"And that'll fit you?" her mother inquired. She was quickly losing this little battle of wills.
Her parents had always been so conciliatory about her, apologetic about the fact that the bathtub was her enemy at eight years old. They would never come right out and say they were sorry about feeding Patricia so much food, but the worried glances and gifts and half-sorrowful tones were all there.
"It'll fit," Jenna-no-longer-Patricia Swaine said. Her voice felt stronger.
"Patricia," her mother said, then fell silent. After a few moments she piped back up, "The price tags on these things are outlandish."
Now Patricia/Jenna did roll her eyes. "If you don't want me to buy this stuff, or you're not going to pay for it or whatever, just say so okay?"
"I don't want you to buy this stuff," her mother said weakly.
"Fine," Jenna Swaine spat, and threw down the pleated skirt she was perusing over. She had been contemplating what size number she would end up at...perhaps a three? Wouldn't that be just like winning the lottery, to end up at size three?
"Let's just go then," Jenna Swaine said, "I'll find a way to pay for these, if dad's eighty thousand a year salary isn't going to cut a few hundred dollars for his daughter's first happy clothing purchases in her entire life."
She noted her newfound ability to pick through the tiny aisles without knocking clothes on the floor, while her mother had a much harder time. A good thirty feet away, and nearly out the door of the The Gap, her mother called her.
"Patricia, stop."
A muttered apology later, Jenna Swaine, now no longer the daughter that her parents had raised, walked out of the shop with two shopping bags full of clothes. They deposited these in the minivan, and came back for more.
Jenna-not-Patricia Swaine figured out that she could work bone just like flesh, only a little tougher. She considered switching into a sculpture class next semester, and smiled. With that, she bent her wrist bones back until her hand flopped at an awkward angle. She felt the tendons and ligaments stretching painfully. She lost the ability to use the hand, until she bent it back the way it'd been before. It wasn't as easy as skin and fat; you couldn't just slop it around like oil paint.
There was a little dog on Jenna Swaine's walk to school. It was a yappy little thing, and she had been sticking her tongue out at the thing for years. Since she lived in a tiny city, it was unavoidable that she was forced to walk by Prince Anthony every single day of her life since age six, when she began walking to school with Evan.
...No, the owners had had another evil yappy dog before Prince Anthony.
Patricia shook her head. "Doesn't matter," she mumbled to herself.
Prince Anthony, precisely the size of a large cat and with an attitude of a lion, would come flying out of nowhere every morning and surprise the devil out of her. The thing yapped and yapped.
Only, now she was no longer Patricia.
She was Jenna, goddamnit. So, one morning about three weeks (and over twenty pounds) into her weight loss/body sculpting program, she approached Prince Anthony's house with a sneer.
The little dog came rocketing out of nowhere, barking and snarling at her.
Jenna Swaine, who would never be Patricia again, knelt by the little beast. It barked and barked, in its lion wannabe voice. To think she had ever been surprised into jumping by this tiny, ineffectual thing. After all, with the digestion problems it had, it would be dead within a month.
Digestion problems, Jenna Swaine thought. Now how could she possibly know that? It didn't matter, she knew anyhow. She could almost see the blood running through its little veins, and feel its muscles protesting in certain places. It had injured its left back leg once upon a time, and it hadn't healed back properly.
"Come here, you little fucker," she cooed to it, as sweet as she could manage. Prince Anthony was already as close as the fence would allow. Jenna somehow squeezed her entire hand inside the little diamond of chain link. The skin from her forearm that didn't feel it wanted to slide through began to bunch around the small opening. She seized the offending Prince, and with a stroke of her thumb, erased its vocal cords. She smoothed the flesh of its windpipe back together before the dog choked to death, and put its fur back.
And she got ideas.
"I'll be back for you," Jenna Swaine whispered.
She was the talk of the school a week after silencing Prince Anthony. She found acceptance into new circles of friends in another two. Doors were opened and she walked through them, welcomed. Forty pounds down, she stopped hearing the Piggy comments, and watched people eye her in wonder. The cafeteria was no longer one of the circles of Hell.
She found that she was an excellent actress. She knew her personality had nothing to do with the friends she was making, or the popularity she was gaining. Rather, it was all just a merry-go-round, spinning and spinning with pretty lights and horses while everyone laughed and laughed. Yet it wasn't real. There was nothing meaningful to get out of the whole act.
