Jet Fuel Review
  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
    • Masthead
  • Submit
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Submit Here
  • Features
  • Interviews
  • Book Reviews
  • Previous Issues
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022

Nik Gallicchio

Hunger


       The boy was born with an appetite for truth.
       “I love you.” Mommy’s words poured forth from an endless fountain, and the boy lapped up the truth as though it was a runny sunrise of a yolk.
       He feasted on it. “I love you,” she said, and it was simple and true, and the boy fell asleep dreaming dreams of Mommies who lived forever and mouths whose words were always baked from grains of truth.
       One morning, he woke up with a quarter under his pillow in exchange for his tooth. Mommy smiled at him with a tooth-fairy reason behind her lips, and that was the moment of his first hunger pang.
       When the boy began his schooling, another boy said, “Hunch over so I can see your answers. We’re friends, you and I.”  But it wasn’t true, and the boy grew hungry.
       School had been a place where 2 plus 2 were makings of a hearty meal, but now when the teachers nodded and said, “Columbus,” and “Thanksgiving,” and “Manifest Destiny,” he couldn’t digest the myth of cornucopia and maize and the Trail of Tears left a bitter taste in his mouth because even that story forgot the foreign disease that left natives’ corpses in its wake, making the soil so fertile in this new land. Instead, he read about how Columbus sold little girls into slavery, and even though those facts were hard to swallow, he wouldn’t feel hungry for an hour or two because of them.
       He grew thin and tall and Mommy’s love wasn’t enough to fill him anymore, so he talked to a girl. They picked fruit off trees and he watched her bite in, juice dribbling down her chin and tracing a fine line down the length of her arm. They lay on the hood of a car in a cornfield harvest of stars, and he told her he loved her, and she said it back, but it tasted all wrong to him, like the flesh of a peach bit into too early.
       He grew taller and thinner and hungered even more. When he flew to far-off places to nourish himself on overseas truth, he saw from the airplane the soil of the Midwest tortured into obedient square farms, the land a vast sheet of graph paper with no patch of earth left to grow wild, true to its nature.
       He took his camera to try to capture the truth so he could savor it. In Kosovo, he snapped a photo of an infant being passed through a barbed wire fence. He zoomed in on the hopscotch children giggling in front of Chicago’s Cabrini Green projects whose windows winked down at him with jagged eyes. But those he photographed in the 3 by 5s wouldn’t stay captured, held captive in the frame. On assignment in Sudan, he clicked away in a barren field of rocky dirt and straw. A baby crouched, forehead kissing the ground, as if in prayer. The beads on her necklace could be counted as easily as her ribs. Her skin stretched tight against the bone. She was starving. His stomach and her stomach growled together, sounding as though a pride of ravenous lions lurked nearby.
       He approached quietly. Five steps behind her sat a hunched vulture, patiently waiting with its full feather coat and hooked beak, its beady eyes watching the tiny girl—an ominous babysitter.
       He had been ordered against touching any of the people here by his bosses who were stuffed full of bottom lines and subscription numbers. They cried, “Disease!” They crowed, “Not our responsibility!” but the boy knew that wasn’t the exact truth. He shot photos of the baby whose prayers were or weren’t answered when her belly stopped growling minutes later. The only sound was the clicking of his camera. The vulture sidled closer and he shooed the bird away, but even in the air, the vulture kept its shadow over the baby girl. He held it at bay until his helicopter came. He pictured her Mommy still in line at the UN’s feeding center, holding out her hands for grain that wouldn’t feed her baby now. He had to go, go, let me go, don’t let me go, don’t let me go, the girl’s captured image said to him, and his hands that took the picture were the ones that left her untouched, unnourished by his honest wish to let her know that someone was there. That someone cared. That she wasn’t alone.
       Back home, when the man photographed a toddler blowing bubbles, his fingertips turned to talons. He snapped away at a bundled child building a snowman, but the picture didn’t look right because he’d taken it hunched against the cold, casting a shadow on the snow.
       He scavenged and picked over his days for bits of truth to survive on while everyone around him seemed to grow full and fat of        “How are you?” “Fine.”s and “have a nice day!”s
       Now he was an old man with Mommy a mere black-and-white memory, and he tried to feed himself at diners at the break of day, but the waitress’s smile couldn’t satisfy him, because it was quick and didn’t crinkle the edges of her eyes. He couldn’t believe her smile, even if he saw her every morning, because she saved her true smiles for her own little boy. And she couldn’t understand this odd old man with the wrinkled shirt who ordered hot peaches and cream crepes and who, day after day, let it grow cold, untouched.
       Another patron was a stooped man who carried his own strawberry syrup with him every morning and chatted with the man who ate truth about the weather and that idiot who just got elected.
       With every conversation that kept him in touch with these people, he tried to touch the baby’s hand, but he never could reach her, because when he’d had the chance, he hadn’t done it—hadn’t been true to everything he believed. And that was what ate him up inside.
       He wanted to tell the syrup man: “I should’ve stayed with her.”
       He wanted to be honest with the waitress: “I have nightmares.”
       He wanted to confess to the baby girl: “Every night, the vulture plucks your veins like violin strings. I see your heart lie still behind your wishbone ribs.”
       In the news, he read about corpses that were used to feed dogs and how a Mommy had killed her own baby boy, and all of this was true, but he couldn’t take it, couldn’t take it anymore. The boy who hungered for truth had grown up into a man who saw that the truth couldn’t sustain him. That to be satiated, he’d have to become a weaver of tooth-fairy tales, daily white lies, history’s wishbone fables. And he knew he couldn’t. He didn’t want to be full of empty falsehoods, and he didn’t want to scavenge for gruesome truth just to stay alive another hour.
       Into the wide world, his starving, shaking steps shambled him forward an inch, and then an inch more. And the boy who hungered for truth was the man who wondered if this inch, hour, sunrise, would be his last.
       His eyes searched out a face that was telling the truth. He saw nothing.
       His ears listened for honesty. All he heard was his stomach. It growled.



--
Nik Gallicchio’s writing has appeared on the stages of Chicago’s Live Lit show Write Club and on the pages of Champaign’s Buzz Magazine. Delighting in the unexpected, Nik crafts and wears things she’s created, like skirts made of men’s ties and dresses made out of book pages. The piece “Hunger” was inspired by the achingly beautiful life of Pulitzer Prize-winning Photojournalist Kevin Carter (1960-1994).

    Get updates from jet fuel review

Subscribe to Newsletter
© COPYRIGHT 2019. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
    • Masthead
  • Submit
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Submit Here
  • Features
  • Interviews
  • Book Reviews
  • Previous Issues
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022