I just recently came to accept my own interest in vore, but I was immediately inspired by u/Dreams___' post about weak/pathetic preds the other day. Here's my first attempt at pred-writing; I hope it's interesting to some of you despite the niche and being a bit of a blueball. What can I say? I'm a denier even when someone's in my mouth ;)

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"Obligate Detritivory", featuring my own werewolf character, Isaac

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"If I lose another one I'm going to starve," I say so evenly that the numbness comes in the wake instead. The long-broken bed creaks as I shift my dwindling weight before my judge. He seems nonplussed. His chocolate eyes leer back from a creasing face, haggard to the point of raccoonishness. His eyelids, the only loose things about him, droop as if to say, "and there'll be reflective surfaces at the funeral".

Strange to be so casual about this, I think offhand, since he'll die with me. I'm sober enough to know I'm wrong; its own problem, though now of fifth rank at best. He keeps looking away, looking off toward other reflections of himself scattered about the room. He's not the one who has to be serious here. "I'm going to starve," I reiterate along with our eye contact. "Do you un-" I cut myself off; no. No more of that. "I do understand."

"Seventeen days," I remind no one, since leaning to tie my well-worn hiking boots has put me out of frame. "Seventeen days. George told me cutoff was 21, maybe 23 if I take it real easy." "Cutoff", as in "to coyote-wile oneself out of a trap by autophagy". I let the petty humor unfurl a little to ease the tension; give that sweet, self-serving keto-chick from Chicago a mental smile; and reign it in.

This is no time to be mushy about the mush-to-be; I enforce the thought with a harsh jerk of the laces. A crossbow string twangs a few dozen yards back, somewhere in a copse of trees I've conjured up far from this cramped, unfinished basement room. Somewhere I'll never see now. I sigh, stand to full, crooked height, and see that my doppelgänger's also dressed for a night out. "Seventeen days," I remind him without a hint of Saturday-mirth. He nods.

We grab our keys and check the locks. I pat our jacket down just inside the door; the goods're stowed. We check the locks once more, and I leave for my first party since that Halloween.

It's actually too easy. The fact that I'm skin-and-bonesing a larger me's wardrobe is entirely my own fault. It's not that there aren't house parties and suburban garages with loose doors. It's not that there aren't always plastic wastes of plastic spaces bobbing about on much more energetic seas. It's not that there aren't, at this very moment, thousands of tender females sitting, leaning, or lying somewhere they'd rather've never been. It's not even that a fair few of those wouldn't, at this very inopportune moment, greedily pay a soul and a half to escape their particular cocktail of pain, boredom, and shame.

These conditions are the standard, every night, in every city, if one knows where to look. So why is my heart skipping more beats than malnutrition demands? Why don't I get to eat?

It's always the same trap. I end up in the same silvered wolffhaken as the meat: the autophagous gyre-stew of pain, boredom, and shame. The pain that motivates some and buckles others like weed-ridden concrete only irritates me. I may as well have fleas; it's only that bad, but it's exactly that bad. The boredom is a consequence of living in a panoptic world of black glass houses, and constitutes a solid proportion of the pain, too. Those alone, or merely the two together, I could deal with easily. Find a way to Alaska, or Russia, or India, and I'd eat like a king until the day some lucky swamp-fucker of a deputy caught me between the ribs.

The shame is what's killing me. The shame is what makes my heart rattle, canarilike in its skin-draped cage: itself at once dying loudly and announcing by its sporadic silences the death of its people. I'm too thoroughly undermined to be its Leviathan, so I fail as lycanthrope. Simple. That's what I get for being born to hedonists.

How they managed to alchemize bad ideas and a child's misplaced trust into an instinctual silver bullet, I hope for reasons of self-preservation that I never find out. What I can say is that they left me in a sorry state to find oneself in, should one ever be turned into an obligate carnivore. A state of not only feeling sorry for prey, but feeling the sorriest for the easiest of prey; the prey most in need and most deserving of serving itself up.

