Maybe it was age, maybe it was something else. Everything felt so different now, even from just a few months ago, and how quickly that internal distance had grown surprised her now. Back then she had, with little hesitation, given up a sure bet for a family, a whole other life. Her last boyfriend, whom she had left seven months ago, had been a lawyer, having only just passed his bar exam but with great prospects. At thirty he was four years her senior, and what had happened wasn’t her fault, not really. She, vivacious and enigmatic, concerned with her latest research study and living in a small studio apartment, always pausing to sneeze loudly as she walked outside, and he, all old money and sailboats, from a family grown bored with its wealth, passionate about becoming a public defender so he could work with the disadvantaged and institutionally overlooked, bristling at social inequity—a man who, for all the irony of espousing the benefits of a welfare state while on a yachting outing off the coast, was a good man, a decent man, which Carmen had known from the start. And she also knew from the start that she should feel a sense of promise, but instead she felt a slowly advancing sense of panic, entrapment. So without meaning to, quite incidentally really, just as a consequent of their dynamic and personalities, just something that happened without her knowing about it until it was over, Carmen had cracked his chest open and eaten out his heart, all in plain view of his friends and family, who had watched it happen, issued warnings as dire as the young man would allow and then those same friends and relatives had to look on with the same morbid fascination felt when watching one insect cannibalize another gruesomely, as this witty and skinny, smiling and blonde, charming and singularly intelligent, aloof and unpredictable young woman had utterly destroyed the young lawyer, he who had imagined her one day on a beach somewhere in whipping white mouthing, “I Do,” but instead she had left after just three months, after licking her fingertips clean of her meal, her pretty mouth smeared with blood and chunks of gore, standing beside the couch in the subtly ornate living room of his family’s beach home, looking around as if saying: what? what? Clearly there has been some misunderstanding, you didn’t think this was going to be it, oh, you did (how much of her knew he thought?), and leaving the family with a corpse next to that plastic-wrapped couch (the scene of the final massacre), a corpse that would take years to revive, perhaps some five-hundred-dollar-an-hour therapy, and it was probable that even then every woman the young lawyer met ever after would be compared and contrasted, seen to fit in congruency or break in some asymmetry, to her. At first she had felt guilty, but it really wasn’t her fault, she had been as clear as possible (hadn’t she?) that this probably wasn’t going to be enough, that she wanted something different than everyone else had right from the beginning, and hadn’t he agreed anyways, proffered himself even, like certain species of male mantises?