Bongiorno 33

Bottom Feeders

By Joe Bongiorno

Lena lies back onto the inclined gurney and starts a crossword puzzle as the drug flows through her intravenously. The light fixture drones. The room is white-noise silent, except for the occasional moan and murmur. The woman with the hooked nose beside her coughs while the purple-eyed kid with the protruding Adam’s apple shuffles a deck of cards.

So far, Lena doesn’t feel any side effects, unlike last week when she was prostrate with nausea and her parched tongue probed her mouth for moisture. At least it’s not an overnight study, though those gigs pay best of all. Steadily, she tells herself, she is catching up to the interest and paying down her credit card debt with the petri dish of her body.

Her belly grumbles, and she looks at the clock. The hands edge closer to noon. Her appetite sends a warning pang, calling for her attention, but a few hours remain before the study is complete. She turns on her side, leaving enough space to keep the IV drip untangled, and stretches her arms to get the blood circulating. Blackbird family. Her limbs tingle. Pins and needles. O-R-I-O-L-E, she writes in neat block letters.

Gases erupt in Lena’s stomach, protesting a petulant hunger. Violet variety of quartz. She starts to spell out A-M-E-T-H-Y-S-T when her phone rings, sending her last pen stroke veering outside the box. She looks at the screen, recognizes the number of the collection agency, and declines the call—the second one this afternoon.

The dusty television set shimmers on the lawn. The score catches Claude’s drowsy eye, and he stops the car. He takes a swig of black coffee from his thermos and steps out to nab the scrap. He drags the TV off the hay-like grass and strips the valuable metal of its useless chassis. He unscrews the back plate of the TV set with his drill and rips out the yoke. Next, he detaches the cast iron grill from the neighbour’s discarded barbecue and unscrews the valves.

Sweat drips down his freckled brow, stinging his eyes. He returns to the popped trunk of his hatchback and separates the different metals into buckets to be sold by weight at the scrapyard. The previous week’s payout exceeded two hundred dollars. Enough to cover the utilities. Up the block, he spots a heap of junk stacked like a totem pole on a driveway. He snips the wire of a vacuum cleaner with his cutters and plucks the bulbs from a plastic garland of Christmas lights. He forages for aluminum, copper, and steel. Motherboards. Rusty radiators. Air conditioners. He untwists the brass nozzle of a watering hose and finds more of the high-payout metal attached to the rod of a toilet tank float. Space in the trunk grows limited. He will have to empty it before the night’s graveyard UCab shift. But the day’s catch isn’t nearly enough to put a dent in the rent.

Claude climbs back into the driver’s seat and drains the rest of the thermos. His tongue is desiccated and bitter, the first symptoms of his daily caffeine crash. He rubs his eyes, contemplating a power nap in the backseat, when his phone chimes. Incoming text message from Lena: “Ready for a bite?”

Customers shuffle in and out of the diner. A man in steel-toe boots sitting at the counter flips through the grease-stained paper and clears the smoker’s grit in his throat. The manager, Cosmo, yells out the next order, and the soot-eyed cook dumps a bag of frozen potato wedges into the gurgling oil.

Claude shakes the mustard bottle and squirts it onto his hot dog, crisscrossing it with streams of ketchup; a yin-yang of condiments. On the other side of the booth, Lena sticks her fork into her poutine. The rising steam fogs up her cat-eye glasses.

Claude grumbles between bites.

“What was that you said?” Lena spins a web of cheese curd and gravy around her fork and blows on it.

“Did I say something?” Claude’s eyes dart up.

“Never mind,” she says. “We gotta talk about the rent.”

He blinks and takes another bite.

“The landlord wants to raise it.”

He chews silently and washes down the food with a mouthful of fizzy pink soda.

“We’ll figure something out,” she says, caressing his knee with her own under the table.

Claude sighs. “We’re university-educated, proactive people. Why are we still scraping by?”

“Student debt, non-lucrative career choices, inflation, a market system that pits workers against each other for scraps in a race to the bottom.” Lena runs through the list automatically. “Take your pick, but I’m tired of having that conversation.”

“The scrapper and the lab rat,” he continues, not taking her cue. He gets into the usual routine, dredging up the loss of his museum curator job. It had happened weeks after he took out a loan on his car but months before “À Louer” signs filled vacant storefronts all over the city.

