A Certain Hunger

Run to its inevitable end, fecundity will always turn to decay.

I never saw Alex again. I’d made my decision, and I saw no need to pretend that it was anything other than the death of our relationship. In the end, it came down to this: Alex made me a better person, but I didn't like her. She bored me. I couldn't imagine forty more years with her. I saw her in my imagination, and I wanted to stab her through the heart with something thrilling and awful. So I killed the relationship instead.

This reason is symbolic. In the anthropological trade, it’s called cannibalistic essentialism: the idea that ingestion of human flesh imparts a crucial element.

To eat people is to get the taste of a Titan. It’s infinite immortalization. It makes a god out of a woman.

Ours is not one of them-no Western European culture openly embraces the eating of people (we will do it on the downlow, though; medicinal cannibalism lives into the twenty-first century). Even in the South Pacific, the cannibal capital of the world, not many cultures continue to practice traditions of cannibalism. It has been bludgeoned out of them, with religion, with laws, and with sticks.

For another Giovanni's insides were out, and much of his outsides were gone trailing down a length of pipe a long metal rod, rebar, I remember some man calling it—sunk into the ground alongside the guardrails. The rebar stuck straight up as a monolith, stood rampant as a needle, gleaming with a dull metallic evil in the light of the pale moon. Impaled, Giovanni hung on the rebar, glistering ominously

The main thing that youth has going for it is porpoise-tight skin. Raw, wide-eyed newness is meaningless. Nostalgia for knowing nothing is asinine; you can't recapture it and you don't want to relive it. Better to sing a song of experience with your burning tiger's heart.

One of the wonderful things about true Italian men is that their default setting is about a cunt hair away from physical violence where their heterosexual bonds are concerned. I do enjoy men with a whiff of menace.

With our friends, our guard tumbles like acrobats, falls like leaves, and swirls in glittery, dusty eddies. That face we keep up in front of everyone else —family, lovers, husbands or children — we let slide. Our friends see the frailties, the insecurities, the unattractive bits that we have to keep hidden from the rest of the world because — and this is the meat of the matter — it’s hard work to be a woman.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for print media, and for me.

…to take our minds off life's real horrors, like the fact that the pesticides DuPont creates are in essence honeybee genocide.

Emma and I loved each other with the ferocity borne of a twisted shared history. I have no other explanation for our relationship.

Yet women weren't always the angels in the house, and angels weren't always benevolent beings playing harps on the tops of trees. We like to forget that men imprisoned women in the house and expected gratitude in rreturn.

land of cock-and it does, the phallus dominates that city's skyline: Roman men strut with unquestioned self-confidence, their limbs decked in crimson, in mustard, in peacock blues and greens, each demanding your gaze but as much as the long penile lines of the skyscraper may define New York City, iť's a place that doesn't care who fucks whom, as long as you do it. Fucking, metaphorical or gla- w to m fe

I gave it a go; you know, when in Rome and all that-Boston was positively seething with lesbiansI don't like to be left free of a fad.

No man wears a sateen shirt without wanting to be petted

My heart became a home, and I did not live there alone.

With that, I realized Id fallen in love. Because of egg coddlers. With a man I knew from college and had forgotten. It was wild, and I felt exhilarated. I sensed a stirring in the void where my soul Should have been-no great hatching of conscience but a flutter, a breath, a quickening.

In death, I am closer to them than I ever was in life. I carry them around with me. It's not as if I imagine I can hear them calling, but I do like to converse with their imagined voices. It amuses me to have them agree with me.

Talking to Andrew, I discovered that my assistant, while only marginally adept at her job, was spectacularly good at being the kind of woman who makes otherwise intelligent men lose their absolute shit. I always marvel at this sort of woman, the sort who accepts total, monogamous devotion like it's her birthright. To my experience, there’s nothing that unites these women- they can be smart as pinstripes or as dumb as fake fur, they can have the classic beauty of a perfectly ripe honey crisp apple or the compelling plainness of a pie. They tend to be skinny; perhaps their performance of appetite suggests comfort with deprivation. Maybe they dupe men into thinking that they, like air plants, don’t need nourishment to survive.