Hatred grew within her; she traded sadness and suicide for fakery and flippancy as she peeled off the pounds. Every day started off with a few more ounces off her ass, a few from the chin and face, and some from the stomach, but it was done with a grim satisfaction that made her face into a mask of hate. The four full-length mirrors that made up her closet door stopped mocking her, and began to welcome her.
They started calling her Jenna Swaine, and it sounded beautiful.
"What are you up to?"
Jenna Swaine whirled and found Evan staring at her. She covered herself with a towel, and it worked this time. It wrapped around her easily.
"You don't even knock when you come over, do you?"
He shrugged. "I never had to wonder if you'd be staring at a mirror, half naked. Why are you staring into the mirror, Patricia?"
"Don't call me that."
He sneered. "Oh, okay, Jenna." He made the word a mockery. "Brand new Jenna, too good for her name and too good for her friends."
"Fuck you," she said. "If you just came over here to mess with me, you can get out."
"How did you do it?" he asked.
"What? Why does it matter? I feel better than I've ever felt."
"Pat–fuck. Your mom is like three hundred pounds. Your dad is big too. You've been a big girl all your life. Now this? What's up? Are you doing the bulimia thing again? Your parents are worried, and so am I. Jenna, please, I'm your friend. Please. That shit's not you. Come on, Patricia."
She'd stopped hanging out with Carlos and Dale and Evan now that people were asking her to hang out with them instead of her sullenly tagging along.
"Fuck off, Evan."
He went from comforting to serious in a heartbeat "No, you tell me just what it is you're doing to yourself."
She shook her head.
"You've never been like this. Tell me what it is. Tell me or I tell your parents you're throwing up every night after dinner."
Anger rushed through her. "You want to see? You really want to see?" She put a hand on her arm and pulled the flesh down like a sock. She'd never done this much before. It left her muscle and bone exposed, shining and blood-red against gleaming white. She dropped the skin to the floor and reveled in the pain that came with exposing her muscle to the open air. It hit the ground with a wet plop.
Evan's eyes grew very wide, and his skin went greenish gray.
"Oh dear Jesus," he whispered. Then he bolted for the bathroom and vomited everywhere. She heard the sickening splash from down the hall with a twisted grin painted on her otherwise beautiful face.
"What's the matter, Evan? Wishing you hadn't asked me now, huh? You pussy, you can't even handle a little skin. When you're done there, get out of my house. I don't want to see you around anymore."
Jenna pinched the fading amount of fat under her chin and took off a half ounce. It looked a bit like silly putty in her fingers, clinging to itself like bubblegum. Then she ran a finger over her stomach, collecting the flesh into a little ball. She worke
d primarily with her right hand, and kept the day's collection in her left. These days it was getting more and more difficult not to just scoop off a whole mess and toss it to the floor to watch it splatter.
She'd conducted experiments on it, but only a little. She wasn't a naturally curious person. She was a naturally defeated person, and had been since first grade when the teasing started. Still, she wondered how much life her extracted body still had. Would it bleed? There wasn't a heart to pump any of the blood around. It would die and decay after a little while, wouldn't it?
At first, she couldn't bear to look at it. She'd simply buried it at the bottom of the trash, or fed bits of it down the garbage disposal and tried not to gag. Afterwards, though...
She gave some of her flesh carpet burn, then punctured at it with scissors to see a little bit of blood leak out, at the behest of gravity. Somehow when she rearranged herself like this, her blood vessels corrected themselves, as did her nerves. She felt neither the razor burn nor the scissors, though in truth she would have enjoyed such pain.
A swipe of flesh off both of her butt cheeks, and some off the sides of her thighs nearly completed the pound ball. It sat dejectedly on the little mailing weight scale. At first it was all cellulite, all little dips and divots, but she took that off first. Now, whatever she took was smooth fat, a bit like Jell-o in that it wobbled precariously on the scale.
Last, but certainly not least, Jenna Swaine thinned out her ankles a bit. Men liked girls with thin, feminine ankles, especially the other Jenna's boyfriend, Jake.
Jake who had ignored her forever, until just last week. Jake who now pressed his lips together and looked away when he saw her, in an almost-smile.
Jake.
Through her experimental time, Jenna discovered that much of what made her was, in fact, muscle. She peeled her skin off and marveled how much dark red muscle there was to behold. After all, hauling herself around everywhere must take some sort of strength. In large part, she left the muscle alone, with one exception: her thighs.
She judged her thighs to be too muscled (who could bear to have thunder thighs, unless you were on the swim team?), and instead discovered that she could even pull off the muscle. This she redistributed, a bit to her shoulder area, a bit to her pectorals for those high, firm breasts the boys loved.
