| By: Brent Meske |
| “If you repay me not on such a day, In such a place, such sum or sums as are Express'd in the condition, let the forfeit Be nominated for an equal pound Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken In what part of your body pleaseth me.” William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice “Hey pig. Piggy pig pig pig.” High school’s a bitch. Most of us felt the same way. A damn shame too. “Hey pig,” someone laughed. “Oink oink.” More laughter. Streaks of red and yellow and darker hues colored her shirt, colored her face. Bits of dried food littered her crumpled expression. A chunk of brownie fell down her face and into her shirt. She lowered her eyes and kept moving, clutching her books to her chest, because her backpack was still somewhere in the cafeteria. Someone swatted her ample ass on the way through the halls. Somebody else did a surprisingly good impression of a pig squealing. Tears divided the grime on her cheeks, but she wouldn’t let any of them see it. She ducked into the bathroom and headed straight for a stall. Amanda Perkins and her friend Nina Calloway looked up at her through the mirror. Their giggles turned into laughter as she heard the door shut, and she was finally alone. Her name was Patricia Swaine. Which was good, not good, it was perfect. It wasn’t just that her name was totally perfect, to top it off she was five eight and a solid two twenty. It hadn’t stopped being perfect through middle school, and it sure as hell didn’t look like it was going to stop being perfect in high school. Piggy Swine the Porker. Hey Piggy. Piggy piggy piggy. She didn’t hate her name, not the last name anyway. Swaine was almost a gentle word, something graceful, maybe even pure. Swan, Swaine. Like drifting on a lake in the sunshine and feeling the cool water on your body, but feeling the heat also. Patricia, on the other hand, sucked it big time. You couldn’t get anything pretty out of Patricia, not Pat (truncated and ugly, like an amputated stump), and definitely not Patty (which sounded like a kicked-around suburban housewife). Piggy Swine didn’t think of herself as a Patricia, not the other two either. They’d been tried, by her friends, but none of them worked. She couldn’t have been stuck with a nice name like Katherine, or Katarina, which could magically transform her into multiple different people. It couldn’t have been anything pretty either, like Violet or Amber or another color. It didn’t help that her middle name was Tamara either. Tammy she wasn’t. It would be nice if you could get a name surgery. But Piggy couldn’t. She’d tried before, cutting on her thick wrists with a steak knife. Her scars had faded to a dullish white-pink. You just couldn’t incise your name out of you like a tumor. So the cancer in school, everyone else, had grown and transformed her name until it transformed her personality. Piggy pulled on her flesh, wanting to rip it off. She actually dug nail marks into her arms, into her baggy stomach. Tiny bubbles of blood bloomed on her skin. The pain felt good enough to chase away her tears. “It’s all going to change,” she told her skin, her fat. “It’s gonna start with my name.” The name she eventually chose was Jenna. Jenna Swaine sounded just wonderful, thank you very much. Not to mention, the prom queen’s name was Jenna. If Piggy couldn’t do anything else, she’d at least gall that uppity, size two, six-foot blonde bitch. “Patricia, are you in here?” It was the voice of Evan, one of her only friends in school. He was a good enough guy, but he was ugly and fat, just like her. She said nothing in response, just hitching sobs at what had happened in the lunchroom. So Physics was next, a useless class, and she’d miss it again. “You’re in here aren’t you?” She was in here probably once every other week. “Fuck off,” she said, without any real conviction. “Hey, come on, it’s going to be fine. Fuck them. We’ll set the school on fire after we chain all the doors closed.” He stepped into the stall and hugged her. She noticed every single time that his arms couldn’t get all the way around. “A pound of flesh,” Mrs. Kirkenbaum said. She walked back to her desk and pulled up a scale, one of those with a little red pointer. It seemed to go from Empty to Full in no time, when their teacher placed her hand down on it. “It’s not much,” their teacher went on. “Sixteen ounces. Less than half a Kilogram. Less than a quarter of what your Social Studies textbook weighs.” There were some polite snickers at this. “Mister Shakespeare, the venerable lord of the written word of English, calls for it. His villain Shylock, a nasty Jew with a grudge, makes a contract for a pound of flesh. No more, no less. He doesn’t wish for his money returned, or any extra money on top for interest. He wants a pound of Antonio, from anywhere on his body.” With this Mrs. Kirkenbaum produced a lump of something the size of a tomato, but clear and squishy, like a stress ball. It was just larger than the size of their teacher’s fist. “Do any of you know what this is?” she asked. “I know it’s probably going to get eaten by Piggy later,” someone muttered from the back. The class erupted, and Piggy set her jaw. Mrs. Kirkenbaum frowned. “This, class, is a breast implant.” It was shown to weigh a pound when she placed it on the scale. More snickers followed. “I present this because it is easier than trying to find a pound of real flesh, and because one should take a look at this, to realize the sheer silliness of trying to change one’s self. Change always comes from the power of will, the determination to change.” “Someone ought to go on a diet of willpower,” the whisperer went on, behind Patricia. More snickers followed. “Thus the adage, beauty