A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

“You have what I call ‘resting bitch face.’ It’s interesting,” he said. I looked at him and arched a brow. “Well, wait until you see it in full fucking action, little man.”

And then, my breath caught in reverence, I watched as his eyes grew blank with ethereal suddenness. It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s death. Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a man orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege.

It was just a house, a stranger’s house, an empty house located apart from others, one with an easily picked lock and running electricity. A house closed for the season, empty of people and barren of company, and now it was burnt. I’m quite certain the owners had insurance. After all, they had a lovely Le Creuset cast-iron French oven. That sort is always well insured.

We women have an emotional wiliness that shellacs us in a glossy patina of caring. We have been raised to take interest in promoting the healthy interior lives of other humans; preparation, I suppose, for taking on the emotional labor of motherhood—or marriage; either way, really. Few women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of girlhood, and even psychopaths are touched by the long, frilly arm of feminine expectations.

He worked long, late hours (time that, as it turned out, was punctuated with a series of mistresses, women whose identities blurred furry into a string of pronouns and epithets—her, she, that one, that bitch, your whore. I’d hear my parents argue in raw hushed tones, my mother making a show because propriety demanded it. In truth, she expected more integrity from the jars of preserves in her pantry). For a man given to 60-to-80-hour work weeks, my father’s home was less his castle and more his weekend office.

I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty.

You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.

Joanne looked around, lost. I was afraid she was going to cry. I hate crying. So pointless, and so damp.

I found Italy an interesting place to be a young American woman. I rather enjoyed being objectified. I like it when men look at me as if they want to devour me. I find it deeply entertaining. It becomes annoying only when they start talking, as if I’d have any interest in anything that comes out of their mouths.

Giovanni. I killed him, and ate his liver. It was an accident, of course. Well, the killing was accidental; the eating was deliberate.

The paté was surprisingly tasty, sapid yet nuanced, though I did have to cheat and use a touch of chicken fat to make it creamy. But given Giovanni’s decades-long adherence to veganism and a lifestyle so ascetic it anesthetized his desires, what else could I do. It was the cleanest human liver ever likely to cross my path. I could hardly waste it.

I reversed the car, driving a few feet backward, the Fiat’s headlights now illuminating Giovanni, who hung on the guardrail, suspended, teetering on the edge of the Piemontese abyss. He did not look good. Giovanni glistened, for one thing. People ought not to glisten, not darkly in the night, not like that.

We’d loved, or it seemed we had. Once the affection is gone, I always have a hard time recollecting it; it comes to me in phantasmagoric slivers in the quicksilver small hours of the night. Once the affection is gone, it slips from my memory like the face of a dead relative.

Cannibalism, tellingly, isn’t illegal in many countries. It’s perfectly legal, for example, across most of the United States of America—Idaho’s felony law prohibiting cannibalism is an anomaly. Kill and eat a human, and the authorities will charge you with murder, of course; merely eat a human, and you may be hit with the charge of desecrating a corpse; in most states, it’s a misdemeanor. I’m not telling you this to imply you should eat a human; I’m telling you this merely to show you that you could eat a human. If your tastes run that way, that is.

I killed Giovanni in 2000, and I got away with it. The polizia called me several days after I had returned to New York, which was two days after I had hit Giovanni and one day after I’d turned his liver into a nice paté and spread it on good Tuscan toast.

It was all surprisingly easy, even with Andrew’s labyrinthine home security system—all you needed to know for the home security code was Andrew’s IQ, 142, and his penis length, 7.5—men can be so predictable. Early the next morning, I returned to find Andrew a rosy shade of dead, opened the windows, aired out the house, sliced off two nice chunks of Andrew’s choir boy buttocks, released the hounds, and let time, canine hunger, and nature take their inevitable courses.

In 1997, diners were discovering the joys of the tasting menu and Thomas Keller’s French Laundry; they were flocking to Nobu, where they’d crane their necks and search for sightings of Robert DeNiro, because nothing accessorizes raw fish quite like the shattered gleam of celebrity—and

Their affair had started on some long night of closing some long issue when she bent over to pick up a pen that Andrew had dropped and allowed him a view of her labial charms. My former assistant, it turned out, did not believe in undergarments, despite their verifiable existence.

We as an English-speaking people can’t not eat our dead—our language loves a cannibal. We don’t just win at sports, we kill the other team; we demolish them; we devour our opponents. To express our appreciation for a baby’s cuteness, we say we could eat her up. When we have sex, we ravish our lovers, nibble their ears, lick their vulvas, or swallow their cocks. Gleeful, we banquet on flesh.

It was also fairly clear that as much as Andrew claimed to be a private equity manager, he mostly went to the office to watch Netflix and porn (he seemed to have a thing for cuckold videos, but then most straight men do), take long lunches, and occasionally dabble desultorily in the stock market.

Tracing my finger down the cleft between his buttocks, I recollected all the times I would take Andrew fresh from the shower, bend him over a pillow, and plant my mouth on his rectum with a wet, open-lipped kiss. Rich, well-bred men have the best hygiene. “Eat the rich,” they say, and in this they are not wrong.

Gil moved fluidly from perversion to vanilla, accepting with good-hearted equanimity all the various pleasures of the flesh from missionary sex to anal. He was a rare good egg, my dear Gil. He was like Mister Rogers, if Mister Rogers hadn’t trained as a preacher and owned a full complement of ball gags and spreader bars, all covered in fine English leather.

Chloe blinked, fumbled her papers. “The magazine business is changing. We have to change with it. Online short-form, more photography, video. It’s nothing personal.” She tossed a tiny, brittle smile. I broke my silence. “Chloe, you’re firing me. I can’t think of anything more personal.”

