On Hunger, by Carol Moody

As the sun dips, indigo dark scatters the day. Neighborhood moms call their children’s names through the woods. I won’t hear mine. I scramble home anyway over fallen grasses oozing their sweet-almost-October smell. I squeeze through a child-sized hole in our chain-link fence. Shoes flooded, body shivering, I pause to peek into the kitchen window, backlit by a single bulb spotlighting my older sister. She hunches forward. With much-too-big-for-her crocheted mitts, she removes TV dinners from the oven.

Guessing that our mom is already asleep in her bedroom hollows my stomach. We six kids must be too much for her. Dad travels for work and is out of town again. He’s a new hire by a fledgling gas company, his days spent securing shale and oil leases. I’m beginning to think he wouldn’t know what to do with us either. I want to double back and lie beneath the shimmering undersides of falling leaves. But something like belonging, like duty, pulls me inside to scoop up the toddler and balance him on my hip.

It’s hard not to love siblings who make foiled-over meals for you. Our palms, lined with Oklahoma soil, stretch across a cluttered counter, centered in the kitchen like a raft we cling to night after night. Lips pursed, we blow impatient puffs over mashed potatoes as waves of emptiness fill in around us. We tread softly to the sink, the taste not yet gone from our mouths, not yet able to language this kind of vigilance.

We couldn’t know then that our dad feared losing his job every day. I imagine him slowing the slapping of the screen door as he’d slip from the house before dawn—his navy-blue polyester suit worn thin at the elbows. Our mom suffered from what we now know was severe clinical depression. No antidepressants, no social support, she’d descend into bed. I can still visualize her cotton-poly nightgown, canary yellow with an orange zipper up the middle—the supposed colors of happiness.

It seemed even then, that we children were as good as we could be, that we’d have to find our own way out somehow. We’d grow up, grow apart, like shorebirds lifting off, grabbing at the sky, climbing far and away to a forgetting. A forgetting of how we once fed each other—small hands passing indented trays, of how we older ones would wake ourselves up in the morning and run and run, limbs flailing, barely making the bus before the driver slid the door shut.

Even still, years later, on some late autumn nights, that familiar ache thrumming inside me, I try to remember those huddled moments in the kitchen, those early morning bus rides. We’d bounce along in the way-back bench seats—the breeze through open windows cooling the stale air. We’d lean into the turns, three across, thin thighs touching, sweat sticking us together like a single living organism. The sunlight blinking through the trees on either side, I’d catch a glimpse of my sisters, their eyes closed, tangled ponytails rising upward. Only we could know how far we would go, how far we had traveled.

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Carol Moody is a recently retired speech-language pathologist. In the company of children, she can be found on the floor. Her hobbies are writing, hiking, and going on adventures with her spouse, three children, and two grandchildren.

© 2025, Carol Moody