aren’t you fucking hungry?

Original “Wings” Scarf Made in Bishu, Japan Jacquard woven textile

everything else kyle did i had long learned to rationalize for the simple reason that i had no other choice. that doesn’t mean i liked it, that the tolerance didn’t wear on me, but that tolerance held for a long time.

i could tolerate kyle’s violence. i could tolerate the Turn, the slow, inevitable creeping way that my selfhood became eroded over the years, the way he used ashton and i against each other, i could tolerate his clear fanaticism and zealotry and mania, being dragged day after wretched day through this empty fucking country—

but the lying. oh, the mountains of lies he’d built at the base of our existence. the clawing itch at the base of my skull has always been there, i think. stronger than the hunger, even, the urge to seek and understand and know. for years i had taken notes, filled journal after journal and notebook after notebook, trying to make sense of something that made no sense at all because it wasn’t true.

i had been working on faulty information from the beginning: he had lied to us, lied about his name and life and the ones before us, about the very nature of what we’d become and the world he’d dragged us into, he lied about what we were and what he wanted, and that was it for me. something snapped.

must've been the eyes, or the curve of my nose, or the slit-pupils or the blood on my mouth. could've been mine. could've been someone else's. flashes of it. hyperventilating, unable to explain my panic. he talked me down. he always did. he's dead now and now and i'm not sorry. can't be. bastard stole my face. what was i supposed to do?

progress isn't linear and neither am i. this means that sometimes i wake in the night like an animal. lock myself in the bathroom. lovers think i'm afraid of them but i'm not; i'm afraid that i'll open the door and it'll be that motel or car or gas station bathroom, afraid it'll be him smiling with bloodied teeth, telling me how well i've done. so i’m calling my brother at 3 am behind a locked door breathing tell me it’s over, tell me it’s over, tell me it’s over like a prayer.

and it is over. it must be.

but i’m still scratching the bite mark on the back of my shoulder like i can get it off of me even though it’s already done, even though it's been done since i was eleven and a half. and i’m unlocking the door, telling my lovers that i’m okay, hanging up the phone.

either way, she spent the first few days separated from kyle intermittently sobbing from the pain and swearing she’d kill us. we told her that her bones would go back to normal soon, until the next hunt, and tried to give her some painkillers. they don’t work normally on us but if you take enough they knock out some of the bite. she, of course, refused anything we tried to give her. i found it interesting how she had all that blood under her fingernails and still had such mundane fears.

ashton fretted over her but i left her where she was, self imposed isolation in that room in a cabin that wasn’t ours. instead i trekked back out into the woods to look at what was left of her victim and managed to find his wallet.

i flipped open one of the leather bound journals kyle didn’t know about and drew a new column for her; recorded the information. name, gender, place of origin. it had always bothered me that i didn’t know the names of my own victims from before i started recording them myself. it’s strange to be guilty over someone nameless and faceless— to mourn without direction. i figured that, perhaps, some day sienna would like to know of her own track record from the beginning.