Understory, Fall 2026—Issue I (Digital Edition)
appetites
by timothy reveri
He stood in front of her open door. Rain matted his hair. His breath was slow, labored, lifting his chest against his damp shirt. The light cut across the right side of his face, casting his left in shadow, and drawing a line down his mouth. He smelled like worry. And subway grease.
“Can I come in?”
She nodded, leaned back against the wall as he shouldered past her into the narrow hallway. He brought his hands up to his lapels and pulled his jacket off, spraying the floor.
“Sorry.”
She shrugged and turned into the kitchen, flicking on the electric kettle and reaching over the fridge for a mug.
“Tea?”
“Yes. Please.”
Her hand closed around two ceramic handles, pinching them together in her palm with a soft clink. The kettle began to simmer, then froth, vapor curling upward and condensing on the cabinet. It clicked off. She picked it up and poured the steaming liquid over a pair of tea bags. The fridge door opened with a small squeak.
“Milk?”
“None for me.”
His voice was fainter, reaching out from the back of the apartment. In the living room maybe. She poured milk into her cup, then replaced the jug.
Mud tracked into the last door on the right of the hallway. He had his back to the door, gazing at a print on her wall. She set a clear mug of tea down on the coffee table, swept her skirt up around her, and sat down on a chair opposite him. He turned, nodding.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. You can clean my floors before you leave, though.”
His eyebrows shot up.
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll sort it, sorry this has been an evening.”
“Looks like it. Anything you want to tell me?”
He picked the mug up in his hands, then tilted back onto the sofa, letting it catch his weight as he fell. The hot liquid spilled into his lap.
“Shit! Shit.”
She stayed in her seat as he rose up again, lifting his arms and turning his head back and forth until he reached down for the box of tissues on the table. He wadded five or six into his hands before dabbing at his legs, wincing.
“Alright?”
“Yeah, yeah. Dammit.”
She crossed her legs and began to swing her foot back and forth. He finished dabbing, tossing the crumpled wet mess back onto the table, then lifted his head towards her.
“I’ll clean that up too.”
“Sure.”
Overhead, a ceiling fan swung in a lazy circle. She leaned back in her chair.
“I found it, Liz.”
She paused, balanced on the rear two legs.
“Found what, Allen?”
“What do you mean, what? The manuscript. Theodora. The work I’ve been looking for ever since Arthur died.”
Her chair swung down onto all four legs, clattering against the wooden floorboards. “What- how? Where did you find it?”
“Strangest thing. It…found me? It was messengered to me this morning. No note or any sort of explanation. I’d given up on ever finding it.”
He pulled an envelope from inside his messenger bag.
“Have you read it? What’s it about?”
He shook his head, cradling the envelope in his fingers. The manila was faded, warped at the edges. The front was splattered with a crude stain, faded to a rust brown color.
“Is that?”
Allen shook his head, fingering the splotches.
“No idea what it could be.”
Liz opened her mouth, then shut it. She pushed that question back down her throat, telling herself it wasn’t important.
“Do you have any idea what this could be worth, Allen?”
Allen’s lips curved upward. His hands tightened around the envelope.
“Why do you think I’m here talking to his old agent?”
Liz tasted bile and had to hold her face from twisting. She swallowed, hard. Whatever Arthur had seen in Allen, she couldn’t say. She also didn’t care.
“I’m taking triple my fee for this.”
Allen’s smile disfigured into a sneer.
“Now how exactly—”
“You don’t know a soul in publishing apart from me. Shop this anywhere else and you’ll get ripped off or laughed out the door.”
Allen started putting the envelope back in his bag. Sweat formed, slick on the back of Liz’s neck. She stood.
“No one will believe Arthur wrote this. Unless I stand behind it.”
Allen paused, envelope halfway in his bag. His eyes narrowed at her, then relaxed. “Double?”
“Triple. Cheer up. You’ll still make a killing.”
