Appetite
by Zach VandeZande
He stood under the shower head, the water a halo of pressure on his scalp. The knob he’d turned to that magic point of heat right before pain. He could not say what he was thinking about. Eyes closed or staring vacant at a sliver of soap, could never recall after a shower if he’d had his eyes open or closed. The language of vision was absent in the shower. It was tactile in the way of sex or other intimacies, this getting clean. He was more than a little high in the early afternoon, and he was taking a shower about it.
What was going on with him lately? He didn’t know. He’d been out of work awhile, had begun to think of late capitalism as a kind of nostalgia for the jaws of a wolf. As if people had grown bored in their two-bedroom brownstones and decided that the best way to counter that was to metaphorically hunt the people weaker than them. Frankly he didn’t want any part of it, but he knew that he’d have to do something soon. His wife was patient but practical, and he wasn’t much interested in seeing which of those traits had a better hold on her. Eventually he’d have to pick up his spear and go on.
Do fish think this much about the ocean? He wondered.
This is what he was thinking when his wedding ring fell off of his soap-slicked finger. He stopped it with his foot and bent down to retrieve it, then he held it in the palm of his hand and let water run over it until his cupped palm was free of soap. Looking at the ring, he was filled up with love for his wife. They had a good relationship. They got along, they had settled into the clockwork cozy way of a marriage. Maybe things were a little boring sometimes. Whose life wasn’t? There was no reason to go looking for blame, and there was no reason to mess with it.
He’d put the wedding ring in his mouth before, always in moments when he was alone, and almost always when he’d been drinking or smoking. Sometimes he held it up to his mouth and blew into it like one would the mouthpiece of a trumpet. Now he put the ring on his tongue like a lozenge, felt the way the warmed metal created a bordered sensation on his taste buds. He thought about buds, something that might bloom, and he thought about the way that what he felt most intensely was the space on his tongue that was inside the ring—that the absence of touch was more profound than the presence of it.
Something in him had known he would swallow the ring for some time, which he did now. It travelled the tumbledown of his esophagus without effort and was gone. Some things there’s just no accounting for.
The deed done, he came back to his senses. Uh oh, he thought, the same way a toddler might who has let the dog run off with his baby carrot. The meaning of the act was metaphorically complex, a dense text of criticism was sitting in his gut like performance art, a—well, he had no fucking clue what it meant, if it was good or bad, if it indicated a kind of love that moved beyond understanding or a desire to consume/destroy/fuck it all up.
What he knew: he’d just invited a kind of trouble into his home. Because he could lie. It would be simple. Down the drain and gone. Fell off on his morning run around the reservoir, he doesn’t know where. He pictured himself doing it, the look of worry on his face. He saw it would be easy. But it would be a betrayal, a real one, if small. And it would linger. Can you believe he lost his wedding ring would become a bullet point of character study, trotted out on phone calls with friends and amid bickerings. Would the dam of the lie break? Would he then confess, years later, in a bitter moment headed toward separation? Look how a meaning grows with the distance of time, like compound interest.
He stood there in the shower and felt keenly the way his ring finger throbbed. He thought of a time when he was twelve years old, left alone in the house. He’d decided to hang upside-down from the spiral staircase that went up to a lofted room where they kept an old sofa and tv, but when he got that way, he’d realized he wouldn’t be able to get down safely. He remembered the blood rushing to his head, looking down at the ground a body’s length below him, and thinking this is how I will die, and it was embarrassing, but also thrilling.
Of course, he’d gotten down, somehow. He’d tumbled out of it and landed just right. He always had.
He turned off the water and felt the cold begin to prickle his flesh before stepping out and drying off with a towel. He was suddenly sober. It was an afternoon like any other, or it could be. He thought about making himself vomit, but he didn’t think he’d be able. They could afford a replacement ring, but it would not be with his money, and he did not know if he could bear the capitalist shame of it. Besides, the ring was still there with him. It was right there in the bathroom. He thought about safekeeping.
He thought, not for the first time, that there might be something more wrong with him than he currently understood. He was full up with questions about himself: is this the beginning of something? An aberration? One never knows, does one?
When he looked down at his stomach, he thought he could make out a faint glow. He stood there looking down at himself in the bathroom, reached out, and shut the light. It was there, shining out at him: a place where the skin was pinked by a circle of light. He was beholden.
He put a hand over the place, alarmed, and stumbled back into the towel rack. The glow came through the crease of his fingers. It seemed impossible because it was. His mind flitted through thoughts without picking one. He felt full of bees, there in the dark. What had he done? What danger had he invited on himself?
In the darkness, he heard his phone buzz on the back of the toilet tank. Words followed in that blue haunted light of cell phones, and he leaned in to read them. It was his wife, as it would be. He pulled his hand away from his stomach like he was checking on a small and wounded bird. It glowed up at him. He was about to lose track of who he was and become only this.
He knew there were people who ate things like dirt and hair and rocks, knew it was called pica, knew that sometimes it was a function of the body’s needs. So maybe his body needed something. Maybe that’s all it was. Maybe this thing he had done, which felt now like an emergency, was no emergency after all, was just some kind of vitamin deficiency.
He took a breath and turned the light on. He got dressed, avoiding himself in the mirror. He hung up his towel and did the dishes piled in the sink. He did not think about the ring inside of him, and how a ring is a kind of hole, and was a hole a safe thing to keep in the body. How things might begin to fall through.
As he thought about ways out of his predicament, the knife that he was soaping with the sponge suddenly bore significance and weight, so much so that he dropped it. It clattered about and landed point up in a stock pot. He picked it up, dried it quickly, and put it in the drawer. He would not retrieve the ring that way.
Standing there with the sink running, he noticed something. There was a small bowl next to the sink, and in it, his wife’s ring. She took it off sometimes while cooking or cleaning up. There it was in front of him. He knew her forgetting it had no meaning—she forgot things often, there was a coffee cup from last week on the bedroom floor—and besides, she didn’t think about the world’s objects as carrying any kind of psychic weight. She was a Christmas-card tosser, a breaker of book spines. He loved this about her. She moved through the world like it didn’t require anything specific from her.
He picked up her ring. It felt light in his hand. Lighter than he would have thought. Almost weightless. He closed his hand around it and he could make out the faint glow, the same as his. It was no solution, what he was thinking of doing. It was no solution at all. But he would do it anyway.
Zach VandeZande is a lapsed academic living in Washington, DC. He is the author of three books of fiction: Apathy and Paying Rent (Loose Teeth Press), Liminal Domestic: Stories (Gold Wake), and the forthcoming Lesser American Boys (Mason Jar Press). He knows all the dogs in the neighborhood.
