How to Be Eaten

by Maria Adelmann

Men don’t have to pretend to be good, I thought. In fact, they’re supposed to be a little brutal.

How infuriating, to have people all around and to still not be heard.

“The true hero of the American utopia is neither the cowboy nor the soldier but the pioneer, the pathfinder.”

It’s ironic, really, she said. This is the pinnacle of late capitalism, isn’t it? To be lured by wealth, to be murdered for wanting it, and then to be transformed into a one-of-a-kind object, a kind of rejection-of and reaction-to mass production?

morals create a labyrinth of rules geared toward blaming the victim,”

You can’t change the past, but it’s infinitely reframeable. You can tell the same story over and over a hundred different ways, and every version is a little right and every version is a little wrong.