Erato Magazine Issue III: Hunger

Hun ER

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The pieces for this issue were selected and edited by Erato Magazine's team: Celina Tran, James Taylor, Emily Smyth, Ana Bogdanova, Tiffani Ngo Le, and Snehil Srivastava

Copyright © 2023 Erato Magazine

“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.”

- Aleksandr

I. Solzhenitsyn,

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Issue III comes at a time when hunger is rippling through society. Every day, there’s a new headline about some foreign conflict or a successful climate conference, photos of starving children next to a review of a brand new, exclusive restaurant with a 3-year-long waitlist. Our social media pages are stuffed with infographics, engagement rings, summer bodies that cause gut-churning envy, and pasta recipes we'll save, but never make. One could argue that these things are all the creation of one inescapable sin: hunger.

Be it hunger for the flesh, success, money, love, or something more, I believe humans are incapable of abandoning the sensation. We eat our bellies full then reach for the fork mere hours later. We crave love and devotion from our soulmates but still yearn for the admiration of others. We tell ourselves not to fall victim to sins, yet many of us do nothing but lust and greed for the approval of someone, something, bigger. The gut eats away at the world, never content, but hunger needn’t always be a bad thing. It also sparks a need for purpose, art, and beauty. It is the mother of lust, but also love, and the primal source of the joining of souls, of creation.

I hope you’ve worked up an appetite because these pages contain more than enough to satisfy the rumbling in your belly, or soul. And as always, regardless of your meaning of hunger, I hope it makes you feel alive.

Love, Celina

Tran

Celina Tran Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Hunger is desire’s more deadly double. Some might argue that hunger is simply synonymous with desirous or humoral feeling, but it suggests something more primal, inescapable, a collapse between the boundaries of body and mind that desire so skillfully tightropes. When consumed by hunger, the mind and body become one harmonious,amalgamated entity, united in attaining the object of its want. It’s been fascinating to read such astute, surprising, and shocking work on the subject - far from singling out the traditional needs of the gut, hunger for this issue’s writers manifests in everything that might suggest ‘selfless subjectivity,’ which, perhaps contradictory, often means being the object of another’s hunger rather than hunger’s subject.

Thus, these are works dedicated to expressing how it feels to be chewed up and spat out by capitalism, consumerism, fleshly landscapes and oblique questions that hunger for easy answers. With this issue’s submission diet, I was surprised by the amount of work dedicated to religion - the need for an almighty purpose or plan, a metaphysical investment that would answer why we perhaps feel such hunger in the first place. Perhaps creative and imaginative works are one way of filling that gap, letting the body speak as the mind, or simulating satisfaction for an appetite that can never be appeased.

To that end, I hope these exemplary poems, stories and artworks are one way of appeasing whatever it might be that you hunger after.

James Taylor Executive Poetry Editor

Citrus season is upon us; words are neatly delivered like a box of clementines. Peel away the tough covers and eat the meat of poetry, sweet and bursting with potential.Squeeze out its meaning and let blood orange rivulets cascade down your hands. I hope this edition of Erato tastes to you like a clementine, savour it, hunger for it.

Emily Smyth

Emily Smyth Executive Poetry Editor

Prickly as a cat's tongue cormorants opened on damp red sheets

Caught in the guilt web of my star chart dangerously high I perished in sucrose imbalance

Brain-fogged fingers hover over the keyboard slippery every time I try to hold on

Everything hurts as I manifest my grip cancel shadow, dismiss drama devastate chronic criptime crisis

Medicine doesn't always work focus my breath in Aloha conjure new pathogens

inspired by The Chronic: Medicine and The Body in Writing, a presentation from the Association of Writers' Writing Programs, Seattle, 2023

Presenters:

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier

Rajiv Mohabir

A H Reaume

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

Anjoli Roy

we don’t talk about it anymore, not since we dissected the body of it. i wish we’d done it sooner, hate that i didn’t know what you needed, who you needed, why you needed

do you remember the summer you returned? you left slim, perhaps a little delicate. you came back a spindle of spider-silk. angular as a church your fragile bones dug trenches

gutted, pitted, pulped, we laid our earth aside – thinking: let her make this hollow space, let her dig until she is tired and then won’t she eat?

