Even as a newborn he was ravenous. He'd empty his mother's breast in a few minutes and then erupt into a tirade the second her milk would stop flowing. His poor mother was dumbfounded, she hadn't had this problem with her first two, so she rented a breast pump from the local hospital to shore up supply.
Soon her days consisted of nothing but feeding and pumping sessions—linked only by bottle-feeding sessions when she couldn't coax another drop from her exhausted breast. The voracious baby was only of average size, however, so she came to the conclusion that there must be a problem with her milk and stopped breast-feeding altogether.
Even then, the baby continued to consume massive amounts of formula, so she learned to utter "growth spurt" whenever one of her wide-eyed friends would take notice of the baby's unusually large appetite. When he was old enough to grab for things, they would end up in his mouth. Upon arrival of his teeth, these things would inevitably end up dimpled with tiny chew marks. He's just an oral baby, her mother would say, he'll grow out of it. She hoped that this was true but in the meantime strictly controlled items within his reach in the house. Her pediatrician told her that anything that could fit through a toilet paper tube posed a choking hazard so she packed up all of her girls' Barbie clothes, jewelry and other small items in a plastic bin and stuck them in the attic.
It wasn't long before the little boy learned to talk. Not surprisingly, the first word he learned to say was "eat." Soon thereafter his day was filled with questions like "eat car...eat ball...eat doggie?" His mother would giggle and tousle the amber curls on his toddler head and his sisters would tease him by saying that he would eat his own foot if he could. At bedtime, his father would read him stories from big, colorful picture books and the little boy would point to the pictures and say, "eat train...eat truck...eat tree?" Then he 'd pretend to grab the item from the page and stick it in his mouth as if he was satisfied only when the things he desired most were tucked safely inside. It was the same when his mother would take him on errands in town, although his questions soon became emphatic statements, "eat school bus... eat tractor... eat pickup truck!"
When the boy started school, his world expanded. His teacher had glossy lips and springy brown curls and when she walked by, her scent made him dizzy. On the first day of school, she gave each of her students a chubby pencil with an eraser that looked like a chef's hat on top. By the end of the first week, he'd plucked these erasers off of all his classmates' pencils and tossed them into his mouth. When his teacher asked him why on earth he had done such a thing, he replied that whenever he sees something beautiful or amazing his belly screams out for it. Thinking him cheeky, the teacher threatened to stick him in a special class if he didn't stop. From his two older sisters, the boy knew enough about the special class to know that he should start keeping his eating habits to himself.
As the boy grew, he took great pleasure in collecting and eating his favorite things; smooth, round pebbles and acorns he'd find on the playground at recess, and the skinny teeth from the black barber combs his father used. At home he feasted on Legos, Lincoln Logs (especially the colored pieces) and nuts and bolts from his erector set. He also grew fond of his sister's Barbies with their flawless flesh and tiny feet, deflecting blame for the missing playthings on the family dog.
And then the boy went to college. This was an experimental time for him as he came into contact with so many new and foreign things, and he tried them all. Miniature liquor bottles and articles of girls' clothing left behind in his dorm-room bed soon became his favorites, though every now and then he'd take comfort in something familiar when he felt homesick. Sometimes, he'd spend days on end in the library, consuming entire volumes of literary works. He'd inhale deeply as he opened each book, and then savor it page by page, often stumbling from the building in a daze. On the eve of his graduation, he dug up an old cobblestone from one of the pathways on campus, pathways he'd used everyday for the last four years, and memorized its 200-year-old flavor as it made its way into his belly.
As he matured into a husband and father, his appetite began to wane. The young girl he'd first spotted in his college philosophy class, and then eventually married, seemed to keep his cravings at bay and then she gave him babies, which were beautiful and amazing in their own right. The boy soon found that there wasn't anything more satisfying than just holding them for hours on end.
But when his career blossomed and he found himself heading up the R&D department for a large corporation, he began to eat large amounts of money. This was especially true whenever one of his colleagues would get a promotion or he'd read about the business success of someone he knew. He'd binge on money, scarfing down as much as he could gather, like a frantic child knocking on as many doors as possible on Halloween night. While he managed to amass and consume many things during this period, instead of feeling fulfilled, he just felt heavy.
By the time he became a grandfather, his teeth had been worn down to tiny nubs from all of the heavy work they'd performed over the years and didn't allow him to eat anything that required too much chewing. Still, he was able to munch on a few select delicacies like flowers from his garden, crickets and other small bugs, and just-read pages from the novels he devoured at breakneck speed (those were the best, they melted on his tongue as he savored the woody flavor).
Finally, the boy died. Only he wasn't a boy any longer, he was a toothless old man who in his final days lived in a nursing home sipping nutritional supplements from a straw. You look good enough to eat, he would say every day to his favorite nurse. She would giggle and rub the prickly hairs on his forearm and remark that she'd be surprised if he had any appetite left after all the protein shakes he'd consumed. Normally my patients turn their noses up at these, she said. But not the old man. It was as if he was acutely aware that the soapy concoction they fed him for breakfast, lunch, and dinner was the only thing sustaining him and the staff watched in wonder as he relished every drop until his last day.
Two days after the old man died, his body was slid into the crematorium chamber and lit. And as he burned, all of the things the old man had eaten over the years, the things beautiful and amazing that he cherished, craved and consumed, that made him into the man he was, burned to dirty white ashes and flew away.
© 2006 Suzanne Abbot
