“Famine” by Meg Vlaun
Blonde children that could be twins splash through the river; they chatter about frogs. For the past two nights, I was alone—then this afternoon a black pickup with a small trailer rolled in, a family of four: mother, father, son, daughter. Noise and chaos invaded my sanctuary. But these three Upper Twin Creek dispersed sites are public. I try not to be annoyed. I try to turn it into a game. I ask myself, Mehmet, how much can you learn about this family by observing?
My broad-brush inspection: mom and dad can’t yet be forty. Their kids may be 12 and 13, which means they married in their early twenties, procreated by mid-twenties. Traditional. It’s all I need to know.
I turn back to my fire and contemplate the earplugs in my saddlebag. Maybe, if the kids don’t calm. Over the upper reaches of tongued flame, reflected by the river’s serrated surface, an unending horizon drifts from orange to magenta to violet. My stomach tumbles, so I haul myself off the wooden stump and over to my bike. A 2005 Triumph Speedmaster sometimes feels like an acceptable consolation prize—the trusty steed to my epic odyssey. Sometimes. Other times it feels like a monk’s habit. I fumble through the sissy seat pack for a can—any can—and when my fingers wrap around tin, I pull it out and hold it to my face in the dim: pork and beans. Fine. Maybe I hoped for beef stew, but now I can save beef stew for tomorrow’s potential silence. It would taste better with silence.
I grab the folding grate, tongs, and a spoon from the bag and head back to the fire. As I walk, I finger the can’s ribs and remember the gas station clerk’s thumb brushing the back of my hand as she took it from me to scan its barcode. Her eyes shot up to meet mine—hot. I couldn’t. I stared at the green display and pretended not to notice. Not now. I tapped my card, took the bag of food, and left.
With my pocket tool, I remove the label and open the can, then set it over the flame’s margin on the unfolded grate. I contemplate returning to my pack and grabbing veggies but decide this is enough for tonight. A lean silhouette emerges from the ring of my neighbors’ fire: the mother, in faded skinny jeans, cowboy boots, and an oversized deep blue sweatshirt with USNA emblazoned across the chest. Her ponytail is darker blonde than her progeny. I inspect the nutrition facts from the can’s label in the firelight: there are sufficient calories in this for two people, technically. I don’t stop myself from admiring the lines of the woman’s long thighs and ivory throat; to admire from a distance is fine, right? In protracted strides, she oversteps bramble to the river’s edge, where she disappears over the bank into darkness. I hear murmuring, then she returns, damp tweens in her wake. She flings each a towel and their father hands them burgers from their outdoor kitchen. I toss the nutrition label into the fire and watch it light blue, then green, then black as ink and glue burn. Pork and beans. What is haram to me anymore? The family eats around their fire on camp chairs.
I don’t try to quash my resentment: that could’ve been me. That could’ve been me with the doting wife and two stupid cute kids that look just like us.
Fuck them. I smolder, as much at them as at myself.
In Montana’s late June, the sun sets at nearly ten. My neighbors quiet once they finish their meal. The kids disappear into the trailer. Their voices muffle then fade to silence. If they linger past noon tomorrow, I’ll find another site. I begrudge them their conventional happiness, but I know it’s not their fault. I douse my fire with river water and turn in.
Warm in my sub-zero bag with a down jacket for a pillow, I imagine my neighbor’s wife finding her way to my tent in the middle of the night, honey-gold hair reflecting the waning gibbous moon, blue eyes owlish to see without light. We’d intertwine. Mother-of-pearl skin stark and bright against mine; fingernails rake my scalp.
No.
I toss to my side, scrape my elbow against some rock or root, and the pain returns me to presence. Darkness. Solitude. Cold. A day without relational catastrophe or regret. Consciousness slips away before the fantasy fully forms.
