John Mynster awoke to the world as one recalls a long, familiar song—not with thought, but with the echo of absence, a hollow in the chest that had somehow taken shape and named itself hunger. The village outside his window slept the way things sleep when they don't know they won't wake again. Smoke from closed chimneys curled like the fingers of forgotten prayers. The moon hung low and clinical, a pale lantern that didn't care whether its light healed or merely revealed.
He didn't ask how he had come to be this way. Memory was a corridor lined with doors that opened only onto dust. Moments of his former self—a name, a crooked laugh among children, the precise weight of a coat the winter he learned to steal heat—arrived like postcards. None explained the reality of his hands. They were bloodless, knuckled, and pale as old paper, and when he flexed them, the sound was the soft abrasion of bone on bone.
His hunger was not the craving of appetite. It was a precise calculus, an ache that measured the remainder of another's life by the pulse still trembling beneath their skin. John quickly learned to sense those at the margins: the barely breathing, the ones whose minds were a carefully held thread above an abyss. They tasted like broken light and secrets. To take from them was to knot a fragment of himself back into existence.
He began with small attempts. He found a woman by the river who was lost in fever and delirium. He sat by her bed and listened to the thin music of her breath. When he swallowed, it was like drinking ink and star fragments. The fever fell away as if removed by a surgeon. The woman awoke and called his name in a voice that belonged more to hope than to memory. For one day, he walked in the guise of the man she remembered. The ache retreated, and bone grew warm, as if it had recalled how to be marrow.
Yet the gift contained a geometry of its own cruelty. The life John stole from the barely living did not simply vanish. It condensed into him and began his rearrangement. He'd wake whole in the hollow of his chest, only to find a scrap of the other's memory had adhered to his mind. He tasted their laughter, their grief, the precise way their tongue favored certain consonants. Faces gathered behind his eyes—not quite his own—like paintings half-glued to a new canvas. With each soul consumed, he learned to speak more humanly, and also to rehearse other people's habits. A man named Thom, whose soul carried a lingering fear of rust, caused John to frown instinctively when he passed an old plough. A girl named Lilcea taught him to hold a cup delicately with two fingers.
The first few times felt like miracles. He revealed his patched self to the fevered woman, and she didn't scream. She looked at him as she might a kind stranger who had done her a service and then forgotten to sign his name. He slept afterward, and in his sleep the world rearranged itself, a small room rebuilding around a memory. But miracles grow brittle under repetition. The more he fed, the more other lives accreted inside him, and the more complicated his sense of self became. Voices began to crowd the corridors of his mind, arguing quietly at the edges of his waking moments.
Not everyone recovered. Sometimes the barely living grew worse even as John grew whole. The thing he took didn't restore them to the blunt certainty of life. It was as if he had peeled away the last thread of their survival and consumed it. They became shells with the ability to breathe, but not the will to begin again. Their eyes remained fogged. In the clinic where a kindly apothecary tended the poor, a nurse began to notice the pattern. People who had been near John found themselves sleeping like strangers beneath their own skins. The apothecary, a broad man whose hands had grown too steady by necessity, watched John with a patience that felt like an accusation.
John learned to avoid him. He moved like a rumor through the town. He learned the hours when the hospital wards were thick with the barely living, the moments when light shivered on a soap dish and no one thought to watch the doorway. He learned to take a life slowly, pulling from the edge of consciousness, tasting first the smell of a childhood hayloft, the memory of a lullaby. He kept the memories in boxes in his mind, the way a careful man keeps knives. He opened them when he needed to be charming. He opened the box labeled Thom when he had to forge a wage that required the steadiness of someone who feared rust.
In those early weeks, there was a simple economy to his acts. Each theft was a step toward something he desired and couldn't quite name. He called it life because language demanded a noun for the thing that returned him to feeling. He wanted the small, ordinary competencies: to be surprised by the sun again, to bruise when hurt, to put his hand in another's and feel the warmth without the calculus of taking. He longed for fidelity to a single self.
