In the Bag: a Bone, a Plate and a Shadow.
Shirley did not just dislike vegetables, she hated them. Broccoli smelled like baby poop, carrots were too orange and boney, cauliflower was like little crumbly brains, peas popped like little pill bugs and Brussels sprouts had no other purpose than to make the back of her tongue taste like turpentine. So she refused to eat them.
Meat and bread were just fine. She would eat them with all the assiduousness of a good ant on a picnic sandwich. Her mother and father were worried, however:
“Shirley, you must eat your vegetables to stay healthy” cried her mother.
This is absurd, thought Shirley putting a spoonful of corn into her mouth, how can cramming spoonfulls of tiny fingertip kernels down my throat make me healthy? Something that made her want to throw up could not possibly be good for her. Why would her stomach turn, her toes curl, her eyes water and her throat close up in revulsion if vegetables were good for her? It was simple for Shirley—her parents were crazy; they did not, they could not love her. She spit the corn like buckshot all over the table. Her father blasted back:
“Shirley, you will not leave this table until you eat every piece of corn! I will not have this in my house again!”
She could hear her mother and father watching the television in the next room. It was her favorite show, and her parents’ laughter echoed into the kitchen where she sat fiddling with a pile of cold, wet corn. She put one little kernel on the end tine of her fork and held up to her critical eye examining the color and shape and then, with her finger she flicked it across the room. A while later, bored and exhausted, she made a circle of corn around the edge of her plate, gave it two half-chewed, corn eyes and a very sad mouth full of corn.
Her mother woke her for bed and wiped the corn from her forehead and cheek, and pulled one sneaky kernel from her ear.
The next morning she was starving. She could smell the blueberry muffins in the kitchen. The dark, warm, soft berries nestled in the fluffy, steaming, sweetened bread, puffing over the tops of the muffin pan infected her brain, and the last stale memories of last night’s dinner washed away in her mouth. She dressed for school, combed her hair, tied her shoes and ran down the stairs to the kitchen. Her mother in an apron and oven mitts turned from the oven with the tray of fresh-baked breakfast.
“Shirley! Good moring. Get it while it’s hot!”
“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm” Shirley licked her lips.
“I’ve warmed up your corn for you.”
Across the table where her father was tearing the fluffy, fresh breakfast bread in half, the steam mixed with buttering wafted across the table.
“Butter for your corn?” he asked, extending the dish to Shirley.
She would have been sick if there were any food in her stomach, so her sadness and disgust formed a lump in her throat instead.
She sat for twenty minutes behind her corn watching her father eat muffin after muffin…after muffin.
“I’ll just pack these up for your lunch Shirley” said her mother scooping the corn into a small paper bag and folding it neatly closed. The bag was soon peppered with small dark circles where the corn began to soak through.
Of course Shirley threw out the corn as soon as she left the house. She would just tell her mother that she had been so hungry that she ate it for lunch, and she would be given a nice dinner, her mother none the wiser.
But her mother was the wiser, her mother knew how children worked, especially children who didn’t like vegetables.
When Shirley came home as hungry as ever, she could smell the stew warming the cold winter air a block from her house. She plopped into her seat, tied her napkin around her neck, grabbed her fork and knife and waited on the edge of her chair.
Shirley’s mother dipped the long round ladle into the steaming pot, pulled the rolling hot broth and aroma over her place setting and filled her bowl with soup—not stew. Stew is thick and rich with meat, and on occasion Shirley would accidentally eat a carrot steeped in beefy gravy. But this was soup—clear broth, vegetables and…and a bone? Carrots, celery and onion floated and rolled around the yellowy water. No meat, but a bone?
“Mother! You haven’t given me any meat. There are only vegetables and a bone.”
Shirley’s mother stirred the pot and smiled. “Well dear, if you don’t eat your vegetables, that is exactly what you will end up as—all bones. The good news is that maybe that corn you threw in the yard will grow in the spring, and then you will have all the corn you ever wanted. Now eat your veggies.”