***
Azra watches children play a pickup soccer game in the parochial school courtyard three floors below our apartment’s kitchen window. She cut her raven hair short—for a change, she said—after she discovered my affair with Caria. Maybe I imagine the correlation; correlation does not equal causation, I remind myself. It falls now like a curtain to her jawline below her ear so that the skin of her neck is exposed. Her features—arched, clear brow, high cheekbones, bridged nose, full lips—appear regal limned in sunlight. Her spine is straight. She’s never been so beautiful, as though each blow, I dealt contributed to her self-worth, not detracted from it.
The kitchen smells of mercimek çorbası: red lentil soup—a recipe Azra inherited from my mother, my Anne. I sit alone at the table, uncertain whether I’ll be able to muster the will to eat when it’s ready.
You don’t have to do this, she says.
I think I do.
She says, your family loves you, Mehmet. I love you—even if we separate. You have four years invested in your role at the fire station, medical and education benefits. Your therapist is here. Ankara is your home.
Maybe, but just now, Ankara is my gaol, I say. Everyone knows. Their eyes judge.
Without a network, how do you hope to recover?
But this network suffocates, and I can’t tell her that I’m not so sure of recovery, that I wonder what the word implies about me, my family, my religion, my culture. Maybe I don’t know if I’m broken or damaged or in need of recovery. Maybe all I need is distance from people to stop hurting them.
Azra turns to face me, to press for an answer. She stuns. She is brilliant: a lawyer with a bent for charity, she works mostly for nonprofits even though she could earn more than me in the private sector. She stands for truth, fairness, what’s right. She loves her family. Children and pets gravitate to her. She still believes in God and the Quran. For over a year now, she’s battled to turn me into an honorable man. Almost tirelessly, she’s renewed her faith in me as I failed her: porn, literotica, sexting, my affair with Caria. All Azra ever wanted was a traditional life: faith, husband, children, stability—to eventually care for our parents as they grow old. I drop my eyes to the tablecloth my sister gifted us for our wedding two years ago. I can’t provide for Azra’s wants and needs. I don’t deserve her.
At the same time, I resent her for all she represents: what is moral versus what is immoral—these categorizations imposed mostly by our culture and religion, in which my faith falters. Why should I be ashamed of something that feels unchangeable about me? What if intense sexuality is my nature? Isn’t libido life force? I can’t believe that God would create homosexuals and then condemn them for living true to their nature. Likewise, I cannot believe God would make someone like me and then condemn me for it. The contradiction corrupts my faith in God; from there, my faith in society and culture collapse in succession.
Often, I wonder if what society condemns as weakness might be a superpower. Couldn’t I help others unearth themselves from culturally imposed sexual repression so that they might improve their relationships and live more fulfilling, creative lives? What might such a career look like? Of course, Turkey is too conservative for this. I’d need to move to someplace more liberal: France, England, Australia, the US. I imagine myself in New York City, in an armchair across a coffee table from a couple side-by-side on a couch, discussing how they relate via sex. They’d receive my suggestions, eyes wide with a mixture of desire and awe. But would they transfer their romantic feelings onto me—and how could I withstand that sort of temptation? My mind automatically flashes to an image of being with them behind my locked office door, showing them instead of telling. Windows unshuttered, to be seen. I can’t halt the vision before it manifests. No; it’s too unlikely, too much temptation.
This is how I’ll recover, I say to Azra. Abstinence. A sabbatical.
Alone, she says, her head tilted to the side. How can that be healthy?
It’s healthier for those I love, I say. I look at her pointedly.
She throws her hands in the air. You’re a grown-ass man, she says. Do what you want.
***
I wake late and ravenous and eat a granola mix: light, simple, nutritional. It provides everything I need—except the pleasure of eating. My neighbor family and their trailer remain; from their outdoor kitchen wafts the smell of bacon. The littles play in the river again—no one gives any sign of packing to leave.
I must go.
Dispersed campsites in National Forest lands are free use with a 14-day limit. In the past month of hopping from dispersed site to dispersed site outside of Yellowstone, Teton, or Glacier, I’ve noticed that they’re mostly vacant or occupied by hardcore outdoorsy twenty-somethings or Europeans. Perhaps Americans aren’t interested in anything off-the-grid; this is the first American family I’ve witnessed utilizing these unserviced areas.
