As seen in Monstrous Appetites by The Bowen Street Press
My mum calls them tall tales and my dad calls them fibs. I call my parents liars. They lie about everything, about what we’re having for dinner, about who’s place we’re going to for Christmas. Mum said high school will become easier once I get used to it, Dad said the girls in math class just need to get to know me better. Liars.
My sister is one too. A liar, that is. She lies that she eats her breakfast, but it was never served. She lies that her school lunches go through her mouth rather than through the school cafeteria’s bins. And she lies that she eats her dinner, when actually she’s just dropped it below her feet under the dining table, waiting for our dog to come collect the scraps.
And so the lies pile up like my sister’s dinners at our feet. Mountains of untruths and untouched lasagnes that we all pretend we can’t see. Because we don’t have a dog, no wagging tail to hide the evidence. That was a lie too, an empty promise. Empty beer bottles, empty dinner plates, empty promises. A house so empty of noise we walk around with our hands on our ears. Just so we can hear ourselves think.
But now the noise has become too loud and the empty bottles too plenty. My sister’s limbs have disappeared, twigs have appeared in their place. Her ankles creak louder than the stairs she has to climb to hide her breakfast in her bedroom. The house has begun to creak too, cracks appearing at the seams and in the corners of every room. Nothing under this roof can withstand the weight of dysfunction.
Dysfunction lays heavy, even when sisters are growing lighter. “Older sisters shouldn’t weigh less than their younger ones,” I try to tell my mother, but she just tells me not to worry. She offers me words like “metabolism” and “puberty” and “normal for this age” that sound a whole lot like excuses. Excuses to problems and ignorance to issues, she asks me to go to bed and asks my father for one more glass.
Ignorance is bliss, my father’s face says, but knowledge is power, I reply in my frown. I thought I told you to go to bed, my mother’s eyes shout at me from across the room, darting between the open bottle of chardonnay and the direction of my bedroom. Conversations this loud should be illegal, I think, especially when no one’s opening their mouths.
Whether my parents actually know what it is to have worries or just wish that I would stop with mine, they sought a solution to the quietness of this home-less house. A distraction from dysfunction and a band aid to bruises, my parents spent money to fix a pickle that can’t be bribed. “Whoever said you can’t buy happiness,” my father bellowed through a clenched mouth of smile and a clenched fist of lead, “forgot about puppies.”
The puppy, the one that my parents are so sure is proof of store-bought happiness, is Ana. Ana has a stump for a tail and moustache for a smile. I’ve never had a dog before. I’ve patted and cuddled and scratched the behinds of ears of dogs that belonged to others, but this is the first time another beating heart is my own. A beating heart and a wagging stump and a smiling moustache, all to call mine.
The caring didn’t stop, not like my parents thought it would, it only shifted in shape. I’m just a couple of years aged out of youthful carelessness, into a world of nothing but caring. Caring how long my woollen school skirt should be, if high ponytails are still a thing, if anyone will want to fill the empty seat next to me in math class. Caring about my parents and about my sister. Caring about the empty wine bottles and the empty dinner plates. About the lips of the bins at home that are screaming with beer stubbies and untouched lamb chops.
And the caring only grows. I’m thirteen and my cares are only ever growing, that’s all that they do. They grow into the shoes that are too big for my feet, into the garden and between the weeds. They grow into my dreams and into my nightmares, hiding in the closet and under the bed. They grow into every corner and crack and crevice of my angst-filled existence. My cares are not replaced. They do not take in turns to fill the space in my mind that is only ever full. Instead, they fight for attention in a room of narcissistic problems, all proclaiming they’re the most important.
But of all the cares that fog this brain, a new one has begun to sprout its seedlings. A new care that came with Ana. Unlike the clouds in my mind that make it sometimes hard to breathe, this care has begun to grow in my gut. Warm and electric, it’s adrenaline and it’s power. I see that smiling moustache and that wagging stump and my fists clench and my face pinches and I can’t help but launch my body toward this beast that is all mine. And this care, this desire, this fearsome want, is so new and so unfamiliar and comes from somewhere so deep within me. I’m unsure what it is, this want that I possess. Is it to squeeze this mutt so tight, to wrap my arms around her softly carpeted frame until her eyes pop through their sockets and her tongue pokes through her beard? This want is so instinctual, so animalistic. I’m scared that one day I’ll be unable to control myself, I’m scared I’ll cause her to explode. And if I don’t, I’ll probably cause it of myself.
My parents call me young and my schoolmates call me dumb but I’d like to think that I’m not as stupid as my thirteen-year-old face makes me seem. The arrival of Ana could not have possibly made things right; nor made things better, nor made things at the very least more tolerable, like I wanted it to. This miracle cure hasn’t taken long to prove to be only a painless placebo, an inevitable disappointment. The dog has come yet the problems have not gone. Conversations are still held through slurred words and only once the sun is down. Meals still go uneaten despite the emptiness of dinner plates. My woollen school skirt is still too long or too short or whatever it is this week that I’m not keeping up with.
The disappointment does not lie in the things that are not made better, but in the things that were things that no longer seem to be things at all. My sister’s appetite is still non-existent; my parents still drink in darkness; we still do not talk. Ana hasn’t fixed any of that. Rather, she provides a buffer to the dysfunction, a cushion to the chaos, a way to distract us from the mountain of crumbs and untruths that we sweep under the table when we think no one is looking. The things that were things are probably still things. But now I only care for one thing, and that one thing is everything.
