Woman, Eating

I arrive at the Otter and the front door is closed and there is no one to let me in. This is what I always fear about arriving at new places. Being stuck outside. I stand as close to the wall as possible so I’m in shade.

I realised that demon is a subjective term, and the splitting of my identity between devil and God, between impure and pure, was something that my mum did to me rather than the reality of my existence. Still, though, after a lifetime of eating just pigs’ blood, I feared eating anything else, especially human, in case I developed a taste for it, and

I look at my hand. In a few hours, that hand will be shaking another hand, I think. This body will soon be in front of other bodies, being seen. These feet will step through the doors of a space I am not familiar with. I find it all impossible.

We only ever got pigs’ blood. This wasn’t because it was the only type of animal blood the butcher had. ‘Pigs are dirty,’ my mum said once. ‘It’s what your body deserves.’ But it turns out that pigs aren’t naturally dirty. Rather, humans keep pigs in dirty conditions, feeding them rotten vegetables, letting the mud in their too-small pens mix with

There’d been nothing in our house that we’d had just because my mum liked it; nothing that stood as a memento of her human life, her life in Malaysia. Everything was about convenience, not her taste or personality.

Still, I like to push my body towards its limits. Or, rather, I like to pretend my body has limits. I like to feel the pain of hunger and imagine that the next step after that pain is death.

‘So, where did you come from?’ Ben says as we walk down a dark corridor. I pause. I get this a lot too. ‘Well, I’m from England. But my dad was Japanese, and my mum is half Malaysian.’ He turns around. ‘Oh my god, shit, no, sorry – I mean where did you come from today? Like, are you living in London?’ ‘Oh, yeah,’ I lie. ‘I live just near here, in K

I can’t really describe how it feels to have another person’s blood in your veins, feeding to your heart, even just a little bit: a human’s blood, not a pig’s, two legs, upright and elegant, hints of something – of foods and memories and experiences, of birth, of being ill and getting better, of love and grief and fear – in its flavour.

I open the Bernice Bing book. I look at her piece Velasquez Family. I don’t know how she does it. I want to paint like this. There are people in this strange painting, one with a green face and alarmingly red eyes, another like an animal with multiple limbs drawn in black paint and a blank white face, and a woman by a window, her face red, her hair