on her metamorphosis.... the small aftermath of new monster - hood...
Eve’s home was drafty, with Georgia’s winter having hit a bit harder than usual. Her windows banged and thrashed from the outside wind, a screeching filling her almost-overstuffed house every other second. Her floorboards creaked angrily whenever she walked across them - a threat of walk over me again and I'll break! that never followed through. But it was a comfort, she found, to allow her feet to touch the floor. Walking on air, hovering over them, had never been an exciting way of travel - Eve had realized this within a few months of her metamorphosis, how her feet left the floor if she wasn't careful, how weightlessness felt like nothing and yet there was a distinct buzzing beneath her soles. Pleasant flies tickling her toes, pushing them upwards until the ground disappeared and was replaced with air. She had realized other things as well. The food she had grown to love and enjoy, dishes that had risen in popularity over the decades, all of them made with loving brown hands, no longer satiated her hunger; now, she consumed them for comfort, rather than survival. And mirrors began to strike her with a certain type of terror that began at the base of her belly and spread outwards, stopping at her corneas and stinging them harshly.
But that was decades ago. Centuries, or maybe months. Her metamorphosis had occurred quickly, and just as quick she had become used to it. As if she had settled into a new skin, Eve had made herself wary of the way her feet brushed against the floors, how her skin almost sizzled - pleasantly so, now that it was winter - in the direct sun. All this had become commonplace, mere inconveniences that filled her lonely days and made them a bit lonelier. It seemed as if she basked in that feeling, a chilly wash covering her shoulders and the top of her head, pooling at her ankles until she couldn't ignore it - until she kicked it away with all her force, until her body ached for company, for laughter, for shared existence.
She lived alone; not by choice, but because it was the only way for her to live. Because she lived alone, her house was full of trinkets, a personality or two other than her own, to mimic the presence of another. Her home also changed with the seasons, with the years, with the decades. She swapped her furniture often until she decided not to, and her home - still drafty, still almost - crowded, still made of her and her alone - became an amalgamation of the past: here was a grandfather clock that no longer ticked, its hands stuck at midnight; here, the couch a store she had visited in the early 60s late at night. Her furniture remained in pristine condition as she took care of it; in truth, she had become unnerved by the changing of time, something she could and would no longer keep up with and continue. Her face had remained the same as it was seventy years ago. The skin of her hands did not wrinkle with age, and her body kept itself from hunching over. Her house remained the same, stuck in the past in definite ways.
She collected chairs and tables as if she were constantly awaiting guests, filling the corners of her rooms with activities, as if these imagined guests were in need of ever-changing entertainment. Music played constantly: in the living room, a brassy Armstrong; in the spare bedroom, a bit of Tchaikovsky; in the kitchen, an old, crackling recording of something muffled from long, long ago. But the music was faint with nothing to drown it out, her own voice not loud enough to cause any noticeable confusion on who was singing who. Eve would tell herself, it's okay, this loneliness. To be lonely is to be safe from the outside, and in some ways she was correct. To be trapped in this home was to be safe from the stares of others, the way mothers held their children close whenever Eve smiled down on them, the way eyebrows raised when her skin began to sizzle like bacon underneath the sun. The way threats were threaded in the words of the mailman who still, still, delivered any packages to her - "I carry knives with me, just in case," or "watch out - I might slip and hurt someone with this box” - despite knowing who she was - what she was, his eyes trained on her when she took boxes from his grasp as if he expected, or wanted, her to lunge at him. As if he were hungry for violence from her, hungry to commit violence unto her.
This, she was sure, the mailman knew of her as well: how her hunger ran deep inside her, deeper than even his. It had accompanied the other feelings, the terror and the wariness, but it also felt as if it were its own thing; it was a separate metamorphosis, but still quick in its own right. While she still brought hot and cooked food to her mouth, it became bland and tasteless and disgusted her more than anything. The comfort it had originally brought was no longer conceivable, nonexistent. A bad taste in her mouth that spread through her throat. A new craving began before she had a chance to reject it: the meat she handled one night, raw and bloody, made her mouth water. The red that stained her cutting board made her stomach growl. As her knife cut into the meat, she imagined lifting the chunks into her mouth and biting through it, chewing and swallowing bite after bite after bite. Caught in this fantasy, her hand slipped, and the knife’s blade took a bite of its own from her finger, small and sudden, and Eve jerked backwards. The knife clattered against the countertop, and the blood - her blood - skittered across the board and onto the floor. Eve watched as her blood dripped from the wound and the surprise melted into expectancy. Into understanding. Fluidly, quietly, Eve lifted her wounded finger to her mouth, and sucked.
[text ID: My loneliness asked nothing of me, it festered with inattention. Rarely did it think out loud. I neglected my loneliness and it expanded with animosity. My loneliness grew into a forest atop me.]
“In early Christian hymns, hunger seems to mean human vulnerability; the implication is, therefore, that the hungry will be satisfied. In the spirituality of eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe, however, hunger began to mean a craving that can never be filled.”
— Caroline Walker Bynum | Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women
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