SHORT FICTION - HERA ON A DIET

Not Vegan

Hera hastily opened the greasy wrapper of the burger and sunk her eager teeth into the sesame dotted bun. She picked up a bunch of fries, smothered it with ketchup, and swallowed everything with a sip of sweet tea. Nothing comforted Hera more than this divine combination of carb, fat, and protein, and indeed it made her double chin more defined and toned almost like a Greek statue. She swiped away a speck of ketchup dropped on her belly and vaguely remembered a time when her dress was several sizes smaller. Oh well, who needed to be that skinny anyway. She could still move around freely and had not destroyed any furniture nor paid for a second seat on the airplane. She had good friends, her husband loved her, and she was happy. What else did a woman need?

“Honey, you have ketchup on your cheek,” her husband said.
“Huh…?”
“There… let me wipe it for you,” he reached forward with a piece of tissue, “and why does it take so long for you to make such a decision. Just say yes. Aren’t you guys best friends of some sorts?”
“Oh! About that…,” she shifted around on the couch, “can I just finish my burger? I haven’t any for so long.”
“Why think too much? You have known each other since college. There will be free food for us. We’ll go, we’ll talk, we’ll have fun, and we’ll go back to our house. Simple as that.”
“Listen, she is vegan and I prefer meat. Last time we went, there was like nothing. Think about it: mushroom. The other time: green thingy whatever you call it.”
“It doesn’t mean she doesn’t know how to grill a burger.”
“I won’t eat a burger again anytime soon, Peter,” she threw the half eaten burger in the brown bag and stood up, “my first order of Jenny Craig is coming.”
“I just want you to reconnect with your old friend,” her husband said “we all went to her place, why wouldn’t we this time?”
“My Jenny Craig order would be coming on that day. I had to stay home to get it. You don’t even like veggie yourself.”
“Easy there, Hera, we could arrange to move it to another day, right?”
“If you want to go, go ahead. I don’t care,” she stopped for a second, “well, since I am not going, you are not going either.” She threw the brown bag in the trash can.

Peter proceeded to say something else but she managed to treat his persuasion as a jumble mumble of cacophonous noises. She and Samanta were friends, that was true, but Samanta had always been the centerpiece of the table while Hera had been like a forgotten side dish that nobody bothered to look at. Samanta hypnotized the whole college singing that heartbreaking aria from Gianni Schicchi while Hera played the cello. Samanta moved to New York to sing for the Met while Hera had to remain in Arkansas to take care of her sick mother. Samanta managed to maintain the body that made all the girls in town slimy green with envy while Hera made a deal with the kitchen God to put on pounds after pounds of love on her body.

Korean Side Dishes - by taylorandayumi

Hera ran into Samanta near the town hall several months ago. The sky was cloudless and the sun mercilessly baked the earth in an almost unbearable batter of heat and humidity. Hera was sweating profusely, the fabric of her skirt stuck to the sticky wetness of her back, and the ice in her plastic cup quickly diluted her coke into something to be thrown away. Out of the nowhere came Samanta impeccably dressed in blue chiffon as if she just fell down from the sky, her wide brim hat shooed away the devil of a heat, and the coolness of something looked like iced jasmine tea enveloped the svelte Samanta in such a graceful serenity that the fiery hell surrounding them almost transformed into an oasis. After some noises expressing surprise, they hugged awkwardly and tried to reignite the old flame of a friendship they used to share years before.

Hera smirked a little thinking that she always had Peter to love while Samanta was in and out of marriage for several times. Samanta’s charming vacation cottage near the lake and that shiny car she drove must be obtained from one of those divorce settlements. Hera felt she should welcome Samanta with open arms since nobody would chase away somebody who came back and make truce. It would be difficult to start fresh and new with somebody who was thirty pounds lighter than yourself. Why would Peter care so much about her relationship with Samanta, she had no idea. Maybe he liked the way Samanta cooked. What was so amazing about veganism anyway? You don’t fight to be on the top of the food chain only to eat veggies, do you? You just throw some mushroom on a grill, pour in some olive oil, sprinkle some dried basils leaves and you call it a meal? That holier-than-thou-because-I-eat-veggie on Samanta’s face almost commanded Hera to smack the bowl of grilled mushroom doused in vinegar and smeared the mess all over her skinny little face.

Grilled Mushroom with Couscous Recipe

“Aww…Hera, you don’t like the vinegar?” Samanta said.
 “Sam, this is the most amazing thing I have ever eaten in a long time,” Hera scraped the basil off the mushroom, “I love this, I could eat this for days.”
“Of course you could. And you, tell me how does it taste, Peter?”
“It is finger-licking good!” Peter shoved in a mouthful, swallowed hastily, and smiled back at Samanta.
“Indeed it is,” Samanta laughed gaily, her teeth shone brightly under the amber dining light.

Maybe there was something in the veggies that helped Samanta preserve the youthfulness of her figure. Maybe that green evil of a broccoli was not that bad after all. Hera felt obliged to click on the box for extra veggie when she ordered her diet food online. Of course Hera wouldn’t want to look like Samanta, but hopefully it would be nice to go down several dress sizes, as advertised by Jenny herself.

