He mentions a bird eating a frog, seeing it flailing its limbs in a last ditch effort to survive. And she can picture it perfectly, can almost smell the frog's metallic tang in their air and the grit of the soil between her teeth. The mental image brings to mind, too, all the people she’s eaten, all the lives snuffed out in a moment of unsatiable hunger.
All their names flash before her eyes, scratched into the paper in her own handwriting, always inside the last page of her journals. Next to each name were the dates and locations. When her time to meet her maker came, she wanted to make sure people knew. She wanted to make sure the families she'd destroyed got an ounce of closure.
Because she never forgot. She would never forget; She could never forget.
Each of those names scribbled in ink was a turning point in her life, another descension to a deeper level of a hell of her own making, each death a shovel full of soil as she dug her own grave and paved the floors of her own cell. Yet as their names passed in a flurry of memory in her head, the flavors of them ghosted over her taste buds in their own flash of melancholic remembrance, overtaking the sour taste of guilt and self pity. She could almost perfectly imagine how they all wriggled and squirmed after she'd taken a few bites, legs twitching by and writhing before her teeth even broke through the cutaneous tissue. The screaming usually began after that, as she tore at their flesh with her teeth and sopped up the blood like a hummingbird drinking sugar water. Their tears often came next, when the bloodlust hit her nervous system, when she could no longer hold back, when the dragon reared its ugly head and she became nothing more than gnashing teeth and big brown eyes.
The initial chomp always stunned them. Like a snake's venom paralyzing its prey, like a deer in the headlights, freezing them with a mixture of fear and disbelief. Some smiled, thinking it a game, or a kink. But most just stared at her like she were Death itself; like prey staring straight into the jaws of a predator.
“I like my overalls, too, but..." One hand raises to the single suspender perched near her neck, and the other hand to the one sloughing off her shoulder like the sleeve of a ballgown. They were her favorite overalls. Taken from the dresser of a vacant farmhouse she'd found and treated with love ever since. But they weren't prime real estate.
His words trigger a coy smile and she chews at the inside of her lip. "I think I'd know which one was you, too. And I think you'd known which one was me, but you'd have to find me first. I'd be the one alone, weaving my web as far away from civilization as possible." Her teeth poke through her smile and Maren dissolves into a silent burst of giggles.
“Some female spiders kill their mates. Either during or after copulating.” Just like she had with Lee, she thinks. Just like she was afraid she’d do with Trent. Maybe she already is a spider. Maybe she’s scarier than spiders, or snakes, or sharks. Maybe she’s scarier than every phobia wrapped into one, and yet Trent likes her anyway.
"We'd be like Charlotte and Wilbur. I could be like Charlotte. But I wouldn't want you to be a pig. You're too tall to be a pig. And too nice."
Being a pig was an insult in Maren's mind. Sully had called people he ate pigs, livestock for the taking. She'd heard people call police officers pigs. Men who had nefarious intentions were pigs. Trent, however, was certainly not a pig.
"I think I like us best as humans, though. I like just being people together with you."
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