Allen barked a laugh at her.
“Fine, but clean your own damn floors.”
Liz shook her head. Her skin was shot with electricity and she held herself from shaking in front of him. “Leave it here. I’ll read it tonight, tomorrow we can start talking through our approach to publishers.” Allen finished placing the envelope in his bag and chuckled.
“You’re dreaming if you think I’d leave this with you. No, tell me when to come to your office tomorrow. You can read it, in front of me, this thing doesn’t leave my sight.”
Liz rolled her eyes.
“Fine. Ten o’clock. I might need all day, so don’t be late.”
Allen smiled, walked past her out the hallway. He lifted his jacket off the hook, and shook the remaining moisture deliberately on her floor before shoving his arms into the sleeves.
“This place is a real mess, Liz.”
“Get out.”
* * *
Liz had tidied and re-tidied her desk already that morning. Her laptop sat open on her desk, fifty-three unread emails. She picked a glass paperweight up in her hands and leaned back in her chair, putting her feet on her desk. She turned the glass over in her fingers, letting the light catch the motes of color shot through it. Her phone started to ring.
“Liz Maycock, Infiniti Agency.”
“Miss Maycock, this is Detective Lana Albright with the NYPD.”
Liz sat up in her chair. The voice was severe, clinical.
“Detecti—NYPD?”
“Yes, Miss Maycock. I’m calling about a murder. Did you know Allen Rigsby at 210 East 115th Street?” The paperweight shattered on the floor.
“What was—are you alright, ma’am?”
“Yes, how—he’s dead?”
“I’m sorry to say his body was discovered this morning ma’am. Yours was the last number called from his phone. I take it you knew him?”
“He—yes. He was in a relationship with one of my authors. He was, that is.”
“They broke up?”
“He died four months ago, officially at least. Never found him. Arthur Hugo.”
Albright didn’t respond right away. There was a flipping of a notebook, pencil scratching on paper. Liz put her head down on her desk and inhaled through her nose.
“Would you be willing to come down to the station and ID the body?”
No, Liz did not want to identify the body. Allen had barely been her friend while Arthur was alive. There had to be someone else.
An image of an envelope and a rust red splatter flashed through her mind.
“Sure. Tell me where to go.”
Albright relayed instructions down the phone to her to the city morgue. Liz wrote them robotically on a sheet of paper, then crumpled it and shoved it in her pocket before standing to leave. She walked out of her office without shutting her laptop.
The morgue was a modern, sterile looking building that gave away nothing like its purpose. Liz buzzed herself in and was ushered into a lobby that could have belonged to a dentist’s office. She sat in a cushioned chair. Jeopardy played on a TV nearby.
The door to the back office opened and a young woman in a pantsuit and badge stepped out of it. She extended a hand towards Liz.
“Elizabeth Maycock? We spoke on the phone. Detective Albright.”
Liz paused. The vision of Allen’s body in a freezer sucked the air out of her lungs. Albright opened her mouth in a question mark, and Liz forced herself to nod and take her hand.
“Yes! Uh, yes. Sorry. I’m a little nervous.”
Albright nodded slowly.
“If you’ll follow me.”
They walked through the doors Albright had come out. Their shoes clopped on sterile white tile as they descended into a basement, before arriving at a pair of stainless steel doors. Albright leaned against one and a vacuum of air pulled them inside. Surgical white light exposed every corner and surface. Liz could taste something chemical in her mouth. Her nose wrinkled.
“Not the most pleasant place to meet, I know.”
Liz shook her head, said nothing. Albright gestured to a set of steel cubbyholes cut into a wall, and they approached the last drawer. The detective reached for the metal pull, then stopped.
“I should’ve warned you earlier, but his body…It was in quite a state when we found it. If you need a minute, you can take one.”
Liz lifted her face to the detective’s, who met her gaze calmly. There was a self-consciousness in how Liz tried to arrange her expression that she was sure Albright was perceiving. She turned her head back down to the floor.