The shipment came early on Friday but everybody was to stay at home. Hera was less than impressed by the gourmet food in the box. Her portion was long gone yet she longed for more. Her taste buds were begging for flavor, her stomach was growling for more food, and her eyes seemed to see imaginary food everywhere. The following Sunday when she came to her mother’s to have their weekly movie session, she started to realize that the old couch in the house looked like a gigantic chunk of brownie. She saw cheese instead of sponge, chocolate instead of the leather-bound Bible, hazelnuts for her mother’s eyes, and fluffy cotton candy for her mother’s hair.

She wanted to blame somebody for her current suffering. It was her mother's food that turned her into a chunky teenager, and thing got worse from there, maybe? However, she had always adored her mother's curvaceous figure, which was now devastated by diabetes and reduced to nothing but skin and bones. Probably having a little meat on your frame wouldn't be that bad after all, but some more food would really help at the moment. She stared blankly at the TV screen showing a scene from Under The Tuscan Sun, let out a loud sigh, and sprung up to have her date back home with Jenny Craig. She was to have some lentil curry today. She stopped for a moment in the driveway, thinking that she just left without saying goodbye to her mother. It wouldn't matter much now that she had her stomach to take care of, and her mom felt asleep ten minutes into the movie anyway.

Red Lentil Curry Recipe

For no reason, she decided to forget the gourmet diet food on purpose. She would rather be starving today than shoving down any of that food for beauty in a box. Several days of trying to eat healthy and skinny proved too much for her already. Her car wouldn’t start, so she had to walk five blocks on hilly terrain to go back to her place. She made a right on St.Paul Street instead of her Maple Avenue to visit her holy mecca of a burger joint. The large double cheese burger with bacon obviously gave her a surge of energy that went missing for days. As the grease oozed slowly out of the corners of her mouth, she saw a blonde woman in blue passing by in her shiny car, her hair flew gracefully with the wind, and a high note of a soprano could be heard leaking from the passenger side of her car. Slowly, she turned left onto Maple Avenue. The meat suddenly turned spongy in Hera’s mouth, the soft bun scratched against her throat harshly, and the whole burger seemed to lose its flavor in a split second. Hera spit out the only bite she took, dropped her half-eaten burger in the brown bag, and quickly threw it in the trashcan. She tried to walk calmly out of the burger joint, yet somehow she bumped into somebody at the front door, and stomped off toward Maple Avenue completely ignoring the complaint behind her back.

The shiny car stopped right in front of her house. If she was ten years older, she would collapse this instance with a heart thumping like a maniac playing drums. The concrete street turned slushy under her feet as if she was treading in a mud pit. She trembled trying to unlock the door quietly. The sun had baked the doorknob into a hot throbbing ball of coal. The heat sucked out all the breathable air and strangled her with a fiery clasp around her sweaty neck. A vague scent of jasmine filled the air with an exuberant furor. She clenched her teeth and labored to breath slowly through her nose. She ascended the stair which suddenly became so steep and every step posed a vertical threat to her shivering feet. The squeaky noise on the eighth step was muffled by the heavy breathing, not from her, but from somebody behind the door standing ajar on top of the stair. Through the door crack, Hera watched in fiery coldness what was being done on the sheet of her matrimonial bed in her own bedroom.

“How… how do you… how do you want it?” the woman moved her hip like butter being churned. Her golden hair swayed in the air.
“Fuck yes. Just like, yeah… just like this,” the man smoothed the contour of her slim body and caress her chest, “yeah, exactly like this.”
“Can that fat bitch… of a wife… you have do… this …to …you?” she lifted her thigh to the point of almost being free then slammed it down with every word she said. She smeared something on the man’s lips.
“Yummy,” he turned her over.

Hera felt calm when she did it. More truthfully, her emotions were sucked through the cutaneous layer of her skin and rendered her callous. She remembered went quietly down to the kitchen to get a drink, throw her entire month of gourmet diet in the trash, and put on some make up. How a woman like her could move so gracefully in silence, she didn’t know.

When the police finally came, she almost finished everything already and that her house was very messy at that point. Some meat was being smoked, some grilled, some bobbling up and down in a pot of stew. There was meat everywhere: loaves of meat on the kitchen counter, chunks of meat in the freezer, and tiny pieces of meat dotted the carpet all the way from the bedroom to the basement. She was found eating in her brown, caked up apron right on the kitchen floor scattered everywhere with bones and cleavers and knives of all sizes. Pigs are dirty but people eat them anyway, don’t you think? She didn’t really eat anything for two day. She was interrupted when she was trying to eat. She was hungry. She was a meat lover, and she didn’t like veggies at all.

Jesus Christ, how could she do such a macabre thing? The morbid thought chilled her right into the bone marrow. With shivering sweat, she hurriedly threw away the half-eaten burger into the trashcan, filled her lungs one last time with the eternally tempting fragrance of the grilled burger, and felt more determined than ever to eat healthy.

She left the burger joint with her head held high.

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