A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

Stories are, like justice or a skyscraper, things that humans fabricate.

I’ve always found that being the center of attention is an implicitly erotic state, and I spread my exotic wings under the students’ bland collective gaze.

Over trays of Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers and mountains of cooling fries, I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty.

Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk.

I yowled, then I luxuriated in the unfamiliar pain, a sensation that thrilled and frightened me.

You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never know too much.

Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone.

Writers say this kind of thing all the time, but to me writing is like drinking water or eating food. Writing sustains me. I don’t know who I am if I don’t write. More important, you don’t know who I am. If I don’t tell my story, it’s as if I’ve died.

I hated the lifestyle section. Lifestyle means nothing; it’s the part of the paper dedicated to making its reading public feel pointlessly bad about themselves—and then convincing readers that the solution to their existential woe is buying the selfsame stuff that made them feel bad. The lifestyle section exists to prescribe a standard of living to which ordinary people should aspire and ultimately fail.

Run to its inevitable end, fecundity will always turn to decay.

I knew that Marco wasn’t smarter than me; I just couldn’t prove his stupidity. It was frustrating.

The men in Rome saunter like they have great towering monuments between their legs.

If you’ve a fat wallet, a broad palate, and a pica-driven yen, truffles are your fix, the methadone to your dirt-eating ecstasy. But at the bottom of it, you should know this: you wanted to eat truffles because someone like me told you to eat them. Without me and people like me, food commoners would be like Sims characters, turning endless, aimless circles, appetites spinning them into unrequited nothingness.

The long-ago lore is that trifulau used sows to hunt because truffles smell like male pigs’ pheromones. All these sows hoping to fuck and finding a tiny, tasty morsel in its stead, a metaphor for modern women’s twee passion for cakepops. Me, I’ll take the truffle.

I don’t want to be forgotten. Kill one man and you’re an oddity. Kill a few and you’re a legend.

When I killed Giovanni in December 2000, I did so in a headlong, confused rush.

Earlier framed it as an accident, now it was intentional

It was all a game, really, but just because it was a game didn’t mean I wasn’t going to play to win.

I look back at that impotent time and I think, This is how ordinary people must feel every day. You poor, pitiful fools.

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

My own life, drab as custard, affords me little entertainment. I must rely on the crises of strangers.

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

I visited Marco’s empire and saw it for what it was: a well-planned, carefully orchestrated machine bent on the extermination of animals for our gastronomical pleasure.

It was a clean, sharp blade. It made Dorothy Parker’s wit look dull.

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

That’s a line I can’t cross.

Her morals are so interesting

And this was, you see, the essential difference between Casimir’s murder and all the rest: I didn’t love him, and I didn’t eat him.

All the things she hates about others is something that she did herself. Almost as if her previous excuses were meaningless... She's not who she paints herself as with her fancy words

These four men I couldn’t live without, and now I don’t have to. I am all of them; they are some of me.

(and no guilt for shoving Liam off the side of the cliff, no guilt for Yves and that remarkably well-timed bee sting, and not even any guilt for letting anaphylactic shock do my dirty work not once but twice).

Why has she left them out until now? Did she eat or not eat these men?

To be honest— and, really, when have I been anything but—I’m not sure I know, not even now.

You haven't been honest for a lot of the book

I maintain that love can’t simultaneously be an accident and a premeditated act, yet we treat it as if it is. It’s a necessary fiction, love’s oxymoronic nature. Love’s a contranym as sharp as “cleave” and twice as dangerous.

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.