House of Hunger

by Alexis Henderson

Agnes pulled on her cigarette in silence, the smoke leaking through the gaps of her missing teeth. She looked haggard from the time she’d spent slaving away on the line, breathing the toxic phosphorous fumes day in and day out until the chemical stench filled her up like a second spirit. That was something Marion’s mother used to say. That folks in Prane had two souls—one made of the stuff of the heavens, the other from miasma.

Marion saw little difference between the two. Both the act of becoming a bloodmaid and the act of becoming a wife were a kind of amalgamation of fealty and flesh, blood and fidelity. And why sell yourself to a penniless man when you could sell yourself to a lord of the North? “I don’t see how the two are so different. I’d rather bleed to sate the appetite of a night lord than bleed on the birthing bed, bearing the children of a man I hardly love.”

“When I was younger, my hunger was all nosebleeds and stupor. Bruises stamped across my skin and a chill that never left me. But now, when I’m laid low, it feels like starving. It’s as if I’m housing a storm of locusts in my belly, and they’re hungry for all of the things I’ll never get to do or see. The people I’ll never meet. The mountains I’ll never climb. The oceans I’ll never sail across. The lives I’ll never lead.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve been building you a House out of my own bones. And still, you look at me with so much contempt and mistrust. You complain because there are gaps in the roof of my ribs, and you ask me to give more of myself to fill them. You want my hips to be the bowl you drink from. My shoulders, your bed. My arms, your walls. My legs, the very ground you stand on. You want your fill of my blood whenever you crave it. What more do you want from me?”