Of course you must learn to love, to
love always and love entirely and to be wounded by nothing so much
as the violence of your own love. You must learn to be confused but
never disappointed by a deficiency of love.
- How To Be A Dog, Andrew Kane

Thanks to gravytape for the once over when this was a lot more rough <3

Your mother is your mother and your father is a beast. It has been this way since you were born but you think it has been since before you were born. People speak of fathers and your tongue gets stuck between your teeth; debris, bits of flesh and you and blood that makes it hard for you to speak. People speak of fathers and you want to tell them he is already dead long before he is. People speak of fathers and you are back in your father’s house and he is stumbling between the empty rooms calling out for you for your brother for your mother for his own mother and you choose not to answer him and wait to see what room he loses himself in. People speak of fathers and you think of your mother.

Nail beds blue and the bloodless knuckles and you had thought her hand would be soft, easy to fold into yours like it was when she slept, but they weren’t and you had sat yourself on the floor, knees to chin, and you kept your fingers loose around hers, sick at the back of your throat but knowing it’s worse to let her go and you watched the low winter sun move over the floor and over your bare feet and beside you and up the wall until the light outside dimmed and went out and the dark fell over you and your eyes got used to it, the dark, and your hand got used to it, the burn up your arm, the pinch at your elbow, and you would stay there forever, you were sure, and you could not look at her. Maybe it was not her but another woman, with her same face and her same clothes, who snuck into your home and died on her bed and you were sitting with another kind of beast, another kind of monster, and she would find you here, horrified at the mess in her room and the stranger in her bed and at you, for sitting here all this time with it.

Your brother, yelling down the house for her—mama it’s fucking cold in here mama I am hungry mama mama mama pour me a drink mama—and his drunken brutish body lumbering through the hallways and your father’s home is it’s own beast, it’s own gaping maw that eats and eats and is never full, and you pulled yourself tighter to the bed, tighter to her bent arm, when you saw the light spread thin under the closed door, the odd shapes of his shadow stretching towards you. You cover your eyes before he opens the door. You split your fingers, you look. His body heavy and leaning, he finds you first, all the lights on now and you realize you hurt all over and you don’t know why, you can’t find where the ache even started and how it has stretched into every crevice and corner of you, it’s on you and in you and it’s holding you to the floor and there is a strain to his mouth, a cruel and senseless thing he wants to say to you, that he is often saying to you, before he sees her, too.

At her funeral, the old floorboard beneath your feet creaking when you shifted your balance. You spent most of the service trying to place your feet so no sound would disrupt it. You had gone to her casket and looked at her lovely white face and the lipstick someone had spread on her thin lips and you had reached towards her to fix the cross around her neck, two fingers slipping beneath the fine gold chain to fix it, lay it smooth on her chest, gentle the dip in her collarbone. Your matching pendant underneath your suit jacket, your buttoned shirt. You did not reach for it once. Your father had picked the wrong dress. It was not her favourite, not the one she put on to sway through the house, when her mind was clear and vivid; when you would wake in the late morning and she was out of bed with music playing and your breakfast cooling on a plate on the table, when an old friend called for dinner and drinks and you could smell her perfume from her room and you would linger outside her closed door to listen to her hum to herself, to memorize her scent and her sound, when she decided she needed to get out of your father’s house and take you by the wrist and tell you, let’s go shopping, let’s go eat something terrible for us, just you and me, Ilyushka. You will never tell him this.

Your inadequacy of language. Your inability to speak. The dogs yipping and barking all night under your window and you never know what they want—food, company, blood, teeth. You maybe never learned to say what you needed to. That no one would understand if you tried, you and your dog mouth. Twice, your brother strikes you on the mouth: back of his hand, the sharp rap of his knuckles to your teeth, so irritated with your refusal to do what he asks. You don’t know what he wants from you. Your mind turns frantic, snags on the words you do not have the means to say.

