Hungerstone

by Kat Dunn

My body is my enemy, and I will use every weapon in my arsenal against it.

When we were courting, Henry would take down my hair from its pins and wind its heavy locks around his fingers like honey around a knife.

It is as though thought and action have been severed as cleanly as a knife through meat. My body is not my own.

They thought I was dead, too, at first, so bathed in bright red arterial blood. Then my eyes opened—two bright white points in a scarlet mask. I believe at least one passing woman fainted away. This was my induction into a motherless world, alone and met with fear and horror.

Better to know what I am faced with than fear its specter.

“Wait—one last thing. What is our guest’s name?” He seems surprised, as though such things as names are beneath him. “Carmilla Kernstein.” “Carmilla,” I say, tasting the syllables in my mouth. A little harsh, but with long, languorous vowels lingering between the lips.

<sirens>

Some things have no end. You pour and pour and pour your soul away, and they are always hungry.”

He was good to me, once. I hold on to that, like a prayer, like a plea. Let this life of mine be about more than pain.

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

Sometimes, I think Henry is more beautiful in his cruel moments. His mouth takes a sneer handsomely, the low set of his brow something Byronic.

Carmilla sneers, her pretty face curling into something sharper. “What a small, pathetic future you build.” She leans forward. “I wonder for what you hunger, and whether you allow yourself to feel it.”

No one has loved me for so many a long year, I have done it all from spite. If 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.

All I had was myself, and the weight of that burden was almost more than I could bear.

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.

It is a better pain. A more familiar one. One I control. In this place I know who I am, and all my suffering is mastered.

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.”

All the while, Carmilla watches me from dark corners, idly turning the pages of the penny dreadfuls I assume she must have obtained from the servants, or else reclining with hooded eyes, watching the world move around her. Each time I catch her gaze, I feel tipped off-balance, like missing a step on a staircase and feeling the world tilt between safety and doom.

lounging around. evilly

She has done this to me. She has sewn this poison in my mind.

if I had taken to bed with my grief, I would have starved there. Weakness is for girls like Cora, who know they will be met with care.

There is something empty in me. I can feed and feed and feed it, but somehow, I am never satiated.

My thoughts pupate and shift as I try to grasp them, becoming something different and new, but not alien. No, I feel these thoughts as though they are plucked from the marrow of my bones, some sickness that has lain within me all along.

I look at my hands in the dark. Are they too pale? Is the poison on my skin where I touched the pastilles? In my mouth? My teeth? In my mind, a white rot spreads through my body like mold, the meat of my organs and the red spill of my blood turned powdery white, corroding like acid. It is in me, in my bones, my gut, my lungs.

so close I can feel the bright, radiating tension alive between our two bodies. It is something alien and sharp, intoxicating and repellent at once. I want her.

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

There was something wrong with her, Lenore—I did not like the way she looked at me. Her eyes were so dark it was as though she could eat me whole.

What a strange, cruel gift she has given me: to truly know myself, to know pleasure, to know freedom—and to wake and find myself in Hell.

I think, in that moment, I was pushed sideways out of the normal world that the rest of you all live in, and I have been trapped here on my own behind a pane of glass in some waking Hell.”

And all I am left with is my raw, untrammeled hunger. 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.