we did not know the bible-fever in your veins. the god you were seeking, the god speaking in your throat. we did not understand the depth of it, the hunger of it, the you-would-have-chewed-your-body-empty-ifyour-teeth-would-just-let-you-

bite of it

your mother bathed you in the muggy belly of July and she wept as she brushed a sponge across your spine

you only tell me this years later, drunk and tired. you tell me how she cried because daughters should be eternal. daughters should not be skeletons. daughters should not die.

when you tell me, i feel we are standing on the edge of surgery, an audience to the main event. we see blood, sinews, cavity. you take my hand then and you show me:

This is where my god was. This is why I killed him.

S A R A H

B Y E D I T H R I E G L E R

Sarah was a friend once, a long time ago, some months ago.

The age of the Industrial Revolution was about sugar. The Industrial Revolution was about fabric. Agriculture. Ironworks. Bread. Indentured servitude. Ironworkers would consume 4 pounds of sugar per week per half-pound of tea. The Industrial Revolution was about trying to find the proverbial garden of Eden or even Kubla Kahn’s pleasure dome, all while destroying gardens, secret & otherwise, nature, & all those lands that didn’t belong to you. You can take someone else’s land when you minimize the culture they’ve stitched & sewn into their soil. Soil they felt an obligation to, not exploitation of. The spice network a rough draft for the impending veins & arteries of global oil & its ravages & how every single aspect of modern life is so oil dependent, & dependent, really, on dead dinosaurs, so don’t tell me you can’t affect the globe, global markets, & shipping lanes long after you’re dead. You want that power 65 million years after you’re gone?

Tell me a little about yourself

which self? how little?

the self that sits before me, your favorite self, if you have one the one you plan on wearing most days

Oh, he’s a real go getter he goes and he gets, and he forgets his family and friends and fortunes so dedicated is he as an employee he finds the profit motive as motivating as avoiding certain destitution and death

Where do you see yourself in 25 years?

I’m barely here as it is I can’t imagine insisting on existing for much longer, where do I see myself other than in the past? Isn’t the future a picture that failed to load?

How about ambitions?

Ambitions are superstitions dressed up in business casual

Then what do you want?

Money

What do you really want?

More money

No, what do you really want

Nothing.

What

The Buddha would be impressed at my complete lack of yearning

And are you impressed?

With the lack of wanting comes a lack of everything else

So why do you want this job?

Does a twig ask the current where it’s going? No

Does the debris decide where the tornado blows?

No.

But are you a twig?

Well then, there you go.

No.

And are you debris?

No. But I sure wish hope and pray to be

I thought you didn’t wish for anything?

I only hunger for hunger for an absence, a missing tooth your tongue never forgets. Like a cave that carves itself a rock and walks out I wish to find an absence somewhere with the shape of myself.

I would sing to my bacon (if it still existed/pre-digested/ post-potbelly flesh) as well –

slaughtered & peppered in the Portland farms before being brought to *a sizzle* bear (your cross was left in the last age [when Socrates sucked & swallowed poison/ hemlocked his last hemorrhage] gone haywire when tipping the high hat)

but I left it at the bar (absentminded, muted, mutilated, mutated, massacre/ Momma Mia: can ya hear me? [is there anybody {in/out/all around bleeding/belting loud their honest soul} still there?])

I’d dance, too, full &/or starving (for the truth

[I had a taste & want the full dose/disclosure]) when we all turn pig (oink, oink, bingo bonkers) but not swine (though butchered just the same) –

there is a difference & I know that you know that we know that they know that it’s all sure to run red (w/carnage) toward the same (shallow) sea in the end

Under empty, xeric sky

a herd of black gnu

wildebeest trample

green-gold grass, a kettledrum thunder of cloven hooves and mettlesome hematite horns; wind billows

shaggy cordage, moirés gauzy

fly-grazed manes Beyond

brocaded fever trees –

journey’s end, terminus:

mighty Mara in muddy swell. Elsewhere, a barrel-blob of hippopotamus

yawns cavern jaws as water’s aestivating

mirror breaks, reforms around naiant

wedge-shaped heads and tails

bundled like swords. The herd descends the river’s edge;

spindly-legged, grey-crowned cranes watch but give no warning Massive, cataphracted, half as heavy as a car –the first erupting archosaur

punches poignard teeth into the warmth of mammal haunch.

