This is a small section of a longer story I’m writing. I was this hungry the other day, and I noticed the same thing in Carver’s short stories. We get really, really hungry when we feel empty.
I roll over and prop myself on my elbow. The drive is urgent and overpowering.
‘Are you hungry?’
She is lying on her back smoking a cigarette, staring at the cieling.
‘No eat often. No money. Not hungry.’
I wave my hand frantically, importantly.
‘What do you want. Anything. What do you want?’
She exhales and glances over, then shrugs.
‘What you want? You hungry. You happy for food.’
I sit still, but I want to tap out a rhythm on her belly, and suck down the broad full orange brown of another drink, and fight as if I were back in the dorms, scrabbling for a bed, and grab her hand and run along the promenade with her, but mostly I want to see steam rising from a roast, a freshly cooked salmon, a chicken gleaming greasily, to inhale that fulsome heady essence deep through my lungs.
‘Get Maria.’
I stare down at the bed, like a drunken man fixating on the single detail in his vision that will buy him a second away from violent regurgitation.
She’s raising her eyebrows, I’m sure, as she stands by the bed and begins to dress.
‘No.’ My craving doesn’t attend her petty, insubstantial concession to decorum. I need, now. She turns and looks at me over her shoulder. I think she hopes the smooth swell of her buttocks, the sweet curvature of her sides will overcome my all-encompassing thirst, that a quick, empty fuck will relieve her her duty.
‘What?’
I stay still, my mouth is all that moves.
‘Maria.’
‘Cook what?’
She doesn’t understand. Even as I speak to her eyes with mine, I tell her, she knows nothing.
‘Everything,’ I fail to make my message explicit.
She shrugs and walks out. She screams in Italian at Maria, and I hear her pad down the hallway.
I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. My belly is a thin membrane, a veined skin-thin purple flesh filled with air. I want. I wish all at once to stop up my emptiness. To be full, filled. I dream of eating Isabella. I envision the bright shine of her legs braising in the sun.
Ruminations 