I’m getting a lesson in cannibalism.
We’re in the kitchen of the expensive coworking space I’ve somehow conned my way into, and R is telling me how we will all be eating each other in twenty years. He’s been having what he describes as a “crisis of hopelessness” about AI, which he is convinced is coming for our jobs. Well, not all. He works in regenerative farming, and apparently, robots are very bad at picking berries.
“Maybe I’ll do that once my book comes out,” I muse, idyllic agrarian fantasies already taking root in my head. “Pick berries, get my hands in the dirt.”
“Berries aren’t even grown in the dirt anymore,” R interrupts. “Not here in Portugal, at least. They grow them in raised beds. If you look at the Google Earth of the Algarve, it’s just miles and miles of white.”
“White?”
“Greenhouses,” he explains.
This disturbs me so much I have to leave the kitchen. As I sit back down at my laptop, nausea tidal, I’m thinking about something you told me the other day, that there will be a food shortage next year. A third of the world’s fertilizer is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, and since it’s been stuck there all spring, farmers have been forced to plant a deficit.
I press play on the lecture I’ve been avoiding, and Derek McCormack’s voice fills my headphones, temporarily exiling these thoughts. They shove a shit in me, he says. Then another. Then another. Then another. They shove a shit in me. Then another. Then another.
My new crush E sent me this lecture. I’m impressed that in our few in-person interactions, he already knows me well enough to know I’m a freak, how much I’ll love a reading of Derek McCormack repeating the word SHIT about 200 times.
Shit, Derek McCormack says. Shit. Shit. Shit.
Soil, my brain rebuts. Fertilizer. Shit. Soil. Fertilizer. Shit.
I was cackling through the first ten minutes, but in the last ten, something worse has begun to happen.
I’ve started getting turned on.
This is unexpected. I don’t have a thing for shit, although my elevated heart rate and the sweat spooning in my armpits might say otherwise. I’d love to intellectualize my body’s current physiological response, say something about the fetishisation of taboo, that I’m feeling aroused because that which is forbidden takes on an erotic quality in abstention.
But I think it’s more simple than that. I think this is about piss. I do have a thing for piss.
I close my eyes, and suddenly I am no longer in the coworking space. I am back in Morocco, crouching in the tiled shower, as J stands above me, his brow furrowed in concentration as he aims at my chest. It’s almost more vulnerable to be the one doing it, he says, as he waits for that first gush to come. It’s very intimate when someone is watching.
When the gush finally comes, I’m not exactly aroused. Mostly I’m surprised, even a little grossed out. The smell is strong and sweet, the sensation warm and pleasant. Right after, I begin to shake so badly I can’t walk to the bed. J carries me there, and when he fucks me, I am only receptive, only an open orifice, the closest I have ever come to oblivion, to becoming one with the beloved, his insides still soaking my outside.
But that was years ago. J a blip in my life, and not a particularly good one. How has it been so long since I have named this desire? I could walk into any kink party and there’d be a dozen men willing to piss on me—and at least two much hotter women. But I don’t see the point. It’s not humiliating to let a stranger piss on you. The humiliation comes from the surrender of ego and identity before the beloved, in declaring your devotion through degradation, in being so cherished an object that you can become a toilet and still be worshipped.
Derek McCormack finishes reading and the facilitator comes back onstage to introduce the next reader, Dennis Cooper. I love Dennis Cooper, you introduced me to him two Christmases ago when we were in San Francisco visiting my family. “I love all his books,” you said, as you handed me a copy of The Sluts in City Lights Bookstore, “everyone who has ever written about the internet owes him a debt.” You’d never mentioned Dennis Cooper before, I’d never seen you read any of his novels, and I wondered, as I thumbed through the pages, where you’d been all along.
There’s this idea, the facilitator says, that if we know someone’s insides, we might also know how and what it means to really love them.
Nausea rises once more, volcanic this time. I know this is a function of arousal too, that sometimes orgasm is not the only way for the body to release itself.
I also know it’s time to go.
I walk home through the dripping heat to the apartment we rent at the top of Penha de França. You aren’t home. You’re visiting your other girlfriend, and although I want to call you and hyperventilate into the phone, I don’t. This is one of the many things I like about you having another girlfriend: how it teaches me to cut myself out of your seams.
(Other girlfriend. Is this even the correct terminology? It has been three years since I’ve been your girlfriend. I’m yoked to something heavier now).
