Hunger
by Michelle
Sagara
Rosdan Press, 2011
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
SMASHWORDS EDITION: 978-1-927094-22-8
Copyright 2011 by Michelle Sagara
All rights reserved
Cover design by Anneli West,
Four
Corners Communication
ghost: photoshop brush by
obsidiandawn.com
“Hunger” Copyright 1993 by Michelle
Sagara. First appeared in Christmas Ghosts, ed. Mike Resnick
and Martin H. Greenberg.
Smashwords Edition License
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Novels by Michelle Sagara
The Book of the Sundered
Into the Dark Lands
Children of the Blood
Lady of Mercy
Chains of Darkness, Chains of Light
Chronicles of Elantra
Cast in Shadow
Cast in Courtlight
Cast in Secret
Cast in Fury
Cast in Silence
Cast in Chaos
Cast in Ruin
Cast in Peril
The Queen of the Dead
Silence*
Touch**
Grave**
*Forthcoming in 2012
**Forthcoming
This story owes a large debt to one of my
oldest friends. I personally love Christmas, even though it’s mired
in commercialism and its own specific type of family angst. My
earliest memories of the season are of my mother helping us to make
construction paper chain links—large ones—one for each day leading
up to Christmas. We made a ritual of cutting a link each night in
December before we went to sleep, and so many of our wishes and
daydreams were tied up in what Santa Claus would bring.
But in university, I discovered that this
sentimental attachment, shared by so many of my friends in their
own idiosyncratic ways, wasn't universal. The heart of this story
is taken from one of them, and it was a reminder—to me—that it’s a
season of plenty only for those of us who don't worry about the
little things.
Like, say, starvation. But it added a layer
of melancholy to the season that has never quite left me, and also
a certain sense of gratitude, when I watch my own children in the
safety and security of our present.
* * *
I read this story twice in Calgary, just
before my oldest son was born. I was visibly very pregnant at the
time, but well enough to travel, and I went—with Tanya Huff—to a
Calgary convention. Part of the Canada Council funding that offset
the cost of our travel came from the library readings we did
outside of the convention. Because I was reading with Tanya—this
really does sound like a theme in the early years—I had taken this
story with me. It was simple, it was the right length, and it was
definitively not clever.
I think this makes me sound humorless, in
hindsight, but I’ll live with that. At the convention, however, one
woman literally fled the reading in tears. I assume that something
in the story triggered something, because I don’t think it’s the
story itself, but I never found her to apologize.
However, it was, once again, written for a
Christmas anthology. I miss writing for those, sometimes, because
right or wrong, there is so much tied up in family memories of
Christmas; in hopes, dreams, disappointment and a sense of the
season from all angles: the naive child’s, the anxious adult’s, the
parents who want Christmas to maintain some of the magic and
mystery that we ourselves remember.
It is interesting to reread this now, though.
The mention of technology dates the story, even if no actual dates
are present. I even considered changing those, but resisted because
if I did that, I would never stop.
I used to hate Christmas more than any other
time of the year.
Not because of the commercialism. Hell, with
my VCR and my laser disk player and my stereo sound system and car
and you name it, I’m just as much a consumer as anyone else. And I
didn’t hate the hypocrisy of it, at least not in the later years,
because I understood it. I didn’t hate the religious overtones, and
I’m not a religious man; I didn’t hate the idiotic television
specials or the hype or the gathering of the family.
I hated Christmas because every Christmas
after my fifth year, I saw her.
Let me tell you about her, really briefly;
it’ll make the rest of it all make sense. Well, at least I hope it
will.
* * *
When I was five, I went travelling with my
parents. We had three weeks at Christmas—and three weeks, at least
to a five year old, are forever. My dad didn’t like snow much, and
he especially didn’t like to shovel it, so when we chose a place to
travel, we went south. Fifty years ago and more, South America
wasn’t a really civilized place; hell, in many places it’s pretty
primitive now. But it had warm weather, and it had lots of people
fussing over my dad, which made him happy; it had good food, and
Christmas was still celebrated.
Of course, it wasn’t Christmas like here, and
there wasn’t any tree, and there certainly wasn’t much in the way
of presents—I got more than anyone else—but it was happy enough,
until she came to the window of the dining room. The place we
stayed, it was a big house—a friend of my dad’s owned it, but I
don’t remember him well. It had lots of servants and lots of land,
and huge rooms. I ran about in it for days; I thought I could get
lost.
Well, I saw her at the windows of the house
while we were eating. She was thin and scrawny, with sun-darkened
skin and these wide, night eyes that seemed to open up forever. Her
fingers were bony; I remember that because she lifted her hand and
touched the glass as if she wanted to reach through it. I called
out to her, but she was gone, and I grabbed my mother’s hand and
dragged her from the table to the window.
“It’s nothing,” my mother said, and drew me
back. But I knew better.
“She’s hungry,” I said. “It’s Christmas.” As
if those two words meant something, meant anything. I didn’t
understand the glance that my mother gave my father, but he shook
his head: No.
They didn’t have doorbells in that huge, old
house; they had something that you banged instead, hard. So I knew
it was her at the door when I heard that grand brass gong start to
hum. I slipped out from under my mother and ran towards the door.
