How to Be Eaten

by Maria Adelmann

Whatever people do on a Friday, the women in the basement are not doing it.

They write their names on white, rectangular name tags, then press those tags to their chests. The instant they’re on, they begin to peel off, as if the tags themselves understand what the women want most: to be rid of their history, to start anew. But they can’t outrun their names and they can’t outrun their stories.

As for Gretel, they’ve all heard her name, and if she’s here, she’s almost certainly the Gretel, the one from the strange kidnapping story that captivated the nation more than two decades before: a brother and sister went missing, reappeared three months later miles from home.

His teeth are a tabula rasa of whiteness. When the women look at them, they each see something different.

Above all, they must be completely and absolutely honest. No lies, not even white lies, not even lies by omission. No holding back. He calls this “Absolute Honesty.” He explains that a natural by-product of Absolute Honesty is tension and conflict.

The house’s best feature was its size—so small that we could see around it, out across the tan-green beach grass into the beautiful blue beyond. At dinner, in the years following my father’s sudden death from a pulmonary embolism, my mom would stare out at the water as we ate. “At least we have that view,” she’d say.

“I heard he chews through women like bubble gum,” said my sister. She had somehow mastered a sophisticated Anthropologie-Patagonia look, though she shopped only at thrift stores. “Chews, chews, and spits them out,” she said.

“There’s no right way,” says Will. “Just keep going.” Ashlee releases the spiral of hair, and it bounces at her shoulder. Ruby tears the R of her name in half. “Bernice,” says Will. “Listen to me. You’re doing great, okay?”

“Your sister is beautiful,” he said. “But you have something more important.” I wanted him to tell me what it was, but he was already out of bed, walking to the bathroom in a blue silken robe.

“What kind of woman are you?” I shouted. “I exist beyond your human concept of gender,” said Andrea. “Fuck you,” I said. “There’s no need for that language,” said Andrea.

“Andrea?” I whispered. “Yes.” “Can you open the doors?” “No,” she said. “Is there some password I can say so you’ll open the doors?” “No,” she said. “The windows?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Do you get asked these questions often?” I asked. “Yes,” she said.

It’s strange, to learn your boyfriend is a psychopath and to not be entirely surprised.

He began a speech I was sure he’d recited many times before, to the many girlfriends he’d murdered. The speech was about, among other things, aristocracy, meritocracy, mediocrity, technology, morality, disruption, and his associations with the color blue.

They think I helped him, and they’re not even afraid. They’re just disgusted. I’m nothing without him, not even a threat.”

He waved his hand around randomly, as if the wallpaper had killed his daughter.

I remembered the Don’t I mistook for a floorboard’s squeak. I thought of the furniture, the women, trapped in the mansion, yelling to the parade of girlfriends passing by, each one eventually joining their ranks.

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

“Though what wouldn’t you believe?” says Ruby. “So you don’t believe her?” asks Will. “I’m not the arbitrator of truth,” says Ruby.

In death, or whatever it was, she felt perpetually horny, or not quite horny, but like she was always on the verge of something exceptional yet unachievable.

Ruby guzzles the water, some of it spilling down her chin, the stainless-steel bottle gleaming like a bullet under the basement lights. She wipes her chin with the wet fur of her sleeve, leaving a fresh track of red across her mouth so it looks as if she’s just devoured a bloody meal.

“I wonder why that coat is so important to you,” Will asks Ruby. “Transitional object,” says Ruby. “From what to what?” asks Will.

Nothing is anything? Was she kidding me? Humans have been making meaning for tens of thousands of years, adding and changing stories like some intergenerational Exquisite Corpse. Even the fucking Neanderthals were scribbling on the walls. As if Chloe and her lame tattoo were immune, as if she’d managed to pull something unique and pure from the ether. I wanted to razor-slash that tattoo, right through that pretentious monocled eyeball.

“I don’t need anything,” I’d said. “You do,” he’d said. “You need everything to be all fucked up.”

Ruby laughs. A bead of red sweat has rolled down the side of her face, leaving a grimy pink trail. She wipes her sweaty forehead with her pink-stained hand, then wipes her hand on the stained breast of her coat, then looks at her wet hand. She’s just transferring liquids from one place to another.

“Do you want to be treated poorly?” “Jesus, I don’t know,” I’d said to whatever question I was supposed to be answering. I’d been on my haunches next to the napkin supply, trying to clean the cum out of my coat, one of hundreds of liquids that had seeped into the fur over the years, a scrapbook of stains: beer and dirt and tears, and, in the lining of the sleeves, smeared lines of blood.

