By Skye Raye
Trigger warning: Eating disorders
Her back is turned to me. Her figure hunched over the stove. I see wisps of steam rising around her, as the spoon hushes across the black Teflon pan. She seems smaller, shrunken into herself, weltering in the heat. Or maybe I’ve just grown in the year I’ve been away.
She asks me how uni has been. I say fine.
Are you studying? Yes. Sleeping? Enough.
Eating?
The question lingers. The emptiness speaks for itself.
We are a family of small bones and stretched skin. I am taller than when I left, much taller than her. But when I reach up to take the bowl of rice from my arms her shake under its weight.
The question fades slowly away as the steam drifts out the open window, into the sticky summer air. It rests on the street. It claws through the night with unsated hunger. There’s a homeless man down there on the corner. Starving each night. Mother won’t let me take my shame beyond these doors.
The table is small. Just us two.
I match the chewing of my cheek to the chink of her fork. By the time Mother finishes her bowl, I am sated with the salt of my own blood.
She looks at me. Her face is scoured from steam; a silent question, a silent plea. I wait for her to wipe the words away from her mouth. She always does.
My bowl is dumped into the bin. The cupboard door is snapped shut. I lie awake and think of each heavy grain in the well of my stomach. Sinking.
Skye Raye is a writing and design student who loves feeling the textures of words and their own unique shades of meaning.
