I slip into my studio. It’s dark inside. My room is still neat, the way I left it before I went up to The Place, Yaga in her strange human form on the canvas that is propped up against the wall, the real, puppet Yaga next to the painting, still strung up on the washing line I made, a little puddle on the table beneath her where the water from our shower has run off her hair. Joseph Beuys and his coyote are still up on the wall too; I’d forgotten that I’d put these pictures up—the coyote tearing at Beuys’s blanket in one picture, placid and looking out the window in the other.

I’m inside for only a few minutes before I sense Ben outside my studio door. He knocks, and then he says my name—my name, which doesn’t feel like it fits me anymore. “Lyd,” he says, and then some other words I can’t quite make out. And then, “Lyd, will you let me in?”

I sit down on the floor against the door. Through it, I can feel Ben’s circulatory system. All his veins, like vines, growing beautifully out of his heart. I can smell his blood, and it smells delicious and familiar and wholesome, as I imagine freshly baked bread smells to humans. I grope at the door with my hands, as though I could get some sort of sustenance through it. I could open the door very quickly. I know how easily I could snatch Ben from the other side. On this side of the door, it would just be me and him, while on that side, other people will be arriving soon—artists starting work for the day, and maybe even doctors too, if he has called someone and told them I need to be seen. But here, it would be just us. Just us, in the dark.

Even in my mind, though, I can’t imagine any scenario beyond that point, beyond the point of pulling Ben into my studio, beyond the point of seeing him in front of me, his body so much weaker than mine, even when mine is at its weakest. I don’t know what I want to do with him. Seeing him purely as food is impossible. But, at the same time, I feel like I don’t know him well enough to spend the rest of eternity with him; if I turned him, I’d be joined to him forever and a part of me—I think the human part—right now is angry with him, for letting anything happen between us when he knew nothing could ever happen again, for pulling his hand away from my hand. And then there’s the other option. Does he deserve the other option? Just death? Just becoming sustenance for my body?