While my four-panel solar charger lays on a boulder in the sun, I plug in my phone and inspect the offline map I downloaded for Flathead National Forest. Ten miles up the highway and then along a protracted unpaved road, the map indicates another dispersed site, this one singular—not shared. It abuts the same river. The sun has laddered its way up the sky. My only concern is that because I woke so late the site might already be claimed for the day.
I roll sleeping bag, tent, jacket, and mash them into my bike’s rear seat storage bag. I collect other belongings strewn about the site and toss them in the saddlebags. Over my cold gear, I pull on my riding pants and jacket. Over wool socks, my riding boots. My helmet collected moisture across its visor overnight; I wipe this away with the microfiber rag from my breast pocket and drop it down over hair untrimmed for so long it’s become a riotous black mop. Then I throw my leg over the bike, kick the stand, and start the engine. As I swing the handlebars to U-turn my bike, the sun reflects off something and catches my eye: my phone and charger still lay on the rock. I roll/walk my bike over some bramble to retrieve them. The phone slides home into my other breast pocket. I toss the cable under the flap of my left saddlebag and hook the charger to the top of my rear seat bag, all four solar panels dangling down and open so that it can charge as I ride.
Obscured by my helmet, I make one last pointed glance at Perfect Family as they eat their pancake and bacon breakfast—and feel a strange mix of longing and nausea. Am I running to escape or avoid? Either way, I move up the trail toward the main road, guiding my front tire to the center of a dirt divot, avoiding mud and gravel. It’s slow going, and by the time I reach paved road, my heart is pounding in my ears and my throat feels too tight. Some premonition tells me that the other dispersed site is already taken—or soon will be. But I can’t go back.
I gun it, and the pressing speed whips anxiety from my chest space the way wind clears smoke. My cheeks warm. Before the first tight turn, I slow until I am confident of my tires’ grip on asphalt, then accelerate through. At the second turn, I only accelerate. The road is dry and clear of debris. The contents of my packs shift and clatter in protest, and their resistance motivates me to press harder at the next turn: I’ll give them something to protest about. In my third turn, I envision speed bikers on a track curve, knee sliders rubbing blacktop, throwing sparks.
My front tire hits some gravel at the apex of the curve. Alarmed, I brake and release handlebar tension to pull out of the turn early. The bike starts to skid, then lurches upright and swerves into the shoulder, missing the one-foot drop-off from paved road to gravel by a matter of centimeters. My ears roar and scalp prickles. I refuse to believe the Triumph’s power exceeds my novice skill. Between jagged breaths, I take off again.
The next few curves are not as tight as the last no matter how I wish they might be, so I press into each straightaway, my speedometer jittering between 80 and 100. An opening flashes past on my right so subtly I nearly miss it, but it must be my turn to the dispersed site. I slow, then U-turn—there it is. So nondescript the average National Park glamper wouldn’t even notice it: tree branches reach inward at its opening and nearly cover the small, reflective number 89 at the top of a metal post. I inch my bike’s tire down off the asphalt onto the dirt at this opening, then wait for my eyes to adjust to the shadows. Once I can distinguish two channels in the dirt from other four-wheeled vehicles, I nose my bike into the left channel and throttle on to see how far I can inch my speedometer without popping from the divot. My attention is consumed by the trail, the speed, the wind; branches reach toward me and blur, sometimes brushing my upper arms or thighs.
I see the rock too late to react. About three inches around, it lays like an egg in a nest at the bottom of my track. My tire hits it at an angle. The divot, clay-like mud gouged over multiple rain seasons, is at least eight inches deep just here. My bike tilts dramatically as the stone flings from beneath it. Spokes and muffler collide with the track’s tall ledge. The handlebars wrench sideways out of my grip. My next few seconds of consciousness are all light, shadow, and noise. Then, silence.
***
Look at me.
From her knees, Caria lifts her chin to meet my gaze, insolence in her eyes. Her garnet braid falls loosely down her back.
You will bite that bratty tongue, I say.
