Amal El-Mohtar

She holds a corpse that was once a man, her hands gloved in its guts, her fingers clutching its alloy spine. She lets go, and the exoskeleton clatters against rock. Crude technology. Ancient. Bronze to depleted uranium. He never had a chance. That is the point of Red.

A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

But hunger is a many-splendoured thing; it needn’t be conceived only in limbic terms, in biology. Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out?

Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.