Hungry

Every time she turned around the kids were shoving fake food in her face. Not the plastic kind she played with growing up, but elaborate felt confections purchased online from felt artists, or from fair trade cooperatives that secured water for Nepali villages. They brought her pancakes with fake butter pats stitched on top, bacon with fake fat ripples, plump fuzzy oranges and pears, chocolate chip cookies with wooden cartons of fake organic milk. Eat it, eat it, they squealed, and she made loud nibbling noises and said, That was delicious! Then they scampered off to their solid wood play kitchen to whip up new culinary combinations.

She was once again enormously pregnant and hungry for some real food, the kind she didn’t buy because it contained trans fats or high fructose corn syrup. Real fake food. Immediately following the natural birth she shocked everyone by demanding a quarter-pounder-with-cheese value meal. When her husband returned with the food, he asked if she was sure she wanted to eat it. She was breastfeeding the baby and said, I thought you’d never make it back.