The Hungerer Matt Bell
Because the older knew no other way to keep the younger safe—not with
his soft and pudgy body, his first and most-lasting source of shame—he
tricked his sister into the cottage's oven, holding its door shut against
her struggling, reading her her favorite Plath to soothe her to sleep. When
she was warmed through and still he took her into his body with fork and
knife, eating every bit of her delicious meat, gnawing every last organ,
cracking bone and sucking gristle from crackling skin until his plate was
empty. Afterward the older's belly hurt so that he thought he might die
there at the table, but he did not die. His long life stretched achingly sad
without the living company of the younger, and despite his great
appetite—I'm eating for two, he cried often at his table set for one, and
all the townspeople thought him a great idiot—never again was there another
meal that tasted so good, not until he was in his old age, when at last he
took his knife to his still-distended belly, believing his swallowed sister
at last as safely grey-haired as he, at last unattractive enough to be set
free, to take her place at the table of life. And from the wound he made in
himself his living sister did spill—but when the younger emerged soaked in
her brother's gore, the older saw she was not aged at all, but exactly as
young as when he'd last seen her: a bloody maiden ready to begin at last her
much-delayed adolescence, a great beauty born twice into a world the
now-elderly older could never do enough to secure. >>>NEXT >>>
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