far

Fiction

hunger

Béibhinn Thorsch
issue four

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CHOMP
CHEW
SPIT

Quite the collection laid down in the plastic trash-can depths – it is kaleidoscopic, and unappreciated, down in the dim.

CHOMP
CHEW
SPIT

The expulsion means nothing to ideas of purity, if the remnants keep missing their mark and kiss the floor with such fat slaps.

Whatever edible thing held in my hand is unseeable. I know nothing about it. This hunger inside touches my womb and claws at my belly button, puppeteers my hand to gorge. I am always moments away from pulling up the skirting board and gnawing along the edge.

I would tear my pillow apart and

CHOMP and
CHEW and
SPIT and

convince myself it is marshmallow, it is meringue, but it doesn’t need to be too convincing after all—

for I will feast on anything that tempts to fill me.

With this feeling, I could crush bone to powder and turn it to paste with my blood and swallow it down as red-velvet cream thereafter.

This is a hunger that could create. This is a hunger that consumes to the point of rebirth. I know it to be true. I feel the power of its truth course through me, hot and hollow. Those who have known hunger such as this will know.

I am the toilet bowl. I am the orange shit smeared upon it. I am the filthy wet splashes landing in droplets back onto my skin. I am the smell that makes others quake and throw blame. I am the convulsion of abdominal muscles propelling bile-soaked boluses back from whence they came. I am infection-ooze-soaked-cotton-polyester-sock from an ingrown toenail.

My mother called me a bitch while my bare feet warmed the kitchen tile beneath me, one sunny afternoon too long ago to remember the details of. She wouldn’t take it back.

Now, I take everything.

I consume endlessly and refuse to relent. No one is begging me to. The stretched muscle walls of my stomach have long given up trying.

There is no satisfaction. There is no need to repent, either – redemption does not come to the gorgers who feast without end. They do not desire it. They, and I, live in the liminal, purgatorial sanctum of space between Eve’s teeth crunching the apple, and swallowing the bite. There we remain.

---

My lover greets me with impeccable kisses and rough warm hands sliding across the lower half of me. He feeds me with laughter and feasts on me after. He does not have the same methods as I. He does not chomp chew, or spit. When he is here, worshipping me like a deity and lifting me like a feather, I am encouraged. I gorge.

I feast by his side. Expanding and weighed down by my most egregious sins. Yet, I levitate from room to room, eyes barely focusing, the feelings indistinguishable between pressing my lips to his or parting them for another morsel. Again and again.

We lounge through the days, such few precious days as they always feel, and tumble gently down from the bed to the kitchen in unequal repetition. This is the melody of the weekend, this harmony and bliss. Fear is swayed, making room only for more and more. More of him, more of me, more of love.

Then it is over. The beat of my heart turns staccato and my mind to untuned strings. Weekends only last so long and his purpose lays beyond the walls of this place I haunt and simper vocationally.

There are the first two days, then, of blankness.

Not of mind, which twists and turns, riverbed over rock and leaking dam. Pulls memories of love asunder and shreds to black what has passed. Expected and yet nonetheless pained. I am abhorred by the stained wall paint. I come out only at night, when the mirrors are more easily avoided.

Two days, only, of this. Then it begins. The

CHOMP
CHEW
SPIT

the over and over the

CHOMP CHEW SPIT

it is like it never left, the

CHOMP
CHEW
CHOMP
CHEW
CHOMP
CHEW
CHOMP
CHOMP
CHOMP

and I cannot.

The key does not turn in the lock, the final puzzle piece does not come into place, the hand that should be reaching out is missing and there is nothing to stop the slipping fingernails clinging to the cliffrock edge.

This happens. It happens occasionally. It happens every week. It happens even when I am lost in sleep. It happens. The days catch up, or they merge, or they weave in such a forceful way that the control does not have a space to squeeze into. It takes me. Usually only briefly.

Briefly, only, usually.

Wednesday and witching hour coincide and I grieve the thread that pulls me to that final step. This time.

Perhaps it had gone on too long. Perhaps the cycle is ouroboros and it eats itself because it must. Because it cannot follow the guide. The plan. That which has been set in place for longer than I dare remember. There is too much left within this affecting place.

It must be consumed for only the reason that the hunger has come.

Those who have known hunger like this will know.

Only once will the control cease to regain itself. Only once can this set of circumstances occur to those who know hunger. Only once, and it is enough. Only once, did I allow it to occur. Only once have I had the opportunity of coming out of the body asphyxiated on the floor and watching down upon it with such perspective. Only once, and then it was over.

In this way, the hunger did end.