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2008 Sample

Omnivores
Anne Germancos

Eating
Throughout twenty years of friendship, there was never a time when I ate more than Madeline. Even when meals were over, I had the feeling she could have gone on eating. By then I was usually stuffed; the mere thought of food was too much. But she was always looking in the bread basket or wetting her fingers and picking up crumbs.

She wasn’t fat, simply a big person, taller than most women. Someone who might be mistaken, at certain angles, for a man. When her husband died, one felt, because of her size, that she was big enough to fill his shoes.

Once, after a meal of steak, pommes frites, and a good bottle of red wine, she asked me about stories—how one thinks them up, where they come from.

I said: They come from an omnivorous place, a mouth that holds everything. Put anything in, the mouth chews and swallows. Nothing escapes.

She appeared not to be listening to me. The fingers of one hand played at her lips. I wondered what hunger she constantly fed, what particular greed fueled her.

Now it’s obvious to me that I’m greedier than she could ever be: nothing escapes.

Viola
I’d heard about Madeline for several years before our paths crossed.

By coincidence, Madeline’s mother and mine shared Viola, a cleaning woman. As she dusted or wiped the windows, Viola told my sister and me about Madeline and her brothers: the way they lived, the things they ate, and their bedrooms, different from ours and thus intriguing.

I used to wonder if Viola invented Madeline and her brothers to keep us company or simply to make us jealous of their more interesting lives. But if Madeline were real, and of course she was, it meant that perhaps my life, as portrayed to her through Viola’s lips, made her jealous as well.

Tennis Balls
Madeline and I had been playing tennis together half the summer before I realized she was the girl in the stories. During hot afternoons, we’d take our vanilla milkshakes under the wooden stands and search for old balls. Madeline was older than me, and bigger. I expected her to keep most of the balls we found for herself, but right away she insisted they were ours, and she protected our stash from other children.

When we played tennis together in the fog, which we liked to do, each of us hit the ball as hard as we could. Our sense of the other was vague in that thick white soup.

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