time. His head was lowered, voice barely more than a murmur as he said he too was marked by the same affliction, and that the milky fluid which plagued me day and night might be the only thing that could save him. I remember clearly I stayed silent and just eased the door open a crack. He slipped in without a sound like a shadow sneaking into a dream.

Two aberrant souls, confined in the same cage, witnessing the same unfolding tragedy, shamelessly trying to redeem each other.

In the beginning, we remained silent. I sat on the edge of the bed, he before me, my body yield to him. His words were few, but when all was done, he would always offer me a warm towel, and then turn away, his figure melding with the moonlight. In the lull as he waited for me to wipe away the dried traces from my nipples, he whispered that he was enchanted by my hair, the colour like a ribbon woven from the darkness of the night. I came to long for his visits, the flicker in my heart lighting dim corners of the house.

Lost in the warmth of it, I didn’t realize that this light would become the spark that set the night ablaze.

That night, we set very close. The room was dark, lit only by the pale pink light filtering through the window, rippling across the wall like a still lake gently stirred by something not quite there. He reached out in silence and took my cold fingertips. I didn’t pull away and closed my eyes, feeling our breaths tangle in the dark, like two small snakes hidden in the night, testing, winding around one another.

When the milk welled up and slid down my skin, his eyes latched onto it, unblinking, as though beholding a miracle. Then he bowed his head and devoutly swallowed the offering to the guardian spirit.

The night grew damp and viscous, the floor trembling faintly, and I fell into a scalding suffocation

After that night, I felt my body swallowed by something heavy. My breasts grew even more swollen, as if some strange organ were blooming and swelling from within my chest. Then mottled patches of black began to appear on the skin, and my fingers and toes slowly fused, hardened. When I walked, they gave off a dull, knocking sound.

I started pacing before the door all day, but he never came again.

On another moonlit night, I knelt and prayed. This time, the guardian spirit brought a circular belt, cold and rigid, casting a faint gleam under the moonlight. He said it could bind the desires I had overstepped, it was the shape of reason, the lock of innocence.

I put it on, devout as a faithful believer, but what other choice did I really have?

The condition did not improve.

My breasts had swelled to a size no body could fathom, and even the rims of my ribs began to rise. When I pressed down, warm fluid shifted beneath my fingers, spilling from the newly formed holes. Barely able to breathe, I stumbled through the panic, searching for any trace of the guardian spirit.

In the silence of unanswered prayers, I stopped looking in the mirror. But each night, when the pink light appeared, I watched in anguish as my silhouette grew closer to that of a beast, cast across the walls, vast, distorted, expanding into every corner of the room.

I was the beast coiled inside this house.

At last, the door was knocked on again.

The clamor of voices and the thud of footsteps came with the blaze of torches, turning night as bright as day. I curled up in a corner of the house, motionless, stopped breathe. until the door burstopen and I saw the boy again, with the entire village standing behind him. Shrieks filled the air as people whispered about my strange appearance.

I heard him, standing among the crowd, lifting his chin, speaking each word slowly, calling me a promiscuous beast, a shameless witch, and the milk spilling from my body was the curse bestowed by the guardian spirit.

I tried to defend myself, but all that escaped were low, hoarse whimpers. The increasingly fearful expressions on their faces told me that I was,without a doubt, a monster abandoned by the guardian spirit.

Before the black house that had once sheltered me, they dragged out the old gallows from the last century. Like some ancient ritual that had judged countless witches, I was bound to the frame.

My four enormous breasts continually spilling milky fluid. The milk gathered into warm streams, soaking the hay, feeding the flames.

Through the rising wall of flame, I saw him standing still in the center of the square, his back slowly merging with the silhouette of the guardian spirit.

After the fire died, the wind carried everything away.

But on certain nights, when moonlight pours down, some girls wake from dreams to find their breasts quietly weeping milky fluid.