They left me unable to eat drifters, or the sick, or cripples; the old, the young, the weak, the slow. The stupid, like me, who become monsters on someone else's whim because they can't say "no" to a peek at their favorite dragon-tracks. La Guardia is a hell of a place, and a hell of a place to get genetically raped with a hot shot of fentanyl and beastblood. I especially can't eat junkies, even when they beg.

So who does that leave? Even in the glory-minutes when I'm towering two heads over some low-rung IT guy who lifts because he can't afford to juice, I'm just a weak man in an hulking body so strange he forgets that its strength belongs to him; a chubby kid who never grew into his adult leanness. Wasted, wasting; a wastrel even of power like this. A few close scrapes and a broken ulna later, I badgered myself into a weightclass I found more manageable.

That's how I find myself here, now, crouched on a strangely low, badly-stuccoed balcony with another Amanda, jealously guarding a beer I can smell but won't taste. Amanda's got nothing going on either. She's also counting the days: she got fired nine days ago and is keeping track, but she won't say why. She's a junkie too, and also drinks hers; she won't think why. She also hates that fucking suit from that news-show, which she clumsily demands that I believe; demands in a way that leaves obvious tracks of embarrassment all the way back to someone's necktie or belt.

Amanda and I have so much in common that the smell of her days-unbrushed teeth is starting to mask the rum she keeps re-sloshing; resterilizing both my nostrils and the too-fertile field in which I grow my pity. We have so much in common that we could probably rent an apartment bigger than either of our current places and start an ant farm or cactus collection together. We won't, because of trillions of reasons I know nothing about; and because we have so much in common that I could never respect her enough to do her dishes.

Amanda smells like sweat, three different smokes, at least five different couches; cheap detergent, someone else's mothballs, and automatic dispenser soap. She'd be funny if she'd stop defaulting to self-crucifixion. She'd be interesting if she'd stop telling anyone who'll listen that she's not. She'd be cool if she didn't squat on low balconies with uncool guys at night. She could never be a friend, though: there isn't enough Amanda to make a whole person, let alone to share.

That's why she's all mine. She hasn't said so yet, but I can see it; I didn't even need the nose for that. The staggered leaning like a cabin-boy on his first go ashore; the closet-wrinkled giggling as mothballed as "her" blouse; the artificially grating voice and word-choice hacking at my libido like a weedwhacker. I don't like them per se, but the omens are clear: I'll be practicing my haruspicy tonight. I don't know when or why, since she wouldn't tell me if she knew, but she probably picked me before I picked her. All the better to consecrate; they're more tender when they're willing.

The muscle parts more smoothly. The delayed choke on the inevitable adrenaline and cortisol imparts a luxurious gaminess without overpowering the rest of the flavors, which can be a dish-saver in the case of such a drinker. I'm less likely to accidentally crack the skull in a struggle, thereby reducing exposure to unnecessary risk of devouring prions along with the forbidden fruit. I leave with fewer unwanted wounds, bleed less, and get away more safely. It's an overall win, especially for a city-whelp like me.

I swallow not-beer at the Kool-Aid-manning of the realization that I've more or less become a scavenger. A fucking detritivore, I howl through gritted mind. I barely even have to kill these things, whispers the derisive phantasm in my cup, and each of the sliding door's panes. She'd probably do it for you if you got her drunk and riled enough. You don't have to do that here. There's O'Donnell's, the Fo'c's'le, that rickety liquor store that sells from the drive-through window past midnight... that alley over there... You-

"Awonder wuthurdoon usstairz..." The pseudo-words and context almost don't register over her ground-glass tone, but an inner ear pricks up nonetheless: I know a whistle. "I don't," I force through a rusted shadow of a smirk. The walls are as thin as the condoms I heard them say they "forgot" from the kitchen. They even had the unselfconscious nerve to buy the ribbed.

