Hunger

We were the seventh group.

Our goals were open and limitless,

Our bodies made of red clay,

red blood, blue lightning.

Our souls without tether.

We had prepared for the voyage

through strict discipline

as instructed.

We had taken the ritual baths

in the mountain temple

for 5 days in a row.

We had been covered in dust

and blankets

and beaten with leather.

Once rising, finally free of dust

and forgetfulness,

they told us we would climb

like a winged bird

towards the sky,

our minds would open

into endless unimaginable landscapes

without the shrouded mist

of our homeland,

without the desolate frozen lakes

of our dying land.

Our newly formed blood

would adapt to the synthetic nutrients,

to the dark brown soil

of the astral ship we were now forming.

For those left behind

we would become part of

the golden rays of sunlight,

a piece of the distant sky.

But certain elements

in the network engineering

began to change our nature.

My companions

hungered for old blood

and I felt waves of a hunger too

even if I couldn’t name it.

We found within ourselves

a desire far greater

than our preconceived nutritional needs.

Somewhere over the horizon

we became creatures of darkness

shadow killers of souls,

and we turned the ship around

and placed within it

the seed of a new message.

We would find a way

To merge

Our desire for flesh

And our wish for the stars.

The Magical Cake

None of the four Plum children ever understood their great uncle Alexander. He kept a great many strange artifacts in glass display cases throughout the house and begged the children to be careful whenever they visited. Running within the house was strictly prohibited. While some of the objects appeared to be quite valuable, others seemed questionable. In one case was kept an ugly wooden goblet which Uncle Alexander insisted  was, in fact, the holy grail, though their mother always pooh poohed this notion whispering to them that he had found it at a garage sale. The same sale, in fact, where she had obtained a rather obnoxious chicken shaped lamp.

In another case what appeared to be a potato sack was nestled between a beautiful ball of solid gold and a ring encrusted with diamonds and sapphires. Nearby this display also stood a shabby antique spinning wheel and a case containing a shoe made of milky blue glass that looked as though it might fit the foot of a 12 year old girl. In one case rested a decaying ball of thread, in another a bejeweled statue, and in yet another some aboriginal instruments adorned with feathers and bones. But of all the oddities preserved within Alexander Plum’s home, perhaps the most unexpected was a cake of unknown antiquity displayed on a solitary pedestal beneath a glass dome in the middle of his library.

While Addi Boo and Baby Ray chased bullfrogs by the pond in the garden and  Buddy  pilfered cigars to smoke behind the garden shed, Tilly Plum  stood transfixed for hours in front of the cake in the library. The frosting was an odd grayish color, which she supposed had once been white and probably would have tasted of vanilla. She would stand there wondering what flavor the cake might have been and what flavor it might still be if one were to taste it now. But most of all she wondered for what occasion it had originally been prepared and why it had never been eaten.

As the years passed and the Plum children aged Tilly continued to visit the strange gray cake in the library, memorizing the contours of the shell borders, roses and drop flowers. She took to cake baking and decorating at home, producing many replicas for birthdays, special dinners, and holidays.
Baby Ray once complained that she always made the same boring cake in different flavors. He, of course, didn’t realize that for Tilly, each cake was a different version of one particular cake whose true nature she could never know for certain. On one occasion Uncle Alexander found Tilly in his library deep in her meditations of butter cream, whipped cream, and royal icing. By this time Buddy was off in college and Addi Boo and Baby Ray had graduated to pilfering cigars to smoke behind the garden shed.

“I see something here has caught your eye.” Uncle Alexander said, coming to stand beside Tilly.
She nodded eagerly.
“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, no touching, nor tasting.” her uncle added.
“Oh no. I know,” she told him emphatically. “I can have cake any other time. I would never touch this one. I just always wonder why it’s here.”
“Oh, well, I have it because it’s a magic cake,” he answered lightly and squeezed her shoulder before taking a book from the shelf and leaving the way he came.

