Writing

2022                                                         We Don't. Not Anymore.

 

For a little while, I watched it eating. Under orders, it gingerly collected a medium bowl of porridge, more than I had expected, and sat down quietly with the food on its lap. It poked at the bowl’s contents with a spoon for tens of seconds, trying to form a small smooth scoop; perhaps its appetite was gone. Spontaneously its eyes began to swell and they became wet, everything about it started to blur and shiver.  I watched remotely as a droplet slashed down its cheek, and another almost at exactly the same time on the other side. It was impossible to work out what had caused this reaction; maybe the gentle failure of not being able to uptake precisely the right amount on the spoon. A few more tears fell onto its coat, from both sides, then suddenly: stopped. The spoon levitated to its mouth and tried to enter the little gap before being ripped away, dashed into the bowl again!

I thought the tears might resume, but they didn’t—it stayed blurry and very firmly looking at the porridge. Ah, it was hot, the porridge must have been too hot… it burned its lips. You could tell, by the surprise, that it hadn’t even thought about the heat of the food.

It tried again a minute or so later. This time, it pursed its little lips, drew the spoon and its load close to its face, and very gently blew on it without a sound. I imagined the cool air and what its breath might be like, and I knew it was being very courageous despite how obviously scared it was. It took the porridge into its little mouth without much of a problem this time, although the opening was just slightly too small for the porridge to enter the mouth comfortably. It was only a tiny amount of porridge, but it seemed to be a lot of work for it. Firstly, like the mouth wasn’t supposed to open even as much as it did (or that it couldn’t), and secondly, the chewing. Like the teeth barely touched. They barely even clicked together and, if they did, I couldn’t hear a sound. Like the porridge was swallowed mostly whole to spare its jaw any disruption.

It was doing better now. The tears were back, but much, much less frequent; only one or two per mouthful. Its mouth appeared to be more functional too, managing to chew faster and more. It still struggled to open its mouth enough for the porridge, its lips were sticky. With each slight spoonful, the porridge grazed the top lip, which printed the food onto the lower lip. The little pink tongue barely poked out and gradually, hesitantly, cleaned both lips before the porridge’s next turn.

By now, the porridge was almost gone. I got the impression that it liked the blueberries that were mashed among the oats—it looked to be fiercely planning ahead the ratios of blueberry to oat to leave it heavy on the side of the blueberries.

I didn’t know what would happen after the porridge was finished.

The next stage surprised me: it very very quickly lifted the final remains to its mouth, it shocked me! It rammed them in, and the porridge was gone. It was like it had been threatened! Like it had been endangered and terrorized with the threat of haunting. It chewed up the porridge, gathered -with the spoon- the one blueberry that had fallen off the pile and was left in the bowl, and put it to its mouth. The blueberry exploded at its lips.

It sat staring and staring, its back to the sun, the blueberry juice on its mouth.