Hunger
By Frank Owen
Author of "Shadows," "The Man Who Lived Next Door to Himself," etc.
All his life Mel Curran had been hungry. He had never known the pleasure of sitting down to a good meal. Hunger is a rat that gnaws at a man's stomach as if it were an empty, untenanted house whose beams were sagging.
Mel Curran was not a credit to humanity, but then neither was humanity a credit to him. He was undersized, underfed, and his mind was not normal. He believed that the dusk-shadows of evening were haunted by all sorts of weird ghosts and wraiths. He was more credulous than a child. He believed everything he heard, everything that was told to him, no matter how fantastic or preposterous. He believed that night was filled with creeping, crawling things, that sleep was a dreadful state. Each night he fought against it. He subjected himself to physical pain to escape the horror of unconsciousness. He held the lids of his eyes open so that the black horror could not creep in. All night long he kept a candle burning beside his bed so that the whirling, plunging, closing net of darkness would not close down upon him. Sometimes he groaned and shrieked in terror, and the sounds of his anguish echoed weirdly throughout the dank, cobweb-draped cellar in which he dwelt. For hours he would fight off the plague of sleep, but eventually, inevitably, from sheer exhaustion he would succumb to it.
Another of his eccentricities was his total vagueness regarding numbers. To him "one", "six", "seven", or any other numeral was merely a word without meaning, and not infrequently his vision also became jumbled. He would see the same man two or three times at once. He never knew how many men were walking toward him. Sometimes it would be only one man and he would appear like four, or, as not infrequently happened, it would be four men and they would appear to him like one. There were times when he walked smack into a person because his distorted vision had taken the person for a group. The same phenomenon was true of buildings, of trees, of automobiles, of stairways. When he walked down a subway stairs he walked as gingerly as if he were walking on eggs, for it was as if he were trying to descend several flights of stairs at once and he was unaware which he was really treading upon.
His life was filled with horrors and tragedies, with fears and desires and dim hopes that never were realized. But greater than all his desires was the supreme wish for a good meal. He was well past sixty, and very thin, like a wisp of straw. He was very tall, and his clothes were greasy and green with age. His eyes always shone fanatically and they bore a searching, hunted, haunted look. Sometimes he would spy a filthy crust of bread by the curbstone. Immediately he would rush forward and devour it as if all the people of New York had perceived it also and were pursuing it. Not infrequently the bit of crust would seem multiplied to four or five pieces, and he would grovel and whine pitifully when he could find only one. He was a familiar sight on the waterfronts, creeping about like an ugly shadow, sinister,
ominous, dangerous, as if bent on
