Hunger

a short story by Emily G. Garcia

Tilda came every Tuesday. Or at least Louisa believed it was Tuesday. Since quitting her corporate job to live off of her husband’s life insurance payout, Louisa ceased to have any concrete way of knowing what day of the week it was. She guessed the day based on observations she made of people who walked along the busy street below her kitchen window.

Tuesday felt less oppressive than a Monday but was nowhere near as busy as a Wednesday or carefree as a Thursday or Friday. From what Louisa could tell, Tuesday was a mixed bag. Businessmen didn’t hurry anywhere but still walked with purpose, dressed smartly in suits and ties. Children giggled and screamed as their parents shepherded them home from school in the early afternoon. Some smiling, some in tears. The week was still young, but not frighteningly so.

Tilda, a small Eastern European woman in her late 50s, arrived every Tuesday at 9 a.m. and always stayed for at least two hours, sometimes three depending on the mess Louisa made in the week prior. She announced her presence to the sleeping Louisa with a sharp knock on the front door of her fourth floor apartment from one of Tilda’s nimble fists.

Once inside, Louisa stumbled her way back to the couch and Tilda wasted no time moving through the apartment to assess the tasks for the day. Then, like a diligent gust of wind, Tilda moved swiftly through the bedroom, bathroom and office, descending upon every balled up sock and dirty plastic fork in her path.

Six months had now passed since Thomas’ death. Louisa was eating two meals a day, which seemed like progress except that her stomach always felt oppressively full two bites into her second meal. She still had no energy to do anything that resembled cooking. Most of her energy was expended getting up from the couch to use the bathroom or selecting a new book to read from the floor to ceiling shelf in the living room. As a result, she frequently ordered takeout.

It started with Tom Yum’s Thai Kitchen, she’d order Pad Thai and Pad Kee Mao and eat one for breakfast and the other for lunch. These had been her favorite meals on nights when she worked late and Thomas didn’t feel like cooking. However, she found that since losing her appetite she had also lost appreciation for all of the foods she used to love. Eating felt more like a chore than a pleasure these days. A ritual reluctantly obeyed to keep her skin from clinging to her bones like plastic wrap.

After a few days of Tom Yum’s she developed a taste aversion to Thai food and moved on to Indian food. Vegetable Pakora and Saag Paneer from Taj Mahal Grill. Both grew tiresome, and subsequently disgusting. In an effort to stave off the boredom her tastebuds so quickly felt, her orders became increasingly extravagant. Since money was no object, she felt no qualm about ordering exotic dishes from exquisite restaurants only to stomach a few bites before they grew cold and thus, inedible. Succulent breasts of duck, cooked medium rare. A selection of delicate sushi and fatty tuna hand rolls. All humbly discarded at the bottom of her garbage can.

Though she’d once been diligent about conserving and eating leftovers, Louisa found that she could no longer bring herself to care about the ethical or practical implications of food waste. Leftovers were mostly something she took part in to get her hard earned money’s worth of a dish. Eating day old food never made her feel worse than scraping the equivalent of two hours-worth of work into the trash. None of that mattered anymore now that money wasn’t an issue. She didn’t have to pretend to enjoy leftovers or feel bad about leaving a filet mignon with béarnaise out on the counter until the fat on the meat congealed and the sauce grew a crinkly skin.

Tilda wordlessly cleared away scattered takeout boxes without the slightest wrinkle of disapproval or disgust on her face. Louisa appreciated her quiet, judgement-free disposition, though she was in no position to express this to Tilda.

Tilda mostly went about her work in silence, outside of the respectful “hello” and “goodbye.” For awhile, Louisa wasn’t sure whether Tilda’s silence was an intentional choice or the byproduct of lacking English skills. Either way, Louisa didn’t initiate conversation with her and thought it was best for the both of them. Grief, like a wasting disease, had rendered Louisa’s heart too weak to engage in even the intimacy of simple pleasantries.