“That’s okay…Let’s— let’s just get it over with.”
The drawer rolled out of the wall soundlessly. A starched white sheet was draped over the body, strangely dignified. Albright lifted a corner of the sheet and pulled it down to Allen’s torso.
Or at least, what was left of it.
Deep gouges of flesh had been removed from his chest and stomach, as if an ice cream scoop had carved out helpings of Allen’s muscle, organs, and tissue. His intestines stewed out of his belly. Liz’s stomach turned violent, and she twisted to throw up on the floor.
Albright rushed to her with a wastebasket. Liz gripped it in her hands as the rest of her breakfast came up. Albright brought a chair up behind her, and Liz sat with the soiled bin, spitting acid.
“Sorry.”
“Happens. Do you need a break?”
Liz shook her head, then turned back to the body.
Allen’s mouth was spread wide open, voraciously open, and his teeth were flecked with blood. A dried crust of red smeared around his lips. His eyes though, were the hardest to look away from. They’d been frozen open, bloodshot, eyebrows curved upward. He looked manic. Thrilled.
“Is it him, then?”
Liz nodded mechanically. Albright stood, leaving Liz’s side for a desk at the opposite corner of the morgue.
“Where— where did you find him?”
Albright paused at the question, her back straightening. She turned.
“Someone in his building phoned in a noise complaint. Strange one. The caller made it sound like they thought someone in his apartment was fornicating, or else just watching porn with the volume set way too high. They kept describing these moans. Orgasmic they said.”
Liz studied Allen’s face. Orgasmic. She could almost see it.
“We found these effects on his person. Do any of them mean anything to you?”
Albright gestured at a tray of items on the desk in front of her. Liz left the body to join her. She stopped halfway to the table.
A bolt of rust brown splashed across manila. A seal with a tie of red string.
“Something wrong?”
Albright turned from Liz to the table, and Liz pulled her face away from the envelope to meet the detective’s. She jerked her head to the side.
“Just. Just can’t believe he’s… you know?”
Albright gave a small nod, not dropping eye contact. Liz came up next to her, lifting a plastic bag holding Allen’s keys and phone, turning it over in her hands deliberately before examining the other items on the table. She touched the envelope last.
“No, nothing of this seems like…anything?”
Albright hadn’t broken off from Liz once as she examined each item, peeling apart Liz’s insides. Liz forced her hand steady as she put the envelope back on the table.
“Nothing, don’t recognize any of it. Or, recognize his phone, but couldn’t tell you much about it.”
Albright said nothing.
“So…”
The doors to the morgue swung open, and a young woman with dark hair and a lab coat started towards them, brandishing a clipboard.
“Lana, God, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I need you to sign off on this effects list for me.” Albright’s face scrunched together. She tilted her head towards Liz.
“I’m with…”
The young woman’s eyes widened in their sockets.
“Sorry! Sorry. It’ll just. It’ll only take a moment though. Please?”
Albright sighed and approached her, turning from Liz and taking the clipboard from her colleague’s hands. She flipped through the pages, mumbling importantly to herself. The young woman peered over her shoulder, pointing periodically.
The envelope stared up at Liz from the table. Static charge lit up the surface of her skin again, sending a tremor through her limbs. She watched her hand move towards the envelope, felt her fingers close around the worn, textureless manila. The manuscript was inside her jacket now and how had that happened? But she was turning already, moving, past Albright and pulling her face away from the desk.
“I have to go. Late for a publisher meeting. Do you need anything else from me?”
Albright put a business card in her hand and told her to call if anything else came to mind. Liz forced her legs to move slowly through the stainless steel doors. When they swung shut behind her, she broke into a jog, taking the tile steps two at a time up the stairs. By the time she was at the lobby, she was in a full sprint. She didn’t stop until she’d left the sterile glass structure behind and was down in the subway station, hands on her knees, face flushed red.
