strange loop

            There is a word for people like me, people with rough hair and sharp white teeth and moons in our eyes, silvery crescent moons, and the growl in the talk and the stalk in the walk and I’ll ask you not to use it, please. It hurts me and will probably hurt you, if you have the time to hurt. (Mustn’t think this way.)

            I am mostly just very, very hungry.

            We’re both hungry, of course. I can smell it on you. There is an ache in your belly that is so like my very own wanting but also critically different. Yours is sweet, it spreads warmly down between your hipbones. It makes you squirm in your chair. Your gaze speaks of nice things, nice damp deep dreams. You have been so deliciously provoked by this sad moon-marionette, you say? Actually you don’t say, you haven’t said. You don’t need to.

            You have a hunch. You’re so close to the truth but really you may be the dumbest intelligent person I know. You keep putting food in front of me. Everyone knows you shouldn’t feed the dog people food! A little joke there, ha ha.

            Really, you shouldn’t have. You checked out a book by Laurie Colwin and read her wonderful essay about the “marvelously killing dinner”, the one about mashed potatoes made with pounds of butter and gallons of hot whole milk, and black and white sausages, the white ones with veal and cream, the black ones with blood and grain, and the big bowl of braised and roasted garlic (garlic, that’s also kind of hilarious given some cousins of mine), and this arrangement is sitting between us in a heap like the goddamn Matterhorn and you are looking at me so anxiously and you hope I don’t notice that your pupils are dilated, and your hands are twitching like they want something to caress or strangle.

            I know how it is, believe me.

            The blood sausages are almost right. I might pick one up on my fork and worry at it a little. If I ate “food”, I would like this. That ferrous tang is quite delightful. The rest of the menu is just a corruption of animals. Veal in a sausage, are you kidding? Slap that calf on the ass and give it a running start, and then we might be able to talk.

            You don't know when to quit. I like that about you. There was one time you were going to try me on lamb chops, your own little joke because you call me “lamb” – I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried, folks – and you went to cook them and wondered where they’d gone. You were sure you’d brought them home, wrapped up in their sticky pink paper from the fancy market, but their fresh young reek spread through the apartment in the dead of night and I couldn’t sleep, I was running away from the moonlight like I do and I ran straight to the different, colder, functional light summoned by the opening of the refrigerator door, and there they were. I couldn’t help myself, not like it mattered in the long run. Then I went outside and saw the moon, the bright silvery moon, and I ran with my paddy-paws in my true self. I was back before the sun came up. Didn’t blow my cover once. The hunting was adequate, I guess.

            The next night I created a diversion, to distract from the missing lamb and the bones in the garbage; we went out for drinks, and you got really lit because you hadn’t eaten, and we danced until we were dizzy, and I neglected to mention that I had eaten and eaten well and there was some whiskey, hmmm, okay a lot of whiskey, and I threw up behind a Dumpster (the police will have a field day with that, if they find it), and then we crawled back to the lair and tumbled into bed. You passed out right away. I lay watching the moon-shadows creeping across the wall, and listened to your heartbeat.

            My restraint is something quite extraordinary.

            I’m sorry about the lamby-lambkin chops. They barely made a dent.

            So now you’re watching as I toy with your mashed potatoes, which are full of wasted fuel for tender young animals, and the sausages that are made of dead things. Your blood is high, heated, vibrant; your whole self says welcome and it’s so good and look what I made for you, love me. I know I can get out of this mess if I go to you and pick you up maybe, and take you someplace comfortable and horizontal, because you actually want my body on you, you crazy person, you want my mouth all over your thighs and lips and belly and you think you want my sharp-sharp ear against your throat so I can hear the blood pumping straight to your heart. You think you want me to feel your pulse reverberating against my teeth.

            I have been so good.

            You don’t know me at all.

            But who knows anybody really?

            I think instead I will push myself away from the table and stand up, and continue to weave this sticky web of I’m not hungry and no thank you, I already ate and I’m sorry, I don’t feel well, but it looks delicious that we’ve been clambering around in for an age, and I will walk away from your sad, hurt eyes, knowing that the next amazing recipe, some divine concoction out of your brain and your desire, your hot quick blood and my own curiosity, will reel me back. I will be sorry for you, and maybe a little bit sorry for myself. I wish…

            No, enough of wishing. The moon is a mere harmless sliver, and I can smell the prey in the woods, and I hope they will see me like you see me, just for a moment. They will come to me like lambs. It will be so easy…. and I am so very hungry…

   

    (My friend F once told me that it’s no wonder I am fond of werewolves, because I’m a girl and girls are always into that shit. I protested feebly, but then there came a short but interesting conversation with JT in which we discussed the Freudian aspect of the feminine affinity for lycanthropy, the phases of the moon, the blood, the transformation, the repressed violence.

            So maybe I like werewolves because I’m a girl. I think mostly I like them because they are ravenous.)

Comments

[nessahead]

Dammit, woman. I love you.