I’ve never had to do this before. My mum always sorted out the food for us; eventually, I did become responsible to a certain degree, but my mum had already established a relationship with the local butcher so all I had to do was turn up with a foldaway luggage trolley, and a bungee cord if there were more than two buckets. While I waited, the butcher always talked to me, and asked me about school or uni, which I commuted to from home, and, when my mum got sick, how she was doing.

We only ever got pig blood. This wasn’t because it was the only type of animal blood the butcher had. “Pigs are dirty,” my mum said once. “It’s what your body deserves.” But it turns out that pigs aren’t naturally dirty. Rather, humans keep pigs in dirty conditions, feeding them rotten vegetables, letting the mud in their too-small pens mix with their feces; the filth of the pig is just symptomatic of the sins of the human. Wild pigs eat plants. They’ve even been shown to clean fruit in creeks before eating it, and they never eat or roll around in their own feces. I told my mum this, but she was adamant that the pig was the filthiest animal and was what we deserved. It was what I grew up eating, never touching anything else—just thinking, dreaming, imagining the taste of other blood.

There was only the hint of something else, some other flavor, in my memory. Something distant, something that was from so long ago that it didn’t feel like part of my life, something that felt ancient, like a memory passed down through generations. This was the taste of—or not the taste but more the experience of consuming and then containing—human blood.

I know that my mum once, while she was pregnant with me, ate a human; she’s never told me who. She calls this incident a “slipup” and she blames me for it. For multiplying her hunger, and making her feel like she needed more than what a pig could offer. I’ve wondered whether my body remembers the taste of it and the feel of it from inside the womb. One time, as a teenager, I’d cut into my own skin and sucked at the cut, hoping that the pig blood would have transformed in my veins into human blood, hoping to taste what it was that I felt I could remember; but what I drank tasted no different from my dinner, and I felt no different afterward.