The wait passed fairly uneventfully, with Namiko being the only one seated at the dinner table. After twenty minutes, however, the whole family sat at the table as Luca heaped piles of lasagna into everybody's plates. Namiko smiled politely as her portion was served. Well, at least it was Italian.
And there they were, all eating. For Namiko eating was always meditative in one way or another, a sacred slice of silence. But at the table they were a family, and Namiko felt like she had been granted entry into their unit, if only for a moment. It was a strange feeling, to see them make inane conversation, to ask in mousy voices for things to be passed around. It was somewhat saddening. She was an only child, once. Now she's an orphan, a title that will stick to her for the rest of her life. She's never had much of a problem with it - for orphans even the epithets carry a tone of solidarity - but still.
And this lasagna. Heavenly. But she reacted in exactly the way she thought. She consumed ravenously, tomato sauce coating the edges of her mouth; spoonful after spoonful down her gullet. And as her hunger was sated a new hunger grew parallel to it: a hunger for emptiness, a hunger for nothingness. Her subconscious dreamed of expelling the pasta from her stomach and diving onto the table, into the mess, and licking up the chunks of pasta, the brown-ish mixture of sauce and gastronomic liquid, layer after layer like a bohemian slushie, the stuff pigs lie in and fish die in. Her brain was her stomach and its synapses were firing, firing firing fucking fast. Oh how wonderful food is, how wonderful it is to eat everything. The leafy crunch of paper, chalk like hardened Pixy-Stix, cloth like the skin of animals. There is nothing purer than pure consumption, sitting in the veldt, putting your fingers between your ass and into your mouth, ripping into the carcass of some deceased animal with pointy sticks rammed into its lungs. They'll eat their teeth as they decay, their loved ones as they die. They will eat and eat until something else eats them.
She was the first to finish. She placed her fork gently onto the table, drank the rest of her glass of water, wiped her mouth off with a napkin, and bowed politely. "Thank you for the meal, Lucas. If you'll excuse me, I'll prepare for bed now." And she walked upstairs.
