You’ve learned a thing or two. The brothers you lured were firmly tied using fabric you shredded from hotel bedsheets, one kept restrained and mute under the increasing heft of your midsection while you tied the other. You felt him try to push you off like a desperate massage and the stomach grumbles that he must have heard up close and personal set him kicking for his life. No avail, though.

Another time, another place. This was the first time I’d ever seen you gain significantly. The ins and outs of your diet were at that time a mystery to me—still are, though I’m a little better acquainted with the “outs” now. You woke with the heat and pleasure of a stomach full of meat, freshly sloughed off the bones of a uni student you got talking to on a bus. She’d had interesting things to say about America’s place on the global stage, and once you’d had your fill of conversation you switched to discussing her own place in the world.

Like a wrestler you throw Gemma onto the bed and keep her down with your weight as you spin above her. Your thighs push her head into the duvet, drowning any scream, and your hands isolate her knees and calves, pointing her toes in one convenient, helpless direction. Feet are a necessary evil. You get around them by deepthroating her calves all in one. The resulting kicking and thrashing underneath your belly excites you, makes you keener to put it inside your belly where it belongs.

You wake at 4am with heartburn and realise fuck, you frenzied again. You breathe through the discomfort, allowing it to dissipate as you struggle to remember the faces and, more importantly, the bodies of the last three days. The fat woman you met while clubbing started it. Jayda? She had pretty eyes and immaculate nails that utterly failed to protect her against her swift consumption when you isolated her in a bathroom.

Freya struggled, melted, poured into your intestines, desiccated inside your colon. Each stage we tracked, both of us fascinated by the mysterious process that converts a living, breathing human being into— well, I have to make assumptions, having never borne witness to the whole of the end result. I’ve certainly seen where some of them goes. You spent a slightly hungover day playing videogames. Over the course of twelve hours Freya ceased to be a distinct lump and dissipated into a diffuse spongy fullness within the whole of your abdomen.

You can’t tell if it’s warm in your room or if the heat is coming from inside you. Digestion is an energy-intensive process and your body has been putting in the energy for four hours now. The cute red-headed woman who is the unfortunate recipient of this attention has long since stopped struggling. Your chest is feeling less constricted: especially plump or plentiful prey will sit high in your middle and compress your lungs.

Like, maybe you’ve gone out and wound up getting a bit drunk, having a good time meeting people. Problems happened when a couple who were interested in you went past flirting into heavy suggestion. Maybe you were interested, but they didn’t know that your appetites are linked. By the time I pull up the man has long since been crushed into submission, his meat sloughing from his bones into the pit inside you.