She had tapes and tapes, old black video tapes, piling up in the back room, of Spider Snuff; hours and hours of arachnid copulation that ended, inevitably, in the death of the male just after the point of orgasm, or whatever spiders did when they got off. 

“They’re my favourite sort of love story,” she explained to me, watching me squirm uncomfortably in my chair as I watched the spiders squirm uncomfortably on the screen. “The kind that ends in cannibalism.” 

All love is a form of cannibalism; I read that once, somewhere, in some book about romance and mystery. All love is a form of consumption; devouring something, consuming it, taking it in, taking it on…

Yeah, the back room is full of things nobody wants to know about. Shirts with strange stains. Underwear that’s been worn a little too long. The hollowed out shells of giant insects that ruled these lands back when humanity was still a distant dream of tiny, cave-dwelling prototype mammals. Big, hungry bugs, that grew monstrously large on the oxygen-thick environment of ancient earth. She uses the shells as ashtrays, and lousy conversation pieces. She loves a lousy conversation.