C:\>Easy Pickings

It was 3:24 in the afternoon when she noticed she had developed a distinct craving for human flesh. It began almost subliminally, like a voice chattering into the windstorm of her customary battered rumination. When she first became conscious of it, she mistook it for heartburn. Lunch that day had been salad- lettuce, cucumbers, a keto vinaigrette. Nothing unusual. Plenty of fiber. Yet there it was, a gnawing insistence that made her appetite do somersaults, flip-flopping between ravenous and queasy.

She found herself mirthlessly folding laundry. She wasn't sure, but she thought she could see her pile of unpaired socks twisting together into elaborate geometries just in the corner of her eye. It was a good twenty minutes before she realized she had crumpled the blouse she was planning to wear. Ah, shit. It took another twenty to find her iron, and when she did she discovered that the cord had tied itself into a perfectly continuous Mobius knot, with no apparent beginning or end. Wary, she plugged it in. It heated fine. She ironed the barely creased satin, only a little inconvenienced by how close to the outlet she had to stand.

On the morning of, she decided she wasn't going to go. Not because of her anxiety, although that too came barking in from its ever-present throttle on her nervous system. No, it was because her face didn't...look...quite...right. There was an almost gestural quality to the bending of her brow, to the way her skin seemed to move over the muscle rather than with it. The great scooping hollows of her eye sockets appeared to be shaped from finely layered papier-mâché. She opened her mouth, and wished she hadn't. No teeth, no tongue, just...blackness. A gaping void. She fogged the bathroom mirror with her rapid breathing.

At T-minus 30 minutes, with her mascara appropriated into a smokey eye and her hair at least combed, her friend was there to pick her up. Abby was many things, but "inside-thinker" was not one of them. She had already offered up a play-by-play of her week in the time it took them to back out of the driveway. Mercifully, none of it penetrated. She tuned back in right around the time Abby started in on gushing about the boy du jour, some solid-sounding guy named Kenny. Kenny? Ick.

She pointed him out to her later on, once they had arrived. Nice enough, though something in the way he kept his mouth almost imperceptibly open at all times gave the impression of a piece of sandwich bread soaking in warm milk. Mostly-focused eyes roamed toward their approximate location, and she could've sworn she heard someone grilling something. Her stomach pinched out a rumble.

"God," Abby said to her, "I mean he's so cute. Couldn't you just eat him up?" She looked at her friend. She looked back over at him. Well, she thought to herself, when in Rome...