The Devourers

by Indra Das

To tell stories of the past to children who walk into the future is a task both noble and taxing.”

Sometimes intimacy is the only way real magic works.”

Intimacy lies in the body and the soul, in scent, in touch and taste and sound. A man whose name you don’t know can tell you a tale to move you to tears, just by filling and emptying his lungs, by moving his tongue and lips, his fingers. Even after, you might never know him.”

Perhaps we only steal your history to make of it ours, just as we steal your lives to extend our own. We call ourselves hunters, but we are scavengers.”

I simply decided, that morning, that if I found myself with no more days to have to survive by myself, it wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen to me. It would be quite terrible, but not the worst.

“Your teeth are sharp stones, dulled by civilization,”

“Believe? Are you not listening? I don’t need to believe anything. Do you need to believe that you are a human? I simply am what I am.

We are the devouring, not the creative.

I’ve never loved a man in my life, but I’m not fool enough to think that there are no men and women in this world who truly love each other, and love their children together, and did not conceive them through violence and pain.

You—you are what all women fear in this world. This is why I am here by your companion’s side, and not yours.”

In his lithe body, the thick waves of hair that gather at his sloping shoulders, his suddenly emerald-green eyes, I see man and woman both, I see a being so human that it becomes inhuman, an animal perfection.