Jamie Richards

Viola Di Grado

Blue Hunger

“When Xu bites me, when she has me in her teeth, naked and bad on top of me, everything is good.”

“Xu has hair the color of tar and is glorious. Slender hands, moon-white legs. A dark smile just a touch off-kilter. She could play the harp and walk the most applauded runways. She could be a supportive girlfriend, the kind mentioned with teary eyes during family gatherings. She could be a lot of things. She is none of them. She’s the person I love. She’s the person who can’t love me. When her chapped mouth rests on me I think useless things with great intensity, for instance, that language shouldn’t come out of the same orifice as vomit and spit.”

“I’m Chinese. We don’t waste time. Don’t you know how fast we can build a hospital?”

“I couldn’t really listen; I just wanted to follow the flow of those phrases, be struck by that sound coming from her throat, that emerged from her body just for me. I’d never had such a physical interest in language.”

“Eat me,” I said. The idea was mine—it was the first time I’d had a thought like that. I was the first to think of my body as brainless pulp. Eat me: make me yours, make me disappear. Something had happened. Something inside me had worked loose, revealing a strange part of the mind.

“Love deposits all over the body, like fat. There are those who gain weight in their backside and those in their middle. There are those who gain in their faces until their features are so stretched they’re unrecognizable even to themselves. The same goes for love. It settles in the parts of the body that best tolerate weight and transfiguration. It can be felt in throbbing temples or tingling fingertips—a commotion like a swarm, insects scurrying in the dark—or in the sweaty nook of a knee. The eyes get red and itchy. The stomach burns. The nerves pull in the elbow like worn strings on an old violin. Love burns the cheeks and the earlobes, which turn the morbid color of crushed roses in a notebook.”

“A form of sacrifice, a form of love. The two get confused when one has been loved too little.”

Blue Hunger quotes

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