Jello Melon
Another night, another bonfire along the Ossipee River.
(This is the story of how we became slime.)
Our tongues snaked around the half-set jello shots, slicing the raw skin of our lips on the plastic rims. Kate chose melon flavor gelatin, I brought the remnants of tequila I had left over from my dorm room, which we mixed with whipped cream flavored vodka Arnold had found in his parent’s liquor cabinet, barely used, and for good reason. The combination of all three turned out pretty vile.
“We shoulda used juice to hide that jello melon taste.” Arnold, from rural Maine, the only kid in his class who came out before graduating high school. Arnold and I met at our orientation weekend. We stuck with each other throughout the year, drank our way through many nights. He’d said he felt like a trinket his friends showed off whenever he returned home from school on breaks. Their friendships relied on jokes made at his expense, but he put up with it because the loneliness was more agonizing. Arnold invited me up for a weekend because he needed a break from the boonie townies, but said he was broke, so you needa come here, Fay, gimme your city energy, we’ll get wasted. I took a bus up after my day-camp job got out on Friday. Arnold said he’d invite his high school friend, Kate too, I’d love her, he said. I said fine, cool. Kate was a ponytail girl. She wore leg warmers all the time—she was a dancer, apparently, even when we were crashing bonfires on the New Hampshire border; muck and river bank algae dried in the purple knit on her calves. Arnold named her Swamp Queen.
Kate downed her last bottle of Twisted Tea before piling us into her car, blasting Lil’ Wayne and that one song by the Veronicas off her iPod. Arnold’s house was the last remaining old house on the edge of a condo development; half-completed houses, cold concrete at night, mounds of dirt where gardens should be, skeleton porches, fluorescent street lamps. The dirt driveway rumbled beneath us, the radio bass was bumped all the way it could go. Kate’s tires squealed as they broke to the paved road and sailed the empty street. Windows rolled down, cool summer night breeze whipped my sour campfire hair in and out my mouth. The streetlights few and far between, we had Kate’s high beams, played chicken with oncoming cars swerving round the hill bends, Kate’s foot on the gas as she rode the middle line. We passed a Baptist church, bait and tackle shop, an apple orchard. Kate said in the fall we should all come back on a long weekend for apple picking.
When we pulled up to the gas station, a slouched man stood outside, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, a chain wallet slinked down his thigh. I heard him whistle the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle’. He had a scraggly gnomish beard and was tapping his foot as though he was waiting for someone. As Kate returned from paying inside, the man nudged her elbow with his. I couldn’t hear what they were saying from the open car windows, they were too far away. I poked Arnold who gazed out the other window facing the tree line.
“Who’s that guy?”
“Who?”
“That weird guy Kate’s talking to.”
“Lee. He’s always here, trying to bum cigarettes from everyone. ‘A bum cig a day keeps the demons away’, he says. He’s harmless.”
“You give him one?” I asked Kate when she got back in the car after filling us up.
“Do I look like I have cigarettes?” Kate flicked her ponytail and winked at me in the rear-view, “I’m a dancer, jello melon.”
“Don’t lie, you have them,” Arnold said.
When did I become a jello melon?
“Boris offered me a Slim Jim ‘on the house’ when I was paying. Whatta sleaze,” Kate said.
“I thought he was working at that package store in Conway.”
“He works both.”
Kate turned to me in the backseat and said, “Boris was that kid who thought he was a pimp with a hot tub. Y’know the type, janky porch jacuzzi, seventh grade girls in tankinis tucked into his hairy pubescent pits, while the other boys have a circle jerk on the PS2 in his basement. Until he grows up into that guy who works every job between New Hampshire and here and you can’t escape his meat jerky offerings.”
I knew the hot tub kid type although to me he was rich white boy with a driveway the length of the dick he thought he possessed. The type to go to college, but not really do much because he had a job waiting for him, daddy connections. The girls didn’t matter in the end, neither did the PS2. I imagined for Boris that the memories of being top-dog were more important to him than to the dudes I went to school with. The difference between past and future.
