Polly Frances Dunn
Polly Frances Dunn
Polly Frances Dunn (instagram @polly.dunn) is a recent graduate of the University of Edinburgh and longtime writer of prose, plays and poetry. Early in her career Dunn was commended both in 2020 and 2021 by the Wimbledon Young Writer's Competition before she went on to university and turned her focus to theatre. Over the course of her time in Edinburgh, Dunn wrote, produced, and directed three plays: Troy Story (a comedic look at Greek mythology through the lens of Aphrodite, goddess of love), The Measure of a Man (a darkly comedic retelling of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure) and Fools and Knaves (about the relationship between Charles I and George Villiers, his father's lover). Through her writing Dunn focuses on the complexity and humour of human relationships, often using her short fiction as an excuse to dip into darker territory. Currently she resides in London working on her latest play, and trying to get her cat to like her.
Hunger
Strange tastes have always run in my family. Growing up it was never odd to me that my father must have weighed around the same as a petite elephant, whilst my mother was positively skeletal.
‘Your mum is so skinny.’ A school friend drawled to me once.
Heroin chic, she continued, oblivious to my discomfort, was back in, and she wanted to know if my mother smoked and if she should take it up so she could finally get down to a size six. I told her she didn’t, but she remained undeterred. I asked Mary about it later that same day, but she only grabbed the loose fat of my cheeks and pinched it into a smile.
‘You don’t need to start smoking Tubs, you just need to stop eating. You don’t want to turn out like dad.’
Mary was thin too, and I was fat, chubby if you were condescending, plump to those in the habit of comparing children to livestock. I just loved food- sweets better than anything, chocolate dots covered in hundreds and thousands, swirls of pink and white gelatine compressed into squares, even the universally despised liquorice, sticky and strangely slick to the touch. Any pocket money I had went to chocolate and my spare time in finding new places to hide it. When I think back to the strange narrow structure that was our house, I can only picture the rooms through the hiding spots I took so many years cultivating; the bench in the front hall littered with old shoes, cautiously perched atop a mountain of chocolate; the drying cupboard where I let a bag of marshmallows swell into damp spongy balloons; the space between the kitchen sink and the fridge, where there is almost certainly to this day, a bag of fudge moulding amongst the drainpipes.
I wasn’t greedy, just hungry. We all were. Mary even more so than me, but without the indulgence. The only food she’d savour was the occasional steak, red and dripping from the pan, leftover from what Dad hadn’t eaten. But generally, she was just content to starve. When we did have meals together, it wasn’t about the intake of food, so much as the ritual of watching our father eat. There wasn’t joy in it, or even greed, it was more like watching some strange fleshy machinery. His mouth would unlatch, food would be deposited, chewed, munched, up and down, up and down, swallowed, and then the process would repeat itself. Every few minutes mum would run back to the kitchen to keep the production line moving. Dishes heaped with chops, pooling with grease that had usually coagulated by the time it got to the table, bowls of mashed potato sculpted into mountains and usually some kind of green vegetable shiny with butter to make it palatable.
It wasn’t all for dad, mind. I was encouraged to help myself as well, but Mary’s hand would always shoot out to stop me from having seconds. Most meals she would sit next to me and wait till after I helped myself only to take the food from my plate and pile it onto her own. Usually, she left me with half as much as she took, so later, inevitably, I’d wait till everyone had gone to bed and sneak back to the fridge, gulping down whatever leftovers dad hadn’t demolished. Some nights I caught him doing the same thing as me and we’d sit companionably on the kitchen floor and share a midnight supper.
My mother I never saw eating. Sometimes she’d allow herself a glass of wine at the table, but mostly she’d just watch dad and make sure his plate was never empty. To finish the ceremony, he licked it clean every night, regardless of what he ate, or the hiss of disgust Mary would make. Sometimes this made me laugh but the look she gave me after wasn’t worth the brief glint in his eye. To her, he was a cautionary tale, not a father.
‘He’ll die you know. He’ll get a heart attack or some kind of blood pressure disease and keel over and collapse way too young, and you’re going the same way.’
She was always worried about my health. One night when I rebelled and licked my own plate in solidarity, she waited till both our parents were asleep to come into my room and kneel by my bed. She sat very still in the dark, never moving her eyes from where I lay.
‘What you did tonight was disgusting. I’m not saying that to be mean, it’s just true. If people saw you do that, they’d feel sick. Someone has to tell you, because dads too far gone and mum wants him that way.’
She was fourteen and I was ten. I suddenly felt too aware of every body part I had that protruded or the swollen belly that hung over my pyjama shorts. I tried curling into a ball and facing the wall away from her, but she brought her mouth close to my ear, so that the heat of her breath stung my neck.
‘I’m trying to help you before it’s too late. If you keep going like him, you’re only going to get fatter and fatter, till you’re obese and people don’t even want to look at you they’re so embarrassed.’
