Delphi Exposed

Charlotte Knoors

You know you shouldn’t put it in your mouth, but you do. It happens without thought: your hand slips to the corner of the mattress, dives under, fitted sheet hooked around the wrist, searching for the little shape of an object you’ve known for so long. You named it Delphi, though you cannot remember the naming process exactly. It was one of those things where you must have babbled the name as a toddler, and your parents repeated it back, and the name settled. Anytime you can’t find Delphi, something drops to your stomach: a weight, heavy, yet ticklish. When that happens, you ransack the bed, lift the pillows, undo them of their covers in a wild, almost animalistic fashion. You cannot stop until you find what you’re looking for. Sometimes, you merely misplaced it; left it in the drawer of your nightstand or it fell behind your bed. These days, you are not that careless anymore. You put it in the corner every time. When you and Olive moved in together six weeks ago, you agreed that you’d be in charge of changing the bed. Thank god, was all you thought. 

Olive is in the shower. You scroll through social media, hooked on videos of cats and hamsters falling off things set to funny music. The soft but firm rubber is tucked between your tongue and palate. You suck on it. The plastic that covers your lips grazes your invisible moustache hairs. You like the feeling of the hairs being pressed against, pushed up then down. There is something soft about it, though there is also the slightest sting on your lip with every sucking motion you make. It’s been like that for a few days now, a blister, an ulcer bordering on the wet and dry part of your lip. You know you need to give it a break, some time to heal. But you don’t care. The pain is relative, the ulcer mostly invisible. The feeling of your hairs swaying against the hard shell eases you further into yourself and into bed. It helps with the undying mill of thoughts going, you shouldn’t forget to do laundry tomorrow. You need to text back Jo and Angie and Nichole and wasn’t there a bill you needed to pay soon? When you get to work tomorrow, the first thing you need to do is– Oh, shit you can’t wear that blouse, it’s still in the wash. All of it quiets down, as soon as Delphi is with you. 

The splattering of the water is now only background noise. You want to switch from one social media to another, but on your journey there, you accidentally tap the wrong icon. Instead of seeing a feed with friends, you see a face. Your face. The image is a jarring juxtaposition. You hate seeing yourself like this, a suckling. Your mother, bless her heart, tried to separate you from Delphi many times when you were a child. Once, she held out her hand and said: “You’re a big girl now.” You responded, words slurred, Delphi still in mouth: “I’m really not.” Another time, she said: “I will throw it away when you’re in school.” You said nothing, only promised yourself to hide Delphi in a different place every morning. When you became a teenager, she’d threaten: “I should take a picture of you and send it to your friends. See what they say.”

Something cold came over you. What you heard was: “You should be embarrassed.” And you are. Embarrassed. Ashamed. But you cannot stop. When it’s late at night and the day is done and you want to undo your thoughts, you find it under your pillow, waiting. When it’s the weekend and you are crying because you are sad and you don’t know why, you undress yourself, get into bed, and put it in your mouth. Almost within a minute, your cries still. It’s not that you can’t do without Delphi, you can. You have had many periods without it, whenever mom was successful in her separating attempts. Somehow, Delphi always found its way back to you.

You’d gone without Delphi for a year once, when you were ten. Then, one day, you were staying at your aunt’s place. She had a 4-month-old baby, your cousin, and you loved taking care of him. Your cousin was taking a nap, as was your aunt, each in their own room. When you thought you heard something, you went to check on your cousin. You found him eyes wide, legs kicking, mouth pouting. You knew what he wanted, recognized the desire intimately. It was next to his head. You picked it up and moved it toward his face. Your cousin’s mouth opened, ready to receive. At the last minute, your hand hesitated, hovered. You knew you shouldn’t put it in your mouth, but you did. Your heart pounded in your chest at first, and you thought this is all wrong. It was different from Delphi: the rubber wider and softer, the plastic larger. It tasted of the milk you smelled on your baby cousin’s breath an hour before. There were remnants of acid. None of that repulsed you enough to stop. You thought, finally, and your shoulders relaxed. Your cousin stared at you, mouth agape, before it turned into a toothless grimace. You knew what was coming. Still, you thought, just a little longer. His cries started, first in hiccups, then turned into wails. You get to have it all the time, you wanted to say to him. It didn’t occur to you to give it back. You merely rubbed his stomach in an attempt to soothe him. It didn’t work. It wasn’t until you heard your aunt’s footsteps down the hall, that your hand shot up and ripped it from your lips. The door opened and your aunt asked, “did you wake him up?” You replied, “no, no, he just lost his binky,” right as you put it in his mouth.