Another night, another bonfire along the Ossipee River. There wasn’t much to do up here, Arnold was right, so most nights someone threw a bonfire, bringing together the drinkers and the smokers. We parked the car at a scenic-view stop along the road and made our way into the woods. The outskirts of the trees themselves had no knots, high branches, upright and uniform, until we started walking down a hill and they appeared older, thicker, with hangnail branches curled around each other, raised roots overlapping, occasionally tripping us as we maneuvered our way towards where the bonfire was supposed to be; Arnold told us it would be inside an old farmhouse foundation on the edge of the woods towards the river.
The further we went the more it felt as though we were going in the wrong direction. It was too quiet. I pulled out my phone, no bars, but that had been happening all weekend up here. It was the lack of noise around us, no bats, birds, crickets, no mosquitos nipping our skin or whistling by our ears, that was eerie. A light flickered towards the ground in front of us, Kate had a keychain flashlight clipped to her shorts.
“Who wants to play two truths and a lie?” Arnold said, either to fill the sudden stillness or because he was completely unaware of it in the first place.
Kate went first. “I peed my pants watching Beetlejuice in fifth grade, I can’t do a back handspring, and I dye my armpits purple.”
“Oh my god, Fay, tell Kate about pubes-guy,” Arnold shouted back to me as he bent beneath a low hanging branch.
“Pubes-guy?”
“This trash dude she was into, before Zachary,” as though he’d discussed my fling with Kate over tea, “like way too into, he was totally grossed out by pubic hair, like any trace of it, not like a normal fear about it, like, I kid you not, he feigned gagging if you dared say the word,” Arnold said, shaking his head, “so straight, like a Wendy’s baked potato.”
“And you still did him?” Kate said.
“Kate, always so blunt, it was her first time.” Arnold was showing off and I wanted to strangle him.
I hadn’t expected Arnold to reveal that, or I hadn’t thought about it, but could feel the blood pulse in my neck. It wasn’t the truth, but to say so would sound as though I was lying. I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t know Kate. I thought to my mother telling me how easy making friends in college would be, but her warning, they don’t know you but it can feel like they do, her voice in my head sudden as the breeze through the trees, as if she was watching me.
I remembered peeling the first wax strip apart, the cool goo as I gently pressed it to my skin. The rip and the blood droplets that peaked after each follicle came away. Arnold pounded on the door and asked me how it was going. I hadn’t felt the pain until he knocked and I angrily screamed Fine!, loud enough for him to go away.
I thought about how Arnold had hooked up with a guy with some stubble, a junior, a couple of weeks into first term, and it had rubbed his face raw from so much kissing. It was the first time he’d hooked up with a five o’clock shadow, he told me, his baby skin wasn’t used to it.
“He is totally a melon-banger,” said Kate, when I finished telling them about pubes-guy.
“What?”
“Like he’s definitely used fruit to fuck with. A lot of fruit. Not one time, he put hours into finding the perfect fruit, which if you’re wondering, is a room-temp honeydew, and now that he’s tried it, real pussy ain’t shit to him.”
“He fucked me like he didn’t expect me to have muscles. Or nerve endings,” I said.
“How didya determine it’s a honeydew?” Arnold asked, tripping over a root and the word ‘determine’.
“Long discussion during an all nighter, me and some friends,” Kate said, flicking her ponytail back, whisking my cheek.
“Jello melon,” I hissed.
A voice from beyond the nearest tree bellowed, “My insides do feel like a wet vagina if you concentrate real hard.”
The three of us froze. Kate shut the flashlight off.
“Who’s there?” Arnold said.
“What the hell was that?” I said. I figured Kate or Arnold would recognize the voice if it was someone from the bonfire, but neither seemed to know.
We listened for a second response as our breathing wheezed louder and louder. When my face had flushed earlier it was nothing to how my body went cold then. I felt Arnold reach for my hand.
“Grab Kate,” he said.
“I’m here.” She found my other hand.
We didn’t move.
We waited for the prank to end.
And then.
“How about another story?” mocked the voice again.
“Who are you? What the hell who are you?” Kate shrieked and turned the flashlight back on.
“I am the JELLO MELON!”
From behind a tree appeared a gigantic, pale green skinned melon, bruises for eyes, sun scars roped around its body, could you call it a body, or was it a head? Its mouth an equator.
I didn’t know whether I should scream. I don’t think any of us knew.
“I can give you the whole speech on how you summoned me if you like: young folk spake my name thrice and I appear thusly in your presence to consume you or your shameful sex stories. You pick. But I won’t wait for long.”
After an eternity of silence, or maybe a minute, Kate spoke:
“I blew a guy I met at a house party, and usually I can do it despite an occasional gag, but that time I barfed Italian Wedding soup all over him.”
“Boooring,” said Jello Melon, “everyone’s done that. Gimme another.”
“When Arnold came out to everyone at school he was drunk off of two beers—two! We were at Boris’ house, y’know, and he stands up on Boris’ coffee table and shouts it, ‘I’m gay, you fucks!’ I was shocked. I mean, I knew, I’d known for a while, he told me in tenth grade, but obviously,” she trailed off.
“MORE. Tell me more. I feed off infatuation stories, the more embarrassing the better, the things you’ll do desperately for love, for connection, to someone who is probably wrong for you but in the moment they are all you can think of and you do favors for them you never thought you’d do. Give them to me, and maybe I’ll let you go.”
“I hooked up with someone who got off on me queefing,” Kate said. “We had a weekend stand. I had to do bed sit-ups to make it happen, and my abs hurt so much afterwards. I enjoyed the workout, I guess. She ignores me now.”
“MORE.”
“Help me,” Kate muttered.
“I told Kate I slept with a guy first term but I lied. I didn’t. I was too nervous. He was nice about it, but then he ghosted,” Arnold spluttered.
“Why’d you tell me you did?” Kate asked.
“NOT THE TIME, KATE!” Arnold not taking his eyes off the melon.
“No, the time is perfect. Tell her,” the melon said, gently.
Arnold trembled, his eyes begged me. For the first time, I felt as though Arnold trusted me more than Kate, when he had been shoving it in my face how much Kate knew him, how well they knew each other, his grip on me tightened as the melon heaved deep breaths, waiting, Kate, waiting.
“I didn’t tell you ‘cause you had been pushing me to screw someone, and it’s not that easy to just do. Not for everyone. Not like you.”
Jello Melon rolled its gigantic bruise eyes. It snarled, melon bits spat onto the ground in front of us.
I wracked my brain, but all I could come up with was what I hadn’t done, and the panicked thought that I wasn’t adventurous at all. Butt plugs kept running to the forefront of my mind and I hadn’t ever tried them, or been with someone who wanted to. But there they were, persisting over the true stories. Then a jolt of angst, a sliver of the last three weeks of fall term when I skipped class to cuddle in bed with Zac, which progressed to sex on every surface of his room, when I agreed to not use a condom because I was on the pill and he really preferred it without, but his bare skin in my body stung. When I agreed to the video. When he dumped me and I didn’t believe he deleted it, but also didn’t care. The Jello Melon focused on me, as if it knew I had a story. I couldn’t tell that one, that was too much, too much to have Kate, who knew exactly what she wanted, and Arnold, who knew I was timid, be embarrassed of me.
“Do you know what Chat Roulette is?” I asked, remembering my whole hall gathered around a laptop in the common room, and later when I was alone in my own room, a treasure chest of encounters the Jello Melon could feed off of, if only we were the first people to tell it.
“What’s that?” Its scarified eyes narrowed in intrigue.
“It’s a website, y’know, on a computer, and the website links your camera up with some rando, so that you can talk to a stranger and see them. For fun,” I said, giving a dramatic pause “which, as you can imagine, lends itself to a lot of unsavory situations.”
“Tell me…” the Jello Melon was hungry.
I began describing all the various genitals I’d witnessed, and what people did with them, without ever revealing their face, without uttering a word or a sound, muted masturbation and flashing, mashing body parts, puppets in a Punch and Judy show.
When I interviewed for the camp job, my mother had instructed me to have a coin to fidget with in my lap, I talked with my hands too much. I figured now would be the time to use my hands to my advantage. I felt Arnold and Kate staring at me in awe. The more I went on, the more detailed my descriptions became, every mole, pimple, hair, wrinkle, scar, blood, pus, cum, lips, skin, hot feeling. Each time a disgusting quirk turned me on, the way when you read about a horrific crime but you want to know more about it and the news withholds how the victim died.
