[Nora] a short story

[Nora]

Nora- that was her name, a stranger of the many I hand encountered on State Street while roaming as a troubadour deep into the night under the deceased of the moon. On my way down West Johnson, past the building that houses Tutto Pasta that has stood since 1898, I watched her walk by and quickly swipe a leftover slice of pizza from an abandoned table and quickly stash it in the satchel on her shoulder. It was without consequence that I noticed her moving down the shadows of State performing this same feat of scavengery.

Without alarming her of my knowledge of the vulture in her, I approached her. It was not all false pretense; She was an attractive sort of plain Jane with succulent symmetry that still could be seen under her baggy, second-hand thrift store apparel. She had a natural beauty accompanied with a scruffy appearance, somewhere in between an orphan collecting cans on the street and a woman who just woke and wandered around her privacy in complete comfort. What was the true facilitator of my fancy for her was her openness. Instead of pretending she was doing something else, anything else, she didn't fail to mention in our introduction that hunger was the most frequent visitor.

I treated her to a dinner at Cosi, a plentiful dinner, Chicken Parmesan Sandwich on multigrain, sea salted chips, large bowl of tomato basil soup with another slice of multigrain bread and a rocky road brownie. There was no expense to spare for her good company. One could hardly imagine that she was alone in the world and on the contrary, she spoke as though she hadn't had a good conversation in years.

After, the night doesn't end. She invites me back to her apartment five blocks towards East Johnson, speaking of her origins and family. She was from a lower-middle class farming family in South Dakota, somewhere near where the Black Hills begin their drastic roll to and from the earth. She had one sibling who was lost to a rogue case of Diphtheria, a young sister, which caused her mum to take into alcohol ever so frequently and her dad to spend more time caring for her than the farm, which in turn, begin to show a decline in capital. She had left South Dakota to study Physics, reserving a deep childhood fascination with Nikolai Tesla and Albert Einstein, yet due to her having to survive, she spent less time in their theorems and more in the facts of science, hunger.

Only in the modern state of thought, as in a city, can on be seen and still be transparent. An accumulation of lore brings forward the better vision of the eye into the world, partakes in all the things that become of it. The decisive movement then becomes an invigoration, more is then as never before asked of language to clarify and translate in belief an elimination process will undergo and undertake, narrative-hero and heroines only see when the eye suffers distortion, goes bland and miraculously, if with hope, vision is mysteriously restored. Disparity seeks to gorge on the spirit, finding that it is an ephemeral thing, falls deeper into itself because hunger follows when the meal is never offered up.

As hunger becomes, it shows no mercy to the starving- it devours what rudiments drift about in the body, the remnants of the stored nutrients, cannibalism enacts itself inside. Mankind has been shape-shifted in the means of avoiding such monstrous physiological response, doing all it can to keep itself fed, full, gluttonous and aversive. It is a force of our own making that serves us, puts our backs to the wall and hands us the ultimate ultimatum; eat or die.

The privacy of her apartment that her parents could barely afford was convenient- there was no one there to see her suffer, roll about on the couch, cradling her stomach, too weak to walk to the union terrace for the free meal afforded to "financially challenge" students.

The following day I was off of work and she had no classes scheduled. So we chatted the night away, enjoyed film after film. At times, I'd run to a corner store and grab snacks for us, return and remove my socks as she always insisted I do when nestled up next to her. We were soon alseep in the arms of one another. A demon must have been at play between our resting bodies. We both came from sleep to a dream, our hands all over one another, insatiable and wild kisses, locking limbs and squirming bodies. Removing her clothes was as stripping the world free of an ugly facade to find a pristine primer beneath.

She takes the thrust of my pelvis shamelessly, with an inalienable ambivalence, moaning that patois of English that compulsion, desire, physical congress, intimacy and coitus in admixture brings about. The world split wide, its origins unmistakably as she transpires, transforms and transposes to the cumean sibyl of frightless endeavors. Neither of the follicle that parts partial a hemisphere of the mind from outside of this life nor an inhuman poltergeist that has never lived, still she relinquished all decision to be or not to be, pulled beneath the mortal realm to be catapulted far into the nethermore of stagnant night terrors. The overseer of the night, that mean-spirited nothing to never be known crawled onto her, inside of her and took it upon himself to journey deep until lost somewhere along the faults of her endometrium. Broken beyond repair, severed beyond recognition, she was, as woman out of darkness, now a anew, fearless. A quartermaster to the axis of the womb, again, I took that voyage deep within her, dying, choosing to drown rather swim in the vaginal sea that her venus gave way tears to. There's an allure to the flogging she withstands, the all but innocuous gestures that my hands stains to her trachea in the blithe the common eludes, the dreaming and woe-begone depraved of the subterranean lustre. Somewhere between our bodies was not only a burn made from the shifting friction, but the lost pagentry long abandoned for mechanics, biology woven irregularly into the strophe, the antistrophe, the epode, a luminous life between the flesh, incidental spawn from our pores. Of no avail, our fluster could not be defeated and we surrender and lie restless upon one another beneath the white flag that is our submission. Twice she surrenders, twice she is defeated, into an indentured servant, then into manumission of the harlot who dares not enter the doors of the magdalene asylum. After our minute deaths, we were back on the elliptical to our deaths in opiate euphoria. She slept naked as the earth left bare after being brutally assaulted. I make a whore of her, then build the Magdalene for her reform, for her salvation, until such time the blood in my veins begin to boil for touch and I'll visit her in her dorm, amongst other retentive whores, and make a whore of her all over again. That was her hell, the virtue I handed to her, her only keepsake.

She refers to me time and again while in refractory as her "intellectual disaster" or "the most haunted mind in all of man."


Nora gave herself to feed herself, acknowledged the primitive method to feed the other. There was no shame to be had in her humanness response- none to my own. Finding a meal, being on the verge of collapse was not the ally of a student- the mind begins, as the body, to disintegrate from hunger. Begging begins to wear off in appeal, few friends she had saw her as a parasite, the one who collected the scraps after having lunch, a lunch she couldn't play for. Even in the modern city of Madison, she resembled the transient on the road, always lying face to face with indigence, survival an instinct if she was to continue to soldier on and go forthright into tomorrow. She thought not of the future but of the presence, time depending on the next meal. Too much competition for thrown out scraps in dumpsters kept her way from the bum-ridden straights and corporate-owned restaurant that would rather throw food to the dogs than feed a human in need. There was no time to become a victim or see herself as one; survival kept her quickly, drastically climbing the incline while her contemporaries survived off of family, scholarships and the planar.

Nora was beautiful in my eyes, not stricken, yet stricken, with the time to go inward and only think of herself. The ailing with having to cope and stay afloat was the buoy she clung to. While parties went noisily throughout the night, she was out, as a vampire, searching for food, knowing while she had a full belly, while her intestines drew in the nutrients of the latest feast, it, hunger, would revisit and overstay its welcome until it was extinguished once again.

I think of Nora every time hunger begins to sink into my stomach, when I think of the rolling black hills of South Dakota. I think of the humanist condition impelled by this insatiable yearn, the transitory fix of a simple meal. I think of Nora.

-Dontrell Lovet't