After that weekend, you had a mission. Fortunately for you, you were skilled at finding things. You found it on one of the top shelves in a kitchen cupboard, hidden in what seemed to be a jar of sugar. You were elated at first, thinking you did it! You found Delphi! But you were also faced with a choice: put Delphi back where you found it or put it back where it belonged. You bargained with yourself, thinking, you’ve done without Delphi for over a year and what happened at your cousin’s was just a slip up. But there was curiosity too. The thought: only a minute. The promise: you would put it back in the jar in the cupboard. But you knew, deep down, that putting it where it belonged was like putting a puzzle back together. And it was: the minute would turn into an hour, into a night’s sleep, into weeks, years. At first, you kept Delphi a secret. But mom always found out again, sighing, muttering, “What am I to do with you?” You didn’t know. You didn’t care. All was well again. What to do about Delphi would be a worry for later.

As adulthood arrived, Delphi hadn’t left, and you had no intentions of getting rid of it. Occasionally you’d wonder what to do if ever you got a partner. Where would you hide it? You came up with a list of places:

• Inside a pair of socks

• Inside your pillowcase 

• Between folded sheets on the top shelf of the closet 

All these places did their job, except the pillowcase. One time when you and Olive had just started dating, Olive grabbed your pillow to put behind her back so that she could comfortably rest against the headboard. Somehow Delphi had slipped out and lay there, on the bed, completely exposed. You felt naked too, skin prickling against the fabric of your clothes, face aglow. Olive didn’t know she was looking at a naked you. If you didn’t act fast, if she moved her head to the left and saw Delphi, she would notice just how naked you were. She wouldn’t be able to unknow or unsee. You wouldn’t be able to unknow or unsee Olive’s face when she realized what you were. And you wouldn’t know how to explain it: an adult suckling. 

“Let’s go for a walk,” you said, grabbing her hand, pulling her into the opposite direction of Delphi. When you were downstairs, you said, “Oh I forgot my wallet,” and ran back to your room. You put Delphi in a pair of socks and shoved the bundle against the back of the drawer. When you met Olive outside, you felt clothed again.

Taking Delphi out of hiding hasn’t been easy since the move. The first week, you waited for Olive to leave the house before you felt safe enough to take out Delphi. You made sure to ask Olive what time she’d be back and if she didn’t know, if she could text you, so that you’d have ample time to put Delphi back in the corner. But you found that Olive wouldn’t be out much, except when you were out too, which meant you almost had no time together with Delphi. You cried silently in the bathroom multiple times that week, thinking, I can’t do this, followed by, maybe I can’t live with Olive. The thought startled you to such an extent that you decided you needed a different solution. You noticed at some point that Olive took a twenty-minute shower every night before bed. You resolved to turn her shower time into your Delphi time. Any time the shower started to run, Delphi was in your mouth. Whenever the sound of the water ceased, Delphi was back in the corner. It took about a week, though, before you found yourself crying silently again, in the bathroom at work this time, overcome and confused. Why can’t the twenty minutes a day be enough, you thought, blowing your nose ungraciously into a wad of toilet paper. That night, three weeks after having moved in, you found yourself staring at Olive in darkness, waiting for her deep, regular breaths, all the while trying to ignore the itch in your hand, forcing yourself to be patient, to be certain she was asleep. Once Olive’s breathing was steady, you waited five more minutes before you gave in to the urge. Turned away from Olive, your body finally softened, only your lips and tongue hard at work. You lost track of time. It was you and Delphi, together. There was no crying, no circling thoughts. Only when Olive wrapped her arm around your waist and pulled you in, you froze, closely listening to her breathing, hand covering your mouth.

