# Read the first page of The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter

Read the opening of The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter free, no signup. In Seagate, eating is sin and cooking is rebellion.

- Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-thick-and-the-lean-chana-porter
- Genre: Dystopian fiction
- Year: 2023
- ISBN: 9781668000199
- Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781668000199&s=read-page
- Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781668000199
- Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781668000199

## The opening

Beatrice Bolano looked down at her almost empty plate. She was still hungry. Hungry in the way they warned about in church, whispered about in the girls' bathroom at school, scratched into the wall behind the Buff 'n' Go. Beatrice was hungry for taste, texture, mouthfeel. Crispy, crunchy, silky, chewy. Beatrice was hungry for juxtaposition, and she would never tell anyone as long as she lived.

There was still a small mound of rice on her plate, and next to that an even smaller mound of celery and carrots cooked together in such a way that they resembled each other. Grayish, stringy, mushy. She ate the remaining rice with a bit of vegetable mush and imagined it overlaid with lemon, butter, salt. Beatrice was comfortable with this kind of game, even in front of her parents, injecting clean, modest meals with her secret perversity.

While Beatrice chewed her bland food, imagining it improved, a litany of words floated through her mind: reduction, flambé, seared, marzipan.

Soon Mama would go into the living room and choose a television program for the evening while Papa cleaned out the cooking pot. Feigning a headache, Beatrice excused herself from her parents to retire early. She couldn’t concentrate, not on homework or television. Colors and scents and flavors she had never actually tasted, only imagined, danced through her mind. Words she knew from her secret hours lurking in chat rooms on her family computer.

Beatrice locked her bedroom door and lay down on her bed. Now that she had made her decision, she wanted to tease herself, to go slow and make it last as long as possible. It wouldn't be like the other times. No one would ever know. As if it had never happened, only a dream. It wouldn't be like that time she'd stood in the refrigerator light in Carrie Sutherland's kitchen, stuffing her face with peas and rice gruel as Carrie’s mother walked in, horrified. Carrie, smirking, fist-deep into a jar of enriched vitamin syrup. Even when misbehaving. Carrie knew better than to let anyone outside her own family actually see her chew and swallow. The memory of that day still filled Beatrice with a cold, static dread every time she saw Mrs. Sutherland at church. Sometimes Beatrice felt her shame so palpably, she could almost taste it. Her mouth watered. Her fingers twitched. Beatrice glanced at the door. The sounds of the television drifted up to her bedroom. A young man screamed out in pleasure and pain, the din interspersed with a woman's throaty laughter. It was her parents' favorite program of late, Boy Meat, where a gang of dominatrixes rode through the countryside on their motorcycles, torturing terrified young men. It was a city show, like most of the media they consumed. The people of Scagate enjoyed the outlandish outfits and dramatics, even though the formula of the show was tiresome. Beatrice mainly watched it for the exit interviews.

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