Spice Orgasm

As I ran my tongue over the glistening, bloated interior of my lips I felt the blisters beginning to bubble.

“Uuughhh…” I let out a moan that’s half pain, half pleasure, before diving back in for more: filling my thin metal soup spoon with the red liquid and slurping, mixing air and broth and inhaling the spice. It constricts in my throat before seeping, boiling, in rivulets across my esophagus. My throat relaxes and another mouthful of heat percolates down into my stomach, and the process starts again.

This is the end of  a bowl of noodles at the restaurant simply named “Noodel Soup.” Madam Puii, the proprietor, sets up shop in front of the gas station convenience store every evening to offer a small make-your-choice selection of noodle soups. You choose the noodle size, the meat of choice, and she delivers you a new level of euphoria.

You get high from this soup. A slow, surging wave of power that multiplies on itself – a mitosis charged though each successive spoonful of broth, each slurp of those noodles dragging with them across your lips a confetti of black pepper, onion, sweet chili and fried garlic.

By the time you realize you’re on fire, it’s too late. Are those tears running down your cheeks from the heat or from the pleasure? Where is the sweetness coming from? Why is your mouth singing? Now you are crying, snorting, laughing. Is it a chemical hook or a metaphysical one?

It doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is that you don’t stop slurping the soup. You can barely make out your utensils through the fog of water in your eyes. Your lips went numb long ago, so when you manage to get the chopsticks up there you fumble around like a blind man until your tongue can take charge.

Before you realize it, the utensils have been dropped onto the wet wood table and the plastic bowl is in both hands and that peppery smell is now in your sinuses and the world gets a little darker as your vision clouds behind the circular rim of your destiny. The red tide of flavor lies cradled halfway up the sides as gravity guides it, slowly and precipitously, into your half-open mouth. You can’t stop for air, if you do the spice will choke you, a cough will erupt and you will lose the nectar. Your only choice is to keep going, power through it, until this liquefied crack has passed the portal and now you can’t move your lips, they are swollen.

There is no more talking, but there doesn’t need to be. For now, I am flying.