A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

I may have been shortsighted with lust, but I wasn’t crazy.

We were girls being girls

From my mother, I learned that beauty was armor. From my teenage friends, I learned that femininity was junk. They were both right.

I rather enjoyed being objectified. 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.

I knew from a young age that motherhood was a cage I never wanted to inhabit.

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

It was an accident, of course. Well, the killing was accidental; the eating was deliberate.

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.

both movement and stillness are equally true. Life erupts with contradictions, and we contain multitudes—

He nosed closer to my heart. He needed to die.

Humans are far more interested in themselves than they are in anyone else.

I could never be a mass murderer. Mass murder is gauche.

I wanted to spend time with him again and I wanted to kill him again;

I like a man who can keep his commitments. Let me rephrase that: I like a man who can keep his commitments to me.

a life sentence is like being married, but without the handholding.

Just because I’m a psychopath doesn’t mean I’m incapable of learning and growing, or whatever.

I was not happy at what my life had pushed me to do, but who is.

If he didn’t fuck me, I’d have to kill him;

Choices are, after all, the things that haunt us. The moments when we could’ve turned left but turned right. The times when we could’ve gone back but forged ahead. The instants when we made decisions that we would live to regret.

You only want what you can’t consistently have, at least if you’re me.

I wanted to pull my brain out through my eye sockets with a buttonhook.

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.

At no point did I stop and wonder at my madness, or kennel the crawling horror-sloth whose incessant growling had edged me into action. I did not think. I only felt,

I had the right to wonder what the fuck I’d done to myself.

Women have to work so much harder than men to appear half as convincing.

All humans are bad. Most of us merely live our lives with our worst, most unethical acts lying like bodies clad in concrete, undiscovered, quiet, and dark. What is heaven but the hope for righteous acknowledgment, and what is hell but the fear of discovery.

It’s a necessary fiction, love’s oxymoronic nature. Love’s a contranym as sharp as “cleave” and twice as dangerous.

His authenticity didn’t match with my gut feeling that all men merely wanted to enjoy me and move on.

One thing I’ve learned since college is that few men will suck your toes. Those who will are men of uncommon bravery, vision, and appetite.

Sure, I loved other men, or thought I did—who can say. How do I know if I really loved them,

You can’t have erotic love without the rank grittiness of dirty bodies, and bodies, like desires, are disgusting.

I like being by myself, you see. I just didn’t want to be alone. And now I never will be.