"I walk a lonely road"

Kate smirked at her iPod, and then stared down the orange red road, illuminated by the fast setting sun.

"Don't know where it goes…"

Neither did she. When you leave everything behind, to try and make good on a flight of fancy, direction is something of a cock block. And so, down one more road that was almost as much dirt as it was road. Kate had decided that for safety reasons, it was best to travel on foot- nothing had happened yet, the last ride she had hitched was almost cliché in how warm and friendly the trucker had been, and it had been hours later and only vaguely did she realized how bad riding with strangers could be.

A few statistics and 'helpful facts' about date rape and student safety from orientation rolled by in her mind's eye, and briefly she wondered if she still qualified as a member of that demographic to which sexual assault and violence belonged.

Or, more to the point, to the human race at all.

Her…. condition made it hard to understand much of anything anymore. When you've grown in to adult hood, knowing that for all the talk of feminism and equality, very little would stop a predator from doing whatever he wanted, should the chance arise.

Predator. Before that word had actually been safe- a way to talk about what happens to poor innocent girls or the wayward hippo calf getting too close to an alligator's open jaws, that it was a way of life, and yet still, it could change. Predators died every day, and they were sent to prison and kept away from civil society.

Now, however what it meant to be a predator weighed heavily on her mind: desires, wants, lust. Need.

Kate shut off the song as the words about "what's fucked up and everything's alright" echoed in her ear. Kate was somewhere in the middle- absent the innocence that lead to the cruel punishment of being a 'tease' or at least the lack of awareness of what warm bodies and expectations and anger can do to a person- and image of Brian's face just before passed though her mind, and yet without the control that came with being strong enough to do things that had consequence.

After she still had to repress the fact that the true reason she found hitching ill advised was due to the allure of the occasional road side meal.

The first time, she made a little joke about how she should just forget about starting her career in environmental law if her lunch break was going to be an animal carcass. Then she remembered when she first expressed that… desire, and then she remembered Brian, and remembered his awkward attempts to get in good with her, followed very rapidly by seething anger, stomach churning guilt, Michael's face and finally the urge to cry like a baby, which Kate indulged.

Her earlier thoughts about control and predatory instinct resurfaced, and it as now that she realized against the steady crunching of sandy rock beneath her feet, was a faint hissing sound. Looking down, Kate spied some species of snake, reddish brown, the first of the evening- it would be too hot any other time of the day. It traveled along leaving a faint, if not almost invisible trail behind it. Kate was quick. First she grabbed it by the tail, then by what would the neck, if there were anything to distinguish one part from another along the length of its body. Her pupils dilated, she was sure and two sets of hyper shat canine teeth exposed themselves. Very quickly then, she pulled taut the reptile and bit dead center.

Kate hoped she had gotten what she was looking for and felt herself relax when her teeth met resistance, a gooey bulge more sweeter than the rest of the meat in her mouth, and swallowed. Willing herself to look down she could see the still twitching pieces she had thrown aside so as not to get bitten. Already a few ants were beginning to crawl over the carcass.

It amazed her how natural it seemed, like a nature documentary after something so… supernatural, had just occurred.

Quickly continuing on, Kate tried to dispel the thoughts of Brian and predators and focus on how her tuition was going to waste, how her parents would be pissed and how much longer would a walk be to a train stop, or at least a crossing.

Unfortunately she couldn't shake how efficiently she had made he kill, just moments before, how she justified he lack of hesitancy as mercy, and how she remembered her phrasing her disemboweling of a former friend who, somewhere deep down she feared she had led on:

I've never hurt anyone. Nobody human anyway.

Did it make a difference?