Page 78 of This Vicious Hunger
The wine is rich, deep and spiced with nutmeg and cloves and hints of black pepper. I hardly taste it. It is like the early days of my exposure to the garden: everything tastes ashy, dry, and powdery.
The second bottle has a deep cork wedged in it. I spend long minutes picking at it, trying to shove it down with a stick, and in the end I give up. I smash the top of the bottle against the rim of the fountain, sending shards of green glass flying. They scatter across the ground beneath the paint stains we left only days ago—it seems like a lifetime already.
My thoughts turn quickly maudlin. Neither Olea nor I have really discussed the subject of the distant future. Olea won’t talk about it, no matter how hard I try. Petaccia alluded to it when she took our notes, wanting clarification on the slow beat of our hearts—one of the few things we didn’t lie about. A slow heartbeat after what can only be described as medically induced death… What does that mean for the rest of our lives? It’s the thought that’s been eating me up inside, every minute like a grain of sand in an hourglass of indefinite size. How long can this go on?
“Are we living?” I ask the garden softly. “Or is this death?”
Of course, the garden doesn’t answer. I drink the wine from the smashed bottle, savouring this one a little more than the last. I’m careless, though, the swing of my arm loose and strong, and asI bring the bottle to my lips I slice the tender flesh. It splits like the skin of an apricot, blood dribbling onto my chin.
I let out a startled laugh. The pain is a slash of brightness across an otherwise black night. I lick the blood, the wound already knitting, sucking the taste of it mingled with wine. The pain is too good, over too soon.
I snatch up one of the glass slices from the ground, holding it up to the sky. The moon is hidden and offers no light. I wish Olea was here; I’m craving the taste of her. But she isn’t, and I’m simultaneously glad. My stomach aches, not with the hunger I’m familiar with, a sensation that will grow until fed and then retreat. This is a different, vicious sort of hunger. Untameable.
More wine. My lip is healed. I lower the shard of glass to my arm, hovering with indecision for just a moment. Enough time to convince myself that I need it. Need—it’s a funny word, isn’t it? What is the difference between want and need but strength? Where do they blur?
I need the cut. The pain. That bright slash of feeling. It is the most I’ve felt in days. I drive the glass into my arm, drunk with the carelessness of it. Thick blood wells at the wound, and the trigger of sensation—it iseverything. I moan, writhing as I watch the wound heal, a pleasant tickling the only evidence as the skin stretches back towards itself. And then I lower the glass again.
I drink the rest of the wine, slicing and stabbing wildly: my arms, my inner thighs, the soft skin at the back of my knees, my belly and my breasts. Each new cut tightens something in me, something that has been unravelling.
I only stop when I become aware of the mess, slowly and distantly. My nightgown is scarlet, sopping, and the stains around the fountain are no longer of paint and lust but this reckless science.I lick the blood that dries sticky on my hand and fall back against the fountain, spent.
Sometime later I come to consciousness, swimming upwards from dreams of sluggish red rivers cutting through soil, vines coiling, leaves scorched with sun. I am so hungry that it hurts, but this is not the pain of mere hours ago. It isn’t hot and bright; there is no pleasure in it. It is dull, an ache so deep it might have doubled me over—if I were still myself.
I peer through the shadows of the foxglove, the long grasses hiding the edge of the trees and the side of the tower. Olea might never find me here if she didn’t come looking. But of course she will. There is no space. I want—no,need—to run, to burn the hunger from my bones, but every way I turn there is eventually another wall. Could I climb them? The iron spikes atop it won’t do me any lasting harm.
I flex my muscles. They feel… weaker. A lot weaker. I could probably still do it, though, scale them and swing myself over to the other side. Or I could find a way to smash the lock—though, again, I’m doubtful that it would be as easy today as it might have been two weeks ago. It’s not as if I’ve not considered it before. Why didn’t I?
It’s the same question Olea and I keep passing back and forth, always dancing just on the edge.Then what?I come back to the thought now, circling it like a vulture. Whatever poison now flows in me is here to stay. Olea says to give it time, she is hopeful the toxins will fade outwardly and soon we will be able to join, and rejoin, the rest of the world. The cure has to fix the poison in our touch, doesn’t it? That’s what it was for.
The more time passes, the less I am sure. Olea might not beable to feel the poison, for her it’s a normal state of being, but I can. I know what to look for, that surge of reckless energy, that base urge driving me on. Iknowwithout knowing that if I were to touch Petaccia on her next visit to these walls she would fall down dead. And Leo, my only friend—
Olea’s last mention of him bothers me.Unfinished business.When I’d said those words I was thinking of my life outside these walls, of learning and libraries and academic acclaim, all the things I left without realising I’d not likely go back. They are so close—sometimes I hear the scholars, the slap of their hard-soled shoes as they race across the square, and I can see the window of my old rooms from the gate—and yet so far they might as well be on another continent. My world has shrunk. And yet the first thing Olea thought I meant was Leo.
She’s jealous, that’s all. I have a friend outside these walls and she no longer does. Is it only jealousy, though? Is it insecurity too? She has me, a captive audience, she is my sun and my moon these days, and still she wants more. Does she realise the way this hurts? No, I don’t think she does.
More.I said that too, didn’t I? More. More. Nothing will ever be enough. If this is living, then what kind of life is it?
Suddenly my cheeks are wet with tears. I blink them back angrily, hot salt stinging. It is too late for crying.
A rustling in the grass shocks me to silence. I am so used to the peace of being surrounded by poison that it takes me a moment to understand what it is I’m hearing, but the second it clicks, my brain stops being my own.
Rabbit, it hisses.Run.I move without thinking; sticking close to the ground, I slink into the long grass. It parts for me, stalks twisting away from my body gently so I make no sound at all.Bare feet in the earth. I follow the sound of the rustling, creeping closer and closer until I spot it.
It is a hare, like one of the ones Petaccia brought to us. It isn’t dead yet, having by some miracle avoided most of the garden’s tricks, though its movements are curiously sluggish. My stomach clenches, famine driving me onwards. The hare doesn’t see me. It doesn’t sense my approach.
I can smell it. Dirty fur, soil, and the scent of living, breathing flesh. Its heartbeat quickens. My mouth fills with water. And then I lunge, capturing its frail body with ease. It is hot in my hands, its fur soft. I picture myself sinking my teeth into its neck, the pulse of blood, the—
“Thora, are you out here?” calls a distant voice.
I stare down at the hare. It is still moving. It doesn’t wriggle, but I can feel the trembling of its tiny heart in my hands. A swoop of hope overtakes me. It isn’t dead. The bird that flew into the garden died almost instantly, but this hare still clings to life. I lick my lips, still tasting the imaginary blood.
I’m still watching hungrily as its movements grow still. It happens so slowly I don’t realise straight away, but the slowing of its heart, thethrob throb, the pause between each beat and the next is longer and longer until there are no more. Horror overtakes me. Bile rising in my throat. I didn’t mean to—
Too late.
I am struck dumb, like a fish thrashing in a tightening net. Who—what—am I? I lay the hare down gently, crouching in the dirt, tears falling.
“Thora?”
