Women’s Hunger

By Sam Veres

 I once saw a play about hunger. It was in a dream, really, but I wrote a review, nonetheless. The play was about women’s hunger. This sensation must not be confused with the hunger of other things, hunger for other things. No, women’s hunger paints over the tick tacky scuffs on walls, well-worn through use. Women’s hunger has a slight pain to it, an aching so consuming it can replace the feeling of fullness altogether. 

Women’s hunger wears clothing too small and too tight; in fact, the clothing doesn’t fit at all because it belonged to a time before children, before the stretching of bones and skin, so it is positioned to lay over the naked body so that one can pretend and erase the too-fleshy structure beneath. 

Women’s hunger feeds the cats in the attic before itself. Women’s hunger curves the treachery of the uterus and rib cages beneath heavier things, all the while asking for more weight. Women’s hunger is its last words. Women’s hunger is rarely spoken at all. Women’s hunger swallows cotton balls and marbles, anything that can slide past the lump of the throat, swallows the words of men drifting from two tables over because, 

“Does she really need all that?” 

Women’s hunger hides in the back of the closet behind the torn denim and dresses too short, too clunky, too modest, too slutty, too, too, too … too broken, but not broken enough to match the body it conceals. Women’s hunger grants a second helping to grandsons but hesitates when granddaughters ask for more because, 

“Does she really need all that?” 

Women’s hunger loves to bake but never for itself, loves the smell of chocolate cake and the sting of paper cuts from printed recipes, sometimes on purpose to distract from the terrible act of wanting. Women’s hunger shifts and crawls through the intestines, slinking and sliding until it convinces itself that it must be a tapeworm. Women’s hunger shrinks and grows but is always there. Women’s hunger breaks every nail scrubbing empty dishes, slamming fingers into car doors as punishment for finishing a medium-sized milkshake on a two-hour car drive, only to stop on the side of the road to choke it back up. Women’s hunger feels unclean. 

Women’s hunger is hereditary, a phenomenon amongst the species of womankind. Women’s hunger is taught, passed down like a cancer of the stomach, the skin, the body. Women’s hunger kills. Women’s hunger pretends it is anything but. Women’s hunger can never be anything else.

I wrote in my review that the play was brilliant—romantic and heartfelt. I was the only one in the audience, but every seat in the theater was filled. I admit that I only saw half the performance because, by the end of the first act, everyone in the crowd was throwing up.