A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

One learns so much about a person when one merely wants to fuck him.

It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s death. Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a man orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege.

I knew that lust was a dangerous thing, but I wanted these men to lust for me because, even though I didn’t know the precise shape and weight of lust, I knew that lust was power—and I wanted power even then.

There in the world, my psychopathy sells better than sex—and sex plus psychopathy, well, that’s a heady delight. As a woman psychopath, the white tiger of human psychological deviance, I am a wonder, and I relish your awe.

Few women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of girlhood,

Feminism comes to all things, it seems, but it comes to recognizing homicidal rage the slowest.

sentimentality is for great meals you’ll never eat again.

I like it when men look at me as if they want to devour me. I find it deeply entertaining. It becomes annoying only when they start talking, as if I’d have any interest in anything that comes out of their mouths.

You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy, moral business, and feel like you are a better person.

Kill one man and you’re an oddity. Kill a few and you’re a legend.

At its most essential, human meat makes me think of magic. I can’t flatten the experience of eating human meat into pork, to veal, or to beef, something common sold at the Piggly Wiggly. In my experience, eating a human is like eating unicorn, or Pegasus, or griffin. It’s a flavor that best belongs in a bestiary, if bestiaries had butcher shops.

To eat people is to get the taste of a Titan. It’s infinite immortalization. It makes a god out of a woman.

Who hasn’t lain in bed next to her lover and wished that, coitus concluded, she could turn her head a balletic one-eighty, unhinge her jaw, and snap off the head of the man lying insensate next to her.

I try to make good choices. I fail. I live to eat another day.

jurisprudence hates a violent woman. We can forgive any number of men murdering their wives and girlfriends. But we have a hard time extending the same compassion to women who kill their husbands and boyfriends, even though women have many more reasons to be driven to it.

Unfettered violence, anger unleashed, the will to destroy, the need to undo—these acts run counter to everything we like to think we know about the feminine nature.

Yet women weren’t always the angels in the house, and angels weren’t always benevolent beings playing harps on the tops of trees.

One thing I’ve learned since college is that few men will suck your toes.

I had never lain in bed next to a man and wanted to feel absorbed into his body, like a kit into the uterine wall of a rabbit—a gross metaphor, but love is rife with body parts, with wet hearts and thudding rib cages and heaving bosoms and salty loins and velvety genitals. You can’t have erotic love without the rank grittiness of dirty bodies, and bodies, like desires, are disgusting.