A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

As a woman psychopath, the white tiger of human psychological deviance, I am a wonder, and I relish your awe.

It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that we fake it better than men.

You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway.

You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.

Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone. Who am I to stand in the way of the call of the wild.

Everywhere you go there is something wonderful, if only you open your heart, your mind, your wallet, or your thighs.

Shockingly true

New York City, it’s a place that doesn’t care who fucks whom, as long as you do it. Fucking, metaphorical or literal, is New York City’s soul. Fucking with, fucking up, fucking over, fucking around, fucking right: New York Fucking City has earned its name. It makes perfect sense that I felt at home on its streets. The catcalls of its men were a comfort.

One of the wonderful things about true Italian men is that their default setting is about a cunt hair away from physical violence where their heterosexual bonds are concerned. I do enjoy men with a whiff of menace.

I knew from a young age that motherhood was a cage I never wanted to inhabit. Children make me turn on the oven and reach for the rosemary.

The men in Rome saunter like they have great towering monuments between their legs. I find it difficult not to go entirely bent-kneed and supplicant, mouth open and teeth delicately bared, so great is the power of Rome.

Kill and eat a human, and the authorities will charge you with murder, of course; merely eat a human, and you may be hit with the charge of desecrating a corpse; in most states, it’s a misdemeanor. I’m not telling you this to imply you should eat a human; I’m telling you this merely to show you that you could eat a human. If your tastes run that way, that is.

Why, you might wonder, am I telling you this. Is it not, you might ask, a legal confession. Could it not, you may ponder, get me in trouble. To this I say, Trouble: I’m in it. Like prison, I’m never getting out of trouble. The only thing I can do is make my trouble your joy—because here’s the thing about reading my memoir: it will make you feel good about yourself. You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. 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.

Outside the electrified perimeter of the prison, life goes on. I don’t want to be forgotten. Kill one man and you’re an oddity. Kill a few and you’re a legend.

In sum, you and I are the same. You may not admit it aloud, but I know you will read this book and wonder how your lover would taste sautéed with shallots and mushrooms and deglazed with a little red wine. You read, and you wonder, and you know the answer would be delicious. Roll that word around in your mouth and feel the tang of its call.

Yet feelings of unease began to susurrate. Andrew could, after all, only die once. I wanted to spend time with him again and I wanted to kill him again; I wanted both, and I wanted them at once, and neither was possible. Were I able, I would gladly have brought Andrew back to life to kill and eat him, over and over. Multiple lives are wasted on cats.

We were like an old married couple, Andrew and I, companionable in long silences and happy to be in each other’s company. Except, of course, that he was dead and I had eaten him.

💀

Sometimes, meals are transcendent. And in those times, you feel unaccountably blessed, like a whore whose john is good-looking, clean, gifted, and possessed of a sensibility that weds generosity with egalitarianism.

People, by and large, are idiots.

We are a rare breed. Worship us.

I’ll never understand people choosing to eat soulless foods—monsters all, say I, the cannibal.

It was a lovely day for a little homicide.

When I feel the need to break up with something, it’s simply dead to me.

Perhaps I had merely learned to enjoy the act of killing. The television shows and the movies all say that—you kill a person or two and you get a “taste for it,” as if murder were caviar or fugu, sophisticated gastronomical experiences whose enjoyment requires inculcation into a cult. Or as if killing were like potato chips; one leads to another in an endless orgy of mindless indulgence. Before you know it, the whole bag is gone, and you’re sitting there with gritty fingers, grease on your lips, and bathed in blood.

I searched the parts of my body where guilt was supposed to live and I found nothing, not a whisper, not a peep, not a flicker, not a flutter, not the faintest susurration of anything even remotely like remorse.