Water crashes glossal roars as phytosaurlike armoured forms drag thrashing backs and blatting, motherparted calves into crushing kris-claw clutch –an imbrued blazonry of blood

as Mara signs her signature in red

--skin purple, soft, smells of river and joining, it surrenders, like other quiescent things.

How many are yielding that shouldn’t be?

A circus tiger with a paper hat, elastic under his chin,

an Instagram sunset pic, with twenty likes

and the typical “beautiful,” and me--when I try to leave your intoxicating scent, your fingers under my chin,

even as I know this goes nowhere.

There was something about numbered buttons and there was something in the oven. We were together, but in that cornstalk way where what sticks out is separate and seeded. I wanted to push toward the edge of your something, wanted to unbutton the number of days together without a recipe, amazed how corn can be made to obey beyond humility. There was something about the way you forsook my husk And though long ago I should have said shuck you, it was I who wanted to do that. It was I who wished to be up before being buttered And there was something about the way your eyes popped when I held your breath for you. One of our buttons says Self-Clean. What would pushing something like that mean, I asked you, just as our time ran out.

H U N G E R

BY ALEJANDRO 'ALE' GONZALEZ

Hunger is a visual representation of dwelling in feelings of lust Particularly in moments in which these are not considered to be opportune. Stylistically, the piece takes cues from early 20th century Expressionism and Street Art in formal aspects such as degrees of abstraction, color relationship, and line application.

"Is there a cure for this hunger? A terrible curse to be under I'll be sleeping with that And it's no small thing You'll smoke me out in your own ways And we'll spin around until morning."

At a distance; round pumilus' hyoids wrap and rise between the muscles; pad' pad lulled their lips; lassoos long and a blink chewed and chewed.

or my hero’s journey I blamed them for the disturbance on the big blue ocean, the grayed-out sky that created a depressive episode.

I enjoyed rocking back and forth to feel the spring of the carpeted staircase underfoot, like pushing a loose tooth back and forth in my mouth.

The directions were clear: you are not to come here as yourself I have remained quiet and have placed a wool blanket on my face. I am lost and remain so.

I don’t want to hear the nice things. Or stand on top of the lighthouse shouting “danger”. Come close.

In town, the home’s wooden shingles looked like wet suede after the storm passed. Far off, American coastal somewhere I don’t belong.

I come from farmers the long sleeves to protect from the sun Yet, the closest I’ve got is a 4-foot-tall rubber plant in my living room, aging computer skills & packets of corporate welcome kits.

Do you want me? It took me three days to decide where to place the mirror and I’m still unhappy about it. Did you see me last night?

I won’t love. The moon here is the scientific timekeeper.

The steel guitar took us into a nocturnal fantasy, the steady pause due to capacity. I’ll be there.

It’s all comedy, simple entertainment.

I waved to the actor on stage at the end of the performance

Baby, I care. This is psychic death

I touched all the chairs arranged in the room. I pictured myself sitting on each one. Here, next to the window I’ll read a book On this chair, I’ll daydream This one, this one is for foreplay

dark humor. Something beautiful like a painting. Let’s talk shit about one another for fun.

I changed my name. Waited for an obsession.

“I don't know why they do that. Maybe they didn't do their laundry. I’m definitely the kind of person to wear underwear all the time.”

– Ashley Tisdale (on party girls of the 2000s falling out of cabs without any underwear on).

Sinking into Paris, the horizon was like the rim of a dirty glass. Looking through the window into the darkening November evening, I could choose to focus on two things: my reflection, or the spectre of the city below – lights gold and glittering and promising. I swung between them all the way down until Paris disappeared and became grey-green fields, trees, asphalt, the soft heavy thunk of the plane meeting the ground.

Three texts snapped onto my phone screen the moment I turned it on.

