=The Great Hunger=

It was a breakfast buffet and I was really putting my back into it. Sausage links, sausage patties, pancakes, eggs scrambled, poach, fried, and unidentified, bacon strips shiny with grease, potatoes likewise, biscuits, muffins, fleshy pink slices of honey-glazed ham…I was loading my plate with everything, the diet be damned, my vegetarianism, too. Where was this great hunger coming from? What kind of hole was I trying so desperately to fill? What was buried at the bottom that I wanted to ensure stay buried? It was as if I were eating for four, for an entire village! Indeed as I began eating off of someone else's abandoned plate it slowly dawned on me that everyone else in the conference room was gone. I was here all by myself. The army had discovered the hotel and were moving carefully through the jungle even as I munched away. They were lining up the coordinates, calling in air support, laying down fire lines. I had a big cold cinnamon bun in my hand as they entered through all the doors at once. Their high-powered weapons converged on me, red dots swarmed my heart. Camouflaged, goggled, masked with breathing apparatus, they looked like creatures from another world. By now I was nauseous, I'd had my fill. How was I going to explain what I was doing here? It was the very question I was asking myself only moments ago when with growing disgust I was trying to compute how many calories I'd consumed and how many meals I'd have to skip to average them out to something like my normal intake. Well, what was I doing here? I could feel the hot itchy swarm of activity at my heart where the red dots swarmed like bees around an inexplicably abandoned hive full of honey. I was the queen and I had gone, ferried away for my own protection, but somehow I'd snuck back, unbeknownst to everyone, even myself, until this very moment. How could I explain it? I couldn't. They weren't going to understand. How could they when I myself didn't? I wish they'd just shoot, half of me was thinking. The other half was thinking any number of other things.