A Hundred Bites

A sharp movement sends me barreling into the wall, jolting me awake. At least, I think I’m awake. My body feels awake, but my eyes can’t see anything. A rhythmic clickety-clack plays secondo to the swaying and creaking of the box car, punctuated with syncopated jerks and thumps as the train speeds over uneven ground.

“Shit,” I say. When I had crawled into the box car to escape from the pouring, freezing rain, it hadn’t been moving. “You weren’t supposed to fall asleep, James,” I tell myself.

I was just so tired, I argue.

“You’re always tired.”

I was right: I’m always tired. It doesn’t matter if I did nothing but sit all day and sleep all night, I was still tired. There’s something exhausting about not being able to relax; about fighting hunger pangs and emotional strains and physical pains; about having nothing but time. I used to think that if I had more time off work that I would be less tired. Now I know better. Existence itself is exhausting.

There’s absolutely no light penetrating the box car. Is it night? Or did the night just get sealed inside the box car? The damp air is filled with the scent of raw wood, rusted metal, and unwashed body. Most of the time I don’t notice the last one, but I must have been sealed in here for a while. How long has the train been going? Where has it been going, anyway? Being a freight train, it could be three states over before the cargo is unloaded.

I grope my way along the ridged wall of the train car, trying to find the latch for the loading door, but only succeed in finding the corner of every shrink-wrapped pallet with my toe. The pain is only a drop in the ocean of pain from the rest of my aching feet. They’re always like this the first thirty minutes of walking. Then the tide will go out, leaving a dull throb in its wake for a few hours before the cycle begins all over again.

I remember standing on a street corner the other day–was it yesterday?

No, the day before? Last week?

The only thing I have an abundance of is time; it bleeds all around me, blurring lines between days and weeks, hours and seconds. The only measure of time I own are the increments I spend at each location before the cops get called on me.

Either way, one day in the not too distant past, I had been holding my cardboard sign. It was hot; too hot to do much of anything but stand in the meager shade of a young tree which was barely taller than me. I’d had good luck at this corner before, and I was hoping for more of the same.

Before too long, a black BMW sedan pulled over in the right turn lane and rolled down its window. Everything about the vehicle smelled of affluence: the tinted windows, the polished exterior, the customized license plate that declared R0XY. The driver was just as perfect: makeuped and manicured, not a stray hair to be seen.

She almost didn’t even seem real.

“Can I help you, sir?” she called over the roar of her air conditioning.

“I could really use some money, if you have some to spare,” I said, inching closer.

“I can’t give you money, but I could buy some food for you. Are you hungry? There’s a McDonald’s just down the road. Let me know what you want and I’ll bring some back.”

I’d just had McDonalds. Somebody had given me a crumpled dollar bill, and the employee was kind enough to pay the taxes from the loose change bowl on the counter. The limp chicken sandwich sat heavily in my gut, like my body wasn’t sure what to do with it now that I'd swallowed it.

“That’s very kind,” I said. “But I don’t need food at the moment. I really just need some money. Any little bit helps. I need some new shoes.”

“I don’t want to give you money; you’ll probably just use it for drugs or booze.” The woman grimaced as she spoke the words, as if by uttering the illicit syllables she would conjure the substances in her own mouth.

I thrust a wave of frustration down, banishing it with the chicken sandwich that didn’t know what to do. “I understand, but look. I’ve been sober for almost nine months now. Please, all I want is some money so I can go get some new shoes. I have foot pain, and these have never fit very well.” I’d fished them out of a Goodwill dumpster. They hadn’t even been good enough for someone to donate.

The lady pinched her lips together and shook her head apologetically as she began to roll forward. The line of cars behind her had grown significantly. Horns began to bleat angry messages. Fingers thrust from behind windshields, outside windows, through a sunroof.

I felt my own frustration rising again. “I’m sober!” I yelled. The lady rolled her window up and stepped on the gas. I ripped off a shoe and held it up. I wanted to throw it at her spotless BMW. “I just want decent shoes!”

Who did she think she was to decide what I needed?

It was hours after that before someone else decided to slip a fiver out the window without more than a glance.

I should’ve just taken the food.

Eventually I inch myself back to where I’d begun. I know it’s the same place because my toe rustles a plastic bag instead of a plastic covered pallet. I hunker down and gather my bag, touching each item to make sure it’s still there.

The thick, scratchy wool of my winter hat–well, my only hat.

The smooth warmth of my cardboard sign– “Lost my job. Please help. God bless.”

The crooked tines of my comb.

The cold, scaly texture of fake leather from the pocket bible someone gave me–my only form of reading.

The crinkly plastic of a disposable water bottle I use to fill up at park water fountains.

And one apple.

It’s all there. I put everything back in the plastic bag except the apple. I cradle it between my hands, reveling in the smooth, waxy skin. An image of six-year-old Ella holding an apple to her cheek floods my mind’s eye.

“What are you doing?” I laughed.

“I’m snuggling my apple!” Ella chirped. Her long eyelashes brushed her cheeks as she smiled. She got her eyelashes from her mom. “Apples need snuggles too. It makes them sweeter.”

“I didn’t know that. I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time.”

Ella opened her big, brown eyes. Those she got from me. “It’s never too late to do it the right way, Daddy.”

I hold the apple to my cheek, sliding it back and forth against the bare spot of skin above my scraggly beard. The apple feels cool to the touch, and this close to my nose I can smell the sweetness. My mouth salivates.

I lower the apple, but don’t quite put it back in the bag. I want to eat it now, but there’s no telling when I will be able to eat again. If I eat it now, it will just make me hungrier, but if I can wait long enough, the hunger pains will eventually give up.

