By Cheyenne Mann
7
Time Eater opens his mouth. He is not ashamed yet. The music is sweet, the cake is loud, and Time Eater, at seven years old, only knows the pale joy of yellow buttercream frosting and heart palpitations. A partially animatronic rat man with a neon purple guitar has been tailing him for the last half of the party, and the mask skin, gray and fuzzy as static, sends his heart into a fizzy stutter. He doesn’t trust anything with man-made eyes. It’s why he doesn’t talk to children with glasses or anyone with an ophthalmology degree. He doesn’t know what they see when they look at him. What’s clearer: 1 or 2? He knows himself so well, too well, world’s leading expert on the rancid Time Eater. The unknown version of him curdles his brain. He hates people who are not mirrors. He hates a lot for a seven-year-old.
It’s not Time Eater’s birthday. He does not know the birthday girl. He can’t remember her name because he’s never met her. He’s only just met himself. The girl is turning maybe four, maybe five? The balloons at the party only show the Rat Man’s face. Stupid corporate child joy. On the table there is a polyethylene bag of two round goldfish set in a cruel bowl. Time Eater is looking forward to seeing how fat they get. He hopes he’s not around when the sallow things ignore the earth’s magnetic pole, when they go belly up. When their gold melts into pale yellow.
The birthday party is at one of those gambling halls for kids, where the colors suck up all the light, but not the noise. Children of various ages are screaming and every other minute the Big Wheel Fishing Game bellows for them to Reeeeel ‘errrrr innnnn. The party is tucked away in a sad corner with golden tinfoil garlands and tablecloths that feel more like rubber gloves than fabric. Time Eater likes places like this, where the liminality grows wisdom teeth. Where time and place fold in on themselves and even gravity has emotions.
An adult lights the candles on the yellow cake. It is time to sing. Time Eater is a consumer. He knows this about himself. At seven he knows himself better than most adults. He could recognize himself by the bottom of his left sole, by the lining of his liver, by the age rings in his baby teeth. And oh, Time Eater is eager to sing. Wants to so badly he feels the ache tighten in his shoulder blades. He is eager to expel something beautiful from his mouth, rather than taking everything else in.
The song ends too soon, and the birthday girl blows out all of her candles on the first try. Her dark hair smears flat across a sweaty face. She is excitement pink, and her smile is thick with a malice she still needs to grow into.
After cake, she opens a purple grow-your-own hydrangeas kit. She opens a large remote control mail truck with a heart painted on the side. She opens a bright blue bag full of two intoxicatingly simple fish. Her teeth are so clean Time Eater sees his reflection in them. He wonders what her name is as he hands her the present he brought.
He’s proud of the present. He got it all by himself because he is too independent to be seven. He doesn’t remember where or how he got it, but he doesn’t care as that is neither here nor now. The gift isn’t wrapped, but it’s beautiful enough without a paper shell. The girl smiles at him all soft at the sight of the white silk dress-up gloves he got her. They’re meant for an adult, and they hang off her like a second skin, but when he tells her she is beautiful in them the lights in her teeth dance up into her eyes and Time Eater realizes the Rat Man isn’t the only one who can send his heartbeat spiraling.
Do you want to be my friend? The girl asks Time Eater shyly.
Yes. Yes, he does. Even more than he wants to sing happy birthday to her again.
Only if you help me hide from the Rat Man.
Deal. She says and ducks underneath the plastic tablecloth with him. They eat a slice of cake on the floor, together. Time Eater is young and the joy curled up in his sternum starts to bloom.
Right now he is happy, but in a minute or an hour or maybe tomorrow he will blink his eyes open to the new light and this girl will be seventeen, or off to college, or maybe it will be her wedding day and she will be eating cake with yellow buttercream frosting, or maybe she will be seventy and dying and Time Eater will be sad because he won’t care about her anymore because he doesn’t have the time to care about the dead.
And he likes caring about her.
But none of that matters right now because that is the future and the future is not now. Time Eater tries not to eat up the Now. Watches the girl spill frosting on her gloves.
The Rat Man lifts the tablecloth. Finds them. Bastard. He reaches a lanky arm down and ruffles Time Eater’s hair. He thinks he might cry or scream or laugh. Instead, he opens his mouth. He eats the Rat Man’s time up. It’s an intrinsic behavior. He’s still so young at it, new to it, he hoped he could scrape away a life without any Time Eating at all. It’s cruel and it makes his molars sing. This is where his shame begins. He hates being intentional, but he hates the Rat Man more.