Because I knew she was hungry, you see, and it was Christmas, and
of course we would feed her.
The servants didn’t see it that way, of
course. Neither did our host. To them, she was just another one of
the countless beggars that came at inopportune moments. And I even
understand it, sometimes—you don’t see me giving away all my
hard-earned money to every little street urchin with a hand held
out.
But whether I understand it or not doesn’t
matter. Because I feel it with a five year old’s shock and anger,
after all these years. They drove her
away
. I didn’t
understand what she was saying, of course, because I didn’t know
any Spanish back then. But I know now, because I learned enough to
try to speak to her later.
I’m hungry. Please. I’m hungry
. Like
a prayer or a litany. She had a thin, raspy voice; she coughed once
or twice although it wasn’t cold. I could see her ribs. I could see
the manservant shove her, hard, from the open door. Well, I was
five and I wasn’t too smart then, so I picked up the nearest thing
and started hitting him with it and hollering a lot. It was an
umbrella, and a five year old can’t damage more than pride.
And I just kept shouting, “It’s Christmas!
It’s Christmas!” until my mother came to take me away. My father
was furious. The host was embarrassed, and made a show of
remonstrating the servants, who were only doing their job.
I went back to the table like a mutinous
prisoner, and I was stubborn enough that I didn’t eat a thing. Not
that night, anyway. My mother was angry at my father, that much I
remember. Dinner kind of lost its momentum that night because of
the tantrum of one half-spoiled boy.
And Christmas lost its magic for that
boy.
* * *
Maybe it wouldn’t have, had she stayed away.
Maybe the toys and the food and the lights on the trees would have
sucked him right back into family comfort. Maybe Santa’s lap and
Santa’s ear would have encouraged him to feel the exact same way he
always had. I’ll never know. Because in the winter of my sixth
year, tucked under the covers and dreaming of Santa, I heard her
tapping at my windows.
Back then, I had my own small room on the
second storey of our house, and when I heard the tapping at the
window, well, I thought it was monsters or something. I gathered my
blankets around me like a shield, yanked ‘em off the bed, and then
trundled, slowly, over to the window.
And I saw her standing there, with her gaunt,
darkened cheeks and her wide, wide eyes. She was rapping the glass
with her thin, bony fingers and she said the same words over and
over again. I think I screamed, because I could see the northern
stars blinking right through her, and I knew what that meant, back
then.
My mother came first—she always did, moving
like a quiet shadow. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her,
pointing—and my mother looked at our reflection in my window and
shook her head softly. You were having a nightmare, she said. Go
back to sleep.
But it’s her, I said. It’s her, can’t you see
her? She’s dead, mom, and she’s hungry. I don’t want her to eat
me.
She’s not here, she’s not dead. Hush. My
mother held me in her arms as if she were a strong, old cradle. And
I cried. Because over my mother’s whispers, I could hear the voice
of the hungry girl.
* * *
It didn’t stop there, of course. Sometime in
my teenage years, I stopped being afraid that she would eat me.
Instead, I started being afraid I was mad, so I never talked about
the dead, starving peasant, and my mom and dad were just as happy
to let the matter drop. But she came every Christmas midnight, and
stayed for a full twelve days, lingering at the window, begging me
to feed her. I even left the table once and threw open the door,
but all I got was snow and a gust of wind. She didn’t come into the
warmth.
She was there every year. Every day. She was
there from the minute I went to college to the minute I graduated.
She was there when I finally left home, found my wife, and settled
down. It wasn’t my parents she haunted, although they wouldn’t feed
her. It was me. I even railed against the injustice of it
all—
I
was the only person who’d even cared about her that
night—but hunger knows no reason, and she came to me.
* * *
I have three children—little Joy, Alexander,
David. Well, I guess they aren’t that little anymore; fact is,
they’re old enough now that they don’t mind being called little. I
consider it a miracle that they survived their teenage years—I
don’t know why God invented teenagers.
But Melissa and I, we had four children. You
see that black and white photo in the corner there? That baby was
my last child, my little girl. She didn’t see three. It’s funny,
you know. They talk a lot about a mother’s grief and a mother’s
loss, but Melissa said her good-byes maybe a year or two after Mary
died, and me—well, I guess I still haven’t. It’s because I never
saw her as a teenager. It’s because I can’t remember the sleepless
nights and the crying and the throwing up.
I just remember the way she used to come and
help me work, with her big, serious eyes and her quiet, serious
nod. She’d spread the newspapers from here to the kitchen, same as
she saw me do with my drafting plans. I had more time with her than
I had with the older kids—maybe I made more time—and I used to sit
with her on weekends when Melissa did her work. Mary’d sleep in my
lap. Draw imaginary faces on my cheek.
I remember what she looked like in the
hospital.
But I’m losing the story, about Christmas.
Let me get back to it.
Mary died when I was thirty-five. Died in the
spring, in a hospital thirty miles north of here. I couldn’t
believe anything could grow after she died. I hated the sight of
all that green. Took it as an insult. Cosmic indifference. Come
winter, everything was darker, which suited me best.