Her eyes widen and lips form an O. When she’s not misbehaving, the freckles along the tops of her cheeks and nose give her an impression of innocence that makes blood hammer in my ears and tension build in my groin. I stride toward her.
***
Consciousness returns, fuzzy about the edges. I can’t see the tree canopy clearly and worry that I’m concussed—but it’s only a crack spidering out from the top of my face shield. My head, resting on the ground, feels fine. I don’t attempt to move; I know better. Instead, I check in with my body, from the top of my head down, hoping any injuries will present themselves to me like alerts on a spaceship dash: low oil, high temps, broken landing gear, engine failure. Head, neck, shoulders, torso, and arms from shoulder to fingers, operational. I notice an ache where my upper arm and shoulder collided with the earth but determine it’s not broken. My ribcage throbs whenever I inhale deeply. Maybe a bruised rib. No concern. I reach up to remove my helmet, rake damp hair from my eyes, and am startled by silence. Not even the trill of a bird. My inspection continues downward; the right side of my body, from cranium to toes, seems fine. But a red alarm flashes for my left side, wedged against a grey and orange lichen-covered boulder. I’m afraid to look, so I rest my head on the ground for a moment and steady my breath. At least my right half reports nothing. Maybe it’s just a bruise.
I lift to my elbows and peer down at my extremities—like a toddler peering around the edge of his closet door after hearing some shuffling inside, so certain of a monster in which he doesn’t want to believe, a monster his parents tell him isn’t real. Yet it is.
My riding pants are intact, yet what’s within them is no longer shaped like a leg. The pants hold me together like a sock filled with marbles, or a sausage casing. I lay my head on the ground once again and focus attention on the leg: where does the pain begin, and where does it end? It begins above the hip, I decide, and it never ends. It trails off into some dark crimson infinity beyond my toes. There’s no doubt my hip is at least fractured, lower leg shattered.
Nausea bubbles up. I heave the contents of my stomach onto the forest floor beside me. Branches blur about the periphery then fade out once again.
***
Caria hadn’t messaged me for months after Azra found out about us. It was all I could do not to reach out; Caria was the best sex I’ve ever had—even existing, as our affair did, in the shadows of my luminous marriage. Caria was 22. Ten years my junior, she was a different generation. A generation of sexual liberty, polyamory, nonmonogamy. Her freedom gave me hope. Caria was dark, though—ivory skin and red hair, but of a dark mind—passionate, rage-filled, possessive. And while I see now that lay the groundwork for treachery, our bedroom was electric. She’d do anything I asked to please and to keep me: conceal, deceive, submit, receive, consent to non-consent.
When I was a pre-teen the boy next door, probably loathe to feel alone in his shame, snuck me down to the basement with him every Friday night, where he watched porn and masturbated. Where I watched porn and masturbated by his side. He never touched me. He barely even looked at me. But in time, this became our habit, our shared indignity. When I finally had my first experience with a woman, I was disheartened that it did not live up to the expectations I’d developed from nights with my neighbor. So, I pursued experiences with greater and greater intensity. Caria was the first woman I’d met willing to descend with me into the obscure dungeon of my sexual fantasies.
But the treachery. When her possessiveness grew unmanageable, when she began sending long threads of texts in the middle of the night so Azra would notice—to deliberately sabotage my marriage—I decided it safest to break ties with Caria. Azra deserved a better me, and I believed I could give it to her. In her grief, perhaps as retribution, Caria messaged Azra directly and confessed everything. She blamed me. She told Azra about my dishonesty, my duplicity, my ignobility. She suggested Azra could not ever trust me.
Azra did not propose divorce, then. I begged her to have faith—that I could make reparations, that I could be virtuous on her behalf. The first three months, Azra left the home we built together to live with her parents. When she finally returned, she slept in the guest room. Conversation over evening meals was tense and superficial. Netflix and chill, frigid. But I tried. I attended therapy weekly and laid it all out. I avoided porn, sexting, masturbation. Still, as months passed it became clear Azra’s trust was irrecoverable. She tried but couldn’t tolerate my touch. Our partnership remained celibate.
