The Hunger haunts me most when I’m nauseous, which feels like it’s all the time these days. Morning sickness, my ass. I throw up at a minimum once per day, and it’s not just in the morning. The nausea is all day, every day; relentless. The Hunger is equally as relentless, though, taunting me through the pains in my empty stomach.
You can eat, It tells me. I can show you how.
It’s a fucking liar.
It looks at me while I’m showering, as I stick a bundle of the loose strands to the wall in a soggy clump for my wife to find later, then while I’m brushing my hair afterwards, pulling it back into a tight bun out of my face. It grumbles when the soft locks are out of touch, out of its reach.
My search history is alarming. ‘Want to eat hair.’ ‘Craving hair.’
Finally, I stumble on what I’m looking for—pica. Thank you, Internet. My fingers tremble as I read the symptoms, the consequences. A disorder that makes you crave inedible things, more common in pregnancy. No cure. You just get through it, somehow, as with almost all the uncomfortable side effects associated with pregnancy.
The Hunger rumbles happily as I read, narcissistic and vain. That’s me, It thinks, the timbre of its voice dreamy and soft.
I knew some things about pregnancy before I got pregnant myself, of course. I did my research and asked family members about their experiences.
Your unborn child can kick so hard that they break your ribs.
Aunt Susan, her uterus exploded! They had to rush her into surgery, or she would have died.
Mom kept getting blood clots. None of them killed him, though, so that was good.
Through all these disturbing little tidbits, though, no one ever mentioned The Hunger.
###
When I finally get in to see my doctor, I try to explain how all-encompassing the nausea is, how it’s devastating my daily life. He prescribes me pills to help. The pills make me tired, but at least when I’m sleeping, I’m not puking. I do a lot of both.
Elena, my partner, finds me often in bed, brings me little snacks she researched online to try and ease the nausea. Crackers, ginger candies, bananas, plain pasta, and rice. I try, I really do. I want to eat so badly, to nourish my child and my own failing body, but everything I manage to choke down comes back tenfold, bringing the small bits of water I can sip up with it.
As I lay in bed that night, pretending to eat fruit and drink tea, I stare at the long strands of my hair splayed out beside me. The Hunger rumbles Its excitement. I’m stronger than this, damn it. I grab a hair tie off my nightstand and tie all my hair up with shaky hands. It screeches inside me, petulant. I eat a grape. I throw up in my mouth and swallow it all down again, bitter and rancid, attempting to force peristalsis where it refuses to exist. There is a certain thrill in pissing It off.
###
Elena is worried about the baby, about me. I want to tell her that it’s alright, that I’m trying, but I know from my brief glances in the mirror that my lying is useless. My skin is sallow and pale, hanging loose at odd places along my limbs. My pregnant belly sticks out unnaturally despite how early along I am.
I’m finally realising that my morning sickness and the Hunger aren’t separate sensations at all; they’re two sides of the same hideous coin. The Hunger won’t allow me to eat unless I’m eating what It wants. And what It wants is—unacceptable. Disgusting.
While I watch TV, It watches me.
My stomach grumbles pitifully, and I feel Its presence there, next to my organs, hissing, slithering. It promises respite through poisoned, lying lips. I turn the volume up to drown out Its screeches and growls.
###
After a few weeks of this, Elena insists I go back to the doctor. She says something is wrong. She’s right, but I’m having trouble paying attention to the conversation. I’m not sure how to tell her I’m so weak that I actually exist outside of my body at this moment. I’m watching all three of us from the ceiling, a little spider, barely nodding my head along to words that are too big right now. I don’t think she’ll understand.
This time, there’s the barest amount of sympathy in the doctor’s expression as Elena describes the volume and frequency of my vomit. I don’t look him in the eyes, terrified that he’ll see the Hunger if he looks too closely. That maybe it’s grown an extra maw on my slightly rounded belly, teeth sharp and dripping with spew.
My mouth is so dry and my head so fuzzy that Elena has to speak for me when I’m asked questions. She agrees that I’ll take the new pills, I think.
There’s a poster on the wall of a pregnant belly sliced right up the middle to show rearranged organs and fetus. I stare at its unformed eyes as its slit of a mouth whispers that it’s hungry. Me too, buddy. Me too.
###
Despite my cynicism, the new pills are helping, I think. I feel better, can brush my teeth again sometimes. The toilet bowl has lost its perpetual acidic odour. No Hunger in sight. Have I ignored It long enough? Is this the fabled waning of sickness the second trimester is meant to bring?
I’m starting to wonder if it was all a nightmare. Fourteen weeks along now, my baby is the size of a lemon, and the apps tell me that they can pee inside me. That’s cool, I guess.
I drink iced tea, put cold compresses on my forehead, and sleep with a strange, malformed pillow meant to cushion my ballooning body. I eat what I can, and some of it even stays inside me.
###
I’ve done my grocery shopping for the day, sweating obscenely in the summer heat, eager to come back to our home’s air conditioning. I’m wearing a cropped maternity sundress I bought recently, cornflower blue with little white daisies. I think it highlights my growing bump in a cute way, and I’m tired of wearing sweatpants all the time. I hum a nameless tune to myself. Elena and I are going to go to one of those big box stores on the weekend and buy a crib and some necessities for the little one. We’re so excited. I just finish putting away the last of the kiwis when I feel a sharp pain in my stomach. It worries me for a moment; the little one kicks now, but not quite like this. Not quite so—
Before I can consciously react, I fall to my knees on the floor, agony radiating from my stomach, my intestines. I feel It. Pulsing. Angry.
No, please, no—
The Hunger lashes out, irate that I might try to evade Its wrath.