One night, in the grip of winter, an old woman with cataracts sat beside him on a bus that smelled of damp wool. She didn't appear barely alive; she was small and precise, the kind of body pared down by years of living. She turned, and her cloudy eyes met his. "Do you want to be a man?" she asked. Her voice threaded through the bus like a bone through skin. For a moment, he imagined all the souls inside him settling like sediment. He nodded.
"Then learn to hunger for what remains," she said. "Hunger is a teacher, but so is restraint."
Her words lodged deep. John wondered if restraint could be learned like a new argument. He hadn't called his acts theft until the apothecary started looking at him with that hard patience. After the old woman's remark, John tried to refuse once. He passed a child in the market, a boy with a cough and palms chalked white with flour. John felt the itch, clapped a hand to his chest, and walked on. The itch didn't die as he walked; it grew into a stone. That night, he dreamed not of warmth but of a field burned black. He woke with the sensation of a small stone lodged under his tongue.
He fed then with a new hunger, quieter and more precise. He took only what was necessary and nothing more. A little memory of a lullaby here, a taste of a laugh there. The people he touched woke with less damage. But the voices inside him continued to multiply. Sometimes he would forget the name of the street where he had slept for weeks because Thom had insisted, with a certainty not his own, that the street had been called by a different name in another town. He became an accordion of patched selves, a man stitched from other people's lives. It wasn't enough.
At the edges of his nights, other things began to appear—shapes in the periphery that took on the geometry of longing. Once, in the alley behind a hospice, a shadow that wasn't shadow waited for him. It had the slow patience of tombstones. When he stepped closer, he felt something vast and ancient peer into him. This presence didn't speak in words. It spoke the way breath speaks to flame, suggesting that his hunger could be made permanent. If he let the voices inside him settle—if he stopped taking only crumbs from the barely living and took instead what belonged to those already gone—he could anchor himself like a stone sunk into deep water.
John recoiled. He had seen the consequences of greedy acts—the empty-eyed people who remained after his early gluttony. Yet the shadow persisted, a patient tutor at the threshold of his work. It taught him to watch for a different kind of hunger. The barely living had edges, but those who are not quite dead and those who are dead but not buried share a curious, liminal market. There are souls that drift, unloved and unsheltered, between the closing of breath and the closing of ceremony. They hum like tools left in damp places. The shadow showed him where they gathered. He learned to lure them with the light of a life he could only mimic. He learned to take from places where mourning was thin and the dead were not yet claimed. The neatness surprised him. Lives taken this way left no wreckage for the living. They slipped cleanly into him. The voices inside grew thicker and less quarrelsome. For the first time, he could stand the mirror for longer than a breath and not have it fracture into a thousand other faces.
With this new appetite came new abilities. He could walk among people with a steadier hand. He leased a small room above a bakery and bought fresh bread with money he hadn't stolen but had somehow arranged from the account of a man who had once kept ledgers. He learned to take his turn at the tavern's piano by recalling the fingers of a musician he had consumed. He began to care about small things. One afternoon he planted an herb in a pot and thrilled when it lifted itself toward the light. The little green thing was, in a small way, a proof. That proof hardened into a plan: if he could anchor his life on souls that drifted and were unclaimed, perhaps he could become less of a patchwork scarecrow.
It was then that the apothecary came to him, not with accusation, but with a question. "John," he said, folding the palms of his hands, "why do you wander so hungry?"
John didn't lie. He told the apothecary what he had become. The apothecary listened without blinking, and when he spoke he was neither kind nor cruel. He said, "There are debts that do not belong to the dead. Some things must remain in the ground. You will not be a man by stealing the rest of the world."
John argued with the brittle logic of one who had been forced into want. "I cannot stay this way," he pleaded. "I cannot be a thing between. Every time I feed, I become more human. I teach myself what it means."
"And every time you take," the apothecary replied, "you teach the living how to be less. You hollow them so that their echoes can be harvested. Life is not a ledger to be balanced with theft."