“You just look, I don’t know, like a rabbit or something, mischievous and scared, like you’re waiting for something violent to happen, and when it does, you’re gonna love it, you’re gonna love being torn apart.”

I wouldn’t even pay me to sleep with me. I was embarrassed for us all.

My phone was out of space, so I had only one song downloaded on it, which I listened to on repeat as I stared at my hazy ghost reflection, the dark wall whizzing behind it. She didn’t look like me.

But it wasn’t that kind of courtship. He laughed with a growl, like he knew something I didn’t. “So you’re that kind of girl,” he said.

Outside one of the shops, I heard a man shouting, “Her is dead! Her is dead!” What did it mean? Did he hate women? Did he want to obliterate gendered pronouns? I wasn’t totally opposed. Why did he have to be so annoying about it?

Red liquid dripped into a pool at my feet. I could see my reflection there: dark, distorted, shimmering. It was beautiful, in some wild way. Rabbit or wolf, I couldn’t tell which. Both, I guess. Probably a little of both.

He remembers, once again, how his insides don’t match his outsides. He remembers how incredibly itchy he is.

The man’s real skin is dry-cracked and flaky. His gut sags. His hair is matted back in a lunch-lady hairnet. His face—well, it’s his face. It’s aged despite every intervention. Irrecoverable, at this point, unless he wants to start from scratch. Unless he wants a whole new face. Which he does. Which he now has for a few hours each week.

He forgets the rest of that story. He can’t even invent a reason why a beautiful woman would want to make herself ugly on purpose.

“Why do we think Ruby’s still wearing the coat?” he asks the group. After a silence, he asks them one by one. “Holding on to old patterns,” offers Bernice. “An unwillingness to let go of the past,” suggests Gretel. “Attention,” says Ashlee, who is aggressively snapping and unsnapping the strap of her baseball cap.

She kept saying it like that, “Real potential.” Not once in my year of folding clothes at Always 16 had my manager ever said I had potential for anything. She was always just like, “Ashlee, did you even look at the planogram?” Which, no.

I couldn’t think in words, could only think in emojis: Red Rose. Smiley Face with Hearts for Eyes. Red Heart. Blue Heart. Pink Heart. Heart with Bow. Beating Heart. Sparkle Heart. Sparkles. Also: Sun, Moon, Stars.

I was like, “Do you believe in love at first sight?” He whispered, “We wouldn’t want to ruin the ending already.”

She was like, “A speaker system? What the fuck is this? North Korea? Nineteen Eighty-Four? The fucking Stanford Prison Experiment?” From the bunk below her Bri was like, “I don’t even know those shows.”

Time passed or it didn’t. It was actually pretty weird. It was like time had once been a stack of cheese cubes, and now all the cubes had melted together.

“Trauma, in and of itself, bestows nothing,” says Gretel. “It gives you power,” says Ruby. “People are fascinated by us.” “You’re mistaking pity for interest,” says Gretel.

“Are you a fucking Magic 8-Ball, Will?” says Ruby. “Are there only eight different things you can say?”

Bernice puts her fingers in her ears, starts quietly humming. “Guys, you’re making Bernice go crazy,” says Ashlee. “She gets enough of women arguing at home.” “Bernice is making herself go crazy,” snaps Ruby.

“I can’t eat all that,” I said. Very slowly, she stirred the orange chicken. “Maybe you can eat some of it,” she said in a tone with a tone beneath it, like a board that had finally begun to creak under my weight.

Back on the bed, she began consuming the pie by puncturing it, licking the fork, puncturing it, licking the fork. I felt a dark nastiness rising within me.

Perhaps my father pulled out the picture of me from his wallet, the one from prom where I’m wearing a powder-pink princess dress and a sparkling tiara. “Could be yours,” my father said—perhaps my father said.

They split bills into impossible configurations. They left coins as tips, spread out across the table among crumbled napkins and wet straw wrappers. I collected them like a bird pecking at seeds.

“Hey, come back here, good lookin’!” I refused to turn around. “I know who you are!” he’d shout after me, a threat. “You’re Mr. Miller’s daughter!” I already knew who I was.

Will leans toward Ruby. “I can see you’re upset,” he says. “I wasn’t attacking you. I wonder why you saw it that way.” “Fuck that,” says Ruby.

“That is not a person,” said Jake. “That’s a troll, a creature of some kind.” This coming from a man who would one day have so much plastic surgery that he’d be half bovine and botulism.