My eyes chewed around the rows of seats, the tunnel that took us from the plane to the baggage claim, the green door declaring nothing, the arrivals area, the taxi rank Somewhere, across time, I’d developed a game out of always looking out for something beautiful, even, and especially, in the ugliest, most functional spaces The most reliable sources of beauty were: tricks of light, some strange effect in the sky, bursts of nature splitting apart some man-made thing, the colours in almost anyone’s eyes when you got close enough, girls enchanted by their own conversation on public transport, the bent of someone’s head over a book whose cover you couldn’t see, elements of symmetry (planned or imagined), and weird coincidences of thought and reality Like just then, I started thinking about the first drink I’d ever had in Paris at the exact moment that my taxi passed a 1950s-style billboard for Martini

At night, in this city, the game was much easier. Paris wanted you to eat it up. Neon lights, pockets of shadow, sequins and the shine of leather or vinyl, flickers of iridescence on eyelids and cheekbones, the fragile glow on people’s faces in the smoking area, even the grey muted tones of the Métro carriage, could all add up to the right kind of magic. Everyone knew that tomorrow something would shift – mornings could be beautiful, but not mornings-after. And yet, we were all willing to sacrifice a few hours of sunshine and glowing skin for the half-remembered ecstasy of real and pure nighttime in an overly-fabled city. I was happy to slice through the sky and down and into Paris, a few brief times a year, new ephemeral sticky-sweet life packed up tight into the largest suitcase that the cheapest airline would give me.

The taxi swung into more familiar territory. The texts continued to hover in the periphery of my notifications like an optical illusion of something loved. I could feel the anticipation beginning to burst up through my skin, golden and fizzing with promises of where I’d be and what I’d look like in just a few hours.

Anika was standing outside the pied-de-terre in that half-formed state that precedes a night out: curlers in her hair, a flash of skin underneath her dressing gown when she walked, two half-moon cold silicone shapes underneath her eyes. She opened the taxi door for me and hauled my suitcase off the seat. We greeted each other in the way that boys liked to tell us was grating: screaming and clutching, like nothing else existed but us, like everybody’s days had been leading up to the second our bodies collided again.

“I’m starving,” she said into the skin of my neck.

We detangled ourselves, made our way through the door and into the miniscule lift up to the seventh floor. Our noses almost touched. “We don’t have to be there ‘til midnight. What should we eat?”

“Oysters,” I said.

When we were seventeen, in Paris for the first time, we had no money and no French and just the barest

"Gluttony denotes, not any desire of eating and drinking, but an inordinate desire..."

Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theolologiae)

When we were seventeen, in Paris for the first time, we had no money and no French and just the barest beginnings of style and taste, scraped together from films and art and descriptions of seafood and champagne in books we were too young to understand So we would eat mostly hand-torn baguettes and sit in the Place des Vosges and Anika would say: “What should we be eating right now?” That was the game, the whole game, and the only rule was that there wasn’t any such thing as too much

“Mille-feuilles ”

“Truffles ”

“Blini ”

The elevator kept rising and I could feel the laughter bubbling higher and higher up our throats, but we kept it in as long as we could.

“Gluttony and glamour.”

I bit my lip to stop from laughing. The game would always get conceptual when we got too hungry to talk about food.

“Decadence and pleasure.”

I could tell she was on the brink of a giggle, the corner of her mouth twitching up.

“Rare meat.”

I heard the shrill ding of my phone, twice, and slid the silencer button on without looking down.

“Illegal birds.”

“Something in its entirety.”

We were both laughing now – and later, on the plane home, I thought about how I’d never be able to explain to anyone why it was funny.

In Anika’s apartment, something felt alive. Thick and luscious bubbles were spilling over from the pasta water on to the gas stove, her tapered candles marched strange meaningful patterns in wax-drips across the kitchen table, the clothes-rail which acted as her wardrobe was bending with the weight of belonging to someone who couldn’t say goodbye to anything beautiful. We sat on silk cushions on the kitchen floor and tore fat basil leaves over penne alla vodka, alternating bites with sips of warm white wine from the bottle.

