Hunger
by Elizabeth Monreal
When the blood poured out of my cunt, running down my legs and reddening the clarity of the toilet water, I didn’t tell my husband. I cleaned myself up and carried on, though I was keenly aware of the constant silence in my womb.
Nature had a cruel sense of humor. My tits still hurt. They were heavy and swollen, my nipples still dripping with milk as if my baby would need to feed in the afterlife. I pictured myself nursing a ghost, feeding him blood until my body was empty and he was alive again.
I never wanted children, but my husband insisted. “You’re just nervous,” he said. “You’re going to be a great mother. You’re going to be so happy. You’re going to change your mind.” And, most stinging of all: “Don’t you love me?” I didn’t know how else to prove it to him. He didn’t believe anything I said. Years of arguing and divorce threats had made us numb and heartless.
We had dutiful and pleasureless sex, drunken and angry. In the bedroom, people would have mistaken us for enemies. He would come home drunk, silently seething. He never hit me or yelled at me. He didn’t have to. He could have forced me on any one of those nights. He could have pinned me beneath him and had his way with me until my womb was full of his seed, but he didn’t.
Still, I gave up my pills and he stopped buying condoms. It was a reluctant agreement between us. I was tired of fighting and so was he. If it happened, it would happen. If not, we would stop talking about it.
And so I got pregnant. In a moment of pleasure, my husband shaped my body to his desire. I hated it—the control he had over me, emotional and tangible like the swelling of my belly. My womb expanded and crushed all my other organs in the process. My lungs were constantly constricting and my stomach turned to mush. My ribs pressed tightly against my chest, piercing my intestines sharply. My tits, raw and heavy as rocks, spilled out of my bras, eliciting lustful looks from strangers. My skin darkened and my face fell. And through it all, my husband laid his big hands possessively against my belly and beamed with pride. “I love you so much,” he would say, and then fuck me into oblivion.
I knew from the start it was a bad idea. I wasn’t made to be a mother. But my husband never listened. So every night, after he had drifted off to sleep, I tiptoed into the kitchen, opened the freezer, and served myself a cup of ice.
It all started with that single cup of ice in July. It was a sweltering night and my skin was at a devilish temperature. Even with the sun gone, summer fell like an oppressive blanket over Guadalajara. We lived on the outskirts of town where the ceilings hung low and the walls absorbed the heatwaves like saunas. It was worse having to sleep next to my husband. His breath, his body, all his subtle signs of life were little flames burning up my skin.
I gave myself the excuse that I was hungry. I envisioned it—not food, but the memories of my father coming home from work, soaked in sweat and starving himself to death until he was sure that my brother and I had enough to eat. I thought of Adriel and I sitting at the kitchen table, greedily slurping beans from our bowls and shoving pieces of tortilla into our mouths. Adriel almost died choking on a tortilla at one point. He was unconscious for a couple of minutes, but that didn’t stop him from licking the bits from his plates as soon as he woke up. I remember hopelessly wishing that he would die. I wanted to finish his food without getting in trouble.
Sometimes, my husband thought he was hungry. But hunger was selfish. It was depraved and ugly and remorseless. Praying to God for the death of your own brother—that was hunger. My husband did not understand.
Maybe it was the heat, so strong that it tricked my mind into thinking I might be starving and would die if I didn’t do something about it. Or maybe it was the baby—the humanity of the tiny embryo inside of me, asking to be fed in the middle of the night the way Adriel and I used to when we were kids. Either way, it made me get up and open the fridge. I almost threw up at the smell of all these foods tightly packed against each other. Beans and tortillas and tacos with rice that must have been two days old. I did all I could not to vomit my guts out.
In the end, I closed the fridge and settled for a cup of ice. The dim moonlight pouring in from the skylight disguised the cubes as crystals. I didn’t wait for them to melt on my tongue. I cracked them open with my teeth, pushing through the searing brain freeze that came only seconds after the first few bites.
I ate viciously and victoriously, like a goddess who eats the hearts of men after battle. I was too high on the illusion of becoming full to notice the ever-growing void inside me.
* * *
I missed the part when Adriel got so grown-up all of a sudden. One day he was my annoying little brother, playing tag with his friends in our backyard, and the next he was a doctor with a rich, supermodel girlfriend and a house with polished ceramic floors and I hadn’t even noticed until we became strangers to each other. He even looked different from the Adriel of my childhood. As children, we were always taken for twins, but he was taller than me now, and his hair, once light and straight, was a dark forest of curls. Though his gray, greedy eyes were the same pair of wolves that used to fight with me over the last bite of our mother’s tortilla. I knew them from my reflection all too well.
