Hungerstone

by Kat Dunn

It is an incessant pain as raw as my anger, and it makes my body ever more a traitorous, alien environment in which I am forced to live.

the world offers me no kindness, then I will take from it armor and sword, create an unassailable fortress for myself, and lock the door.

“It is too easy to disguise cruelty as frankness.”

Her need is not a weakness or a threat to her own survival. It gives her power.

He wishes to talk over the day, and I take it, echoing his words when he wants me to, confirming his opinions. I am a mirror for him, and I have learned how to show the desired reflection.

The rocks on the cliff below me start to crumble; I feel the lurching vertigo of the drop—a hopelessness so total it is like a weight pressing me into the earth.

The whole episode had taken little more than twenty minutes, and all was back as it had been before. The memory took on a dreamlike quality, and later I wondered if perhaps I had invented it all. I never told Aunt Daphne. I never told anyone. There was nothing to tell, I thought. But perhaps the truth was there had been no one to listen.

It is as though reality has been put together badly, and the rules by which I know the world to operate are losing their power. The only solid thing is my body and the sensation of fullness like ballast against a storm.

am so tired. I am so tired of struggling, of vigilance, of hopelessness. It would be so easy to believe him, to take the fantasy that he sells me and hide within its pretty walls. So easy. I miss when I thought it all possible. That I could master all my disappointment and vulnerability, and walk steel-plated and invincible through the world.

My body gives me no quarter and I long, not for the first time, to step outside it, to shed my skin and float, formless and unfeeling through the world.

But perhaps if I have never been safe, that means fear has no purpose. I am not safe if I obey and reduce and control, just as I am not safe if I rebel and shout and anger.

I am a woman woken from thirty years slumber, and I would eat the world should it satisfy this empty, keening void where my heart should be. I would cry with grief over my life so unfulfilled, and drink down the salty tears, eat my worthless tongue and impotent fingers, skin this carcass and pick the bones clean.

the drawing room where Henry and Cora await dinner. How stupid all of this is. All this formality and display—for what? Control. Mastery. Some sop of comfort, the idea that in this cold, loveless world we can overcome reality and impose our will upon it.