What he brings me, I eat.
Today he brought me a pigeon, its feathers still in but singed, chalking at the edges like ash shed from a dying tree. Its eyes stare, so I eat them first to stop the pigeon from seeing me. The legs are next, and they taste like a popsicle stick. He stands against the wall by the staircase, watching me from just outside the range of where my chain allows. He smiles when I eat; throughout all of this, I don’t think I’ve seen him without a smile. That fact used to scare me, but now it comforts me, reassures me that I’m doing right by him.
The beak I save for last. I set it on the ground, still vaguely attached to the remainder of the face, and smash it with my chain. The sound reverberates off the concrete walls and almost sounds like church bells. When nothing remains but dust and a snapped wing, I kneel to the ground and lick it off. I know this will make him laugh, and it does.
“You are so beautiful,” he says to me, eyes wet. He doesn’t always say this, so it feels special. It makes me feel special; I know there have been others from the scratches on the wall. Then he leaves.
I sit back and close my eyes, although the darkness of my room when he isn’t here makes this meaningless.
****
What he brings me, I eat.
Something different, a treat perhaps; a raw honeycomb, dripping with sweetness and leaving a residue as I drag it from the middle of the room to my favorite corner. Before he dropped it on the floor, he sliced open his index finger and drew a pattern on the floor, swirls and circles and jagged edges. A star.
It doesn’t bother me, but there are still bees at work on this honeycomb. One dances lazily around, tracing a hexagon around a hollow where an egg is gestating. Perhaps it’s trying to tell the other bees, of which there are perhaps a dozen, where next to search for pollen. That does make me feel somewhat sad, so to spare the bees from seeing their home further destroyed, I eat them first. Most are lodged deep in the syrupy honey and can’t do much to escape, but a few are enraged and fly around my face, unsure of how to stop me. I pincer one out of the air and swallow it whole. Then another. I’m somewhat surprised at how quick my reflexes are, but he doesn’t seem to be. If anything, the smile is even wider than usual as he watches me hunt.
I feel a sharpness in my throat; one of them managed to get a sting in before sinking into my stomach acid. I’m allergic to bees, and he knows this. My eyes begin to water as I feel my neck swell, the air feels like I’m at a high altitude. The smile never leaves his face. Gracefully, he steps into his bloodied pattern and squeezes the finger he sliced, then holds it to my face expectantly. I already know what to do. I grab his wrist and yank the finger all the way into the back of my throat, then swallow the coppery-sweet blood.
It acts immediately. As soon as it gets near the sting, I can actually feel it recede. I look up at him in awe.
“More,” he says.
Yes, more. I bite down as hard as I can, my teeth tearing through tendon. I feel tooth hit bone with a brisk immediacy and I see stars from the blinding pain, but then I bite one more time and the finger is mine now. Blood pumps down my throat and I almost vomit from the sheer force of it, but I swallow hungrily and I manage to keep it all. The finger I chew down to a morsel. He backs up, the blood from his hand spilling over the floor and the honeycomb. The love in his eyes when he looks at me makes my heart flutter.
“You are so beautiful.”
The honeycomb I cherish for days after he leaves, a treat for a job well done.
****
What he brings me, I eat.
Somebody new is in the room with me now, shivering in the opposite corner, similarly chained. She asks me question after question, who am I, where we are, what do we do to escape. I’m beginning to get tired of her.
When he comes down the stairs, she screams in recognition. He is carrying something in his four-fingered hand, but I can’t see what it is just yet. The tips of his fingers are smudged with soot as he kneels down next to the cowering woman, compassion evident in every move he makes. I can see it as he draws a line in smudge across her forehead, then two dots and a curl on the far end. “Søraïs,” he whispers to both of us. Something deep in me flares in recognition at this name. I don’t know how I know it is a name, but it is. The woman hurls curses at him, tries to scratch at him to no avail.
He rises, and then in a move that seems to shock the other woman, he gives me the object in his hand; a key. The lock’s click as it opens is surprisingly mundane. It’s just metal and plastic, after all. I stand to my full height for the first time since I arrived, and I can feel the top of my head scrape the ceiling, which it certainly didn’t do back then. I look down at the other two; he is clasping his hands in prayer and whispering the name, my name, over and over again. Tears of joy fall into the dirt and muddy the floor. The woman, on the other hand, is trying to scream but there is no sound coming out.
I reach out to her, sorrowful at what I have to do but aware that there will be many, many more like her to come. My heart hardens as I bend to my work.
What he brings me, I eat.
And I’m still so hungry.
Devin Marcus is an author and editor living in the Pacific Northwest with his partner, where he explores all things scary in the omnipresent rain and fog. His work has been published in Black Petals Webzine, Impostor Magazine, the “Liminal Madness” short story collection, and in radio play format with The Storyteller Series on Spotify, among others. He can be found @DubbleOhDevin.
Published 10/30/26