I was starved—for attention, for intimacy, maybe for a compassion I wouldn’t permit myself. It was not my modus operandi to complain. The complications of my life are mine; I own them. It might be possible to blame my neighbor, but to do so, I’ve determined, would be weak. I was stronger than that.
I was not stronger.
In the dead of night during a week that Azra worked in Istanbul, I could tolerate my loneliness no more. With Netflix droning in the background, I descended into a thick, bottomless swamp of self-pity. I messaged Caria.
What disgusts me most is that messaging Caria was never about Caria. I see now I didn’t care about Caria. All I cared about was filling the void within me.
Still wounded, Caria’s vengeance was acute. Instead of texting me back, she called Azra.
That was the end for Azra.
***
When consciousness returns, I recall Hatchet, a book I read back in tenth grade, and I remember my own hatchet, in the saddlebag. Survival. Propped up on my elbows again, I try to peer through the miasma of pain at my surroundings. If the bike’s functional, can I ride it to a hospital?
The bike, covered in dirt, pine needles, scratches, its handlebars askew, lays on the trail some twenty-five feet up the way, between where I lay and the river I can neither see nor hear. From this distance, I see the solar panels of my charger no longer lay in a line over the rear storage bag. The left saddlebag is open. Right saddlebag is missing altogether but probably not far. It’s impossible to say whether the bike is ridable.
My first impulse is to stand on my uninjured right leg and hop to the bike. This, I find, is the wishful thinking of a man who’s never experienced major injury. Even shifting my left leg sideways sends a pain up my core that dims my vision and roars in my ears. No. Wait. The roar is my own. Standing will not happen—at least not yet. I decide to keep my leg in the same position and pull myself backwards, scooching on my rump with my hands and right leg, toward the bike. The pain is at its worst in the beginning when I must change the direction of my leg. Once my back is aimed at the bike, I can pull straight, and except when the leg drags over a tree root or stone, pain no longer jeopardizes consciousness. Like an injured insect I inch toward my battered Triumph, pausing each time darkness threatens.
When I am close enough to touch the bike, I lay back to rest. The adrenaline coursing through my body has burned through all calories I consumed for breakfast—which weren’t many. I need water and food. Wait. No. I need to call an ambulance. As my hands search my chest for the phone, I vaguely recall dropping into a breast pocket, I already know what I don’t want to know. I see another monster in the closet that isn’t supposed to exist but does exist: No Service. People like me come out to remote National Forest land in Montana to escape internet, email, social media, texts, phone calls. To escape the complexity that is interpersonal relation. To escape problems, pain, obligation.
Somehow, it's already 1:45pm. The phone’s battery registers 33%. I was planning to plug it into the charger as soon as I set up camp, but perhaps it could receive a weaker cell signal if the battery were fully charged. The charger’s four panels are still attached at the top of my storage bag, but they’ve tumbled over the side. Despite their rubber casings, the two bottommost panels are shattered, but the top ones appear undamaged. Then I recall that the left saddlebag had been flung open in the crash: what items were lost in the fray? It would take too long to backwards crabwalk to the other side of the bike, so instead I decide to reach over the seat and feel for the charging cable in the open saddlebag with my right arm. The long reach levers my hips and rump off the ground. I see white, then scarlet. I feel electricity, branding irons, ten triggered bear traps along my left side. I howl to maintain consciousness. My right foot instinctually moves up behind my left thigh to relieve some of the pressure, while my hand flails about the saddlebag.
Supplies are missing, for sure. It was never this empty—it couldn’t have been. I try to recall what was on top in the bag: a few water bottles, my water filter, some granola bars, jerky. These are all missing. My hatchet was at the bottom; I can’t reach that far but wager it’s still there. My fingers snag on wire: it must’ve slipped down below the water bottles as I rode. I yank, then fall back and gasp for air, the cable wound around my fingers. Where are my water bottles? I’ll need to search for them. But not now. Now to charge my phone.
