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wet gleam and the erection to signify your arousal, but I am left to wonder if I will be the instrument of resolution, or if tonight you will seek out some other means of release. And, too, I must wonder if the sight of my own body was sufficient stimulation, or if it was my story, or some union of the two.
    “Does she have regrets?” you ask me. “The cannibal’s lover? Now that it has gone this tar, that she been so diminished and her death is within sight, is she sorry?”
    “No,” I say, and doubtless I respond too quickly. “She is not sorry. She only regrets there is so little time remaining, that she did not have more to offer.”
    “She had what any woman would have had.”
    “Yes. But she fears now it was not enough, and that when it’s done, their courtship, the banquet, when it is finished, she will have been inadequate to the surgeon’s needs.”
    “But not possibly more or less inadequate than any woman willing to acquiesce to the preconditions of such a necessarily transitory relationship.”
    I frown and watch the candles instead of watching you, trying now to ignore my own nagging erection. “You make it sound so dry, so cold.” And you assure me this is not your intent. I can smell you now, that musky sweetness leaking from the cleft below your stunted phallus, the saltiness of your sweat, your breath which always stinks slightly of old blood and carrion. “These women love one another,” I say.
    “So, you insist it is more than need, more than lust or a maniac hunger?”
    “My, Grandmother, what big ears you have.”
    I glance back to your face to see that familiar expression that says maybe this is the night when you have inevitably grown tired of me. Maybe this is the night you will no longer indulge my impertinence, because, after all, I am only a depraved little bastard and there are a thousand more where I came from. The world is lousy with depraved little bastards-or bitches, depending on your mood. The bored, exasperated expression that reminds me that you will never tell me how much you love me, because you have probably never loved anything, not in that frail, careless way that human beings love one another. There are plenty enough nights when I see that look in your wide eyes the color of polished granite and absolutely know that I would be relieved to find we had come to our conclusion, that I had nothing left in my flensed soul for you to cut away and stew with shallots and baby potatoes and rosemary and a bit of fennel.
    “No,” you say. “Not tonight. If I killed you tonight, how would I ever find out how your love story ends?”
    “Oh, see, I think you know exactly how it will end,” I tell you, and you shrug and go back to lazily playing with yourself.
    “It is enough that I am confident,” you tell me, “that you will find the ending, or that it will somehow find you. That you and the ending will find one another. I do not remember you ever leaving one of your little tales unfinished. That would be indecent, and though you may well be depraved, my sweet, I have always sensed a nasty streak of decency about you.”
    And then you do invite me, and as is usually the case, there is no need for clumsy words, for language which might be misunderstood. You deliver the invitation by means of some voiceless communion a hundred million years older even than the coming of mankind into the decaying, time-haunted world. You call me, and I have never yet failed to answer, and soon my tongue has better things to do than tell you stories for which I have not yet discovered endings.

    I have always been the sort who sleeps after sex, and so I have been dozing, drifting in that calm and utterly satiated space between orgasm and groggy wakefulness, that sleep which might almost recall the perfect amniotic peace of the womb. I do not dream here, and I am not plagued by the self-awareness that, in the old mythologies, drove the damned from this or that Helen and forever consigned them to