What Remained Hungry

by Jack Fisher

Yura Lytkin

After the flood, the town banned soup.

Not officially—nothing so organized as law survived the water. The ban began as a silence. Someone would set a pot over fire, and the smell of broth would rise into the ruined street, and everyone within smelling distance would remember what had floated past them.

Chickens. Mattresses. Gas cans. Family photos. A horse with one eye open. A young woman's wedding dress, moving in the current as though the bride were still inside it.

No soup.

They ate things dry. Bread hardened on relief-truck shelves. Beans with the water poured off. Children learned to swallow without asking for milk. Three months after the flood, Mara found a spoon in the branches of an apple tree.

The tree stood where the elementary school had been. It had not grown there before. Nothing made sense about it: the trunk was black, the apples were pale, and every morning the roots surfaced from the mud in a different place.

Mara climbed the broken wall and reached up. The spoon hung by its bowl from a twig. It was silver, though no one had owned silver in that part of town except Mrs. Ochoa, who had drowned in her attic with her cat.

The spoon was warm. Mara took it anyway.

At the shelter, her brother Tomas was repairing a cot with electrical wire. He had survived the flood by standing on the roof of the bus depot for two days with a vending machine full of diet soda. Since then, he distrusted anything that came easily.

“Put it back,” he said.

“It's a spoon.”

“It's from the water.”

“Everything is from the water now.” He looked at her then.

Mara put the spoon inside her coat. Before the flood, she had run the lunchroom at the school. She knew every child by what they refused. Naomi hated peas but would eat them if Mara called them moon seeds. Junie, who had a cleft-lip, liked extra broth.

Broth, Mara had learned, was how poor people made a meal keep its promise.

The relief workers brought bottled water, powdered eggs, tarps, and a pamphlet that said REBUILDING BEGINS WITH YOU, as if the town had been waiting for permission.

That afternoon, Mrs. Paloma's boy stopped eating.

His name was Izzy. He was six and shaped like a question mark, all elbows and watching. Since the flood, he had spoken only to dogs, though none remained. He kept a red leash tied around his wrist and saved half of everything he was given, softened in his palm until it shone like amber.

“For Luna,” he would say. Luna had been his dog. Or his sister. No one asked. That day he sat on a milk crate and held a cracker in his mouth until it softened and fell into his lap.

“He needs soup,” Mrs. Paloma said. No one answered her.

Mara looked toward the dead school. The black apple tree leaned over the broken wall, its pale fruit bright as skulls. She went before she could be talked out of it.

The bark pulsed under her hand when she picked the apples. In the community garden, she found carrots twisted beneath the mud. She took onions, salt, and a chicken bone Tomas had been saving to carve into a needle.

“What are you doing?” he asked when she returned.

“Mending something.”

“No,” he said, seeing the pot.

Mara filled it with bottled water. The sound—water on metal—made people turn.

“Don't,” Tomas said.

But Izzy was watching now. So were the others. They watched with the terror of people being offered a door. Mara set the pot over the fire.

When the first steam rose, Mrs. Paloma covered her mouth. Tomas walked away and came back. The broth darkened. The apples split, releasing a smell like a field remembering itself. Then the pot began to speak. It made the sound of rain in gutters. Of someone trapped behind a wall, tapping once. People backed away. One man stumbled and fell. Mrs. Paloma screamed Izzy's name.

Mara gripped the warm silver spoon.

“Enough,” she told the pot.

The surface shivered. In the broth she saw things the flood had kept. She saw Mrs. Ochoa's kitchen table set for six, though she had lived alone for twenty years. She saw the school cafeteria on the last dry morning, every child leaving something behind: a mitten, a tooth, a sentence they meant to finish after recess.

Then she saw the town years from now, muddied and molded. The dead remained dead. But someone had cleared the school steps. Someone had planted beans in a bathtub. Izzy, taller, was feeding soup to a child who was not yet born.

Mara lifted the spoon. Her hand shook so hard broth spilled into the fire and hissed like a struck animal. She tasted it first. It was terrible. Bitter, smoky, under-salted. It tasted like floodwater and apples and every kitchen that had ever failed to save anyone.

Then it changed.

It tasted like cafeteria Mondays. Like a mother blowing on a spoon before giving it to a child.

Mara held the spoon out to Izzy. No one breathed. The boy opened his mouth.

After he swallowed, he began to cry. He cried like a house finally collapsing after everyone had gotten out. Then he untied the red leash from his wrist and placed it beside the fire.

“You can go now,” he said.

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Jack Fisher is a nurse practitioner and anatomy professor in New Jersey. After more than a decade away from writing, he has returned to fiction. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cemetery Dance, ZOETROPE, American Poetry Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere.