There’s a monster on the loose, but the final girl is standing alone in the kitchen. Her small hands are sliding under the skin of a raw chicken. She’s placing garlic cloves one by one, and the pads of her fingers are slipping on the butter and the herbs smeared across its pink and blue translucence. If she closes her eyes and thinks about the way the loose layer of skin slides over her knuckles—no, she doesn’t. Not intentionally.

She places the dish in the oven and checks her reflection. Her hair is long, or short, or medium-length, but it’s soft. Her skin and her smile and her eyes are soft, and they’re soft on purpose. When her doomed boyfriend arrives, he greets her at the door with a kiss, his lips marking the unnaturally smooth apple of her cheek. “This is fine,” she thinks, but she’s holding her breath. She focuses and pushes it out from her lungs. Maybe the monster is out there, but it isn’t right here right now. 

At the table, she watches her date chastely, her own plate bare as he slices into the bird’s breast and lifts the fork to his mouth. She sees something move through the moonlit yard; the outside world is as grey and still as an alien landscape. She knows what lurks out there, beyond the wide bay windows. Outside, light bleeds from a crack in the curtains like an old movie theatre, the kind where you tremble against the velvet seat wondering whether he’s going to touch you. Whether you even want him to. 

The boy’s hand drives up her thigh, an empty blacktop ending in the cul-de-sac beneath her skirt. She freezes. Pressed beneath his body, she’s checking the locks. If they’re not secured, the wrong thing could fall out of her like a loose tooth, bloody root exposed. She’s not hungry. She’s not. 

When he takes her stillness as an invitation, she thinks about her body like a cheap Halloween mask: all thick rubber, and nothing ever lines up right. At the edge of her vision, a dark shape stills in the light of the porch: strong, solid, ravenous. The final girl knows that she should be afraid. Knows, the way she knows that the sky is above and the ground is below, that this fear is the only way she makes it to the end of the movie. She swallows the saliva pooling on her tongue and then there are uncertain hands on the swell of her ass and blunt teeth grazing her throat. She wonders what it would feel like to eat instead of being eaten. 

He rolls her on top of his body, flipping their positions, and that’s when the wood splinters under the lock. The metal releases a thin whimper under the pressure. In the brief second before it gives out, she sees red. With thighs split wide around his hips she bares her teeth, jaw fighting its hinges. She thinks about watching the blood pool, sticky like pomegranate spray in the hollow of his—

No. She wants to live. And every book she’s ever read, every movie she’s ever seen, every drunk aunt at a cousin’s wedding has told her that there’s only one person who makes it out of this kind of picture alive. So, when a warm body covers hers and she starts to feel famished, she ignores the familiar voice saying, “This won’t satisfy.” She pretends she doesn’t hear where, in the dark throat of the hallway, the monster shifts its weight, all muscle and sinew covered in coarse hair with hard-won scars kept close to its chest. His sure body beneath hers, her doomed boyfriend is treating the lobe of her left ear like it’s a cherry popsicle, and she’s staring up at the thing in the shadows, choking on her own spit. 

Because she sees the final girl when she looks in the mirror, but it’s like looking at a puzzle where the pieces only fit because they’ve been hammered in. If she looks close enough, there’s a thrill in the angle of her jaw. She tilts her chin to admire where the hair grows a little longer on her neck and next to her ears. Twenty-four times a day she runs her tongue across the surface of her teeth to see if they’re sharper than they were an hour ago and lets out a sigh of relief. 

There’s no relief tonight. The tip of her tongue catches on her canine and she can taste it now. Hot blood, wet. She swivels her hips, scraping herself against the boy beneath her, and sees his eyes widen. Even he knows this isn’t in the script. For a moment she wonders if he’s pretending too. She isn’t sure why anyone would choose to play the doomed boyfriend but then, he doesn’t get out of here any way you slice it. At least this way he gets a home-cooked meal first. But the final girl, they can’t kill her, and they’ve tried it all: fangs, claws, chainsaws, machetes and hook hands, gasoline and the slow arc of a single match. Nothing takes. She’s haemorrhaging friends but she’s alive. At least, she thought she was. It occurs to her that she’s never felt more vital than right now, grinding on an enthusiastic suitor with the breath of a monster hot against the back of her neck like steam from a subway grate. Right now, she could devour that chicken in totality, fingers breaking through the crisp brown skin and mulching the meat beneath as she crams it into her open mouth. The snap of the bones between her molars sounds like raw spaghetti. She thinks about the feeling of grease sliding down the curve of her chin. Yeah, she could eat. 

But when a hand crests the swell of her breast she comes crashing back into her body like the rock that killed the dinosaurs. Jerking up stiffly, the final girl artfully dismounts, landing in the middle of the room with her arms wrapped close around her body. Still supine on the couch, her doomed boyfriend has his mouth hanging open like he didn’t know his fast hands could cause an extinction event. The hunger shifts suddenly, becoming an ache at the bottom of her gut; a black hole collapsing inwards. She knows what usually happens next: she walks away, and by the time she returns the boy is dead. By now there have been so many unsaveable suitors, their headshots sliding across her vision like microfiche. This isn’t the ending she wants; she just wants to protect herself from what’s waiting in the dark. But by this inevitable climax, it’s her or it, so she kills the monster even though the tight twist of the kitchen knife in its gut hurts her just as much.

But this time she hasn’t walked yet and her doomed boyfriend is still on the couch alive as ever, if a little confused at his empty lap. Somewhere just out of sight, a sharp growl rumbles across the stain-resistant low-pile carpeting. The final girl tries to make out the monster’s shape in the shadows but it can’t seem to stick to just one. A single golden eye catches hers, and there’s the unmistakable swish of a tail, but this is just how she sees it: in bits and pieces. It’s a snarl against her ear when an uninvited hand grazes the small of her back or a razor-like claw scraping down her flank to criticise the curves of her body. She only sees the whole of it when she’s looking in the mirror. 

The final girl tries to convince her body to move. She knows she should run to the kitchen and grab a knife, long and gleaming, run the monster through so that she can live. The credits will roll and the theatre will slowly empty and there will be girls like her in the seats waiting for their boyfriend’s hands to leave their thighs and for the pits in their stomachs to fill. She wonders if any of them would rather die as a monster than live as a girl. 

Her eyes snap over to her reflection in the dead space of the television screen and there it is in high definition, massive and looming and ready to pounce. She can see it in her own face: she’s starving, she’s exhausted. She doesn’t think her legs can take another 78-minute runtime. So this time, for the first time, she lets it in. 

The monster feels good. Every corner of its body is a warm escape. Vertebrae in the long column of its spine snap into place, muscles stretching and shifting as the creature finds solace in a new but familiar shape. For the first time, it can relax and let go of the lockjaw tension that has seized its every waking moment. It’s surprised to find that it doesn’t feel like a monster, not at all. It still has a craving, but it’s about to be satisfied.