27
I love you, Time Eater tells his wife at their wedding. He writes his own vows because he likes the agency and she is beautiful and he still cannot believe she is his. She does not write any vows at all, but that is ok because Time Eater has enough to say for the both of them. He’s always been good at opening his mouth.
His wife looks like a pale bumblebee, all puff and fuzz and sting. Her feathered dress is short and light yellow. Almost a cream, really. So thick and syrupy Time Eater could bend over and drink it right off her, if he really wanted. And oh, does he want. Her dark hair is twirled up with silver and clips and hope, but strands of it still stick to her sweaty face, like when they were kids. Time Eater takes in his wife. Takes in the long, lean legs. Athletes’ calves toned from years of soccer, shaved clean of the usual fuzzy hair that glimmers gold in the evening sun. Twelve moles on her right arm. Two on her left. Indicative of the radiation pooling on one side of her. Proof she likes to lift her sharper side to the sun.
I love you like flies love an open mouth. Like sugar loves dehydration. Like canaries love gas stoves.
Time Eater’s wife pats his cheek, softly. Her hands are cold and gloved, the white lace tickling Time Eater’s cheekbones. They’re the same gloves he gave her when they were both small and frosting-drunk and hiding from now-dead Rat Men. The fabric sags and doesn’t reach all the way to her elbows anymore, but the gloves are hers and always have been. Just like Time Eater.
He wishes he could live in this moment forever, spend the rest of always with only the firm hand of his beloved pressed to his face. That isn’t feasible though. Time is never a location. He knows this, but hates it. Dumb, naive Time Eater with his Now addiction.
You may now kiss the bride.
He blinks. Doesn’t know how or when he got to this moment. Misses his wife’s hand on his cheek. Only realizes it’s gone in the absence. In the left behind. In the moment after a canary goes silent. He kisses her, closed mouthed, and still.
He is a joy warble. A bird song. After the ceremony, he stands next to his wife as she talks and laughs with all her brutal friends. Sally Remington compliments her dress, and she glows brighter than silk.
There’s not much to do since she won’t dance with him. He wanted a karaoke machine for the afterparty, but his wife said no and he’d do anything for her, even keep his mouth closed. Even never sing again. He is grateful to spend another clipped celebration with his wife. No Rat Men are present this time, but there are goldfish. One on each table in a terribly small bowl. A living centerpiece.
After the service, some of the catering staff whisper about it. They call it cruel. Throw rude glances at his wife that Time Eater will not allow. So he eats their time. He isn’t proud of it. Call it nerves. Heightened emotions on a reactive day. Call it true love.
When he is full, Time Eater asks his wife if the goldfish will be ok. He asks what will happen to the little creatures, but she just flashes him her teeth, his weakness, and says not to worry about it. She wants the goldfish at the wedding. She wants Time Eater at the wedding. He can’t argue with her when her lips are all sugar and coal mine and his, his, his.
37
He is thirty-seven and the dinner table is set with the good china, the white plates with dark blue crisping around the edges. They are having spaghetti, and he thinks his wife might hate him. Or at the very least, she might love others. She’s having an affair with the mailman, and she doesn’t wear her gloves anymore. Not even with her Sunday best. Her hands are cold, but she hates the feeling of her fingers being trapped. Time Eater reaches across the table for her palms, but she misreads his action and hands him the salt.
Thank you, he says and smiles.
Time Eater loves his wife. He forgets to buy her flowers on Valentine’s Day and her birthday and the 20-year anniversary of her favorite goldfish’s death. Time Eater’s favorite food is his wife’s spaghetti, she blends carrots in the sauce for added sweetness. He crunches too al dente noodles between his teeth. Garlicky and sharp. Salty supernovas. Time Eater tells people he is happy, but what he really is, is starving.
Time Eater does not want to be a Time Eater, he wants to be a man, but most men do not get what they want, and he tells himself this is close enough to becoming. He tries to fill in the gaps with other man things. He buys a hat that he hangs up on a hook by the door when he gets home from work every day. He calls out Honey, I’m home! when he sees his wife.
Time Eater wants his wife to love only him. This is such a human want. She doesn’t. This is such a human tragedy. He hates the hurt. Loves the human. He will never be a man, his teeth are too sharp, they catch seconds and decades and eons too easy, like flies on yellow sticky paper
Later that night he kisses his wife, close-mouthed, on the cheek and compliments her hair and her dusting abilities. She is quite bad at dusting, but Time Eater wants to love her. Time Eater wants a lot for a thirty-seven-year-old. Dust is a small enough thing to forget. It’s dead skin. And Time Eater always forgets the dead.
