small hungers.
Rejected work, a hunger for something out of reach.
Showing you my ‘unpublishables’ as a form of rejection therapy. TW: Eating Disorder.
SMALL HUNGERS.
Ennie Fakoya.
Word Count: 982
I have been so hungry recently.
A gaping hole has formed inside me, and nothing seems to fill it. Why does one stuff themselves consistently so that the body survives only to die? If this is the case, the only case, then I would just eat myself.
…
The room has shrunk sizeably to the extent that the soft dips of my body are moulding around sharp furniture. It is uncomfortable, but the pit in my stomach is unbearable enough to distract.
My mother enters without a word, dropping bags full of indistinguishable meat and fruits. Primary colours meld together unpleasantly, a pile of mush served to me in flimsy plastic.
But things like that don’t deter me, I am too hungry to think of sore sights or rancid smells. The feel of it on my tongue, sinking deep into my throat and I will myself to keep it down. This is not a matter of choice, and my mother is aware, despite her disdain. This is how I have always remembered us. The Feeder and The Fed, joined together at the hip by a certain hunger for things just out of reach.
Whilst my mother wishes for a life outside of this, I have never left this room. It has been the only space I have known and for years the things inside this room have been tailored to me. But now, I must find a way to fit around my bed, my closet, and my dressing table. I shouldn’t have asked for sharper edges and pointy arrowheads to embellish my mirror, that was a grave mistake. I had grown so large that my eye was now mere millimetres away from it, and I felt a sick urge to move forward. The feeling sends my heart into a lurch and I fear for a moment that this body that has grown without my consent will also kill itself if pushed too far.
I must not eat more. I must stay empty until I have deflated enough for the arrowhead to be far away from my eye. I can’t say that this will cause me to shrink in size, but the bright beam of hope causes the building bubble of hunger to cease bit by bit.
…
I often believe that my stomach is sentient. It has formed its own heart and lungs and thoughts which do not require my guidance anymore. This belief is strongest when I stop eating. An already difficult task is magnified by the ropes of swallowed string in my stomach slinking up towards my throat and squeezing from the inside. There’s not much you can do when the attack comes from inside. It takes you by surprise and causes you to falter because you are the one hurting yourself. No one can take the blame for an action self-inflicted, therefore you must keep quiet, retire into your skin and beg your sunken God for forgiveness.
But I have concluded that someone like me cannot be forgiven. I don’t have the heart to change and my body knows. It keeps score of my accidents and in the moment another gleam of hope falls before me, so close to reaching my arteries, pounds of fat engulf that hope and stab it with a bright knife of memory; my mother and her slimy lover, scared of what they see in me but too curious to stop looking. My lover, a meek, pale boy with his own sentient stomach, removes this external urge to feast and feast until the floor is wet with slivers of drool and fatty sauces.
I hated him so much. That boy had no reason to keep empty, what with all the family he had around him. All I have is my mother, who doesn’t even enjoy feeding me. He has trays of food served to him by hoards of people. What is as violent a love that? And yet he declines it all. How could he decline something I have always wanted? Why would he let it go to waste like that?
My mother wants me and the boy to fall in love but I don’t know how to tell her that the love I feel is a brutal envy for the way his bones protrude. The way he controls himself. Restricts his desire because I know he desires things, I see it in the dry cracks of his lips.
When I tell my mother this, eventually and with great anxiety, she sneers so viciously at me you would think we were two animals fighting over meat.
“Oh, can’t you just accept good things? Must you always sour it? God help the man that thinks to marry you.”
It didn’t take long for my mother to stop entering the room with miscellaneous foods. It became every other day, and then every other week, twice every two weeks. Three months into this routine I heard a door slam loudly in the distance. The food stuck in my throat as I looked outside my foggy window and saw my mother, her lover, and the boy get into a car and drive away. The panic had not set in because there was another bag to get through. I had become more ravenous lately. Starving myself was a horrible idea, and I was paying for it faster than my body could handle.
I kept eating and eating, and eating, feral with hunger until there was a sick crunch, pulling away to see the muscle and bone of my hand bared and bloody. I didn’t feel it, a searing hot pain that would be promised from this kind of wound. There was only a sharp taste of iron and my hand, slowly rising to the dark abyss of my mouth.
Myself. I was eating myself. I began to cry when I realised that this was the end God had in store for me. A body so starved and yet so full will find satisfaction only in consuming itself. I will be my end and my own beginning.