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​*THIS DRAFT IS CURRENTLY UNDERGOING REVISION AND WILL BE POSTED SOON!*

For now, please enjoy this short excerpt.



          As if nothing could satisfy my preternatural hunger for her. She who murmured words that sounded like wet, ripe mangoes to my quivering ears, she who had the night in her whispers. She who ate me up the second my wandering eyes fixed on hers, she who demanded a simple grocery store companion instead of a friend or lover. I must admit that I am lost. I am not sure if I exist at all anymore. I cannot explain myself to her, for it is not necessary. The past grieves itself in repetition.          

            It all began on a Thursday night when the clouds felt too limp to rain, and too heavy to rise. I walked into the meeting at the simple, small church I went to on weeks when memories of my dead husband, lounging in an armchair with a drink hung loosely in his hand, or standing behind the shower curtain as vespers of steam rose into my open hands, would not leave me. Try as I might, I could not bear to banish Frank into the past. He was my husband. He was first great love. And then he was gone.

            Until I saw this creature—this thing who passes for an ordinary woman—sitting in a chair across the room from me. She was magnetizing. My eyes were drawn to hers before I could think, and it was over in the instant she flashed me her small, nervous smile. If I had known then what lay behind those eyes, that I would have two less fingers by the end of my encounter with her. But I was stupid, though some forty years old, and lonely.

            She did not speak at that meeting, or the next. But I returned and waited, hoping to dispel memories of my deceased husband and too see her, so I could feed the fantasies that sprang in my head like a violent disease.