I wanted to scour my skin with a Brillo pad. Instead, I just made myself even smaller and waited for her to leave. The next night dad rewarded me with a conspiratorial wink that made my skin crawl and proceeded to lick the fat from the empty roasting dish whilst Mary groaned, and I stared at the food smeared across my plate with no appetite. If mum noticed I hadn’t eaten she didn’t comment except to press a chocolate bar on me when no one else was looking. Perversely, for all he ate, our father didn’t end up dying of heart failure. Our mother ate him. Its common in nature, more common than you might think. The sexy sterility of the black widow, the languid grace of the praying mantis. Insects just usually don’t take the time to fatten up their prey beforehand.
It took me a long time to notice the scarring. Longer than Mary, who twigged years before the day I walked in on him changing and saw the scratches crisscrossing his stomach, like the outline of a jigsaw. The door was slammed in my face before I could see anymore, but what was eventually left of his body was closer to Swiss cheese than a human being.
‘She cuts chunks out of him. After dark, when we’re all asleep, and he’s snoring away like an old pig. She gets an old knife and carves off a slice, just like on Sundays with a roast, but she can only have a bite at a time before she has to sew him back up again.’
Mary had sat me cross-legged on the floor of the bathroom while she brushed her hair. Apparently, she’d caught her once after the fact, face grimy with dad’s juices and hunched over the kitchen sink. The whole thing was so pathetic she’d started to laugh.
‘And don’t bother telling dad to leave, he never will.’
‘But why?’ I warbled, the ruddy pink of his chequered flesh still racing through my mind. Mary shrugged. ‘No one else would feed him.’
That was as much as we ever spoke about it. Because she didn’t eat except for the special rare indulgence, our mother slept often, and we spent the days we weren’t at school whispering our way through the house, avoiding creaking steps and trying not to wake the monster. Once you knew it was impossible not to see the hunger in her eyes every time our father entered the room, the vacant stare of a predator waiting for its quarry to come to water.
It was Mary’s idea to kill her. Dad was shrinking piece by piece, and it was clear to both of us what would happen once he was gone.
‘She won’t start with me you know.’
We were washing dishes after another elaborate family dinner. Both parents had already gone to bed, but not to sleep.
‘She’ll go for you, ‘cuz you’re bigger, and she’ll make short work of you and then I’ll be all alone-’
Suds coated her hands and steam billowed from the hot jets of water she poured over the greasy plates. That night our mother had roasted a leg of lamb, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat a single bite. What was left sat congealing in the pan, red sweating from the grain mum had haphazardly carved earlier in the night. It sickened me but my stomach clenched all the same. ‘How would we even do it?’
The meat continued to perspire on the kitchen table, and I surreptitiously hacked off a piece. Mary turned and caught my eye just as it entered my mouth, fat smeared across my face and chewing frantically. For once the look on her face was not one of distaste, but pity. ‘We get her while she’s eating. She’ll be vulnerable then.’
She handed me a dishcloth and allowed me the dignity to wipe my face before she took the lamb and threw it away.
That night I dreamt of vultures, or some kind of predatory bird at least, its beak and talons wet from whoever had been the mess of guts and intestines it now feasted on. When I leaned back, I realised too late that the body it fed on was mine, and its face my mother’s. Somewhere between dreaming and waking she continued to bury her maw into my stomach, blunt teeth latching onto the loose skin and biting down so slowly it began to feel closer to sunburn than being eaten alive. It didn’t take long after that for Mary to convince me what needed to be done.
The night we finally crept into their room, a cleaver in Mary’s hand, a pair of scissors in mine, she lay sleeping, curled up in the gaps that had made up our father’s ribcage. Maybe she’d known something like this was coming, because this time she hadn’t even bothered to sew him back up.
When she did wake, face wet with gore, and mouth an endless black hole, there was something so horribly familiar about the whole thing. It was the way I had caught myself in the past, the frenzied and desperate way I would binge in the kitchen, horrified at the thought of anyone seeing me to the point I spurned my own reflection. The face of shame itself.
Mary didn’t hold back but ran at her with the cleaver, hacking and grunting like a beast while I cowered by their bed. She carried on long after the monster was dead and the bodies on the bedspread became an interchangeable mess of blood and viscera. It was only when the knife fell from her hand, and she brought her fingers to her lips that I realised she had tasted them. For a second she was an animal caught in a trap, and I couldn’t help but think of all the times she’d snatched sweets out of my hand without eating them, picking at the rarest cuts of meat when she thought no one was looking. We both knew what hunger looked like, but what was left of our parents was long past consumption.
The whites of her eyes seemed to glow in the dark as she stared at me, shaking like a child. Leaving would have been easy, but it was also impossible. How could I leave her to starve when I knew what it was to long for all those things, sugary or otherwise, that you could not have? She had her way of caring, and I had mine. What could I do but lay on the bed and let her eat.