moon teeth

LINDA TOMOL PENNISI : Chew

That summer she decided to consume all her calories before noon. It’s not that she woke feeling ravenous, but rather that she knew intuitively that her hunger had shifted, that it required her to pull the Tupperware bowl from the fridge before 7:00 and carry the chunked watermelon to the chair where she’d watch Katie and Matt discuss the source of the White House leak of a CIA agent to the press. And the fact that her eating could continue through the morning was in a strange way nourishing in itself, so she’d ignore the piles of laundry and the flourishing weeds and would only perform tasks that allowed her to work and eat simultaneously. And though dusting and Windexing took longer than usual and sometimes her sourdough toast ended up smelling of Lemon Pledge or ammonia, she found she could read and write at just about the same pace as always, the stains adding abstractions of smudged color— mocha or ruby or midnight blue. And the way a map might instill in one the desire to travel, or the way stones might encourage one to step across a too-deep stream, the stains became part of what she was saying, and when she called her sister and spoke of how her new eating routine fed her, her sister with great empathy replied, Sometimes you just gotta chew.