* * *
Liz had two missed calls on her cellphone when she sat back down at her desk, and a sticky note from the office assistant asking her to call a “Det. All Right” as soon as she was available. She pulled the blinds down on the window to her office, then dropped the manuscript on her desk. The envelope unfolded slowly down the middle, creased where she’d cinched it together to fit it into her jacket pocket.
She sat down and let her fingers unspool the red twine sealing the envelope closed. The fold sighed open, revealing crisp white printer pages inside. They whispered against the manila as she pulled them out before settling the manuscript on her desk. The same stain, angrier, obscenely red against the pale white paper, splashed across the front page. Liz brushed her fingers across it despite herself. The crusted page lifted and bubbled underneath her fingertips, luxuriating under her touch. It was warm. Lavish.
The cover page turned over to deliver the opening.
I am born with my first pang of hunger. Before desire I am desolate. After it, everything.
The voice was strange, bizarre even. Unlike anything Arthur had produced while he was alive. Liz kept reading in spite of herself, and slowly it wrapped its arms around her, pulling her face closer to the page. Soon her focus only broke from each pull quote she imagined for the book jacket, each soundbite for the press tour. She was twelve pages in, there was no mistaking what this was.
The phone on her desk pulled her out of the text. Albright’s number. Liz straightened her back, then lifted the receiver.
“Liz Maycock, Infin—”
“Miss Maycock, stealing evidence from an ongoing murder investigation is a crime, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that.”
Liz’s palm slipped from her desk.
“I don’t know—”
“I have you on camera sprinting out the doors to the building.”
“I told you, I was late to a publisher meeting.”
“I am getting a warrant for your arrest as we speak. Return the envelope now, this only gets worse the longer you wait.”
Liz started to argue, but the line had already gone dead.
She stood and made a beeline for the office assistant, envelope in hand.
“Eric, I need you to make three copies of this immediately. Messenger one to Paul at Weiss, and another to Kayla at Simmons. Leave the third on my desk.”
Eric took a long sip of his iced coffee, nodding absently while studying something on his monitor. “Now!”
Eric lifted his eyes slowly to Liz’s, then held his hand out.
“Yikes Liz, fine. Give it here.”
Liz put the envelope in Eric’s hand, and Eric stood to head to the copier. Except that Liz’s hand was still closed around the manuscript.
“… Liz?”
A weight shifted in Liz’s stomach, lifted, leaving a void behind. Her hunger was cavernous, animated, whole. Desire blossomed through every pore in her skin, down every nerve in her fingers. Her hand tightened on the envelope.
“Did you still want those copies?”
Liz shook her head, registering Eric as if for the first time.
“Yes—sorry, I think I need to…eat something maybe? Please, here you go.”
Liz went back to her desk, sat and stared at her hands, turning them over in front of her. She was still for a moment, wondering. Then she reached for the phone, and dialed Paul’s number.
Fifteen years in publishing had earned Liz enough experience to be able to generate a bidding war on her word alone, and Paul and Kayla played along. Sight unseen, she had two offers in her inbox already, conditional on getting hands on the text. A creeping, slow smile lifted her lips up her cheeks, all memory of her phone call with Albright gone from Liz’s mind.
Then the fire alarm began to sound.
Heads popped up from cubicles, searching for confirmation of the alarm’s authenticity.
“Hey, hey! Smoke!”
There was a shout from the back of the office. Fingers pointed at a grey haze collecting near the ceiling. It was thickest by the doors next to the elevator bank. The doors to the copier pod.
“Eric!”
Liz was on her feet, bolting through her door and across the office. She passed bodies heading the opposite direction to the stairs, knocking a colleague to the floor and slowing only to step over them without a word. The doorknob was warm, she hauled it open anyway.
Flame consumed the copier. Eric was on the floor groaning, burns up half his face. The manuscript sat in the copier tray, framed with smoke, flames licking at the edges.
