The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Chana Porter
- Language: English
- Genre: Dystopian Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Beatrice Bolano looked down at her almost empty plate. She was still hungry.
Hungry in the way they warned about in church, whispered about in the girls’
bathroom at school, scratched into the wall behind the Bu ’n’ Go. Beatrice was
hungry for taste, texture, mouthfeel. Crispy, crunchy, silky, chewy. Beatrice was
hungry for juxtaposition, and she would never tell anyone as long as she lived.
There was still a small mound of rice on her plate, and next to that an even
smaller mound of celery and carrots cooked together in such a way that they
resembled each other. Grayish, stringy, mushy. She ate the remaining rice with a
bit of vegetable mush and imagined it overlaid with lemon, butter, salt. Beatrice
was comfortable with this kind of game, even in front of her parents, injecting
clean, modest meals with her secret perversity. While Beatrice chewed her bland
food, imagining it improved, a litany of words oated through her mind:
reduction, flambé, seared, marzipan.
Soon Mama would go into the living room and choose a television program
for the evening while Papa cleaned out the cooking pot. Feigning a headache,
Beatrice excused herself from her parents to retire early. She couldn’t
concentrate, not on homework or television. Colors and scents and avors she
had never actually tasted, only imagined, danced through her mind. Words she
knew from her secret hours lurking in chat rooms on her family computer.
Beatrice locked her bedroom door and lay down on her bed. Now that she
had made her decision, she wanted to tease herself, to go slow and make it last as
long as possible. It wouldn’t be like the other times. No one would ever know.
As if it had never happened, only a dream. It wouldn’t be like that time she’d
stood in the refrigerator light in Carrie Sutherland’s kitchen, stung her face
with peas and rice gruel as Carrie’s mother walked in, horried. Carrie, smirking,
st-deep into a jar of enriched vitamin syrup. Even when misbehaving, Carrie
knew better than to let anyone outside her own family actually see her chew and
swallow. The memory of that day still lled Beatrice with a cold, static dread
every time she saw Mrs. Sutherland at church. Sometimes Beatrice felt her shame
so palpably, she could almost taste it.
Her mouth watered. Her ngers twitched. Beatrice glanced at the door. The
sounds of the television drifted up to her bedroom. A young man screamed out
in pleasure and pain, the din interspersed with a woman’s throaty laughter. It
was her parents’ favorite program of late, Boy Meat, where a gang of
dominatrixes rode through the countryside on their motorcycles, torturing
terried young men. It was a city show, like most of the media they consumed.
The people of Seagate enjoyed the outlandish outts and dramatics, even though
the formula of the show was tiresome. Beatrice mainly watched it for the exit
interviews.
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