“Let’s not do this here.”

He shakes his head, unable to comprehend how Lena carries on without disintegrating under the interest-accumulating mass of her own debt. He cannot grasp how she gets through the day without making a public scene, without yelling at strangers for having to resort to odd jobs to supplement her income from her daytime gig at the dance studio.

“I’m gonna make a trip to the food bank tomorrow and see what they’ve got in the community fridge,” she says. “I was thinking maybe—”

Her sentence trails off. She stares at the wall behind him.

Claude lifts his head. “You were thinking?”

He turns to see the poster above him Lena is gazing at.

In the picture, a petite woman holds up a championship belt emblazoned with a gleaming burger. In her other hand, a three-tiered trophy. “Cheeseburger Championship,” it reads. “Bonnie Lin defends her title. Enter to win $10,000!”

Claude turns back to Lena. “Why am I looking at this?”

Her eyes remain fixed on the poster.

“The money?”

“The money,” she repeats.

He shrugs and looks back at Bonnie the champ, triumphant and glittering. “You don’t normally eat your way out of financial problems.”

Lena nudges him with her foot. “How much money do you have on you right now?”

“Maybe sixty bucks.”

Lena turns to the counter and calls out to the manager.

Cosmo lifts his head from the cash register. His gaze indifferent.

“We’ll take ten more hot dogs.”

“Ten?” Cosmo’s left eyebrow arches. “To go?”

“Each,” she insists. “For here.”

The muscles in Claude’s neck constrict. He lowers his voice. “I’m not blowing my cash on wieners.”

“Twenty hot dogs?” Cosmo repeats. A dozen lines appear on his forehead like ripples of sand. “This a joke?”

She shakes her head and points to the poster on the wall.

Cosmo crosses his arms and smirks. “I tell you what. If you can eat all that in five minutes, it’s on the house.”

“Bet graciously accepted,” Lena bows.

“Hold on,” Claude breaks in. “I’m not signing up for this.”

“You don’t like free food?”

He leans his head back against the booth cushion, too exhausted to argue. He looks up at the cobwebbed ceiling fan and shuts his eyes.

Cosmo brings twenty steamed plain hot dogs on two plastic trays and sets them on the table. A casse-croûte banquet of processed meat and bleached flour.

It smells like a pile of starch and jellified pork.

“I’m setting the timer on my watch.” Cosmo grins with confidence. “Ready. Set. Go!”

Lena thrusts the first hot dog in her mouth. Her jaws crank like the shaft of a piston engine.

Claude scarfs down his first. Nine to go, then eight. His gut expands and he burps, feeling the acids rise and sizzle. He pushes the food down as Lena chomps on her sixth, one ahead of him. She glances up and shifts her focus to number five. Hunching over, she conquers the steamé.

Cosmo places his hands on his hips, mouth agape, as the seconds flash by on his timer. Two minutes remain. Stuffed, Claude bites into the next one. A wave of queasiness stirs in his gut, but he glances at the timer in Cosmo’s hand and carries on, praying the steamé doesn’t get lodged in his esophagus. The price of twenty hot dogs is on the line.

0:15—0:14—0:13.

As Lena throws her hands up like a boxer after a declaration of victory, bits of bun and hot dog meat tumble from her lips.

0:08—0:07—0:06.

With three seconds left on Cosmo’s clock, Claude clears his last hot dog hurdle and raises a fist in bloated triumph.

The left-for-dead air conditioner wheezes on the windowsill, leaking water down the plaster patches in the bedroom wall. From the bed, Claude jabs the AC—scrap he’d nabbed and revived—with the butt end of a broom until it sounds about right.

Lena sidles closer to Claude and holds her phone up so they can watch Jason “Jaws” Jablonski’s latest video on the screen.

“Hey gurgitators,” Jaws salutes his viewers. His handlebar mustache waxed to curl like mammoth tusks. “Jaws here in Milwaukee ready to take on this bad boy. I’m about to embark on the Hercules Pastrami Challenge, and let me tell you, I am pumped for this one!”

