eat your heart out

illustration made by Maria Ysabel Manarpaac (and also just in time for Yellowjackets Season 3)

I remember being thirteen, so hungry and canine-toothed that when I bit into the severed fingers, I tasted metal and nail polish.

Plucked from the cold tiles of our decrepit cabin, the fingers had receded my childhood into yellowed teeth.

A gnawing desire pooled in the crescent of my belly as I snaked my fingers through the blood, scarlet-dark like Mama’s lipstick when she smeared it in front of the mirror.

The once-emerald floors were already mildewed, grotty-black in their crevices, as the tang of human fluid rivered thick. In the kitchen’s corner, a bruised hue coiled like rot on the walls. The architectural wound oozed pus-gray. Molds crawled alongside smudged red handprints. An impressionistic painting of genuine violence.

The kitchen was tiny, so Mama’s howling echoed like a lone, wounded wolf.

I stood in my summer dress, hair twined with brambles and daisies. I wanted to hatch my jaw open and gnash my teeth into the mold, taste the hell of decay just to recognize some residue of what I was. Maybe it would taste like the forest: feathery green and aqua mulch.

The second finger I plucked from the soup of blood was clean, nails trimmed perfectly. It fit snug inside my mouth. The third still bore an algae-colored ring mark with an uneven ridge, and it crunched wildly against the bones of my palate. The skin around it was bitten harshly, a reminder of a girl who had anxiously chomped on it for comfort.

Looking at the other fingers, scattered like broken teeth, I couldn’t tell anymore the person they belonged to. Only that my mother heaved a tender reckoning of what she had mutilated.

Her cries harrowed circles of hell, and you could almost hear the nails of it scratching the fleshy parts of her insides. Her hair shone silver in the moonlight, and when I traced my fingertips over her bony shoulders, she bared her fangs at me and screamed. The lipstick on her face looked like a mystical massacre, cleaving her into a glamorous changeling from the chiaroscuro of the dark.

The color always wore her when she was hungry. In the mirror, I would watch her pull the ends of her lips until her brusque teeth ripped open their seams.

"Tonight, we are gonna feast, my darling little angel. My tiny meat."

The smell of sweat lingered like butchered meat, and traces of citrus fruits perfumed the air of mutilated flesh. Mama shuddered from the cold night, the fabric of her dress puffing around her waist like the froth of sea before it receded into garnet fluid at the hem.

Just last week, my teeth ached, molars pushing themselves from my pink gums. Mama was pained too, but in a different way. Visceral. Hungry. Wanting for more.

She kneeled in the mud of the forest and prayed to the trees. I watched her from the fogged-up kitchen windows, my lips snarling in sadness. She flailed her arms, reaching her grubby nails into the entrails of heaven for a stray.

In a way, I was my mother’s daughter. I felt the pang of her hunger.

After that night, the woods opened its womb into the pinch of summer. Flowers unfurled their arms to the sun-god. Leaves danced with my folk songs. I ran into the beck’s underbelly, twisted my fingers into veins, and rubbed bug-laden soil into my skin.

In Mama’s room, she skittered and danced to her old vinyl songs. A nymph waiting for her stray to milk-feed.

When I ran back to our cabin, the pockets of my dress heavy with mushrooms and devil’s trumpets, a woman-shaped thing limped on the roadway. Mama’s prayers had been answered.

When I inspected her skin, it split open with wounds, like the forest had tried its best to claw her out.

Mama loved calling me her bunny because of my effortless innocence, and I used all my bunny tenderness to escort the stray into the cabin. She told me her car had flattened on the road, spiraling into a ditch.

Her steps were larger than mine, but I was faster. We reached the doorway, and Mama stood against the awning, baptized in sainthood.

Her gaze latched onto the stray softly, and for the first time, the hunger I always foresaw didn’t burn in wildfire colors behind her ochred eyes. It was feral yet contained. The rabidness of her desire to consume was, for once, kept at bay.

I looked at the stray, trying to understand what had grazed the moralistic tendons of Mama’s wildling.

A beautiful destruction in the form of coal-black hair, green eyes, and thick lips.

She offered her name to Mama.

"Palmera."

Mama sniffed, tempering her insatiability as she seized up her lamb. I expected her hands to grip the stray’s arms like the hooves of a predator pressing against a prey’s neck, but instead, they carried the tenderness of a mother to her newborn.

I was hungry, but Mama had dispelled her answered prayers against the presence of this stray.

Each day, I visited the backyard and crawled into the graveyard of bones. Bugs, worms, and insects burrowed their metal heads into my skin as I played with the previous strays' remains. I fingered tokens: ribbons from a city girl lost after a music rave, military boots from the horse-faced man who kissed Mama, earrings from a freckled doctor, piercings from a tattooed man, tote bags, hair clips. Artifacts.

From the open door, I heard Mama’s fierce laughter laced with the stray’s whiskey-strong guffaw. The jokes were too adult for me, but I knew they tickled Mama.

I had never seen her glow like sunlight before, but this stray had managed to excavate the angry, bright bolt of energy from her.

When Palmera braided my greasy hair with her scalpel fingers, I smelled the faint taint of strawberries on her skin. My teeth bristled. My stomach rumbled. My heart galloped.

How long would Mama prowl on this hollowed martyr before she chiseled her canines into her?

I prayed to the same god as Mama—the earth.

I ate bark. Chomped on flowers. Crunched butterfly wings inside my yearning mouth as I begged the forest matriarch to finally give me a chance to satiate my appetite.

Each carcassed day, the wide-eyed stray became more beautiful from the wilderness.

Mama crouched into meadows and chased bees with her. They rolled in grass stalks beaded with the earth’s nectar, exhuming their dreams to each other.

