When I was born, I don’t believe it was me truly being born, I was waking up. I had been dormant, I think. I don’t recall any type of birth. Just sleeping. I was never small and never grew, I slept in the same body I woke up in, stagnant. I was in a dreamless sleep for a very long time when suddenly my lungs filled with something painful. It felt like what I now know as ashes and broken glass, my chest tightening and making my body contort with life. My eyes were ripped open, pried by fingers that weren’t my own and I couldn’t see, aggressive and unrelenting as I writhed in an effort to get away. It may have been a birth, although no mother was present, I still wailed for her comfort. I didn’t receive anything resembling comfort though, but I did receive touch. A cold touch, something dead and desperate, something that was tearing at my feverish body. There were hundreds of hands, a swarm that I could see, all reaching out and clawing at my skin, streaking through it and making it cry tears of tar. There was silence in their touch, they did not call out to me or face me, my screams falling on deaf ears and muted tongues. Their touch said all that had to be said. They were beneath me, above me, between my arms and legs, just a constant pull, pull, pull, pull from decaying fingers and palms. Their nails dug into me like frigid metal clamps, sinking so deep my bones crunched in the tightening hold, and I begged whatever they were to stop…stop…. Stop…Stop…Stop. Each time I cried out, more ash and shards of torture entered my body, cutting my lips and the insides of my cheeks. It felt like I was being shredded inside and outside, a simultaneous affliction of misery.  I don’t know how long that lasted…but what I do know is that it wasn’t a birth, nowhere close to one. The next time I opened my eyes I was somewhere empty…there was grass…and a moon…and stars…and I was as empty as where I laid…. I was hungry.

        I’ve tasted bone marrow of all kinds…flesh of all sorts. I have bitten, licked, gnawed, and savored. None of this is enough. I am hungry. My skin sticks to my bones and my eyes sink into my skull. My hands are delicate and paper thin. I am hungry…. When I find you, and beg to be fed, what will you say? I am beautiful as well…I have a body that as ghastly as it is, has been touched by many. The handprints are still there. Because everyone is hungry, that is what I learned, everyone wants to consume something… What will you say? Don’t you want to rip me open? See what I’m made of? Don’t you want to comfort me and wipe my tears? Don’t you want to clean the blood stains from my arms and legs and pick the rotting fragments of death from my teeth? I am coming to you…and I am hungry.