I wanted to make the Jello Melon want more, as I did, mindlessly typing “chat” into the search bar upon opening my computer, as though I was checking a newsfeed or my email, checking in on the world, those who needed to show me their naked selves. The way I squealed when my roommate returned from class early and I slammed my computer shut on my finger.
One day, I told the melon, I found myself reaching to the fly on my jeans, below the camera's reach. I felt bad for this guy, this lonely guy, maybe I should join him to make him feel better. Another time I moaned along with them, synching my voice to theirs from inside their echoey room, harmonizing an orgasm. My high school music teacher would be proud. The thought of her triggered me out of ranting, an annoyance, a giggle.
My mouth dry, I had no idea how much I’d been talking, it felt like a marathon.
“Wow, Fay,” Kate said. I couldn’t tell if she was impressed or disgusted.
(I was impressed.)
“I bet pubes guy was on Chat Roulette,” Arnold said as he squeezed my hand.
“Oh my god, Arnold.”
I avoided looking the Jello Melon in his cut up eyes, panted out of breath for either Kate or Arnold to come up with something else. The Jello Melon squinted like maybe he was almost satisfied, like he needed one more.
(And maybe he will always need one more.)
“I slept with Boris after graduation and he told me to drink pineapple juice because he hated the way my pussy tastes,” Kate said.
“Boris? You?” Arnold butted in.
“Yep. First time Boris.”
“Oh so you were full of mature advice, oh yeah, Arnold, sleep with the first guy you meet in college, get it over with. Because you boned BORIS.”
The Jello Melon’s cracks for eyes danced between us. I felt it swell, its proximity to us closing in.
“I heard that’s not even real,” Arnold said, sounding relaxed, as though he had forgotten the perilous melon mouth standing a foot away. “You can’t go eating whole cows, fried cafeteria food, asparag-ass, or whatever and top it off with a glass of pineapple juice and expect your jizz to taste like a Dole Whip.”
Lee, the guy from the gas station, was already in the Jello Melon’s belly—melty and slimy inside the tangle of seed webs, but we settled down into various crevices, dug our nails into the sinews for stability as the Jello Melon moved on, breaking branches as it bounded through the woods.
“It don’t matter what you tell it, or what you’ve done, it eats you anyway,” he said, “I heard it all, the rind is rather thin.”
We heard the winds outside, smelled burning coal a short distance away, the lapping of the Ossipee River, at last we were close to it.
“I never scored a cig today, and it’s after midnight. So it came for me,” Lee said.
“You can’t be serious,” Kate said, her hands tangled in the fibers.
“How else would I be here?”
“We summoned it by saying its name three times. But we didn’t know what it was.” Melon juice dripped into Arnold’s mouth as he spoke.
“What’d you tell it?” I asked Lee.
“Me? I told it I dated someone who was into me because I have hairless thighs and hairy calves. She thought I was sexy because I reminded her of Mr. Tumnus. Got me so drunk and put goat horns on me and everything. ‘Cause of the bear—”
“—the beard.”
“Yeah. I thought that’d be a good one to tell.”
“Didn’t convince it, though.”
“No, I lied. It was actually me who was into the hairless thighs and hairy calves. She put the horns on willingly, completely sober. Hindsight, maybe it would have done me better to be honest.”
We all agreed as though we were experts on our grim situation.
Kate’s ponytail was sopping and slick, pulled over her shoulder.
“I was sure your Chat Roulette rant would work,” she said.
“I’m sorry it didn’t.”
“It’s a total lie that everyone has thrown up meatball soup on someone’s balls. Ugh, what the Hell. I’m not even drunk anymore.”
“I am. Fuck, I never got to have sex and now I’m being digested by a demon melon,” Arnold said, his legs indiscernible from the Jello Melon flesh.
I feel each bounce within the Jello Melon through the Maine woods, our bodies bright green muck— our bodies slowly parasitic.
(Will we, too, feed off others’ shame and escapades?)
(When and if it we are found, those in the Jello Melon’s lines of sight will not know or care to cut us out.)
Alison is a mixed and messy writer existing in Massachusetts. They grew up near the ocean, not the nice ocean, but the sulphuric, rife with seaweed and trash, storm waves, kind. They have some other stories in, HAD, jmww, and Identity Theory. Read more by visiting www.alisonfraser.space
