There was a strange way, for Mara, that being on the show was a relief. She didn’t have to consider the surreality of dark figures spying, or cameras in the trees. There was nothing to research, to doubt or to believe. The cameras were real, and everyone knew it. The eyes were always there.

10

Ashley was hungry. They all were. Mara had never eaten so little, and it made more of a difference than she cared to admit. By the eighth day, she saw it in her teammates: how they paused after standing, hesitating before each step. Hands on tree trunks as they walked, reaching for stability. The shelter sounded with growling stomachs, the white noise of their days and nights. Mara hoped for more groundnuts, the size and starch of them, but though she searched again in drainages and the bog, she couldn’t find any more. Instead she gathered nettles and ramps for their daily water-and-greens stew, and though the survivors ate dutifully, the stew did little to salve their hunger and was, frankly, not even good. The ramps soured their breath and their stomachs; the smell of onion seemed to seep from their pores.

When Mara’s mind wandered, it went to food. Pasta in cheese sauce, or burgers on the grill. After the meals she’d eaten as a child, foraged veggies and wild meat, she thought she had an appreciation for food. The work it required, and the gratitude a full belly deserved. But there was a difference between appreciating and understanding. A difference between knowing what you have and knowing what it’s like to live without it.

The year after Mara’s family moved east, their lab had puppies. She was a fat old dog, or at least they thought she was fat and old when she showed up one day and never left. But that was just her way of being. Slow and careful, calmer than her age deserved. They put her on a diet, but she kept growing. Thin in the spine and round in the belly. The fur fell from her stomach in tufts, and one day she started digging. She’d dig a trench, lie down inside it, and then change her mind and dig another one somewhere else. In the morning she had nine squeaking pups.

Mara was obsessed with them. All day long she sat by the squirming pile, first touching the pups with one finger, then picking them up and pressing them to her cheek. How each one fit in a single palm. How soft and slippery their fur. The puppies seemed impossibly small, like they were hardly alive. Not like dogs. Like something simpler, hamsters or mice. Like lost and helpless prey.

Each morning, the pups were bigger than the day before. They grew fat, impossibly fat, bulging and rolling, and the fat in them flattened where they lay, like their bodies were a barely contained liquid. They were everything puppies should be. But what struck Mara about them, more than their tiny paws or their half-moon ears, the sweet stink of their breath, was their desire. She could lift a puppy, and put it down, and wherever she put it, it would immediately lump across the ground in the direction of its mother’s nipples. They could not be distracted. All of existence, the point of existence, was milk.