Suzy Skips a Meal
Around 207 calories, the headache starts. The pain behind her right eye, just her right eye, a hammer knocking the dents out of her eye-socket. She doesn’t stop; she has to get to 300 calories. She doesn’t know the time or the distance, just a rising red number in the upper left of the display panel. 300 is the goal, although she knows that isn’t accurate; it’s an approximation, an average. It may be more than 300, maybe less. Her right eye throbs, and she resists the urge to press the hell of her hand into it, tip her head down, look ill. The breakfast peach rolls in her stomach, whole. Her stomach has magical properties, and each bite of the peach–torn, soft skin, sweat meat–has reassembled itself to be whole again. Even the hard, spiny pit, tossed in the empty garbage can so it rustled through the plastic bag and pilled it down as it thudded in the bottom, has been regrown in her stomac, and the whole thing pitches against her stomach’s walls as she presses forward, faster now, intent on hitting 3-0-0 quickly.
300 calories isn’t so much.
She drinks coffee, sugared and creamed to pale brown perfection. These additives will save her jitters, let her drink faster, but it won’t kill her appetite like pure black can. She imagine the liquid thick like cough syrup, coating her throat and stomach, sealing it off for the day. The cream will do its job, the half and half, half in and half out. She’ll feel it enter her intestines, warm and thick, starting the griping pain traveling downward. Strong fingers massaging miles of intestinal tubes. Not to be outdone, the coffee will force all of it to go faster, move faster, slid faster through the prodding fingers of pain. There won’t be time to soak up nutrients, to sepearate the necessary from the waste, and eventually the pain will spread throughout her stomach, nausea, burning, and it’ll end much the same as it started. As she waits she looks with a critical eye at her naked flesh being reflected by the bathroom mirror.
Hold in your stomach, tighten the muscles, and lean back: you’ll see your abs, you can count them. She does, six pockets of muscle under a thin layer of fat, and she touches them, counting them like the fingers and toes of a newborn baby. It will be a birth, when that fat slides away and those six more or less square boxes come to the surface, pushing and straining, to breathe.
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