A short story by Jack Mint
His face is haunted. Cheekbones press against his sallow skin like bruised fists. He hasn’t eaten in days. The grocery store shelves went empty a month ago. Between the shooting pains of his stomach eating itself and the ever-approaching void of his mind are the moans of his children. They cry themselves to sleep to escape the hunger. He cannot escape their cries and his hunger, and he hates them for it. He’s done everything he could and still they want and want. Cooked the cat and the dog, but the fish was the first to go.
Pets and wild animals don’t roam the neighborhood any longer. Everything is still, because whatever moved was rapidly consumed. Any plot of gravel in the city attempted to become a garden. However, overwhelming boot-prints and upturned roots clarifies that it is too late. The same empty cabinets and trash cans flood every house around until the people are pushed out as derelict boats pondering the streets. Hunger is an ever-present ebb and flow into his life like tides awash with bottles of bad news.
He slogs past burning cars. He drags his worn-out soles across the miles of broken store-front glass. Vitamin deficiency makes his skin peel off. Back home, his children’s bellies swell up and they’ve stopped crying. Their eyes look for the next meal and see nothing.
But he sees a house. They say it’s a hold-out house. They have food but they don’t want to share. He walks up to the door. They’ll share, he thinks for the first time in ages, they’ll share or else.
Someone must eat, might as well be him. He goes through the door as if he’s an invited guest who almost missed dinner. An aroma of food hits him. The hint of ambrosia tells him automatically where the kitchen is. Every nerve in his body crimps down into the center of his guts for the final capitulation of the universe. The knife in his hand is ready to carve out his piece of ill-cursed fate that wasn’t fed to him. He forgets everyone else in his home and city starving because he needs his share first. Oh, how the warmth will fill the emptiness and make it all right again. No one will take another meal from him again; he mutters under his breath just as he’s about to exit the hallway.
Before he enters the kitchen—a gun shot. He slides down the wall and the weak blood goes out. The hold-out homeowner lowers his gun and remarks to his wife how much the now shivering intruder looks like a zombie.
Many ears hear the shot and shuffle towards the hold-out house.
