[short fiction] refeeding syndrome

The featured image and affiliated copyright belongs to Simon Hopkinson, who captures the beautiful and grotesque in urban dilapidation.

More beloved lit mag rejects! This one is about a haunted house.

This story contains body horror, and addresses themes of disordered eating and self-harm. Please read with caution.

-

You swallow him whole, but that isn’t the end of it. At noon you can feel him rooting around, hands and knees dimpling puckered ulcers in the basement linoleum. The salt of his breath starches your alveoli. Through the night you groan and cry through nauseous rolls of your scaffolding: this is why you don’t eat.

He’d left crumbs; the tools dotting your front step. It’s filthy and it chills your skin. You knew better than this, of course — it was easier when you let the others go first. You miss the way it was then. They would be so wonderfully thoughtless and leave nothing for you. Then you could continue to thin, weather and crane nobly over the beautiful and full-bellied living things, on dry air and dead cells.

There are no more living things here, just you, and you have forgotten how to do anything else but digest. Or you’d thought. You’d wanted. At first you hoped the impulses had atrophied: the corridors of you were wasted, the bile discoloring wallflesh and nursing blooms of mold. You were not closer to a body than you were a year ago. But when he appeared the hunger did too, roaring, and frightened you.

Fine. You’d get it over with. You took him like a pill. But now he sticks and bloats and the meat of you aches, because in the absence of something to fill it everything has grown in paresis, and there is nothing to move him.

And you are in pain.

You hate him. He doesn’t even taste of anything. Burning. The acid roils and sloshes as if to punish you, and dilutes with the water of him as you swell and overgrow. Suddenly you protrude, you tower. You start to fear that someone will see, because you are impossible to ignore: a hard mass pushing up from the carapace of the earth.

Worst of all, however, you feel. There are insects in your foundation, moving with their mandibles. The mold sags your plaster in strange pockmarks. Dust suffocates every port of glass in your body and makes you dingy, makes you sick. You weren’t sick before this, before him. It’s his fault.

This is why you don’t eat.

Because you didn’t hate before this, either. You didn’t cry. You sat quietly with forever and thought about lovely, empty things, like the ocean and the sky. You thought you might be a shelter for a poet, a sad wanderer. Over time you would decay and now you have to start

all

OVER

AGAIN

because YOU ARE REMEMBERING WHAT THINGS FEEL LIKE

You didn’t last. You still know how to salivate. Time couldn’t work fast enough. They should’ve starved you better, you should’ve controlled yourself. You’re craving the tools on the front step. You’re craving another, and there is nothing and nothing for miles and miles: the ocean and the sky and the salt in a crust on your scalp.

If you screamed for help maybe someone would come, and you could eat again.

If you screamed for help maybe they’d come and take you apart. The pain might be worse than the starving. It will be, in fact — you know the starving. And if they came and saw what you’d done they would want to know why you’re trying to unbecome, and who would understand the sweet membrane between trying and doing, between an end and giving yourself something to be?

You’re hungry but there is nothing, nothing.

It’ll pass. You make yourself think of empty things.