The Hunger
By
Ricky Olson
She was walking down a back road when I found her. Had her thumb stuck in the air, the polish on her nail glimmering against my headlights. Her shirt was torn on one side. What made me stop was the blood on her chin, in the corners of her mouth. It was the way she turned and smiled like she was proud of it.
I rolled down the window and asked where she was going. The outside smelled like wet soil and metal.
She leaned against the passenger door, the blacks of her eyes sparkling like glitter.
“With you,” she said, matter of fact. Like it was always supposed to be that way. Like she saw me coming down that road even before I was born.
Sometimes I think my life ended then, the way it only could have for everything that followed to make sense.
We never talked about what happened that night. How it happened. But when I licked the blood between her teeth I could feel the heat around my eyes, feel that pit growing in my gut like something ancient waking. Something older than god, maybe. And then I understood the hunger burning there like fire. Like it was something I’d always known.
We watched the sun rise in ultraviolet over the mountains, bleed across the sky like a growing bruise. I’d never seen anything more beautiful.
Her name was Eve. At least that’s what she was calling herself. This could have been her first name or her tenth. She’d been doing this long enough that I didn’t question it. So I went by Adam because it felt like the two of us together were the first of something special. But the names didn’t matter. Not really. We could have been anyone because we were just hunger shaped like people. And names made you real, too easy to grieve over if you didn’t come back.
The first time we fed together she held my hand and I thought my heart might burst. I wasn’t sure if it was hunger disguised as love or the other way around. Maybe it was a little of both.
It was some guy out in Wichita that smelled like oil and sweat. The kind of cologne my grandfather wore to cover it up. He let us sleep in the barn at the end of his property, like we were his grandkids having a sleepover. During the night we stood at the end of his bed watching the heartbeat in his neck until it drove us wild. Until we couldn’t control ourselves.
She wiped the blood from my face and kissed me like it was a promise. Nodded that this was just how it was supposed to be. If we couldn’t be saved, then the one thing we had was each other.
I wasn’t looking to be saved but, yeah, it felt like enough.
We kept heading southwest toward the desert. Where the summer nights were cool and dry. Where we could lay in the back of my truck and watch the stars form shapes overhead like two high school sweethearts. We never stayed in one place too long. This life, the thing that destroys you is stagnation. So we just kept going, my forearm resting on the center console, hand on her thigh, and never looked back.
In St. George we watched a kid play an acoustic guitar under the brick arches of the park tower. He couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, nowhere to be. For hours we sat on the bench nearby listening to his music, the fountain arcing water over the pavement, kids running through the streams.
“Him?” I asked, nodding my forehead to the kid with the guitar. Because this felt less familiar now, not quite like we were hunting. But she shook her head, looked away. The sun beamed down onto her face and made her glow.
“Reminds me of something,” she said. “My childhood maybe. I don’t know.”
She’d been doing this so long that she was forgetting whole chunks of her life. They say blood holds memory. Dreams. The more you take from others, the less you stay yourself. That was the theory I was working with, anyway. Because I was starting to forget little things from before too: Where I worked. Where I grew up. I couldn’t even remember my original name. I was just Adam now. Maybe I always had been.
Deep down, there was a part of me that wondered if on a long enough timeline I’d forget her, even.
But I shook away the thought and we ended up killing that kid anyway. Drank him dry in an alleyway when the streetlights had popped on, glowing amber against the periwinkle sky. Eve cried the whole way through it. I’d never seen her do that. Filled up with blood, her tears were red. She was dripping the kid back onto himself.
We holed up in cheap hotel where Eve kept rubbing her skin in the tub, like she couldn’t get clean enough. I was sitting on the floor, leaned up against the wall. The cherry of my cigarette glowing hot in the dark. The blacks of her eyes shimmered, welled up with red, still dripping. Blood blooming in the bath water.
“When will it be enough?” she asked.
But the silence answered because we both already knew.
I climbed into the tub fully clothed. Sat across from her, our legs spilling over each other. I wiped the tears from her eyes, streaking red across her cheeks. Leaned my forehead against hers. Both of our eyes shimmering in the darkness like sets of disco balls against velvet. She kissed me hard, pulled back.
“I wish I could climb inside of you,” she said.
I nodded, felt the heat welling up behind my eyes then. Warm tears falling down my cheeks, dripping into the water. Blooming, expanding. The bathtub staining pink around us.
