Faster

It was 1987. Everyone Dominick knew was gorging, engorged, gorgeous. There was finally enough money. People could buy the tap shoes, the electric toothbrushes, the giant faux-wood microwaves big enough to hold Butterballs. They could afford a year’s supply of the old red Doritos and the new blue Doritos and the old Coke and the new Coke and coke, uncapitalized. Everyone capitalized. They could have the Guess denim vest, the Ralph Lauren dress, the best of the best.

Dominick quit eating at 5:55 p.m. on January one of that rich year. It was an unplanned resolution. Dominick’s mother came to the table wearing an entire bottle of Giorgio. His sister, Danielle, an entire can of Final Net. Inside his father was a fifth of Smirnoff. Dominick could hear the vodka slosh as his father pulled up his chair. Dominick imagined a little yacht in his father’s stomach, going back and forth on the waves. On that little yacht, Dominick imagined tiny people—also drunk—with even tinier yachts going back and forth inside of them.

At dinner, there was no blessing, merely a toast. To wealth, his mother said. To wealth, everyone but Dominick answered. Dominick ate a single black-eyed pea off his plate. The plate was rimmed with gold stirrups as if his family rode horses (which they didn’t) or owned them (which they could have). Eat, eat, his family said. Fast, fast, Dominick thought. The way he saw it, the less he consumed, the faster the world was saved. Inside of Dominick, the lone pea rattled like a penny in a beggar’s coffee can.

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Dominick was twelve and gaunt and downy-haired, everywhere. His pediatrician had just returned from a worldwide medical meeting in the Netherlands. He now knew everything there was to know about anorexia and was buying none of it.

“He’s not anorexic,” the doctor said. “He’s besieged by Weltschmerz!” This was the German word for ho-hum. “Right now, the boy has little appetite for food because he has little appetite for life,” the doctor told Dominick’s mother. “Give him a year. Next thing you know he’ll be all about sex and steaks.”

Dominick knew this was baloney, because he could think of baloney and say ‘baloney’ without craving baloney. Dominick’s mother, however, breathed a sigh of relief. She smoothed her silk scarf. The scarf was covered with saddles and riding crops. In the real world, Dominick’s mother was terrified of everything equine, miniature ponies included.

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By February, the only things Dominick had consumed were a bag of red Doritos, a bag of blue Doritos, and several circular items that he cataloged on a piece of paper: three silver-dollar pancakes, seven M&Ms, one Ritz cracker, four pepperonis, two inner rings of a white onion.

On Valentine’s Day, Dominick fell in love with the idea of eating things that people would not think to eat: A single piece of uncooked fettucine licked and dipped into powdered Tang. A pinch of fish food. Gray-pink erasers from worn pencils. Limp pickles from a Quarter Pounder, left to grow cold on the Mercedes dashboard between errands.

As Dominick disappeared, he appeared. Now, he could see a visible pulse in his wrist and abdomen and ankle. There were new tendons behind his knees and on the tops of his feet. Here, at last, were his cheekbones and hip bones and eye sockets. Without food, his mind grew dim but his desires became clear: want nothing, take nothing, be nothing.

Meanwhile, people went to the mall. The mall expanded. The people expanded. Wallets expanded, overnight, like dough rising under dish towels. Children across the ocean stacked denim six stories high. They pulled levers, and the levers cut out blue jeans like cookies. The children stitched zippers and sewed rhinestones. They sent the blue jeans across the sea to America on weighty barges. They were paid in coins. Their hands bled. Who would consume all of the jeans? At home, Dominick lay on the couch and ran his bony fingers over his rib cage, strumming himself like a harp.

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A new doctor said that if Dominick didn’t eat, there would be no choice but to insert a feeding tube. The doctor told Dominick’s mother to put one broccoli floret and one chicken nugget on a blue plate and present it to Dominick. If he did not eat them in thirty minutes, he was to be sent to his room for an additional thirty minutes, after which the floret and nugget were to be reintroduced on a red plate. Dominick and his mother played this game for eight hours, during which time Dominick ate nothing and his mother drank everything. While in his room, Dominick stared at his white walls and had visions. He saw monks eating monkeys eating bananas. The bananas were prophetic. One banana peeled itself and out came a scroll. Unrolled it said: keep up the good work.

▴ ▴ ▴

The day before the feeding tube, Dominick’s father took him to the circus. His father had one fifth of Smirnoff inside of him and another inside his coat. He pushed Dominick in a wheelchair in silence. In the circus’s center ring, Dominick watched an impassive tiger walk on its hind legs, a gloomy brown bear pedal a tricycle. Then came a man in a red leotard with a mustache like a soaring blackbird. He brought out three shining swords and—one, two, three!—they went down his throat. The audience roared and—one, two, three!—the swords came out. The tiger growled. The bear growled. Dominick’s stomach growled.

That night, Dominick went into the pantry. On the top shelf he found a little netted bag of chocolate coins. He brought them down and removed their copper wrappers and ate them all. They landed inside of him like pennies in a beggar’s coffee can. His mother and father and sister, Danielle, took three separate cars to three different candy stores and bought bag after netted bag of chocolate coins. At home, they piled the coins in front of Dominick. Some were gold, some were silver, some were copper. Dominick ate them all. The next day—and the day after that, and the day after that—his family went out and bought chocolate money with real money and Dominick ate everything put before him. Before long, Dominick’s face filled out and his tendons went into hiding and his pulse could no longer be felt under his fat. The way he saw it, the faster he consumed, the faster the world was saved.


Whitney Collins is a 2020 Pushcart Prize recipient, a 2020 Pushcart Prize Special Mention recipient, and winner of American Short Fiction’s 2020 Short(er) Fiction Prize. Her debut story collection, Big Bad (Sarabande Books), won the 2019 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in AGNI, Slice, The Pinch, Grist, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, the Chattahoochee Review, and Catapult’s Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror anthology, among others.