Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  Aria felt sick to her stomach. Again, she found herself almost amused by one of the painful aspects of her current state. The body can be starving, but when it is too starving and you feed it, it rejects the food. One more of life’s little design flaws.

  Nausea had a way of capturing all of her attention. So much so that she did not notice the man that she had been watching in the store just minutes before, rounding the corner and catching sight of her.

  “Hey! You there!”

  The words cut through her like a skewer. Suddenly, she was in a race. He was hurrying toward her, with the intention of shooing her off. Would he reach her before she could untie Clifford? Her fingers fumbled to loosen the knot.

  It was anyone’s game. Like a gift from somewhere beyond her, the idea occurred to unclip the latch to Clifford’s collar.

  Aria grabbed him and ran as fast as she could. She knew there would be no way for the man to catch up to her, given his weight. But she felt his words again skewer into her back. “You stay the hell out of here!” And then, more faintly, “If you come back here, next time I’m calling the cops.”

  She rounded the corner into the alley of a nearby building. She was out of breath and the shoe that was missing its laces was only halfway holding on to her foot. Her heavy breaths quickly became the doorway for suppressed tears. She was crying. Smothering Clifford’s bulk with her arms, she could feel nothing but his resistance to her. Having ended up in this touch-and-go hostage situation, he looked as aghast as a cat could ever look.

  The close call with the Pizza Hut manager was what it took to corrode Aria’s denial of the situation at hand. She could not keep Clifford with her. In that moment, she felt herself splitting in two, torn between her need to keep him with her, and her need to know he was both safe and happy. After she had been taken away from Lucy, he was the only living thing she had felt true belonging with. She held him there against his will, letting the gravity of the awareness sink in until it broke her heart. By the time it was successfully broken, she knew what she had to do.

  The public park was bleak this time of year. Still it was an oasis of calm, fenced in from the bustle of the rest of the city. She had returned to the familiarity of the public subway station bathroom by the museum and had spent most of the night there. Having locked herself into a stall, trapping the now collarless Clifford in her lap, she had successfully managed to go unnoticed. Upon waking, she was so tired; she began to wonder if she could still consider herself sane. As if on autopilot, she joined the citizens of the city, making their way by foot on their morning commutes. She stopped with them at stoplights and moved with them when they became fluid again. She spent the day at the public park, sitting and walking through the dappled, swaying light, worrying about the greasiness of her hair and letting Clifford sun himself while watching out for dogs, who frequently showed both shock and hysteria at his being there.

  Nature, she thought, must possess some secret to living that people were not privy to. It seemed to Aria that the little yellow flowers, which were leading the way for the arrival of spring, were God’s way of laughing at her. In truth, Aria did not believe in God, certainly not in the way that Mrs Johnson did. But she could feel something bigger than herself, and bigger than everything, at work in the world. She just didn’t know what that was. She didn’t know so many things. She was unsure of her body, yet she was stuck in it. She seemed to be navigating her way through life with a lighthouse that remained unlit. Aria often followed these mental pathways of existential thinking to escape the world instead of to venture deeper into it. Today, she followed these mental pathways to avoid the reality of the decision she had made.

  Aria had been waiting to take Clifford home until she knew that the Johnsons would be home, having finished work and picked up the younger kids from their school. She felt disheartened to realize that now when she thought of them, they felt less and less like a mother and father to her. The possibility of that ever feeling real to her was gone. Mere days had passed and already the life she had lived with them for the last three years felt like it belonged to someone else. The life she had been living on the street felt more real to her. There was more continuity in it. It felt more like where her life began and therefore, more true to who she really was. Whether she wanted that to be the case or not, there was some dark relief to be found in that belonging as opposed to always feeling like a fish in a nest of birds.

  When it was time, Aria pushed through the friction of the part of herself that needed Clifford with her, the part that could not face what she was about to do. She left the sanctuary of the park and boarded the last city bus she would ever take with him. Clifford was motionless. Perhaps he has sensed what was about to happen. Perhaps the weight of Aria’s heartache had subdued him. She was saying goodbye, long before she ever actually said it. When she reached her neighborhood, she felt nostalgic. It was already a lost life. It was one more place she had never belonged, only tried to. Each house boasted only marginal differences from the others that surrounded it, as if they had all been fashioned with a cookie cutter. More so than ever before, she could feel the fakeness of this neighborhood. Like a perfectly groomed tree, it had been crafted out of someone’s vision of the great American dream. A dream where all the family problems were to be kept closed tightly behind those idyllic front doors.

  Walking closer, she spotted the house that she had tried to consider a home. She was not afraid of being seen. At this point in her life, Aria had perfected the art of going unnoticed. She was far enough away that she could watch them like the ghost of someone who was one of them once. This time, when she kissed Clifford on the forehead and held him one last time, the tears did not come. “I love you, Bobbins,” she said in a whisper, using the nickname that he frequently went by in the house. “I’m gonna miss you.” She let a succession of kisses repeat this sentiment to him before she released her grasp on him. “Go on, run home,” she whispered louder, as an instruction. With no reservation, Clifford fled toward the home as if it were his salvation.

