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Wednesday, October 23, 2024#2024MakeAMonster day 23: Fridge
FridgeYou can buy pinkies in bulk online: little baby mice and rats, naked as eyes, pink as palms, nicely dead and vacuum-sealed. I kept them boxed in my freezer, and when it was time to feed, I put one in the fridge to thaw. After that I warmed it in water, ready to eat. I mean, they don’t ask you if you have a snake before they sell you feeder mice. One of these days I was going to go to the hunter and beg him to cure me. They said it can be done, but what it involved . . . he’d drown you in running water before he took the silver knife to peel off your skin, they told me, and then you wouldn’t feel the worst of it. But only if you’d never, well, never eaten worse than pinkies, and by the time I realised what was wrong with me it was too late for that. That was doing it the easy way. He’d drown you first if you paid him five thousand instead of three; if all you had was three, he'd do you conscious. But I didn’t have five thousand. Night-shift work paid extra, so I was saving up. In the meantime, there were the pinkies. I started with little mice. It held me for a while, but I’d wake up with the sunlight burning behind my curtains like acid and the veins of my wrists gnawed open, and a face caked and itching with my own blood. I wasn’t holding out. I moved up to feeder rats. A couple of weeks, I slept like a baby; I dreamed blood-warm dreams. But then it started to hurt again. I had only two thousand saved. And I still had to pay my rent; if I ended on the street there was no way I could keep my teeth to myself. You can buy edible snails and eat them live. They squirm against your tongue like a cold kiss you don’t want, but they’ll hold you for a while. You can buy bigger animals to dissect, but that made me sick before I even got my teeth into the cat I ordered: the thing was cankered with formaldehyde. The other thing you can buy live is invertebrates. Crickets aren’t so bad once you’re used to the crunch, but the way they struggle between your teeth made my heart pound and I wanted it too much. There was a cat hoarder who lived down the street. She never missed it if I took some kittens from her garden, but every night I stood there under the moon, I could smell her veins fat with blood and rich as butter right through the walls of the house. I was only going to last so long before I went in and took her. My landlord lived downstairs. He said I was a quiet tenant, and I was. He never heard my feet on the ceiling; I was padding soft as a tiger now. But it was him who brought up my post because it came in the day while I hid from the sunlight. If I wasn’t too exhausted I could hear it land on the mat and race downstairs, my dressing-gown hood up and my steps never touching the carpet where the sunlight fell – but I wasn’t sleeping. My fridge was full of baby mice and my bathroom crammed with cricket tubs, but I lay in my bed and thrashed against the sheets and dreamed of hunger. So that evening he was at my door with a parcel in his hands, and he was looking at me sharp. I’d never seen my own eyes as I looked at the neighbours, the drunks on the street, the veins and veins and veins of what I couldn’t drink – but the way he met my eyes, I saw a gaze I recognised. ‘A lot of creatures,’ he said. His smile was so bland beneath those eyes as he handed me my parcel. ‘Anyone would think you were eating them yourself.’ I laughed. I didn’t show my teeth. He leaned on the door frame. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I used to . . . order a lot of pinkies myself.’ I looked at him. His eyes were very dark. His teeth only a little pointed. His hair was short and grey, but his skin – every inch of it was clean and new. You’d think someone had taken a silver knife and peeled off the old layer. He saw me looking. He nodded, gentle as a lamb. ‘It’s been a long time, though,’ he said. ‘You could say I’ve gone vegetarian. It’s amazing how much joy there is to come back to it, eating plain, normal food.’ ‘I’d rather,’ I said very quietly, ‘you didn’t look at my mail.’ ‘I’m sure you would.’ So calm, his smile. ‘It’s true, what they say of the hunter, you know. Even drowned, it hurts more than you’d believe.’ I said, ‘If I collected rent instead of paying it, maybe I could afford to do it drowned.’ ‘Ah,’ he said. He didn’t blink. ‘Well, that’s unlucky for you. But unluckier still – my dear, I’m afraid I have some bad new for you. Your rent’s about to increase.’ ‘What?’ I dropped the box. The pinkies rattled in their sealed tomb. ‘No. No, I can’t pay a higher rent.’ ‘You may have to,’ he said. ‘After all, that poor woman down the road, with all her cats and all her problems. I’m sure she doesn’t deserve to have strangers in her garden at night. I’m sure it’s . . . cruelty to animals, we might say, to steal her kittens.’ I swallowed. I could feel my tongue cutting itself against the edges of my teeth. ‘The police don’t care about minor trespassing,’ I said. ‘Even if you could prove it.’ ‘Ah, no,’ he said. ‘But the hunters. Our local man will flay you free if you pay him, but if you don't get to him in time . . . well, my dear. There's other hunters. I think, for both our sakes, another hundred a month won’t kill anyone.’ A hundred a month. I’d been setting aside a hundred and ten for the hunter, payday after payday after payday. Years till my freedom. Years of filling my fridge with dead rats and keeping my teeth to myself. Years, even if I paid for the cure without the drowning first, if I let him flay my waking skin from my screaming flesh. ‘I know it’s hard on you, my dear,’ he said, ‘but after all, I have to eat.’ I couldn’t do it on ten a month. I just couldn’t. ‘Come in and we’ll talk about it,’ I said. He might have seen it coming. But I suppose he saw how hard I was trying to keep my teeth to myself. The hunter must be good at his work. The man’s veins burst under my teeth like candy, and once I began to drink I thought I’d never be hungry again. Whatever the hunter had done to him – what he could do to me one day, once I’d saved enough – it had cured the man entirely. He was as mortal and delicious as my first kill. And that first kill – it was a stranger coming out of a pub drunk enough to ask me to go up an alley for sex, and nobody had caught me for that either – well, that first kill put me into the higher price bracket anyway. It wasn’t as if this second kill would make the cure any more expensive. I’d have to find somewhere else to live, but I wasn’t as sorry about it as I had been about the first. After all, they say landlords are bloodsuckers too. 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