The trail of blood led them nowhere.  Whatever had consumed the old woman left no trace of itself.  Claudia sat down at the dinner table where the trail ended.  She touched the bowl where a bowl and plate were smeared with red.  It was a brilliant color and Claudia thought it looked nice on the flatware. 

“I’d like bowls like this.” She said.  Her finger trailed across the red, which of course came free onto her fingertips. 

Eudora hovered by the doorway.  Her expression was strange and filled with passion.  “And they fall to hunger or the hungry.”

“Your eyes are bright like the sun.  Are you an angel or a demon?  Dora, what are you?”

“And what are you pretty one? You’ve fallen so far and yet your legs are unbroken.”

“I am nothing.  I’ve know that for so long it’s hard to remember when I didn’t.  All I have is a heart.”  Claudia rested her hand over the offending organ.  Did it beat again?  Could she see his face?  No he was still hidden from her.  Her heart saw nothing but it did beat. 

“Then you are ahead of me. I tore mine out long ago and watched as it stopped beating.  Once they come out you can’t help them.  And my heart just couldn’t survive.”  Again her hand touched the pouch at her side.  She touched it for comfort, Claudia realized.  Some relic of her old life must lie within.  Some proof of a place outside this.

“Red, red, red,” Claudia said staring at the bowl.  Then her mind met her hands.  It met Eudora’s words on seeing the bowl and the blood.  She retched; luckily there was nothing in her stomach to come up.

She darted away from the table and stared in horror at what was left of someone’s feast.  Only a few small bones and blood remained but it was enough.  “What kind of person would…”

Eudora laughed.  “Hunger.”

Claudia ran blindly from the room.  Her feet brought her right back to the corpse.  The old woman’s eyes stared out at her.  Eudora’s soft footsteps approached behind her.  Claudia sank to her knees.

A memory surfaced and she did not know if it was real or conjured up by her own fear of it.  She saw another pair of vague staring eyes.  Cold flesh under her fingers and a raw mindless hunger ripping through her.  And this flesh sitting there, empty and waiting.  Meat.

Could she really remember the taste of it, raw and cold against her teeth and tongue?  Her mouth tasted bitter at the memory that might or might not belong to her.  She could see it in her mind, teeth struggling to rip through the upper flesh on the arm.  The stringy impossible muscle dividing the small mouthful she could obtain. 

Claudia gagged again and her head dropped down toward the old woman’s stomach.  It smelt awful down there.  In her mouth was the taste of flesh bitter with the beginnings of mold.  It was cold and tough so that her teeth had to snap through it, her jaws crashing together with the force of it.

She could not remove her mind from this one moment.  There was no context just a taste and a feel, a desperate hunger.  Yet even as she prodded at the thought it grew away from her.  A mind that is sure will remain sure.  A mind that has no reason to believe will not.  But a mind likes to believe in something, an existence or the absence there of.  The longer Claudia’s mind dwelt on this taste the more true it felt.  She could taste it now, slick meat sliding against the sides of her mouth.  Her mind wanted to believe because doubt was worse.  She did not want to believe because nothing was worse than that.

“Dora, Dora,” She called as once she had called to God.  “Oh Dora did I?”

Eudora’s hands pulled her back from the corpse.  “In any event perhaps they will bring us chicken tonight.”

Claudia lay back against Eudora’s chest.  She expected tears to come but they did not.  “I think I remember but it’s so distant…like a dream.”

“Tis all a dream pet.  And you will never wake, so what does it matter one way or the other?”

There was logic in that.  Claudia stood and allowed Eudora to lead her away.  The taste remained in her mouth.  The flesh had been so cold, almost frozen.  It tasted bitter and dull with cold.  Claudia rubbed her tongue against the top of her mouth trying to get the taste to go away.  It remained.

Title Reference: *Dostoevsky, Fyodor. “Crime And Punishment” Bantam Books, co 1866: 57