Prologue

A MINUTE BEFORE

She had never truly loved her mother. Had never really thought about her presence beyond her god-given duties, considered her an abbreviation of a person. They rarely talked, but they argued incessantly. Any conversations that did occur were clipped and vile, as if the two of them had been bitter rivals in a past life, and their souls could not resist falling into old habits. They argued about the sort of nonsense only bitterly rivalled souls could argue about, such as the state of the weather and the price of gas and milk, things that did not matter beyond their ability to spark a triple-digit decibel screaming match.

Then there were the times that she would lose the argument soundly, and the entire affair would devolve into a one-sided humiliation ritual. These times were not worth reminiscing upon; they hurt some deep spot at the back of her head, where she assumed was where all the bad memories got stored.

Because of this, and because she was only sixteen years of age, she had imagined her dead on more than one occasion. Sometimes in freakish accidents. A wayward beam, careening downwards from a hundred meters up. A car ramming through a red light. A sudden and unexplainable episode of cardiac arrest. Her father returning from his decade-spanning trip to the dairy. Sometimes her mother died by her hands as well, but she never let the fantasy get too far. These were disgusting flights of fancy in two parts: the first was that she was fantasising about the death of her own mother, and the second was she would never have the guts to do the deed herself.

The time was six in the evening. The skies had affected a garish shade of ultraviolet blue, the kind you saw in abstract paintings and on computer screens. The dinner table was pointedly void of dinner, and her mother did not scream profanities—she loved screaming, and she loved profanities even more—when she returned from school late, which was what first tipped her off.

When she ventured further into the living room, she found her body.

She thought herself shellshocked at first, her primordial soup of a brain too untraumatised to properly comprehend any concept of death. She walked closer, trekking her shoes onto the carpet carelessly, powered by a morbid curiosity; corpses were so sacred, so allegedly repellent, and she wanted to understand just how repellent a corpse that was wearing her mother's face could be.

That understanding came plainly. There was no nausea, no immediate betrayal of gravity against her unsteady self, no lapse of consciousness nor of breath. This, the movies had gotten wrong. The body was a featureless lump against the sofa, as if someone had swaddled a bundle of logs in a sack and forgotten to take it home. Living things did not assume this shape; they actively avoided this shape. The limbs were positioned all wrong as well, all limp and dangling, nonsensical and foolish, and she resembled a mannequin that had been posed by a child. Her head had lolled over to rest on her shoulder. The streetlights flicked on; they limned the lifeless curve of her spine in too-gentle strokes.

As for her face… she looked serene; she looked like a pearl; she looked, for once in her life, like she was well and truly asleep.

She reached out to brush a platinum strand of her mother's hair from her eyes in hopes that the act would elicit nausea. She wanted badly to feel something instead of nothing. Even maniacal laughter was preferable to this.

Touching the body was her first mistake.

Her mouth filled with what she first assumed to be honey, and her nose tingled with a scent that she couldn't name, did not want to name for fear that she would not be able to grace it with a worthy comparison. Her stomach cramped with hunger. The honey, which she realised was really drool, pooled under her tongue and threatened to dribble over her lips. Her teeth seemed to ache at their roots for sensation; she clacked them together and found the lack of resistance disconcerting.

Thus, the second mistake: she ate.

She chewed.

She drowned.

The rest of the world sluiced away into kaleidoscopic phantasm. The meat was sinewy and gamey, and it took many trips through the molars to work it into a swallowable state. The grain stuck between the gaps between her teeth and rested there like an old friend. Again she couldn't pinpoint its taste—it palpitated indecisively between a slab of iron-rich beef and a cut of inoffensive white chicken, and had a meandering, bloodyish aftertaste—but this was not necessary; her body had responded. It knew this flesh. It sustained her far more than any protein could. All of her nerve endings were rapid-firing, as if she'd lapped at a live wire and could do nothing but shrivel at the sensation. All she could do was eat, so she did. She consumed strip after strip of the material in great, unflattering slurps, allowing its juices to splatter over her uniform and sluice down her chin.

It was madness. It was great joy. It was heresy. Her vision had blurred mid-fervour, and she couldn't say for sure just how many seconds she'd spent like that, her extremities buzzing with hysterical euphoria, her tongue aflame, impassioned, as she crouched over the body of her—

***

The time was six-thirty. By the time she was lucid again, she had chewed off half her mother's forearm.