Remember the surgeons advising operations to remove the excess skin, to suck out the fat around her eyes, so that she might be able to see? From around her ears, so that she might be able to hear? How you hated the doctors for trying to decide in what ways our daughter could be beautiful, how she should see the world, and how the world should see her!
Remember the difficulty of your labor, and how at first the doctors mistook our daughter for a breach birth, but then came no foot, no other hard limb or promontory leading the way?
And what was stuck instead: Only this plump fluff of flesh, these great greased rolls of fat. Only flush skin in handfuls, leaving nothing for the doctors to do but tug it free.
And what a baby contained within! What gigantic girth of daughter, her face hung with meat, her fingers barely able to poke free from the folds of her wrists!
Remember how you were too weak to hold her weight for the first months of her life, how the only way to feed her was to bring your breast to her buried mouth, instead of the other way around? How at bath-time we would have to stretch her skin tight so the other might wash between the furrows, so that together we might clear the lint-slop between, might scrub off the mold that grew in every hanging crevice?
Remember the surgeons advising operations to remove the excess skin, to suck out the fat around her eyes, so that she might be able to see? From around her ears, so that she might be able to hear? How you hated the doctors for trying to decide in what ways our daughter could be beautiful, how she should see the world, and how the world should see her!
No, you said. She will eat what she wants to eat, until she fills out that great skin of hers, until she stretches it taut, until jagged lines of purpled flesh mark new territories upon the body of her person.
My daughter could fill a room, you said, and still I would love her. Still I would think she was perfect.
Remember saying these words?
Tell me you remember. Turn around from the stove, from the meat-stink you're making, and tell me.
Remember how she grew after you said them? How her head swelled so she needed a brace to support it, and yet there was no brace that could fit the trunk of her neck? How she toddled, now a worm the size of a bulldog, buried in rolls of flesh that restricted her movement, that reduced her to a slither, to lunging and dragging across the carpet?
Blind and deaf, mumbling behind the choke of her own face, she cried for help, but all we heard was a muffle, a moan, and still you refused, still you said she was your pretty darling, your shining star.
Remember how you buried your face in her belly, laughing and tickling her with your lips? How you said she was so delicious you wanted to eat her? Or how the salt-shame of her tears collected in the shelves of her face, left their etchings for us to find later with the washcloth?
How much worse was it for her then, because we pretended for so long? When the doctors finally cut her free of the gorge of herself, when they returned her to us, wrapped in bandages, mutilated of face, but freed of the weight of her origin?
How much worse when the bandages came off, and we saw what skinny monster your honest love had made?
And how hungry she was then. And how little food there was left in the stores, the depleted and shuttered supermarkets. And how dry your breast, empty as our larder.
And then what? How to feed our daughter, who you still loved, whose forgiveness you wished only to earn?
Remember how once, long before this grease-spat daughter, now munching and chewing in her highchair, remember how once you said my legs were my best attribute, that they were where you began falling in love with me? That you fell in love with me starting from my feet and working your way up?
Remember how thick the muscle of my thighs, how fine the curve of my calf?
Please: Say you remember.
Say you remember, then look again upon the re-fleshed face of our daughter: As awful as it was to make a monster of her once, how much worse is to have made her one all over again?
And only you can stop this, because who am I, without these legs?
Who am I, without these hands, taken from me by you and given to her, in the absence of all our gifts she deserved instead?
Who I am: I am still her father. I am still your husband, your partner, a half wedded to match your half. Even if you have made me less of a man to make her more of a daughter, still I claim the whole of what is mine.
Come close, my one time love. Come closer and find out that our ravening daughter is not the only one with teeth, nor the only one who hungers.
Closer now. Closer. So close you can taste it: All that's happened to me, to you, to our daughter, this fat wedge shoved between us until we splintered. Taste how soon I will tear you both free, and how I will wrench her life from inside yours, where still you are wrapped tight in the weight of all she once was.
Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found, a fiction collection forthcoming in Fall 2010 from Keyhole Press, as well as The Collectors, a novella, and How the Broken Lead the Blind, a chapbook of short fiction. He is also the editor of The Collagist and can be found online at www.mdbell.com. The above short is from a recently completed novella. Other excerpts are forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Unsaid, Sleepingfish, Puerto del Sol, and other magazines.
