The Hungry
After my father fell through a loose brick in the parapet of a Rajasthan fort, the wires stopped, so I began planning my return home when my computer science professor said, Go see Exxon Singh. Singh gave me a below minimum wage job in a gas station by the brook, and I liked it: filling up SUVs for ruddy suburban moms with their children in cleats; executing the last drops of dribbling water with my rubber blade after washing their window shields. It was beautiful on rainy days, the puddles growing into an iridescent, oil-slicked floor of mirrors. Singh thought I enjoyed it too much and put me in the convenience store. It was there that I first met them, the men who came every day—some with dog tags, some in bowler hats, some with dragon tattoos that shadowed their arms—buying the $1.99 frozen burrito, oversized and stuffed with beans and corn. They would throw it into the microwave until the stench filled the store. It was their only meal of the day, these men who stank of whisky, weed, or cigarettes. When things went wrong and the shops began shuttering, they split them, cutting them with a white plastic knife, arguing over the fairness of the cut. Sometimes they fought, dragging each other to the brook, where they’d crash empty nips, the seared edges of aluminum cans and discarded needles into heads and arms until Singh called the cops while they whelped like beaten puppies. So many nights, through the high weeds—the flash of the red lights on the dark skin of the brook.
