2nd: Hunger by Elizabeth May

I was starving. It was the only way to rationalize it. Starving and it was already dead. I hadn't killed it. It wasn't me. Not me.

It was just laying there. Dead. Blood pooled in the snow around the rock its head had struck. Decaying while my insides ate themselves.

What else was I supposed to do? I had no other option. And so I ate.

That's when it happened. The change. I was human then I wasn't. The cold I once felt was gone, and was replaced with that hunger once more. I had crossed a line to survive. I needed to. My hunger had turned me into something else. Something that was hardly human. But it still held that hunger. The hunger for something delicate. Something no man should eat.

I had caught the reflection of what I assumed to be my new self, only once. A normal human body turned emaciated and corpse-like. My eyes were sunken and lifeless, my ribs poked out from under my bare skin, my limbs had grown long and boney, and worst of all I had gnawed off my own lips leaving my teeth bare and my finger tips long gone in desperation to feed that hunger. I had no name for what I was now. But I knew one thing. I was hungry for more and would stop at nothing to fill that hunger.

I hungered for that delicate meat once more. The meat that was fatty and somehow sweet. The skin had been salty but I assumed that was because of how much running the corpse had done before it died. I didn’t want the skin. I wanted more of that meat.

I hadn’t expected it to taste like red meat, but it was even better than red meat wasn’t it? It was like veal in both texture and taste. Even raw it had a mouth watering quality to it. I wanted more. Needed more. 

Who knew we could taste so damn good?