This was indeed food for thought. That brief encounter left Tilly with more, rather than less, to wonder about. In fifth grade she penned a story entitled “The Magickal Cake.” in which a well meaning fairy godmother gave the cake as a wedding gift to a beloved princess. The princess was killed by a wicked witch and the kingdom fell under a dark spell leaving the cake uneaten. Its powers went unused and unknown.
Mrs.Gruber’s comments were written with scathing red ink in the margin, “Why is the cake magical? Why even mention the cake, if you don’t describe what it does? The story did not have the three elements of a story. There is no clear resolution to the conflict. Points deducted for spelling and punctuation. C-”

Naturally, Tilly was incensed. She wrote her own notes in the opposite margin.
“Three Elemints of  A story: 1.The begining: A mysteryous magical cake is made. 2. The conflict: A princes is going to ruin the mystery by eating it. 3. The resolutun: A wich kills her. My story is about a magiCKal cake that survives. Not a stupid princeses weding.”
After re-submitting the story with her own comments on the comments, Tilly was sent to the principal's office. Her parents were called in and the school recommended that Tilly speak with the school psychologist. Her mother, accustomed to accommodating a variety of difficult people since marrying into the Plum family, simply nodded, pursed her lips as if concerned, and indicated that they would consider the counseling. She whispered to Tilly on the way out that Mrs.Gruber had been seeing a psychiatrist for years now, in the same building, in fact, where Mrs. Plum saw a podiatrist for her corns.

For Uncle Alexander’s 106th birthday, Tilly created for him a replica of his magic cake. It was entirely undeniable by this point that Alexander Plum's magic cake had impacted his niece Tilly. After high school and some community college, she graduated from Le Cordon Bleu as a pastry chef and opened a high end cake shop on Colombus Ave.
Now, two years and one lost relationship into the endeavor, her personal funds exhausted, The Magic Cake was closing it’s doors for good. There were some last special orders to fill on Saturday, and then it would be off to the unemployment line and probably Baby Ray’s couch. Nonetheless, Tilly arrived that Friday night, cake in hand, to celebrate her uncle's continuing health and longevity.

Addi Boo was by then married with two year old triplets. Recognizing the impossibility of managing her brood in his makeshift museum, she hadn’t visited Uncle Alexander since their birth.
Baby Ray, recently divorced, came by often to keep the garden in shape, and particularly to care for the pond. He was absent on that particular Friday night, the occasion of Uncle Alexander’s sweet 106th birthday bash, due to an unavoidable trip to Las Vegas with the soon to be second Mrs. Baby Ray Plum. With Buddy in Brazil, and their parents on sabbatical in Florida, Tilly was the only other Plum in attendance, along with Uncle Alexander, and his live-in nurse, Amalia.