is only skin deep,” Mrs. Kirdenbaum said. “Not buried under layers of fat.” Their small Jewish teacher folded her arms under her breasts and stared at the class in disapproval. “That will be enough. Now, to get back to the point: this entire play is about an evil money-loving Jew. Back then, this was a common theme: the Jews were usurers and moneylenders, and reviled all over Europe for that. It became a stereotype leading toward Hitler’s line of reasoning, that the Jews were wicked and ought to be cleansed from the land in order to give the right to rule back to the Aryans. “Throughout the whole story, the characters ask Shylock to change his heart, to change his mind. But he’s a stubborn Jew, and wants only his pound of flesh. It may become his undoing.” “I know someone who could stand to lose a pound of flesh,” the whisper drifted out, toward Patricia. She’d watched the breast implant sit lazily on the scale, flicking her eyes up toward the clock every few seconds, to see if perhaps ten minutes might miraculously pass without anybody noticing. After several eternities, the bell consented to end her torture. Some whore sonovabitch tripped her on her way to gym class. The hallway erupted into half embarrassed giggling. Her books scattered to the four winds and she hit her chin on the tile, clicking her teeth together. The tears came like a reflex. "Jesus, would you look at this big fat mess in my way?" This was Jenna Hawkins, resident prom queen and homecoming queen. Patricia, or should it be Jenna also, lay at her feet, trying to pull together her dignity so she could stand up. It wouldn't work. If she'd had as much dignity as body fat, she could chase her problems away with hard stares. "Hey bitch," Jenna Hawkins leaned over her. Strawberry and cream scented blonde hair brushed her burning cheeks. It was shining and perfect, not like Patricia’s tangled mop of dirty brown hair. More than everything else on the past prom queen, her hair was just the right way every single day. "I heard that you want to change your name to Jenna. I'm real flattered and all, but quit it now. People are going to start calling me pig, and I can't have that." She stood tall. "I mean, it's not like anybody's going to confuse us. You couldn't fit a pair of my underwear around your ankle." Her barbie friends got a kick out of that one, and she went with them, laughing down the hall. "You'll always be Piggy to me," she called out. She never cried in front of her parents. Of course they loved her, but their love always manifested with stuff. They wanted to give her more clothes that might not fit in months to come, more jewelry she’d never wear, and toys. They still gave her toys. The worst of it was the food. Both her mother and father enjoyed eating, enjoyed it prodigiously. They always cleaned their plates, at times wiping them clean with buttered bread so as not to miss anything. More than this, though, they stocked the house so full of food that the three of them could have eaten well for a month and not cleaned out the pantry. Whenever Patricia asked her mother about this, the excuse was always along the lines of: “We eat it, don’t we? It’s not like it’s going to waste.” Her mother had learned hard lessons from growing up poor. The Janislaski household saved everything. This practice was brought into the Swaine household when she married Patricia’s father. No, she never cried in front of them, she let her sullen looks and solid gloomy presence announce her, like a damp headstone. She always ate in silence. Her computer time was spent in silence, during which she would clench her jaw and feel her throat begin to tighten, despite the Cheetos or potato chips or brownies by her side. Patricia, who wished her name could be Jenna, drowned these things in food. It was there, she was there, and her parents had made it impossible to resist. The only one to see Patricia cry was her closet mirror. Or rather, the four full-length mirrors that made up her closet doors always watched her. She could not fit into just one of these, but they never seemed to judge her too harshly. They were dutiful; they only gave her the facts. The facts were thus: Patricia Swaine, or Piggy Swine if you were in a playful mood, ate too much, and everything she tried in order to make herself stop ended in failure. "May God look upon you with favor, and give you peace." Her pastor sketched out the sign of the cross in the air. Just the motion made her want to vomit. Patricia didn't want to go to church anymore. She resolved to tell her parents how useless God was, that if he could scrub cruelty from the world, he would start with the church. Her few friends went, but she just couldn't stomach the idea that God loved her. She couldn't fathom the idea that Jenna Hawkins and her prom date boyfriends came here every so often and prayed like good little Christians. That was a load of shit, to be honest, so her faith wilted. Watching Jenna sit there, with her blonde hair practically giving her a halo made Patricia want to throw up again. She walked out in the middle of the service that day, quietly turning her back on God, on the pastor, and her friends, even her family. She left the church, swearing under her breath, and walked two miles home praying to Satan. Piggy stood shivering in the bathroom again, silently crying. The world of high school moved on outside, beyond her, distant and removed. Chocolate sauce spelled out her nickname on her chest in ragged letters: PIGGY. She'd sat there and let the fullback, a guy just about her size, drizzle the letters on there. He took the dare, and she stared into his eyes the entire time, until his cheeks burned with shame. He'd never forget this day, for damn sure. His hands shook