Food for Thought

By: Justin Ryan Schwan
September 10, 2008

Benny looked at the chocolate cake and pushed his plate away. He sat back with his hands on his bloated tummy and looked up at his aunt, Ruth, and smiled. Leaning forward, he took a toothpick from the table’s centerpiece, and placed it between his lips.

“You're done, sweetie?” Aunt Ruth said. She took her oven mitts off and came over.

“I don’t think I can have anymore, honestly,” Benny said, his voice full of satisfaction.

“Well, I didn’t have you to dinner for you not to eat what I’ve made.”

“I know, I know, Auntie, but it’s just that I’ve had so much and my stomach...you know?”

“I know your mother would be very upset if she knew you hadn’t eaten everything--and all those dying Africans.”

Aunt Ruth adjusted the tablecloth underneath the final plate. The plate was blue and the tablecloth white--a white sheet on a black table glistening under a bright light. Benny’s knife and spoon sat neatly at the side of the plate. The fork lay in the empty dish at the other side of the round table. Ruth walked away, picking up the empty plate and entering the kitchen door.

“Do you want help with the dishes?” Benny yelled over the running water. He saw steam escaping from the partially open door.

“I want you to finish your cake,” Ruth replied.

Her voice was muffled by the running water, the dense steam, the clanking glass and scratching of metal cutlery. He looked at the plate and the chocolate cake sitting on top of the blue china, the coconut frosting smeared across the black chocolate. He pulled the plate closer, took the spoon, relaxed. His stomach throbbed. He had eaten so much already. Half a turkey--a small turkey, but still, a turkey--and yams, three candied yams, along with two cups of stuffing dug out of the young turkey's gut. He took a peek at the chocolate and decided a few more bites wouldn’t be bad. His tongue still worked and so what if he got sick--it wasn’t like he’d have to eat his own puke.

2

He was here because of what he’d done at school. He had been caught by one, cheerfully toxic cafeteria attendant, as he tried to lift a half-pint of two percent milk.

The attendant called the office, the office called his mother--

And his mother called Aunt Ruth pleading for answers to her unruly child. Benny hadn’t understood though. His mother was strict with him and he’d never dreamed of doing something he wasn’t supposed to, it was just that the first milk wasn’t enough--and he’d find enough by trading up with some of the other kids for his dessert, a half piece of pie for a sandwich was fair enough--but today the school hadn’t made any pie, hadn’t passed out any cookies, or any cobbler. The one slice of pizza and macaroni and cheese were not enough, and his mother never allowed him to clip his ticket twice. He didn’t dare do that, but neither did he dare go the rest of the day hungry. His stomach would growl so loudly the classmates sitting near him--Becky Applegate, in particular--would look at him with snaky eyes.

Now he was here, in his aunt’s dining room. The candles shined and flickered, dancing before his glazed, content eyes.

“Have you finished?” Ruth asked as she walked into the room. She carried a cloth, twisting it left and right to soak the water from her wrinkled skin. She picked up her oven mitts and looked at the plate, then Benny. “You haven’t.”

“No.”

“You should, I would.”

“Maybe you have a bigger stomach than I do?”

“Don't be a smart mouth. You’re a growing boy, and you like to drink and eat more than what is given you, so tonight, you’ll get all you can have.”

“But I’ve already had it all.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Aunt Ruth said. She walked away and came back, carrying something black, reflective. “I will help you eat it.”

“What’s that?” Benny squirmed in his seat. The object glistened. Ruth walked to him and pulled out the chair next to his. She sat down, her necklace creeping close, her blue pearl earrings bouncing against her ears. There was a smile on her face, slight, transparent.

“I want you to finish now.”

Benny scraped a spoonful of frosting off the top of the cake. He licked it off and looked at the dull spoon with the coconut smear. “What will you do if I don’t?”

3

Benny was used to his mother’s punishments. She would slap him sometimes, but mostly it was just spanking and yelling. She would yank his pants down around his ankles and turn him around so she could see his privates. Then she forced his body against the bed and put a sock in his mouth. She would use her hand, which didn’t hurt nearly as bad as daddy’s belt, but she’d spank and spank and spank until they were both crying.