Jaws cuts a sandwich in half with a knife the size of a machete, revealing a dozen layers of pink meat. “Oh, boy,” he grins. “I’ve been naughty, haven’t I? That’s five pounds of pastrami right there. Pro champ tip: if you go into a challenge with the right strategy, you win before the contest even begins. With this kind of challenge, you don’t just start chomping away. That’s a rookie mistake. First you eat the meat, then the veggies.” He removes a dill pickle impaled on a toothpick the size of a skewer. “Last is the bread and fries. Carbs always go last.”

Claude rubs his stubbled chin as Jaws dismantles and devours the sandwich. He wonders how the man hasn’t keeled over and gripped his chest with cholesterol spewing through the ruptured valves of his heart. But above all, he wants to know what kind of money he clears with each empty plate.

Meanwhile, Lena beams. She lights up like watching a tightrope walker conquering a death-defying feat to applause. It’s a display of physical power, like a bodybuilder doing deadlifts with their insides.

“Stay tuned for my next challenge,” says Jaws, tapping his gut. “I’ll be in Belfast to tackle the Wicked Waffle challenge. As you know, I have a sweet tooth, so I’m looking forward to that one. Remember kids, if you’ve got the intestinal fortitude, you too can travel the world and eat like a champ!”

Video after video, Lena and Claude watch gurgitators take down colossal heaps of food. Five-pound stacks of pancakes in forty minutes. Shawarma gauntlet. One hundred and fifty oysters in under an hour. Bowls of ramen noodles the size of washbasins. Fifteen grilled cheese sandwiches in two minutes. Sixty-nine hot dogs in ten minutes. The crowds cheer on the average-looking, seemingly unremarkable contestants to see who can withstand the salt, sugar, and saturated fat.

Lena turns to Claude. “Imagine kissing our hustles goodbye and eating our way around the globe.”

“Sounds about as sensible as any career move I’ve ever made.”

“Guess how much Jaws makes.”

He shrugs.

“Six figures.”

“Six figures?”

“And you know Chester Rollins, the reigning Weiner World hot dog champion? He clears a crisp two hundred grand a year.”

“Huh.” Claude lifts himself up and rests his head on the headboard. “We’re gonna have to back up a little bit before making travel plans. We gotta talk about the rent.”

The glow fades from her cheeks. “I haven’t been eligible for any studies lately. How short are we?”

“Two hundred.”

“Two hundred?” She sighs. “I don’t have that right now.”

The air conditioner gasps and halts.

“I’ll see if I can fit in a few more cab shifts,” he says, whacking the AC with the broom. A perfect hit that sets it straight.

Her eyes downcast. “Maybe I can start selling arts and crafts online. There are people out there willing to pay top dollar for fusilli effigies of Elton John.”

“Fusilli effigies. . . right.”

“And I hear dog-walking pay is solid. Good exercise, too.”

The drone of the air conditioner fills the silence.

“Right,” he repeats, and squeezes her hand. “Just don’t book any gigs the last Saturday of the month.”

“Why?” She looks up.

He forces a smile. “We’ve got a contest to win.”

Lena glides through the park on her roller-skate sneakers, gripping the leashes of the collie, Doberman, and Pomeranian. She skates past the playground where mothers in yoga pants watch their children swing skyward. The Cerberus barks and squeals, layers of drool dribble down to the grass. The Pomeranian, the smallest and loudest of the pack, yaps and pulls Lena toward the jungle gym, but she tugs the dog back in stride.

The competitive eating podcast ends and the next one, a nature series, begins on autoplay. She turns up the volume.

“Some bottom feeders—like the sea star—feed on organic waste to survive,” the podcast narrator recites in Lena’s ear. “In fact, bottom feeders are popular in aquariums for the role they play in eating the leftovers of their overfed aquatic neighbours.”

Since conquering the diner, she and Claude had disciplined the tubing of their digestive tracts into resilient, pulverizing muscle. They completed the extra-large pizza challenge at Castello Pizzeria. The prize: two oversized T-shirts and photographic immortalization on the wall of fame. At Guerilla Taco, they completed the Quesadilla Quest for a free lunch.

“Isopods may be related to woodlice and look like underwater cockroaches, but these crustaceans are bottom feeders just like the lobsters and prawns you might find at your local seafood restaurant.”

