Winter’s Hunger

The snow is rising to my knees. It’s soft snow – the gentle, malleable kind that doesn’t sit too heavily upon the ground. I am grateful for that. It means I’ll freeze much slower, uncompacted by what piles atop me. My legs, already buried, aren’t cold. They aren’t anything. Powdery snowfall covers the fractures I cannot feel, hiding the sight of my split shins and snapped bones. Even the rocks I’d landed on two days ago have disappeared under the quiet blanket of Winter.
Dylan hasn’t moved. He’d landed upside down and it’d turned his entire head around. I cannot see his face from where I sit – another thing to be grateful for – so I can pretend he’s only asleep. In small moments of stubborn hope, I convince myself that he’s conserving his energy, restoring his strength before he starts a search for help.
The snow also keeps me from feeling thirsty. I’ve shoveled gloved fistfuls into my mouth to keep my tongue and lips wet. I didn’t care when a little dirt snuck past my teeth. After a while, I was grateful for the for the taste. Even the texture. In two days, I have grown remarkably, uncomfortably hungry.
With the rise of today’s sun, I am weak. Maybe ill. My starved stomach stabs at every neighboring organ. I push more snow into my mouth only to heave it back up, tasting bile instead of water. I know that I am freezing. Starving. Dying. I also know that I don’t want to. Not in the slightest.
Dylan’s leg is the closest to me. With what remains of my strength, I grab his ankle and yank. He’s two-hundred pounds of dead weight, made heavier in the sopping wet cold. I can barely breathe as I pull on him, desperate and dry-heaving. Finally, when he is within easier reach, I tear fiercely at the leg of his cargo pants, revealing the blue-greyish flesh beneath.
I no longer have my backpack. I’m not sure where it landed, and I can’t see it through the snow. My only tools are the keys in my pocket – one for a home I might never return to, one for the car parked four miles away, and one for the garden shed we’d never gotten around to cleaning out. I think of the clutter in there – all the trowels and saws and sheers – and promise to never take the mess for granted again.
The blunt teeth of keys won’t ever pierce his skin. Instead, I stab the shed key deep into the back of the calf. It takes no time at all to puncture the muscle with a soft, sickly squish. Blood just barely spurts when I yank it out, peppering the snow with cola red dots. I want to recoil, but I want more to survive.
The car key – the largest blade- does the best job of sawing the flesh. Bit by bit, I cut pieces of Dylan’s skin, wash them in the snow, and swallow them whole. I don’t want to taste him, so I flatten my tongue and slurp like I might an oyster. On the third sliver, I begin to cry. Then, I laugh. It’s a desperate, maniacal sound that gets me through the rhythm of cutting. Washing. Swallowing.
Dylan’s leg is cut up to the back of his knee. I thank him through ebbing tears and promise him that none will go to waste. Finally full, I sleep. I even dream a little until the pain finds me, showing me what a gentle caress my hunger had been in comparison.
The antlers hurt the most. It feels as though they’ll split me in half from the top, or burst from me like eels in a hawk’s belly. All the blood makes sense, but not its methods. I didn’t think I’d be twisted and bled at this crawling, torturous pace. A curse bestowed so quickly ought to run its course the same way – as quickly as my first bite had been cut, devoured, and kept down.
Next, I watch my fingers crack and ball up in place, hard now like hooves. My knees are bowing forward like they might in a funhouse mirror. What’s cruel is I can feel them again. I can feel everything. All of it. All at once. It’s a cacophony of agony for no one but the trees and rocks to hear.
The pain of a broken body is significant. Any survivor will tell you that as they ruminate on the things they had no choice but to do. However, the pain of a body rebuilding itself in all the wrong directions is unfathomable. As my skull splinters, the pain traveling fast to the thickening stumps of my teeth, I notice my jaw can no longer accommodate them. Instead, it juts and warps forward like taffy might be pulled - harsh and sudden, over and over.
Through my shredded coat, I can see the ribs pushed up against my skin, desperate to escape from the remains of my living flesh. They writhe like snakes, hissing for freedom. As the rest of my bones take their new, unnatural places, I feel the familiar rumblings of hunger. Except, it isn’t familiar at all. This hunger doesn’t compare to what I managed, horrifically, to satiate. It runs much deeper to the very core of whatever I’m becoming. I feel it rattling the in space where my stomach had been, now reduced to a gaunt and hollow trench. It spreads like a gasoline fire along the length of my body. My blood, black now as tar, is boiling and bubbling with hunger. I groan, except the sound is more of a rough and rabid growl.
I lift my head, tears streaming from eyes that still fleetingly belong to me, and scream.

***

Roux Bedrosian (she/they) is a musician, writer, and performer based in South New Jersey. They most often focus their fiction in horror, and enjoy exploring macabre topics through humorous, romantic, and visceral lenses. Their other work spans poetry, songwriting, and personal essays exploring deeper emotions, desires, and fears. More stories and personal pieces are available at www.rouxbedrosian.com