so bad by the time he finished that the Y was just a weird scribble. It did the trick though. Somebody else had smeared a cupcake in her hair, then down her face. Instead of lowering herself, she'd silently gotten up and left to the sounds of roaring laughter, and even applause. Her chin crinkled, her bottom lip convulsed, and tears ate away at the frosting on her face. She held herself and cried, not caring to miss Physics with the rotten old bag that taught the class. Physics or Suicide 101, either one was okay by Patricia. Once again she tried to steel herself against the pain, and push it down inside, but it wouldn't stay where it belonged: in her stomach, where it might be best to put to use against Jenna Hawkins. Instead it cascaded down her body in shivers and tears. It was a battle, and she ended up cursing to herself. Her fingers dug into her fleshy arms again. The pain was good, and she watched the little blood droplets form. Pain almost let you forget for a few minutes. The pain disappeared, and the wounds closed, before her eyes. Patricia gasped, then looked outside the stall. No one. She dug her fingers into her arms again. This time when she pulled, her flesh came with it, in big clumps of skin and fat. She opened her hands and found her body in her hands, on the tips of her fingers. She was too stunned to scream. Instead she looked down at her arms and found deep finger markings, where the skin and fat used to be. But no blood. A tiny croaking sound came from her throat and escaped. It startled her. She held the fat out away from her, and shook it off her hands, like it was manure. Gobs of it splattered onto the stall walls and on the floor. Mushy skin. With her hands on her arms again, she poked at the marks in her arms. Then, feeling bolder, she rubbed over the reddish runnels and crevices. Her skin smoothed over like clay. A little more smoothing and she looked just like normal again. Yet there, spattered around the stall, were little pieces of her, blobs here and there stuck to the floor, the door, the walls, the toilet. "Oh God," she said, and a stone fell into the center of her guts. It glowed hot and disgusting, and painful in her middle. That afternoon, Patricia stripped off about a hundred pounds of fat in her bedroom, scooping and remodeling her skin as if she were a piece of art. It was actually kind of fun, once you got outside the butcher shop idea of what she was doing. She found that underneath it all, she had a surprising amount of smooth, strong muscle. She kept her breasts just the size they were; only now they seemed huge on her. She worked in a daze of satisfaction and determination, scooping off this or that disproportion and smoothing it here. She worked herself down sixty, eighty, a hundred pounds, until the scale read one-twenty-three. A massive lump of ruddy pink flesh sat in the corner, a strange snow that seemed would soon melt. She even worked on her face, smoothing it down until it was Jenna Hawkins-delicate, and prom queen haughty. Now she looked herself over in the mirror, completely naked, and marveled. It wouldn't work, not for a few weeks at least, but she would end up here. She slapped most of her body back into place, making this and that adjustment until she was back to mostly normal. She left off ten pounds, which seemed pitiful in comparison to the behemoth she'd shed earlier. But that was okay. She could scrape off a pound of flesh every day and be perfect in two months. Patricia went out that night and bought a small postal scale, one that weighed up to two pounds. She hid it in her closet and fawned over it. No longer. They went into Saks and Abercrombie & Fitch, the spin off Hollister, American Eagle, and finally Victoria’s Secret. “Are you sure about this?” her mother asked, on several occasions, in a small voice. Patricia (Jenna Swaine, Jenna Swaine, she kept repeating) looked at her mother and held herself from rolling her eyes. In her reduced sized hands she held a pink tank top with the words ‘Saturday Night Skinny Dip Club’ in darker pink, with little bits of silver drop shadow. “There are plenty of things at JC Penney that look perfectly respectable,” her mother hinted. “Are you sure-” “There are plenty of things at JC Penney that would get me laughed at,” Jenna Swaine replied. “And that’ll fit you?” her mother inquired. She sounded as though she were losing this little battle of wills. Patricia/Jenna Swaine could understand. Her parents had always been so conciliatory about her, apologetic about the fact that the bathtub was her enemy at eight years old. They would never come right out and say they were sorry about feeding Patricia so much food, but the worried glances and gifts and half-sorrowful tones were all there. “It’ll fit,” Jenna Swaine said. Her voice felt stronger. “Patricia,” her mother said, then fell silent. After a few moments she piped back up, “The price tags on these things are outlandish.” Now Patricia/Jenna did roll her eyes. “If you don’t want me to buy this stuff, or you’re not going to pay for it or whatever, just say so okay?” “I don’t want you to buy this stuff,” her mother said weakly. “Fine,” Jenna Swaine spat, and threw down the pleated skirt she was perusing over. She had been contemplating what size number she would end up at…perhaps a three? Wouldn’t that be just like winning the lottery, to end up at size three? “Let’s just go then,” Jenna Swaine said, “I’ll find a way to pay for these, if dad’s eighty thousand a year salary isn’t going to cut a few hundred dollars for his daughter’s first happy clothing purchases in her entire life.” She noted her newfound ability to pick through the tiny aisleways without knocking clothes on the floor, while her mother had a much