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’m saying that if you can’t trust the world to behave how you thought it would—if the impossible becomes possible—then you’re open to believing so much more,”

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?

“It’s not like there’s a trial,” says Ruby, “except the trial of public opinion, which actually seems pretty immune to evidence.”

“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.”

I 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.

“Tragedy isn’t capital,” says Gretel. “It doesn’t buy you anything. It doesn’t automatically make you a better person. And it certainly doesn’t make people fall in love with you.”

“Aisha says morals create a labyrinth of rules geared toward blaming the victim,” says Bernice.

“Maybe don’t even be out there, on the street, not if it’s dark, not if you’re alone, not if you’re a kid, not if you’re a woman, not without a rape whistle around your neck, not without pepper spray clutched in your hand, not, anyway, if you’re wearing that outfit.”

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.