A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

People tend to think that the most natural stories begin at their beginning and unwind through their middle to their completion, and sometimes they do. But that narrative structure is only as true as time, which is to say it’s as much a construct as a house or a dress or a turducken. Stories are, like justice or a skyscraper, things that humans fabricate.

Feminism comes to all things, it seems, but it comes to recognizing homicidal rage the slowest.

Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk. Adolescence immersed me in an ouroboros of desires, and it was ecstasy. What choice did I have but to lose my virginity to a fry-cook.

we fucked so much, so long, and so often, we passed a yeast infection back and forth like a joint.

More than once, I considered just letting that gay cat out of the rainbow bag, but even a psychopath like me has some compunction when it comes to the mental health of her baby brother. Besides, it wasn’t as if I’d take any pleasure in telling his news.

New York City may have a commercial skin, but it’s built on a skeleton of sex and magic.

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.

Don’t believe those lies, anyway. Believe others, if it makes you feel safe. Safety, too, is a lie.

The long-ago lore is that trifulau used sows to hunt because truffles smell like male pigs’ pheromones. All these sows hoping to fuck and finding a tiny, tasty morsel in its stead, a metaphor for modern women’s twee passion for cakepops. Me, I’ll take the truffle.

Do a little research and you’ll find there’s a surprising amount of available information on the cooking and eating of people, so much, in fact, that one could begin to believe it’s entirely normal.

He was a luscious memory I held in my head. I could take his memory out of safekeeping and stroke it when I needed it. Giovanni was right where I needed him to be.

The only thing I can do is make my trouble your joy—because here’s the thing about reading my memoir: it will make you feel good about yourself. You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy, moral business, and feel like you are a better person.

Mass murderers make homicidal psychopaths look bad, in my opinion. At least we serial killers employ art in our abandon.

Afterward, I felt a keen buzz, like the susurrations of a crush. But I also felt intensely anxious, taut and tight with the realization of what I had done. It wasn’t guilt, not really, not as I fumble to understand what “guilt” means. It was more the pervasive fear that I’d be found out—or possibly the fear that I wouldn’t. An inarticulate wonder that I’d come to inhabit the amorphous amoral space of having killed a man and being entirely okay with it.

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 wanted Marco and all our weight, all our wrinkles, all our textures, all our complexities.

But what aesthetics can one expect from a committee. No group will ever agree on any design that’s truly beautiful; a group will always default to bourgeois blandness.

He was adequate, a typical mediocre white male whose career advanced because he was not entirely horrible. Women have to work so much harder than men to appear half as convincing.

We can forgive any number of men murdering their wives and girlfriends. But we have a hard time extending the same compassion to women who kill their husbands and boyfriends, even though women have many more reasons to be driven to it. Culture refuses to see violence in women, and the law nurtures a special loathing for violent women. Unfettered violence, anger unleashed, the will to destroy, the need to undo—these acts run counter to everything we like to think we know about the feminine nature. Yet women weren’t always the angels in the house, and angels weren’t always benevolent beings playing harps on the tops of trees. We like to forget that men imprisoned women in the house and expected gratitude in return.

You can’t have erotic love without the rank grittiness of dirty bodies, and bodies, like desires, are disgusting.

Love makes us do the wacky;

Isnt this in buffy?