harder time. A good thirty feet away, and nearly out the door of the American Eagle, her mother called her. “Patricia stop.” A muttered apology later, Jenna Swaine, now no longer seeming the daughter that her parents had raised, walked out of the shop with two full sacks of clothing. They deposited these in the minivan, and came back for more. Jenna Swaine figured out that she could work bone just like flesh, only a little tougher. She considered switching into a sculpture class next semester, and smiled. With that, she bent her wrist bones back until her hand flopped at an awkward angle. She felt the tendons and ligaments stretching painfully. She lost the ability to use the hand, until she bent it back the way it’d been before. It wasn’t as easy as skin and fat; you couldn’t just slop it around like oil paint. There was a little dog on Jenna Swaine’s walk to school. It was a yappy little thing, and she had been sticking her tongue out at the thing for years. Since she lived in a tiny city, it was unavoidable that she was forced to walk by Prince Anthony every single day of her life since age six, when she began walking to school with Evan. Prince Anthony, precisely the size of a large cat and with an attitude of a lion, would yap just the other side of the chain link fence, every morning. The little Prince seemed to delight in making Patricia’s life awful every morning, yapping with little hops from the time she appeared until she was about a block down the street. Only, now she was no longer Patricia. She was Jenna, goddamnit. So, one morning about three weeks (and over twenty pounds) into her weight loss/body sculpting program, she approached Prince Anthony with a sneer. The dog had to be about a thousand dog years old by now, since Jenna was now seventeen years old. Perhaps the old woman who lived here had heard by her neighbors that little Jenna would now be walking to school, and decided in her infinite cruelty to purchase the hateful little barking demon that very day. Perhaps it was just more of Patricia’s bad luck. Jenna Swaine, who would never be Patricia again, knelt by the little beast. It barked and barked, in its lion wannabe voice, trying to intimidate anything larger than it. To think she had ever been surprised into jumping by this tiny, ineffectual thing. After all, with the digestion problems it had, it would be dead within a month. It was over eleven years old. Digestion problems, Jenna Swaine thought. Now how could she possibly know that? It didn’t matter, she knew anyhow. She could almost see the blood running through its little veins, and feel its muscles protesting in certain places. It had injured its left back leg once upon a time, and it hadn’t healed back properly. “Come here, you little fucker,” she cooed to it, as sweet as she could manage. Prince Anthony was already as close as the fence would allow. Jenna darted her hand into the fence, somehow squeezing her entire hand inside. The skin from her forearm that didn’t feel it wanted to slide through began to bunch around the small chain link opening. She seized the offending Prince, and with a stroke of her thumb, erased its vocal cords. She smoothed the flesh of its windpipe back together before the dog choked to death, and put its fur back. And she got ideas. “I’ll be back for you,” Jenna Swaine whispered. She was the talk of the school in two weeks. She found acceptance into new circles of friends in another two. Doors were opened, and she walked through them, welcomed. Forty pounds down, she stopped hearing the Piggy comments, and watched people eye her in wonder. The cafeteria was no longer one of the circles of Hell for her. She found that she was an excellent actress. She knew that her personality had nothing to do with the friends she was making, or the popularity she was gaining. Rather, it was all just a merry-go-round, spinning and spinning with pretty lights and horses while everyone laughed and laughed. There was nothing to get out of the whole act. Hatred grew within her; she traded sadness and suicide for fakery and flippancy as she peeled off the pounds. Every day started off with a few more ounces off her ass, a few from the chin and face, and some from the stomach, but it was done with a grim satisfaction that made her face into a mask of hate. The four full-length mirrors that made up her closet door stopped mocking her, and began to welcome her. They started calling her Jenna Swaine, and it sounded beautiful. "What are you up to?" Jenna Swaine whirled and found Evan staring at her. She covered herself with a towel, and it worked this time. It wrapped around her easily. "You don't even knock when you come over, do you?" He shrugged. "I never had to wonder if you’d be staring at a mirror, half naked. Why are you staring into the mirror, Patricia?" "Don't call me that." He sneered. "Oh, okay, Jenna." He made the word a mockery. "Jenna the beautiful, you're going to be prom queen, I can feel it." "Fuck you," she said. "If you just came over here to mess with me, you can get out." "How did you do it?" he asked. "What, why does it matter? I feel better than I've ever felt." "Pat- fuck. Your mom is like three hundred pounds, your dad is big too. You've been a big girl all your life. Now this? What's up, are you doing the bulimia thing again? Your parents are worried, and so am I. I want to understand, uh, Jenna, please, I’m your friend. Please, I want to know why you’ve stopped hanging out with Carlos and Dale and I, I want to know why you’re trying to be popular now, I want to know why you went and changed your name. That shit’s not you. Come on, Patricia." "Fuck off, Evan." He went from comforting to serious in a heartbeat "No, you tell me just what it is you're