I was seven years old, old enough to know the difference between hunger and fear, even though they often hurt in the same place. Hunger was a vicious emptiness clawing at me from the inside. Fear was colder—a frozen hand around my throat, squeezing until I couldn’t breathe. That night, I felt both.
The house smelled of wet smoke, fresh firewood, and the heavy stew simmering on the iron stove. Outside, the little town of Pine Hollow had vanished beneath a brutal January storm. Inside, Raymond sat smoking at the table, staring blankly at the wall as if neither the rain, nor I, nor life itself had anything to do with him. Evelyn stood over the pot, stirring with a wooden spoon, sighing every time the steam hit her face.
“Don’t come near,” she had warned earlier without even looking at me.
But I had spent two days living on almost nothing—just an old tortilla soaked in black coffee. Two days hearing my stomach twist and growl like dry branches cracking in the woods. Two days watching them save the meat for themselves while I got the thin broth at the bottom, or nothing at all.