Then – “Oh my god,” I said, interrupting my own story about the couple next to me on the plane who had either been fighting or fucking under a blanket. “I didn’t tell you–”

So I told her. The man was older than me and he had not yet succeeded in giving me an orgasm. That Sunday morning was maybe the fifth or sixth time we had slept together. Afterwards, tangled and naked in mid-morning light, I explained that I thought we ascribed too much value to the narrative idea of a climax. I wasn’t trying to let him off the hook so much as present a personal analysis of sexual mores in Western culture, but I also felt a little bad because he was very beautiful and kissed me so carefully, like I was a stick of butter that’d melt with too much touch

“I guess I’ve just got reliant on my vibrator,” I’d told him

“Maybe that’s something you should try and wean yourself off,” he’d said (“Oh my god,” Anika said “I know,” I said ) Then he kissed me and made me breakfast I couldn’t remember what we’d eaten

“That’s sort of what I’m worried about,” I said now, to Anika, “It’s like I don’t know how to do things in moderation anymore If it’s not sex, it’s – chocolate, or homemade pasta, or dancing, or new shoes, or the same song over and over again ” I speared the last piece of pasta on my plate, silky and dripping, and gestured with it: “D’you think that’s normal?”

“Isn’t that just life?” Anika said. “Why wouldn’t you eat it, if it’s there and it’s good?”

I shook my head. “You know what he told me last week?”

We were in bed, again. He’d just listened to my story about the night before: in sparkles and somebody else’s fur coat, I’d gone to a party, met a girl, laughed and kissed her for hours on someone else’s bed, and then, at midnight, went home and texted someone I had met once: come over. When we fell back into my bed, tangled and hot, it was nearly 6am. We slept lightly, I woke up with his face in my hair. I lost my drivers’

licence and a pair of black underwear

The version of the night I gave the man was only bested in chastity by what I’d tell my mother later on the phone, but even so –

“He listens, and then he goes really quiet, and then he says, there’s a certain hue of a death wish to it all ”

“A certain hue? Does he really talk like that?”

By now we were on our knees, looking through the splayed-out mess of clothes – I’d tipped out my suitcase to join most of Anika’s wardrobe on the floor We were making little piles of our selections: I picked out a cherry-red Gaultier jacket and white lace stockings with just one small hole in them

“He always talks like that He read me a poem in bed last weekend ”

“You’re going to look like one of those frilly cakes from the eighties,” Anika said, “What poem?”

“Auden. ‘The More Loving One’.”

Anika made a face. Sometimes I find myself making this face in the mirror. On Anika, it’s two creases rising between her serious eyebrows, a tilt of her head forward so her hair falls a little too much over her jaw, a quirk of humour in the left corner of her mouth. My face went to match hers like we were tied together with ribbons.

“Hmm.”

“I know. Remember that guy who sent you–”

“Bukowski. The one about shooting sperm like a whale.”

“God.”

“I know. What about this?” Anika held up a midnight-blue sequin dress, its sweetheart neckline trickling down to go mermaid at the skirt. “With the boots?”

“Try it,” I said, “I need a visual. I’m still starving.”

Shrugging her dressing-gown down to her waist as she went, Anika walked over to the fridge and took out a shell-pink cardboard box, miraculously the same colour as her nipples. Elements of symmetry (planned or imagined). “We made these today in class. You’re gonna die.”

The tarts were shining raspberries and perfect pale green pistachio cream. Anika had made the tiny chocolate hearts adorning each rounded bubble of fruit. We tried to eat them slowly and I told Anika some more about the man.

“He’s been texting me today, actually. He keeps asking me stuff.”

“Stuff like what?” There were pastry crumbs on the Gaultier. Anika shimmered around the room, picking up stray shoes and holding them one-by-one against her blue dress.

“You know How are you? Stuff ” I set the tart down, half-bitten away, on my bare thigh “I feel awful I feel like a bad person ”

“He’s making you feel like that?”

“No Yes I guess I just keep thinking about all those things he’s said ” I picked up the wine bottle, like the label was interesting “The death wish and the vibrator That fucking poem And if he’s right If there’s something wrong with me ”

“Like what?”