Uncle Alexander was surprised and delighted with Tilly’s replica of his cake. Spry as a man half his age, dinner was merry, the wine flowed. Even after Amalia had cleared the table, washed the dishes and gone to bed, Tilly and Alexander talked and drank. On the subject of his good health he chuckled and waved a hand,
“Gads girl, you know, I have the holy grail to drink from if anything ails me. That and more to scare off death.”
Of politic a weary sigh,
“Once you’ve lived as long as I have you’ve seen it all.”
And at last, of family matters, laughter, until Tilly herself was the subject. Then, too intoxicated to censor her woes, she told Alexander all that burdened her, more than she could ever tell Baby Ray or her parents. Who among them could understand her passion, her obsession with her cake shop?  Who could see the loss for what it really was? Not just a failed business, but the end of a quest.
“You know Uncle Alex, I always thought, maybe one of my cakes would end up some day under glass turning pearly gray, a cake too perfect to ever have been eaten, some little cyborg kid or something, wondering how it got there.”
She laughed sadly at herself then, but Alexander sat silent and perfectly still. His eyes had acquired a fiery gleam and his back had straightened. His manner demanded Tilly’s full attention and she felt herself sober up a little as he rose and left the room without a word.
Within minutes he returned carrying the magic cake, the original in its glass dome, and set it gently upon the table near the remains of Tilly’s replica. Tilly stopped breathing. She could feel the goose pimples rise all over her flesh as Uncle Alexander took his seat and spoke slowly in a tone she had never heard from him,
“I have lived so long you know. You kids and your parents knew me as great uncle Alexander, and you wont believe me, but your  grandfather knew me as the same. As many generations as I’ve watched come and go, and because I endure, no Plum has ever inherited one of my artifacts, nor ever shown the slightest interest in them, with one exception, long, long, ago. That makes you the second exception.”
He paused then, letting the weight of his words settle, observing Tilly’s breathless silence before continuing,
“I feel a certain responsibility to protect the items I have collected, not only from damage but from abuse. You’ve read fairytales, I’m sure, and so you must know that the guardian of a magical item can only entrust it to one whom they deem worthy. At least, that is my approach.”
Gingerly he lifted the glass dome, exposing the cake, and set it aside.
“I don’t know where it came from really. All I have found in my research is vague. I do know that it was passed down through generations of Austrian Princesses. This is the cake Marie Antoinette was referring to in her despair, when she cried, 'Let them eat cake!' And yet, even then, it seems it passed untouched. When the palace was stormed, and the royal family failed to escape, somehow, the cake did. It was returned to Austria until world war II, and then it was collected with a great many other artifacts by Adolf Hitler. After his death it made it’s way into private collections, finally mine.”
He pushed a fork across the table to her.
“I don’t know what the magic does.”
Steadying her trembling hand, Tilly picked up the fork. Slowly she brought it closer and closer to the cake she had spent countless hour admiring, speculating about, and endeavoring to reproduce. It was not, she now could see, the most artfully decorated cake. But it was pretty, if simple. She brought the fork within inches of its pearly surface. Everything was still.
She felt, for the first time, the naked strangeness of the house, its contents, her uncle, a strangeness that had always been pushed aside made into something small and silly, but now it loomed, immense, unfathomable, terrifying, and real. Suddenly, against such a backdrop, her cake shop, her financial worries, her failure in the eyes of her siblings and parents seemed inconsequential. It was her life which was silly.

In that moment, Tilly Plum knew that the cake was truly magical, and that true magic shouldn’t be squandered on petty material concerns. At the last moment she withdrew her hand and set the fork deliberately down. She took a deep breath and looked into the eyes of the man she thought of as her great uncle Alexander and wondered at all the strangeness. And he, whoever he was, whatever he was, relaxed back into his chair, his face melting once again into a broad easy smile, and said,
“Good girl.”

The Nature Of Pain

Pain demands remedy.  It demands attention, it creates an end.  Ends are found wandering down many paths. 

Little by little I felt like dying.  I drove home up the 15 degree incline that went on for seven miles from the ocean to the mountainous woods.
The late afternoon sun was bright and hit my shoulders, browning them slightly.  The heat came in through the window and he sat next to me, a 200 pound man with the potential for artistic expression and a capacity for miserable effort and run-ins with the law. 
As I began to reach the peak of the oak covered meadow before a curvy 2 mile long descent into wooded Felton, I felt overwhelmed. The man had a multitude of chemical addictions and twenty nine years of pain that needed to be dulled and a father that had just died.
The family would not wait to hold the funeral and as a result, the tattooed addict beside me would never, as my mother said, have closure.  She could see what was coming more than I could, that girl I was with firm round breasts and idealism that had somehow sucked her into a cave full of murky water.
My tattooed addict, sitting in the cushioned chair beside me had a history of minor crimes and outstanding warrants in a few states and credit debt that would haunt him until death.

Each one of his problems fell on my shoulders. I opened my arms to them and held them.
For a time I hoped that they would get better or change or that he would change or that his jail stays would alter him or that visiting the county hospital would at least provide him with methadone or some legal compound, but none of it changed.  He took the methadone and then went to the streets moment later.  Even after the doctors finally approved a physical therapist and a reason was identified for his unbearable back pain, he never stopped mixing and injecting, he never followed through on the recommended exercises. He was in a cave of his own.
He let me carry all his problems. I took him to the appointments and to the streets. I went to work and then handed over my cash to his open hands that were like magnets. I picked up his cigarettes and cringed every moment he stood at the doorway smoking, wasps of pungent odor coming right back towards me, covering my clothes and books with their stench so that one day I would have to throw them all away. 

