She threw open his refrigerator. “Got anything to drink?”
“Uh, sure. There should be—”
“V8? Can’t stand the stuff.” She grabbed a bottle, opened it, and chugged a healthy portion. Some of it dribbled down her chin. Red drops stained her little blue dress.
“Oh great.” Diana yanked at the dress, pulling it to her lips.
She was making an unpleasant sucking noise when she looked up and noticed Chuck was watching her with a slight, yet noticeable, revulsion.
“Oh, jeez. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. Just really hungry all of a sudden, that’s all.”
“I noticed.”
They took a seat at the table. Diana pushed her appetite to manageable levels and forced herself to eat at a leisurely pace. It was surprisingly hard to do.
“This is really good.”
“You said that already,” he remarked flatly. “Several times.”
“Did I?” She speared a small bite, stuck it in her mouth, and chewed. “Sorry, but I’m just really hungry.”
“You said that too.”
Her stomach growled, and they both pretended not to hear it.
The conversation went flat after that. Neither said much of anything for several minutes. She kept trying to think of something to get everything back on track, but the only subjects that came to mind were lasagna-related. Whenever he spoke, she was usually too busy chewing to offer more than a nod and a murmur.
She had three servings. Three heaping servings. She emptied the lasagna pan in the time it took him to finish off his one plate. The more she ate, the hungrier she seemed to get. She tried to ignore the problem, hoping it would go away on its own. When she accidentally ate her own fork, she decided the problem wasn’t one that could be ignored.
Diana studied the stub of silverware in her fingers. She’d sheared it off at the handle, and was chewing the prong end. The metal had a peculiar tang, not altogether unpleasant. And since half a fork wasn’t much good to anyone, she went ahead and finished it off.
By now Chuck had stopped registering the weirdness of it.
“Maybe I should leave,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for. You said it. There’s always something new to deal with.”
He smiled at her, gave her a slight hug that was friendly without being presumptuous. He really was a great guy, and she almost convinced herself that she could just ignore her hunger pangs and push on with the date. Then her stomach rumbled.
“Excuse me.”
She rushed over to her apartment, threw open the door. The monsters were sitting in the living room, watching television. Except Vom.
“Where is he?” she asked.
They pointed toward the kitchen.
“Of course he is.”
She found Vom the hungering hunched over the counter, spreading tuna salad on bread.
“What are you doing?”
“Making a sandwich,” he said. “Want one?”
“No, I don’t want a sandwich, and don’t play dumb. You’re doing something to me.”
The furry green creature swallowed the sandwich in one bite and started making another. “Sure you don’t want one?”
“Don’t try to distract me.”
“If I were trying to distract you, I wouldn’t be offering to feed you.” He held out a plate of a dozen sandwiches and offered it to her. “Eat. Trust me. You’ll feel better.”
She grabbed one and bit into it. It tasted so good. It was the best sandwich she’d ever eaten. The best sandwich anyone had ever eaten, she decided.
“The secret ingredient is whipped cream,” said Vom. “Also, I find that sawdust adds a delightful texture.”
She rolled her tongue around her mouth and nodded. He was right.
“You know what would be good with this,” she said. “Copper. I think I have some pennies on my dresser.”
“Intriguing.”
Diana went to retrieve the coins, but she made it only a few steps before stopping herself.
“Am I seriously thinking about eating pennies?”
“Is there anything you’re considering not eating?” asked Vom.
She performed a thorough mental scan and found that anything she thought of, no matter how bizarre or unappetizing, seemed reasonable to consume. She tried not to dwell on anything too disgusting, even as her mouth watered.
“I wouldn’t eat shag carpeting.” The insight both pleased and revolted her.
“Good. Although shag carpeting is pretty tasty if I do say so myself.”
She joined him at the table and forced herself to eat a sandwich with slow, deliberate bites. Just the act of eating seemed to relax her. The functional grace of the chewing motion as her jaws worked. The wonderful transformative process where something was destroyed only to become part of something else. She’d taken it for granted her entire life, but she felt the particles dancing between her teeth, skipping lightly on her tongue, sliding down her throat. It was erotic and holy, pure and primal. It was beautiful, a sacrament.
“Oh God.” She closed her eyes, tasting every element of her meal. She was closer to an orgasm than she wanted to admit.
“It’s transference,” said Vom.
“Stop it.”
“I can’t. It’s not something I’m doing. It’s just something that happens sometimes. When the conditions are right.”
“What conditions?”
“I don’t really know. It’s not like I have a manual on this.”
“It’s like I’m hungry, and I know that I can never satisfy that hunger but I have to try anyway.” She grabbed another sandwich and gobbled it down without concern over table manners. “How do you live like this?”
“I was made hungry, and I’ll always be hungry. It’s just something I deal with.”
“That must suck.”
“It’s not always easy,” he said, “but it is my natural state of being. I’ve always thought it must suck to be a decaying bag of flesh that is constantly struggling against entropic forces that will eventually cause all your systems to break down into their component matter and then be redistributed, reprocessed, and repeated in an endless struggle against the chaos you deny is waiting to consume you.”
“Hadn’t thought of it like that,” she admitted.
“Why should you? It’s like being a frog enjoying the taste of flies. It’s not something the frog has to think about. It’s just something it accepts.”
Vom beat her to the last sandwich. He opened wide to swallow it, then stopped, tore the sandwich in two, and handed one half to her.
“Thanks. I know how hard that was for you to do.”
“Not as hard as you think,” he said. “Sure, where I came from, when I was just a single-minded eating machine, it would’ve been impossible. But the transference process works both ways. You might have my appetite, but I have your selfcontrol, your empathy.”
She chuckled. “Never thought of myself as having much self-control before.”
“Most humans have infinitely more self-control than we horrors do. It’s how your species functions, bred into you. You need it to have a civilization. Where I come from, civilization isn’t even a word.”
