Hungerstone

by Kat Dunn

To be a woman is a horror I can little comprehend.

“I wonder for what you hunger, and whether you allow yourself to feel it.”

The moon and stars are concealed by cloud, so it is as though we have been plucked from the face of the earth and set amongst some inhuman landscape of nothingness. When Lucifer fell from Heaven, was this how he found Hell? A cold, blank world into which no good thing could be born?

For a moment, I wish to be as cold and unmovable. I am too soft and vulnerable, as the past few days have shown, and it feels as though my life is slipping through my grip like sand: the harder I grasp it, the more my control slips.

It is a scouring gaze that fixes me in place and flays the skin and muscle from my bones until it is as though all the soft, intimate, raw parts of me are exposed for the world to peck out with its teeth and talons. I have kept myself so perfectly guarded for so long, learning to strengthen my carapace against Aunt Daphne. I have had no home to be soft in, to want and need and to have those wants met. So what is the point in wanting?

Aunt Daphne would have called her a whore to loiter alone in public.

I killed my heart, the raw beating thing that cried in horror at the monstrousness of what had just occurred. I drove a nail through it and buried it in unhallowed ground.

It is terrible to be alive. But it is worse to be dead to ourselves.”

I lean forward, urgent. “Yes. Yes. That is the question. What do I want?” A question for which I have no answer. I thought it was the perfect mastery of myself and my world, to know and excel within any situation, to be impeachable, impervious. To survive, at all costs. But that is nothing but scraps of life. I was starving and thought myself at a banquet.

All we can hope for in life is to know one’s own desires in order to be able to act on them. To want is to surrender to uncertainty. To step into the unknown. To expose ourselves to all possible outcomes and trust we will not be destroyed by disappointment.

I am a drowning woman clinging to a wreckage, but I will sing so loud as I go down.

My appetite is vast, and I am in agony knowing myself to be unsatisfied.

Damn control. Damn mastery. I want, I lack, I hunger. I will die like all mortal things. At least let me taste a little life before I go.

I knew then that I could die, and no one would care. There was only me to care about myself. So I would not let my mortal body die; I would keep it alive and propel it forward by the only means possible. Instead, to survive, I must die inside; I must shut down every sense of self, every dream, every weakness. I killed hope, to live. Now I must find a way to live again. Even if it means I must kill.