A Brief History of Hunger

The sky snakeroot smoke and rasping—a terrible light swallowed up
the village. Up close: monsters of dirt, without number. Their wings
sickled and shining: fairies rapacious, red red. They sheathed the
cedars and barley fields ash yellow. Soon we could see neither land
nor sky. We bolted the doors and windows: the Teeth of the Wind
kept us quiet in the dark. In the morning we discovered they couldn’t
open their wings soon enough. At once the whole village was
unleashed upon them. In the burlap sacks, reed baskets, gagris,
woolen hats, and shawls we gathered the unblessed harvest like fallen
leaves. We poured them into the boiling pots, plucked their devil
heads—their faces so like our amas’—and wings and legs into a pile
of dinner for the cats and dogs and crows, fried what remained in
burnt ghee until they crunched between our teeth. We ate them, each
one now the size of a girl’s finger, dipped in wild honey. Some even
smoked them in bamboo skewers for winter. Where did they come
from? Where were they going? They knew only hunger. They ravaged
the leaves as though they had to pass through all the green on the
land to get to the other side. But we, too, knew hunger. If we waited
for the gods, come winter we would be hurling our lambs and
newborns into the same ravine. So we spared no leaf, no blade, no
sky, no angel. Akhes prophesied they’d return in twelve years, but we
never saw them again. That summer we turned famine into feast. For
nine days we ate nothing but what had come to eat us. That hunger
lives in our blood now and our children’s and their children’s, and it
will not stop until the last green is cut.