Benny stared at the object in Aunt Ruth’s hand and wondered what she would do if he misbehaved. He swallowed another spoonful of frosting. His tongue loved the rich taste, but his stomach was starting to split at the seams. His bowels pounded like melons rolling across the ground by the hundreds of dozens.

“I am going to cut that little stomach out of you,” Aunt Ruth said.

She moved her hand into the light and he saw clearly that it was a black knife with an ivory handle. He struggled to find his voice, stuttering over simple words.

“Why d-do you w-want to d-do that?”

“We like little boys to grow up to be big men. We enjoy righteous children and kind children--and you’re just not right.”

“W-we?”

“You're rotten, as rotten as a black banana smelling of decay and grime.

“But if you cut--”

“God’s kingdom is an eternal one and what happens in the flesh is little to what happens up there,” Ruth stated--quite factually--then placed the hunting knife on the table and picked up the bread knife at Benny’s wrist. “Let me help you cut it into smaller bites.”

Benny put the spoon to one of the pieces of cake his aunt cut away from the whole. The cake was just a single layer, nine inches in diameter, but there was something else cooking in the kitchen. He smelled it through the dark slit under the door, as dark as his aunt’s face as she finished slicing the cake. Benny quietly imagined that it would be much the same way she’d slice his stomach. He saw his tummy, white and paunchy under his shirt, his belly button trying to squirm away from the tip of his Aunt's deer knife.

Benny chewed what was in his mouth and then went after the next piece. He chewed that one, went for the next, chewed and kept eating until he had slowly gotten through a third of what lay on the blue china plate--but now his jaws ground to a stop and he felt Aunt Ruth looking at him as if she didn’t think that he could do it, taunting him.

As if she doesn’t want me to finish it because she likes what’s next best!

What would be next? He didn’t know, and all he could think to do to keep from finding out was to put another piece of cake into his mouth, and chew it slowly. His tongue was sticking to his palate and the chocolate was easily as thick as peanut butter.

He closed his eyes and said, “I can’t eat anymore, auntie, I just can’t.” Tears boiled just behind his eyes. The little boy he imagined sitting in his stomach, eating everything Benny ate, was pinching him to stop.

“Then lift up your shirt.”

“Auntie, please, can’t I be done?”

She reached forward and grasped Benny’s shirt. He was too sick to move, and he thought if he tried, he’d puke. And now his Aunt Ruth just might make him lap it up, because of something stupid, like principle.

“I can’t!”

The tears spilled down his thin cheeks. Aunt Ruth slammed her open hand against his chest, pushing him to the floor with the chair. The chair's back broke in half and Benny slid through the cracked wood to the hard floor. He leaned over in a wave of sickness and yarked. The puke came out in a slippery flow of black, then a pasty beige color with green and brown specs, hot mush splashing onto his hands.

“You are possessed, child! You are possessed!” Aunt Ruth's voice pierced Benny’s ears, shaking his eardrums like bass hammers. He rolled over and a cold hand slapped his back. Sharp nails dug into his shirt, and the skin beneath. His head snapped around to stare into the dizzying light, at the shadow of Aunt Ruth’s face. She pulled the white cotton t-shirt over his eyes and wrapped it into a knot to stuff into his mouth. He could no longer cry or scream.

“I can’t breath,” he tried to say. “I will eat it all I can’t breathe please I can eat it all!” She heard none of this, of course. Not through the gag, or over her own shrieks.

He felt the cold hand on his stomach and jerked his legs wildly, blindly, only to grate them across the bottom of the table, striking his shins against the hard oak feet. Then he felt the knife, cold and strong against his belly. It was bitter cold against his warmth, pain against life.

4

Benny stood under the open window of the cafeteria, surrounded by dozens of children either coming or going, lunch trays fully loaded or empty. He stared at the blue two percent milk in his hands, at the chocolate half pint on his tray. His friends stared at him from their table, each in a fit of hot anticipation. Benny looked at the lunch lady as she dished out half servings of food like a robot, then at the chocolate milk on his plate. He put the white milk back and walked to his friends' table.

“Why did you put it back?”

“It’s a dare, Benny; you just can’t NOT do it!”

“We both did it. How can you be with us if you don’t?”

“Why not?” Benny said. “You have any idea what my mother will do to me if I get caught?”