Ancilla: Serialized Edition

Gevurah (PART 2)

My stomach growls at me. I ignore it. It's growled since I woke up this morning, and it can keep growling until suppertime, which is at four; because when you can only eat one meal per day, if the meal is too early, you get hungry hours before it's time for bed, and if the meal is too late, you get faint halfway through the day. I have no extra food for additional meals. Growling is therefore pointless. Sooner or later, my stomach will figure that out.

I wish today wasn't the day I have the morning shift off to keep me from reaching forty hours and qualifying for full-time status. Work keeps me too busy to think about food. Also, there's plenty of free coffee at work, and I can calm my stomach down with coffee, especially if I dump in lots of powdered creamer.

My checkbook is on the floor beside my mattress. As I reach for it, I see a cockroach scurry past. It doesn't scurry fast enough; my checkbook lands hard, and I grind it against the roach for good measure. This produces a satisfying crunch. Beware, cockroach, I am the hammer of doom.

The landlord won't call an exterminator. He thinks it costs too much money, and maybe he's right; even if he were to exterminate through the entire building, we'd probably just get invaded soon after by cockroaches from the building next door. He'd be spending all his profit on exterminator fees. It's easier for him to just tell us to buy roach motels. I've scattered Borax around the perimeter of my apartment, and I have a can of roach spray; and every couple of weeks or so, the landlord comes and sprays with something industrial, which drives the roaches downstairs. They then establish themselves down in the first-floor apartment, and the downstairs neighbor complains, and the landlord sprays, driving them back up here again. These must be some of the healthiest, most in-shape cockroaches in existence. If there was a roach Olympics held, these roaches would win gold medals in track and field sports.

They used to disgust me. They don't anymore. What would be the point?

My stomach growls again, more loudly this time. Shut up, stomach.

Eventually, the growling becomes a gnawing, a horribly empty and hollow sort of ache. But if I eat my slice of bread and peanut butter now, I'll get hungry in the middle of my calling shift, and I won't be able to concentrate, which will hurt my sales, which will lose me my new job. I've only been there a week and a half, now, and that's not long enough to cut me the slack I need to have an off day due to hunger pains.

Clearly, I have to do something.

There's a stack of notebook paper that I bought for seventy-nine cents to use for my weekly essay assignments. I still have plenty of paper. One sheet won't make a huge difference.

It takes a while to chew it and swallow it, but I manage, and as luck would have it, it does stop the growling. It might not be very nutritious, but it gets the job done. No more pain in my belly, well, not as much; the void is filled. And it's fiber. Fiber is supposed to be healthy, right?

There are only a few days left until I get my first paycheck. It will be minuscule, because I was hired near the end of the pay period, so only worked one day out of the week, but after another week, the money will start coming in, and the commissions from my subscription sales will be added a few weeks after that, once I officially get out of my probationary period, assuming I make quota, which I generally do. If things get really bad, I can always force myself to sell my plasma again. Hopefully, things won't come to that, because I don't like having a needle jabbed into my vein and hooked up to a machine that I have to feed. The one time I did it, I had to keep my eyes shut the whole time, and even though my eyes were shut, I knew the needle was there.

The fifteen dollars from selling plasma, though, can buy enough ramen, generic toasted oats, bread, peanut butter, and canned fruit to last for two weeks, if I'm careful enough stretching the food. Most of that food won't need to be cooked. Only the ramen poses a problem. I can't use the stove if the gas has been shut off, so I'll have to eat the ramen dry. Maybe my landlord would let me grab the electric hot plate and toaster oven from the old attic apartment? Then I could get rice and dried lentils and boxed macaroni and cheese and some other cheap things that would also be warm and stick to my ribs, in a way dry ramen and peanut butter sandwiches on cold bread do not.

I can survive this for a few weeks. It could be worse. At least I'll eat well on the weekends, when I visit Magister. And today is Wednesday, so I only have to wait a couple more days until I can eat better.

The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. I of all people should know this by now. I am not going to mourn my fall. It was a fortunate fall. I chose my own path. Freedom is better than wealth. I have myself, now. I gave up my family and my life of ease, and in return, I kept my integrity. It was a more than fair trade.

I don't even miss my family. No, really, I don't. I don't remember what it felt like to love them, or if I ever really loved them at all. Isn't that funny? It's strange how things work out, sometimes. When I think back to the times I hugged my mother and told her I loved her, or the times I won an academic prize and made my father proud of me, it's like watching an old movie without any sound. There's no context, and everything seems vague and distant and a little confusing. It doesn't seem like something from the world I actually live in. I don't feel emotion watching the memories. College is a black-and-white movie. My girlfriend - both my girlfriends - they're in the past, too, on hazy slides and jumpy movie reels that fall off the spool and need putting back together if they're to be watched at all. My sorority sisters are dusty albums (in the end, my first girlfriend and I didn't have to worry about being kicked out of the sorority. "We want you to know that no matter what, you're still sisters," our sorority sisters said. They even used some of the sorority's funds to help me get the off-campus efficiency apartment after I got disowned, since I couldn't live in my dorm room after I had to drop out of college. They let me attend sorority events for as long as I lived nearby. But we lost touch after I moved here, an hour away, with no transportation, and that ended the sisterhood, for me). Everything is in the past. The past is dead. The past is in books and old photographs and dilapidated reels of celluloid.

Several minutes go by.

I am not crying. My eyes are just making tears. Stupid eyes.

After a while, I put my mouth to the pillow I buried my face in, and suck my tears. Maybe they will ease my hunger pains. It's worth a try.