Broth with bone and vegetables. Shirley slammed down her knife and fork, sloshing broth on the table top. She stuck her hand in the bowl, grabbed the bone, stuck it into her mouth and gnawed angrily. The vegetable broth had seeped into it and spread across her tongue. Tears filled her eyes, but she refused to take it out and eat her vegetables. At the end of dinner, when she was finally excused, she stood up, turned around and went to her bedroom with the bone in her mouth.
She laid the bone on her nightstand and crawled in bed, delirious with hunger. She didn’t even brush her teeth; she hadn’t really eaten anything all day. She felt weak, and delerious--not feverish, more like her insides had been twisted like a taught towel choking her brain. The moon shined through her window, filled her room with blue-black light, and seemed to glide past her window as her room spun. She shook her head to still the room. Something stirred. Outside her window, a shadow passed. Her head ached and her stomach turned. And then it passed again. Shirley pulled the covers up to her nose and peered at the window. She reeled and her hunger turned to nervousness and fear. The shadow slid slowly over the window sill and slinked across the floor. Shirley covered her head completely.
She heard a whisper: “That is my bone.”
She closed her eyes.
“That is my bone” the voice whispered again.
Shirley reached for something to defend herself, a brush, maybe a mirror, she wasn’t sure, but the only thing she could reach was the dinner bone, which she immediately threw back out of her blanket for fear the shadow would come in after it. It seemed like forever that she had cringed under her blankets listening for the shadow, and even after its last “That is my bone,” the creaking of the house and the tapping and snapping of the trees outside kept her vigilant and uncertain.
She wasn’t sure how long it stayed and when exactly it had left, but eventually she shivered herself to sleep. Shirley awoke to the smell of breakfast and grunted. Tired and still afraid, she peaked out from underneath her covers, but the morning light had obviously chased away whatever it was that slithered around at night.
Breakfast was the same bowl of cold, drown vegetables that she refused to eat the night before. At school she ate the crust of her best friend’s sandwich, a couple of cold French fries, and had enough change for some half-cool milk. She was starving. She couldn’t concentrate. She just wanted to go home and have a nice meal.
Of course, dinner was a colorful mountain of broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, and corn garnished with a single bone. Shirley gave in, stabbed a bloom of broccoli, and crammed it into her mouth. The million little fuzzy, moss blossoms smashed against her tongue and teeth and gums. Her body seized and her eyes wrinkled tighter than her fists. She chewed once and the tiny, green buds released their swampy juices into her throat. Her tongue revolted, and the glop of broccoli plopped to a stop in the middle of the table. She grabbed the bone from her plate and seated it in the corner of her mouth, crossing her arms.
That night she sat it next to last night’s bone on the nightstand. She climbed into bed and waited. It was quiet and the moon was so far behind the clouds that the shadows had seemed to go in for the night. She could hear the cold hiss of the evening outside and the empty growl of her stomach. It was pitch black. In the darkness her head spun with famine and she dreamed of plates full of roasted chicken and warm, fresh bread. It was quiet and dark.
“Those are my bones…” she heard whispered in the darkness.
“Who are you and what do you want?” she cried.
“My bones…those are my bones” the voice answered.
“Who are you? Where are your bones? These are food bones from dinner. These are not your bones.”
There was a pause.
“My bones. Thomas. Thomas’s bones. Those are my bones.”
But regardless of what questions Shirley asked, this was the most information she could get from the shadow in the darkness.
“What do you want from these bones? Where did you come from?”
“My bones here, my bones. Thomas’s bones.”
Her stomach had twisted into a knot and her throat was tight and full of emptiness. A biscuit and some gravy would have been nice. “Can you sneak into the kitchen, maybe and bring me a muffin?” she asked the shadow.
“My bones.”
Shirley, frustrated--tired from boredom and dizzy from hunger--fell asleep.
