FICTION: Hunger

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So, in response to Pictures, Poetry & Prose's challenge: She dreams of something more ...

Hunger

The girls enter the diner giggling, young and pretty in too-short skirts that reveal too-perfect thighs. They sit down at the booth and order a mountain of food: pancakes, hash brown, bacon, biscuits with sausage gravy. When it arrives, steaming hot and glistening with grease, the girls dig in with gusto. Their bony fingers pick at sausage links, glossy lips sucking soda pop through straws as thin as their arms.

She watches them from behind the counter. She remembers fifteen. Fifteen, when she was so hungry for life she could eat an entire turkey and not gain a pound. Ambition and innocence burns everything it touches, even the most saturated of fats.

She wants to tell these girls, I was like you once, but she knows they wouldn't believe her. They would never believe she was once so stunning, so thin, so desirable that she walked runways for Dior, wore haute couture gowns made of nothing but swan feathers and silk, was made up like a geisha and photographed for Vogue. They'd laugh if she told them she had rock star lovers at sixteen or a closet full of $500 shoes before she turned twenty. They would take one look at her sagging breasts, her support hose, her swollen ankles, and they would howl like banshees until their full stomachs ached.

And maybe she doesn't want to tell them. Maybe it's best that way. Let them believe they'll always be a size zero and turn heads every time they cross the street. Let them think they'll never be anything less than radiant. She doesn't want to go over to them and tell them, I used to be a princess, and look at me now. She doesn't want to break their hearts. Time will do that eventually. It always does.

Instead, she just watches them eat their breakfasts, these pretty teenaged girls, until their plates are as clean as their toothpaste-ad smiles. She watches, and she dreams of fifteen, when she was something more.