The apothecary's words were not law. They were the brittle authority of someone whose trade was tending to those who lingered. John left with them knotted in his throat. He thought for a while that he could continue as he had, taking only unclaimed drift and living in the seams. He believed that restraint and skill would be enough to build a life.
Then came the winter that taught him the truth.
A fever ravaged the town. The barely living multiplied. The apothecary's hands shook with the weight of so many needing care. John moved through the wards like a surgeon without a permit. He found a child in the infirmary with a breath so thin it was an argument for survival. The child was unclaimed; the mother had gone to beg in the next town and hadn't returned. John took the child's last sliver of life and felt himself stitch tenable, almost whole. He carried the warmth home and slept as if for the first time.
When he opened his eyes, the child was still breathing. Small miracles sometimes arrive bruised. The child woke and whispered a name in their sleep—a name John did not own. He realized then that the child's life had not been entirely given up. There were hands in the world that held certain names. There were debts that living people could not repay if every unclaimed ripple of soul found its way into a hungry man.
People noticed a shift. The apothecary spoke quietly to the nurse, and then to others. The town, which had tolerated John as a strange figure, began to feel the edges of his theft. Those who had once recovered from being barely alive now carried small, unfinished silences. A child's cough moved like weather through houses. The old woman who had once told him to learn restraint found him in the market and pressed a folded paper into his hand. Inside was a list of names and a map drawn in ink that had clotted with age. "There are places where the dead linger and must be buried," she said. "They are not for eating. They are for burying."
John read the map and felt the familiar stir of desire to be more. To claim himself, he could go where the unclaimed gathered and be greedy, or he could do what the apothecary and the old woman suggested. He might learn to be something else. The map led to a graveyard outside town where stones leaned like tired men and where the earth had been disturbed by root and animal. There, he found small remains of rituals—coins left in the dark, a string of prayer beads chewed by the weather. He knelt and began to bury. He dug with hands that did not hurt, and as he covered the bones, the voices inside him hushed in a way he had not expected. It was not death that silenced them, but ceremony. The act of return, even performed by him, felt adequate to some small economy of nature.
At dusk, when his hands were raw and the earth smelled like a remembered thing, he felt something shift inside. Not completion, not peace, but the possibility of an answer that wasn't theft. He realized that to be a man was not only to have a single skin but to owe allegiance to those who remained. To be alive again might not mean gathering a thousand lives into one. It might mean learning to let a life be, even when it cost him his own hunger.
John didn't become whole in one night. He made mistakes. He took when he should have tended. He boiled with want when the town was wintered and hungry. But he learned how to bury and how to mend. He apprenticed himself to the apothecary, learning to bind wounds and stitch a name into linen. The voices inside him grew fewer. Those that remained were the quieter ones, memories that no longer argued but offered counsel.
Years later, children who had once whispered about the strange man with paper hands would point to the same man and call him by his given name without wonder. When the fever came again, he worked through the nights, keeping vigil for a woman he loved and for children who needed warmth. He felt pain when his arm was struck by a falling beam in the bakery he frequented and cried in a way that was all his own.
He never became exactly what he had been. He remained a man shaped by other lives. That patchwork could not be undone. Yet he learned that life was not a thing to be reclaimed by theft. It was an obligation, a practice, and frequently an act of mercy. He learned that hunger could be taught to serve. In learning to bury the dead, he learned to tend the living. In learning to let go, he found, finally, that some parts of him could stay and be called wholly his.
On the night he died again, decades later, he lay in a bed surrounded by people who remembered the kindnesses of a lifetime. He didn't steal from the barely living—not in the end. He had consumed enough to know what he had been. He closed his eyes and felt the familiar hollow open. It was not hunger now, but a suregoing tiredness. Voices rose and fell like the tide. Somewhere in the house, a child hummed a lullaby he had once borrowed. He smiled, and in that smile, the patchwork of him fit like pieces finally settled into their frame.
He tasted nothing as he left. He had learned to be, at last, a part of the world that gave without taking.