The Architecture of Hunger

The papaya sat on her desk like a wounded sun, its flesh revealing itself through the careless incision of her knife. She'd bought it on impulse, remembering how Carlos used to slice them for breakfast on their balcony in Mérida, the juice staining their fingertips like communion wine. That was before the pyramid scheme swallowed him whole, before he started selling those bullshit vitamin supplements that promised eternal youth and delivered only maxed-out credit cards and estranged daughter-hood.

Now Sarah worked in a different pyramid altogether—forty-three floors of glass and steel where she sold cable packages to people who didn't need them, climbing hierarchically toward promotions that never materialized. Her manager called it "opportunity." She called it what it was: another kind of hunger.

"You need your vitamins," Carlos had told her that last night, pressing a neon bottle into her palm. His eyes were bright with that frightening intensity of the recently converted. "This stuff changes lives. We're building something here."

She'd thrown the bottle in the trash after he left. Some things you couldn't supplement away.

The papaya was sweet and slightly fermented, like fruit kept too long in anticipation. Sarah ate it standing up, watching the sun disappear behind the skyline. Forty-three floors below, the city was beginning to glow. She thought about calling her mother, about asking if she'd ever been happy, really happy, or if that particular vitamin had been genetically deficient in their bloodline.

Instead, she went to the window and pressed her forehead against the cold glass. Somewhere out there, Carlos was probably giving his pitch to another room full of desperate people, selling dreams packaged in capsules and monthly subscriptions. And she was here, eating fermented fruit alone in her corporate pyramid, connected to nothing but the cable she spent her days convincing others they couldn't live without.

The papaya seeds clung to her fingers like small black pearls. She licked them off, one by one, and decided tomorrow she would buy a ticket south. Some hungers, she realized, could only be fed at the source.