Chapter One: The Vile Mother
You see, I was only seven years young when I first tasted human flesh. My mother had just died. By accident, of course…
The lights flickered again. I did not like when they did that—it made the shadows do things. Mama always said shadows were just places the light did not figure out how to reach yet. But I still did not trust them, at least not when they moved like that.
I was sitting at the dining room table with my dinosaurs when I heard Mama call out, “Chai, go sit on the couch. Mama fixin’ the leak.” She was standing on the kitchen chair again, reaching up into the cabinet where the pipes lived.
I nodded and kept playing. But I was watching too. She always told me to watch, to learn. “In case I’m not around,” she said once. I told her she would always be around. She smiled like she did not believe it. Mama started humming a tune to herself and I loved when she would sing.
Then I heard the chair scrape, like it got scared and tried to run.
I looked up.
She reached for a wrench. It slipped. Her hand missed. The chair rocked back on its legs like it was thinking about falling. I opened my mouth to yell, but the sound did not come fast enough.
She fell backwards.
Time got real slow, like it was thinking too. She hit the floor with a crack that did not sound like anything I ever heard. Not like thunder. Not like glass. Just... wrong.
Her eyes blinked, once. Her mouth moved like she was going to say my name.
Then nothing.
For a moment I did not know how to breathe. I crawled to her, my fingers touching the warm spot on her head where blood was pouring out, thick and shiny. Her hair was tied up like a crown of snakes and her hand was open, palm up, like she was waiting for me to hold it.
So I did.
I said, “Mama?”
But there was no answer. Not even a hum.
The house went quiet—too quiet. No pipes dripping, no wind knocking, no fridge humming. Just me, holding her hand, and wondering why the shadows were not moving anymore.
I rubbed the mood ring she wore on her ring finger as I silently sobbed. Although Mama never married, she wore that ring on because it was the only piece of my dad she had left, besides me.
And now I was all alone.
Out of the ring, like steam off a boiling ribcage came charcoal black smoke with hints of deep crimson, then a woman appeared. She seemed to be sculpted with limbs that were long and fluid, her fingers like bone flutes. The woman's body was emaciated and tall, almost too tall—like her bones remember being something larger. From her navel downward, she faded away—like she was not fully formed, like her body was an illusion and the real her was starving just beneath it.
She was dressed in death, but it was her birthright. Her blood-washed cotton rags looked holy, maybe even cursed. Each strip was a relic: plague doctors’ cloaks, famine victims’ linens, scraps from execution hoods and mourning veils. They wrapped around her like she was mummified and resurrected by spite. Occasionally, a piece peeled away and fluttered in some eternal wind that only she felt, then snaked back to her tighter.
Rings made of jawbones and finger bones, still etched with tiny runes from the ones she devoured adorned her fingers. She wore bracelets made of baby shoes and broken rosaries. Dangling like charms and trophies. Like warnings. She had tongue-piercings yanked from the mouths of liars. Her nails were painted with the ash of saints, chipped and cracked from digging into rib cages for the truth. She smelled like honey-rotted fruit, iron, and incense burnt too long.
And when she spoke, it sounded like velvet dipped in gristle. Every word tasted like lullabies soaked in bone marrow. Then she asked me if I believed in divine hunger.
The worst part?
I did.
Then she disappeared—like plague, like passion, like prophecy. Her smoke lingered just long enough to whisper: "Feast my child–be nurtured by whom nurtured you.”
Then the hunger set in. Curiosity. I mean, what was the harm in just one bite?
