Hungry Daughters
HUNGRY DAUGHTERS
by Sydney Flaherty
All morning my mom complained about the smell in the alley. She fanned the air in front of her nose, and I copied her movements. With our noses pointed high, I hoped we looked the same.
The summer I was four, she let me play in the alley every day. She’d bring out an old, folded lawn chair and sip lemon water as I drew with chalk. The alley was always empty, so she would leave me in the road occasionally to take a call or switch the laundry. Still, she watched me through the window in our kitchen.
I remember her leaving to empty the dishwasher, plugging her nose. I continued with my chalk until a heavy gust of wind came. The smell clawed its way into my nose, filling my throat. My mouth watered. I stumbled towards it on the uneven pavement. I filled with the scent in heavy, deep breaths.
A few houses down the street I stopped above a dead squirrel, dried from the sun. It was in the middle of the street; tire tracks shaped its body into grooves. Its fur was matted and dyed red with cracking blood. I pet it tentatively, like it was a dog known to bite. I was so hungry.
I pried it from the pavement slowly. It was stiff and I held it from the tail. There was a hole in my stomach, which I had only noticed then. It felt real, trembling. A string of drool leaked from the corner of my mouth.
I touched the paws to my mouth shyly, like a first kiss. It took energy to rip them from the body and my teeth hurt with the exertion. The fur was soft on the roof of my mouth. After the first bite I started to eat faster, and low, deep groans echoed out from my throat. The colors around me became brighter, and everything seemed to focus. The meat was chewy and warm. I sucked on the bones and swallowed a few whole. Once I was done, I licked my fingers and the ground the squirrel had laid on.
I sat, exhausted. It felt like I was floating. My mom came out of the house soon afterwards and yelled at me for going down the street, scared and angry. She spat on her finger and rubbed a bit of the squirrel's blood off my cheek, “you have to stop playing in the dirt, it’s unladylike.” She made me go inside and wash my hands. She counted to twenty from behind me as I did it.
—
My mom never smiled with her teeth because she thought it made her look ugly. She was stern 3 with me, as stern as she was with herself. She made fun of my outfits and never let our hair touch the water when we went to the beach. In everything I did, I anticipated her opinions.
As often happens with mothers and daughters, I could not draw a line where I stopped, and she began. As I grew, I adopted her habits subconsciously: we liked the same music and stores. As often happens with mothers and daughters, I hated myself as I hated her—passionately and silently.
Occasionally, when she would adjust my hair or scold me, I thought of the dismembered squirrel. I remembered the feelings it had evoked like a friend.
On my thirteenth birthday, my mom threw me a party at our house. I barely talked to anyone at school; she thought this was the perfect solution. She made the invitations I handed out in study hall—pink with little bows.
We made a stack of cupcakes topped with globs of bright pink and purple frosting, littered with sprinkles. The heavy platter was right in the middle of the dining table.
During the party, I stayed near my mom while my classmates talked to each other. Occasionally I glanced at the platter, staring up at the cupcakes with anticipation and saliva pooling on my tongue. I thought those cupcakes might make me feel the way I had that day in the alley. I daydreamed about my taste buds opening and expanding.
When I blew out the candles, my mom took photos, smiling so big.
I chose a pink cupcake I had decorated especially for myself with more frosting than the others, and big chunks of chocolate on top. I opened my mouth wider with each bite I took. Sugar melted and stuck to the insides of my cheeks. I wanted to fill the hole, to feel satisfied.
I reached for another, licking the frosting from my lips, but my mom’s hand grabbed my wrist tightly. Under her breath, she told me I should wait thirty minutes to tell if I was still hungry. My wrist ached. After thirty minutes, she was cleaning up, and all the cupcakes had been eaten.
Our house was a sanctuary of unspoken rules and rituals. We straightened our hair and poked our eyes with mascara wands every morning. It was a house filled with restraint. We skipped breakfast, we forgot about lunch, we ate salads and three bites of unseasoned chicken for dinner. My hunger grew every time I looked at her.
—
I was excited to go to college and leave our house. When we arrived, she made my bed and forced strangers to take pictures of us outside my dorm. She said she was proud of me.
The first night without her, I went to the dining hall alone and felt overwhelmed. I clung to the safety of the salad bar. I knew not to eat raw meat; I knew it was gross. Still, I yearned to feel as I had in the alley: content, used entirely.
One night when my roommate was gone, I went to the dining hall alone and got a plate from every station. I wanted to fill myself as I had once been filled: to the brim and with abandon. I stayed for hours, sampling every cake and filling cups with soft serve. My tongue felt thick and heavy. I imagined all these foods, drinks, and sauces mixing in my stomach, becoming one big swamp of half-digested ingredients. For a moment, I thought I would return to the fullness.
When the dining hall closed, I got a to-go box and brought it to my room. I ate until I threw up in the communal bathroom of my dorm. And still, this emptiness, this shroud covering everything. I looked at my failure in the toilet and cried.