“I love you,” I whispered, trembling. God, I did. The love was almost too much to contain, keep quiet. When we kissed, I could taste blood on her lips. That warmth in her heart.
It felt like a dream I was always just on the verge of waking from.
We must have traveled the country multiple times over. We were seeing places I’d recognized before but couldn’t remember being. Denver, Reno, Santa Monica. I started losing track of time. Whole months disappearing with the sunsets, like they’d never existed at all.
Sometimes we’d find a little park and sit in the shade, watch the clouds skirt by. Pretend we had a real home to go to at the end of all this. That we weren’t going to wind up in a backyard with our bodies filled with some stranger’s blood. Miles later, we sat on the pier and watched a Ferris wheel circle. Eve smiled then, the neon lights reflecting in her teeth. For a moment it felt like things might be okay.
But it was getting harder.
The hunger was stronger. I wondered if it was because we were using the blood to fill a void. Because no matter how much we drank, we were always half empty, breathing hard about where that next meal was going to be.
Sometimes I’d catch her eyeing people in public the way a lion stalks its prey. I was afraid one day she was going to lose it, take out a whole store, leave us in some countrywide manhunt. Both of our faces on the news.
And then I woke up one morning somewhere near Bozeman and Eve was gone. She’d left me in the cab of the truck with half our cash and an empty hole in my gut that wasn’t exactly hunger. I figured she was headed off to whatever happy ending she was looking for. The one I was always afraid I couldn’t give her.
It was just like in the dreams I’d had, where I couldn’t remember what she looked like anymore, but had the feeling I’d lost something special.
Four sunrises later, Eve slipped into the seat across from me at a little diner. Her eyes were sunken, I could see the ribs under her shirt. She’d been living off cigarettes, pretending like she wasn’t starving. Her hands were wrapped around my mug of coffee, trembling.
“I thought you’d have left,” she said.
When you don’t feed the world starts to look like a color negative. Like there’s blood creeping in around the edges. It’s all you see after a while.
“I had to try,” she said. She shook her head. There was no normal in our future. I took her hand like she hadn’t hollowed me out, eaten her way out of my chest. Because if we held each other tight enough, maybe the hunger would loosen its hold.
She asked if we could drive somewhere isolated, away from temptation. We needed to be closer to nature, she said.
I just nodded because it didn’t matter where we landed as long as she was right there next to me.
We ended up at Snoqualmie Falls, where Eve stood at the edge of the rocky cliff. She cradled herself in her arms, the windy mist in her hair. I wanted to pull her head to the side, bite into her neck and taste her, I was so hungry. Instead, I took her hand. Squeezed it tight, like that would dull the ache.
“We could end this,” she said, leaning over the edge. “Right now.” When she turned to me there was something like hope in her eyes. “We don’t have to run anymore.”
I touched her face, leaned to kiss her.
“I’d rather starve here with you,” I said.
She half smiled, nodding. Something like disappointment on her face. Understanding. She looked out over the Falls into that sea of pines. We let the mist collect on our eyelashes until our clothes were damp.
That night we drove up to an overlook and slept in the tailgate, our bodies twisted together against the cold. In the morning, we watched the sun rise over the valley, turning the sky red. Painting the world in everything we wanted.
We kept going because we had to. Kept feeding because we were chasing something we could never find.
Boise, Salt Lake, Phoenix. We hit I-10 east toward Dallas. Toward New Orleans, Orlando. Until we didn’t know where we were anymore, but recognized it all the same.
We followed a double lane highway until the sun fell behind the horizon, washing the landscape a dusty blue. Eve’s eyes shimmered in the dark and I fell in love all over again, just like that first night, thousands of miles ago.
Out there, the world kept turning. We kept driving. The sky didn’t split open. The stars didn’t blink. I held onto her thigh, and she smiled, grabbed my hand like we were something worth saving.
Maybe we were.
Driving side by side, the open road laid out before us, we had blood in our teeth, love in our eyes, trying with all our might to hold each other tighter than the hunger.
We weren’t saved, but we were together, starving.
And, for now, that would have to be enough.
Ricky Olson is the guitarist of American metal band, Motionless In White. His work has been featured on GuitarWorld.com and The NoSleep Podcast. He is currently hard at work on a debut novel.