Ana sleeps outside my room, not more than a couple of meters from me in my bed, in a little round bed of her own. For the first couple of weeks, I’d wake in the morning to scramble out of consciousness and pull open my bedroom door. I wanted to make sure I hadn’t dreamt up the one thing that made it worth waking for. And every morning she’d be there looking up at me with her bearded smile and moon-shaped eyes that rose like the Autumn sun.
The tram ride home from school has quickly become unbearable. Sniggers from the other kids as I pull at the hem of my skirt are suddenly tolerable compared to the pain of patience that I have to endure every minute I’m away from my beast. I sway to stay balanced between school backpacks and briefcases. I sway with the tram and with the clouds in my mind. The only thing that keeps me from falling is the puddle of pup that I know is waiting for me to get home.
The girls at school don’t talk to me and the girls at home don’t listen. There’s only one girl who looks like she’s trying. She hears me but does not understand, and that’s more than the rest give me combined. She doesn’t possess the skill of listening, and by no fault of her own. The fault lays in the simple biology of us existing as different beasts. Beasts that can’t listen to each other, that can never fully understand what it is the other is saying. But beasts that will always try. This one beast will hear me, no matter if the words never translate. The three other beasts seem to always have more important things to be doing with their ears. Like watching the horses, or the dogs, or watching SVU. Like listening to the same sad pop song from 2008. Like waiting for the sound of the garbage man to come collect the evidence.
It is only when my beast makes an effort to talk that the others hear us. They hear us and they ignore us and they tell us to be quiet, so that their ears can further busy themselves with issues of more importance.
And so I rely on that Autumn sun, the one that rises to meet me every morning. And like the perfect April day, all I want to do is drink Ana up. I want to eat her whole, to swallow her paws and digest her whiskers. Whatever sunshine that she is so miraculously blessed with, I want it too.
But now the winter sun rises, but it’s not in Ana’s eyes. It’s in the air and in the house, a chill that dances through the front door every time someone leaves. Winter brings tension; it brings earlier closing times at the pub. It brings more tea but more wine, and maybe now some whiskey. Winter brings shivers, down my spine and also down Ana’s. An excuse, I reason with my parents, for her to sleep in my room. It’s already dark and they’re already drunk and so I ask them at the perfect time. They slur a “sure,” mumble a “whatever”. And so Ana’s oval-shaped bed is now at the foot of my square one.
They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but what do they know? The closer Ana is to me, my fonder heart only grows fonder-er. So bloody fond that Ana doesn’t even spend half a night at the foot of my bed, for she is curled up next to me within hours. She plays little spoon and I play the whole dam cutlery set, cradling her like knives and forks and all the rest.
When Ana is next to me at night, when the reverberations of her heart line up with my own, when all that she feels like is an extension of who I am; that’s when I finally feel safe. Safe from school hallway taunts and prying eyes on trams. Safe from slurred talking and half-talking and no talking at all. Safe from worries of my sister, and worries of my mother, and worries for the both of them together because they never seem to worry about each other. When my heart echoes Ana’s, all that needs to be worried about is curled up safely in my arms. A soul so warm I can feel it in my own. An energy so perfect I can taste it on my lips.
And I can, really, truly, taste it on my lips. Beneath the bristle-haired fur and sandpapered skin, I can taste an energy that feels too familiar to not be my own. But it is mine, I remind myself, she is all mine. And I love her so much. I love her more than she can ever understand, more than human English or dog language can ever lose in translation.
Does she know that? Can she know that? How can she, with her bearded lips and canine mind. How can she ever understand how much a part of me she has become?
I press my lips further, further into the part of me that is a part of her that she doesn’t know is a part of me. The whole of me. Between her shoulders, below her neck. Just underneath her collar. The teeth graze her skin. Or is it my skin. I don’t know whose skin is what anymore. And it almost doesn’t matter whose skin is what when my teeth stretch around further, when my jaw widens beyond its reach. When in my mouth I taste the very thing that I have yearned for since the Autumn sun first rose in this house. The only sun that can ever reach the corners of a house that hadn’t yet known light. Hadn’t yet experienced the warmth that a house can feel when it becomes a home.
I pull away, from her and from me, with a piece of us between my teeth. We stay there for a moment, in my room and in my mouth. And then I swallow.
Ana had been a part of me from the first day she arrived, but only now do we exist as one. She’s in me, she’s a part of me, she is me. She’s in my veins and in my brain. She’s lining my stomach and circulating my heart. Every cell, every molecule, every atom to split and exist within the confines of this flesh cage now lives with her. She now lives in me.
Ana doesn’t struggle, she doesn’t even move. Maybe this is what she expects, maybe she’s always known her fate. I reach in for a little more, not so much a taste this time but a big fucking bite. A bite of her back and a chew of her tail. With each munch and a crunch Ana’s fate becomes my own. With a lick of my lips with the remainder of what were once hers, there’s no more Ana beside me. Ana is in me; Ana is a part of me now.
Call them tall tales or fibs, this house is full of them. Liars, that is. Full of liars and full of lies, ones that pile up at our feet. And now we’ve no way to dispose the scraps, no dog to feed full with fractured untruths and broken promises. But the scraps mean nothing to me anymore, I’m not starving for a meal nor desperate for a drink. “I’m full,” I tell my parents at the offer of bolognese.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be hungry again”.
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