During my pregnancy, we made a habit of seeing each other at least once a month. It was Adriel’s discreet way of checking up on me without the formality of his profession. He never could stand my husband and he only pretended to like me because we were siblings, but he developed a strange sense of protectiveness over me in those days, so we used our time together to repair our broken sibling bond. Now that I was about to have a child and he was on the brink of proposing to his girlfriend, we thought it would be good for us. So, we met up every month to eat.
Our greatest ruse was eating. In front of each other, we were the people of napkins and table manners. We didn’t eat with our hands, much less steal glances at each other’s plates, nothing to be found of those starving kids. When the waiters asked us if we wanted dessert, we always said no, even though we asked for extra glasses of water to drown out our lingering appetites. It wasn’t until I started eating ice at midnight that I began to ask Adriel for his napkins.
“Yeah,” he would say and hand them over with no questions asked, though I could tell he grew suspicious after I asked for his straws and receipts too. He never saw me eat them, of course, but I could tell he worried about me. His gaze would soften and he would search my face for a hint of something he could never find. Then, he would hug me lamely, as if I might break if he touched me too hard, and say, “I’ll see you.” But I couldn’t help it. Without thinking, as time went by, I found myself more and more absentmindedly sucking on silverware and chewing on pieces of paper until I could taste the ink on my tongue.
“You look well,” Adriel said, breaking the silence at the table. He had chosen an Italian dish—something with pasta and cilantro that seemed utterly disgusting to me. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m always so tired. Even when I’ve slept for hours.”
“That’s normal,” he said without looking at me. “Don’t worry about it so much.” At times, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get him to be my brother again. He was Dr. Adriel Rosales Avila, not a trace of my brother in sight. He furiously typed out emails on his phone at the table and didn’t meet my eyes. But all this was good for me. I could sneak off to the bathroom when I wanted to and fill the hole in my guts with tiny wads of toilet paper. I could crunch the ice cubes at the bottom of my drink without him paying attention.
“Adriel,” I whispered, knowing that if I didn’t tell him then, I would never get the weight off my chest. “I hate it.”
“Hate what?”
I stretched my hand across the table and reached for his. I thought that if I could touch him for a second he might feel what I felt. The deep, overwhelming hunger that spread from my belly into my spine, infecting my mind. I wanted to eat everything I saw. I was a starving woman.
Adriel squeezed my hand. His skin was white and soft. I could almost imagine it on my tongue, the sweetness of his flesh. “It’s just your hormones,” he said. His nails must have been made of sugar the way they glinted in the light. They reminded me of those delicious sugar skulls during the Day of the Dead season that we begged our parents to buy us. I wanted to bite them. I made myself imagine that one of them stuck between my teeth and opened up the flesh in my gums every time I bit down so that I would stop craving them, but that didn’t help. I knew that the blood would be worth the taste and soon enough, I was craving the blood too.
“Before you start losing your mind over it,” he said, snatching me away from my thoughts, “let me just tell you now that this doesn’t make you a bad mother.”
I never noticed how tall Adriel turned out to be. He was about 190 centimeters, big enough to feed a swarm of rats for several days. I tried to imagine how he was before we went our separate ways, back when his head barely reached the sink and he had to stand on our mother’s vanity stool to reach most things. He didn’t take so much care of himself back then either, not until he met Miss Mexico or whatever the fuck people called her. Now, his hair looked like chocolate-flavored frosting.
The funny thing is that my husband had bought me a small cake to celebrate my third trimester. I spent all night vomiting the chocolate and now, just the sight of chocolate desserts conjured a tremendous wave of nausea that I had trouble suppressing. But not Adriel’s hair, not his nails, or his skin. I imagined that he let me suck on his curls and they would taste like our mother’s hot chocolate at the height of the holiday season.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know what PPD is?”
“Sounds like a disease.”
“It’s depression. I’m just telling you now because you’re exactly the type to let it get to you. It’s not your fault, but if you ever feel like…like…”
“What? Just say it.”
“Like, you know, like you want to hurt yourself—”
“Kill myself you mean?”