If I concentrate I can feel Its slimy grin inside me, moving my kidneys and liver aside to get at my stomach, squeezing, clawing, crunching. The pain is sharp and lancing and I retch, and retch. Vomit comes up as expected, but with it comes hair, and hair, and more hair, more than a person could ever eat, mountains of it, thick and dark and suffocating. It slides up my throat in greasy, sodden clumps, bits of red flesh and blood mixed in with the spit and fruit seeds and venom. The remnants of my recently taken anti-nausea pills taunts me, half-digested. Tears run down my cheeks as I finally stop and catch my breath, my whole body trembling and weak. I feel Its discontentment with me, that I thought I might disobey.
Sobbing, I sit in the evidence of Its malice, my daisies dotted with specks of blood.
I know what I have to do.
I bring a handful of my hair up to my mouth tentatively, rest the split ends between my front teeth. The strands are slippery and somehow firm; I can’t bite through them. A single piece slides up between my incisor and canine, and I gag at the sensation of human floss. I wiggle my teeth side to side, grinding until bits break off in my mouth, thin little worms of me, scratchy and satisfying. It’s nearly impossible to chew through like this, so I force it to the back of my throat and take little sips of water to wash it down.
I don’t throw it up.
The Hunger grumbles, content, and I fall asleep fuller than I’ve felt in weeks.
###
Once I stop fighting it, it’s not so bad. No one notices the underlayers of my hair getting shorter, shorn by the tombstones of my initially hesitant teeth. I flush my pills down the toilet while I snack on self-made keratin. It shouldn’t make me feel better. Some part of my logical brain knows that this is wrong, that there’s no way my own hair is keeping me nourished. I don’t know what to tell you, though. The Hunger has demands. And I’m weak.
Elena comes home from work and cradles me, cherishes me. She tells me that I’m glowing, that she’s so proud of me for growing our child. I tell her that I want the “mom chop”, to cut all my long hair off. She smiles and embraces me, petting at my dark locks.
“Whatever you want, baby. I’m just glad you’re feeling better.” She leans down to whisper to my belly, sweet promises and words of love. I plaster on a smile, my heart beating fast. She doesn’t need to know who she’s really talking to.
###
I tell the hairdresser I’m donating my hair to one of those wig foundations. She explains that they’ll braid my long hair, cut it off at the nape, then bag it and take it away. I nod and smile without opening my mouth. Sometimes I worry that if I smile too wide, too much, people will see The Hunger peeking out. That something about the absence in my eyes will warn people of my secret. The hairdresser goes to the back to get things ready.
The Hunger doesn’t like this. It shakes the lining of my stomach, threatens to upturn the contents of me onto the spotless mirror.
I slip out of the chair and out the front door. At home, I cut my hair over the bathroom sink and then sit on the floor and cry.
I eat handfuls of it later with a glass of red wine.
###
“You’re looking better, that’s great. Glad to see the pills are helping!” The doctor is disgustingly, falsely cheery. He barely looks at me, checking his watch when he enters the room.
“A friend of mine mentioned that when she was pregnant, she craved, um…things that weren’t food. Have you heard of that?” He’s writing me a prescription for more antiemetics, not looking at me.
“Oh, yeah. Not super common, but some women crave dirt, clay, things like that. The main theory is that it’s a lack of some vitamin in your body.” He finishes writing the script and holds it out for me, smiling without his eyes.
“What about…hair?” He looks at me for real now, the script wavering softly in the air between us. He glances down at my freshly-cut bob, a question on his lips. Not paid to ask that, though. He nods slowly.
“I haven’t heard of that one, but it’s possible. It will go away when you…when your friend, delivers.”
The smile is back, his hand more insistently pushing the paper towards me. “Not to rush you out, but I have a 4:30 tee time. You know how it is.” I take the script, and my bob, and my Hunger, and throw the paper in the garbage near the reception desk on my way out.
###
While the doctor is as useless as ever, he has given me something of a light at the end of the tunnel. Just make it to the birth, and all this will end. I can do that.
I try my eyelashes too, because the Hunger insists and I am feeling a bit peckish. They don’t have the same bite as my other hair, but they’re small and go down easily. An apéritif, if you will. Eyebrows are sweeter, thicker, fine little strands that tickle my throat and sate my appetite for a moment.
The main course is always the same. I tell Elena that hair loss is a common pregnancy side effect, and some brief online research suggests that I’m not wrong. Nearly anything could be a pregnancy side effect at this point. She doesn’t question me, just kisses my sparse eyebrows and frets.
###
As my imminent delivery approaches and I come closer to meeting my child, I feel the Hunger’s power waning, just as the doctor predicted. It whimpers at Its loss of control, knowing that I will soon be rid of It. Where does it go when Its time is up? Will It stay inside me, dormant, starving? Does It wait until I’m vulnerable again and make Its triumphant return? I know it’s a horrible thing, a sickness, but I think that I’ll miss It, in a strange way. Its jaws have kept me company on sleepless nights; Its urgings have likely kept me alive.
###
Family comes to visit, to meet the baby. I grit my teeth as my child is passed around, with greasy skin and chapped lips touching her perfect face. I feel a blood clot slide slowly out of me, that unmistakable sticky, wet expulsion. I should go check that it’s no bigger than a golf ball, per the doctor’s instructions, as though I have one handy in the bathroom to make that comparison. As I stand, I hear Elena’s aunt mention that she thought from the pictures the baby had been born with lots of hair, and isn’t it funny that it’s all gone?
Elena laughs and explains that lots of babies lose their hair because they sleep on their backs so much these days. Her aunt chuckles, too. Things have sure changed since you were born, haven’t they, she says.
I smile and go check on my passed clot. No bigger than a golf ball. I open my nightstand drawer and push pill bottles, eye masks, and breast pads aside until I find my prize, a treat for later: a small jar of my baby’s downy, perfect hair.