47
Time Eater does not describe himself as handsome. He has fallen into age. Tricky thing, a body is. So eager to fail. This body has not learned how to listen to his brain, yet. It listens to time. Like how Time Eater’s little pet bird listens to the weather channel anchor’s voice, but not to Time Eater’s voice. The bird falls silent when he turns the TV on. Time Eater’s wife says the weather channel anchor is handsome. Sometimes Time Eater thinks if he could Time Eat through the television, he would.
What I’d give to be alone in the greenroom with him! She says and shriek-laughs.
The man, in his opinion, is quite plain and his hair is too stiff. Time Eater doesn’t understand it, but he also doesn’t understand goldfish weddings or Rat-Man birthdays, so he holds his tongue. Keeps his mouth closed. He’s learned they’re both a lot happier when his mouth is closed. Crunches his lips into a long, thin strip of matter.
Time Eater’s wife’s lips are swollen from her afternoon with the mailman, while Time Eater was away at work. Time still doesn’t stop for him, but at least there is the bird and at least he still gets the scraps of his wife she leaves for him in the evenings when she is dizzy on her yellowed wine and the TV static drowns out her rumbling thoughts.
At least there is spaghetti.
Time Eater’s wife thinks he is handsome. She tells him every day and the word catches in his chest. The repetition becomes a new organ. Handsome relief. An emotion growing at the base of his esophagus. She likes him. She thinks he is pretty. She keeps him small, like a goldfish in a bowl. Her mailman is not a sign of Time Eater’s failing, but a reminder his wife is even more voracious than he is. That her hunger is lined with a barbarism she doesn’t mean. She is intentional when she is cruel, and she, at least, semi-loves her handsome Time Eater.
Time Eater feels every inch of his own always-hunger. So he bears his wife’s lust-whims. Holds his wife’s empty gloves instead of her hands when he is lonely and misses her. They’re tucked in the front pocket of his button-up shirt. They always are. One day her hands will start to lose circulation, and he will be there to warm her. One day. He doesn’t know when. He doesn’t know the future, he only eats it.
His wife likes his hair, blonde curls, and his eyes, dark blue, and she, when she is in the right mood, traces the seams where his muscles melt into bone and laughs at the way he shivers. You’re so shy sometimes, she tells him in a sucrose-yellow voice. She is caramelized sugar. Something beyond sweet, crunching up at the edges. He is hunger and dehydration and every tragic form of want.
You blush like you’re giving up everything when I look at you, she says.
I am.
What is everything, to you?
You, he says, and it feels like an admission of guilt.
She hums appreciatively.
Later that evening when they, again, are eating their spaghetti dinner together, Time Eater braves himself to ask her that same question.
What is everything to you? Time Eater asks. He doesn’t want to know the answer.
His wife thinks about this. Opens her mouth.
Goldfish, she says. Pleasure.
Sally Remington down the street got glasses last week. Time Eater tells his wife, and she grins, malicious as all get out.
Good. That bitch will get what’s coming to her one of these days. I can’t even stand to look at her anymore.
Neither can I. Time Eater says, and when he opens his mouth to eat his spaghetti, it is cold.
…
Time Eater’s wife peers through the window and grins as Sally Remington screams, devastated, in her front yard. Every one of her hydrangeas is dead. She sinks to her knees surrounded by the crispy balloon corpses. Sally Remington’s house was passed down to her. Those flowers have been alive longer than she has. A passion project from her long-dead mother. Now the flowers themselves are dead too.
Yesterday, Time Eater’s wife hid empty bleach cans in the garage.
That will teach her to mind her own business, Time Eater’s wife says smugly to him.
They’re both nearly fifty and while Time Eater never had a taste for revenge, his wife seeks it out like it is a fish’s infinite reflection on the inside of a bowl.
What was it this time?
She says rude things about our garden, says our grass is too long, and the apple tree out back has a weird-shaped gnarl. Well, how’s she like having an ugly yard? I bet she wishes her grass was long now. Her grass is dead.
Because humans would rather have imperfection than death. Because humans think they can bargain their way out of anything. But they can’t. Just like Time Eater can’t brain his way into personhood. So he pretends not to notice the way a chemical scent faintly clings onto the tired red wisps of her clothing.
