Eat the Sun

She had concluded the difference between those with and those without had basis in something she’d overheard her mother saying about the neighbor whose children had the nicest clothes and least tangled hair: I guess they have money to throw away.

For much of her fourth grade year Mandy deposited her lunch money into a different trash bin as she walked the alleys to school each morning. She dropped change and made wishes by small fistfuls.

I don’t eat, she told her classmates who were seated on benches taking half-moon bites from sandwiches. I don’t need to eat. Not everyone does, you know. Plants don’t eat except for the sun. I eat the sun.









Tammy Peacy lives in southeastern Wisconsin. A few of her stories can be read in past issues of Concis, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Big Bridge. She teaches children about food and how to prepare it for eating, and works toward earning a master’s in public health from ATSU.

See another piece by Tammy in issue 6.1 here