doing to yourself." She shook her head. "You've never been like this. Tell me what it is. Tell me or I tell your parents you're throwing up every night after dinner." Anger rushed through her. "You want to see? You really want to see?" She put a hand on her arm and pulled the flesh down like a sock. She'd never done this much before, it left her muscle and bone exposed, shining and blood-red against gleaming white. She dropped the skin to the floor and reveled in the pain that came with exposing her muscle to the open air. It hit the ground with a wet plop sound. Evan's eyes grew very wide, and his skin went greenish gray. "Oh dear Jesus," he whispered. Then he bolted for the bathroom and vomited everywhere. She heard the sickening splash from down the hall with a twisted grin painted on her otherwise beautiful face. "What's the matter, Evan? Wishing you hadn't asked me now, huh? You pussy, you can't even handle a little skin. When you're done there, get out of my house. I don't want to see you around anymore." Jenna pinched the fading amount of fat under her chin and took off a half ounce. It looked a bit like silly putty in her fingers, clinging to itself like bubblegum. Then she ran a finger over her stomach, collecting the flesh into a little ball. She worked primarily with her right hand, and kept the day’s collection in her left. These days it was getting more and more difficult not to just scoop off a whole mess and toss it to the floor to watch it splatter. She’d conducted experiments on it, but only a little. She wasn’t a naturally curious person, she was a naturally defeated person, and had been since first grade when the teasing started. Still, she wondered how much life her extracted body still had. Would it bleed? There wasn’t a heart to pump any of the blood around. It would die and decay after a little while, wouldn’t it? At first, she couldn’t bear to look at it. She’d simply buried it at the bottom of the trash, or fed bits of it down the garbage disposal and tried not to gag. Afterwards though… She gave some of her flesh carpet burn, then punctured at it with scissors to see a little bit of blood leak out, at the behest of gravity. Somehow when she rearranged herself like this, her blood vessels corrected themselves, as did her nerves. She felt neither the razor burn nor the scissors, though in truth she would have enjoyed such pain. A swipe of flesh off both of her butt cheeks, and some off the sides of her thighs nearly completed the pound ball. It sat dejectedly on the little mailing weight scale. At first it was all cellulite, all little dips and divots, but she took that off first. Now whatever she took was smooth fat, a bit like Jello in that it wobbled precariously on the scale. Last, but certainly not least, Jenna Swaine thinned out her ankles a bit. Men liked girls with thin, feminine ankles. Through her experimental time, Jenna discovered that much of what made her was, in fact, muscle. She peeled her skin off and marveled how much dark red muscle there was to behold. After all, hauling herself around everywhere must take some sort of strength. In large part, she left the muscle alone, with one exception: her thighs. She judged her thighs to be too muscled (who could bear to have thunder thighs, unless you were on the girls’ swim team?), and instead discovered that she could even pull off the muscle. This she redistributed, a bit to her shoulder area, a bit to her pectorals for those high, firm breasts the boys loved. With her day’s work done, Jenna peered at herself in the mirror and smiled. It was solitary work, but rewarding. She even discovered that she enjoyed doing it, toying with herself as though she were a doll. She gathered the ball up, it was a bit like a ball of pizza dough, and put it in her purse. Then she glimpsed into the living room, where her parents sat, mesmerized in front of the television. She headed into the kitchen, then back and down into the basement. The Swaine basement was not a wonderful place. The ceiling was low, possibly conceived of by midgets, and her father hated to come down here for fear of hitting his head on a nail and ending up dead without anyone bothering to come look for him. Consequently, none of them ventured here very much. The extra shelves for food were here, and lots of winter clothing packed into waterproof plastic boxes. Mostly it was odds and ends, only necessary around the holidays, or never to see the light of day until it ended up in a garbage bag. Jenna enjoyed it because her mother never came down here, and her father only rarely. Plus, it had a little closet. She opened the closet, and peered inside. There, attached to the ceiling and back in the corner behind her father’s unused hunting jackets, panted Prince Anthony. “Well hey there, you little fucker,” she said. Prince Anthony only looked at her, as dogs do. Did she have food? No? Might she have food in a minute? Its fur was almost completely gone. She’d discarded that a long while back. The fur only got in the way of the additions. Prince Anthony was, by this point, composed almost entirely of Jenna’s old body mass. It bulged and hung obscenely in places. Its stubby little legs were all but lost in the folds of flesh surrounding the head. It hung from a little mesh hammock, the kind with hooks and bungee cords to help it achieve the best possible help while camping. Its little legs hurried to nowhere, and the hammock bobbed a little. The bungee cords strained to hold up the weight of the new and improved Prince Anthony. Jenna got the pound of flesh from her body and began to smooth it onto the silent dog’s bloated body. She could no longer feel the digestion problems within it; she had taken out and spliced together those