hunger and haunt
Series Metadata
Listing Series
-
Tags
Summary
Morales has no incentive to care beyond base pay and overtime and right now he’s pulling his plate away as Crash coughs up another shred of lung. And Crash says, You gonna pull me?
And Morales says no. So.
— 1992. Crash keeps some things to himself.
Series
- Part 1 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
Crash is in thirteen places at once, thirteen pieces, and today is the day. Today has to be the day. The whine of static in his ears and the way the coke hones the corners of his vision sharper than Ginger’s Bowie knife. The way if this ain’t the end of it then he’ll beg for Miles’s bullet, maybe. He’ll beg for it.
— 1993. Crash and the end of days.
Series
- Part 2 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
His Christmas list would be blank, not because he’s short of things to want but he’s somehow forgotten how.
Series
- Part 3 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
There were things he didn’t tell Morales about. Things he wouldn’t have told anyone about, if he’d had anyone to tell, and things he won’t tell Marty either, though Marty can likely guess. Marty’s a strange thing: Marty thinks he’s nicer than he is and yet doesn’t know what it means not to be nice, he’s only guessing at it, half-hitching the idea. Crash never looked for nice.
Series
- Part 4 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
In the glow of the lighter, watching it dissolve in the pit of the spoon, Rust’s profile is put together like something handsome drawn only from memory, the connective tissue slightly off, lines configuring without anything soft or warm in it. Marty wants to touch that cheekbone. Hit it, maybe. Find out if it’s really as unyielding as it looks.
— the night after Ledoux, Marty and Rust each seek out a different sort of release.
Series
- Part 5 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
Maggie had warned her in fits and starts — he’s a little edgy, doesn’t like hospitals, don’t ask him if he wants kids — but Maggie separated work and the personal, because she had to, because living with Marty was like living with a lion doing shifts at the circus. Took Laurie three years and persistence in the hospital cafeteria to get a glass of wine with her after work, and then they didn’t talk about it, the work, not once. Barely smiled at each other in the hallways. No, Maggie’s grim sense of duty and soft pediatric smile worked at odds with a wicked grin and maternal confidence at weekends, and Rust she framed through the latter, and so there were things about him she wouldn’t ever truly see.
— 1998. Laurie, Rust, and a second first date.
Series
- Part 6 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
Submission is a matter of handling someone. Rust hates to drive but he’s going to need something to do with his hands, with his eyes, some lost hall of memory to fall back into as Marty says, “Gay rodeo,” twitchy in the passenger seat, and, “What d’ya make of that, huh?”
— October 2000, Rust and Marty catch a case that has two worlds colliding.
Series
- Part 7 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
Marty doesn't matter anymore, Marty is irrelevant. Rust haunts their conversations more than he does and Rust is far away, Rust disappeared like a pile of tobacco ash only briefly, coincidentally shaped as a person. Rust disappeared so completely it's as though he's still here, eliding around corners, drawling in the wind. Looking out at them from the eyes of their daughter, who's been committed to the psych ward because she tried to kill herself in a bathtub the way Marty always half suspected Rust would one day.
Series
- Part 8 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
When she walks in the guy from the truck is sitting at the bar, smoking. Looking at her mom or rather through her mom, not looking at her mom at all. Drunk enough that his chin’s dipping close to his ashtray.
— Rust, a few Christmas Eves, and the same small town, Alaska.
Series
- Part 9 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
In a bar in Anchorage, a woman asks him to buy her a drink. His hair’s gone long, shaggy nearly to cover his ears, and he’s wind-browned and hollow, thin like a knife, a little feral behind the eyes, but she’s the kind who wants rough. Dark hair and she has him pressing her against a wall before he tastes it, the touch of crepe and pomelo, and he lets her go so fast it’s like she burns.
That night he sits awake and thinks of another syllogism. Men and women cannot remain in love: Marty is a man and Maggie is a woman, therefore–
Series
- Part 10 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
These few days have been studies in closeness and distance somehow both, and Marty never used to think about it so much, how Rust might come close in the bullpen to tell him something he didn’t want nobody else to hear, or how their fingers would brush when Marty handed him lunch in squeaky styrofoam. Now he thinks about it all the time.
— 2012. co-habitation, a few days in; marty suggests a shower.
Series
- Part 11 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
They don’t talk, which, Marty usually got something to say when they’re eating, something idle about the news or sports or the weather, and that he ain’t talking means that he’s probably thinking about it too, the touch of his hand across the line of Rust’s ribs, the way that line is burning under Rust’s borrowed flannel.
— 2012. a night, then a morning, then a night again.
Series
- Part 12 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
She hasn’t heard anything of Rust that isn’t connected to her dad, not ever, Rust- of Rust-and-Marty, excepting that one time her mom was drunk and crying in the bathroom after the divorce. Even now. And even then. They were on the news together and why would Rust be here if not because Marty’s somewhere close behind?
/ Audrey's exhibiting in New Orleans. Rust becomes a regular.
Series
- Part 13 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
Rust and her dad, Rust-and-her-dad, Macie can’t stop seeing it, the little ways they glance at each other, or don’t glance at each other, know each other well enough not to need to, to be assured innately that the other’s still there.
— December 2013. A family dinner, such as it is.
Series
- Part 14 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
Rust, well, he always seemed to wear his own functionality, sneered at and rose above the aesthetic. Here he is, smoothing factor 30 into the ridge of that scar.
Series
- Part 15 of hunger and haunt
-
Tags
Summary
It is nearly Christmas. Rust has been thinking about these things because of the whisper of cold in the air, how Marty wraps his fingers around his mug of coffee, both hands.
// December 2014. Memories and personhood that linger.
Series
- Part 16 of hunger and haunt