There was this part of the Auden poem which had really got me at the time – not the line the man had pronounced so meaningfully, not let the more loving one be me, but the last verse: Were all stars to disappear or die, / I should learn to look at an empty sky. I had never related less to anything. How was it more loving to accept less – or nothing at all? How could that be love? Why was absence and temperance and smallness what everyone seemed to want from me, as a sign of my goodness, my ability to love right?

I tried to say all that to Anika. Her hands were stained red with raspberries and she took my face with them. I could feel the wet juice join up with my skin. “You’re being silly.”

“Am I?”

Her eyes, my favourite eyes, widened with intent. “He’s just a guy. I know he’s very pretty and smart but

that’s You’re going to let him tell you what everything is all about?” Her voice went up in a lilt, the way it does when I know she’s about to make me laugh: “Dude, he can’t even make you come ” I smiled so hard that my cheeks pressed into her palms She let go of my face and told me to finish eating the tart

“Do you really think I’ll look like a cake in the Gaultier?”

“I didn’t say cake in a bad way,” she said The bravado of honesty, later regretted at the slightest tremor of feelings hurt – and that was Anika She started rummaging through a heap of silver clothes (we’d started organising the piles by colour), and then pulled out a ‘20s fringed dress we’d fought over in Place de la République last summer “Here You think he’d like this?”

“He’d hate it,” I said, “It looks too much like something you’d have fun in.” He’d once described an exflame’s wardrobe as a bit embarrassing. I’d never wanted to meet someone more.

I pulled my clothes off and when the dress was on my body, I didn’t need a mirror: Anika was enough. The fringe danced around the hideous and vast bruise which covered my left knee, another remnant of my last night-out. The man had made a soft hushed sound when he saw it, like my pain belonged to his sphere of perception. It had felt like kindness at the time; perhaps it was.

Anika reached out and traced the bruise, once, lightly. “This is so gross. What’d you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“The dress is perfect.”

“Mine or yours?

“Both.”

We forgot to wash up our plates, and I did Anika’s make-up, then mine. “What time do you wanna get there again?” I asked.

“Midnight,” she said.

It was a quarter past eleven. “Let’s go.”

On the Métro, we were hungry with it, envisioning a night which straddled bacchanal, bachelorette, and Art Basel. We can’t help turning up with big appetites – otherwise, how would you know what to wear?

“I’m worried we’re going to be the coolest people there,” Anika said. We took up a whole four seats facing each other and passed a bottle of Malbec between us.

“I’m always worried about that,” I said, “But doesn’t everyone think that?”

Anika’s face lit up like moonstone in the light of another passing Métro car. “I don’t know. I think we’re kind of special.”

The night didn’t satiate: the drinks were expensive and the dry martinis some guy bought for us were all wrong No one made me laugh and no one was wearing anything I could think about the next day, bad or good Things got so dire I looked at my phone: the man had texted me and asked if I had touched down in Paris safely?And areyougoingoutwithAnikatonight?And Imissyou

But then, in the bathroom before we left, we stood side-by-side in the mirror I’d patted some of the lipstick high on our cheekbones, and her eyes were wide and dramatic with kohl and wine

“Are you still feeling bad?” Anika asked

“You’re right,” I said, “I was being silly ”

“This place is nothing,” she said, and then, more gently, because stories from when you were seventeen are delicate things: “What should we be eating?”

And then, the night bursting with longing, we went home, and we split the last tart. We were hungrier than this city, maybe than the whole sparkling world – but then I was sure there would always be more to eat tomorrow.

The Three Of Us is a painting collection which looks at the desire for stability and affection during a time where this had been taken away. The painting depicts three characters, all somehow alike, yet different in the ways of facial structure and personality. Influenced by going no contact and yearning for a romantic interest, the piece was created to symbolise a person's natural hunger for love, touch and the presence of a person who is otherwise now absent both physically and mentally.

