Howard never understood hunger when he was a kid. It was something he saw on the TV for UNICEF commercials, something he heard people lived with but never understood himself. He regularly used the term 'I'm starving' in the class period before lunch, or said 'no way I'm hungry enough to eat that' over cafeteria food.
But he's not really a kid anymore, and he knows that hunger isn't the malaise of a meal postponed. Hunger is a gun against your head and shackles on your feet at the exact same time. Hunger is the knife in your gut and the dizziness in your head and the way you feel like all the blood in your veins has been turned to ash. It's the tiny cracks as hair falls out and the gaping void of hours moving impossibly slowly with nothing in your mouth but spit and teeth and tongue. Hunger consumes you; it worms its way into the hollowness it's carved into you, and it becomes your identity.
You become it.
So at first, Howard doesn't even realize he isn't hungry. He doesn't even realize he's alive. It's as if someone's lobotomized him with an ice cream scoop. He lifts a hand to his hand, struck stupid by the change, and feels a dribble of saliva on his lower lip. Then he looks around where he is.
Suburbia. Not just suburbia, but distinctly un-Californian suburbia. Bricks, painted white paneling and siding. Gutters. Trees that lose their leaves in the winter. A slight chill on the breeze. Howard wraps his arms around himself, around his jutting ribs in the size XS sweater that seems less like clothing and more like a voracious amoeba that could swallow him in two bites.
This is probably not the sort of town an emaciated black teenager will go unnoticed in. He jumps up and grabs the top of a white fence, in the wedge where the two pickets meet, and with a strength he'd long since assumed was sapped by malnutrition, hoists himself up and over into someone's garden. He lands with a bit of a crunch - rosebush - and picks his way out of the botanical security system to try and get a look in the window.
Howard | warning for starvation
But he's not really a kid anymore, and he knows that hunger isn't the malaise of a meal postponed. Hunger is a gun against your head and shackles on your feet at the exact same time. Hunger is the knife in your gut and the dizziness in your head and the way you feel like all the blood in your veins has been turned to ash. It's the tiny cracks as hair falls out and the gaping void of hours moving impossibly slowly with nothing in your mouth but spit and teeth and tongue. Hunger consumes you; it worms its way into the hollowness it's carved into you, and it becomes your identity.
You become it.
So at first, Howard doesn't even realize he isn't hungry. He doesn't even realize he's alive. It's as if someone's lobotomized him with an ice cream scoop. He lifts a hand to his hand, struck stupid by the change, and feels a dribble of saliva on his lower lip. Then he looks around where he is.
Suburbia. Not just suburbia, but distinctly un-Californian suburbia. Bricks, painted white paneling and siding. Gutters. Trees that lose their leaves in the winter. A slight chill on the breeze. Howard wraps his arms around himself, around his jutting ribs in the size XS sweater that seems less like clothing and more like a voracious amoeba that could swallow him in two bites.
This is probably not the sort of town an emaciated black teenager will go unnoticed in. He jumps up and grabs the top of a white fence, in the wedge where the two pickets meet, and with a strength he'd long since assumed was sapped by malnutrition, hoists himself up and over into someone's garden. He lands with a bit of a crunch - rosebush - and picks his way out of the botanical security system to try and get a look in the window.