  Aria watched him run up the front steps onto the porch and survey the door, only to find it closed. He did not meow to be let in. He was a quiet cat in general. Instead, he sat down on his haunches and began licking himself passionately, restarting the grooming he had ceased during his time with her. She felt her heart break a little bit more, seeing him so relieved and at home in this place that she could not belong to no matter how hard she had tried.

  She moved so as not to be noticed by any of the neighbors returning home. Half an hour passed. Clifford was still grooming himself when the front door opened. Mr Johnson almost tripped over Clifford, not having seen him until the last second because his view had been obscured by the black trash bag that he was carrying in front of him. Clifford darted past him and disappeared into the house. Mr Johnson poked his head back in the door to follow his trail or maybe to yell something that Aria could not hear. He then closed the door behind him and walked the trash bag he was carrying out to the black garbage bin by the side of the garage. Aria tracked his movements. She had memorized them. They were the same ones he always made … his part of the Johnson family routine. Today, that routine made her queasy. It was obvious to her, sitting there, that dreams pull apart before they ever manifest. Her dream of mattering to this family, or any family, would obviously never come true. Had she hoped to arrive and find a squadron of cop cars with flashing lights? Had she hoped to see Mrs Johnson reduced to tears, begging them to find her daughter? Had she hoped to find Mr Johnson gone, turning over every stone to find her? She became conscious of these desires only now, once she could see that the reality was quite the opposite. Instead, Aria observed that she had already been forgotten. Had they even realized she was gone? “Of course they did,” she muttered under her breath in response to the thought. She imagined what they were doing inside. She imagined the smell and sounds of Mrs Johnson cooking. She imagined watching cartoons with her other adoptive siblings. She used to find the
weight of them leaning against her on the couch obnoxious. Now, she missed that weight. She could see it now as a gift, rather than an imposition. A gift she had thrown away by running away.

  For the briefest of moments, Aria entertained the thought of walking back through the door, but then she reminded herself of their plans to return her to the group home. Having said goodbye to Clifford, who did not seem upset to leave her, and having seen how forgettable she really was, she let her anger rescue her from the despair. It lifted her up and out of her state of drowning. Because of that anger, she could not access the feelings of grief underneath. They existed like watery depths inside her somewhere, beyond her awareness. And she was glad of that.

  Aria took her shoes off, holding them in her hands, and ran. She ran as if by running away from those watery depths within her, she would not carry them with her. She ran until she couldn’t.

  Several neighborhoods away, there stood a vacated house. The real estate sign in front of it had been there for so long that it now projected crooked from the earth. It was obvious from the wear of the siding and the untended landscaping that no one had lived there or visited for a long time, and most likely wouldn’t.

  Aria spotted a doghouse through the chain-link fence. The heavy chain affixed to the metal post beside it meant it was most likely built for a guard dog. The red paint had faded so badly that most of it had given way to gray, weathered wood. The once-black shingles had turned the color of ash and were lifting and corroding at the edges. Despite the dilapidation of the little shelter, she felt it calling to her, a promise of being able to let go of the tension of living like a fugitive for so long. She slipped her shoes back on, leaving the one that still had laces untied, and walked toward it.

  Most people would have felt demeaned by crawling on their hands and knees into a doghouse. But Aria had always felt much closer to animals than she had ever felt to people. Though the dust that covered the floor made her cough, she felt soothed by the thought of the dog that once lived there. She curled herself up in a fetal position, not caring whether her head was in the dust. Not caring how much of it she breathed in. She imagined herself curled up with the dog that once lived there. The image of him was so strong she could feel him guarding her and soothing her to sleep.

  There are times when the pain that someone faces is so great that the mind cannot wrap itself around it. The mind cannot dissect it to find meaning and it cannot analyze it to figure out how to avoid it in the future. Instead, the mind simply submits to the dizziness of it. This was one such time for Aria. That dizziness came upon her like a sandstorm. And in the process of submitting to it, she fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 5

  A week had passed since Aria had spent the night in the abandoned doghouse, a slipshod week of learning the ins and outs of life on the streets of Chicago. She had found a mission that allowed vagrants to stay for three nights per month. Having lied to the staff about her age, she was shown to a room that looked roughly like a refugee camp. It was a large gymnasium, converted into a human-scale rat cage. The flooring had been peeled up, exposing the cement floor underneath. It was easier to clean this way. Pipes of different sizes platted the ceiling like a maze overhead. The entire room was covered in bunk beds, with no sheets to cushion the thinness of the mattresses. Standing in the crowd of other women and children who had been ushered in with her, Aria suddenly regretted being there. But being too shy to draw attention to herself by rescinding her decision, she stood still and contained her feelings, listening to two directors who were in charge that night, reading out the rules of the shelter.

  One woman read them in English, then the other repeated them in Spanish. They were made to strip to their underwear and hand over their shoes and then clothing. Aria watched one of the mission volunteers take her clothes and backpack over to a metal locker, among a row of hundreds, and lock them in. They were to sleep in underwear. It was a way of ensuring that violence was kept to a minimum. If one of the women tried to kill another one in this place, she could not make a getaway, because her clothes and shoes would be locked up. Each woman was then given a pile of threadbare sheets, which she was expected to make her bed with.

