Avidity

by Gretchen Lehtonen

When Mathilde was seventeen, she fled the convent in which she had spent the first part of the war. She took nothing with her. It was the first time in her life she was truly responsible for herself. On the first day, walking through fields and along country roads, she swung between elation and terror; by the second, exhaustion had overcome both emotions. Hunger clawed her belly.

There were farmhouses, abandoned, along the road, and in one she dwelt like a cat: curled on a sack or blanket on the floor to sleep, fitfully starting at each rustle and owl call, and prowling the kitchen for crumbs. The larders had been mostly lost to scavengers and rats, and the fruit and butter crocks were spoiled, but some of the hens that had been frightened into the thin woods had come back to roost in their coops.

On her third day in the house, she slipped into one of the coops to escape the eyes of a convoy. In the straw she saw the egg: a tiny beam of sunlight had chanced to fall through a crack in the roof, and limned it with gold. She seized it, holding its warm smoothness in her palms for only a moment before she tipped her head back and cracked it, fresh and viscous, into her mouth.

She stayed in that house for four more days, foraging into the woods to look for berries and girolles during the day. The well had been ruined, but there was a small stream just beyond the treeline. The orchard was bare, not one shriveled apple under the gnarled trees, but in the kitchen garden she found a few of the herbs had grown wild and undisturbed. She dined on fennel, nibbling on the white bulb like a rabbit: her saliva ran with its bright, sharp flavor. She scoured the coop for more eggs, but the hens had become canny, and she only managed to get one more.

In the end the house was too close to the road, and troops came by several times per day. There had also been some rough men she suspected of banditry, who went through the house while she hid trembling in the woods. They took the rest of the fennel as well as the tarragon she’d been saving for her dinner, and though she was just as much a scavenger, somehow she felt violated and the house seemed unfriendly after they had been there.

* * *

Years later, settled in a small cottage outside Mons, the memory of that house would come suddenly upon her, gently folding unbidden into her mouth as she went about her menial tasks. Digging in the soft black soil of her garden, the perfume of fennel crept across her tongue, and while thieving her hands under her pecking hens, she felt rich, slippery raw yolk in the back of her throat. At night, lying under her Belgian husband, the shadow of the bandits fell upon her, sinking into her skin. The hunger she had felt on the road inhabited her like a djinn, creeping along her nerves and tattooing an insistent beat on her eyelids.

She took to wandering down the rural lanes and into the woods, returning near dusk with pockets fat with mushrooms and wild herbs. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sharp and fey as sparrows. “Are you well?” her husband asked her one evening, as she came up the walk. “Where are your shoes?” Her feet were dark with mud.

“Yes, fine, wonderful!” She thrust her hand into her apron pocket. “Look what I’ve found!” A duck egg, fat and green-white, lay in her hand. She took it into the kitchen and brought out sage and fresh butter. But when she cracked the egg, a mass emerged: a fetal duckling, fragile in its membranous caul, lay cold in the bottom of the bowl. She recoiled, and felt the ravening within her wither and fade. It slipped back as it had come, stealthily, leaving her hollow and quiescent.

About the author

Gretchen Lehtonen is a freelance writer and editor in Northern California, She is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in fiction at the University of San Francisco.

About the illustration

The illustration is "The Artist's Summer Home", oil painting by Hippolyte Camille Delpy, 1876. In the collection of a private collector. In the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.