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  • 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
  • Issue #25 Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Art Spring 2023 >
      • David Carter Spring 2023
      • Annabel Jung Spring 2023
      • Ryota Matsumoto Spring 2023
      • Leah Oates Spring 2023
      • Eve Ozer Spring 2023
      • Emily Rankin Spring 2023
      • Esther Yeon Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Poetry Spring 2023 >
      • Emma Bolden Spring 2023
      • Ronda Piszk Broatch Spring 2023
      • M. Cynthia Cheung Spring 2023
      • Flower Conroy Spring 2023
      • Jill Crammond Spring 2023
      • Sandra Crouch Spring 2023
      • Satya Dash Spring 2023
      • Rita Feinstein Spring 2023
      • Dan Fliegel Spring 2023
      • Lisa Higgs ​Spring 2023
      • Dennis Hinrichsen ​Spring 2023
      • Mara Jebsen ​Spring 2023
      • Abriana Jetté ​Spring 2023
      • Letitia Jiju ​Spring 2023
      • E.W.I. Johnson ​Spring 2023
      • Ashley Kunsa ​Spring 2023
      • Susanna Lang ​Spring 2023
      • James Fujinami Moore Spring 2023
      • Matthew Murrey Spring 2023
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2023
      • Heather Qin ​Spring 2023
      • Wesley Sexton ​Spring 2023
      • Ashish Singh ​Spring 2023
      • Sara Sowers-Wills ​Spring 2023
      • Sydney Vogl ​Spring 2023
      • Elinor Ann Walker Spring 2023
      • Andrew Wells Spring 2023
      • Erin Wilson Spring 2023
      • Marina Hope Wilson ​Spring 2023
      • David Wojciechowski Spring 2023
      • Jules Wood Spring 2023
      • Ellen Zhang Spring 2023
      • BJ Zhou Spring 2023
      • Jane Zwart Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Fiction Spring 2023 >
      • Eleonora Balsano Spring 2023
      • Callie S. Blackstone Spring 2023
      • Daniel Deisinger Spring 2023
      • CL Glanzing Spring 2023
      • Janine Kovac Spring 2023
      • Jeremy T. Wilson Spring 2023
      • Richie Zaborowske Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Nonfiction Spring 2023 >
      • Kalie Johnson Spring 2023
      • Amanda Roth Spring 2023
  • Issue #26 Fall 2023
    • Issue #26 Art Fall 2023 >
      • Alexey Adonin Fall 2023
      • Jian Choi Fall 2023
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2023
      • ​Anna Maeve Fall 2023
      • Jason Reblando Fall 2023
    • Issue #26 Poetry Fall 2023 >
      • Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo ​ Fall 2023
      • Christopher Ankney Fall 2023
      • Magdalena Arias Vásquez Fall 2023
      • John Peter Beck Fall 2023
      • Mihir Bellamkonda Fall 2023
      • Benjamin Bellas Fall 2023
      • Michael Carson Fall 2023
      • Kevin Clark Fall 2023
      • Aaron Coleman Fall 2023
      • Mark DeCarteret Fall 2023
      • Denise Duhamel Fall 2023
      • Brandel France de Bravo Fall 2023
      • Tina Gross Fall 2023
      • Amorak Huey Fall 2023
      • James Kimbrell Fall 2023
      • Casey Knott Fall 2023
      • Stephen Lackaye Fall 2023
      • Cynthia Manick Fall 2023
      • Savannah McClendon Fall 2023
      • John Muellner Fall 2023
      • Mollie O’Leary Fall 2023
      • Joel Peckham Fall 2023
      • Natalia Prusinska Fall 2023
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Fall 2023
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2023
      • Hilary Sallick Fall 2023
      • Kelly R. Samuels Fall 2023
    • Issue #26 Fiction Fall 2023 >
      • Abbie Barker Fall 2023
      • Eric Rasmussen Fall 2023
      • E.P. Tuazon Fall 2023

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).