His problems were my problems. And his problems where too big for me and I wanted it all to end.
I remember saying: “but I haven’t made my mark on the world yet.”  And he agreed.  And so there was no double suicide.
But every day he got worse and I felt the dark cloud grow bigger and thicker and so strong that I could not see light beyond it.  Every day his tolerance grew and he needed a little more black tar.  Every day he needed a little more money.  Every day he sunk deeper and I watched from the edge, teetering on the side, looking in and then beyond. 
I went to work, I went to school.  I brought him money and he took it to the beach flats and got small brown goo wrapped in pieces of plastic. After disappearing into the bathroom for hours and poking in every vein he remembered having he would emerge all sweaty and pink. 
For a precious moment he would be free of pain, he would forget about his dad and the mounting legal problems and his back and the mountain of darkness that hung over our heads. Then time would slip and we would remember and the rattle would begin once again.

The Telephone

She sat on a cement bench with no back. Her feet, masked in shiny boots of leather, were touching, the proper position, her mother had always told her, for a young lady to sit. Her knees pressed together tightly, though now, with years and training, she hardly felt the pressure on the inside of both knees. Small pinkish white hands were folded in her lap, like a simple cloth napkin on a dinner table.
She was refined and cosmopolitan, like the crisp red wines she would sometimes sip in warmly lit bars that held soft laughter. Towering buildings stood behind her, all shiny and glittering with the bright sun. They whispered at her back, telling tales of newly-scented clothes, filling her ears with the familiar sputtering noise of a credit card machine.
She was this city’s Woman. She was the product of careful breeding, of clever advertising; the result of meetings in high offices around wooden tables. A fashionable wool sweater draped artfully over her shoulders, her thick legs were covered in thin black cotton that did not leave her shape to the imagination.
She was solid, but soft, a modern Amazon covered in expensive fabric. The strap of a sleek black leather handbag rested on her right shoulder, within were the contents of her world: a makeup bag filled with lipsticks and lotions and eye pencils. A tube of lotion, a tube of hand sanitizer, her cell phone, a little plastic bag of clean tissues, her red wallet, stuffed with plastic cards and yellow receipts.
She was the woman of the city, the pretty picture of Female, Wealth, and Urban. She was the photo, the living vision.

And there, on the other side of the train tracks, filling her world with the pungent stench of decay, was a man. He was not what they had envisioned. Not there in the board rooms or the executive meetings. He was the one that had fallen through the cracks, whether by sickness, luck, or habit, he was not what they wanted to see. No one wanted to see this.
He was a man fit for hospitals and drugs and white-walled rooms. But there were no hospitals now, no women in clean uniforms that cared. There was nothing for this man but the streets and the whims of his madness. In one body, he was the product of a rotting culture, a civilization in decay. He was a man with no home, no bathroom, no razor, nothing but voices and filth.
She had watched him for fifteen minutes, the entire time she had been waiting for the L train. She looked at the overhead sign again, blinking with the times for in-bound trains. Another six minutes to go. She judged the man to be about 40, but he was weathered by time, like a badly battered shell that had lost all its shine in the ocean’s tumbling surf.
Gray hair along the side of his temples merged into the black matted mess that was the rest of his hair. A scruffy salt and pepper beard looked like it had last been trimmed with a pair of rusty scissors. His feet were dark brown with soot and the street’s mess. She wondered what had become of his shoes, how long it had been since he had had any. The stained jeans he wore hung on his hips by a piece of string as thin as a shoe lace, maybe that is it was. She pictured him stealing the lace from another man in the middle of the night, someone just as dirty and forgotten.

