Teeth, hair, fingernails, knucklebones.
Colleen swallows without chewing; it has been years since she’s used her teeth for anything except defense. Her throat is hard as granite, muscles grinding against each other like tectonic plates, like calcified slugs, crushing everything to powder and thence to atoms. Her stomach is a hole in the cosmos, a wound in space that shatters every bond. She bolts awake some nights to hear it singing to her, just below the edge of hearing, a slow and steady oscillation between tones.
Cold, she is always cold. She builds bonfires on the beach and sits among the blazing logs and feels nothing. Flames run along her fingers and up her arms like water from a showerhead, and she shivers against the wind. Her hair has fallen out and regrown half a dozen times, and every time it falls out she swallows it whole. She guzzles windex, tide pods, simple green, wd-40, drinks deep at the fuel pump, desperate for complex hydrocarbons and benzene rings.
She is never hungry, but nor is she ever full. The world builds and breaks itself faster than she can choke it down, but it’s not for lack of trying