Energetic and staunchly nice, Gil was there when I called him, many more times than not, regardless of his marriage status. I like a man who can keep his commitments. Let me rephrase that: I like a man who can keep his commitments to me.

Some meals, simple as they may be, unfurl with the sacred precision of art, and this was one. Nature had conspired to give us a beautiful day, Gil had used his skill to give us a beautiful sail, and I had made a beautiful meal. Now all I had to do was wait for Gil’s anaphylactic shock to kick in before I pushed him overboard and cut out his tongue.

Gil’s tongue was a lovely little morsel, surprisingly delectable for all its swelling. I skinned, sliced, then sautéed it with olive oil and garlic, adding chunks of plump Roma tomatoes, and finishing with green olives. I served it alongside a lovely arugula salad that I dressed simply with olive oil, lemon, and shaved Parmesan. Crostini rubbed with olive oil and layered with anchovy paste, and a cutting, fresh white from Liguria, Bisson Bianco Marea—hard to find, and utterly worth the search—completed the meal. I dined outside on my little terrace, Manhattan like a magical film still, as it can be on a June night, and I thought about all the wonderful times I’d shared with Gil. He was a lovely man, Gil. So delicate.

I wasn’t looking forward to going to Italy and having to seduce a new lover. Nearly fifty, I was beginning to find it laborious—it wasn’t the seduction, exactly. I looked good, and I’ve always been as charming as a hungry cat when I needed to be. It was more that performing the dance had grown tedious. I didn’t want to tell someone my history; I didn’t want to be bothered to invent a new one.

I don’t mean to boast, but I cannot forbear saying this: aside from my two books, Ravenous and Voracious, killing Marco is my finest achievement. Nearly two years had passed since I had turned Gil into a delicate dish of tongue.

Although I pressed him until the moment I closed the zipper on my suitcase, Marco remained adamantly opposed to seeing me for sex. “Il mio cuore, anima, vita, cazzo—appartengono alla mia amata moglie,” he said to me before I left America. His heart, his soul, his life, his cock, they all belonged to his wife, enumerating his parts in escalating importance.

An average cow produces 490 pounds of trimmed, edible meat; it also produces about 12 tons of shit, or 24,000 pounds, during its lifespan. Vast truckloads of shit must be moved, somewhere, to get that steak on the plate or that burger on the bun. Think about that the next time you unwrap your BK Double.

Prison food is part of the punishment. The food the prison feeds you is almost entirely comprised of meals made from cans, boxes, or mixes, made by people who can’t be bothered to care, and served to people who have no choice but to eat it.

One thing most people don’t fully comprehend is that the USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture, is for all intents and purposes run by big agro. Let me put it another way: the USDA is a giddy dystopian wonderland designed for the pleasure of big agribusiness. There are only a handful of American agribusiness corporations, and they essentially dictate what Americans eat because they essentially control the USDA.

For example, the USDA created the nutritional pyramid first and foremost to serve agribusiness’s interests—not human physical needs. And thus the meals served to schools and to prisons reflect not what the bodies of growing boys and girls or aging men and women need to thrive and/or survive; rather, these meals, planned and vetted and carefully created by lockstep scads of bureaucratic drones, work to buttress the agribusiness economy—while costing the State (or the corporation running the institution) as little as possible.

Here’s another way to look at it: in the 1930s, there were 5,000,000 more American farmers than there are now, not quite a hundred years later, and these millions of farmers grew a wider range of foodstuffs on these predominantly family-owned-and-operated farms. Most important, these farms don’t exist today. That cool six-figure loss hides the explosive growth of corporations like Monsanto and DuPont, shrouds the decrease in differing crops that American farmers grow, and obfuscates how what we eat is making us sick because what we’re eating is in no small part dictated by the big businesses that grow th...

So much mechanized precision in the interest of beneficent death made me inexpressibly hot. I wanted Marco. I wanted to fuck him hard on that kill-yard floor. And I couldn’t show it. Not a sigh, not a glance, not a whimper, not if I wanted him dead.

I don’t regret killing Marco. It was, after all, almost his decision. Had Marco broken with his monogamous pact, had he forsaken his bourgeois conformity to the donna, to his faith, to the superego of respectability, had he merely made the easy choice to fall gently into vague dissolution, he’d still be walking and talking, alive to sneak into obscure trattorias to eat prosciutto and finger-fuck my familiar genitalia beneath the table. I’d rub my face into his badger-pelt chest and order another magnum of Champagne. We’d have oysters and anal, not necessarily in that order, and all would be right with the world.

I unbuckled Marco’s Gucci belt, unzipped his Valentino trousers, pulled his cock free of his Dolce & Gabbana boxers, and I took it into my mouth. I lulled Marco into willing submission, and as I felt his cock quiver with the hardness of near orgasm, and as I tasted the bleach-and-umami flavor of his precum, I reached my right into my purse. Marco spent himself into my mouth, shuddering, groaning; his orgasm echoed in his butcher’s room. I caressed his flank with my left hand, waiting for him to go soft in my mouth. Then, I stood and kissed him, looked him in the eye, and I slit his throat with my blade.

I couldn’t decide which I wanted to eat more, so I took both, first slicing the pectorals away from the chest wall in smooth, heavy sheets, and next following the intestine trail through the belly to find the stomach. It was swollen as an old boot. I turned the stomach inside out, spilling the contents onto the floor. Chunks of chicken, shards of broccoli, and bits of white somethings, possibly orecchiette. I’d always told Marco to chew his food better. I felt almost nostalgic, seeing how right I’d been.