Your father is a beast and you are part father. You are part myth, part homeland, part black earth soil, part unfinished word. You want to say, I think my father saw something terrible in me the day I was born. You want to say, I think my father has known me better than I have ever known myself. You want to say, I think my father saw himself in me. You stand in the shape you have been made into and the rest moves to you. Your father asks you anything, you turn to face him. He holds out his hand, you rise to meet it. His hand, mighty and guiltless, on the back of your neck, on the side of your face, on your shoulder. He never hurt you, not once. Your body is nothing but hurt. 

Your father is a beast and so you lay yourself carefully in the mouths of many men, any that will have you. You know how to hold yourself so their teeth don't cut your skin. You fit yourself to molars of men that move through your father's house to drink his vodka and hear his stories and you look sidelong at the medals on his walls. You tuck yourself into the cheeks of the coaches who rattle the cage of your helmet, hiss through their sharp teeth what they want of you. You spread your body across the tongues of the boys on your team, move with the pitch of their foul talk, their locker room howling, let yourself roll over them. You are good at lying still. You are good at playing dead. You are good at not saying anything when they bite through your skin. You are good letting other mouths speak for you. Now that you know it you can know it no other way.

Skate to ice, blade to puck, the phone still ringing and a voice on the other line speaking to you as if you are young or stupid or do not understand your own language. Maybe you don’t, in that moment, being told your father is dead. Maybe you have lost all capacity to speak or know the language you were raised in. It has been so long since you spoke. Your father did not know a thing about hockey except that you were good, he could never teach you a thing you did not know and you listened to him every time he spoke to you. Your mother, her fur coat, dim shivery dusk through the streets, her small hand reaching for yours. You went with her everywhere. Her hands were never warm and you would wrap both of yours over hers, blow between your cupped fingers, rub them to warmth between yours. She would touch your cheek, the back of your head, her fingers cold against your skin.

Your back, your shoulders, your neck, hard and vicious off the boards, down onto ice. You are thirteen years old, your mother a year dead, and your body has grown beyond you, your long legs you've gained over the summer and your balance is gone and you lose yourself more than you have it. When the other boy hits you, you go down hard, easy. Hot pricks of humiliation at the corner of your eyes. You want to press your face to the ice. You spend too long down there, you know. They send the medical assistant out. You grit your teeth enough that your hear a click in your jaw, pinch at your cheekbone, beneath your ear. You do not need him, you don't need anything, you want to be left to get up on your own. You know you have to get up on your own. Your teammate’s arm under yours, his glove awkward and bulky over your wrist. Your father, arms folded over broad chest, his pale eyes, his mean slash of a mouth. You are taller than him, now, by enough. You still tuck your chin to your chest when he talks to you. You can feel his hand on the back of your neck even after you have buried him. He wants to know if you are ashamed. You were born with shame in you, inherited from your mother, your mother's mother. You have spent much of your life swallowing down anything that could cure you of it. Made yourself sick on it.

Behind your house, in the alley below your bedroom window the street dogs would scuff their noses through the garbage looking for scraps. They fought when the street lights came on and you would lie awake, transfixed and scared, listening to them. In the morning, you look for the thin trail of dried blood over the ground, the spray of it up against the wall, drying in thin rivulets through the graffiti. Your mother and the cigarette between her lips, filter stained pink from her lipstick she sometimes wore, speaking low and steady to the mange-ridden beastly ones, their crooked nails scraping at the stone, the valleys of their ribs as they panted hot and sour over her outstretched hand, their ratlike tails swaying. Those dogs, their constant whimpering and their bitten off ears, upset you. You couldn’t look at them, not for long, didn’t want to see the glint of their yellow teeth, their narrow slack jaws, the blood seeping out from sores that you know will still be there in the morning. She knew which ones were hungry enough to risk violence for an overcooked piece of meat, all the fat and gristle. They crawl, bellies to the ground, to her, begging. She turns to you, that look on her face that makes you want to apologize to her. She holds out the meat for you to take and you put it in your palm, turn your face from their wet noses, their warm tongues. They eat.