Time Eater’s wife takes his lack of response for distaste (always misreading him) (always taking).
You don’t like her either, she snarls at him. Throws her words at the ground like they’ll break with the good china. Like breaking is what scares Time Eater.
No, I don’t. Time Eater agrees. Sally Remington is probably weeping, but he can’t tell, can’t see her eyes clear enough from underneath her glasses. He doesn’t look closely when he opens his mouth to eat her time. It tastes stale anyway. Doesn’t leave him very full. But he does it for his wife, because she hates her and hate is human.
Time Eater’s wife is cruel and vindictive and sneaky and always gets what she wants, but she is so beautiful and charismatic that when she speaks even the dust bunnies turn to listen. Even the canary quiets for a minute. Time Eater gives her anything she wants. Even the mailman. Time Eater is a dust bunny like that.
The mailman is beautiful too, like Time Eater. In the eyes of Time Eater’s wife, at least. Unlike Time Eater, he is human. He looks like Time Eater, but fuller. His shoulders are broader, his skin more sun-spotted. His hair is straight and clipped closer to the tender scalp. When the mailman blinks, the world doesn’t shift forward fifty years. When he kisses Time Eater’s wife, he doesn’t worry about opening his mouth too wide. One day, back when the whole thing started, Time Eater kissed his wife, and she tasted like pine aftershave and beeswax. Now Time Eater knows what the mailman tastes like.
Time Eater fantasizes, sometimes. He knows he shouldn’t, but he can’t help it. He wishes the mailman would kiss him, too. Wishes anyone would see him and know him and want him and only him, still. But everyone always wants more all the time. That is what it means to be human. Time Eater only thinks about kissing the mailman when he is sad. When he is anything else he fantasizes about the color of the man’s gravestone. Killing the mailman. What a terrible thought. What horrible proof that Time Eater has grown into his nature. He wanted to avoid it, but no one can avoid time forever. Not even Time Eater. Not even death.
…
When the mailman knocks on his door on a random Wednesday in June, asking about his wife, Time Eater lets him in. His wife isn’t home, she’s with Sally Remington’s husband picking out new flower seeds at the nearby supermarket.
Time Eater sits the mailman down on their yellow sofa, gives him a young glass of aged wine, and kisses him. He doesn’t hold back. Not like with his wife. His mouth is open wide, as wide as it can go, the mailman kisses him back just as hungrily. He does taste like beeswax. Like pine. His tongue is spongy and soft and Time Eater feels terribly ashamed.
He kisses the man. His heart feels too light. As if it fell out from behind his clavicles. Like a shooting star or a piece of debris or a goldfish floating up dead. He pulses. Feels new and obtrusive, in a way. Feels every centimeter of the mailman’s open mouth against his, veins shot through like snake tongues. The heart, an unswallowable thing. Time Eater kisses the mailman. He kisses him and he kisses him and he eats every last little bit of the mailman’s time.
57
Time Eater’s wife has grown quiet in the past ten years since the mailman died. She’s frailer. Weaker. Nicer. All the things that indicate a human body is being bad at its job. She is cold. She wears her gloves again. He wonders if it’s because the mailman’s lips had healing properties. He wonders if it’s because his lips stamp expiration dates.
I’m hungry, thinks the Time Eater when he and his wife are at church one Sunday. His narrow gut aches. Pulls like sad gravity. He sits, quiet in his pew, opens his hymn book to the correct page. He sings but keeps his voice quiet enough that his wife does not hear. Keeps his voice quiet enough so it is lost in the crowd. What a human thing. To be lost.
Time Eater loves church, but he loves going home more. The canary always sings when he walks through the door. It’s a new one. Pale. A buttercream yellow.
Church, his wife, and his bird. Time Eater is so full of love, he hurts.
This canary is the seventh canary he has owned in his life. He loves the small creatures, but they keep dying out on him so fast. It’s probably his fault. He has a bad habit of singing along with them. Maybe he opens his mouth a bit too far.
This canary is sweet and gentle and melancholy. It’s just the same as him.
We’re the warnings, he whispers in its bird-ear. We are the bearer of bad news, the shot messenger. Only, you can sing, and maybe that is why they forgive you. I forgive you for dying one day and leaving me, because I love you and I am happy now. And now is all I know.
He kisses the bird’s head, and it sighs. Happy. He is the only one who has ever kissed this bird. The bird loves only him. Him and no one else. When Time Eater grins, his mouth falls open.