The slight ache is still there in the morning a warm and elastic stretch in my thighs, the inward twinge to my spine when I turn the wrong way

This bed is only big enough for me, and that is everything I have ever craved, and loathed, in these depraved twenty-three years of living

I can always see the change in the seasons from the window right above the bedframe it is where I first smell the rain from the night before, pooling in the curves underneath the bushes, dropping onto spider webs and clinging to the last budding petals of spring; the daffodils have died, but their corpses hang their heads, still, and the lilacs have started to bloom in their stead. That I may only smell them at the flourishing birth of dusk every evening is a pleasure in itself I press my nose to the blooms, velvet soft against my cheek, and hold myself there for two seconds when the first puff of downy, powdery sweetness fills my lungs.

It is, of course, what inevitably happens in the cavernous absence of immediate or presumed pleasure otherwise. As a young French woman once did, you must cultivate your pleasures elsewhere, in the small things. My bedsheets are damp, from sweat; the summer air is blessedly light, still, this early in the afternoon. No matter the place I enunciate myself, it is wet and yielding and perfectly pathetic in its instances; the bathtub water always sloshes too far over the lip, even with one leg draped over its side for better purchase. My spine curves upwards against the comforter and is passably reminded of trying to be quiet, even amidst the throes of ecstasy and only-just repressed desire.

I would muzzle myself in all these efforts; an open-mouthed scream, but without any sound to justify it. It sometimes is performative, or at least feels that way. Again, like dead flowers trying to beautify their decay by remaining in place onstage, playing their death as well as they did their living.

This is made worse when I finally turn off the lights each night, and bring him to life between my hands; he is Molly, now a delicate, shaking mess of praises and pleas, dark eyes blown wide at the closest sight of me he’s ever been allowed. My hands are in his hair, twisting the curls around my littlest finger. He is peeling me back, layer by layer, a clementine in his hands that I wish he’d be impatient with spill the juices everywhere and smile through the skin stuck in his teeth, sticky and uncertain with where my mouth is but kissing it anyway.

I see the complete film of it in my head tying the knot of my dress at my breasts, the trace of thumb and forefinger around the glass curvature of my waist (the earth, he calls it), tumbling fingers through my hair and its counterpart

This makes the push of my own hand more frenzied, and desperate a severed, wavering cry out in desperation, and need; his voice takes on a tinge of my own, never really himself He has never truly existed, only ever filled the space between then and now If I cannot find love, gifted at my doorstep or against the wall of my childhood bedroom, or in the confines of unfamiliar sheets, then I must invent it myself Even as the chasm grows wider, and infinitely more impatient

It insists upon itself; the silky cream of conditioner in my hair, the cling of silk to my hips in that strawberry print dress, red lips to match; lace scalloped lingerie in a mirror for one; buttery sunlight casting my eyes bronze as the grass tickles my bared shoulders I am touched in every way the world might offer, except in the hands of someone else. This is somehow its loneliest omission, and I am grinning through the indiscretion of untethered abandon in the face of it. I become a maddening, hungry mess of disillusion and hopelessness, plunging my fingers further to reach some unmissable point, and finding myself wanting. Always wanting every boy is a conquest, a plucked request from the cutting room floor. I stand behind my workplace till and imagine their cries, their hair wet with exertion, skin shivering and slick to the touch. The universe is soft and melding in this place, pliant to my touch and commands; I am turned over when I imagine the delights in the full pain and the gasps of breath in amongst the loss. I am ripe, fresh and sweet to

the tongue; I am meant to be hungered for, but I am out of season, and the summers pass every year, and I wither in the cold along with my red roses and the fouled strawberries in their bushes, overrun with oozing insects and the harsh pinpricks of thorns

These are the minute satisfactions of the flesh, but it does not stop me chasing them, even when my feet are bleeding along with my insides, with my nose, with my mouth. The girl I see in my head is very unlike me, even in her most vulnerable moments I leave my stains everywhere, yearning, thirsty marks of dominance, claiming space over the scraps left to the dogs. There is a honey musk under my nails, a crimson smear across my mouth. A wild, dark look in my eyes.

I am bloody, heavy and sore; a dissected collection of limbs in my bed, a nightmare of Angela Carter loping through the charred and scattered tethers of my desire. I am pawing through the wreckage, for any signs of life. I am throwing my head back when he finally takes that first taste. I am clawing at his skin, at my own, at the wallpaper and peeling paint and pillowcase.

