Brain Slug Nutritional Supplement

Tales of cannibalism and ramen are generally exaggerated. Issei Sagawa did not make ramen with human flesh in 1981. Esther Choy did claim she could menstruate a better batch of ramen than other ramen chefs, but the dark broth she produced for a select clientele was achieved with pig's blood. Accounts of castaways using human bones to make stock or the ashes of a ramen chef being mixed into a broth are unfounded. Tales of women eating placenta after giving birth are less fantastic, but there is only one case of it happening, after food artist Tomie Tama gave birth to triplets in 2036.

Extraterrestrials, however, have a different relationship with food. Certain trace elements and compounds are difficult to reproduce through human foodstuffs and need to be recaptured. Normally, this is only done by accredited chefs who are licensed to work with alien remains, and the process is carefully managed. It is a biological necessity for a few extraterrestrial citizens, not a delicacy for thrillseekers and gourmands. When a brain slug budding fails, for example, the human host may ingest the remains of the slug to keep their biological material within the hive or collective. Brain slug ramen is best understood as an act of mourning.
—1,001 Ways to Cook Ramen, Appendix: The Forbidden Recipes

The old woman with the long, grey braids held her hand in front of her mouth, thumb and forefinger in a circle. She brought the circle almost to her lips, mouth open wide, then moved it about eight inches away from her, then back again.

Rachel, seated next to him, repeated the gesture. So did everyone else in the class, except Mel. The old woman noticed.

"Mr. Arkwright? Something wrong? Did you need me to demonstrate the sign again?" the old woman said, her hands moving as she signed the same as she spoke aloud.

"No," he said after a moment, fumbling the simple sign, tapping his thumb too many times. Unable to put into words his discomfort.

"Then please participate with the rest of the class," the teacher said. "You never know when you may need to ask for—"

The buzz of a set of clippers woke Mel from his sleep. Soon was curled up next to him on the twin mattress. With her back to him, he could see the slug on her neck. Now that he knew to look for it, he could see the little grey line where the second slug was budding off. The tip was dark, with little sensory tentacles, moving on its own. Only about three centimeters long now, or a third of the length of the rest of the brain slug. Mel knew it was looking at him, even as he was looking at it.

He rolled off carefully, so as not to wake his sleeping roommate. Found Rachel and Jordan in the kitchen. Jordan was seated on Rachel's chair, which had been set up on a square of newsprint to catch the hair as Rachel carefully shaved the side of her sister's head, right down to the skin. Jordan wasn't wearing clothes, though she was holding something in each hand, and Rachel was only wearing a t-shirt, and there was a time not long ago when Mel would have found that particularly strange.

Mel noticed, as Rachel moved, that she had already shaved. She noticed him notice and smiled.

"Jordan needed a haircut for work. She hasn't had one in weeks," Rachel said. "And, um."

She pointed at the fridge. Letters had been arranged there.

PLEASE SHAVE

Mel felt a new and unfamiliar anxiety. Pubes had been a fact of life for a few years now, but the sudden prospect of taking a razor to his junk had him nervous. He didn't know why. Knew thousands of men who successfully shaved their balls every day. Had seen Jordan and Soong shave each other on the couch. Yet like an idiot, he said: "Both of us?"

Jordan turned to look at him. In her hand was a pink, disposable razor, and she held it out to him.

"If you don't want to do it, I could do it for you," Rachel said with a smirk.

Mel went to take the razor, but then Jordan cocked her head and stood. She pointed to the chair. He got the message and, with a resigned grin, sat down, butt on the very edge so that his balls could dangle over the edge. Rachel got into the idea and fetched the bar of yellow soap and a wet washcloth.

There were, Mel reflected, probably people who would pay good money to have a pair of sisters rub soap onto their sack, and over their crotch, up to his navel. It wasn't lewd, exactly, though Rachel couldn't keep a smile off her face as she rubbed his scrotum, felt the soft, fragile testes within, and held them in the palm of her hand.

Jordan had a steady hand. The razor wasn't very different from the one Mel used on his face. A hard line, pressed into the skin. It pulled softly, and hair disappeared, revealing a smooth strip of skin from Mel's navel down to the root. The brain slug host repeated the gesture, not fast, but carefully, steadily. Leaving no scratches, pulling no hairs.

Then it was her turn to hold his balls in her hand. She pulled the chicken-skin taut and went very carefully. A tricky business, as Mel's lower half had grown stiff as Jordan pinched his scrote between thumb and forefinger, lifted it up to shave the underside, and finally, through a complicated gesture, got him to stand up and turn around, bent over the chair as the razor very carefully followed the hairs over his buttocks and between his cheeks.

Rachel didn't laugh. Mel could see her very carefully, not laughing, but her hand covered her own recently-shaven crotch.

"Did she give you the same treatment?" he asked.

Her smile faltered a little. More color in her cheeks.

"Yes," she said. "I, uh. Was a little uncomfortable about that at first. But really, it was no different than what I was doing to her. Just more intimate."

"Did you give each other haircuts before?" he asked. He touched his own hair, which now felt too long.

"Yeah. Not a lot of money once we got into university, you know," Rachel said, her accent momentarily thicker. "You? How did they cut hair at the orphanage?"

"Once every couple of months. The barber was this old Vietnamese guy with a toothbrush moustache, very old-school, and we'd all line up and sit in his chair. He'd give us all the same haircut, 'whether we needed it or not,' as he put it. They had a separate hairdresser for the girls. I remember when this trans kid got to stand in the girls' line for the first time; it was a big day for her."