“No!”
Liz was over Eric’s body and at the copier, but the heat stopped her short. A ribbon of yellow and red sprung up the middle of the cover page, flickering across the splatter, curling the pages and toasting the white sheets yellow, then brown.
The flames were cold on her skin.
Her hands lifted the manuscript from the tray, while freezing fire lacquered her sweater onto her arms. Her nose filled with something acrid, then sweet. The smoke from her own flesh.
“Liz, what the hell are you doing?!”
Strong arms pulled at her shoulders and she tumbled backwards. Eric’s face hovered over her, an ugly blister closing his right eye shut and oozing a white liquid down his nose.
“We need to get out of here, come on!”
Liz let him pull her to her feet, right arm still holding the manuscript tight to her chest, and they stumbled out of the smoke back into the office, hacking ash out of their lungs as they pushed into the stairwell to follow everyone else out of the building.
The crowd at the street stood back from Liz and Eric as they exited the emergency doors out onto the sidewalk, and there were a few gasps as Eric turned his head, exposing his burns, to check that Liz was still behind him.
“God Liz, what the hell were you thinking?”
She shrugged at him, holding the manuscript to her chest tighter.
“Just- just needed to keep it safe.”
Eric stared, saying nothing, finally shaking his head and turning away from her. Sirens parted the traffic on the street, and a firetruck and ambulance pulled up to the building. Two paramedics exited the ambulance. They spotted Eric first.
“Christ, let’s get you in the back of the bus, quick.”
Eric jerked his head over to Liz.
“She needs help, too. Her arms. Stuck ‘em right in the flames.”
They turned, confused. One, younger with a small cleft in his chin, pulled Liz’s left arm from her side. Her sweater had fused into her skin, purple stitching bubbling into flesh cooked black. His nose wrinkled. She looked at her arm curiously, like she was studying a steak left on the grill.
“We can’t treat these here, you’re going to need to come back to the hospital. You both’ll have serious smoke inhalation besides, and they’ll have to monitor you for any complications.”
The older paramedic was addressing each of them now. Liz nodded absently, lowering her arm back to her side as the blisters snapped and crackled up her shoulder. A siren whooped, and a police car pulled around the corner of the block, tucking behind the fire truck. A pantsuit leg stepped out of the passenger side of the vehicle.
Liz froze.
Albright had started for the building, then turned as she clocked the ambulance. Her eyes found Liz’s sweater, the burns up her arms, the envelope at her chest.
“Miss Maycock are…what happened?”
Liz bolted onto the street. Brakes screeched and a taxi stopped just short as the driver leaned on the horn. Liz kept running. The detective shouted behind her, but she’d cleared the street and turned left, heading for the subway. Albright was shoving her badge at car windows, helplessly trying to slow down traffic to cross. Liz ducked down into the station, threw her phone at the turnstile and pushed through. She ran down to the end of the platform as a train pulled in, and got into the first car, sinking all the way down into her seat.
“Are you alright, lady?”
A woman—spiked blonde hair and a tie-dye crop top—couldn’t tear her gaze away from Liz’s arms. Liz pulled the manuscript tight to her chest, a smile blooming up her face.
“I’m brilliant.”
* * *
Her apartment was radioactive, Albright was sure to be there. But there was an old haunt of Arthur’s that she knew he’d retreat to when he was blocked and needed to disappear from view. He’d given her the key to it once after he’d stopped answering calls for two weeks.
“But only if someone’s literally died, Liz.”
Well.
It was a tiny studio at the far edge of Queens, shoved into the top of a fourth floor walkup above a Chinese restaurant and laundromat. Two trains later she was there. She checked the address on the doorbell, the resident’s name had been smudged out. The key slid into the front door lock and turned with a little coaxing.
At the top of the steps, she knocked at the door, waiting for some new inhabitant to answer. Silence. She tried again, pounding on the brass knocker.