By
Ricky Olson
She was walking down a back road when I found her. Had her thumb stuck in the air, the polish on her nail glimmering against my headlights. Her shirt was torn on one side. What made me stop was the blood on her chin, in the corners of her mouth. It was the way she turned and smiled like she was proud of it.
I rolled down the window and asked where she was going. The outside smelled like wet soil and metal.
She leaned against the passenger door, the blacks of her eyes sparkling like glitter.
“With you,” she said, matter of fact. Like it was always supposed to be that way. Like she saw me coming down that road even before I was born.
Sometimes I think my life ended then, the way it only could have for everything that followed to make sense.
We never talked about what happened that night. How it happened. But when I licked the blood between her teeth I could feel the heat around my eyes, feel that pit growing in my gut like something ancient waking. Something older than god, maybe. And then I understood the hunger burning there like fire. Like it was something I’d always known.
We watched the sun rise in ultraviolet over the mountains, bleed across the sky like a growing bruise. I’d never seen anything more beautiful.
Her name was Eve. At least that’s what she was calling herself. This could have been her first name or her tenth. She’d been doing this long enough that I didn’t question it. So I went by Adam because it felt like the two of us together were the first of something special. But the names didn’t matter. Not really. We could have been anyone because we were just hunger shaped like people. And names made you real, too easy to grieve over if you didn’t come back.
The first time we fed together she held my hand and I thought my heart might burst. I wasn’t sure if it was hunger disguised as love or the other way around. Maybe it was a little of both.
It was some guy out in Wichita that smelled like oil and sweat. The kind of cologne my grandfather wore to cover it up. He let us sleep in the barn at the end of his property, like we were his grandkids having a sleepover. During the night we stood at the end of his bed watching the heartbeat in his neck until it drove us wild. Until we couldn’t control ourselves.
She wiped the blood from my face and kissed me like it was a promise. Nodded that this was just how it was supposed to be. If we couldn’t be saved, then the one thing we had was each other.
I wasn’t looking to be saved but, yeah, it felt like enough.
We kept heading southwest toward the desert. Where the summer nights were cool and dry. Where we could lay in the back of my truck and watch the stars form shapes overhead like two high school sweethearts. We never stayed in one place too long. This life, the thing that destroys you is stagnation. So we just kept going, my forearm resting on the center console, hand on her thigh, and never looked back.
In St. George we watched a kid play an acoustic guitar under the brick arches of the park tower. He couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, nowhere to be. For hours we sat on the bench nearby listening to his music, the fountain arcing water over the pavement, kids running through the streams.
“Him?” I asked, nodding my forehead to the kid with the guitar. Because this felt less familiar now, not quite like we were hunting. But she shook her head, looked away. The sun beamed down onto her face and made her glow.
“Reminds me of something,” she said. “My childhood maybe. I don’t know.”
She’d been doing this so long that she was forgetting whole chunks of her life. They say blood holds memory. Dreams. The more you take from others, the less you stay yourself. That was the theory I was working with, anyway. Because I was starting to forget little things from before too: Where I worked. Where I grew up. I couldn’t even remember my original name. I was just Adam now. Maybe I always had been.
Deep down, there was a part of me that wondered if on a long enough timeline I’d forget her, even.
But I shook away the thought and we ended up killing that kid anyway. Drank him dry in an alleyway when the streetlights had popped on, glowing amber against the periwinkle sky. Eve cried the whole way through it. I’d never seen her do that. Filled up with blood, her tears were red. She was dripping the kid back onto himself.
We holed up in cheap hotel where Eve kept rubbing her skin in the tub, like she couldn’t get clean enough. I was sitting on the floor, leaned up against the wall. The cherry of my cigarette glowing hot in the dark. The blacks of her eyes shimmered, welled up with red, still dripping. Blood blooming in the bath water.
“When will it be enough?” she asked.
But the silence answered because we both already knew.
I climbed into the tub fully clothed. Sat across from her, our legs spilling over each other. I wiped the tears from her eyes, streaking red across her cheeks. Leaned my forehead against hers. Both of our eyes shimmering in the darkness like sets of disco balls against velvet. She kissed me hard, pulled back.
“I wish I could climb inside of you,” she said.
I nodded, felt the heat welling up behind my eyes then. Warm tears falling down my cheeks, dripping into the water. Blooming, expanding. The bathtub staining pink around us.