Lena slows to a stop to let the dogs shower the bushes. She slips a seventh stick of gum into her mouth, chomping vigorously to strengthen her jaw. Besides, she needs the sugar to get through the afternoon fast as part of her training regimen. Temporary abstinence to sharpen her appetite for her next meal. The gum mass is as hard as plastic.

“Catfish are whiskered omnivores that hunt for food at night. Their diet is composed of a variety of foods, including other bottom feeders.”

Despite her belly’s whining, Lena puts an eighth stick of gum in her mouth. She embraces its grumbling. Chew. Chew. Chew. She feels the transformation of her gut in real time, its lining hardening into citadel walls, acids scorching. Deep within her bowels, in the pit of transformation, she will test her mettle.

The dull gum whets the appetite clamouring to be satisfied. Lena drains every last bit of strawberry sweetness from the musket-ball-sized wad of gum and fires it into a garbage bin, sending squirrels fleeing into the bushes. Even a remote possibility—a pipe dream of a gamble based on bad math—leaves more than a zero percent chance of walking out with some cash.

Lena’s big band ringtone interrupts the podcast. She sees the familiar number of the collection agency and clenches her well-exercised jaws, her stomach rumbling. She swipes the screen clumsily with her thumb, accidentally answering the call instead of hanging up.

“Hello?”

“Yes, hello, is this Miss Lena Wójcik?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’re calling to speak about the debt repayment plan worked out with one of our agents recently—”

“I told you I don’t want to get these calls anymore. Do you not see that I made the request to receive only written—”

“It appears that although you made six minimum payments, you missed the last payment, which was due yesterday morning.”

“I know,” Lena replies. Fury stirs up within her belly. “I’m working on it.”

“According to the plan you worked out and agreed to—”

“I said I’m working on it!” she repeats and hangs up.

Claude pulls over by the stone lions guarding the Chinatown gate. He turns on the hazard lights and waits as the windshield wipers swipe aside the grease-stained takeout bags and chocolate bar wrappers discarded by the wind. Across the street, grey-bearded men lie in tents pitched on a patch of wet grass. Soaked shirts and socks hang like Tibetan prayer flags. A man approaches the driver’s seat, shaking a plastic McDonald’s cup, asking for spare change, but Claude waves him off.

Staring into the rearview mirror, Claude opens his mouth and inspects his teeth, yellow from Darjeeling tea. He rubs his jaw, trying to soothe the molar that started throbbing this morning. He tried biting into a pear, but he spat out the flesh, unable to chew. How much will the dentist ask him to cough up? And the contest registration fee is already paid. No refunds. For a second, he sees reigning champion Bonnie Lin handing over a cheque the size of refrigerator, and in the next, he is back in the driver’s seat. He swallows a second ibuprofen capsule to dull his ache and sprays the air freshener, coating the area in the backseat where a drunk clubber puked a chunky heap stinking of gorgonzola and did not so much as leave a tip. Claude shakes the empty bottle, but it releases no more vapour.

Claude glances at the UCab app. Another no-show. He raises his hand to cancel the ride when he spots a man in a business suit, possibly the customer, Preston H., stumbling toward the car from behind. The man takes a bite of a kebab, tosses the half-eaten skewer to the side of the road, and sticks a cigarette between his lips.

“Open sesame,” he mumbles, knocking on the passenger window glass.

Claude unlocks the doors and eyes him in the rearview mirror.

“You the cabbie?”

Claude nods.

“Nice ride,” Preston smirks and loosens his tie. His eyes glazed with boozy confidence.

“Please don’t knock on the windows.”

Preston looks down at the glowing screen of his cell phone. He chuckles and texts.

Claude sucks in the bile brewing in his gut and focuses on the road ahead. He weaves through the flow of midnight traffic, evading a dozen pothole craters. He feels each bump of the road in the car’s shoddy suspension and in the roots of his teeth.

In the rearview mirror Claude sees the customer in the backseat light a smoke. The traffic light turns green, but Claude’s foot presses down firmly on the brakes. He squeezes the steering wheel and glares.

“It’s green,” Preston whines, blowing smoke through his nostrils.

Cars honk. A driver curses.

“Ride’s over,” Claude says and cancels the fare.

“I’m not going anywhere except where I paid you to take me. So, drive!”

The smoke rises, creeping into the upholstery.