“—you’ve got to call me right away.”
“Like you’re going to pick up your phone.”
“I will if you call, but—”
“You never answer—”
“—you never call.”
He stopped talking and signaled the waiter for the check, and I knew that he was done with me. I had been prepared to go back home and fight with my husband all night, but I was just so hungry, I couldn’t bear the thought of not having my stomach acid dissolve one more thing.
“What shampoo do you use?”
* * *
Adriel’s shampoo cost me three hundred pesos so I only bought one, but it lasted me a good while. Nothing teaches you how to survive like hunger does. I recalled the days when our mother taught us how to ration our food so we would have enough to eat for the week when money was low. I poured a little shampoo every morning into a small cup after my husband left for work. I was careful to measure the exact amount and, when I was sure I hadn’t gone over my daily dose, I downed the shampoo like I was taking a shot of tequila. It smelled like cedarwood, petrichor, and freshly laid concrete, but it tasted like metallic slime. But I still craved it. In its golden bottle, it looked like honey-flavored jelly that reminded me of deific ambrosia. The idea of it was more delicious than the taste, but I had to eat it. I knew I would die if I didn’t.
It wasn’t just Adriel’s shampoo I consumed. Almost every kind of soap I laid my hands on enticed me: bar soap, laundry soap, powdered soap, dish soap—I didn’t care.
“Looks like we’ve got mice,” my husband said upon seeing the little trails of powdered soap scattered across the floor. He imagined that, in their search for bread crumbs and maize, they confused our detergent for food and made a mess of things.
“You know, now that you mention it,” I said, pushing around the food on my plate—anything not to eat it. “I have seen a couple of mice running around here sometimes when I’m cleaning.”
“When are they going to learn that it’s poison? You’d think it’d keep them away…”
“No, I think they’re starting to like it. I noticed that they really only eat inedible stuff, you know like, detergent and napkins…”
“Stupid animals.” He sighed. “Well, alright. I’ll get an exterminator in later.”
The next week, we exterminated what wasn’t there. The exterminator set out mouse traps in every corner of the house but when no mice came out, my husband grew impatient.
“He doesn’t even know what he’s doing!” he said about the exterminator.
“There’s no reason to be upset about it.”
“This whole thing is a scam!”
“Fine, it’s a scam, whatever you say. Please just stop yelling at me.”
He kissed me and apologized. “I just don’t want to expose you to that, my love. Our baby will be here soon, we can’t have rodents around.”
Since it meant so much to him, I went out in search of field mice in the patch of forest just a couple kilometers away from the park and laid out my prey’s corpses into the traps. It was only then that my husband felt at ease again and the bones and whiskers of the mice were enough to satiate my hunger for a little while longer.
* * *
Something about the taste of the cotton filling in a sanitary pad made my mouth water. I was proud that my saliva—something so mundane to me—had the power to dissolve notebook paper and flower petals, but I liked the challenge that a small string of cotton had on my tongue. Half of the taste was the image: the way my enzymes would try to suck the elements away, fighting to drag an ounce of nutrition from it, but to no avail. Still, it was a delicious fight.
I was in the middle of a binge when I heard a knock at the door. It was a delicate knock. I thought I imagined it at first, but it came again. I was surprised to see Miss Mexico when I opened the door. She wore a light blue dress that fit her body like a glove, accentuating and outlining her beauty. It was easy to see why Adriel liked her—why any man did. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
When she pulled me into a hug, I panicked. I thought she would be able to tell what I had done and like the ever-righteous woman she was, make one of the men in my life punish me for it. But no. Thankfully, there were no traces of cotton on my face and she did nothing but smile at me the whole time.
“I thought I’d come by,” she said. “You know I’m so busy these days, I’ve hardly had any time to myself, but I wanted to do this in person.”
“Do what?”
Without my invitation, she sat in an equipal in our bleak little living room. I never really cared much about money or having a nice house, not until someone like her came to visit us. I could just tell she was judging me by the way she always looked around the room silently. But not on that day. On that day, she dug excitedly into her bag and held an envelope out to me.
“What is it?”
“An invitation to our wedding! We’re getting married in May.”
“He proposed already?” Adriel hadn’t told me anything about it the last time we spoke. I almost didn’t believe her but the shiny diamond ring on her finger convinced me otherwise.
