Bloody Scrap Eugenie Juliet Theall I knew a Harvard man who slept like a crocodile— jaw locked open, with a bloody scrap of meat wedged between his teeth. A strand of his mother’s white hair, trailed from an incisor, rippled waves of nausea in me. Territorial, she climbed inside his mouth, feasted when I wasn’t there. I couldn’t liberate the entrails, proof of his insatiable hunger, no matter how far I crawled on his acrid tongue, breasts swollen with sugared milk, searching for a backbone, a beating heart, someone with balls. Like a cheetah, I dragged his carcass between my legs to the top of a tree, but she couldn’t let go of her baby, her sustenance. She followed, waited until the limb broke.
94