Hungerstone

by Kat Dunn

Leaving a bloody splatter against the porcelain, I place the lid on the chamber pot and push it beneath the bed. This is no quiet loss; I have not lain with Henry in many months. There was no hope to lose.

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.

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

There are perhaps some graces to being unmothered. My body is as unused as a dress not yet worn, and so remains as crisp and fresh as the day it was bought.

An elegant disorder is perfectly distinct from a vulgar confusion.

I feel as though I carry some fragile, painful growth in my throat, and every small challenge or inconvenience threatens to burst open the pustule and fill my mouth with poison.

I thought marriage freedom when I sought it; I thought it safety. But sometimes, when my control slips, I think there is only safety and certainty in death.

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

You are a song, Lenore, harmony and discord. I am learning to sing it.”

Her smile is delicious and wicked and just for me.

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

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.

It is as though she has made mobile some long-calcified element of my soul, a great crack of a landslide within me as something shakes loose—something buried by death and blood and fear.

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

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.

Whatever scaffolding I have constructed to hold my life up cannot disguise that I lie in ruins.

I could take the tin and stave his head in—smash the fragile bone of temple and jaw, flatten his nose and split his lip, crack him in two and find out if there is a heart in his body.

Little demons inside my house come to count my sins and cut them from me pound by pound.

The truth is rancid and unpalatable, a meal I have been unable to digest for the last twenty years.

The truth was, I was so unbearably lonely, I lapped it up, a light-starved plant pressing its leaves against a windowpane, keening for the sun.

Men conspiring in dark little holes like vermin, chittering their spiteful thoughts to one another, make the world like this, hurt people like that. I hate them I hate them I hate them.