I wanted to eat her. I wanted to take some small part of her and put it inside of my body, in my stomach. I thought of Christ’s body, Communion wafers. I thought of a giant slug of hair I saw in a museum once, one of those museums of medical history full of human oddities—skeletons of two-headed children, Siamese twins sharing organs, skulls ballooned out from inflamed brains, all the strange things that can happen to a body—the hair had been removed from a woman’s stomach after she died. It was the size and shape of a large eggplant and ruddy brown in color. Hair was nearly indigestible, like chewing gum; it just sat around inside people when they ate it. This appealed to me. I nuzzled into Lonnie’s neck, mouth open, trying to catch some of her hair between my teeth and bite it off. I sucked it in, my mouth open by her neck, the strands catching in my incisors. It smelled like coconut oil, but tasted bitter.

I grabbed a hand and put her fingers into my mouth, listening to James grunting on the corner of the mattress. I was glad that what I appeared to be doing was pleasing to him—his pleasure a happy, innocent by-product of my own intense desire for consumption. I sucked on her fingers, as if to appease him, but I was actually seeking, with the wet tip of my tongue, a stray fingernail to bite—a snag of cuticle I could rip off and keep inside my own body. Her nails were uncharacteristically dirty, little crescents of darkness under the tips, all that sand she had run through her hands, you couldn’t ever get all that sand out. But they were still smooth and long, I found as I flicked my tongue against the tips, her cuticles flat. I bit down on her index finger and she didn’t even flinch.

I’d come so far, made it so close to her. I couldn’t stop. I still felt she might reciprocate if I could just push a little more. I pressed my whole body against her and she fell back on the bed. Our legs were interlaced, so I pushed my thigh down, pushed myself on top of her thigh. She was waxed completely smooth now. I’d never waxed, never been waxed. I hadn’t felt that skin so smooth since I was a child. I touched her and then couldn’t stop touching her, the smoothness addicting, encouraging perpetual motion atop it.

I put my fingers inside her and found polished rocks—crystals—amethyst and rose quartz. They fell out into my palm. I recognized them from the jagged innards of geodes I’d kept on my windowsill as a child. I held them in my hand, rubbed them against myself. The source of her power.