"Someday, you're going to see me projected onto silver screens. I will be a scream queen. My voice a knife-shrill. My presence an electric fury." Palmera smiled at the late afternoon light.

Mama tucked a strand of her hair and thirsted for a life outside our hunger.

"Someday, I am going to wear a silver dress. It’s your film screening. Think Cannes. I am the silent lull of support behind your back. My applause a greedy sound. My love a gong-reverberation."

And as evening curled like the frayed edges of burned fabric, Mama traced constellations with her long claws.

Palmera laid her head on Mama’s spindly arms, nuzzling her city-rosed nose to Mama’s egg-sour neck.

They giggled like syncopated poetry as I traipsed, catching fireflies with my paws.

Both were a voracious ache.

I had never wanted anything more than to see Mama’s sneer finally turn into a smile.

Palmera loved Mama with dauntless stability. She never asked questions when Mama told her to run barefoot into the woods, their arms soaring like dark angels into the gut punch of the night. Beneath the hum of insects, the creaking branches, and the watchful gaze of darkness, I watched Mama part her lips, her teeth glinting with decay, and kiss Palmera with the venerated attentiveness of her humanity. That love was porous in itself because Mama was never capable of it. Palmera returned the same gnashing of lips, teeth, and saliva. Between them coalesced a hunger—one with a merciful snout, the other with a lured sinew.

Mama loved this stray very much, making me question the liminal space between my daughterness and my changelingness. From a stray, Palmera humanized herself against Mama’s lush famine for meat.

"How do you feel love, Mama?"

Mother’s fingers enmeshed themselves in my matte hair, the velvet silk of shampoo combing through my scalp as bubbles swelled and burst. Outside the bathroom, Palmera was singing an unfamiliar tune, the heavy soles of her feet spinning and sweeping with swan-like grace.

"What do you do when you're hungry, my little darling?" Her claws dug into my shoulders as she scooped water from the tub.

"I eat, Mama." Water dribbled down my face. The soapy taste rescinded my longing for blood.

"And when you're too hungry, do you eat more?"

I nodded, and she continued.

"That's love. You feel the need to consume, to gobble them up and let them nest inside your stomach so they can never break free. You want them to be part of you—their skin melted into yours, their bones grafted into your marrow, their veins ribboned through your capillaries. You hope your body is big enough for theirs to meld like a sapling into your crevice."

I marinated in her words, waiting to learn what love truly tasted like.

Days split open, their guts unflinchingly revealed as Mama and her stray devoured each other: snagged kisses, tangled limbs, webbed hands, and the stark gnarling of silver-black hair. Palmera was growing more into a wildling. The forest was claiming her.

Just as their love bloomed like a wildflower spilling color into stone cracks, Mama’s hunger grew stronger. Palmera didn’t know about this ugly thing we nursed, fed, and devoted ourselves to. There was a depravity in me, passed down by my mother’s mother’s mother, an heirloom of hunger that refused to die.

When Mama asked me to grind the devil’s trumpet, a flash of grief scorned her, but she doused it away with a hungry smirk. I knew then that it was the day.

Mama took her time in the bathroom, and when she emerged, I watched her color her lips for the ceremony. I held Palmera’s hand one last time as we trudged into the trees. She plucked flowers from their roots and braided them into my savage hair. I memorized the details of her borrowed dress from Mama. It made her float. It painted her an angel. She smiled at me and kissed my forehead. We danced until our feet ached from the sharp beaks of stone and grass.

At dinner, Mama danced alone in the living room, the same vinyl song hauntingly cloying. She winked at Palmera and handed her the wine. The grounded devil’s weed receded into her colon as she drank with giddy assuredness. The silver moon smirked at the scene. Mama spun Palmera in her arms. Both of them glitteringly beautiful.

"You make me complete. I love you!" Palmera raved, woozy with love and wine.

Mama began plucking the straps from Palmera’s dress. There was a slow erosion to it, a careful diminishing. She stripped her down, unraveling the stray one cloth at a time, until Palmera stuttered onto the kitchen floor, offering herself like a willing damsel.

Mama always told me that the last moments of a stray’s life were embedded in their flesh. A happy stray produced good meat. A miserable stray left behind guilt.

In school, I learned the proverbial stance: We are what we eat.

Mama hung unconscious Palmera on the hook bolted to the ceiling. She sliced her open, and the tears that escaped Palmera’s throat were muffled by the soft stream of her blood pooling onto the floor. The metallic punch of it clawed at my gut, reverting me into something primal.

Mama opened her mouth and drank greedily from the scarlet gush, her harrowed screams center-stage against the crickets and the squawks of death. Her shoulders trembled as she sobbed, the meat in her mouth a taste of her guilt. She stood up, swaying from the consequences of her bruteness. Her bloodied hand smeared along the wall.

She exorcised another chunk of her love and bit into it tenderly. She looked otherworldly, potent, and limitless.

What was the purpose of loving a stray, of filling them up with love until they bloated with stagnant content, if they were only going to end up hacked, mutilated, and debauched?

I knifed a sinew of flesh and brined it in my mouth. The visceral slick of copper was heavy on my tongue. My gums stretched from the rich, gamey bite of Palmera’s flesh. The thick oil of the meat blended too familiar, too warm, too human in my throat.

And as I ate with Mama, her fingers trembled, in sin, in regret, in the realization that she had just ripped apart her soul.

I wondered then if the penumbra of sweetness, the scald of iron in the nooks, and the decayed space of my teeth tasted the same as love.

What did Mama savor as she pulled a tuft of meat with her canines?

What did her love taste like as the meat nestled on her tongue?

Was it brutal?

Was it soft?

Was it all-consuming, like she had divinely ordained?