Still Life – Charu Sinha

December 27, 2025

We ate the children first, the meat sticky and falling off the bone. There were a number of factors to consider: the softness of the skin, the bending of the joints, which were frail, and also the fact that the children were always sweet and fatty, and they complemented the meal that would follow. This was our unspoken rule, one of many that George and I collected between the two of us. I sometimes wondered if our brains had once been connected but had splintered off at the stem.
        George and I met in an art class, drawing a still-life of a bowl of fruit. He was short and unassuming. I couldn’t stop staring at his hands. The fingers were blunt, like they had been chopped off at the knuckle with a dull razor. George always drew the fruit inside-out. An orange he drew with the pulp bleeding out, the peel twisted inwards. I asked him about it over Taco Bell one night after class, and he explained to me this was the way he saw all living things. He said when he saw me, he saw the pink meat of my lungs first, then the shiny muscle of my stomach. I sipped my coffee. We married a few months later.
        George’s family owned and operated the chain of Quality Inns that speckled the sides of highways in our town. When his father died, George took over, and we moved into the manager’s cottage at the southernmost Quality Inn location. That night was the first night I saw him eating. I had my suspicions before, but it’s not the kind of thing you ask. He thought I had already gone to sleep. I found him on the kitchen floor, sweetbread in his hands and a plastic bag of entrails beside him. I knew without knowing that it was his father’s. He met my eyes, and he looked so scared and small, like a child, before I sat beside him and reached into the bag, unspooling a colon. We ate heartily that night, and fell asleep right there on the kitchen floor, our hands and fingernails crusted a happy, dirty red. The next morning, we set about our homestead.
        Under his father’s direction, the Quality Inns had become the domain of exhausted salesmen and the recently homeless. But George had an eye for business. He installed playgrounds, invested in cheap concrete pools. I kept the books and George was the face, seemingly everywhere at once, charming women at the front desk and handing out toffees to the children. He told me to be patient. We replaced the molding couches and carpets with sturdy, stain-resistant varieties. We offered discount packages for staying at our southernmost location, wedged between a forgotten overpass and a sprawling canyon. One family jumped on this offer.
        We were both still hungry. But we had to be careful. We locked the doors of the family’s suite from the outside one night, and fed a noxious gas through the vents. Over the father’s body, my mouth thick with meat, I looked over at George, who was gnawing at the man’s arm. I couldn’t find words to tell him how much I loved him.
        It went on like this, for more years than I deserved. We left the skeletons in the canyon, though I kept the femurs to simmer into a nourishing golden broth. George spread a rumor about coyotes. There was the occasional call, but we had a talent for evading exposure. Only once did someone from the state come knocking at our hut. George took him by the hand and led him into the canyon below. I watched them disappear together into the dusty red. I sat on our porch with my feet dangling over the edge, digging my toes into the loamy soil below. The moon was full, and I wasn’t afraid, because I trusted my husband. George came back a few hours later, alone and panting, and that was the end of it.
        My cheeks were rosy, my hair long and glossy. I began painting again. Huge, heavy landscapes. I set up a studio in our kitchen and forwent brushes, instead dipping my hands directly into the oily tankards of paint. I perched on our kitchen stool, dragging handfuls of green and brown across the canvas. I watched the paintings drip-dry and the colors blur together, forming new and terrible shapes over the ones I had drawn.
        I think back now about that last meal. I could tell right away that something was off. For one, the mother was always drunk—the kind of drunk that indicated she was running from something. We assumed it was a husband or boyfriend. But it was the child, the child who was with her. He was a strange little boy, with pale skin and a small, impertinent mouth. After we administered the gas to their suite, his eyes were open and unmoving. George ate the child while he was still alive, and the boy didn’t even scream.
        The next day, George fell ill. His eyes became gray and clouded. He shouted things in his sleep in languages I didn’t understand. I put cold compresses to his forehead, made up excuses to the staff, insisted that he shouldn’t go to the hospital. His hands, those beautiful hands, oozed a strange black bile from beneath the fingernails. He would draw me close, and with my ear to his chest I could hear a scratching. One night, he started to wail, clawing at his chest. I had to do something. Neither of us had to say anything. I saw him as if for the first time, as he had first seen me, inside-out, all of his slippery muscle and bone. This is what marriage is, I thought. I tied him to the bed posts, sliced his chest open, and began to eat.