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I’ve learned the hard way that insatiable girls don’t get happily ever afters. They eat their way through lovers and friends too heartily—and that they also want to be eaten alive, their blood drunk and their bones cracked open, is irrelevant. Insatiable girls stay alone. Insatiable girls settle for living by proxy, for craving and wanting and shoving those wants down where they won’t scare anyone away.
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“Come with us, Janneth, and you will have every wish fulfilled. Come, and you’ll know not hunger nor cold nor the stale kiss of death. I will sing to you of your own whispers and your own thoughts; I will croon to you of secrets untold for lifetimes. And you will know the taste of your own longing only as a garnish, not as its own meal, for in our world, there is only ever surfeit, never any lack.”
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And I like playing a naughty French maid game as much as the next pervy grad student—particularly if there’s spanking involved—and I’m not saying I haven’t occasionally dreamed of being kidnapped and tortured with sexy shit—but this isn’t a dream, this is my real-ass Halloween night.
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Even without the thin circle of gold set in her hair, there is something about her bearing, something about her expression…It reminds me of the way cats sit and stags stand. It reminds me of the unhurried way the moon skims across the sky. There is a completeness about her, a certainty, and a well of power that isn’t interested in proving itself, since such a thing would be unnecessary. Redundant. It speaks for itself.
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Because I’d like her to. Because even though I was kidnapped by someone named Maynard and carried to a mushroom castle, even though I’m so very certain this is a dream, it would be a very good mushroom castle dream if she put her fingers in my mouth.
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“Because mortal toys are more fun,” he says. “And more beloved. And when beloved things bleed, the land sings.”
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The queen’s eyes, although still cool as ever, are like the dark water under a new moon, promising eternity, promising endless, endless forever. And when they meet mine, I suddenly feel like that eternity already knows me, already sees me—sees too much of me.
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“It pleases me to have you as my pet,” she says finally and then closes her eyes. “And so whatever you do, I shall find pleasing, because you are mine.”
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Why have I been pressing myself into the shape of someone easy, someone composed and guarded and temperate, when I’m none of those things? When I don’t even really want to be? When what I really want is to be as hungry as I can be, as messy as I can be, as much?
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The entire world is inside of me and inside of her, and between our mouths is the truth of living, dying, wanting. The truth is that I want to swallow it all whole, come what may.
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I know she must like this, that this pleases her, because she stabs a hand into my hair and rides my face like she paid for it.
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You think you love something, you think it will love you back, but then the closer you get, the further it draws away from you. The more you realize that, rather than the thing itself, you loved the way it made you feel when you knew nothing about it instead.”
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Whatever the reason, you need not treat your humiliations as things that will diminish what I feel for you. Your trust in showing them to me will feed me, delight me, because you delight me. It is like seeing your heart naked, or your mind naked, and I think as I’ve established earlier today, I like seeing you naked very much.”
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She’s cold and inhuman, and she kissed me in the forest with heart blood smearing her mouth, and I think I’m in love.
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Never underestimate the human capacity for accepting weird shit, I guess.
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