“He didn’t tell you? It was so romantic! He took me to…”
Miss Mexico had such an elegant mouth, and with her lips that shade of red, it looked like a ripe fruit ready for the harvest. I wanted to kiss her, to bite her lips and taste her. I was instantly jealous that Adriel was going to marry her, that he would have those lips to savor all to himself. She had always been beautiful, but she had never seemed so delicious to me before.
“And how is this little one doing?” She reached over and touched my belly. Her touch was so gentle. Her warmth lingered on my skin even after her hand was gone and I had never wished for something more desperately than I did then. I wanted her touch to be a tangible thing. I wanted it to have a flavor. I wanted to stuff it in my mouth and scratch the inside of my throat with it.
“You’re so lucky to have time to be a mother. Adriel and I want to have babies so badly, but it will be a couple of years until that happens. He wants the timing to be right.”
Adriel always knew how to pick his times—becoming a doctor, getting married, having babies… He could choose the things he wanted and when he wanted them so easily. I didn’t have that luxury. For me, everything happened without my say-so. And I couldn’t say no to people when they said, “It’s time you start working, it’s time you settle down, it’s time you start having children…” But God forbid my little brother have something happen to him at an inopportune moment. And so I ate because eating was the only control over my life I had left.
“Really, I’m jealous of you,” Miss Mexico said with no trace of jealousy in her voice and, even though I knew it was her way of comforting me, it made me hate her even more.
My mother used to tell me that the things I hated were good for me. I would whine and cry because I didn’t want to drink the foul-tasting medicine she used to give me when I was sick even though it was good for me. So, the more I hated Miss Mexico, the more I realized she would be a good thing to eat.
When she left, I opened the invitation and started to nibble on it, focusing my energy on consuming the fancy lettering in her name. I hadn’t eaten for hours.
* * *
I didn’t hate my husband for wanting a baby. It was just the opposite. I was so in love with him that I had forgotten that he was just another man. I was disappointed in him.
I met him when I was still in high school. He was my classmate’s older brother. I don’t know how or why, but the moment I laid eyes on him, I knew I wanted to be buried next to him one day. He had hair as black as night and skin the color of a dying leaf in the midst of autumn. His eyes were so dark that I couldn’t see myself in them and his hands were firm and strong. I loved the way he held onto me like he was restraining himself from ruining my life. I loved the idea that a man could be enamored by me and still respect me. He was nothing like the boys in my class. He was a man. He was beautiful. And, the thing that captivated me most of all, he never had to ask permission for anything, not even to eat.
He proposed when I was still in high school and I dropped out to marry him. I told myself that I was doing the right thing, that if I didn’t do it then, some other girl would steal him from me. It was all a big rush. I strangely remember Adriel telling me that I wouldn’t love him nearly as much when I had to cook and clean and fuck him whenever he demanded me to. But I did love him even when he demanded those things. It was a small price to pay for love. It would have been like this with any other man—at least I was doing it for a man I was in love with.
And because I was in love with him, I cried when I gave birth to our stillborn son. I cried when I held him in my arms. I cried when I kissed the tears off my husband’s cheeks.
In the days after our baby died, my husband would sleep with his back to me and avoid talking to me as much as he could. I was surprised to find myself hurt by this, but it was nothing compared to his pain. That was his first experience of grief but I had known death all my life so, for me, it was nothing.
I started cutting myself. It felt like the right thing to do. It was the only way I could outwardly express my pain and let him know that I felt it too. He never noticed, but I didn’t let that stop me. What started as a pretend act of love developed into an inescapable atonement for my sins.
“Please talk to me,” I said. “You’re not the only one it’s happening to.”
He was lying in bed. It was all he did in those days. Just lie in bed and cry and sleep.
“We were so c-c-close,” he whispered. His voice, jaded and hollow, was unrecognizable to me. He looked like a child who had lost his favorite toy. His eyes were red and his skin had sunken around his cheeks. “How did—how did this even…happen?”
“We need to get you some help. I think you might have PPD.”
“What?”
“It’s depression. Adriel said—”
“How the fuck else am I supposed to feel! My baby is dead!”
“We need to see a therapist. Both of us. It’ll help us feel better.”
“I don’t want to feel better! Just leave me alone!”
“I can’t.” I began to cry. “You’re all I have.”