  The mission volunteers made Aria nervous. Most of them were homeless themselves. They simply viewed volunteering as a way to better manipulate their way into getting their own needs met. Many of the women staying there made a quick thirty bucks in the daytime by going to a blood plasma donation center nearby. Aria followed a group of them the first day, but did not go inside. The entire experience at the mission had made her feel like an animal at a slaughterhouse. She squirmed at the thought of giving in to that likeness one step further by willingly letting them drain her blood. The other women kept the money they had made there in the pockets of their clothing. On more than one occasion, Aria witnessed one of the volunteers stealing this money out of the pockets when she took the clothes to the lockers before it was time for the lights to go out. Having your possessions stolen, no matter how few possessions you had, seemed to be part of life on the street.

  “Lights out” was not really lights out in the mission. In fact, half of the lights stayed on all night long. Long, fluorescent bulbs that hissed as if cursing the women that lay directly underneath them. Every so often, in a muddled chorus, a child started crying in the middle of the night, and then another and another. Their cries usually subsided, but only so the children could avoid further scolding, not because they were being soothed. Aria had come to the mission thinking that she would sleep better there than she did out in the frigid night air. Being there, however, she realized that sleeplessness was another part of life on the streets that simply had to be accepted. On multiple occasions, she lay in her bottom bunk completely bewildered by the fact that so many women seemed to have no problem whatsoever sleeping in those conditions. Again, this made Aria feel like she did not belong.

  In the morning, at about 5.30am, the other lights went on in the large room. A woman shouted for everyone to wake up and then they were ordered not to leave their beds until a volunteer had collected their clothing and handed it to them personally. In exchange, the women turned in the bed sheets they had used for the night, which were placed in an industrial waste bin to be taken to launder.

  With clothing in hand, they then formed a line outside the bathroom. The lines in the mission seemed to last forever. Every so often Aria’s attempt to dissociate while standing in them was interrupted by the bark of someone trying to get the women already inside the bathroom to hurry up. Inside the bathroom, there was a row of toilets with no doors, and opposite each toilet, a sink with no mirror above it. Adjacent to this was a room completely covered by stained and aging off-white tiles: the community shower area. The walls were studded with silver nozzles, only one of which worked properly. During her stay there, Aria witnessed more than one tussle over which woman got to use that nozzle. But, as dilapidated as it was, there was hot water. This was what made Aria come back the next night and the next. Aria became conscious that she always took hot water for granted until she had no access to it anymore. The swelter of it whittled down the sharpness of the fear she felt constantly now. As much as her circumstances did not seem to improve from day to day, at least the water could fool her into hoping that they would. Even if it was illusion, she could feel like it might be a fresh new start.

  Despite the mandatory showers, the mission smelled rancid. It smelled rancid because people’s clothes were rancid. The women were prohibited from washing them in the sinks. When they had used their ration of soap for bathing, they were handed a towel, which they were made to deposit in a large bin before putting their polluted clothes back on. It was just as well. The industrial soap at the mission smelled like tallow. It made Aria sick to her stomach.

  As usual, Aria said next to nothing during her time at the mission. Some of the other women, who, like Aria, stayed for successive nights, began to wonder if she could speak at all. In her silence, Aria simply observed. She listened t
o conversations to extract advice that the other women were unaware they were even giving. Advice about where to get food and water, places where the police didn’t hassle you during the day, places to go undetected at night, places that gave away things like clothes and toiletries for free, places to get temporary labor jobs for the day, places to loiter and, perhaps most importantly, places to procure street drugs. It took Aria a few minutes of confusion to figure out what they were really talking about, seeing as how none of the women overtly used the word drugs, nor did they use any of the names she had heard commonly used for them. Instead, they spoke of things like Smoke, Bo-Bo, C-Game, Chicken Feed, Base, Brown Sugar, Dirt and Seccy.

  If she wanted to stay at the mission, she had to be there by 5pm. Each person trying to get a bed for the night had to fill out the required paperwork about who they were and where they were going. Each night Aria lied on nearly every question. She felt the tension of the potential of getting caught in that lie, but she soon came to find that no one really cared. The actual mission of the mission was to proselytize.

  After check-in, it was mandatory for the women and children to listen to a preacher for at least an hour. The first time Aria was subjected to this routine, she was struck by the sheer effort put into the man’s seemingly effortlessly dressed-down attire. As with a politician, it struck her as contrived. His dress was chosen to evoke a sense of commonality with the vagrants who stood before him every night. She could feel the self-gratification oozing through his philanthropy. As a result, the words, which made a pretense of the words of Christ, were contaminated. They were contaminated by the overwhelming feeling that, as if life had not been cruel enough to these people already, they were now all being used as pawns to guarantee someone else’s admittance into heaven. It reminded her of Mrs Johnson’s faith … A mediocre veil drawn over the reality of things to make them look better than they truly were.