Ribs, whispers the wraith in the window, and in Amanda's rum. Ribs! screams her too-tight skin under her somehow still too-tight clothes. Ribs, growls my own invaginated gut. Ribs, I conclude solemnly with a little help from my friends.

Amanda seems different now, like her dials have all been turned up in a way I can't place. She smells filthier, cheesier behind the ears; more inviting. A reeking haze hangs about her, involuntarily drawing attention to her armpits, groin, and dingily-socked feet. Her palms sweat too, but that I have to see. The stuffy August night is getting to her, and between the rum and coke it's running her ragged. I realize with dismay that this'll be yet another meal without liver, for food safety reasons. Some runty part of me spits with oft-repeated dissatisfaction, bib fastened and fists balled; bitterness at yet another stroke of the same dull ax. I kill it quickly in its cradle before it can give me away; scarf it down without a belch. A fair appetizer for my pride.

"Ohhh... yyyeeeah?" Amanda tries to look at me, but her bubblegum-and-seawater eyes see even less of me than I show. Vitreous inside and out, her looking-glasses are too scuffed to notice that my smile has some genuine warmth to it now. She keeps trying to stammer the same stupid something as she continuously raises and lowers her right hand on her own knee. She can't control her jaw, and most of her asinine "words" come out with a quarter of a bray tacked on like a tail. "Djyoowannaggo?" she mutters twice more, getting more antsy and closer to belligerence with every unanswered mating call.

It actually takes me a moment to collect myself after it hits me that she's almost certainly blacked-out. I feel a pang of disgust at my own stooping, but I hear the wooden-spoon-voice of a great-grandmother I never knew grinding in agitation between my bones: "Mangia!" The proposition I've been awaiting for over two weeks came with such a suicidally hollow ocean-stare that I wonder if I can really go through with this one. If she's not asking for it, that's only because she physically can't articulate it, even to herself. In the only way that matters, she's down. I peer deeply into the clogged pores on her now too-detailed face; inhale deeply her bitter, complex amygdalic perfumes; hear the cocaethylene flood and poison her heart, then spill back out, guideless and antlike, into the ragged chasm of her empty body. A switch flips over. I decide that I can, in fact, shut up and eat tonight.

"Yeah, I do," I lie through a deathmask.

"Amgonnabeezo fvuckin' maddin havvanowwer..." Amanda, shambling like a Romero extra and apropos of nothing relevant to me, spits thick, brownish goop onto a nightstand she doesn't own. In the midst of her halting, palsied sprint of unbuttoning she now and again looks like she may lose her nerve, or vomit; but she unbuttons. Good, I think with the all-demanding nobility of a duke taking a first night; of a cop. Make this even easier, you grimy tramp. I deserve you on a gilded plate for the shame of having to look at you at all. Certainly no lady, remarks the cold, obsidian stare of the judge from an open laptop across the room. Plenty of time yet for her to become lacking in nerves; and though the plate wears no gold, the sheets are one of the few shades of yellow I don't hate. Bile, I think with a persistent, taffilike longing, mourning anew the same old waste of good liver.

That flat, black gaze wrenches my attention away from viscera, and for a rapturous moment I forget the pain in my stomach. I drift free and sleek through a forest, a self-uprooted mahogany tree hurtling toward some poor sap who happened to wander too far. Most do become lost when they think they know better than the route, I think wearily as I come back to myself; to this agonizingly small armory of underutilized weapons. I stare the judge down for a few more seconds, contemplating the laptop itself rather than where it can lead. No cords, no lights, but still open. I wonder, Amandalike and half-dreaming under the inscrutable, mind-dissolving yoke of reasserting hunger, if the webcam still works without power.

"No;" I say without looking. Her unwashedness slots into my thoughts like an oily skeleton key, locking my attention away from the judge's prying eyes. No, I remember: the eyes don't work anymore when they're left wide-open for the juice to run out.

"No, leave your pants on," I grumble, choosing the burden of tonight's last words carefully as I turn, the change already burgeoning beyond my feeble grasp. "I prefer to peel chicks myself."