The first years had been the worst. He’d wrought his change in her and left, which showed all males were alike, living or not. She hungered with little appeasement, traveling on foot, by night, toward the glowing city of the plains. It was blood, back then, and she was stunned when she found the animal pens and of Chicago, slaughterhouse to the nation. Cow’s blood provided perfect satiation, until it didn’t. After 30 years of nights, she visited the stockyards for a meal and it had tasted like blood, viscous, metallic and disgusting, when just the week before, it had been nectar.

She left Chicago and wandered the farmlands until one evening, a scent on the breeze stroked her face and her throat and she ran, leaping fences, tearing through gardens, until she found the source, a woman draped with netting and wielding a smoker, settling her bees for the night. She had plowed through the woman, snapping her bones and driving her into the soil, to pull honeycomb from the hive and suck down the sweetness, oblivious to stings. After, she’d gone on to work beehives for a honey farmer, sipping sweet comb every few weeks, until the day came the honey tasted of ashes.

With her pay from the honey farmer, she rode a train west, across Iowa and the Dakotas to Wyoming, where for six quiet seasons she worked as a shepherd, sustained on sheep milk. When the milk soured in her mouth, she went on to the pacific coast and found the red, rich meat of salmon. When that became paste, she took down a bear and drowned it in the river, carved off its pelt and wore it on a long, nights-only trek to Oregon, where she haunted the fruit orchards for three years, so sated that she cried sweet, sticky juice.

When the fruit failed her, she wandered, hungry, until in a mountain town of small houses and enormous gardens, she discovered the lasting crunch of raw winter squash and sweet summer melons, bought a small house and grew her own garden, settled down with friends and hobbies and local fairs, and fell in love. Until this morning, when a watermelon, harvested from her garden and cooled in the icebox, tasted of nothing but loneliness.

Inez Schaechterle teaches college English in northeastern Arizona, where she lives in a vintage camper trailer with too many pets and too much yarn.