He sat on the brick floor of the station, his back pressed to the wall. Beside him, on the glossy brick wall, was a telephone. It was a phone to be used by train-system employees, not one that could access the outside world.
Every few minutes, the man would rise, pick up the phone’s receiver and speak into it. Sometimes he would speak calmly, the next time he would yell, the next he would cry. She watched him from afar, watching the loop. She was a little afraid of his erratic behavior, but slightly intrigued and unable to look away, even when she tried.
He didn’t seem to notice her. He shouted into the receiver:
“I told you I’m coming! I’ve got all my stuff. I’m coming right now! Stop bothering me!”
It was the loudest he had been, a few other people in the station turned to look. She felt thankful for the train tracks between them, somehow feeling safer with the distance and metal rails.
The man sat back down on the ground. Looking agitated and worried. She wondered what he heard, what he thought, what he would do.
Her hair started to blow slightly and she heard the swishing sound of a train arriving. The metal doors opened and she got in, taking a seat by the window and looking out, to the man that she would soon forget.
He got up once again and grabbed the receiver, shouting into it. She watched him talking as the doors closed and the train took her away from his madness, from the telephone, from the glimpse of what she might one day become.

Destroyer

The destroyer laughed, looking up at the blackened heavens. All above was a blanket of glittering lights, the stars hung in the sky, low, like fruit waiting to be picked by a youngster with sticky hands. The destroyer laughed. The stripes on his sleeve attested to a long-distant past, the battles he had survived, the men he had killed and the ones he had saved. The captain beside him shrugged, he could not laugh with a man who so resembled a skeleton, a creature that had once only existed in the minds of little boys. But the apparition before him was real, as real as the worries that clung to the edges of his being, as real as the wind that brushed close to him like the wife he used to know. There was nothing he could do, he was a powerless lump of skin, shrouded by white flesh and a baggage of pain that rested on his shoulders like heavy bricks. Another chorus of laughs strung his ears, the captain raised his head, following the gaze of the destroyer to the flashing lights above. The stars where out of his control, just like the ship. Above, they moved by the whims of other forces, they would never answer to firepower, they would not respond to taunts of abuse or even soft kisses. Just as everything else, they were beyond his sphere of influence and it was pointless to wrestle with that simple truth.
He shook his head regretfully, and looked to the destroyer. Before him was a tube of metal and steel and white teeth painted like a picket fence. This was no man, but there were no other words to describe this being of decrepit laughter and sickly smells.
The ship bounced reassuringly. The waves were calm, the ocean was a baby asleep, its dreams moving quietly with the sharks below. The captain looked at his watch, the second hand moved slowly, too slowly, as slow as death seemed to approach his hell. Dawn herself seemed just out of reach. Why did she tempt him so? His memories of her were soft… bright golden rays that chased waves from their mountainous forms, pink clouds that announced the rising orb. He watched the movement of time. The hand moved slowly.
The destroyer let out another laugh.
The captain knew he was engaged in a battle that he could not win. The forces were too strong, too violent… even for a man like him. He still had shreds of a conscience, he still felt pain. The others did not.
He was surrounded by a horde of strangers who looked more like vampires and walking skeletons than the humans he remembered. Was he the lone survivor in a game of savages? For a second, he debated his own will. How long would it be until he became like them? How long could his stomach growl before he began to feast on human flesh? Before he went into the ship’s chambers and found the softest girl available and he began to chew on her breasts, bite by bite. There were plenty of girls below, their pastel dresses stained in blood and soot. There were plenty of them, plenty of food for a ship full of animals, hungry cannibals that had not seen the beauty of the moon for years.
The stars continued to shine, but the moon had begun to punish them, taking away their light, blinding them to the movement of a larger time, a larger cycle. Without the moon, they would have died on the sea had they not come across the lost ship, after months adrift.
The lost ship was like a gift from a maker who had given up on existence. When they had climbed aboard, they discovered the ship had a full belly of ample women and their men were too soft to stop the destroyer. He had walked right up to the captain and in minutes had turned him into their first meal in weeks. With the captain gone, and a pile of soft men who knew nothing of true savagery, they made a stew of the men and brought the women aboard as prisoners, as food to be stored til the next meal was needed. Now, with ample supplies, each man, each thing resembling a man, could have what he liked. A nipple, an arm, a piece of a lip. There was plenty for all. The old captain heard the belly of the destroyer rumble, the thing laughed and began to walk towards the lower chamber of the ship.