Jordan finished up by rubbing him down with the wet hand towel. He was smooth, aside from some residual soap-scum, and oddly lighter . . . or perhaps exposed was the right word. Mel felt her hand stroke his shaft, which stood up and out, pointed at the back of the chair. He wasn't particularly surprised when he felt Jordan angle the condom over the tip.

Rachel dropped into a squat, her arms holding the chair steady as Jordan stroked him with her bare hand. His buttocks bounced slightly as the brain slug host tugged at him, the fingers of her right hand rubbing him up and down, always squeezing a little tighter around the sensitive crest of his glans. Mel stared into her sister's face, and Rachel's cheeks were burning bright, her grin unfeigned.

"You know, I love how expressive you are when you get close," she said, and their lips almost touched. "When you start to lose control. I always wonder if I make a face like that when I c—"

His body jerked. Their noses collided, slipped past each other. Not hard enough for teeth to hit teeth, but hard enough that Rachel's tongue pushing into his mouth was a shock. Jordan kept stroking him as Mel's shaft jumped hard enough to hit his stomach, filling the reservoir at the end of the condom with thick, white spurts. Rachel stared into his eyes the whole time.

It was weird, walking to work with Jordan again. Rachel had to take the book to university, Soong was still staying home. The two of them walked side by side now, and Mel resisted the urge to try to take her hand, not sure if that was the right thing to do. She stared straight ahead, face as placid and untroubled as ever, a long shirt on beneath her Cosmic Fill-Up work shirt, to help protect against the cool breeze.

Ha-Yoon smiled and welcomed Jordan back as the pair checked in. Tomie and Bobbie were already there. The same familiar assignments for the day: Jordan behind the counter, Mel cleaning, replacing receipt paper, stocking shelves. It felt like a return to normalcy. To the way things had been weeks ago, before the mess with Antonio, before Rachel had come by. Mel relaxed into his work. There was a simple satisfaction to be had from a clean toilet, even if he knew the situation was only temporary.

During lunch, the brain slug hosts all sat together. Jordan and Tomie were across the table from one another, and from a pocket, his roommate withdrew the condom Mel had filled that morning; Tomie accepted it, their hands touching and remaining in contact for perhaps a moment too long. Communicating a message in the way that brain slugs did.

Except Ha-Yoon noticed.

"Hey, red shirt, I need some help in the stock room," was how it started. Once the door was closed, the grilling started.

"Is Jordan on ****?" the manager asked, point-blank.

It was a cramped space that smelled sweet and dry. In the overhead lights, the gold stars in Ha-Yoon's eyeballs almost seemed to sparkle.

"No?" Mel asked, the confusion making it come out as more of a question than he'd intended, as if unsure.

"Is she dealing ****? Did Soong get some painkillers or something from the doctor, and now she's selling them?" Ha-Yoon pressed. "I saw her pass something to Tomie."

"No, and no," Mel said. "It's not a ****, it's a . . . brain slug nutritional supplement."

The improvised line came out sounding rather professional. Ha-Yoon raised an eyebrow, her mouth set in a grim line.

"Explain," she said.

"It's about that feral brain slug that came in the other week," Mel said. "Her name's Natalie. Her brain slug needs a lot of specialized nutrition to help her out. The Seacouver Hive is helping the Collective with her nutritional needs. It's nothing illegal. All organic protein."

Another ad-lib. And technically true, as far as Mel figured. At least, if Tomie was doing anything else with his sperm samples, Mel had no idea what that was. With a frown, he realized that they might do absolutely anything with them. Hell, they could be using them to impregnate women and make their human/brain slug hybrid for all he knew. That was something that Mel decided he would need to ask Jordan about. Later.

Ha-Yoon crossed her arms in front of her chest.

"Would you tell me if Jordan was dealing ****?" she asked.

Mel considered that.

"I don't know. She's my roommate. And kinda my girlfriend now? It's complicated."

As Ha-Yoon's eyes went wide and her tight line of a mouth twisted up at the corners, Mel realized he had said too much.

"Girlfriend? You? And her? What about her sister?" she asked.

"Rachel is also sort of my girlfriend. It's complicated. I mean, it's not really that complicated, we had this talk about it the other day—" he began.

"Oh, this I have to hear," Ha-Yoon said, her managerial instincts about ****-dealing employees completely sidelined by juicy gossip and Mel's own evident discomfort in talking about his sex life and romantic relationships.

The story, or at least as much of it as Mel was willing to tell, came out in fits and starts to probing questions and wild, rampant speculations. Until Ha-Yoon was finally satisfied that she had the shape of the thing.

"You," she said. "Managed to accidentally land yourself a polycule."

"I guess? I think I need to read more about that," Mel said. Then, he sensed an opening. "How are James and Autumn?"

Ha-Yoon sighed and rolled her eyes. "Well, Autumn is still healing from her fissure, and that means I'm largely tackling James on my own. Of course, Autumn doesn't want to be left out, so I'm handling both of them at once, or trying to. Autumn has been working at this lesbian newspaper and wants me to go with her to this after-work thing, but it's going to be at a bar, and I just got my sixty-day sobriety chip, and I don't need that kind of temptation, so I suggest James goes with her, but Autumn's workmates don't know she's in a throuple, so—"

It was good for another ten thousand words. Mel lent a sympathetic ear. Sometimes it helped to listen to other people's problems to put his own in perspective.

As they left the Cosmic Fill-Up to walk home, Mel smiled at Jordan and said:

"I know I haven't really said this, and I should have before now, but I really like you. I appreciate everything you do for me. Would you like to hold hands on the way back?"

Jordan paused. She stared at the outstretched hand. Then, almost shyly, she slipped her palm into his. There was no tingle of electric contact, no soft whisper in the back of his brain. The semi-translucent slug on her neck shifted, eyespots watching their backs.

They walked home together like that.