Dirty beasts, your father spat later. Your father hated them, the dogs that hung around all the time now, as much as he hated anything your mother did. He would kick his leg wide and clumsy at them, cigarette turning to ash between his thumb and finger, and they would scatter back down the alley, panting, staring back at you, as if expecting you to do something about any of this.

It’s your tongue, your teeth, your pink wet gums you pick clean. You bare your blunt white mouth and they lay themselves readily, happily, at your feet and you can’t remember when you stopped being the hand and started being the mouth. You move your body spectral half-life through streets well known to you and light your cigarettes in the sallow glow of snow banks at street corners, your feet constantly cold, boots full of snow. The world moves at you and around you, narrowly missing you with jostling shoulders and shuffling aimless feet and the distant sounds of voices. You want people to like you, to want you, even for a minute, an hour. Forever. You see yourself this way: wretched dog cowering to the floor.

Beast, dog, mutt, boy.

Her thin fingers, the flesh under her nails pale blue, without fail clean and trimmed. She would put your wrist between her knees, her slim body hunched over yours, her whetted shoulders, her ridged spine at her nape, pushing the cuticles back with a plastic tool, trimming down your nails, she was devotional about the tidiness of your hands and hers, the ones she made the sign of the cross with in the corner of the kitchen, the ones she clasped together at her bedside down at her knees by the floor where your father would not see her. Her nails had been trimmed at her funeral. They had cut her nails too short.

His blunt bitten down nails. You notice them all the time, his hand spread wide on the bed beneath him, beside him, fisted into the pillow, the sheets. Pink and the white under the nails. His hands were warm every time you touched them. You have tried so hard to keep your hands clean. You have gotten good at picking it all from between your teeth.

You get him beneath you and he is good, so good for you. He is brilliant, flushed from chest to cheek in his warm-pink glow, sprawled under you where you have come to learn the shape of him, path mapped of his body by the flat of your hand, the tips of your fingers digging into the softest parts of him, your thumb fit to the crease at his hip and thigh, the fold at his armpit where you nose at his clean sweat, his deodorant, the course patch of hair you put your mouth and face to. His hand slapping blindly at yours to take your fingers to his own mouth and you are hungry, starving. Like a dog. Sick to your stomach with it. Your body moves senseless, all noise, all instinct, you don’t know yourself when he makes these sounds, your fingers hooked around his bottom teeth, hi lip pinched between, every noise from him hushed and obscene, his tongue slick and warm against your fingers with each heavy breath out. He closes his eyes, sighing happy; he scrunches up his nose, shivering. You can’t stop looking at him. When he comes, he tenses, pulls his body taut, his shoulders rise to his ears and you feel it through your whole body, in your ribs and the back of your head like a punch, like a shot, and you listen to his breath coming in punctuated gasps, then a keening so pretty and indistinct that stretches long and slow and you bow your body over him, your thrusts gone indelicate, crude, grab at his chin and his face and kiss him, ugly and inelegant, feel his teeth under your tongue. You sink whole-body into him. You have never been so hungry.

You thought he would be the one to lay himself willingly across your tongue. You thought it would be you with the sharp teeth, the open mouth. You know now that you are putting yourself at his feet. After your mother died, the dogs still came to your door. Scratching and whimpering, wanting your food, your hand, your touch. You had shouted at them; anything you could get your blind furious hand on, you threw at them: a stick, a rock, a broken piece of the step where your mother used to sit. Their tongues hanging, their tails tucked, their unblinking weepy eyes, hungry and in love with you. They would not leave—they did not know you in this way, hating them, hating their smell and the sight of them, their pathetic wants, their need for your affection you felt you would never be able to give. You know it will be your body between the teeth. You wait for him to open his mouth.

Title comes from the same poem as in the beginning notes. I apologize if the diminutive of Ilya used in this fic is incorrect.

I am captivated by this man and all the things we don't know about him. I want to pick away at him forever. Thank you so much for reading. You can come see me be a lot less put together on tumblr.