“Ride’s over,” Claude repeats. He moves the stick shift into park and turns on the hazard lights. He sees himself knocking the cigarette out of the passenger’s mouth with a swift backhand.

“Have it your way, asshole,” Preston snaps, and puts out the cigarette in the seat cushion. “You just earned yourself a one-star review.”

The door slams, rattling the car’s metal.

Claude hits the gas and tightens his grip on the steering wheel. One-star review, he repeats, ignoring the next ride request. He accelerates through the next intersection, his fingernails digging into the rubber. He grinds his teeth, molar pulsing in concert with the bass drum of his pounding heart. One-star review. The next light turns yellow. Straight ahead, a pickup’s rear lights flash, but Claude’s foot is a breath too slow to hit the brakes.

One by one, the contestants’ names are called out. From plump to petite, the competitors—indistinguishable from the non-gurgitator class—wave and flex. Lena scans the crowd gathered on the dandelion field and turns to Claude on her right, holding the side of his mouth, competing despite his aching molar and nose bandaged after banging his face against the steering wheel in the fender bender.

She cracks her knuckles and eyes her competitors on the stage as Bonnie Lin blows kisses. The championship belt glimmers around her narrow waist.

“Our last competitor, Lena Wójcik!” shouts the announcer in a hamburger costume. The painted-on lettuce and tomato dreamily crisp and juicy.

Claude cheers and raises his fist.

“It’s simple, folks,” the announcer says. “Whoever eats the most cheeseburgers takes the cake. Just that simple, just that hard. Ten thousand big ones on the line. Are we clear?”

Cheerleaders sporting the regal purple of Royal Cola bring out the cheeseburger platters and set them in front of the dozen contestants.

Lena stares down the mound of burgers before her. After days of protein supplements and lemon-water purging, her hunger is ready to spring loose on the towers of beef.

“I can’t hear you,” the announcer repeats. “Food gladiators, are we ready?”

The crowd cheers louder.

Lena glances takes a deep breath and flexes her jaws.

Claude hunches over the platter, waiting to dive in.

“On your mark. Ready. Set. Go!”

Lena grabs cheeseburger number one, scarfs the patty down and dunks the bun in her glass of water to soften up the bread before inhaling it. She follows the Chester Rollins maneuver. Hunched over the platter, she bobs up and down, using gravity to force the food down her esophagus. Cheeseburger after cheeseburger, her stomach stretches into a receptacle for the carbs, meat, and processed dairy.

The scorekeeper flips the pages of the scoreboard to mark her burger count. Six—seven—eight. She doesn’t allow herself to peek at Bonnie or the others. The faces around her blur. Nine—ten—eleven. She feels the meat and carbs slither down and squish into her vital organs, coating her kidneys, heart, and pancreas. Chew. Chew. Chew. Each 300-calorie cheeseburger cleared is a step closer to paid rent, replacing Claude’s fender and finally settling her student debt.

Betraying her game plan, Lena glances at Claude, sees him slowing down, way behind her on the burger count but still eating through the pain. His eyes bulge with strained focus. She gulps. Their chance to win rides on her shoulders alone.

Seventeen—eighteen—nineteen. The food mush accumulates at the back of Lena’s throat, and for a second, she chokes. She smacks herself in the chest. The blow dislodges the meat from her throat and rises into her mouth, but she doesn’t spit it out. She holds it there for a moment, tongues it back and swallows hard, fighting to keep it down. The stage goes fuzzy. She blinks, sees stars, and opens her mouth. Eat or be eaten. Instead of gasping for air, she reaches for number twenty. Lightheaded, drained, she bites into the suffocating meat, clutching the platter to steady her feet. Another 300 calories to go, then another and one more. Chewing, swallowing, Lena contorts her body for the crown, devouring her way out of captivity.

Based in Montreal, Joe Bongiorno is a journalist, teacher and a writer of prose. He has written for places like Canadian Notes & Queries, Geist, CBC, Maisonneuve, Event, Exile, The Antigonish Review and Broken Pencil. He won Event’s 2019 Speculative Writing Contest. His work has also been shortlisted for contests, including the 2024 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction and the 2021 Carter V. Cooper Contest. In 2025 he was longlisted for The New Quarterly’s Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award.