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Mad Poster
Original Poster
#1 Old 8th Jan 2008 at 12:54 AM
Default This Skin
I hope that I wasn't too subtle in this one; I wanted the problem to be clear, but I didn't want to come out and say it. Hope you enjoy; feedback is always appreciated.

--

He doesn’t have a problem.

People never say that he does, but he knows that they think it. He sees them eye his emaciated frame up and down in a manner that makes him feel not unlike a piece of meat sized up for purchase, sees the wheels in their brains fairly turning as they judge him, sees them shake their heads in the self-righteous pity he doesn’t deserve when realization finally dawns.

He doesn’t deserve their pity because he’s done nothing to earn it. And even if he had done something (he hasn’t; he does not have a problem), he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want the sympathy of the judgmental passers-by who have nothing better to do than make false, unfair assumptions about him. He doesn’t even want the pity of his family.

He doesn’t have a problem, though, so it’s not an issue.

He tries not to think about it and often succeeds, but it’s those wide-eyed stares from the people too half-assed to meet his gaze that seem to bore into his very soul while he lies awake at night. He doesn’t have a problem, but they often make him think about what life would be like if he did.

It wouldn’t be much different than now, he can’t help but muse. Sure, there would be more therapists, more attention, more drugs (truth be told, he wouldn’t mind that)… but the differences would be small in comparison to the similarities. Small, half-digested meals jettisoned into the toilet not long after consumption, searching gazes from his friends and what little family he has left, too many cigarettes to maintain his not-girlish-enough figure…

If he had a problem, life wouldn’t be that different.

But he doesn’t have a problem, so it doesn’t matter.

And he’ll never have a problem, therefore it never will.

Before the car crash, his mother used to say that if you could pinch an inch, you were overweight. He knows that the statistics contradict her mantra, knows that his doctor says he’s far from overweight, knows that everyone says she was wrong… but how could she be wrong? How could the mother he lost at seven, the mother whose every word was and continues to be his gospel, ever be wrong?

She isn’t wrong. No matter what everyone else says, he won’t let her be. He wants, no, he needs her to be right.

He finds himself standing at the mirror often, self-conscious and shirtless. He grips a stretch of the fleshy skin, ashen due to working late and too much coffee, between the bottom of his ribcage and the sharp, jutting line of his hipbone and grimaces. He’s seen worse, he’s seen far worse, but this still isn’t good enough. He doesn’t measure it because he doesn’t want to know, but he knows enough. He knows that it’s too much.

He doesn’t have a problem, and even if he did, it wouldn’t matter.

But this? This matters.

Sometimes he looks at himself when he stands in front of the cracked, half-length mirror in the urban studio apartment he rents. He doesn’t just give himself the once-over though, not just a cursory glance like the damned people on the street- he really looks at himself.

He isn’t remarkable in any way. Dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin slightly mottled from teenage acne and unimpressive but not repulsive features construct his head, but his shoulders are sharp and seem to jut from his flesh like bird bones. His chest is thin and he can count every one of the ribs that heave in time with his breath- there isn’t an ounce of muscle mass on him. However, even beneath the protruding bones and the sharp exterior, he’s nothing special.

Beneath all of this, he’s ugly. Body and soul, he’s ugly. He’s sure of it. He doesn’t need to be told. This skin that he’s in is ugly.

His sister says that he’s too thin.

He tells her he doesn’t have a problem. She worries too much.

In truth, he isn’t thin enough.

A few weeks pass and he’s working late again, typing furiously on an article for which he missed the deadline. His eyes ache from the strain of staring at the artificial light of the computer screen, but he needs to finish this. His editor earlier asked him where he was, and for that he couldn’t concoct a sufficient response.

He had been at home doing what he always does; smoking, watching television, watching the world pass him by and wondering why he couldn’t be happy like everybody else. He supposes that, in the perpetual game of cards that life was, he simply has a bad hand. In the grand scheme of things, he had drawn the short straw.

He doesn’t like it and he sure as hell doesn’t think it’s fair, but that’s the way things are. They won’t change and he can’t change them because nothing ever does, but for now, he’ll take what he can get.

He had told his editor that he had a problem with his car, but he was lying. It wasn’t something unusual.

He doesn’t have a problem- not with his car, sure as hell not with himself. And now, it matters.

He loses track of the time as he sifts through city records and logs of past interviews for further information, but sooner than he knows it, his editor approaches and leans comfortably against his cluttered desk. “You’ve been looking kind of thin lately,” he remarks, calculating teal eyes traversing his skeletal frame.

And somehow, he feels violated. Somehow, beneath this man’s knowing gaze, he feels stripped. Somehow, he feels as though each and every thing about him, each and every thing he keeps hidden, has been laid bare. Somehow, he feels naked.

He chuckles and shrugs off the remark. He doesn’t have a problem, and he’s not going to let this son of a bitch make him think he does. “Caffeine will do that to you,” he responds jokingly. What else is he to say to a jibe like that?

“I know what you mean,” his editor responds, a sly smile curving up his lips, thinned by age. He extends a tangerine that must have been in his hand the whole time but that he failed to notice, gesturing for him to take it. “You look like you could use this more than me.”

“Thanks,” he says hesitantly.

And he takes it, even though he doesn’t want it. He can’t refuse it, and somehow, even beneath the unflattering florescent lights and in his talon-like fingers, it looks appealing. The skin is smooth and orange, glistening with moisture and tantalizing him with the lure of the succulent fruit beneath.

When his editor finally returns to his office and closes the blinds, he rises to his feet and navigates across the crowded copy-room to the small canteen where a private trash receptacle is located. He stands in front of it, warring with himself as he turns the luscious fruit over and over within his hand.

He’s been living on coffee and cigarettes for longer than he cares to remember, and because of it, this simple fruit is threatening to undo everything he works for.

The pangs he won’t admit are hunger dulled by too much caffeine and nicotine return with a vengeance, threatening to bend him double. He wants to eat the tangerine, but he can’t. He doesn’t have a problem, but if he eats this one thing, he will.

And he doesn’t want that.

Somehow the fruit becomes ugly; the formerly appealing orange skin is rotten and mottled, an overripe stench rising from the inner flesh like congealed blood. This thing in his hand is an abomination and should be as far from his lips, much less his stomach, as possible.

He doesn’t understand how people live like this.

He has his reasons, and he wishes he didn’t.

Disgusted, he deposits the fruit in the rubbish bin.

Suddenly, he’s not really hungry anymore.

Do I dare disturb the universe?
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Field Researcher
#2 Old 21st Jan 2008 at 8:26 AM
This is a fantastic piece. Maybe it's just that I've been reading a lot of his work lately, but your style reminds me of Chuck Palahniuk's--abrupt, stylishly repetitious of certain phrases, and many one-sentence paragraphs. I enjoyed the way each fact of his life, of his past was embedded into a thought rather than taking the reader aside to explain. The story runs smoother for it. I also must say I'm jealous of your ability to write an actual short story, as in being able to cut off at a certain point while still having explained everything succinctly.
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