I crawl out. I feel weak and sick. I can barely remember the duck’s flight now; the bird is gone from me, just dregs of its life left, of feeling a weird flaccidness take over its muscles, of recognizing that the stench it smells is coming off itself. A strange thing happens to my body when I get beyond the initial stages of hunger. I start to shiver and my hairs stand up, even though my body temperature is just as cold as it was after eating, when it was full. Before, I thought of it as being something vestigial, left over from when I was fully human and needed body heat to survive; now, though, I wonder if it is, in fact, my human-self coming to the fore, while my demon-self weakens and fades into the background.

I pause Buffy and look up the symptoms of hunger on my laptop, wondering if the things I feel now align with human hunger, and find a document on the NHS website describing something called the “hunger scale”—a list of symptoms ranked from one to ten. I look at ten: “Beyond full,” it reads. “This is a typical Christmas Day sort of feeling—you are physically miserable, don’t want to or can’t move, and feel like you never want to look at food again. Not a good point to reach!” I’ve never in my life experienced this, and I want to so much; I want so much to be full with other humans, full of fat and protein and carbohydrates and vitamins. I go down the scale, reaching one. “Beyond hungry,” it reads. “You may have a headache and experience dizziness and a lack of concentration. Your body feels totally out of energy and you need to lie down.” I wish I could plot my own hunger on this human scale. I wish all I felt were a headache and dizziness and a lack of concentration. But I also feel an awful spiritual emptiness. From the duck, I’d received the feeling of urgency to hold on to life, to make young, to protect eggs, to raise the animals that came from them. From Ben, I’d received love for family and friends, which was often difficult, manifesting in grief and pain and worry, but which was also beautiful and gave meaning to everything. From pigs, even, I have received love for the little piglets they’ve given birth to, and something like love even for human owners who only fill the pigs’ food and water troughs. All the animals—human, bird, and pig—had felt something larger than themselves that they were a part of, families, flocks, or something bigger and less definable. Now, I feel only the absence of something like love, of something like faith, of purpose, meaning, of appreciation for anything. But, I don’t want to have to eat to get these things back. Or else, I want to eat but the thing I want to consume is the food humans lovingly make for themselves and for each other: home-cooked meals, and tea, and hot milk, and things like that.