Ella always asked me to slice her apple. “Mommy doesn’t do it right,” she said.

Sandra rolled her eyes. “I cut it the way every normal person does.”

“Normal is boring,” I said, winking at Ella. She giggled. I cut the apple in half, then placed each half face down on the cutting board. With infinite precision, I pressed the knife through the juicy flesh, letting the paper-thin slices faint into a heap. “One, two, three,” I counted.

“Four, five, six,” Ella echoed after me. “Do you think you can make it to one hundred?”

I grinned. “Pull up a chair and come see. Don’t let me lose count!”

I bring the apple to my lips. Maybe I can make it last for a hundred bites. I was never able to slice that small, but maybe I could make this one last. Just a few bites now, and a few bites later. I part my chapped lips and press the apple to my teeth, but I can’t make myself break the skin. Part of me knows that if I start now, I won’t be able to stop until it’s devoured. Better to just wait.

I nestle the apple safely inside my hat and fold the bag over to distance myself from the temptation.

Waiting is something I’ve grown accustomed to.

I wait for the night, to give me some privacy and relief from the heat. I wait for the day, to give me some warmth and relief from the threat of violence. I wait for shelters to have an opening, for buses to bring me from one end of misery to another, for something good to happen, for something worse to happen. I wait for the humility to go away. I wait for the pain to subside.

I’m very good at waiting.

It used to drive Sandra nuts.

“How can you just sit there?” she yelled at me once. Her voice fled from her lips and didn’t stop running until it reached the end of the hospital hall.

“I’m tired. What do you want me to do? Wear a hole in the floor like you? You think that’s gonna help?”

Sandra glared at me. “I want you to at least act like you care that our daughter is sick.”

She always knew how to make her words count for something, like we were in a boxing ring and it was either punch or be punched.

More often than not, I was the one tapping out.

I shift my weight so I’m no longer on my feet, and I lean forward to massage them. In the dark, I can’t even see my own hands. It makes me question if I’m really there. Maybe after being invisible for so long, I’ve finally ceased to exist.

The pain spiking through my arches grounds me. I know that’s real, at least.

After a year of being homeless, the part that still hurts–besides the actual pain–is feeling invisible. Being treated like something less than human. Hundreds of people walk or drive past me every day, looking without seeing, their eyes glancing through me like I'm no more than an empty sign post: a useless eyesore.

No–the part that hurts is that I’d felt that same, empty gaze pass over me for weeks before I was even homeless.

Our house had never felt so empty. It seemed to double in size overnight, full of cavernous, empty rooms and hallways that echoed my footsteps, making me jerk around more than once even though I knew she wasn’t there anymore.

Sandra flitted from room to room like a ghost, mindlessly occupying her body with dusters, febreze sprays, and listlessly moving objects from one spot to another.

Our house had never felt so clean.

It was days before she spoke, and when she did, I almost wished she hadn’t. “I wake up at night, thinking I hear her crying in her room.” Sandra’s eyes stared blindly out the window, not even flinching at the blazing morning light. The softness of her tone told me she would have said that even if I hadn’t been in the room to hear it. It wasn’t meant for me.

I reached for her hand anyway, but she flinched at the contact, spilling her coffee on the granite countertop. And then she was off, spraying and wiping and weeping and mopping.

It was weeks before she spoke my name. And when she did, I wished she hadn’t.

“James… I want a divorce.”

I cradle my head in my hands, letting the movements of the train rock my shoulder against the wall.

Bump, bump, bump.

The emotion that I should have felt at that moment nearly a year ago rears it ugly head now, tearing its way through my chest like a vicious parasite eating me from the inside out. I grip my thinning hair. My jagged fingernails dig into my scalp. I growl, and then scream. Finally my voice fades to a gray whisper.

The pain of grief comes in waves, just like my hunger. Like the pain in my feet. It won’t always feel like this, I tell myself. Some days it will feel worse, and some days I won’t feel anything at all. I just have to wait.

The only thing that matters now is the present: this pitch black train car and its rhythmic song, the aromatic pallets and their mummified contents, my small bag and the sweetened apple inside it. Wherever this train is taking me, it doesn’t matter. Maybe it will be good to get away from that city where my world fell apart. Maybe it’s all for the best.

“It’s probably all for the best,” my brother said to me. He looked uncomfortable, and it was equally as uncomfortable to look at him. Maybe because I’d never seen him in a suit. Maybe because eye contact at a funeral feels forbidden.

Maybe because I was going to sock the next person to utter those words.

“I doubt it,” I said.

My brother shrugged and clapped me on the shoulder. His repertoire of consoling phrases had already run dry.

I didn’t mind. I didn’t want consolation. I wanted Ella back. I wanted to strangle the doctors that failed to save her. I wanted to slice an apple into a hundred pieces for her. Why couldn’t I ever do that?

Two weeks after Ella passed, the Family Blossom Orchard opened for their annual apple picking events. Sandra went by herself.

A few days later, I found a giant honey crisp apple placed at Ella’s headstone. It sure looked ‘a hundred slices’ worthy, but there was no point in finding out now. She wasn’t there to let each one dissolve on her tongue, her long eyelashes brushing against her rapt cheeks.

I retrieve the apple from my bag. It’s small, but firm. I know it will give way beneath my teeth with satisfying crunches.

There’s no knowing when this train will stop. I’m done waiting.

I bring the fruit to my lips, part my teeth as little as possible, and take a single, microscopic bite.

One.