Nate McCarthy
23
Fiction Nonfiction
It was Dave who finally got me to eat meat again after sixteen years of being a vegetarian. I watched him from the living room as he lit the barbecue in the backyard; I was drowsing in the soporific warmth of the gas heater, stretched right out on the thick rug that his mother had begun to make while she was pregnant with him. I was too weak to hold my thoughts with me on the floor so I let them float up with the heat and disintegrate. I loved the rug and I loved the heater. That was about all I could manage. It was my ninth week on the elimination diet, a stringent diagnostic regimen developed by immunologists, and I was wild with hunger. I’d been severely unwell for a few years, and the doctors had very little to suggest apart from the elimination diet and paperwork for a disabled parking sticker. The sticker had helped. Perhaps the diet would too. The elimination diet is an agonising staircase for the chronically ill to climb. It is meant to bring to light any food intolerance that could be causing a patient’s symptoms. It means, often under medical supervision, dragging yourself up floor after floor of food groups, week after week. First comes food that contains the lowest level of triggers, then the next, and the next. Pears at the bottom, pineapples at the top. You could only progress through the stages when your symptoms improved. Mine never did. I was stuck on the lowest landing, down in the culinary dark, unable to eat a single meal that had not been prepared at home from the complicated advice book filled with tables and lists. I could not have bread, milk, or gluten. If I went out, weak as I was, there was no sustenance I could easily grab, not a hunk of bread, not an apple
Poetry
The First Steak of the Rest of My Life
