House of Hunger

by Alexis Henderson

She sometimes wondered if there was a single person in the slums who found something, anything, to love about the place. Agnes, for her part, seemed resigned, even content. 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.

“I’ll let you in on a little secret that will serve you well in the North: The whole world runs on blood. Who has good blood. Who has bad blood. Whose blood is shed and whose isn’t. That’s what it all comes down to in the end. And you southerners like to pretend that isn’t true, but you’re just as bloodthirsty as the rest. Blood is everything in the South. It’s everything everywhere.”

She’d never been able to understand why people who had so much fought over so little. What was the point of war when everyone had full bellies and more money than they could ever spend? What more could they possibly want? As far as Marion was concerned, they were simply too rich and too bored and looking for violent ways to pass the years.

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

Marion had always found it odd that someone would go through the trouble of killing a creature only to make it look alive again. It seemed somehow perverse.

“I don’t know how you could mistake me for anything more than entirely loyal to you and you only,” said Marion, in a shaking voice, and the tears she’d been fighting back spilled down her cheeks. “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?”

One learns to make the object of your hunger love you. Because when they love you, they’ll do the emotional butchery themselves. It was you, Marion, not me, who cut open your own chest, reached into the wet cavern behind your ribs, cut your heart loose of its rigging, and offered it to me. I had only to take it.”

“We don’t make ourselves prone,” said Marion, and in that moment all of the residual love she’d had left for Lisavet—love she now had no place or purpose for—curdled and turned to hatred. “We’re broken into submission, by grief and poverty, long before we ever set foot in this House. And then we arrive, on the promise of the first kindness many of us have received in years, and you take advantage of our weakness. You cultivate it, to better exploit us. You torment people until they give up everything—their blood, their dignity, even their names.