For two weeks, this worked for you. Then came the nightmares. Different variations of the same scenario: you’d be somewhere in public, the supermarket, the office, someone’s house, talking to strangers, colleagues or loved ones – your in-laws – when your hand would move down, completely of its own accord, and you wouldn’t notice what was in your hand until it was already in your mouth. You didn’t mean to do it, but you did. Something like panic crashed down on you. You’d think, they can see me. I need to spit it out. But your mouth wouldn’t let you, would feverishly hold the rubber between your tongue and palate. It was as if your mouth and hand had a life of their own, as though they wanted Delphi to be seen. When you woke, your fingers were plucking at your lips, Olive asleep next to you. Daybreak peered through the curtains. Your hand went to the corner, and you allowed yourself five minutes to calm down.

Now, in bed, you close your phone and put it away, so you don’t have to see yourself any longer. The shower is on and Delphi is still in your mouth. Your palate forms the perfect cup for it, holds Delphi in place as your tongue pushes and pulls in an unending loop. You move your upper lip ever so slightly to maneuver the hairs on your moustache in different directions, and as you do, the blister, the ulcer starts to tingle. It slowly turns into prickling, then burning. You know you probably need to cut back your downtime with Delphi so that the ulcer can heal. But the crying, you think. Well, you can –

You grab your phone again, telling yourself you don’t have to think about it now, and go back to the videos of the cats and hamsters. You want to forget. And you do. You are so absorbed in your phone, that you don’t hear the water stop. You don’t hear Olive’s movements about the bathroom as she puts on lotion and brushes her teeth and puts on her pajamas. You only notice when the door opens and Olive is in the doorway. Your hand automatically shoots up to your mouth to rip Delphi out. 

The movement startles Olive. “Everything okay?”

Delphi is warm and wet in your palm. Olive looks at you in a way you know is loving and caring: eyes soft, lips curled up. She turns out the light before she comes into bed and caresses your head, then huddles close under the blanket. Her hands are searching for yours. Your hand is a fist, a cocoon. Olive’s fingers trace the outlines of it, her face a question. Your body becomes stiff, frozen in place. 

“It’s been a long day, hasn’t it?” she says.

You nod, acutely aware of Delphi, there, between the two of you, locked inside your firm grip.

Olive moves in closer, wraps her hand around your fist, places the other on your face. She kisses you, gently at first, then her tongue traces the contours of your lips, licks the ulcer. It stings. But it’s not that bad, you tell yourself. You focus on kissing her back, distracting her tongue with yours. But she is getting into it, moving faster and harsher, licking and licking until she nibbles, no bites, the ulcer.

“Ouch,” you say.

Olive looks at you in confusion.

“My lip,” you say. “I have an ulcer.”

“Oh no, my poor baby,” she says, wanting to touch your mouth.

You move your head away. “Yeah, maybe no kissing till it’s gone?”

Olive makes an exaggerated sad face. “How will I survive?”

“I’m sorry.” You lower your gaze.

“No need to be sorry. It’s not like you asked to get an ulcer.” She plants a kiss on your forehead, says goodnight and turns around.

Some of your stiffness eases as you wait for Olive’s breathing to slow. But it only disappears when she’s fast asleep and you put Delphi back in your mouth. There’s the familiar sting, the prickling against the plastic, but you ignore it, focus on the movement of the hairs above your lip, and allow yourself five minutes.

Charlotte Knoors is based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, where she teaches English (and feminism) to high school students. When Charlotte's not at work, they write fiction and essays. She's been published on Salty and various Dutch platforms. Her most recent short story "Gay Big Bird, She/They" was published in The Galaxy Gazette.