“I love you,” I whispered, trembling. God, I did. The love was almost too much to contain, keep quiet. When we kissed, I could taste blood on her lips. That warmth in her heart.
It felt like a dream I was always just on the verge of waking from.
We must have traveled the country multiple times over. We were seeing places I’d recognized before but couldn’t remember being. Denver, Reno, Santa Monica. I started losing track of time. Whole months disappearing with the sunsets, like they’d never existed at all.
Sometimes we’d find a little park and sit in the shade, watch the clouds skirt by. Pretend we had a real home to go to at the end of all this. That we weren’t going to wind up in a backyard with our bodies filled with some stranger’s blood. Miles later, we sat on the pier and watched a Ferris wheel circle. Eve smiled then, the neon lights reflecting in her teeth. For a moment it felt like things might be okay.
But it was getting harder.
The hunger was stronger. I wondered if it was because we were using the blood to fill a void. Because no matter how much we drank, we were always half empty, breathing hard about where that next meal was going to be.
Sometimes I’d catch her eyeing people in public the way a lion stalks its prey. I was afraid one day she was going to lose it, take out a whole store, leave us in some countrywide manhunt. Both of our faces on the news.
And then I woke up one morning somewhere near Bozeman and Eve was gone. She’d left me in the cab of the truck with half our cash and an empty hole in my gut that wasn’t exactly hunger. I figured she was headed off to whatever happy ending she was looking for. The one I was always afraid I couldn’t give her.
It was just like in the dreams I’d had, where I couldn’t remember what she looked like anymore, but had the feeling I’d lost something special.
Four sunrises later, Eve slipped into the seat across from me at a little diner. Her eyes were sunken, I could see the ribs under her shirt. She’d been living off cigarettes, pretending like she wasn’t starving. Her hands were wrapped around my mug of coffee, trembling.
“I thought you’d have left,” she said.
When you don’t feed the world starts to look like a color negative. Like there’s blood creeping in around the edges. It’s all you see after a while.
“I had to try,” she said. She shook her head. There was no normal in our future. I took her hand like she hadn’t hollowed me out, eaten her way out of my chest. Because if we held each other tight enough, maybe the hunger would loosen its hold.
She asked if we could drive somewhere isolated, away from temptation. We needed to be closer to nature, she said.
I just nodded because it didn’t matter where we landed as long as she was right there next to me.
We ended up at Snoqualmie Falls, where Eve stood at the edge of the rocky cliff. She cradled herself in her arms, the windy mist in her hair. I wanted to pull her head to the side, bite into her neck and taste her, I was so hungry. Instead, I took her hand. Squeezed it tight, like that would dull the ache.
“We could end this,” she said, leaning over the edge. “Right now.” When she turned to me there was something like hope in her eyes. “We don’t have to run anymore.”
I touched her face, leaned to kiss her.
“I’d rather starve here with you,” I said.
She half smiled, nodding. Something like disappointment on her face. Understanding. She looked out over the Falls into that sea of pines. We let the mist collect on our eyelashes until our clothes were damp.
That night we drove up to an overlook and slept in the tailgate, our bodies twisted together against the cold. In the morning, we watched the sun rise over the valley, turning the sky red. Painting the world in everything we wanted.
We kept going because we had to. Kept feeding because we were chasing something we could never find.
Boise, Salt Lake, Phoenix. We hit I-10 east toward Dallas. Toward New Orleans, Orlando. Until we didn’t know where we were anymore, but recognized it all the same.
We followed a double lane highway until the sun fell behind the horizon, washing the landscape a dusty blue. Eve’s eyes shimmered in the dark and I fell in love all over again, just like that first night, thousands of miles ago.
Out there, the world kept turning. We kept driving. The sky didn’t split open. The stars didn’t blink. I held onto her thigh, and she smiled, grabbed my hand like we were something worth saving.
Maybe we were.
Driving side by side, the open road laid out before us, we had blood in our teeth, love in our eyes, trying with all our might to hold each other tighter than the hunger.
We weren’t saved, but we were together, starving.
And, for now, that would have to be enough.
Ricky Olson is the guitarist of American metal band, Motionless In White. His work has been featured on GuitarWorld.com and The NoSleep Podcast. He is currently hard at work on a debut novel.
