The first one is a delicacy slipped from a tottering pile at her local grocery store. She falls in love with the idea of it, the way the pocked orange exterior looks like skin, how the label underneath them reads “blood oranges” in a neat, unthreatening script. She likes the idea that other things, heartless things, can bleed.

The news breaks weeks later, after she has filled her fridge with oranges, hung her windows with their desiccated, aromatic skins, and coated her teeth in their rich, sweet pulp. She rarely eats anything else, obsessed as she is with the violence. She can transpose all her hurt to the oranges, turn them into effigies of her ex, who left before Macie was born, who didn’t return, even for the funeral. She can stab through the skin with her thumbnail, let the juice drip out in bloody rivulets, and imagine that it is his skin that is breaking and bruising.

She is aware of the danger. They say that there is an infestation brewing in the flesh of the oranges, microscopic organisms that look like squirming blood clots. The oranges are being pulled off of grocery store shelves, thrown out in droves by her mindless neighbors who drop the perfectly ripe fruit into bins already full of coffee grounds and half-rotted vegetable ends. She rescues what she can, pawing through trashcans to pull the bright treasures from their graves, holding them close to her heart with the same reverence someone might give to a malnourished kitten.

They say it would take an inordinate amount of consumption to allow any real harm, the way that eating enough poppy seed muffins could, theoretically, poison you. The chance is so low, and her need is so strong, that she ignores the possibility all together.

It isn’t until her belly begins to swell, noduled and tender, that she begins to suspect she has gone too far. And it is later, when she sees her naked body in a mirror, pale, thin, and padded like a badly stuffed pillow around the middle, that she becomes afraid. It is too late. She is already doubled over in pain, grappling with a deep, primal fear wrestling itself free within her abdomen. Despite her obsession, the agony, the niggling wonderment at her own self destruction, she is triumphant. What was it she needed a man for anyway?