Some Cannibals
Two women, one spidery, one fat, sell my mom hamsters. When they give her the furry lumps to hold, my mom makes a roof out of her palms. Her hands bounce as the hamsters bump their heads.
Lesson one in becoming a house: raise your ceiling.
The hamsters seem wobbly, playful.
I never take the hamsters out, because Sheila, the fat one, warns me that hamsters don't like small hands. Daphne wrings her skinny hands like she’s contemplating discarding them. Her wrists carry enough droopy skin to glove new ones.
Bringing Daphne and Sheila’s bags of hamster feed to our place takes four trips.
Afterward, my mom will clock this as the first red flag: “They wanted to stuff the hamsters.” She still says this after big meals, not in sympathy with Daphne and Sheila, but with the hamsters, like she too has been duped into eating too much.
Three months into owning the hamsters, my sister finds them half-eaten. The bite marks have tender, dark-red centers.
My dad is a lawyer, and I want him to classify the kill. Consensual cannibalism? Assisted suicide? Does he think the hamsters took turns? Eventually, he starts crying, so I stop. He got close to the hamsters. His hands were the only ones large enough to hold them.
#
In college, my roommate keeps pet tarantulas. The spiders have black bodies and pink knee joints. They whistle and gnaw in the night. My roommate’s boyfriend comes into my bed. “Are the spiders yours?” I tell him yes, and he recoils, embarrassed that he tried to fuck me. By morning, one spider’s torso is a rind. The pink knees are intact and glittery.
#
My sister eats her placenta and describes the taste as “savory” and “metallic.”
#
I watch a nature documentary that relieves me.
The narrator is paternal when he explains that it’s been disproven that female praying mantises cannibalize male praying mantises after sex. It wasn’t sex that made them hungry. In fact, the female praying mantises weren’t hungry at all! They were only confused and blinded by the lab’s strip lights.
Elliot flinches. Over the last quarter of our relationship, I’ve gained weight, enough that it’s uncomfortable for me to top him. He looks at me, like he’s trying to decipher if my hunger is real or panic-driven.
On screen, the praying mantis rubs its legs together.
“I think the documentary is fake,” Elliot says.
I look up the narrator’s credentials. He’s a voice actor, semi-renowned.
“I’ve seen a female praying mantis eat a male one,” he says. “Outside, very close to here.”
I ask him if he could’ve confused consumption with sex.
“Are you kidding?”
We walk to the hill behind our house to find praying mantises. I clap my hands over my ears, the chirping is so, so loud.
Nora Esme Wagner is a rising sophomore at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in JMWW, Milk Candy Review, Moon City Review, 100 Word Story, and elsewhere. Her work has been longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel.