The Hunger and the Call
Guest Piece
Español |
Guest piece inspired by “The Rooster” / Part 1 of eXis
Author: Eric McCormick
The Hunger and the Call
The first night under the overpass, I thought I heard a bird.
A single sound, far off, brief enough that it could have been memory or metal or a man shouting something he would later deny. It came once, then vanished, leaving my chest tight and my thoughts snagged on it like fabric on a nail.
I did not look for the source. I pulled my jacket tighter, folded cardboard into something like a bed, and told myself the universe always speaks in borrowed tongues.
By morning, I had convinced myself it hadn’t happened.
Not that I cared much at that point. I woke stiff and damp, spine pressed into concrete. The river below the overpass dragged its skin along the rocks, thick with the smell of rust and wet leaves. Traffic above me stitched the dawn together with tires and brakes and impatience. Those people were really going places. I sat up slowly, palms flat on the ground until the stars in my vision faded.
A man I did not know was already packing his things. He moved with practiced economy, rolling fabric, tying cord, checking pockets. He didn’t look at me until I stood.
“You hear things your first nights,” he said, voice gravelly, unbothered. “Goes away.”
“What kind of things?”
“Whatever you’re carrying.”
He shouldered his pack and stepped past me into the thinning dark.
I followed the river path until the city opened enough to pretend I had a direction in mind. Hunger moved through me in waves, dull at first, then sharp enough to bend my posture. I knew where to find food if I was patient and lucky. Bakeries discarded mercy early. Convenience stores forgot to lock kindness behind glass when clerks grew tired. Shelters offered rules I no longer trusted myself to keep.
By midmorning, hunger had a second edge.
It was not in my stomach. It lived closer to my chest, a pressure that came and went like breath I did not control. I noticed it when I stopped moving. When I stood in line behind people who couldn’t see me. When I caught my reflection in a window and did not recognize the man staring back.
I blamed it on sleep. On withdrawal from a life I had dropped too quickly. On the way minds invent sensations to fill silence.
At the library, I sat at a table and pretended to read. Words slid off of me. The pressure grew warmer, heavier, as if something leaned close enough to hear my thoughts.
You have more, a voice said, soft as my own internal speech.
I closed the book and left.
The day taught me its rhythms again. Ride a bus until the driver notices you. Step off before suspicion hardens. Walk until your calves burn. Keep your eyes neutral. Smile once, maybe, when someone looks directly at you, so they remember you as harmless.
The pressure followed.
It stirred when I passed a man eating a sandwich with his whole attention on the act. It thickened when a woman laughed into her phone and I felt the echo of a life where someone laughed because of me. It swelled when I thought about calling my brother and letting the ring run out, just to prove I still knew his number.
By evening, my hunger had shape.
Not a body. A presence. A way of leaning that did not touch skin but bent it. I sat on a low wall near the river and pressed my palms into my thighs, grounding myself in muscle and ache.
“Leave me alone,” I muttered, to the air, to myself.
You open easily, the voice replied.
My jaw tightened. “I didn’t invite you.”
No one does, it said, and something in the way it spoke suggested patience older than manners.
I stood and walked until the sky bruised purple. Under the overpass again, the space felt occupied even before I lay down. I unrolled my blanket, keeping my movements deliberate. When I closed my eyes, images surfaced unbidden. Not dreams. Memories sharpened to edges. A kitchen table with a crack down the center. A door I had slammed hard enough to shake dust from the frame. A hand reaching for me and missing.
Each image came with a pull. A sensation of being tasted.
Stop, I said, louder now.
The pressure paused. Then multiplied.
You give freely, another voice murmured.
I sat up, heart racing. “Who are you?”
We eat what is offered.
The words slid into me like a key finding an old lock. My mouth went dry. I had lived long enough to recognize predators. Men who leaned too close. Employers who asked for loyalty without pay. Lovers who mistook hunger for devotion.
These felt different. Intimate. Inside the fence.
“I don’t have anything,” I said.
Laughter, close and wet. You are made of it.
I did not sleep. I drifted, waking each time the pressure shifted. By morning, my body ached with exhaustion sharper than hunger. I stood anyway, because stillness made it worse.
I wandered through streets. A man sweeping outside a closed shop nodded at me, eyes measuring but not unkind. I nodded back, filed it away as a possibility. Possibilities mattered now.
By afternoon, the voices had names, unspoken but felt. One carried the weight of authority, heavy and instructive. One carried desire, slick and persuasive. One carried shame, intimate and precise.
They fed when I argued with them. They fed when I ignored them. They fed when I replayed my failures with the care of a curator.
I tried to starve them by starving myself of thought. I counted steps. I named colors. I recited lyrics I barely remembered.
It did not last.
At dusk, I stood outside of a bakery, breathing in sugar and yeast until my vision swam. The back door was closed. I knew the schedule. I knew the risk. The authoritative voice leaned in.
Take it, it said.
I shook my head. “I won’t.”
You already have, the shame voice whispered. You took time. You took trust. You took yourself away.
My hands shook. The desire voice purred. You could eat now and feel better. You could be warm tonight.
I stepped back from the door, spine pressing into brick. Sweat cooled on my neck. “No.”
The pressure surged, angry now, crowded.
You want to suffer, it said, as if diagnosing a flaw.
“I want quiet,” I replied.
The voices pressed closer. My thoughts narrowed to the smell of bread, the ease of breaking a lock, the certainty of punishment that would follow and feel deserved.
And then, beneath all of it, something small resisted.
Not a thought. A sensation. A weight that was not there and yet undeniable. Like a stone in my palm that I had forgotten how to drop.
I flexed my fingers. Empty.
Still the weight remained.
I breathed into it. The pressure around my chest wavered, confused. The voices hesitated.
What is that, the authoritative one demanded.
“I don’t know,” I said, surprised by the steadiness of my voice. “But it’s mine.”
The desire voice hissed. The shame voice recoiled.
I left the bakery alley without looking back.
Night came thick and restless. Under the overpass, I lay awake, holding my empty palm against my chest, feeling the weight grow warmer, denser. The voices circled but did not land. They spoke from farther away now, probing for old seams.
Give us something, they whispered.
I did not answer.
At dawn, I woke to silence so complete it rang. For the first time in days, the pressure had loosened. My breath came easier. I sat up and waited for the hunger to spike.
It did, cleanly and without commentary.
I followed the street toward the bakery again, not because I wanted bread, but because something in my body pulled me there with purpose rather than need. The alley was empty. The pallet near the dumpster lay bare. The yellow cord coiled in dirt like a discarded skin.
I stepped into the alley, heart steady, palm warm.
The air shifted.
At the mouth of the alley, framed by the thinning morning light, stood the bird.
It was a rooster, comletely out of place in the grime and exhaust fumes of the alley. Not ragged. Not tethered. Present in a way that bent the space around it. Its feathers drank the light. Its eye caught mine and held without threat, without mercy. The weight in my palm flared, real now, undeniable.
I opened my hand.
A green stone rested there, smooth and cool edged, warm at its center, as if it had been waiting for daylight. The color held depth, the kind that suggests growth breaking through bone. My fingers curled around it instinctively.
The voices recoiled in unison, startled into silence.
The bird took one step forward. The alley seemed to narrow, attention drawn tight as a wire.
It lifted its head and called once.
The sound did not accuse. It did not warn. It named.
The call cut through me and through the city, through brick and river and morning fatigue. It struck the place the voices had occupied and left nothing for them to grip. I gasped, breath tearing free, and felt the last of their pressure slide out of me like a hand withdrawing.
The bird watched until the quiet settled, until my breathing steadied and the stone’s warmth matched my pulse.
Then it turned and walked away, unhurried, disappearing into the city as if it had never been anything.
I stood alone in the alley, stone in hand, hunger present but ordinary. The world felt wider. Not safer. Not gentler. Just possible again.
When I stepped back onto the street, a man was unlocking a shop door, broom leaning against the wall.
“You looking for work,” he asked, not unkindly.
I looked at my hands. At the stone. At the street stretching forward.
“Yes,” I said, and meant it.
About the Text
The Hunger and the Call turns hunger into challenge and pursuit: something much stronger than a physical sensation; it appears as pressure, as voices, as a tyrannical force that dismantles and tempts. The story explores the character’s inner world with almost clinical precision, while at the same time letting in a strange, almost sacred dimension that unsettles him and opens up another way of being in the world. The prose is restrained and highly sensorial, full of small gestures and thoughts that build a suffocating atmosphere until the “call” breaks through. It’s an urban, intimate, and spiritual piece at the same time, in perfect dialogue with the rooster in eXis while remaining completely its own. A story that has left me with sensations that very few texts achieve.
Gon Vas
About the Author
Eric McCormick is a poet and writer who explores the liminal spaces between worlds and the unseen forces that connect us to the divine.
 | A guest post by
|