Page 21 of Morsel

But I’m not a real cannibal. This is pretend.

I clear my throat. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to know that someone would be there for me if I needed them?—”

She cuts me off. “But have you forced anyone before?”

I blink rapidly at her. Forced anyone? “What?”

“Rape,” she says. “It’s simple. You take what you want, don’t you, love?”

My gut twists as I stumble over her words. Rape? I may have done some things that my sexual partners didn’t like, but I never went into it without telling them what I was going to do. They knew what I wanted and what I was like. I can’t control how they react to me.

My mind glimmers with a memory: a woman is chained to my oven. Tears coat her face, and her mouth opens in a blood-curdling scream. I don’t hear anything though; I simply see. Red liquid drips down her chest. The knife is in my hand. Her blood dribbles on my chin and lips. It’s not like she was that hurt. For fuck’s sake, the incision was basically a paper cut.

The point is I told her what I was planning to do. She agreed.

And she got her fucking money.

“No,” I say. “I’m not a rapist.”

“Of course you’re not a rapist,” Mona says, exaggerating the last word. A disconcerting sensation washes over my chest and down to my groin. She continues: “Have you ever fantasized about rape though?” She licks her lips. “I have.”

Romantic cannibalism has always been about digestion, when my soul mate becomes a literal part of me. There isn’t anything more meaningful than that. When I think about my actual fantasies though, those sexual dreams that I can’t stop, the idea of a woman’s face bending in agony as I cut off a sliver of her tit has always made me hard. Licking her tears. Eating delicate chunks of her labia. Her cunt constricting around my cock as her legless and armless torso fights me.

I don’t know if I consider that rape, though. I’m not hurting anyone if I’m only imagining it.

“I guess,” I say. “I can see why the power in doing something like that is appealing.”

“Exactly. It’s just like cannibalism, isn’t it?” I open my mouth to disagree. She keeps talking. “When was the first time you considered cannibalism?”

I’m instantly transported to another memory. I was too dizzy to get up, so I stayed in my sleeping bag, unable to move and being forced to watch as my mother and her boyfriend fucked. His jaws latched onto her breast, and her skin crunched in his teeth like tendons being ripped apart. She screamed, but her lips reached for his, and it didn’t seem like pain anymore. It seemed as if she wanted more.

Then I see my mother lying on the kitchen table, her mouth pried open so far her jaw looks unhinged. The frayed edges of her chapped lips like a wreath around her empty, cavernous mouth. The raw muscle of her tongue warmed my palm, and I found it comforting. It was like she was finally there for me. Like she wanted to talk to me for once.

I shake those memories away. Those weren’t the first times I thought about cannibalism, but Mona doesn’t need to know the details of my pathetic childhood. The highlights are enough.

“Camping,” I say. She wrinkles her nose. I increase my bravado to not seem so childish. “I saw some weird shit as a kid. My mother was crazy.” I laugh loudly. “What about you? When did you first think about being eaten?”

“My pet rabbit ate her baby.”

She angles her head and studies her wine glass, almost like she’s lost in a memory. A mother eating a child, even if it is a small-brained creature, must be a shocking event to witness. It’s hard to think of any mother or father eating their child.

The server presents our matching dishes: two filet mignons with smashed garlic potatoes and caramelized Brussels sprouts. Mona squeals, and though it bothers me that she’s eating meat, her excitement makes me lighter and heightens my arousal.

Now, I get to show her what I’m capable of.

I cut into my rare steak, and the watery blood oozes onto the plate. I stab the bite, mentally skimming through my filthy speech.

“Do you know how I would?—”

My jaw drops.

Mona clutches the steak in her bare hands. The red drips flow down her wrists like oil in a marinade.

I look around nervously; the far tables are busy with their meals, and our neighboring booths can’t see us, but there are at least two nearby tables watching us. Watching her. A little girl gawks, and her mother shakes her head. Don’t pay attention to them, the mother mouths. Her actual whispers are inaudible from this distance, so I imagine her next words: They’re embarrassing themselves.

Mona doesn’t notice. She bites the meat, then closes her eyes and moans as she savors the taste. Her body shifts, her hips wriggling, and I get the sense that underneath the table, she’s spreading her legs.

When her eyes open again, she glances at the camera. The red light blinks. She’s recording, then. She must always be recording.

---