Hungerstone

by Kat Dunn

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

I was good for nothing but blood.

I was alone, as in all things. I learned: learned, then, that mastery is the gift that befalls the isolated and unhappy.

“You think yourself a tool, needed only when useful. You are wrong.”

“It is naive to think one is owed anything from life. We endure it; we survive it. That is enough.”

I can only stand the demand of everything beyond these walls if I have a door I can shut and lock.

I have survived everything that has befallen me before now. I will survive this. By skill or force of will, I must endure.

In this brief moment, I know what I want, and I understand how completely that terrifies me.

Because to want is to risk disappointment. And life has so bitterly disappointed me.

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 in a house full of adults and not a single thing would get done if I did not urge it into being.

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.

He will not discern that I have discovered his plan to murder me, because it does not enter into his understanding of the world that I might have my own agency, that I might set my will against his. I have not taught him to think any differently of me.

am so incredibly tired—of Henry, of my life, of every response that comes to my lips. Why should I care about any of it? What consequences are there to anything I do?

Since Carmilla, something vital in me is changed. She found a crack within me and has levered me apart.

It would be so simple to fall. My own weight would drag me down. It could kill me. Worse, it could not.

am jealous that anybody has the gift of growing up differently.

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

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

How sick and wrong this all is. This little pantomime of a life, each of us miserable and none allowed their own appetites.