Bowels of poverty

         At my house we always seem to have random canisters of flavored Metamucil which hang around for years and years and tend to multiply now and again. Last Thanksgiving a big orange cylinder of Metamucil fell from a cabinet and hit me in the head, so I wrote this piece.


              When times were tough Donna went down to the District 103 Fire Station where they handed out bricks of cheddar cheese and butter to anyone who wanted it. The firefighters were nice and handsome and passed out dairy staples with a smile and without any questions. They weren’t anything like Barry. She couldn’t say she didn’t love the mean son of bitch, but a part of her breathed a sigh of relief when the game warden showed up at her front stoop to tell her that a stray bullet meant for a deer had hit Barry behind the ear and blew most of his brains out of his eye socket in a gooey pink mist. Of course he didn’t leave much behind for her and the kids. Of course.

Getting a GED with a dead husband wasn’t easy so she got the food stamps. Every so often she’d sleep with a lonely fat man who worked doing something with computers at the community college. Of course she wasn’t a prostitute or anything. Of course. It was just...an understanding. Whenever something went wrong - the shower faucet began to leak or one fall when the heater pooped out - she gave Cal a call. He’d fix it, or hire someone to fix it, then they’d have a glass of wine after the kids went to bed and he never stayed the night. It was an understanding; and it made the tough times a little less tough.

On the first of the month it was always easy to see who was buying food on the government's dime. Disheveled women with dark, sunken and hungry eyes, ravaging the Wal-Mart like coyotes looking for the scraps left behind by bigger, stronger animals. They’d be there at midnight frothing at the mouth on the last day of the month with a bag of chips and a long deli sandwich. Never. Never will I become that, never in a million years, Donna told herself. From the beginning, she promised to always stretch out the calories and never join the packs of the permanently poor. On the third day after her plastic card would fill with food money, she’d slowly pace the aisle and spend a small portion on oatmeal, rice, and whatever cheap fruit happened to be in season.  On Sundays, Donna treated herself to a cup of coffee at the Denny’s and scavenged through left-behind newspapers for coupons.

At least once every few months she’d find a coupon for a bulk tub of some gritty orange fiber powder and pick it up for next to nothing. Toward the end of each month, as food ran low, she’d sprinkle it on the kid’s oatmeal and tell them it was a treat for behaving so well. They’d bloat up and not ask for seconds. It made Donna laugh when she thought about it: here they were - eating like paupers and crapping like kings.