My dog Nelly used to bury pieces of hard bread when he didn’t feel like eating. It tore up the dirt with its front paws, took a rough aim, released the food from its mouth, and then covered it with its snout. She got dirty and that’s why I discovered her. Center users were also used to hiding packaged food in the inner pockets of their luggage. I mostly found expired biscuits and salty snacks by accident, but not infrequently some now-spoiled vacuum-sealed sausages could be timidly found among the dirty t-shirts and underwear; at which point everything was thrown into the unsorted waste.
Homeless people are afraid of hunger, like dogs.
Instead of starving, Guido made it his job. After the inflation crisis, he opened a center for faster: Waves of Prana. He invited me several times, said he would give me a good price. I’m not going because I don’t believe the air can satisfy you and then I don’t want to meet you. Now you call yourself Shabra and on Fridays you go to the Campo dei Fiori dressed in orange, with a poorly drawn bindi on your forehead, to hum songs of peace. I don’t believe in peace songs.
I still have eight packages of unsalted whole grain crackers left. Each plastic package contains six cookies, 31.3 grams, which, if divided along the suggested dotted lines, become 12 squares, totaling 145 kcal. 145 divided by twelve is 12,083 periodic. Twelve kcal per day. I’m hungry.
Today, world statistics count in real time 235,086 deaths from starvation, including my noisy neighbor Tobias and Barbara, the hairdresser. She wasn’t good at balayage. Peace to their souls. I am going to set the table: a white tissue with my whole wheat dry saltine cracker in the middle, thin and crispy. That little bit of chewing gives me a nasty pain in my jaw. At the end of the meal, I try to use my tongue to retrieve the remains of the soft cracker stuck between my molars and they attack me.
We went shopping at the mall on the weekend; it would be your dream to go to NaturaSì, but it was out of the budget for us. When we arrived at the Coop, we put a fifty-cent coin in the cart and set off for the stereotype of a traditional family. Our galvanized cart was filled in every aisle with products that I would never have bought without you: spelled, peeled red lentils, oat milk, kamut flour, kefir flakes, whole grain crackers. While the cashier was counting, I was already thinking about the focaccia with mortadella, which I will secretly have in the afternoon before I go to work. We collected around 7,000 kcal from the 14,000 recommended by the doctor, a total of 164.57 euros. “Our health is at stake!”
Then we’d leave our fake uncut baby on a pile of carts, I’d get the fifty cents back in a hurry before your morals were swayed by an intrepid desire to give them to the Senegalese on the corner, and we’d go home.
My cognitive performance is impaired and I have severe spasms in the epigastric region. I’m hungry. Is Nelly the dog still sleeping or is she dead? No, he’s sleeping. They closed the reception center and occupied it with users. Three of the four operators died, the rest no longer have the strength to walk, like me. Like Asia, Ester, Stefano, Marco, Halim and Benedetta. Now the homeless have a roof over their heads and they’ve had enough of stale vanilla cookies. I would like a cookie, but not the red fruit cereal cookie you bought. I’d like two discs of 00 flour, yeast, cocoa mass, palm oil and cornstarch holding together a light cream shrouded in a secret I’m not going to reveal. I take my third to last packet of cookies, my mouth still watering from the capitalist mirage I just had. I’m so tired I have trouble opening the plastic. I help my teeth clumsily. I can see the spicy segments collapsing like pieces of Jenza wood on the cold kitchen tiles. Nelly moves. I look at Nelly and she looks back. I’m looking at the cookies. Nelly looks at the cookies. I see Nelly grab the food and I don’t have the sense to stop her. I kicked her with a strength I didn’t think I had. She cries and hides, she is afraid of me.
I collapsed on the floor and swallowed as many cookies as I could. They are so dry I can’t swallow them. My mouth is a crunchy desert. Sorry Nelly! Sorry! I am sorry. I’m so sorry. Nelly, I’m sorry.
I’m also worried about myself. It would be better if you brought a whole pack of cookies with you, so I might not have the preservative-filled hope of keeping me alive. Maybe then I would die too… maybe I would die too!
My cognitive performance is severely impaired. I’m hungry. I miss you. I hate you.
Francesca Cannone