House of Hunger

by Alexis Henderson

“I don’t see how the two are so different. I’d rather bleed to sate the appetite of a night lord than bleed on the birthing bed, bearing the children of a man I hardly love.”

If you cheated your way out of life’s hurts, you wouldn’t be ready for the next blow. And the next blow was always coming.

“We have to learn how to bleed for ourselves before we can learn to bleed for them,”

My mother once told me beautiful was the worst thing a girl could be. I’m now inclined to believe her.

“We’re broken into submission, by grief and poverty, long before we ever set foot in this House. And then we arrive, on the promise of the first kindness many of us have received in years, and you take advantage of our weakness. You cultivate it, to better exploit us.