parts when she’d brought him here. Then she fed it some water, and a bit of dog food from a big bag even deeper in the corner. It was probably getting hungrier and hungrier, with all of the old Patricia attached to it, but she fed it the same amount every day regardless. “That’s a good boy,” she whispered to the dog, and petted its tiny, pathetic head. The fullback with the chocolate sauce was Greg Alvarado. These days, when she hung out with Jenna Hawkins (the real Jenna, Jenna Hawkins persisted) and her friends, Greg apologized for the chocolate syrup thing every day. “It’s cool Greg,” she’d say every day. One day, they were sitting around eating lunch at prom-queen-Jenna’s house when Greg must have felt the need to apologize again. “Jenna, I’m really sorry about that chocolate sauce thing,” he said in that deep, rumbling voice that comes with being six foot six and two-forty. “I know I say it every day, but, you know, it was really stupid, and I’m really really sorry.” She noticed how his eyes were usually downcast when he gave these heartless, pointless, tedious apologies, day after day. But sometimes his eyes would travel up her legs, over her stomach, and up her boobs until they reached her face a long time later. It didn’t hit her until one day when she watched Greg’s eyes travel over Jenna Hawkins, as she sashayed out of the room in one of her tiny pleated skirts. She’d never had any sort of sex appeal before, and now it had possibilities. They were in the kitchen, scraping off their plates, when she turned to Greg. “Hey Greg,” she said, looking up at him. She was still five foot eight, although perhaps not for much longer. “Yeah?” “You want to come over sometime and hang out after school?” He flinched. “Wha…you mean it?” “Yeah, swing by today, maybe we can catch a movie.” “Shit, yeah, cool. I’m glad you’re not mad about the thing, you know.” She laughed, thinking fake fake fake, I’m such a good actor. “Quit beating yourself up over it, Greg. People can be assholes sometimes.” He smiled, and it pushed his unattractive face into an awkward shape. “Yeah.” She was in his arms, in his front seat. He could almost put his arms around her twice, and that was just awesome, when you came right to it. A steering wheel pressed against her fashionably spongy little butt, and Greg’s face pressed into her fashionably sized breasts. Even with everything turning up, she couldn’t rid herself of the memories, of being called Piggy. She couldn’t get the name Piggy out of her head. Jenna still called her Piggy sometimes and though those times were becoming rarer, she still hated the bitch for it. She stared down at his face, pressed into her smooth, perfect skin, and grimaced. She reached behind her and smoothed the skin of his forearms together. They were touching, it was easy. With her hand against his forehead, she slithered out of the loop of his arms, and he started to panic. “What, Jenna, what, I can’t, my arms,” he stammered. She shook her head and sighed. His voice rose in pitch, and he started to pant, to hyperventilate. “Shut the fuck up,” she hissed, and punched him in the face. She could feel every nerve ending and bone in his face, and her arm. She didn’t pull his flesh, she could control that now. Instead she beat the hell out of him while he cried like a little girl. She punched him until his nose was broken, and she could feel it, like an instinct. She could heal it too, smooth it over. It might take a while, but it was a possibility. A possibility she would never enact. She punched and punched while blood flew from his nose, his lips, and the bashes on his face. His cheekbone broke, along with his jaw. His crying stopped, and his consciousness faded. That was another strange instinct that popped into her head. She knew he couldn’t take much more. “Listen to me Greg,” she said, her voice calm. “You’re not going to say a word about this, or I’ll rearrange every part of your body. Understand me? You got beat up at a restaurant defending me from some jackasses. They were trying to hit on me. Alright?” He nodded drunkenly while a bubble of blood popped out of his nostril. “I’m sorry,” he said, but his voice was thick with half-consciousness and blood. She hitched his shirt in her much reduced hands and hauled him close. “You’ll never understand how you humiliated me. I want you to understand.” He was still nodding, one eye swollen shut, when he passed out. She pulled his arms apart and moved everything back to the way it should be. Then she got out of his pickup truck and walked three miles home. The scrape and clink of silverware on tableware were the only sounds. The Swaine family didn’t have the television on today, which was strange in and of itself. Instead, they ate in complete silence, glancing at one another every so often. It was driving Jenna Swaine more or less out of her mind. “So,” her father said around a giant chunk of roast beef. Jenna looked at him. “So?” she asked, trying not to sound as irritated as she felt. “How was school?” he asked, and forked in a dollop of mashed potatoes, with gravy and butter. Even when she’d been Patricia, she had never really thrown up on purpose. Now though, watching her parents eat, she was almost tempted. Jenna Swaine shrugged and mumbled some nonsense syllables. She picked at her food and stared at the peas moving around on the plate. She destroyed the pea pyramid, and watched them invade her mashed potatoes. “What’s that mean?” her father asked. “Answer your father,” her mother snapped immediately, without giving her an opportunity. Jenna looked between them, back and forth, then back again. “It means nothing really happened,” she said. “Am I on trial or something?” “We uh…” her father said, and scratched the back