The smell was sweet and acidic. I thought back to the squirrel, the violence of it, the disgust. Quickly, I plunged my hand into the toilet, filling my palm with water and vomit. It dripped down my wrist, cooling my body. My lips quivered and I gagged prematurely. Still, I wanted to be full. I opened my mouth and dripped the vomit down my throat. I could only swallow a few handfuls before everything came up again.
I kneeled on the tile, vomit covering my forearms and chin. I imagined my mom outside the stall, looking at my shoes. In my head, she was not yelling or laughing. Instead, she was filled with embarrassment, which made her body appear bloated.
After that night, I gave up on fullness. It felt like I couldn’t clean the vomit and squirrel blood off me. I didn’t want to be desperate, or gross, anymore. I learned to be comfortable with the hole in my stomach.
—
My mom drove sixteen hours to my graduation. She sat through the four-hour ceremony and cheered extra loud when I crossed the stage. I could see her perfectly, even though she was high in the bleachers.
Afterwards she took me to a fancy restaurant. We got a table by the window with a candle in its center. The menus were large and ornate.
When the waiter came, she ordered the house salad, so I did too. I had graduated, and was still following everything she did, noting every breath. The waiter brought bread and oil to the table and she moved it to the far corner. My stomach twisted in hunger, but I didn’t move. We spoke pleasantly; she had a doctor's appointment next week.
When our food came, I counted how many bites she took. Three, four, she stopped after five. I stopped after four. I knew she was counting too. We put our hunger on the table, dissecting our emptiness like the insides of a frog. I was my mom’s rival now. Each minute, the hole inside of me shook with more intensity.
—
She got sick a year later. I had gotten a job at a marketing firm in New York, but I moved back home to be with her. It was second nature, like birds migrating in the winter. I moved not because we had no close relatives or that I felt particularly bad for her. It was only that she needed me, and there I was.
I watched her body as it weakened, so much like how she had watched me grow. Her body’s deterioration matched the widening of the emptiness inside of me. When I saw roadkill, my stomach lurched. I dreamed of dead things.
Two months after I moved back, she entered hospice. The nurses and I moved a bed into the living room because she couldn’t climb the stairs to her room. I hated nights because that was when the nurses left, and it was only us.
One night, I woke up to her voice yelling my name. I ran down the stairs, scared something had happened. In the dim light she looked even smaller, shadows covering the hallows of her cheeks.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” she told me, looking away.
I placed one arm under her back and one under her knees. When I lifted her, the hard edges of her bones pressed against my skin. I watched her through the crack in the bathroom door, making sure she didn’t fall. I thought of her, looking out through the kitchen window. Our love hung in the air we shared.
—
I alone watched her body burn through the window at the crematorium. There, every surface became liquid, dripping and mixing uncontrollably. I had no benchmark from which to understand myself anymore. They gave me her ashes in a simple, black urn. Afterwards, everything was quiet and I went on a drive just to hear the wind hitting the windshield.
The night was clear, and everything was covered in blue. The hole in my stomach felt wide and growing. I accelerated and felt a jolt; all at once a few drops of blood sprawled across the window, and a deer lay on the road in front of my car.
Blood pooled around the deer’s stomach; some of her intestines sprawled out in the moonlight. I kneeled over her. She was little, with white dots along her back, but her stomach was round. No one was around. I groaned, a sound from the back of my throat.
Shaking, I walked back to the car. Pain emanated from deep inside my stomach. I reached my hand to the passenger seat for the object of my hunger. My fingers began to steady, tracing the smooth steel of her urn.
When I opened the lid, her ashes emitted a sterilized smell. I breathed it deeply, gasping. Dipping my hand into the urn, she felt warm and soft, like sand at the beach. I ate her out of my open palm.
The ash was rough and granular. Its small pebbles, bits of bone, snapped between my molars. The course texture rubbed against the insides of my cheeks, making them bleed. Gray streaks formed around my lips. I did not think of vomit or squirrel blood; there was no disgust. I could only think of the warmth circling my body.
The small gray particles tucked themselves into the divots between my teeth, the folds of my mouth. My saliva mixed with the ash, creating a thick slime. I slurred my mom’s name.
I ate faster, both hands diving into the urn and bringing her to my mouth like a dance. I took large swallows, filling my whole throat with her so that I could barely breathe. My vision ebbed in and out of focus, and the moon felt hot on my skin.
My stomach bulged as though she could break out of me, bursting from my pores. She tasted like cupcakes and sunscreen, like pavement licked clean. My eyes rolled back and my body glowed.
When I reached the bottom of the urn, I lifted it to my lips and tilted it up to the sky. She fell into the back of my mouth. I was full.
—
The house was quiet when I returned. My fullness was already fading, and the hole twisted and expanded. I had hoped that in eating her it would disappear. But it stayed like her dishes in the cabinets, her ghost inside me, right under my skin.
I washed my hands in the kitchen sink and caught my reflection in the window. Ash covered my mouth, and my eyes were big and empty. I looked just like her.
In the window, a tear dripped down her face.
Sydney Flaherty is a recent graduate of Emerson College, where she received a degree in writing, literature, and publishing. She is from the United States and has recently been published in Exclamation Mark Lit and Concrete Magazine and mainly writes body horror fiction.
