inez is forgotten

Contentment keeps you curled up around your belly all night. Excess in food and excess in drink mean you wake, disoriented, several times through the night. Each time you are surprised and pleased to discover a wonderful warm meal packing your body, the bulge being lower and less pronounced each time. Gurgling as blissful as a kitten’s purr draws you back to sleep.

But the morning brings with it a temple-squeezing hangover. You squint one eye open to find that the traitorous curtains have let through one chink of late-morning sun, and that bastard has found your face.

You roll over and your belly flops with you. Fluids, liquids and solids gush into place, bringing a queasy restless sensation down deep. A risky spurt of air between cheeks is silent, but the stink of it makes your cheeks burn. Inez was so beautiful. You are so beautiful. Why does the combination produce something so rancid?

I’m not in the makeshift bed, but you can hear me humming a song as I fry breakfast. The smell of bacon approaching a chemical composition of 50% carbon makes your tummy emit another warning groan. It demands emptying before it will take on more.

So you slip away. Having slept off two people’s binges and gained a smattering of fat and a hanging belly, you’re a little unsteady on your feet. Pfffrts pepper your tip-toeing trail to the bathroom.

She’s coming. Oh God, she’s coming. You make it—barely—before aching guts open up and Inez sees daylight again. Soft as tears, she rains down in the bowl, not even kept long enough to firm up ready to face the outside world. You shit out your soft-scoop would-be lover and feel nothing but relief.

After the torrent thins and stops you clean up, flush, and wash your hands. As you do you study yourself in the mirror. Hangover-sleep and smudged makeup compete with the healthy flush that living food gives you. One quick face-wash later and you’re feeling much better. When you step back from the mirror you can see more of yourself.

And there is more of yourself. Will you ever not be fascinated by the way your own body feeds on its prey? It has seized on the chance to undo your good work losing weight. Inez’s legacy is an extra bounce to your tits, the cutest crease in new fat wrapping your waist, a distinct rounding of your hips, and an oil slick draining towards a sewage processing plant.

“Rey,” you hear me say in the other room. “Breakfast is— oh, you’re not here.”

“Coming,” you call, turning your body to leave but not actually ready to stop staring at yourself. The angle you’re now standing at shows you just how magnificently your butt has filled out. You simply have to slap it: a sharp sound in the small bathroom. Ripples in your flesh take ages to die down. You do it again.

When you do finally open the door you jump from surprise. I’m standing there with a mug of tea. I smirk as I hand it to you. “You’re radiant. I wish I could have been in there with you.”

“This one was private. She wasn’t pretty coming out.”

I don’t argue, just lean forward to give you a kiss, then lead you to the kitchen-diner. Breakfast is already waiting: the dining table is heavy with toast and butter, fried potatoes, sausages, hash browns (because fried potatoes weren’t enough), and the bacon you first smelled. Your mouth floods and you sit down.

Inez is forgotten like she never existed. The hunger that burned her up has new prey. I watch you set upon thickly-buttered toast and pause in knocking up another round of sausages. Once you eat me, I too might become just a fragment of the past: a dress size you decide to lose on a whim. It makes me feel transient and you seem impossibly solid. Maybe you’re the only real thing in this world, and the rest of us are put here to feed you.

I don’t know. All I know as you make eye contact with me and raise an interrogative eyebrow is that I belong here in the eye of your storm. Every day I feel joy, and even on my last day, when that hunger turns on me, I will know with iron certainty that I am exactly where I am meant to be.

You take another slice of toast.