Thus on that second day, Habiba had observed her husband while he slept for a long time. The idea of eating him piece by piece excited her. Her desire for him grew and grew. She was sweating and shaking. She drew close to him, started stroking his arms and then moved onto his hands. She sucked his fingers, one by one, and gleefully munched on them. On the third day, she started eating his arms. On the fourth she ate his feet and most of his legs. On the fifth, she severed his head and placed it in a crystal jar, which was a gift from her uncle, who’d made his fortune working in the Gulf. Finally on the sixth she ate what was left of him, taking care not to damage his genitals, which she placed in a magic box. By the seventh day, there was nothing left of the man she’d married. Or rather, every part of him was still there, just inside her. Habiba hadn’t even put on any weight. She felt happy and proud of herself
.Finally a successful marriage. Habiba and her husband had become a single person. Nobody noticed anything. The wedding party had been in full swing when Habiba had been busy eating her husband, taking to it rigorously and methodically, scrupulously following the advice that her mother had given her a long time earlier: “You must always hang on to your man, my daughter, you can’t share your man with anyone else. And there’s no better way to keep him all to yourself than by eating him! If you do that, you’ll never need to talk to him, or threaten him that “I’ll cut off your balls if I catch you cheating on me, or if I see you with someone else I’ll slice both your throats” … You must stay one step ahead of him, otherwise it’ll be too late, men quickly get used to having us under their heels.”
Habiba had always told herself: “My man will be mine and I’ll be his. There won’t be any differences between us. We’ll be so inseparable that you won’t even be able to slide a thread of silk between us. We’ll become one person and we’ll stay like that forever. A perfect, total union, which nobody would ever destroy or surpass. That is love, crazy love. That’s what mothers teach their daughters. Men are hard to find. So women have to do everything in their power in order to keep their husbands close and prevent them from being lured away by other women
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