of his neck. If the answers were there, he hadn’t scratched enough to discover them. “We’re concerned about you,” her mother said. “Well I’m fine,” she replied. “We want to know what you’re doing to yourself,” her mother cried. “Honey please,” her father said. “Tell us!” Jenna screwed up her face in disbelief. “Wait, you mean now you’re all concerned, because I’m not fat anymore? Is that what the problem is?” “Patricia!” her mother cried indignantly. “You were-” “Oh, don’t give me that shit,” Jenna Swaine said. She was beginning to wonder if she were still her parents’ child. “Don’t try to coddle me with that ‘you weren’t fat’ line. I was fat, now I’m not.” “We weren’t going to lie to you,” her father said, with a glance toward her mother to tell her exactly what she shouldn’t say. His tone was soft, not ingratiating or accommodating at all. “This is a radical change for you and we just, we want to know if it’s healthy for you.” “Healthy for me!” Jenna all but screamed. She jerked back in the chair, as though her fat were suddenly back and pushing her away from the table. Then she was on her feet. “Healthy for me? I haven’t missed a meal since I started losing the weight. I swear to fucking Christ, I’ve never felt better than this, and you want to ruin it for me!” Her mother’s mouth was open in a wide ‘O’ of surprise, while a bit of the flesh around her cheeks and jowls jiggled with fury. Color had appeared there, twin splashes of red wine on her pale, pale skin. “Young lady, you sit down this instant,” her father whispered. “I’m not doing anything you say!” she shouted, “I hate you, both of you!” And she, being a barely contained nuclear blast, left before the tears welling up could have a chance to humiliate her. She was done with humiliation. “Hey Jake,” Jenna Swaine said. She was down to one-twenty now, a nice weight that still left her rounded in the right places. She didn’t have an ounce of fat in the places she didn’t want it. Three weeks ago her mother had taken her clothes shopping again, but said nothing. Jenna knew her mother was still furious and confused over whatever happened that night at dinner, and dismissed it out of hand. She wasn’t starving herself or doing the binge/purge thing, so why should her parents care? Sure, the little scraps of clothing she bought almost cost more than the plus sizes from those other stores (ones Jenna Swaine now thought of as ‘fat people places’) but Jenna didn’t care. If her parents cared about her, they should be showering her with gifts, and more than just the clothes she should have been able to fit in all along. “Hey Jenna Two,” he smiled. All that was past now, and she was hanging out at lunch with the other Jenna’s boyfriend, Jake Graves. “You’re on the prom committee right?” she asked. He nodded. “We’ve got the final arrangements on just about everything.” “Awesome!” the bright and cheery was easy now. Jake was hot. More than hot, he had a tattoo, his parents had allowed him to get when he turned sixteen. Everyone in school knew about it, but only his circle of friends had seen it. A few weeks after Greg the Fullback got a hero’s welcome for defending Jenna Swaine, the tattoo had been shown around again. It was a dragon, sort of, composed of spiky little blocks of black all arranged the right way. It seemed to rise up his shoulder, spread out its wings, and turn a speculative eye on whoever might be looking over his shoulder. When he showed it off, Jenna Swaine fell in love with his smooth, tanned skin and muscles moving and bunching with his every movement. It had been lovely, feeling his heartbeat and sensing the blush of health in his body, until Jenna Hawkins had glided up and put her arms around him from behind, stroking him all over. That night, Jenna Hawkins (who was not being called Jenna Original, which in turn had caused Jenna Original to call her Extra Crispy) had looked over her shoulder and smiled derisively. “What kind of tux are you doing?” she asked, with the pre-girlfriend image of Jake fresh in her mind. Now he was like a paper doll, and she could dress him however she pleased. Or undress him at her leisure. “Probably a double breasted, dark purple vest. Jenna’s got purple picked out.” Jake drew out a little photo of the dress, printed out from a website. “That is really pretty,” she beamed. “Leave it to Jenna to pick out the most beautiful dress ever. How could anybody compete? Hey, you don’t mind if I take this so I can order my dress off this site, do you?” He shrugged. “Sure, go for it.” She’d folded it up and stuffed in her backpack when Jenna Hawkins appeared. "Piggy, oh, I mean Jenna, what're you doing with my boyfriend?" "Nothing," Jenna Swaine said, looking at the grass of the school's courtyard. Why the fuck did the goddamn prom queen keep calling her Piggy? The rest of them had forgotten it, or at least stopped calling her names. They were all talking about her in hushed whispers, about how good she looked. Even the social circle of Jenna Hawkins had taken to calling her Jenna Two. Why couldn’t Jenna Swaine overcome this last hurdle? "We were just talking about prom, you know," Jake said. "Oh, who are you going with?" Jenna Hawkins HHasked, and her voice was full of amusement. It seemed to say ‘I've got Jake, so who ever you're going with can't possibly compare.’ She looked from beautiful blonde Jenna Hawkins, with her perpetual strawberries and crème scented hair, to her beautiful boyfriend. "I don't know. I've had a few guys ask me, but I haven't decided." It was a lie. Nobody had asked. She hadn't turned anyone down. She didn't understand why. The possibility of asking a boy, or perhaps her old cache of friends never entered her mind. She sat alone most nights, after her homework and body reduction were done. "Who?" "Don't worry about it, Jenna," she said, standing up, "You worry about Jake and your purple dress and I'll take care of myself alright?” Jenna Hawkins seemed to float above the grass, to glow with overpowering teenage sexiness, and that perfect strawberry and crème scented blonde hair glimmered like divinity. Jenna Swaine, pretender that she was, knew what she had to do. Jenna Swaine felt the triumph, not hers, sure, but how much could that matter? All eyes were on her, and Jake was in the middle of crowning her. Later she'd let him do whatever he wanted, because it wasn't her reputation she was ruining. This perfect mask was going to serve her well. Her shining, styled, stolen strawberry and crème scented hair gleamed in the spotlight. Nobody knew the difference, she was Jenna Hawkins right down to the stolen scalp grafted onto her head. It had been strange stroking her bare, wet skull before replacing her mousy brown head of hair with Jenna Hawkins’s own. Now, the purple dress fit her Jenna-sized body better than it would have fit Jenna Original. She had Jake on her arm, radiating manliness like a Greek god. They matched. Somebody gasped from the darkness. Somebody screamed something, but it was drowned out by the sound of gagging. There was a sickening, unmistakable splash of vomit striking tile floor. A hulked shape lumbered into the hall, and Jenna Swaine squinted into the light. The silhouettes of the other students parted into an aisle, like the red sea. A spotlight went to the figure, until someone screamed. "You bitch," came a cold voice, the voice of the real Jenna. Jenna Hawkins. "You cunt. Come out here, Piggy." "What?" Jake said from beside her. "Jenna?" He turned towards Jenna Swaine. “That sounds like you. Wait…” "No! I'm Jenna!” Jenna Swaine almost shouted at him in her desperation, “Give me that crown, do it now." The real Jenna, who was no longer herself either, screamed from where the crowd was giving her a wide berth. It was high-pitched, with a lost edge of sanity. The scream turned into a few gibbered words, then trailed off into laughter. Jenna Swaine took the crown out of Jake's hands and put it on her head. A light was back on the other one, the monster she'd made. The spotlight trembled against the hulk of flab and flesh she’d sculpted out of the prom queen bitch. Jenna Swaine hopped off the stage and went straight for it. "I'm queen now, I'm queen! No more Piggy, not ever again!" The massed form of fat and skin loped towards Jenna Swaine. It reached out with an arm that had too many joints and caressed the stolen hair. Somewhere in there was a load of the old Patricia, and somewhere in a dank basement the head of a dead dog lay amongst pools of dark, vile liquids. This monster had only stumps for legs; Jenna Swaine had stolen the feet and thrown them away. She'd used the shins for extra forearm joints. Apparently she'd made it stronger than she thought. Set in the middle of the ragged scraps of purple dress and skin and flesh sat a pale, perfect face. A quick swipe of the disjointed looking arm later, and the little diadem was skidding across the floor. "This is mine, you stole it," the monster said. "You'll always be little Piggy. You were nothing and you're still nothing, that's all you are, don't you see that?" The monster was ripe with the smell of decay and richer, more potent reeking. It's Jenna-face turned into a mask of pain and rage. The whole evening was totally screwed. Jenna Swaine, Patricia/Piggy looked at Jake, who had wet his pants and was slowly backing away now. She looked at her beautiful friends, who were staring with horrid fascination. She looked at Evan, and at her old friends. Evan shook his head, then moved into the crowd and disappeared. "You ruined everything," The Jenna-face said, then latched her elongated fingers around Jenna Swaine's pretty neck. She noticed the ragged flaps of skin at the wrists where she'd bound it, bleeding onto the prom dance floor. “What am I supposed to do?” Jenna screamed at the monster. “You’re supposed to totter around and squeal,” the monster rasped. “Forgetting your place. It’s all fucked up because of you, Piggy.” Jenna’s face nestled between mounds of flesh held a strange mocking tone. Jenna Swaine stared into the horrified crowd. Most of them were lost in darkness, but those faces she could see confirmed how she felt. Nothing mattered now. The only thing she cared about was tearing this bitch apart, piece by piece. She dove at the thing in the center of the gym floor. No one moved to stop her. Jenna screamed and pulled off the monster's flesh, handful by handful. She screamed, and that was the cue for a chorus of other screams. The hands disappeared first, skidding on the waxed floor, then the forearms, the arms at the shoulders, then gobbets of fat and organs and skin. It went on for minutes, where the only sounds were the sloshing and ripping of the monster she’d created. Blood poured out in gouts onto the floor, soaking everything. When it was over, Patricia-Jenna-Piggy Swaine was soaked with gore, and knee deep in piles of skin. Everyone still left in the hall watched silently as she left the building with Jenna's pretty face in her hands, cradling it like a doll. The tears dripped from one Jenna’s cheeks to another. |
| Brent Meske currently teaches English in Korea. In between correcting Koreans on their terrible grammar, he writes and sees the world. His stories and poems can be found at Crimson Highway, The Eloquent Atheist, and Magazine of the Dead. He will also appear soon in Bewildering Stories. His views of the world can be found at: www.themeske.com/pages/live.htm |
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