Inkblood

Inspired by Laurie Halse Anderson's 'Winter Girls'. A short story about a girl with an eating disorder. Can be read together or separately with Deathfruit.

Short, heavy breaths gasped through her chest, rocking her ribs backwards and forwards like a rusty grandfather clock. Her nails dug into the mattress, pushing through the stark white fibres that weaved a mesh underneath her not-thin frame. Cold sweat leaked through her porcelain pores like frozen tears, clinging to flesh like a second skin.

My god. She choked, throat closing up from the scent of her putrid living, rotting between the wooden floorboards. The list of failures she had scratched into the yellowing plaster lingered like microscopic parasites, chewing their way through her consciousness as she sleptsleptslep.

Or tried to sleep.

The pillows were like bricks, harsh and rugged against the concaves of her cheeks, the stuffed toys from a long-lost childhood stared at her with empty, dead eyes, stitches were their hearts should be. A vile stench from The Drawer curdled the air, the stale ache from food left untouched in shame crawling up her senses and drowning them in bulimic bacteria and vulture viruses. She imagined the hundreds and thousands of pixels and particles, mulching and munching and multiplying, pushing against its constraints, reaching out for her, always reaching-

Her fist slammed against The Drawer with an angry splash of hatred spewing from her tendons. Again and again the bonefatskin beat against the sinews of catastrophe and hunger, devouring her obsessions and compulsions with the repetitive knocking as if some satanic flesh vampire was waiting on the other side, just waiting to be let in.

Over the years she had carefully written out lyrical quotations and heartfelt confessions, sticking them perfectly parallel to one another on her walls, hiding the staring blankness of the white paint from smothering her in her sleep. They had offered her some kind of halfway empathy at times, but now it seemed as if she hadn’t been neat and creative at all in her writing, having instead scrawled out the words of her own weakness and thrown them precariously onto the plaster, sweat and saliva making them stick. Fluid leaked from the words, making the inkblood run down the walls like the inkblood that was spat from her skin when the slickslick kiss of the slickslick knife drew pretty patterns between the goosebumbs on her bloated-barelythere stomach.

The heavy hum of buzzing bees pressed up against her skull and she feared that maybe they were blaming her for their demise. A man with a brain bigger than her stomach once prophesised with crystal balls and microscopes that when the bees died, all the manbeings and humankind would falldropsplat a mere onetwothreefour years later. She cried then, big obese tears stumbling down her gauntfat cheeks, because she knew that the bees were dying because she had eaten all their honey.

Light started to peak through her curtains, timid and wary of what it might find behind the drapes. When it saw a beating heart, it breathed a sigh of relief and began to steadily rise into the winter sky. She watched its ascent into the heavens, jealous, and then swam to the drawer that was filled with the non-edible lies. A mirror tried to catch her attention with its wings and thunder, but she felt guilty at seeing that poor, skinny child trapped behind the glass frame being suffocated with her failures. Maybe once she had come back, drowning in her sweat and incantations, she could present the child with another day of promises and wishes. Maybe that would keep the child from screaming unimaginable things at her. She didn’t like it when she did that. Made it hard to hear her own unimaginable things.

There used to be others dwelling with her, but she couldn’t remember their shapes or words, just their intentions and lies. Only when they fell into slumberland, dreaming of the aboveworld, was she able to unscrew the latches down into the underworld, the extra-small needtobebetterland. She stepped into her baggy, material skin for the day, made to hide the whiteasbone straightjacket that kept her warm, and set her speed to ‘neverfastenough’. As she walked, she waved to the ghosts and beasts and salivating shadows that stalked and judged her. I’m trying, she whistled to them. Not hard enough, they would howl.

And as the sun slowly came to a wobbly stand, noting how flat its horizon was this morning, she pounded her feet into the pavement, hoping that if she stepped on enough cracks, maybe the world would end and she could finally go to sleep.

Author's Note

This can be read as a sister-story to Deathfruit, or as a separate story.