67
Time Eater cannot tell you what his wife looks like unless he is looking at her. This is how he knows she is dying. He can never bring himself to care about the dead.
He doesn’t remember her face, but he knows she is beautiful and witty and cruel and loves goldfish with more acres of her heart than she loves him. The surgeon came in earlier. Said her heart was broken. That it was all mangled and wrong and pale, like a bloated goldfish. Time Eater holds his wife’s hand and gently tssssks at her.
That is not what a heart is supposed to be, he chides. She should know better. Time Eater would give her his heart if he could. But he can’t. He’s not sure if he has one.
His wife moans in pain and he cannot stop the solar flare of jealousy that consumes him. At least she is human. At least she is a flicker, a taker, an eager sugar-biter. All he is is an eon hoarder and a failed heart surgeon. He’s no better than a Rat Man. Time Eater does not care if she lives or dies. But, oh, he wants to care. This is what crushes him.
The sky out the hospital window flushes with the clean fracture of day. The clouds are pink. Gum pink. Gingivitis. Infected. Like they haven’t seen the dentist in half a decade. Like someone smeared roadkill across the sky with a paint knife.
Time Eater glances at his wife again. Her image is bleeding into the sunset now. Her hair flows behind her, clouds, wine dark tendrils in a sky of honey. Time Eater feels every warm color a person can see rise up in his chest, revolt, and burn to nothing. Grief, like a child’s birthday party.
He knows what he is meant to do. His job. His canary.
Time Eater opens his mouth and his wife dies.
It’s against his usual protocol, but Time Eater allows himself one posthumous minute to feel. He sobs, screams, cries. Enough tears to wash all the buttercream frosting off every cake that has ever been made.
He thinks he may be tasteless for an eternity without her. She is salt-water. Is starch soaked. Pain hits him like boiling water after all the pasta has been removed. Like a sauce with no carrots to sweeten its tang.
His wife made him a man. How would he be a man without her? Whose cheek would he kiss? Where would he hang his hat? She was a lovely thing, so ruthless and demanding and she made him feel so real because her cruelty made him sad, and he knew if he was sad, he was a man. If he was sad, he was real. And real things weren’t perpetual. Not like Time Eater. Not like his concrete brain and intangible desires. He just wants to be a real man. A real boy. Pinocchio sorrow. A universe where he never knows the past or the future, where the only moment he feels is right now. And right now, Time Eater loves his beautiful wife for the last time.
When he returns to himself, he is floaty inside. Like a word, unwritten.
Oh well, thinks Time Eater. That was fun.
7
Time Eater peels the long white gloves off the body lying in the bed. He can’t remember its name, but it seems old. For a human. Time Eater doesn’t normally see things as old, not even dust or space or 37-year-olds, but this body reeks of age-rot. He wonders if it’s his handiwork that destroyed it. He hopes not. It’s an impressive job and he does not want to be that cruel. He does not want to learn how to be ashamed.
He doesn’t like the way his new young body feels as the bones contract. He hates bodies. He hates a lot for a seven-year-old.
The only thing he knows how to do to a body, is destroy it. For good reason. It’s his job. Down to the curl of his toes. This doesn’t make it any less spine-numbingly painful so Time Eater finds his apathy again.
There’s a Chuck-E-Cheese holding a birthday party at a mall twelve miles south of the hospital. There’s a pet store on the way. Maybe he can get the birthday girl two presents. Gloves and fish. Time Eater puffs out his chest, proud. He is nothing if not devoted.
A bird lands on a branch outside the hospital window. A crow with black feathers. Opposite-yellow. One for sorrow. It has a small fish in its mouth.
You’re not a man either, Time Eater thinks.
It swallows the fish and opens its beak to caw. Sings as best and loud as it can. Time Eater grins, sees his teeth reflected back in the dull bird eyes. He wants to sing too. Time Eater opens his mouth.
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Cheyenne Mann is an experimental surrealist fiction writer from Iowa. They’re a two-time winner of the Iowa Chapbook Prize (2021, 2022), the recipient of the 2025 Robert Coover Prize in Fiction, and a semi-finalist in the 2025 Writers of the Future Contest. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast and Chestnut Review. You can find them on Instagram @cheyennewrites, on Twitter @NotCheyenneMann, and on their website CheyenneMann.com. Cheyenne lives in Providence, RI, with their cat, Fig, where they are an MFA candidate in fiction at Brown University.
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