House of Hunger

Sometimes I feel like I’ve been building you a House out of my own bones. And still, you look at me with so much contempt and mistrust. You complain because there are gaps in the roof of my ribs, and you ask me to give more of myself to fill them. You want my hips to be the bowl you drink from. My shoulders, your bed. My arms, your walls. My legs, the very ground you stand on. You want your fill of my blood whenever you crave it. What more do you want from me?

My mother once told me beautiful was the worst thing a girl could be. I’m now inclined to believe her.

The mind is a different matter than the body. It’s meant to be sacred, private.

Hunger makes monsters of the kindest souls.

To love is to devour

My sins are too many to count... but I feel I've bled enough to absolve them all.

In the end there are only those who eat and those who bleed. - Countess Lisavet Bathory

We’re broken into submission, by grief and poverty, long before we ever set foot in this House. And then we arrive, on the promise of the first kindness many of us have received in years, and you take advantage of our weakness. You cultivate it, to better exploit us.

I’ve built you a house out of my bones and still it’s as if you believe there are cracks in it.

You know, when I was a little girl, my father once told me that if you eat the weak, you’ll never go hungry. I learned at a young age that love requires a kind of . . . dismantling. One learns to make the object of your hunger love you. Because when they love you, they’ll do the emotional butchery themselves. It was you, Marion, not me, who cut open your own chest, reached into the wet cavern behind your ribs, cut your heart loose of its rigging, and offered it to me. I had only to take it.

The hunger will come. Whether or not you let it.

Love is an act of sacrifice.

When I was younger, my hunger was all nosebleeds and stupor. Bruises stamped across my skin and a chill that never left me. But now, when I'm laid low, it feels like starving. It's as if I'm housing a storm of locusts in my belly, and they're hungry for all the things I'll never get to do or see. The people I'll never meet. The mountains I'll never climb. The oceans I'll never sail across. The lives I'll never lead.

Lovers lie entwined until night dies into morning. They spend their days together. They make promises to each other that they know they can’t keep.

Because it’s waking you up. It’s making you see. You’ve got to have your eyes open, and yours were closed, and in a world like ours that’s dangerous. You’ve got to see everything for what it is. Right?

Never mind the fact that Marion's heart was so full with Lisavet, she scarcely had room to love anyone else.

And everything before her eyes took on the warm overtones of nostalgia, as though she were reliving a memory, or wading through the tepid murk of a dream.

I’ve staked my time on it, and when you’re as busy as I am there’s no gamble so big as that.

It's almost pathetic, that you're so thoroughly lacking in charm that Lisavet could never lower herself to love you. A low-ranking casttoff in the House of your birth—a bastard son, beloved by no one—and now the only way for you to realize your ambition is to pick at the leavings of another's inheritance like a vulture stripping meat from a bloated corpse. At least, that's what's rumored. Tell us, Ivor, is it true? Or would you prefer to forfeit in the interest of protecting what little remains of your dignity?