Hungerstone

by Kat Dunn

I furl myself in the quilt like an oyster in its shell with no pearl to show for the grit that works through it. Pain and blood, grief and hunger. To be a woman is a horror I can little comprehend.

The blood that came each month after. At first, a disappointment, then a fear, then a grief, then an inevitability. I was good for nothing but blood.

You are not some hysterical woman. That is your great strength: you are more like a man emotionally.”

Carmilla holds an allure, like ghosting a finger around the edge of a flame: the temptation, the beauty, and the anticipation of pain.

A decade ago, Henry placed his trust in me, and that pact has grown thin and stretched over the years. I am unsure where this boldness has come from, and I fear I may pay for it, but there is something a little petulant and stubborn in me tonight. I have

“Have you never done anything a little perverse, my dear Lenore? Just to know how it feels?”

“You have the most beautiful voice,” says Carmilla when I finish the chapter. “It is most soothing.” “Oh, I am sure it is quite plain.” “It is a melody to me. You are a song, Lenore, harmony and discord. I am learning to sing it.”

I learned quickly that my wants and needs were unwelcome, too great for any reasonable person to fulfill, and in time I came to agree with her. I was too much, too loud, too emotional, too clumsy, too self-involved. My existence was a burden to all involved with it, and I resolved to never make any demand if I could help it. Then, perhaps, I could be tolerated. Then, perhaps, I could be loved.

I know I should be worried about the way my body bucks and breaks beneath my hand; it is its own animal, with its own limits, that I have not cared to mind. It betrays me with its wants and needs, its pains and limitations, and I am furious to be tethered in this way. I thought us prisoners together, but perhaps we are enemies, working tirelessly to move in opposite directions.

If Cora is an English rose, I am milk thistle: a weed, persistent and desperate. This is the bargain I have struck: to lose my softness in exchange for survival.

“Disappointment tells us what we truly wanted. And to want is to be alive.”

Carmilla seems more fragile in the daylight, and I realize I have not been outside the house with her before. It is as though she is a pencil drawing, so faint that the bright light all but washes her away.

I know how to manage any social function, how to plan a dinner for fifty guests, run a house, direct staff, throw a ball. I know how to manage Henry’s moods, how to school my own weak mind into order. But I do not know what to do about this.

There was nothing to tell, I thought. But perhaps the truth was there had been no one to listen.

Oh, my husband. I am not buying what you are selling. I have seen him be brilliant, charm everyone in a room; even today at Ajax, I witnessed him at work. I am only another mark to him. Though I hold such power over his life, he still thinks he can pull all the strings.

I had passed too many years of my life in monstrous isolation, and I knew that one way to ensure my future was to populate it not with people who cared for me but with people for whom it would be deeply inconvenient if I were to be absent.

“Because you won’t listen to me,” she snaps. With a finger like an iron bar, she jabs me in the shoulder. “I see you. I see everything in you that you will not admit, and I want more for you.”

So I kiss her back. Henry is the only person I have ever touched like this. It is quite different, not only in the softness of her body against mine where his was hard and coarse with hair on his chin and chest. No, the real difference is this: I see now that I wanted with Henry only to accomplish what I knew was expected of me. There was no heat, no hunger.

“Oh, little Lenore. It is terrible to be alive. But it is worse to be dead to ourselves.”

How frightening it would be to die, but how great a relief to sleep forever.

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.

It is too much to look at suffering directly. We can only survive if we close our eyes; reality is not a thing to be experienced raw.

“Then why are you so concerned with what I do, if I am only a woman?”

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.