I'm Not Hungry But I Could Eat by Christopher Gonzalez

Author:Christopher Gonzalez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION
Body/Mind/Spirit
FICTION / Hispanic & Latino
FICTION / LGBT / Bisexual
Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
Published: 2021-08-12T18:50:25+00:00

There is no sleeping tonight for Felix. With Julisa knocked out in his room, he considers eating one of the casseroles. More eating instead of sleeping, instead of thinking. But for once, he isn’t hungry. He reaches for his phone, clicks open the text messages. Cristián is the second-to-last person from whom he received a message. It’s well past 3AM now, so Felix will wait until later, after the sun has risen, to reply.

The apartment is too quiet. He opens Spotify. He selects a playlist of old school merengue and salsa hits. The earbuds go in, and the music from his childhood, from when he used to dance, transports him. Vanessa had started dating when she taught Felix the right moves. Felix falls into the memory: their childhood living room, where the air conditioner wheezes in the window and flies twitch on ribboned glue traps. And there is Vanessa, moving like water to the music, total fluidity, and her first boyfriend, Ryan, lying across the sofa, his buzz cut tight, those “papi chulo” eyes, as she called them, gazing over at her as she moves. No one ever teaches a little boy how to one day dance with another man. Felix is looking at Ryan thinking he’d love to give it a try.

That’s where the scene ends. What comes after could prevent this from being a happy memory. He’ll cauterize reality, instead.

He stands and picks up the box of ashes. Holds it to his chest. And with the music steady in his ear, the vibration of his own eager heart, it all comes back: that instinctual swaying of his hips, legs moving to the rhythm. He circles the coffee table, the sofa, he moves across the room, raising the box higher and away from him, bringing it closer. That’s how she taught him. Dancing was about bodies, about push and pull, about the separation and joining between two people.

And as Felix dances, the lid loosens, ashes sprinkling out onto his carpet. This goes unnoticed between the merengue and salsa numbers. He spins around and kicks and flails and doesn’t stop on account of the ashes, which are falling, coating his coffee table and sofa. He doesn’t stop either when Julisa emerges from his bedroom, screaming over the music blaring inside of him. Or when she grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him. He keeps on dancing, and swaying, and then he is singing, belting out in Spanish he doesn’t fully understand, feeling light and free.

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