His arms and legs were withered and devoid of muscle or fat. His belly jutted outward obscenely and the skin of his face clung to his skull like wet mache. His hair had fallen out.
He was, in short, hungry.
He walked to the kitchen and opened the fridge. It looked bleak. There was a drawer full of fresh fruit: some apples, oranges, kiwi and a fat, green melon. A shelf full of meat: some ham, salami, a turkey and some left-over chicken. He shuddered and whinced as he thought of the stuff between two slices of bread with some tasty condiments spread liberally throughout. There was a fat tin of juice, a jug of milk, and the usual miscellaneous stuff found in all fridges: spreads, jars of pickled things, vegetables, Hitler chunks...
He sighed. He wasn't in the mood for any of the tidbits which sat before his eyes. He closed the fridge and stalked over to the cupboards.
First cupboard: sugar, spice, tupperware, baking soda, etc. Second cupboard: cereals, uncooked speghetti, cookies, crackers, flavour-crystals. In short: nothing.
The hungry boy sighed. He wished he were in the mood for these things. But it was Sunday. One of those helplessly lazy, depressing Sunday's, when there's nothing entertaining on television and grown men are left to putter around the house and check for food again and again, as if someone might have gone out shopping and snuck loads of groceries in the house in the interval of time in which he wasn't scanning the fridge...
He researched his kitchen and was unsurprised to find everything unchanged.
He was reduced to sitting on his sofa and watching his arms and legs get even more thinner. He sighed, bored.
"Shit..." he said experimentally. "Shit fuck cunt bastard lick la la la fuck."
He grew bored again.
Outside his door, empires were rising and falling, men were dying heroic deaths, fighting tooth and nails for their ideals and their lives. Great knights in full battle armour were waging war on other great knights in full battle armour. Missiles were rocketing across the sky and exploding entertainingly into huge towering skyscrapers. The Earth shook as tectonic plates smashed into each other at the speed of light. Mighty pillers of stone crashed through the ground and fell from the sky and everything rocked in a gigantic blood-fest-orgy-death-war.
He went to his front door and checked, just in case. No. None of those things were really happening, it was just his imagination.
He went to his bookshelf to see if he possessed any books which he hadn't read. There was only one book, looking very forlorn on the huge set of shelves. He had built a bookshelf, with the intentions of buying lots of books to put on it, but so far, he had only bought one, and he had read it. Oh well.
Then, like a wet napkin, inspiration struck. Ketchup! He had ketchup! Of course: he had hid it in one of the shelves in his kitchen which nobody ever opened, so his children wouldn't get their little hands on it. Ah, bliss!
He rushed into the room of linoleum and threw open that cupboard above his fridge which no one ever looked in, and there it was. An industrial-family-economy sized bottle o' the finest Heines. Rapture. He couldn't bring the thing down from it's perch and get the cap unscrewed and bring the nozzle to his mouth quick enough. The blood-red semi-liquid poured into his gaping jaw and down his queasy throat like pure necture of nature. An involuntary groan managed to work it's way around the thick Utopia and escape into the air, sending waves of pleasure to his eardrums. He was halfway through the bottle when something suddenly occured to him:
"Needs salt."
He ran to the cupboard and ripped off the top and poured the white grains into the bottle o' bliss and started in on it again.
The bottle empty, he sighed in satisfaction. He looked at the clock. Sunday was over!! In fact, it was the next Friday night. He had missed a whole week of work, but, what the hell, he deserved a break. He grabbed his coat and went to the grocery store...
He suddenly woke up from the disturbing daydream.
"What? Huh? Ketchup?" he said to the air. A contemplative look crept across his face. "How odd," he said.
"Honey! Dinner!" his wife called from the kitchen.
He sat down to steak and fries. Yum.
"Oh honey," said his wife. "You want some ketchup with your fries."