english breakfast, $15.20
Plump sausages laced with spice; black pudding still thick with the taste of copper; bread fried in pools of butter; mushrooms roasted in puddles of butter; baked beans soaked in grease and thinned-out tomato sauce. More butter. A bottle of sour brown sauce.
Like nothing skinny, pretty Molly would normally eat.
Meat was too triggery, Molly used to tell her friends, whenever they asked why she preferred finger-bone slivers of raw carrot to veal, heads of broccoli to lamb brains stewed in an intricate masala sauce; raw things, clean things, vegetal and bloodless. They had laughed. But it is a half-true fact.
Meat isn’t wasn’t triggery.
Meat triggers triggered.
international phone call, £156.28
Last week, he told her everything.
Molly plucked at the seams of the armchair with her short, sharp nails until its stuffing fell out like clumps of hair and skin. Over and over, while her voice held steady and her heart thrashed in its cage of ribs.
“And you let her just… get away?”
“What else did you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. Report her—?”
“I can’t. I’ve I told you already. She has a daughter. If she goes to jail, they’re going to give custody to her next of kin: her parents.”
Molly felt a throb of hunger, a loosening of tendons. Under her skin, cells conspired against their veneer of humanity. “So?”
“Her parents are the reason she is the way she is, Molly. I can’t—I can’t do that to an innocent girl.”
Molly swallowed. In her head, the words “innocent girl” were indistinguishable from “meat”.
“Seven years,” he whispered to her. “If you’re going to do anything stupid, promise me you’ll wait seven years before you do anything stupid?” he asked and Molly said yes, okay, even though all of her, bone and blood and brain, ached to disobey.
bottom-shelf whiskey, $125.50
Molly drinks in gulps, not sips, without pleasure, only an inchoate fury. The alcohol glimmers like a fire in her veins, almost enough to distract from the insurrection of her flesh, the mutiny of her marrow. Almost, but not quite.
She drains the first bottle in an hour, orders a second, a third. Halfway through the last, a man approaches, a milquetoast accountant with chins in duplicate, emboldened by booze. She does not protest his company or his conversation, nor does she argue the arm around her waist, the hand on her thigh; not even the smell of him, rank and oily with want.
At the end of the night, he says to her: “Do you want to get out of here?”
And Molly, burning inside the husk of her skin, burning with anger, burning with hate, replies: “Why not?”
room in a two-star hotel behind the bar, free
He lays her out on the white sheets like a bride. His touch is reverent, cautious. His fingers quiver. Molly sighs as he pushes her shirt up.
For a moment, she thinks blearily of giving in, of delighting in his layered softness, his eager attention, the way his mouth, wet and hot and hungry, climbs the rungs of her ribs.
She twists fingers in his damp, thinning curls and he moans as she pulls at him, inhumanly strong. Molly lets one small, sleek smile escape before the change eddies across her, skin and fat sloughing in ripples, dripping gore atop the sheets.
He shrieks, high and thin, even as Molly’s bones rewrite themselves in the language of carnivore lusts, muscles growing long and lupine. Her skull crunches as jaws lengthen into a muzzle, and teeth into knives.
Too late, he attempts to run.
She lunges.
He screams.
entrails, free
He is delicious, meltingly tender from a lifetime of inaction, marbled with broad strokes of fat. Better than wagyu, Molly thinks, as she cracks his sternum like an egg. Better than sex, she sighs, as she pries loose pustulant alveoli. They burst on her tongue, copper-sweet.
She nuzzles between coils of intestines, finds the cooling gelatin of his liver, slurps it down. She has missed this so much. The years, bland, thin into nothingness, replaced by the damp, salty pleasure of fresh offal.
So much better than anything else she has tasted in these last years. Better than this human helplessness. Better than this waiting, this endless counting of the hours and the weeks and the attoseconds until she is free.
private investigator, $598
“She has a daughter,” he says reproachfully. “An eleven-year-old girl who needs her mother.”
The P.I is not a bad man. Molly wouldn’t have contracted him otherwise. He is merely unethical, encumbered with a vein of compassion no amount of money could drain. In a different life, he might have been a hero, a hunter, armored in whaleskin leather and dressed in blades. Not here, though. Where the law defangs, defuses, defeats any instinct but the urge to hunker down and endure.
Molly smiles, shrugs carefully. Her skin feels too tight, the ridges of her vertebrae jagged against the underside of her skin. She is afraid that if she moves too quickly, her epidermis will split, disgorging clumps of muscle and slivers of change-whetted bone, the hair of the accountant from the night before, snarled like yarn in the pit of her belly, a bezoar in infancy.
