I gave him what I hoped was a comforting smile. “I wouldn’t. And people can go for like three weeks without eating. We’re getting enough water as we go, too. We’ll be okay.”

He just stared at me for a moment and then turned back to watching the fire. “We’ll see.”

I knew he was acting weird, but I never thought he would actually hurt me, and when I finally drifted off to sleep that night, my sleep was more troubled by my fears of holding him back with my growing illness than it was worries of him attacking me. So when I woke up with him on top of me, panting hot breath against my neck, my first thought was that he was sicker now too, not that he was getting ready to bite me.

“Just a taste. I just need a little taste.”

“What? Get the fuck off me, Tony. Tonyyyyy!” I began to scream as he bit down into my shoulder, ripping a chunk of flesh off and swallowing it whole. I squirmed out from under him, my right arm going numb from the pain and damage he had caused. For his part, my husband looked up at me almost bashfully, his eyes apologetic as he absently wiped the blood from his mouth.

“I’m sorry, honey. I just need a little. And you can have some of me too. I don’t mind. Right after I have a bit more.”

He came for me again then, and I’m sorry, but I won’t relate the details of how I killed the person I loved most in the world. The short version is that we fought and I won, but not without cost. I broke my wrist in the process and used the last of my body’s reserves fighting for my life. As dawn broke, I lay next to my dead love, my lungs filling with fluid as fever began to overtake me.

I think I slipped in and out of consciousness for several hours then. I had strange dreams, and the line between those dreams and the times when I was awake blurred to the point that they were indistinguishable. I remember burning with fever, I remember being cold. I remember talking to Tony, even though he was lying next to me dead. And I remember dark figures standing over me, offering me a meal of his flesh.

You came here, tracking me down despite me avoiding your calls and emails, because you wanted a story, right? No, you wanted this story. The story of the woman who ate her own husband to survive. Who grew stronger after she did so and was able to keep going until she found her way back to civilization.