Back to Normal

I don’t know what this Thing is that lives in my stomach and that demands something from me and that Will Not Shut Up. I want to smother this Thing but the only way to placate it is to eat. When I stop eating it starts whimpering again like a dog with arthritis. So I eat and eat and eat and my body grows bigger until I lose the privilege of looking the way people want me to look and no-one wants to have sex with me and people try to hide their shock when they run into me.

I try coffee enemas and worms and illegal stimulants but my body is indifferent, indifferent also to a psychoanalyst who believes that I am subconsciously trying to repel men because of the thing with my brother and that I should ‘love’ my body, and I laugh at the psychoanalyst until I have no money left.

One night there is a party in a back garden where there is smoke and sex appeal of strangers.  There is also a fay who speaks loudly in the form of Socratic dialogue (annoying but to be humoured if, like me, you want to get something from him):

‘Would you agree, my esteemed friend, when I say that there is a relationship between eating and bodily dimensions?’ (says the fay)

 ‘How could I not?’ (says I)

‘Would you not also concur with the idea that this relationship is, in most cases, a parallel one?’ (says the fay)

‘I think so. In what way do you mean exactly?’ (says I)

‘Pardon me my good sir. I have not been making myself clear. What I mean to say is that, as eating increases in volume and frequency, so does bodily size. Is this not indisputable?’ (says the fay)

‘Certainly.’ (says I)

‘Then is it not so that your solution is simple? To cease growing you need to cease eating.’ (says the fay)

‘I cannot dispute that. But how am I to do such a thing? There is a creature that lives inside me that mewls and whines unless I feed it.’ (says I)

The fay, being a fay, knows about the Thing. I wonder if he put it there in the first place but I don’t care because he makes me an offer. If I perform a nightly ritual at midnight, in which I sacrifice one piece of pubic hair by setting it alight, and sing the words ‘fat fucker’ over and over again to the melody of a national anthem of my choice, the Thing would become mute. The conditions are strict however. If I were to fail even once, the mewling would resume.

I set my alarm for midnight. I take off my underwear and cut a piece of hair from my labia. I light a candle, burn the pube, and start singing. I stumble through the ritual and go back to sleep. The next morning my body is quiet. I have won, I have shut the Thing up. That day I eat nothing but a grape, and as I fall asleep I imagine a future of photos featuring my legs in shorts. Only for a moment do I see the image of my brother, fumbling-smiling-sweating wholesomely while planting vegetables in a small garden with soil that holds optimism and sun and freedom. I tell him to fuck off.

For the next six months I live in the best way possible – having food available, yet not eating. At times I feel a meek hunger and I see for how long I can postpone mollifying it with an almond or apple. Sometimes I don’t eat for days. With only mild feelings of guilt I forsake my fat compatriots to their discomfort. I swim in lakes. I abandon meals after a single bite to feel the satisfaction of being able to do so. I talk openly about bowel movements because people with sex appeal are permitted to do that: their assholes are enticing.

I become thin. So thin that people often don’t see me. I can hide under blankets and behind streetlamps, something that I do on Sundays in bliss while stroking my abdomen and watching things that take place on streets. It happens occasionally that people knock me over and my thin body slices through the air so sharply that I get a kind of carpet burn effect on my skin. This is not my favourite thing. When people do see me, however, they want to fuck me (this ís my favourite thing). Unfortunately sex hurts because my body has no space inside. It is small and the Thing is still in there, taking up most of what’s left. But I don’t care about having sex, I only care about being wanted for it. And like I just told you, everyone wants to have sex with me so my life is great.

I live this life for two years until one night when I am so engrossed in a dream about root vegetables that I miss my alarm and don’t perform the ritual. The next day I go to PicknPay to buy forty seven tubs of ice cream. There I run into the fay, who is performing Socrates for an unfortunate preteen in the dental hygiene section. He sees me and smiles. He is smug as hell.

‘My dear friend did I not tell you that you had to perform the ritual without exception if you desired beauty?’

I want to strangle the fay but the best I can do is to leave in silence and look at his social media pages when I get home. The Thing in my stomach is screaming for attention so I fill my stomach to the point of nausea. Every day. I spend large amounts of money. I hide wrappers under carpets and in couches and behind portraits. I eat my housemates’ food and replace it over and over again until they eventually say wow these biscuits have been here for months we should throw them away. I pick food out of the trash.

I go to meetings for compulsions, addictions, over-eating. I quit alcohol. I keep a food diary. I say I have a disease. I say Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can. 

Then something happens that I cannot change. The preteen from PicknPay starts appearing at the meetings, also saying Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can. I try to avoid her, but one night she corners me. She says ‘I hate that fucking fay. I’m going to help you destroy the Thing, just wait.’ I’m not sure what this preteen can do about fay magic, but her promise is all I have. At the next meeting she hands me a vial. ‘It’s Worcestershire sauce. Put it on whatever you eat next.’

At home I eat three pizzas with Worcestershire sauce that has no doubt passed its best-before date. I throw up: 

1) globs of cheese and flour, 

2) the Thing.

It has donkey ears and hooves. It is moaning and wrinkled and covered in vomit. It grabs at my breasts and as I try to pull it away it clambers onto my head and wraps its smelly body around my face. It bites into my skull. I bang my head against the wall until it collapses and curls up in a foetal position, wailing. I punch its face until it is soft like clay.

I feel no pity when I bury it in the garden, but as my wet face transforms dirt to mud I am overcome with alien desperation that makes me call my brother to apologise for everything I’d done.