Free Hunger by Michelle Sagara Page B

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.
    We went to Mary’s grave—at least I did—once a
week or more. Took flowers, little things. Near Christmas, I took a
wreath, because she liked to play with them. I’ve heard all about
how people think graveyards are a waste of space and greenery, and
maybe they’re right. But I know that having that site, where little
Mary rested in the earth, was a boon. I’d come to it weekly like a
pilgrim to a shrine, making these little offerings. Talking to her
like a crazy person. You don’t know what it’s like, to lose a
child. I hope you never know it.
    That Christmas, when I was thirty-six, my
regular little visitor came, as usual, at midnight. I wasn’t in bed
then; Melissa and I were wrapping our presents, late as always,
both of us crying and trying not to look at the fireplace, where
Mary’s little stocking wasn’t. Family things like this,