Nothing.
The apartment key stuck in the lock for a moment, then twisted underneath her hand. She leaned against the door and it swung open into a dark, spare apartment. A folding table sat in the middle of the room in front of a tired sofa, opposite a sink and microwave that gestured at some kind of kitchen. On the far wall next to the window was a small desk and typewriter—a frustrating affection of Arthur’s that he’d refused to give up on. The light switch flipped up and down uselessly, but there was light from a billboard across the street coming through the windows. She shut the door, and sat herself down on the naked hardwood next to the glass.
Liz ran her fingertips across the charred edges of the manuscript. Most of the text was still readable, if warped and distorted underneath the heat. She inclined her head, picking up the story where she’d left off in her office.
I lower my fork and stab another morsel off the plate. My companion is silent, his eyes vacant, his flesh decadent. I luxuriate in the muscle fibers as they break down over my tongue, fat rendering before sliding down my throat. His mouth is open, empty, wanting.
Saliva collected at the edges of Liz’s mouth, sliding down her chin. Thunder rumbled from deep inside her. A small voice, barely audible to her now, screamed in revulsion at the back of her mind. It watched her hand turn the page.
There was a ding on her phone, another email from Paul, asking when he’d get his copy of the text. Copies. Liz held her arms up in front of her. There was a pale, milky red fluid oozing from the tissue on her arms onto the floorboards. She lifted her head to the typewriter on the desk.
The dust cover was coated in grime. She pulled the canvas up over the machine, and tested the action on the keys. They sprung back under her fingertips. Liz sat down at the desk, checked the drawers for paper and loaded a sheet into the carriage. Her hands moved over the instrument.
T H E O D O R A
Her fingers had hesitated over the first press, but by the last letter they were picking up speed, the first flakes of an avalanche, and Liz could barely turn the pages of the manuscript fast enough to keep pace with her own typing.
My tongue runs up the clean length of his rib. Impossibly, there is nothing left. His empty eye sockets are staring at me in mocking desolation. My hunger will have more.
She’d reached the end of the manuscript’s text, but couldn’t stop herself from typing, there was more to write. She grabbed another page from the desk. Arthur had been the story, but Liz was the epilogue, the denouement. Her fingers mashed into the machine, leaving bloody streaks where her blisters popped under the force of her creation. She bent for another sheet, but only swiped the bottom of the drawer.
Next to her, the manuscript sat alongside its freshly birthed twin, ink still drying. But she knew it would not be accepted by Paul. Would not sell. It was incomplete.
My hunger will have more.
The rust red splatter on the manuscript. The fire had nearly purged it, warped it in a smoking char, but the manuscript was still alive. Liz lifted her arm to her face. Layers of skin peeled off her muscle, yielding angry pink flesh underneath. Each pulse of her heart sent a shock of color through it. Liz’s mouth was dry. She licked her lips.
There were no more words missing from the manuscript. It needed to breathe. It needed her.
Her teeth crushed the soft, baked flesh of her wrist, and the first gush of red filled her mouth with iron and salt. Liquid dripped, then poured down her chin, sliding off her face onto her newborn. Her lips curved upward, and she took another bite, closing her eyes and groaning into her arm as the flesh burst on her tongue. It was warm. Sticky. Sweet.
Darkness began to wrap around the edges of her vision, and she lifted her arm from her face and turned it over on the pages. A puddle swelled on the cover of the new manuscript, soaking through layer after layer. Liz’s smile spread wider, lips pulling back from her teeth as her eyes fluttered. The darkness in her vision swelled, embracing her.
My hunger will have more.
Timothy Reveri is an anxious ginger who sometimes works as a Product Manager. His writing hasn't appeared anywhere apart from some very old, out of print, undergraduate creative writing journals, so thanks Understory! He lives in Durham, NC. In his free time, he likes to make pasta, pound on his laptop keys, and read whatever Stephen Graham Jones has written.