Deathfruit

Inspired by Laurie Halse Anderson's 'Winter Girls', this is a short story about a girl suffering from an eating disorder and depression, stylistically written to match her mental state.

The light coming through her window is a cold, clinical grey. It scratches her bare arms, clawing through the thin glass of her bedroom-shaped coffin. She watches the lines and shapes of non-sunlight march across the floor, giving the shadows a wide berth. Ghosts live in those shadows and don’t like to be disturbed.

Footsteps seem to come towards her, but after a few held-breath seconds, she realises that it was just her heart beating away the cold. It gave up momentarily.

Where is everyone? Gone. Out. Hiding. Having something resembling fun, drinking something resembling alcohol and popularity. She can’t remember their names anymore, jumbled letters and linguistic sounds meshed together in some closed compartment in her furry mind. Their faces stick to the back of her marble eyes though, bitter, empty and angry. Always angry. Angry at her and what she does. What she doesn’t do. What she wants to do but is usually too scared to do it.

A pomegranate is perched by her blueing toes, rocking with the missing sunshine. She can’t remember buying it or washing it or wanting it, but she can remember the tale she was told one lesson long ago about gods and underworlds and hauntings and promises. A girl stolen to the land of nonliving, nonhoping, grey and black, who ate enough seeds of the fruit to remain there for half of a year, but not enough to be chained there for all time. If she ate enough seeds to last eternity, maybe a rotting hand will reach up from beneath the floor, beneath the basement, beneath the bones and worms and beetles and grip her fatskinny ankle and tug her down and down and down until she was choked with silent screams of dying and death and dead.

Or maybe she wanted to go to hell instead, because at least then the raging fires of sin might warm her greyscale skin up for a minute. Or two. Three would be nice.

Cars drive by outside of her glass cement coffin, and she imagines that heavy carcasses are draped over the bonnets and bull bars and cracked plastic windshields, blood tripping into the engine and making it stall at the traffic lights. The plump drivers don’t stop, veins filled with salt and caffeine, children filled with genetically modified plastic happymeals. No one notices but her. She always notices.

Ruby pearls leak their blood onto her carpet as she stares down at them. She can’t remember ripping into the fruit, but skin is under her blue nails, the flesh and juice spilling across her thighs. Her tongue thirsts but her stomach skips a beat. The heart gives up fighting the cold, slumping down behind her ribs, leaning against her pink lungs for support and warmth.

A scale stares at her from the corner, scuffed and bruised from the times it had been thrown onto the cold pavement. It always found its way back like a homing pigeon or a knife-crime stalker. The small sphere of perfection glares at her with a smug shine, the strict needle pointing up at it to emphasis the point where she was aiming to be. No other number was good enough.

Considering it was so perfect, its purpose waiting to be fulfilled, it liked to allude her body for too long, it seemed. Tricksy and spy-like, it snuck away from her every time… but she was catching up. At first she didn’t get it right, but after trytrytrytrytrytrying again, she was getting quicker. Better. She would be awarded her round, circular medal soon enough.

Never soon enough.

White post-it notes whispered at her from their place behind the door. They had been there for so long now, short centuries, wide seconds, plain and obvious. No one looked behind the door, which was silly, because that’s where things always hide when they don’t want to be found. Black felt-tip reiterated past thoughts and screams, pushing them into her weak skull with knitting needles, sewing the goodbad intentions into her nerve cells and grey pulsing mass. Each time her blood thinned and pumped through her spaghetti arteries and veins (a for away from the heart and v for her vibrant verisimilitude of a notsoperfect mask), the post-it notes stuck to her insides like thick cholesterol and fat and white blood cells and tiny beetles that gnawed and gnawed until the holes were the only things left.

Next to her death fruit was a small plastic container. She couldn’t remember whether it was half-full or half-empty because the person stuck inside her grumbled and mumbled and groaned and moaned all the time, whether she had consumed something or not. Maybe she hadn’t taken a thing and she always thought like this. Or maybe she was perfectly sane and this was something completely out of the ordinary. Extra ordinary. More than ordinary. Better than ordinary? Most definitely better than ordinary. She hated being ordinary. Ordinary meant fat and failure and f**k-up and full up on false ideas and frantic choices and fits of full-cost shopping and full-fat butter and fists for fighting. So maybe she did swallow each little crazy skittle, fat candy seeds meant to bloom in her belly and make happiness and love and rose-coloured lifestyle choices. She wondered when they would start to work. Spiders were starting to crawl out from under her bed and wardrobe and desk, seeping and scuttling from the wallpaper, attracted by the scent of sugar and juice and blood and death.

She watched them for a while, days she guessed, as they etched a trail over her carpet, hiking their long eight legs towards the rotting pomegranate. When they got too close, she reached for the nearest thing in a blind scurry. With a vicious slash, she slammed the weapon in her hand down onto the creatures. They didn’t die, they just broke off into smaller black dots. They began to shriek and spin in tight circles like puppies chasing their tails.

She must have accidentally gotten more death juice on her fingers for red ruby crimson was marching down her fingerprints, dripping dripdrop dropping onto her processed paper thighs. The drops formed words across the lines in her flesh, rhyming words and riddles that twisted and befuddled her crazy candy mind. Not wanting to see the words anymore " she didn’t want red post-it notes made from deathfruit on her thighs, they belonged behind the door, black-hole-eyes could see the words if they broke through the thick plasterglass of her coffinroom and that would cause a right tiff with her celestially-genetically bestowed jailors/parents " she leant down, her spine arching with a rusty-hinge-groan, and licked up the bloodjuice with her pink tongue. The words tasted metallic and dirty and personal, not the taste of deathfruit flesh but the taste of deadbody flesh. She looked at her fingerprints and realised they were misshapen now. The veins on her wrist were red not blue, which was odd, but much nicer to look at.

She was getting colder. Damn non-sunlight. Maybe if she had opened the blinds it would be brighter. Or maybe the bodies of car-crashes and hit-and-runs from the long stream of cars outside were clouding the view and only the reek of death could shine through, greying up her glass walls and glass windows and glass, slumping heart.

Feeling sorry for the confused spiders, still spinning, she knocked over the plastic pandora’s box and let them suck on the crazy candies too. She wasn’t a greedy person. Greed was sin. Greed was fat. Fat was sin. Sin was fat. Sin was her. Sin was cold. She was cold. She couldn’t remember where she had left her jumper. The spiders leapt on the bitter skittles, munching on the chemicals and mathematical equations that made up the substances that were wheelspinning through her a-for-away-from-heart and v-for-i’m-not-very-hungry-thanks.

A horrible sound cried out from all around her and the nonsunlight disappeared entirely. Greyness shuffled in from all sides and she saw that thinthinthin fractures covered her glass coffinroom, letting the underworld crawl through. The spiders all turned at once and marched towards the window, and she decided to follow them. Her legs didn’t want to move though " her heart wanted a quick nap, she decided " so she dragged her deathfruit bloodjuice covered body towards the biggest rip in her walls.

As she fell into the torn glass, ready to let her bones stitch up the gap, she realised she had forgotten one thing. With the movement of perfectly trained habit, she forced her broken, pomegranate-stained hand to reach out and grab the cool metal. The spiders jumped onto her v’s and a’s, and helped her carry the weight of the scales. As the colour crazy candies stuck in her throat, the periodic table bubbling up to rot around her teeth, she allowed herself one last glance.

The black arrow remained pointing to the sphere of unattainable, perfect, nonsunlight, smug zero.

Author's Note

The perspective of this is to be fairly literal and straightforward in the social and psychological observations one might make when not quite in touch with the supposed 'reality'.