How to Be Eaten

by Maria Adelmann

treat bookstores like Saks Fifth Avenue: perusing but rarely buying. I am a connoisseur of bargain bins, libraries, used bookstores. But still, guiltily, I’ll slink into a new bookstore from time to time, let my fingers glide across the spines, sleek and shining as if glazed.

To want is to be bewitched, I’ve long thought. If it’s beautiful or sweet, it will ruin you.

drawing the items from her tote like a magician or a witch. I’m wary of gifts. Nothing is free. You always pay for it later.

She has an interest in halves, in how people divide, how one part of yourself can separate from the other so completely, so definitively, that the division is impossible to repair.

was a little note like one of these—a cocktail napkin with ten numbers written on it—that had changed her life.

When I was little, he’d whisper stories into my ear at night, his breath warm and sweet: a beautiful woman with hair like a rope, a beast with hunger in his stomach, another with hunger in his loins.

strange smile slides across Will’s face. “Yes,” says Raina. “I’m Jake Jackson’s wife.”