Owen Minor kept asking, “What’s happening to me?”
He asked that of his reflection in the mirror.
He asked it of God, though he was pretty sure he was shouting into an empty room.
He asked it on social media through a dozen dummy accounts he created. Reddit and 4chan, and even some Facebook pages. He was good at creating false identities. Very good. He even found his way onto some sites on the Dark Web, but there were too many criminals and criminal wannabes.
No one had an answer. Most of the people he met online thought he was a freak. Owen couldn’t fault that view, though he was not the kind of freak they took him for. He wasn’t a sex stalker. No, his hungers were so very different from that, but he did not know how to identify or explain them.
On one late night, as Santa Ana winds blew through the trees outside, Owen wondered if he was a monster. An actual one. A supernatural thing.
It was such a strange conversation to have with himself.
What, after all, was supernatural? This was the real world. He still liked the idea that he was a mutant, the next stage in human evolution, but the more he fed on memories the less that felt likely. This was stranger than that. The hunger was so specific, and the need so urgent that it felt less genetically aberrant and more …
More what?
Unnatural felt wrong because it was clearly natural to him. There had been no accident. No one had injected him with an experimental drug, he hadn’t been bitten by radioactive spiders. Somehow he knew this ran deeper than DNA. It didn’t feel at all like an accident.
No, it seemed to him as this was very much like a gift given, By whom, or why, was beyond him.
“I’m a fucking monster,” he told the mirror one night, as tears ran like mercury down his face.
“I’m a monster,” he said on another night, after feasting on fresh grief from a man who wore a tattoo with the faces and birth and death dates of his wife and two kids, whom he’d buried after they died in a car accident and he had lived. “I’m a monster.”
That time he said it with a bottomless and pernicious joy.