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that I were still asleep and dreaming nothing at all. But then you place a hand beneath my head and lift it slightly, taking care that your short, curved claws will not tear at my scalp or the back of my neck. “I have been very busy,” you say.
    And, opening my eyes, I see now that you have been very busy, indeed. Gazing down the length of my bare torso, past the limp droop of my own sex, I see that you have wrapped both my legs in blankets, shrouding them in such a way that, in the flickering candlelight, I am greeted by the impression that I have no legs at all, the illusion of a double transfemoral amputation, and I do not need to ask to know that you have done the same with my arms all the way up to my shoulder blades. While I dozed, you have made of me an immobile, swaddled simulacrum of the cannibal’s lover, as you worked out the ending to a story that was not yours to end.
    “What I found,” you say, “is that the cannibal suffers a sort of epiphany.” And now you gently return my head to its place upon my pillow. “To quote James Joyce, ‘By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.’”
    “ Ulysses? ” I ask reflexively, not particularly interested in the provenance of the quote, having never cared very much for Mr. Joyce’s writing.
    You are propped up now on your right elbow, watching me. You frown and scowl, the way any good professor might when faced with an indolent schoolboy. “No,” you say. “It’s from Stephen Hero ,” and you explain how this was the manuscript that Joyce abandoned in 1905, then later successfully reworked into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “The cannibal is about to cut out her lover’s tongue, even though she knows this means that she will also be excising her lovers voice, and that she will also be robbing her lover of the ability to share their feasts, to taste the flesh her lover is surrendering.”
    “It is my story,” I say, delivering the words with more deliberateness than I usually hazard with you. “It is not yours to finish. I had not planned for her to take her lover’s tongue, not until the very end, and I had not planned for her to suffer an epiphany.” You watch me for a time, then, and I cannot even begin to read the thoughts trapped in back of those seething granite irises. One might just as well try to guess the thoughts of a cat or a serpent or a tree. When some number of minutes have come and gone, you flare your wide black nostrils and cock your head to one side.
    “Grandmother,” you whisper, “you have such a very big mouth.” And I reply, “That comes from eating children.”
    “So it does,” you say. “Sometimes, we must open our jaws very, very wide to swallow even small things.”
    “The cannibal has an epiphany,” I whisper, shaping each word as though it were spun from glass or built of segments stolen from the most fragile insect’s shell. “She comes to understand that her love for the girl transcends her compulsion to devour—”
    “—and that in the absence of her lover,” you continue for me, handling the words with tar less care, “she would be left empty. An emptiness that no amount of gluttony would ever assuage. Surely, now you see how it could cud no other way?”
    “You have a finer sense of irony than I will ever have,” I say, conceding the point, and then I sigh and frown as though this sentiment is somehow undesigning, as if it has arisen from an epiphany of my own rather than from baser instincts of self-preservation. But we have been playing these games for years, you and I, and you do not mind my masks, but ask only that I wear them well.
    “Are you too horribly uncomfortable, my dear?” you ask, and I shake my head, accepting the discomfort as I would accept any necessary evil, knowing it is finite, like your whims. “I needed to see you like this, to make yon a surrogate of the