I plug one end of the cable into the solar charger still attached to the bike bag. The other end I plug into my phone and wait to hear that telltale bing. The bing takes forever, but I know adrenaline can make a minute seem like hours, so I am patient. The bing never comes. I look at my phone. No lightning bolt appears in the battery icon. I swipe down from the top right corner: 33% and not charging. I yank the cable out of both devices and fling it at the solar charger, screaming like a fox at dusk.
My mind fixates on that hatchet which I’m almost certain is still in the saddlebag. I don’t know why. I begin to shiver. My body needs water (wherever that has gone) and food (probably gone too), but just now every inch of me is too cold, too tired. As I haul my sleeping bag and coat from the rear storage pack and wrap them around my body, I wonder how frequently people use this campsite during the long days of summer. I think about the three sites from last night—that two sat vacant for days before the family arrived. I rushed over here this morning certain someone would snag this site before me, yet the site’s marker and entrance were so overgrown I nearly missed them. I look at the dirt track to determine if there are any signs someone passed through recently, but I’m no tracker. I can’t tell.
As my body warms and the shivering ceases, I welcome drowsiness.
***
Mehmet.
Mehmet look at me, Baba says. He looks healthy, like he hasn’t aged since the day I graduated from Bilkent. Those last wasting years when his cheeks sucked concave and purple crescents developed below his eyes, I am glad to forget.
You’ll be the man of this house now, he says with a nod that knows the future.
Baba, no. That will always be you, I say.
Care for your Anne and your sister.
His faith crushes, suffocates me. I can’t breathe. I try to speak: Baba, I—.
Son, I see you. All of you. I am proud of you.
***
I wake sometime in the evening just long enough to notice my cold gear is saturated with sweat beneath my riding pants and jacket. I am hot and cold. I am hungry and thirsty. My head throbs along with the lower left half of my body. My cell phone reads 7:34pm. I need to search for my water soon, but just now I feel the pull again…to sleep…
***
In a stone chamber, under a vaulted roof, a vast oak table is set with two meals, one at each end. I cannot eat both; I must choose one or the other for the rest of my life. The first, nested upon an ornate silver charger, is a plate piled with meats, crusty bread, cheeses, and chocolate. The second, on a hammered bronze charger, a steaming bowl of mercimek çorbası.
I turn in despair from one meal to the other. Both delicious. Both desirable. Neither meal, however, complete. Neither the stuff of a full-time diet. I refuse to relinquish one for the other—I refuse to deny the parts of me that want both.
Unable to decide, I eat nothing. My stomach shrieks.
***
Voices through the waves crashing in my ears wake me. My arms are too heavy to check the time on my phone, but the sun has shifted back over to the horizon in the east. I blink, but my vision never clears. Hazy human forms manifest toward me from large black vehicle parked up the path from my mangled bike.
He’s moving! someone shouts. A girl.
Go open the truck bed and lay out a sleeping mat Tay-Tay, another voice says. A man. We’ll have to leave the bike. Jackson, bring me the sheet from your bed to carry him.
Hey buddy, you ok? A woman now, beside me. Drink some water.
I open my lips for the liquid, but my throat forgets how to swallow. I choke and sputter. Fire rages up from my left hip through my chest and down to my toes. I moan.
I’m so sorry, the woman says. I know it hurts, but we gotta get you out of here. It’s his left leg, she says to someone beside her. A dirty blonde ponytail whips out to the side when she turns her head.
Air shifts as a sheet is stretched taut on the ground beside me.
Be brave, she says in a voice that reminds me of my Anne. We need to move you now.
The pressure of hands on my body, my limbs. Torque on my left leg. I fall under again.
About Meg Vlaun
She/Her/Hers
Meg Vlaun has an MA in English Literature and currently attends Regis University’s Mile-High MFA. She writes creative nonfiction, fiction, book reviews, and poetry, and has published pieces in Zaum Magazine, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Meat for Tea, Limina UNM Nonfiction Review, CC&D Magazine, Blue Mesa Review’s Blog, and Leonardo Magazine (both print and online). Meg instructs writing at Central New Mexico Community College. You can find her on Instagram @megvlaun or visit her blog: megvlaun.com.