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Fragonard murals on the walls, of a garden musicale that Miriam had actually attended, at Le Petit Trianon in 1769. She sat at the piano and played a few bars of Chopin, some prelude, she didn’t recall which one.
    She realized that she was making him wait, contemplate the fleam lying in its case, and listen to the furnace that would soon consume him. Still, it was essentially just another person going to die because she had to eat.
    She held the clothes to her face and inhaled. God, but he was foul. She forced herself to suck the air in again, to smell the greasy, rotted essence of him, to smother herself in it. Maybe she did it because it revolted her, and maybe she liked that. She wanted more, to inhale more, to feel more, to suffer more. Maybe she should have let him rape her longer. Now, was that a sick thought.
    She took the clothes down to the basement. He watched her with the empty eyes of a shark. “Look,” he said, “I got overexcited. It’s my fantasy, that’s all. I never hurt anybody. Oh, I couldn’t do that. It’s my fantasy, is all.”
    She opened the furnace, tossed in a shoe. It evaporated in a white flash.
    “How am I gonna get down the street, you bitch?”
    “It’s okay. It’s all okay.” She tossed in the other shoe.
    “Oh, no. Oh, God, please, please.”
    She got the rest of the clothes.
    “Don’t do that!”
    She threw them in, wallet, belt and all.
    “Listen, please, this is crazy.”
    She took the fleam from its case.
    “Shit! What is that thing? Oh, Christ, put it down! Oh, Christ, Christ. Hey. Help! HEY! HEY! HELP!” He shook and he kicked and he twisted against the steel that held him pinned to the wall.
    “It would’ve been nice to make love,” she said as she slapped his neck with two fingers to bring up the vein, holding his head still via a fistful of hair.
    “We can make love! Oh, I’m good, I’m beautiful. Please, lady. Oh, shit, why did I ever do this?”
    She laid the fleam against his neck, flicked it into the vein, drew it out.
    She caught the spray of blood in her mouth, even as he jerked his head to the side and shrieked, his eyes screwed shut. It was always like this. She stopped the stream with a fingertip. Male or female, young or old, they all reacted, at this point, exactly the same way. “Calm down,” she said. He lurched away and started spraying again. Again, she blocked the flow. “Don’t move,” she said. “Stop. Just stop.”
    He snarled at her.
    “If you don’t let me control this, you’ll die.”
    He became still.
    She drew closer. She watched his teeth, his glaring eyes. With her free hand, she stroked him down below, and actually got a bit of a rise. Now, that was impressive. Brave man, for a serial rapist or whatever he was. She exhaled to the point of almost collapsing her lungs, then withdrew her finger in favor of her mouth.
    With all her might, she sucked. He realized what was happening and gave out a high, frantic yell and lurched away from her. She was on him, though, like a leech stuck to a hippo.
    The blood came in slowly at first, annoyingly so, but then some inner resistance collapsed and it flowed, then gushed, sluicing down her throat like water down a rapids. It shocked her from her toes to the top of her head, a bolt of electric life. The sensation was so magical—his living, squirming essence transferred into her thirsting organs and bone-dry bones—that she groaned with pleasure as she sucked. Waves of vibrant new life swept up and down her, from her toes to the top of her head, great, white waves sighing ecstasy as they broke on the shores of her starvation.
    The fire entering her bones turned to sweet vibration, the itching that had been driving her mad ended as moist softness suffused her skin. Beginning down deep below her navel, where lay her body’s center of gravity, there spread outward in every direction a sense of well-being so profound that it was like an actual glow.
    She withdrew her mouth from the neck,