Often, while Tilda worked, Louisa settled into the couch with a book. The towering shelf in the living room was filled to the brim with a collection of impressive novels, paperback and hardcover. More than half of them belonged to Thomas.

It was guilt that prompted her to start reading again. A few days after his death, Louisa was awoken from a long afternoon nap on the couch by a prickling feeling spreading out over her skin. When she’d rubbed the last cloud of sleep from her eyes, she saw, clear as day, all 107 of his books staring at her like neglected shelter animals — wanting, desperately, for attention. She decided, then and there, to pick each one up and read it cover to cover, stroking the spine as lovingly as she could.

Thomas was partial to fiction stories from authors like Murakami and Garcia-Marquez. Though Louisa preferred non-fiction, she appreciated that fiction allowed her to step away from herself. In each book, as if by hypnosis, the author summoned another person to the helm of her consciousness. And for some unknowable amount of time, Louisa peacefully ceased to exist — or at least, ceased to be cognizant of herself, which was essentially the same as ceasing to exist. The body without the soul.

While Tilda circled the living room with her ancient-looking vacuum one Tuesday morning in April, Louisa read Until August, a short story by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Even the vacuum’s unpleasant roar couldn’t pull her away from the white sand beaches of the unnamed Caribbean Island where Ana Magdalena Bach visited her mother’s grave each August.

Ana Magdalena sat at a dim hotel bar, her dark eyelids moistened with sweat. Her raven black hair was braided down her back and her breasts sat nobly in her tight purple dress. She waited, like a demure statue, for a man to approach her first. She hoped it would be someone good-looking enough to justify cheating on her husband with. This was, after all, what she looked forward to most on her visits to the island.

Louisa pulled the book closer as Ana Magdalena entered her air conditioned hotel room with a man who smelled of lavender. It’d been six months since Louisa had even thought of sex. She could feel the coolness of untouched white sheets on Ana Magdalena’s bare back. A man with thick chest hair and strong arms caressing the inside of her thighs, gently but with noticeable intention. The lightness of his touch, its lingering warmth, stirred in Louisa an aching, cavernous hunger. She felt hungrier than she had been in six months.

Sitting cross-legged on the couch, Louisa leaned forward and pressed herself against the heel of her foot — enjoying the friction and pressure created by her foot against the seam of her pants. She looked up from the pages of her book to see where Tilda had gone. The slosh of water in the toilet bowl told her that Tilda had moved on to cleaning the bathroom, which Louisa believed would keep her occupied for at least half an hour.

She returned to the island. Warmth radiated upwards throughout her body as the man planted languorous kisses on her neck and breasts. The cold air of the hotel room hardened her nipples. Louisa reached down to touch the seam of her pants with her hand, rubbing more directly against her clitoris now. She groaned lowly, feeling the hunger in her body recoil as she threw her head back in tacit enjoyment.

The image of the raging sea outside the hotel kept coming to mind. The insistence of the waves lapping against the shore without end. She imagined laying beside it, naked, while a crowd of men in cheap jewelry looked on. She felt like a prized cow at auction, knowing how badly they all wanted her and for what. The fear she felt, the sticky lurid quality of their stares only served to turn her on more.

She opened her legs to the coming ocean, imagining it as a man far greater in power than any man she had ever known before — a man with no name and no use for learning hers. The complete opposite of her husband, she shuddered in excitement. She took shallower, deeper breathes now, the intensity of her own touch mounting inside her.

She could visualize Thomas, before the accident, cutting through the throngs of men to see her opening her legs to the night. Louisa registered the horror on his face and kept going. She closed her eyelids, flicking her eyes wildly beneath them as she approached the edge of a canyon. She felt no fear as she positioned herself in a swan drive, hoping the forceful river below would carry her back to the ocean and the cycle would start again. Sweat beaded on her skin. Before she could jump, a crash from the bathroom pulled Louisa back to herself and her living room. When she opened her eyes, her body was splayed out on the couch and her underwear felt distinctly damp.

She laid Thomas’s book on the coffee table, facedown so it couldn’t look at her how she knew it would.