by Dave Eggers
I had been thrown into the river, a different river, when I was young by a man because I would not fight. I was supposed to fight and he kicked me and slapped my head and tried to make me mean. I didn’t know why he was kicking me, slapping. I wanted him to be happy. I wanted the squirrels to jump and be happy as we dogs were. But they were different than we were, and the man who threw me to the river was also different. I thought we were all the same but as I was inside my dead body and looking into the murky river bottom I knew that some are wanting to run and some are afraid to run and maybe they are broken and are angry for it.
I slept in my broken sack of a body at the bottom of the river, and wondered what would happen. It was dark inside, and musty, and the air was hard to draw. I sang to myself.
After the sixth day I woke up and it was bright. I knew I was back. I was no longer inside a loose sack but was now inhabiting a body like my own, from before; I was the same. I stood and was in a wide field of buttercups. I could smell their smell and walked through them, my eyes at the level of the yellow, a wide blur of a line of yellow. I was heavy-headed from the gorgeousness of the yellow all blurry. I loved breathing this way again, and seeing everything.
I should say that it’s very much the same here as there. There are more hills, and more waterfalls, and things are cleaner. I like it. Each day I walk for a long time, and I don’t have to walk back. I can walk and walk, and when I am tired I can sleep. When I wake up, I can keep walking and I never miss where I started and have no home.
I haven’t seen anyone yet. I don’t miss the cement like sandpaper on my feet, or the buildings with the sleeping men reaching. I sometimes miss the other dogs and the running.
The one big surprise is that as it turns out, God is the sun. It makes sense, if you think about it. Why we didn’t see it sooner I cannot say. Every day the sun was right there burning, our and other planets hovering around it, always apologizing, and we didn’t think it was God. Why would there be a God and also a sun? Of course God is the sun.
Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.
DAVE EGGERS
HOW WE ARE HUNGRY
Dave Eggers and his wife live in northern California. He edits a magazine, McSweeney’s, and teaches at 826 Valencia in San Francisco.
www.mcsweeneys.net
ALSO BY DAVE EGGERS
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
You Shall Know Our Velocity! (briefly called Sacrament)
Jokes Told in Heaven About Babies ([booklet] with Lucy Thomas)
Gira fes? Gira fes! (as coresearcher)
Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans:
The Best of McSweeney’s Humor Category (as coeditor)
The Unforbidden Is Compulsory, or, Optimism (booklet)
Expansive thanks go to the editors who encouraged and improved these pieces—N.H.,
E.H., M.C., M.C., C.L., D.T., J.H., S.K., H.J., T.S., T.B., P.W., M.R., J.W., J.S., A.M.,
J.B., O.V.G., Z.J., A.V., J.T., L.D. (light!), D.B., A.W., S.P., and to B.B., N.C., Y.H.,
D.K., H.M., A.L., A.V., D.L., and all at 826/McSwys. Also to Bill, Hesham, Ashak, and
all at the Webb-Waring Foundation/Kilimanjaro.
VV: AOCwYGGL.
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2005
Copyright © 2004 by McSweeney’s Publishing, LLC
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water” first appeared in Zoetrope All-Story. An
earlier, shorter version of “Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance” first appeared in
The New Yorker, under the title “Measuring the Jump.” “Up the Mountain Coming Down
Slowly” first appeared, in slightly altered form, in McSweeney’s Issue 10, also called McSweeney’s
Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales—that edition copublished by Vintage. “After I Was
Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned” first appeared in slightly different form in
Speaking with the Angel , a collection of original fiction edited by Nick Hornby and benefiting
the London school called TreeHouse. “Your Mother and I” was published in h2s04 and in a
chapbook put out by Downtown 4 Democracy.
Many of the very short stories first appeared in the U.K. Guardian.
A different version of “Notes for a Story about a Man Who Would Not Die Alone” was
first published by Ninth Letter, the new magazine produced at the University of Illinois, which
is the author’s alma mater, not to mention the proud and worthy recipient of two 2003 Nobel
Prizes. The rest of the stories were written for this collection and appear here for the first time.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eggers, Dave.
How we are hungry: stories / by Dave Eggers.
p. cm.
1. Psychological fiction, American I. Title.
PS3605.G48 H69 2005
813’.6—dc22
2005042321
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42630-7
v3.0