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.

I wanted to be alone forever, and I never wanted to be alone again. I wanted to never unlock another door, never enter another unfamiliar room. I didn’t want to encounter any more mysteries: not one wrapped gift, not one page in a page-turning novel, not one movie where the ending wasn’t abundantly clear. I wanted to avoid everything: myself, the news, the color blue—every shade, cyan and slate, sapphire and cerulean. I wanted blue eradicated. I wanted the sky to pick another color, any other color, but it arched over me daily like a blue bowl, and I was a bug trapped beneath.

“It’s like you’ve spent your whole life putting one foot in front of the other, knowing the ground would always be there to meet you, and then suddenly, one day…it isn’t. The bottom has dropped out. The unbelievable happens and you just…fall.”

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.