From A Hungry Ghost

Wanting another…
Just one more
And maybe one more after that…
Your lips glide across mine
Igniting fire within ancient caves,
finally, the strange paintings are visible
and they glow with the magic of secret things
that have been forgotten.
I cry when it ends
Even as your lips touch mine,
I am thinking about the next time,
and then,
the time after that.
When will it be?
When will there be more?
My hunger stops at nothing
I feast on chocolate and bread,
ripe fruits and thick cream
Still, my stomach growls
unsatisfied
The ghostly pit quietly begs
One more touch, feel my breast
One more kiss, taste my tongue
One more
Another, and perhaps I can rest...

But this machine full of trickery
takes the upper hand
Pulling me by my hair,
I crawl along the marble steps,
cleaning the floor with my desire
I consume the dirt,
grabbing handfuls of dark soil and sand
I lick the leaves
crunchy and crackling between white teeth,
they taste like winter in eternal fog
politely, the machine asks for more
without a smile, the machine asks for more
with anger, the machine screams for more
with tears, the machine begs for another
with hurt, the machine wails
sending rays of pain through the white walls that surround it,
into all matter that expands endlessly
in this vast Universe
in which it finds itself alone,
and now at last it lays
tired and drained,
devastated and consumed
frozen to stone and left to rot
and still
hungry…