I am stretching my hands to the bedframe as I gaze, bleary eyed, up to the blinking, afternoon sun. It will do for now, I suppose.

Sometimes we hunt in groups: gnaw holes in the bellies of ships or guide them into rocky terrain We bide our time, watching the sailors writhe in the currents Then, as water weighs down their boots and their heads slip under, lungs on fire, we drag them to shore They wake on their backs in the wet sand, greeted by bare breasts and eyes like black pearls, fish tails pressed against their thighs The sailors know they are prey, they are frightened but they never deny us our pleasure

Sometimes we hunt alone, swimming in shallow waters, luring the lonely out to sea. My most precious catch was the solitary kind, a figure in a cove, crouched in the sand just out of reach of the waves. Head bowed above the spine of a book, cracked wide. I glided through the water, angling for a closer look.

It was a woman in a gray skirt and white blouse with rolled sleeves, chestnut hair loose around her face, cheeks red with sun. I almost ended my pursuit then and there. Men could be enticed, but human women weren’t so easily charmed they saw through us, looked at us with horror.

Still, something in me whispered, swimcloser, and I conceded. I swam until I could touch the ocean floor, tail fin stirring up sand, and still raise my head and shoulders to the sky. I saw her clearly, even the veins in her wrists. And the whites of her eyes when she lifted her head.

Her face contorted, certainly. But her lips also parted, eyes widened with a fascination I knew well. She pressed the book to her chest like a shield and stood, body angled away. Head turned toward me still, as if my hand were cupped under her chin, guiding her gaze.

I waited, almost motionless, tail flicking below the water, hair bobbing in the swell like wet seaweed. She raised a hand to her cheek as she studied my gills, pale red slits across my cheekbones.

I could hear her heart pulsing between trembling lungs, as fervently as any man’s and I smiled, careful not to show my teeth.

Maybe that small movement shook her from her daze. She stumbled backward on weak legs, then took off running toward the dunes and the town beyond. Her skirt billowed, hair tangled in the ocean breeze.

It pained me to watch her go. But I remembered the look on her face jaw slack, eyes enamored and felt a heat inside, sharp and sweet as it expanded. I tipped my head back, sinking into the icy water, mouth closed, gills sifting through foam and sea salt.

What was I, if not a patient creature?

She returned two days later, as I knew she would, slinking into the cove in the red light of dawn She had dark hollows under her eyes, like she hadn’t properly closed them since seeing my face

I hung back, clinging to a rock and hiding in its shadow, and watched her search for me: first from a distance, arms crossed and chin lowered Then kneeling at the water’s edge, scanning waves while the tide soaked the hem of her skirt

I made her wait And wait, and wait crying softly, fingers curled like claws in the wet sand

Once she was desperate, I slipped below the water and propelled myself toward her, moving soundlessly I waited for a large wave to crest, then rode it to shore, abdomen skidding across the sand

The woman gasped at my sudden arrival, a swallowed scream, scrambling like a crab to put space between us Though her gaze wide, awestruck eyes never wavered I lifted my torso, proud head and shoulders above a ribcage lined with gills. Tender openings; raw, pink flesh so easily marred by those of sound mind.

I approached her slowly: hand over hand, dragging my tail, red sunlight mirrored in my scales. Her lower lip trembled, but she made no sound. Even as I inched closer, so that we sat parallel, faces close, my tail curled around her like a crescent moon.

I brushed a strand of hair from the sun-kissed skin above her collarbone, widening the valley in her blouse. As I angled my head, cold lips meeting her neck, she let out a cry: a small, strangled noise between pleasure and pain.

With shaking fingers, she undid one button, then the next, revealing pale shoulders. My lips slid down, teeth grazing skin, as her blouse fell to her waist. Lower still, I turned my head, feeling the fullness and warmth of her breast against my mouth.

I opened wider, biting down Sharp teeth tearing into veins and flesh The woman screamed, a shriek as wild and bright as the blood seeping down my chin Her taste filled my mouth, iron that sang against my tongue and woke the nerves in my spine

Luscious, rich Sweeter than any sailor