She’s younger than me, and when you met you were already published in prestigious magazines and had a good, gentrifying job, a long cry from the line cook of twenty-four I used to share a single bed with in Galway. What you does she know? What you fucks her on her sister’s couch? Would I like him, too?
I sink my head against the cool tiles above the hob as lust leaks from me. What would you do if you came home right now, found me with my hands down my shorts? Would you know me well enough to cross to where I stand, push me onto the floor, and empty yourself onto me? I mentioned it to you once, this desire, and you seemed curious, but then I made it a test, waited for you to flunk. This is a bad pattern of ours. Your inertia, my resentments.
After a few calming breaths, I text you that I’m feeling anxious, that I’m going on a long walk. You respond that you’re proud of me for always knowing what I need.
As I walk around the city, I fantasize about piss. You pissing on me on our bed, ruining the mid-range linen sheets we bought to herald our adulthood. You pissing on me in our tiny shower, the curtain clinging to my thigh. You pissing on me in the boutique hotel in Bruges where we stayed on my thirtieth birthday, almost five years ago now, where I picked a fight because I hated your pants and you inexplicably bought me a fur coat. You pissing inside of me, after you’ve finished, continuing to fuck me as it dribbles out, turning your semen liquid and translucent. Kissing my forehead as you piss a little more, making soft, muttering noises as you push the last drops out, careful to make sure I get it all.
When I reach the top of Parque Eduardo and am sitting at the lake outside Linha d’Agua, my feet buoyant in the water, it hits me why I was so disturbed by the conversation with R: that what is grown in the beloved is always sacred, whether that’s the food in the earth or the piss in my husband.
I want that sacredness, want the divinity of your insides, to no longer choke on flavorless plastic but find nourishment in your most intimate organs. Rich with nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, all the nutrients needed to keep plants alive (the artificial cousins of which are rotting in the Strait of Hormuz), the terroir of you in the golden pee that splashes out against the porcelain toilet bowl I should probably clean more. Maybe I should be satisfied with your semen, but it’s only seen your scrotum, and if I’m to reach you, to really reach you, I need the places that are impenetrable, not just the juices you’ve swallowed but the ones that have mapped you.
I’m not the only one who has noticed this chasm. I’m thinking of B’s words about you: still waters run deep. Or C’s, some months earlier: You like that he’s mysterious. You’d get bored otherwise.
It’s true that I’m easily bored. That I’m easily restless and uncontainable. It’s true that I’m difficult and moody, that I like to be shocking to defibrillate intimacy. And it’s true what he said, too, him, when he was trying to convince me to leave you: you need to really know someone, Amelia, to love them.
A few days later, I see E again at a writing hour. As if reading my mind, he brings up emotional openness, how elusive it can be in long-term relationships. “It’s easier with someone you don’t know,” I say, and the simplicity winds me. “There’s so much less to lose.” And suddenly I understand why these words have taken seven years to leave me, why they still struggle to find their way out through my lips, out through my fingers, out through any of these tools that language has given us.
We grow, E tells me, by doing hard things, and I know he has had both hands in the ground, too.
I want to do hard things; to say these desires out loud, in intimate moments of surrender and up in front of strangers, want to live by the words you said to me, when we first started dating: your poetry shames me with its openness.
And I don’t want to shame you, but I do want this openness.
To tell you what I need while we still have jobs, while there’s still some food left in the fucking soil.
To cross the room to where you stand by the dresser, kneel down before you, take your cock in my fingers, and slip my tongue through the hole at the tip of the trunk, peel back the foreskin. Make you hard in the familiar way, aroused but still a long way from orgasm, tipping your head back as you make that small sigh of relief—a woman unhooking her bra at the end of the day—and fill my mouth with urine.
What I need is for you to feed me.
~~~
Amelia Furlong is an American writer living in Lisbon and holds an MA in Writing from the University of Galway, Ireland. Furlong’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Club Chicxulub, The Bold Italic, ROPES 2020, Strukturriss, The Racket, and others. In 2022, Furlong’s story “My Boyfriend, The Alien” was longlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize. Furlong attended the 2016 Tin House Summer Workshop in Nonfiction and, in 2026, was a writer-in-residence at the Shakespeare & Company Tumbleweed Programme. Furlong additionally writes dark academia romance novels under the name Emilia Briar Pope, the first of which is forthcoming from HarperCollins UK in 2027.