A Gathering of Ghosts

It is a crisp San Francisco afternoon, with the sun and the wind balancing each other so that those who love the heat never get too cold and those who prefer the cold never get too hot. The wind from a passing white bus whips a long piece of hair from my loose bun and I feel the buzzing energy of the city streets. I am standing at a busy intersection, the long store laden Powell St. is behind me, and in front of me, across the busy Market Street, is the lavish Westfield Mall. Powell St never physically meets Market St. Between the two streets is a large island of cement which funnels into the two wide sidewalks that run from east to west on Market St. At the end of Powell St, right before the large cement island, is the main boarding station for the famous San Francisco trolley cars. There is a continuous long line of people standing around the curving roped poles that are there to keep them in order. Men with cameras around their necks board the blond wooden cars and hold on to the golden poles. I watch them lean out of the trolley as they make their way up Powell St.
Sharing the same cement space are a handful of street vendors. Their small wooden carts, which line the green metal fence on the periphery, are covered in metal jewelry made from forks bent into dozens of shapes, beaded necklaces and friendship bracelets. There are screeching buses and cars that zoom along Market St. An endless crowd flows down Powell street, laden with shopping bags. Here, in this land of consumer frenzy, is also the boundary between the world of opulence and the land of the destitute. Less than a block away, the street turns into an urban hell, where the red lights of old and dirty porn shops glare over the homeless drunks who sleep in the forgotten corners of broken buildings. The rag covered men and the shrunken faced women spill over into this clean, well ordered financial zone. On the strip of pedestrian concrete, an aging black man, with gray in his beard, holds a neon pink picket sign which says "Jesus loves You." People walk by him as if he was just inanimate feature of the landscape.
Next to me is a small card table with voter registration forms and Obama T-shirts and buttons. The table is staffed by a tough looking black man who is probably about 30 years old. His eyes are hidden by his black lens sunglasses and the image of Obama’s face on his shirt is outlined in gold. I watch him for a while, standing erect and proud, with his hands in his pockets. For most of the afternoon he folds and re-folds his pile of political T-shirts and constantly rearranges the contents of the table…moving buttons and making it all look more clean and organized. Next to him is a muscular black busker wearing sunglasses. He is topless and wears loose maroon basketball shorts, tap shoes and white socks. He has set up a small square of wood for his tap platform. There is a small amplifier right beside him, on top of which is a laptop, which he occasionally fumbles with to change his playlist. Every now and then, he tap dances, drawing a big crowd. When I first show up, he is dancing with an older blond woman, a woman who clings to her fading youth through gestures of fashion and makeup. He holds her tightly, dancing to an old tune and moving like an unlikely pair in an old Sinatra movie.
I am wearing an oversized T-shirt, which I have tied in a knot along the small of my back. It’s an eggshell white color and in the center is a colorful picture of an idyllic farm. The image is set inside a large oval frame, over which is the name of the company: Cascadian Farm My hair is tied back and I have a matching baseball hat on my head. I glance at my unrecognizable image in a storefront window. My job is to introduce the public to the company’s new product: dark chocolate granola. There are two pallets full of mini sample boxes. It is my job to give them all away.
The set up is fragile. There are two pieces of wood, creating a three sided base which forms the bottom of the table, and a long white plank of wood which forms the countertop of the table. But today, the screw has fallen off the bottom, and our three-sided table base only has two sides. It works, but a little extra pressure will cause it to fall. The table is high, about four feet tall and about 6 feet in length. On top of the long flat surface there are two dark brown woven baskets. To keep up the appearance of abundance, as soon as supplies run short, I keep refilling the baskets with the smaller boxes of free cereal samples. In between the baskets are a high stack of coupons, worth $1 off the price of a large box of cereal. I have put a box of cereal on top of the coupons, to keep them from blowing away, but every so often, someone takes the sample box/paper weight and the little fliers blow away in the wind, scattering like colorful leaves over the wide gray sidewalk.
My job partner, Kelly, gives me a five minute training and the disappears. I am left to distribute the samples alone. There are a group of people in front of me. They all want samples. The more people want them, the more other people want to know what it is that people want and the small group multiplies geometrically. The crowd grows larger by the second, as more and more pedestrians stop to see the cause of so much interest. There are little old Asian women, college kids, city workers in their brown and orange vests, middle aged homeless men in smelly rags, all of then unified in their quest for a "free" something. The baskets on the table soon are empty, I can not fill them fast enough. People are grabbing five and six packets at a time.
I am holding onto a large cardboard box, full of 50 small sample boxes. I put two directly into the outstretched hands in front of me, their palms open in a gesture of obvious demand. I cannot hand them out fast enough. In the commotion, the old little Asian women that barely reach my elbow are taking boxes of cereal out of the larger shipping packages on my right side and filling their shopping bags with the free samples. The mob is pushing and pulsing, trying to reach me, the benefactor of free cereal. All I see are outstretched hands all around me. They have surrounded me like a hungry third world mob. They are not satisfied with two boxes, they do not go away after I fill their hands with another package. They open their other hand, asking for more.
In their push towards me, the crowd puts too much weight on the unsteady table top, and the long board falls over; the baskets and the coupons fall with the board to the ground. As I bend down to try and pick up the coupons, the crowd realizes the source of free cereal has moved, and they push closer to try and reach me. I am kneeling on the ground, trying to stand, but there are people on all sides of me, all of them with outstretched hands. I yell for the crowd to back up and they move away slightly. I dump an entire large carton of samples into the small woven baskets. The crowd makes an "ohhhhh" sound as the basket is quickly filled and the rest of the samples fall to the ground. I buy a couple seconds as people scramble for the small boxes on the street and others reach into the basket. The people are preoccupied for the moment, and I fix the table top and quickly put out more boxes of cereal.
The people still want more. Once they realize they can have one little box of cereal, they ask for two. When I give them two, they want four. Some people want entire cases. One man in a green floral shirt comes back every 10 minutes, taking three boxes away with him each time. I notice myself getting possessive, wanting to teach the people good manners. Somehow, for some unexplained reason, I don’t want to indulge their greed. I start to be more firm with my offerings. I only give each one two boxes, no matter how much they want. When someone asks for more, I say no, a polite but strong voice with the deep sound of finality. An older man, much shorter than me, stands by my side, unwilling to go away, unwilling to accept just two. He keeps on asking, he keeps saying: "just one more… that’s all I want."
A little more is never enough. We seek to fill what cannot be filled, with cereal, with clothes, with sex, with money, with love, with pleasure. This voracious form is never satisfied. It can swallow the world and still look towards other stars with naked desire. I see this in the open demanding hands and the eager bulging eyes. I see it in the discarded cereal packets and the arms cradling many shopping bags. I see it in myself when the day is over and, as I slowly walk to the subway, my body shivers with the waves of endless hunger that demand to be immediately satisfied.