His mother drove herself to the hospital smiling.
“The easiest pregnancy I’ve had,” she told her friends over and over for nine months. “Such a quiet child. Sensitive. The girls will love him.”
She sighed and folded her hands over her stomach, rubbing circles with her fingers over the stretched, nearly translucent skin of her stomach.
“How far along are you?” the doctors asked her, listening to her heartbeat.
“Nine months,” she said. “Exactly.”
The doctor frowned.
“I am,” his mother frowned and shrugged. “I don’t know why I’m not showing as much as I should be. A blessing, I suppose.”
“This child is not ready,” her doctor told her. “This child has not grown enough. You look barely five months pregnant.”
The child’s mother’s smile faltered for a moment as a contraction wracked her body, but she kept nodding her head.
“He’s ready,” she said. “He’s coming.”

He was born so quietly that they almost missed him. He was put in an incubator for the first night; no one could understand how a healthy baby boy had grown in such a small womb.

His mother had forgotten how to hold a child. He felt frightening in her arms, a child awake and silent, eyes opaque and rolling aimlessly, not yet coordinated enough to focus on faces. It was two days later, and he hadn’t taken her milk, much less a bottle.
“Silent and stubborn,” his mother whispered to him, touching the decomposing skin on his cheek. “Bryan.”
The skin under his fingernails began to rot. He way dying.

His mother took to sleeping slumped in a chair next to the incubator. She awoke one morning, just as the sun burst over the horizon, to a whimper. Tiny Bryan had eaten the thumbnail of his left hand. His cheeks were no longer blue. His eyelashes were coming back.

By the time he was three, he had eaten the thumb of his left hand and his first and middle fingers. The remnants of his middle finger, which he had been nibbling on the previous night, was an open sore. His mother wrapped it in gauze, worrying about bacteria on the lunch tables at preschool.

In middle school, Bryan was a novelty. He was short for his age, but made up for his lack of height by showing classmates how he could unhinge his arm from its socket under his shirt. Bryan’s lunch table was packed to bursting with wriggling bodies, and yet he was unable to participate in sports or birthday parties at water parks. He often felt as if he existed only as an accessory, a flashy earring dangling from the ear of the collective youth he lusted to be a part of.
In high school, Bryan’s mother proved to be right. Girls fell over themselves for him, for the quiet boy with one arm and, it was rumored, and exposed lung under his shirt. He brought tears to their eyes when he walked by, as if the corners of their hearts had been hooked into his brittle, yellowing ribs. They longed to be the one with whom he hooked gentle fingers on dewey mornings, the exception to whom he showed his ravaged body and disappearing limbs during intimate exchanges.

He first fell in love when he was sixteen. She drove him mad; she consumed him nearly as literally as he consumed himself. From the circles under her eyes to her wild, raspy laugh, he felt as if he’d found someone just as fragmented as he. He let her touch his heart one orange afternoon as they lay in his bed, her head nestled between two of his ribs, listening to the slow whir and hum of his lungs. It was slippery, almost too hot to bear. With her, Bryan was not hungry. He became nothing but golden light.

So when she asked him that afternoon if she could taste his heart, Bryan lifted his shirt and watched as her teeth ripped a hole in the left ventricle of his heaving heart.

When they discontinued their relationship, the wound on Bryan’s heart did not heal. The small rip her teeth made continued to leak blood so that it rippled streams down his spine and pooled around his pelvic bone, which was just now beginning to show. His appetite became ravenous. He inhaled cigarettes by the pack in an effort to stave off binges, nights similar to last Tuesday, when he drank a half bottle of whiskey and ate his entire liver.

He sought thrill after new thrill, from running stop signs to snorting pills and not sleeping for days, locking the bathroom door and inviting girls to taste the skin on his neck.

His mother went for weeks without seeing him. Each time she did, she felt as if she was falling into the grey circles that had blossomed beneath his eyes. She found him early one morning asleep in his bed. He had recently eaten the left side of his bottom lip and the surrounding skin, and the wound was bright red, nearly steaming of freshness. He woke when she pressed a warm compress to his wound, and pushed her out of his room, yelling malformed obscenities and spraying her with a mixture of spit and blood.

By the time he was twenty, he had nothing left but his heart. The hole had ripped ragged over the years; blood was staining his bathroom and leaking through the wood floors onto the heads of his downstairs neighbors. He had been evicted numerous times for this kind of damage to the property.

One afternoon at the age of twenty one, Bryan disappeared. He left behind a blood soaked apartment, and no body for his mother to bury.