You’ll need to go to your local town market and ask for a pound of uncooked beef. After you’ve acquired the meat, you need to return home and leave the beef in a place where it won’t be disturbed. Leave it outside.

It won’t be long before all kinds of insects will arrive, a glittering haze swallowing the portion of meat until they’ve finally nourished themselves and laid their eggs deep in its brawn.

After two days of waiting, you’re to go outside and locate the sun-cooked meat.

Though it may disgust you, you’re to take a knife and fork and hack throw the uncooked beef, slice off a small piece, and consume it.

You’re to do this until the meat is completely gone and you’re fully fed.

You may want to throw up after you’ve eaten. You may feel as though you need to. I urge you to keep as much of it down as possible – that’s the only way this will work.

And, of course, you want this to work, don’t you?

EMAIL FROM AGNES PETRELLA

Date: 08/05/2000

Time: 9:07 p.m.

From: Agnes Petrella <agnes_in_wonderland_76@[omitted].com>

To: Zoe Cross <crushedmarigolds@[omitted].com>

Subject: It’s finished

It’s over now. The worst part is behind me.

Chewing on that – the way the little eggs burst between my teeth like sunflower seeds. I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll bet you want to know how it happened.

I did exactly what you said. I went into town and visited the local market – a horrible place I worked over the summer when I was a teenager. Haven’t been there in several years, but I remember the butcher there – this giant man with a pockmarked face dressed in a bloodstained apron.

He greeted me at the counter.

“How’s your mother?” he asked, leaning over and exposing the dark stains beneath both of his arms.

I made some bland comment about how well she’s been (after all, how am I supposed to know?), and I asked him how his daughters are – I remember they were in preschool when I worked there.

When we were finally past the painful pleasantries, I asked him for a cut of sirloin steak.

“Just the one?” he asked me.

I nodded.

When he was done packaging it, it was as neatly packaged as a Christmas present. I recall marveling at the wrapping paper. I remember how when I was little, I thought exquisitely wrapped slices of meat resembled something too graceful to eat, as if it were the organ of an angel – the innards of some divine being far too consecrated to consume.