Page 21 of Aftertaste

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ON A SCALE of one to suck, the Hunger’s an eleven.

You eat around-the-clock but never once feel full.

You’re trapped in the Food Hall, unable to move On.

You keep hoping things’ll get better. That your sister—the one who couldn’t let you go—will get therapy. Get laid. Find some other way to get her mind off you.

Spoiler alert? She doesn’t. She just stays angry, and sad, and stuck.

And so do you.

As time goes on, you feel a shift. Your hand, you think, has it always been this grey? Did your voice always echo when you spoke? It isn’t your imagination; this Hunger changes you. It transforms.

(Honestly? If you’d known it would be this much trouble being Dead, you never would have killed yourself.)

You wonder how it might end. What you might become if you never move On. If Maura—that’s your sister—dies before she ever lets you go.

Then you find out.

In a dark corner of the Food Hall is a place full of shadows. Filled with the empty husks of spirits who were once like you—haunted by their Living and never released. Only they’re not spirits anymore, and they’re worse than Hungry.

They’ve become ghosts.

Hangry Ghosts.

(Try not to laugh, okay? It really isn’t funny.)

Hangry Ghosts are soulless things with torment in their eyes. Grief for the incarnations they’ll never get to live. Cravings for the satisfaction they’ll never feel again. Fury, at the way they’ve been bound. They are cold, and dark, and desperate. Scared. Impulsive. Violent, too. Powerful enough to rip anyone who gets too close to shreds. If they were ever to get out, the Hangry Ghosts could tear the veil between the Living and the Dead apart. And they would, too. They’d go to any lengths to try and sate their urge. Which is why the Hall locks them away.

It isn’t fair, not really, what happens to them. What’s happening to you.

It reminds you of your dad, of how he got when his depression hit. All the joy sucked away. Hollow and drowning and unwilling to swim until the moment when he snapped, a pin from a grenade.

You refused to live that life. You didn’t want it. It’s the whole reason you chose death. Because you’d been diagnosed with what he had.

But now you might contract it anyway. For all eternity. With no way out this time.

Well screw that, you decide.