A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege.

I genuinely lack remorse.

It took Emma nine years to join me in my glorious New York City, but I was glad when she did.

Better to sing a song of experience with your burning tiger’s heart.

“Eat the rich,” they say, and in this they are not wrong.

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.

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

I killed him, I wanted to tell her.

Anything that was good about me, anything, that is, that wasn’t my work, lived in my relationship with Emma.

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

And I left Alex there on the wind-whipped observation deck of the building that, once the tallest in the world, killed five men in its creation, a skyscraper that will only ever be a building to me.