Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart by Caitlin R. Kiernan Read Free Book Online

cannibal’s lover, so that I might begin to understand. You know that I will never be half the storyteller you’ve become, for I must always resort to such crude devices to find a conclusion.”
    “It is not so marvelous a talent that you should feel deprived,” I say and shut my eyes against the growing ache in my shoulders and the vacant chill where my arms should be. Beside me, you’re silent and still for a time, and I lie there, waiting, listening, wondering halfheartedly if this might be the night when your infatuation has inexorably run its course, and wondering again, as well, if I will be disappointed or relieved if that proves to be the case. And then you ask me, “Shall I tell you how it ends?”
    “What comes after the epiphany, you mean?”
    “Yes. That is, the consequences of the epiphany.”
    “How else will I ever know?” I reply, and, even with my eyes shut, I see now that this is not the night (or the final hour before dawn) when at last I feel your teeth close about my throat, clamping down upon and collapsing my windpipe and severing my carotid artery and jugular veins, spilling oxygenated and deoxygenated blood alike. I will live to see the sun at least one more day, and it does not surprise me, knowing this, that I feel nothing much at all.
    “Open your eyes,” you tell me, though not unkindly, and so I do. “ Ma mère-grand, que vous avez de grands yeux ,” you smile, and the darkness all around our bed shudders, but does not withdraw. “ C’est pour mieux te voir, mon enfant, ” I answer in my turn.
    “Yes, that’s better,” you say, your smile becoming a wide grin to flash the razor gate of crooked incisors and yellowed canines and the untenanted spaces where premolars should be. At this instant, the paling dregs of night lingering or caged inside the room would roll back, retreating like ocean waves from slaty Jurassic shingle or white quartz sands, if it but knew how to withdraw without the age-old push of sunrise.
    And then you are speaking again, telling me exactly how my story ends, and I concentrate on the interplay of your tongue and lips and teeth and palate and larynx and all the things this easy dance of flesh reveals.
    “The surgeon—the cannibal surgeon—lays aside her clamps and scalpel, and she stares deeply into her lover’s one remaining eye. All the universe is cradled within that eye, which is the soft green of moss after a spring rain. And she says, ‘No, I cannot take your voice away.’ Before her confused lover can respond, the cannibal says to her, ‘I see now that there is more to me than appetite, and more to you than the capacity for surrender. Already, I have taken more than I deserve, and I will take no more, not now or ever.’”
    “So,” I say. “She loses her nerve.”
    “You are not listening very closely, mon enfant. No, in this moment the cannibal finds her nerve, or her resolve, or her balance, or self-restraint, or whatever you wish to name it. She discovers, looking at what she has made of her lover, that her love is greater than her lust. Do you not understand? You said it was a love story.”
    “Yes, I did.”
    “In this moment, the cannibal finds a compassion that outweighs her lover’s need to sacrifice, and also her own perverse trophic desires. She promises that she will forevermore take care of her lover, and that they will have a long life together, and that she will do everything in her power to atone for the weaknesses of her mind and body. Twill make you comfortable,’ she says. ‘You will not ever want for anything that I can give you.’ Rut her lover, reduced by their many long months of feasting, is horrified—literally and wholly horrified to the innermost core of her being—and she begs the cannibal to please, please continue, swearing that she cannot possibly live like this, not as the broken abomination they have together made of her. She swears that she would take her own life, if all their gormandizing had