“I know.”
The P.I hesitates, nails digging into the sheaf of brown folders, held out like temple offerings. She can tell he is second-guessing himself, weighing the consequence of a refund, balancing this month’s rent with a lifetime of guilt.
“I made a promise,” she adds. “A promise to wait seven years.”
He does not ask her why, or what she intends after that statute of seven. Some secrets are best left buried in the earth. Besides, there is something mythic about her proclamation, an officiousness that resonates with his intrinsic humanity, an honesty that borders on religious hypothesis. The P.I., who is really a good man in a terrible world, slumps, suddenly old.
“Seven years?” he asks, and in the echoes of the words, she can hear him beg don’t hurt her, please don’t hurt the girl.
“Seven years,” she lies.
iphone 4s, $199
She calls him again, tells him about the accountant but not the detective, or her roadmap of a woman’s daily rituals, demarcated by activity and hour, the photographs of a little girl with dark, thoughtful eyes.
“It was a mistake,” she says, power writhing like a butterfly trapped beneath her skin.
“You ate him?” he whispers, incredulous. The revelation frightens him.
“The world is better without someone like him.”
His riposte cuts her. “That’s not up to you to say.”
Molly’s anger thumps against the cup of her skull, a warning she can’t quite define, full of thunder, full of danger, full of rot. Her mouth thins and her blood grows hot. She runs her tongue over sharp teeth that are no longer short.
“He was just meat,” she tells him, still blood-drunk, still warm from the fat she suckled from the accountant’s breast. “A wastrel. No one will miss him.”
“What you’re doing is not right.”
She chokes on his defense, on the memory of his defense, of all the times he’d prescribed life to the undeserving, of all the times he had told her to sit, sit, stay, good girl, stay. For a moment, she loathes him.
“It’s not like I can get caught.”
It is a truth. There can be no case without evidence, no arrest without a body to put on display.
“That’s not the point.”
Molly pauses.
“Is it because you’re scared I’d hurt her?”
“No. It has nothing to do with that.”
“Liar!” She screams, throat throbbing with the impulse to change. “It has everything to do—”
“It has everything to do with you. We talked about this. We talked about what the change does to—”
“You’re afraid this means I’ll find her and that I’ll hurt her.”
“No, but—”
“Yes.” She thumps her fist against the wall. The concrete flakes. “Yes. It’s exactly that. And I know… I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me to think about the girl, about her daughter, about that stupid, useless child that will do nothing but grow up and consume and take and—”
“And what if she grows up to become someone compassionate, someone who understands pain, someone who changes the world, someone worthy?” A shivering breath. “She didn’t hurt me. It wasn’t right. What she did. But she didn’t hurt me and her daughter shouldn’t suffer for this, regardless.”
“That’s not the point.”
“No, it’s exactly the point. This is not your story.”
Molly freezes.
He continues, relentless. “This is not your story. This is mine. You understand that, right? And I am choosing to let this go. Why can’t you?”
Rage blisters her vision. The phone smashes when it hits the wall, geysering electronics; motherboard shards and bits of plastic like shattered finger-bones lodged in her teeth.
kitchen knife, $5.60
She buys a dozen, even though they’re nowhere near sharp enough, intended for the softest cuts, the simplest meals.
But she doesn’t mind. They are only for show.
rope, masking tape, plastic bags, $21.50
“It’s a serial killer’s shopping list!” The clerk laughs nervously.
Molly does not correct him.
taxi ride, free
The money he quotes is more than she would have ever paid for a cab, but she endures the cost the way she tolerates the driver’s advances. When they arrive, she devours him whole—an appetizer, a prelude.
retribution, one relationship
She thinks about sending him an ear, a skin graft taken from a porcelain cheek, a bone strung on a loop of black rope.
She thinks about sending him a picture.
As she sits licking pancreatic juices from her fingertips, Molly thinks about many things, but mostly how much she’ll miss the tobacco-warmth of his scent, the weight of his arm about her shoulders, the years that will never happen, the price of vengeance.
In the end, she does nothing at all. This was not for him, after all. This was for her.
She rolls the thought in her palm, even as she enumerates the pattern of tendons, the bouquet of veins, stretched across the floor like a warning.
“Mama?”
Molly looks up.
Dark eyes, an unlined face, hair still tangled in a cloud of restless sleep. Just a child, delicate as any other. For a moment, compassion pulls at the seams of her skin, at the despair that pinches her throat. Molly could still salvage this. She could—
Hunger judders.
She leaps.