He eats as if it were just a suggestion.

I crumple the whole stack of napkins, one at a time, in an absent progression. I eat with my fingers as if they were forks; the food is a carcass, the grease the warm blood of a freshly maimed taco. I am glad of the meat and the lettuce, of the hard shell and biting, red sauce. He appears nonchalant, very easily grazes the plate with utensils and keeps his hooves clean.

More and more I consider the predator…that would be me, by our contrast in habits. He wears a holy procession of morals and hunts with a gun or a quiver of arrows. I have my claws and my teeth and a fur coat and seem to attract the intent to be shot down or put in a cage.

Had I chosen, I’d still be a kitten, a cub or an embryo safe in a snooze. I don’t want to eat such a man as he eats; I like just to watch as he cradles it in.

The way a man treats his vittles is how he makes love. If you catch his demeanor at something he wants, you will see in his hunger the way he behaves. I assume that the same could be said of a woman, though likely her kinship to eating is different than that of a man.

_______

After the fall was wind. And wind preceded summer, as with summer came the sweat and a very weary silence. We’d eaten everything in sight…the sight of us, that is, presuming something somehow coupled like an ordinary launch. Sometimes his tongue could levitate, deploying in an outward breath a kiss of indiscretion and the tasteful words I loved…sometimes it was a disinclining lump. The muscle was a magnet, though, and I was surely metal. By the end of one more year, there was another name for hunting, and a face to match the certainty that I would be as little as a prayer.

_______

They talked it over dinner, over midnight, over lee. Up one side and down the other way, the talking…red, blue, green. Nothing yellow hit the talking wall; no paler color winner. It was more than just a walk to eat…the less they said, the thinner.