Over the next week, Shirley became accustomed to the hunger, the smell of vegetables for dinner and breakfast, and she became accustomed to begging for lunch scraps at school. She grew tired and the pile of bones on her nightstand grew bigger. She was losing weight, but had not lost her indignation or her distaste for vegetables. Every night was the same. Her body was heavy and her head was light and fuzzy from eating like a bird at school. Thomas would come to the window. Shirley would pull her blankets up to her nose. Ask a few questions. Get the same wispy cold answer, “Those are my bones.” She would get bored. The room would spin. She would lower her blanket. Lie her head on her pillow and slip into asleep only to wake up to more vegetables.
By dinner that night, she was fed up.. This time she didn’t even try the soggy squash and stringy asparagus stinking up her plate. And of course, there was the bone. She sat in her seat, arms crossed, lower lip out, and bone clenched tightly in her teeth, glaring at her mother.
“Shirley dear, eat your vegetables” chimed her mother sucking down a green rat tail of asparagus. Sewage. It was sewage thought Shirley. Once, she had eaten asparagus, once, and it made her pee smell like asparagus and now she couldn’t stand the steam of it rising from her plate. Across the table it dripped its yellow-green piddle on her mother’s plate and she resolved not even to look down at her own. She would not eat these vegetables. Ever!
“Shirley!” grunted her father, “You eat those vegetables or else!”
“Or else what?” she grumbled through her bone.
Her mother looked down and swallowed a soggy mound of mushy squash. Just following the “glorp”, Shirley heard an almost inaudible whimper come from her mother. “Or else her mother mumbled…you’ll end up all bones, dear.”
Her father exploded, “You’ll end up just like—“
“A twig!” Her mother interrupted.
“Yes. A twig,” her father continued, a little more reserved than before he was interrupted.
“A twig?” retorted Shirley, “a twig? I’m skin and bones and all I want is a dinner I can eat. For days I’ve been chewing on bones and all I ask is for some meat or bread.”
”But Shirley,” her mother replied, “You must eat your vegetables or you shall grow sick and die and be forever lost to us. We could give you all meat and bread, but you would end up…”
“Happy and satisfied? For days I have been chewing on bones and begging for scraps. I go to bed so hungry that by the time I can get to sleep I am so delirious that I start spinning and a shadow named Thomas comes to claim the bones, or his bo--”
“What did you say!?” yelled her father. Her mother started crying.
“I keep seeing this shadow named Thomas—“
“What name did you just say? Cried her mother.
“Thomas comes for his bones—“
“Why did you just say?” cried her father.
“Thomas! Thomas! Thomas! Comes every night and asks for his bones, mother and father!”
Her mother spit out her squash and her father dropped his asparagus speared by his fork.
“Shirley! How dare you?” her father said gravely. Her mother sobbed.
“No, no, no,” cried her mother.
Her father nodded his head understanding exactly what her mother was going through.:
“Thomas, Shirley, was your brother. Much older than you, of course.”
“I had a brother?” Shirley was astounded.
“Yes, but Thomas, much like you, did not eat his vegetables, and while he appeared to be healthy on the outside, one winter, well, he got sick and died for lack of proper nutrition.”
Her mother wiped her mouth and settled herself, “You can understand our concern, dear. We just wanted you to be healthy. We don’t want you to end up like your brother.”
Shirley crossed her eyes and looked down at the bone in her mouth. She put down her fork and slowly removed the bone from her mouth and sat it next to her plate. That night she ate all of the vegetables on her plate. When she went to bed, she waited. Thomas came into her room:
“Those are my bones,” he whispered.
“Maybe they are or maybe they are not, but maybe you should have eaten your vegetables!” With that, the shadow started and retreated into the night, never to return. With that, Shirley slammed her window shut and closed the drapes, making sure they overlapped. The next morning Shirley threw the bones out with the garbage, had a nice breakfast and ate all of her vegetables from that day on.
