gluttony: excessive desire, particularly for food, which causes the object of desire to be withheld from the needy. extreme, dangerous selfishness.
Dark, cold, clawing, Hunger is the first punishment.
Quiet and unassuming, Exhaustion is the second.
He sleeps in a cage with electrified bars and a heated floor. The cage is not tall enough for him to stand, or long enough for him to lay down, but he can squat. Every few hours, the hunger dulls for a handful of minutes. Three, maybe five – his class was working on telling time the last time he went to school, but Asher doesn’t need to read a clock to know that was forever ago. He can sleep in those three, maybe five minutes – but the boogeymen are everywhere in the shadows, and they can turn on the floor so it’s hot as the sun.
The floor burns. The exhaustion deepens. The hunger stays.
His tears are salty, like McDonalds’ French fries, and they make him thirsty. He wants Mom and Dad, and he wants them to take him on a trip that ends with McDonalds’. But he left them in the house, and the boogeymen showed him a video of the house burning. All smoke and fire, with no firemen to save them or any of his things.
Asher starts crying again. The floor heats up under his feet. Electricity cracks between the bars, but it’s late. Too late. His shirt burns and his shoes melt and there’s not enough air because his eyes are soggy and snot fills his mouth. He swallows, gags. He wants food and water and Mom and Dad, but one of the boogeymen comes and bangs a stick on his cage. He says something that Asher doesn’t hear until he hits the cage so hard, the blow echoes in Asher’s ribs.
“You want food, kid?” he asks. Asher swallows more snot before he nods. The boogeymen don’t like it when he cries, but the tears drip down his cheeks and catch in his open mouth.
“I’m hungry,” Asher says.
The boogeyman laughs like the big bad wolf. He walks away, into the dark where Asher can’t see. The cage bars stop buzzing. The floor cools. A light high up in the warehouse ceiling snaps on, bright, blinding white. Asher blinks. A bright red box with curved yellow handles smiles from the center of the cracked floor. The boogeyman comes back, but he’s not alone: a skeleton with short hair and pale skin and wild eyes stumbles behind him.
The boogeyman throws the skeleton onto the floor, and the kid – Asher thinks it’s a kid, anyway – scrambles for the box. Asher’s box. It claws the box open and rips the wrapper inside with its teeth.
Tension gathers in Asher’s exhausted muscles. “Fight for it,” the boogeyman says, and Asher falls onto the warehouse floor before the barred door opens all the way. He crashes into the skeleton, screaming. Its skin is tissue, its bones papier-mâché: its claws sting like paper cuts but Asher grabs it by the head and slams t into the ground, again and again and again. It cries like a baby awake in the middle of the night, but its bones crunch and Asher squashes it like his Mom squashed bugs in their kitchen.
The boogeyman comes to check it when it stops moving. To make sure it isn’t playing pretend. But there’s no pretending: it’s really not moving, and Asher really gets to eat his Happy Meal. Blood stains his tennis shoes, but he sits on the ground crisscross-applesauce and the boogeyman is so happy, Asher gets another Happy Meal and another and he eats so much the hunger hides in his bones.
One of the boogeymen take the skeleton away. Asher goes back to his cage: the bars stay quiet, and he sleeps without the sun beneath his feet.
