House of Hunger

by Alexis Henderson

But begrudging contentment was not the same as happiness. At best it was familiarity, and at worst defeat. It certainly wasn’t the same as true fondness.

True night is black too thick to see through. It’s a crescent moon and starless skies and the kind of cold that kills. You’ll know it when you feel it.”

We bleed for those we love most.

My mother once told me beautiful was the worst thing a girl could be. I’m now inclined to believe her.

“What we are made to feel we are made to remember. And there is no feeling as memorable as pain.

Marion watched the nobles of the court glut themselves on each other in the throes of their passion in a grotesque amalgamation of tangled limbs, wet mouths, and grasping fingers. In the midst of this . . . display, no one belonged to anyone. Even as a simple onlooker, Marion began to feel like she didn’t belong to herself. Amid this feast of flesh, there was no singularity or distinction between bodies or the spirits they harbored. They were all made one by . . . hunger. That was the word for it.

I’ll never know an evil so debased as my love for her.

I was . . . intimidated by my desire for you. That’s why I stayed away. I thought the distance would help, but it only made me want you more.

In her eyes were the same desperation and want that Marion often saw in the glazed eyes of the children who haunted the street corners of Prane in the wintertime, frostbitten fingers outstretched to the passersby, begging for coin. Marion, once one of those children herself, knew the magnitude of that hunger. A deprivation so complete it became almost punitive. A want that made the knees go weak.

The stickiness of guilt. Like honey on the skin.

Love is an act of sacrifice.

To love is to devour.

I belong more to her than I do myself. Is that not love?

A darkness yawned open before them, the esophagus of the House, spiraling down to its belly, where Marion—like the other girls who’d come before her—would be digested. Consumed.

Desire is a kind of madness.