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  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
    • Masthead
  • Submit
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Submit Here
  • Features
  • Interviews
  • Book Reviews
  • Previous Issues
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • 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
  • Issue #25 Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Art Spring 2023 >
      • David Carter Spring 2023
      • Annabel Jung Spring 2023
      • Ryota Matsumoto Spring 2023
      • Leah Oates Spring 2023
      • Eve Ozer Spring 2023
      • Emily Rankin Spring 2023
      • Esther Yeon Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Poetry Spring 2023 >
      • Emma Bolden Spring 2023
      • Ronda Piszk Broatch Spring 2023
      • M. Cynthia Cheung Spring 2023
      • Flower Conroy Spring 2023
      • Jill Crammond Spring 2023
      • Sandra Crouch Spring 2023
      • Satya Dash Spring 2023
      • Rita Feinstein Spring 2023
      • Dan Fliegel Spring 2023
      • Lisa Higgs ​Spring 2023
      • Dennis Hinrichsen ​Spring 2023
      • Mara Jebsen ​Spring 2023
      • Abriana Jetté ​Spring 2023
      • Letitia Jiju ​Spring 2023
      • E.W.I. Johnson ​Spring 2023
      • Ashley Kunsa ​Spring 2023
      • Susanna Lang ​Spring 2023
      • James Fujinami Moore Spring 2023
      • Matthew Murrey Spring 2023
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2023
      • Heather Qin ​Spring 2023
      • Wesley Sexton ​Spring 2023
      • Ashish Singh ​Spring 2023
      • Sara Sowers-Wills ​Spring 2023
      • Sydney Vogl ​Spring 2023
      • Elinor Ann Walker Spring 2023
      • Andrew Wells Spring 2023
      • Erin Wilson Spring 2023
      • Marina Hope Wilson ​Spring 2023
      • David Wojciechowski Spring 2023
      • Jules Wood Spring 2023
      • Ellen Zhang Spring 2023
      • BJ Zhou Spring 2023
      • Jane Zwart Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Fiction Spring 2023 >
      • Eleonora Balsano Spring 2023
      • Callie S. Blackstone Spring 2023
      • Daniel Deisinger Spring 2023
      • CL Glanzing Spring 2023
      • Janine Kovac Spring 2023
      • Jeremy T. Wilson Spring 2023
      • Richie Zaborowske Spring 2023
    • Issue #25 Nonfiction Spring 2023 >
      • Kalie Johnson Spring 2023
      • Amanda Roth Spring 2023
  • Issue #26 Fall 2023
    • Issue #26 Art Fall 2023 >
      • Alexey Adonin Fall 2023
      • Jian Choi Fall 2023
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2023
      • ​Anna Maeve Fall 2023
      • Jason Reblando Fall 2023
    • Issue #26 Poetry Fall 2023 >
      • Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo ​ Fall 2023
      • Christopher Ankney Fall 2023
      • Magdalena Arias Vásquez Fall 2023
      • John Peter Beck Fall 2023
      • Mihir Bellamkonda Fall 2023
      • Benjamin Bellas Fall 2023
      • Michael Carson Fall 2023
      • Kevin Clark Fall 2023
      • Aaron Coleman Fall 2023
      • Mark DeCarteret Fall 2023
      • Denise Duhamel Fall 2023
      • Brandel France de Bravo Fall 2023
      • Tina Gross Fall 2023
      • Amorak Huey Fall 2023
      • James Kimbrell Fall 2023
      • Casey Knott Fall 2023
      • Stephen Lackaye Fall 2023
      • Cynthia Manick Fall 2023
      • Savannah McClendon Fall 2023
      • John Muellner Fall 2023
      • Mollie O’Leary Fall 2023
      • Joel Peckham Fall 2023
      • Natalia Prusinska Fall 2023
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Fall 2023
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2023
      • Hilary Sallick Fall 2023
      • Kelly R. Samuels Fall 2023
    • Issue #26 Fiction Fall 2023 >
      • Abbie Barker Fall 2023
      • Eric Rasmussen Fall 2023
      • E.P. Tuazon Fall 2023