Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (fun books to read for adults .txt) 📗

didn’t even break. The skin just opened right up. I could see the entire bone. It hurt so goddamn bad I couldn’t bring myself to hit it again.”

I considered what he was proposing, that it was probably easy, though I didn’t want to do it. It didn’t seem necessary.

“But what if I get caught? Can’t doctors tell how old a bruise is?”

“What the fuck?” He leaned close. “This is nothing. You used to talk about robbing banks. Get over it.”

The waitress came, and he sat back and smiled and ordered pasta with chicken. She strutted off, the menus in one hand, and again, he hunched over the table.

“Just so you know,” he told me with an anger that conveyed his full disappointment, “I’m not supporting you. You want to write all day, then you figure this one out.”

I shrugged. “I have enough money left over to get by for a while.”

“Aw, fucking come on.” He gripped the table as if he were going to flip it. “You’re a minor. If you get caught, your record will be erased when you turn eighteen. Have some balls.”

I rubbed my cheek. He hated that I’d lost, that I was weak and showing it, that I couldn’t keep it in. And I hated it too.

“How do I do it?” I asked, speaking softly.

He shook his head. “You want to write novels and you can’t even figure out how to fool a bunch of idiots. This should be easy.”

✴

THE HORIZON—a gray line corrugated by low, uneven clouds—announced the dawn.

My foot throbbed with each step, a dull pain like a blunt nail against the bone. All weekend, I’d written as the red and black bruise spread, and now, gritting my teeth, I made my way across the parking lot and tried not to think about the breaking of a law put in place for a good reason. In my novel, the dystopian society was the result of greed and war, and my actions seemed no better. But if I didn’t do this now, I’d look as if I’d always been full of shit.

I shut out my thoughts. Crossing the warehouse, I was empty, existing only through my senses: a gust of wet air, the hiss of water hoses and the banging of metal carts over floor drains, the weight of my rubber boots.

And then I was alone in the gymnasium-sized freezer, beneath the high metal shelves. Bing, a wiry man with liver-spotted cheeks, had gone to get the forklift, and I was supposed to load boxes on a pallet. I glanced around and then reached up, pulled three boxes from the shelf, and let myself fall with them. They cracked against the concrete, jostling blocks of frozen shrimp inside. I jammed my foot into the pallet’s slats and lay, trying to grimace, though I felt resigned.

“What wrong?” Bing asked as soon as he got down from the forklift.

“I twisted my foot,” I told him, clutching my ankle.

He laughed. “Get up!” When I didn’t, he furrowed his brow and repeated, “Get up!”

“I can’t!” I said, feigning concern.

He hurried off and returned with the boss, a short Chinese man I often saw watching over his employees, his hands behind his back as he paced alone with a look of discipline and concern.

“You’re fine,” he told me.

“No, I’m not. I really hurt my foot.”

“No. You are fine!” he repeated, but loudly now, clipping each word as if chanting at a rally.

“I can’t stand up.”

“Yes, you can!”

“No, I can’t.”

I could see that he didn’t believe me, that he could find no shock or pain in my expression.

The foreman, a French Canadian with a lean face and pale brown eyes, stepped to the front of the growing knot of onlookers. “Show us your foot,” he mumbled.

The employees craned their necks. A gigantic, bearded Pole came to the rear, a man who referred to himself in the third person and who was often called upon for heavy loads. “Stan wants to see!” he announced.

Gingerly, I removed the rubber boot. I peeled back the three pairs of socks that I wore to prevent blisters. The distended skin of my foot ached.

The crowd said, “Ah” and “Oh.” They were speaking in Chinese, very quickly, pointing as if the others might not have seen.

My foot was like a glimpse of a murder-scene photograph on a detective’s desk, or something sticking out from beneath a sheet in a morgue. The crowd parted, and Stan stepped to the front and helped me up with surprising tenderness.

At the emergency room, anxiety made sweat bead on my forehead. The doctor would see straightaway that the injury was two days old. He was a gangly Al Pacino, his breath reeking of mint like that of a teenage smoker returning home. He touched the taut skin, whistled, and then poured Tic Tacs into his mouth and almost choked on them.

“Let’s get you an X-ray,” he said between crunching. “You’re not going to be putting weight on this baby for a while.”

The X-rays showed that nothing was broken, but he told me that soft-tissue injuries could be worse than fractures. I went home on crutches, with an appointment for physiotherapy and the determination to use workers’ comp to finish my first real book.

“I guess you won’t be training,” my father said when I shared these plans with him.

“I’m not even supposed to walk.”

He stared out the window and asked if I’d train again once my foot was better.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go traveling then, or else I’ll just write.”

He nodded, but I could tell that he recognized his mistake.

✴

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, my blinds drawn, I expanded on my vision of the future—a militant civilization purified in a flood of biblical fire.

I’d never been so happy. As I wrote, I tried to decide what it meant to be part of a society caught between the fear of loss and the desire for change. My villains valued only their satisfaction and survival. They made me think of the trailer park in