* * *
Adriel didn’t know how to get rid of me. He wouldn’t say, but I knew that he thought if he pushed me away, I would kill myself. So our meetings didn’t stop. For years, we watched our youth slip away as we sat in restaurants and food stands. We drank to the dirty and hungry days of our childhood and complained about the struggles of adulthood.
“I would rather starve than have to deal with difficult patients,” he would say. “They’re such a headache.”
“I would rather starve than spend my days fixing things that will always go back to the way they were.”
But contrary to my words, I gave up the act of eating like a civilized woman. Adriel kept living the lie, but not me. I would tear apart meat with my teeth and gulp down whole bottles of beer until I couldn’t understand anything anymore. I asked for seconds and sometimes thirds and I ate it all like it would be my last meal. Adriel didn’t try to stop me. He just looked at me and smiled sadly. “It’s good that you’re eating again,” he would say. “Your body needs it.”
I saw him for the last time during the rainy season on a day when the sky was threatening a flood. Adriel either hadn’t noticed it or hadn’t cared because he didn’t suggest driving me home or for us to go inside the restaurant to stay out of the inevitable rain.
“Hey, listen. I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a while now.” His tone was serious but he was smiling. His eyes sparkled in a way I had forgotten they could. “Aurora is pregnant,” he said. “We’re expecting the baby in the winter.”
I just knew there was going to be a storm, but I wanted the rain to drench me. I wanted it to wash me away, to wipe every last trace of my existence.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but Aurora didn’t want me to say anything before thirteen weeks. I know it’s soon and all, but we were hoping you and Héctor would be the godparents—hey, is something wrong?”
My hand was in the air before I knew I was doing it. My ears popped with the sound of thunder. I slapped him so hard that I left a handprint on his cheek. My hand hurt and my eyes watered. “You’re so fucking insensitive! How dare you!”
I wasn’t made to be a mother, but hearing him say it—hearing him choose it and being happy about it was all it took for my hunger to finally break me.
Adriel held his hand to his cheek. He stared at me, his gaze was as hard as stone. He was ready to destroy me, but then I started to cry and his anger dissolved.
“I-I thought you would be happy for me.”
“Well, I’m not! I don’t want to see you anymore!”
He drank the last bit of his beer and stood up. “Fine,” he said. He had tears in his eyes. “If that’s what you want.” He took me home and drove away before I made it to the entrance.
I didn’t go inside. I spent the afternoon drinking the rain and praying that my brother’s baby would die too.
I never saw him again.
* * *
My husband was never the same again. My guilt at seeing his heartache was so powerful that I even suggested we try to conceive again, but he always shut me down. He didn’t even want to fuck me anymore. He didn’t want to talk about it with me. He didn’t want to think about it. Five years had gone by and he still had trouble sleeping at night.
Sometimes a craving would wake me in the middle of the night, but since my husband was always awake, I could only manage to go to the bathroom and drink my urine. It looked like chamomile tea and I had only just developed the craving for it that year, but the bitter salty taste didn’t sit well in my stomach. I drank it only when the hunger threatened to tear my stomach open, and even then, I didn’t really enjoy it.
One night, I dared to reach for my husband’s hand. The air was so hot that we were both sweating, but I didn’t care. I wanted him. I laced my fingers with his and brought his hand to my lips. I couldn’t stop myself from tasting him. The kisses I planted on his skin developed into hickeys by morning, but he didn’t pull away from me.
“Tell me to stop or to keep going,” I begged as streams of morning sunlight poured through the skylight. “Please, tell me what you’re thinking.”
I hadn’t seen the tears forming in his eyes until they spilled down his temples as he continued staring at the ceiling. “I just want to know… Why me? Out of… Out of everyone… What did I do to deserve this?”
“Nothing.”
“There has to be a reason.”
“It isn’t your fault.”
“No, there has to be a reason! Otherwise…”
I closed my eyes and expelled the breath in my lungs. “This is my fault.”
He sat up slowly and turned to face me. I didn’t hear his voice, but the vibrations in the air sunk into my skin when his lips parted to say, “What do you mean?”
And I explained as best as I could. I explained the pain and the hunger I knew he would never experience. I wanted him to understand why I had to eat the things I ate, to understand why the hunger never ceased.
When I finished, he broke down and wept. He didn’t hit me or yell at me. He didn’t have to. His tears said it all. No matter how much time he spent by my side or how much heartache he endured, he would never understand.
Elizabeth Monreal is a young Mexican-American writer based in Las Vegas.