With her day's work done, Jenna peered at herself in the mirror and smiled. It was solitary work, but rewarding. She even discovered that she enjoyed doing it, toying with herself as though she were a doll.
She gathered the ball up, it was a bit like a ball of pizza dough, and put it in her purse. She glimpsed her parents as she passed the living room, where they sat, mesmerized, in front of the television. She headed into the kitchen, and down into the basement.
The Swaine basement was not a wonderful place. The low ceiling, possibly conceived of by midgets, filled her father with fear of hitting his head on a nail and ending up dead without anyone bothering to come look for him. Consequently, none of them ventured here very much. Extra shelves for food lined the walls, and lots of winter clothing packed into waterproof plastic boxes. Mostly it was odds and ends, only necessary around the holidays, or never to see the light of day until it ended up in a garbage bag. Jenna enjoyed it because her mother never came down here, and her father only rarely.
Plus, it had a little closet.
She opened the closet, and peered inside. There, attached to the ceiling and back in the corner behind her father's unused hunting jackets, panted Prince Anthony.
"Well hey there, you little fucker," she said affectionately.
Prince Anthony only looked at her, as dogs do. Did she have food? No? Might she have food in a minute?
Its fur was almost completely gone. She'd discarded that a long while back. The fur only got in the way of the additions. Prince Anthony was, by this point, composed almost entirely of Jenna's old body mass. It bulged and hung obscenely in places. Its stubby little legs were all but lost in the folds of flesh surrounding the head.
It hung from a little mesh hammock, the kind with hooks and bungee cords for all kinds of inventive uses while camping. Its little legs hurried to nowhere, and the hammock bobbed a little. The bungee cords strained to hold up the weight of the new and improved Prince Anthony.
Jenna got the pound of flesh from her body and began to smooth it onto the silent dog's bloated body. She could no longer feel the digestion problems within it; she had taken out and spliced together those parts when she'd brought him here. Then she fed it some water, and a bit of dog food from a big bag even deeper in the corner. It was probably getting hungrier and hungrier, with all of the old Patricia attached to it, but she fed it the same amount every day regardless.
"That's a good boy," she whispered to the dog, and petted its tiny, pathetic head.
The fullback with the chocolate sauce was Greg Alvarado. These days, when she hung out with Jenna Hawkins (the real Jenna, Jenna Hawkins persisted) and her friends, Greg apologized for the chocolate syrup thing every day.
"It's cool, Greg," she'd say every day. One day, they were sitting around eating lunch at prom-queen-Jenna's house when Greg must have felt the need to apologize again.
"Jenna, I'm really sorry about that chocolate sauce thing," he said in that deep, rumbling voice that comes with being six foot six and two-forty. "I know I say it every day, but, you know, it was really stupid, and I'm really, really sorry."
She noticed how his eyes were usually downcast when he gave these heartless, pointless, tedious apologies, day after day. But sometimes his eyes would travel up her legs, over her stomach, and up her boobs until they reached her face a long time later. It didn't hit her until one day when she watched Greg's eyes travel over Jenna Hawkins, as she sashayed out of the room in one of her tiny pleated skirts.
She'd never had any sort of sex appeal before. Now though...it had possibilities.
They were in the kitchen, scraping off their plates, when she turned to Greg.
"Hey Greg," she said, looking up at him. She was still five foot eight, although perhaps not for much longer.
"Yeah?"
"You want to come over sometime and hang out after school?"
He flinched. "Wha...you mean it?"
"Yeah, swing by today, maybe we can catch a movie."
"Shit, yeah, cool. I'm glad you're not mad about the thing, you know."
She laughed in a perfect Jenna Hawkins imitation tinkle. "Quit beating yourself up over it, Greg. People can be assholes sometimes."
He smiled, and it pushed his broad face into an awkward shape. "Yeah."
She was in his arms, in his front seat. He could almost put his arms around her twice, and that was just awesome, when you came right to it. A steering wheel pressed against her fashionably spongy little butt, and Greg's face pressed into her fashionably sized breasts.
She stared down at his face, pressed into her smooth, perfect skin, and grimaced.
She reached behind her and smoothed the skin of his forearms together. They were touching, it was easy. With her hand against his forehead, she slithered out of the loop of his arms, and he started to panic.
"What? Jenna, what? I can't, my arms," he stammered. She shook her head and sighed. His voice rose in pitch, and he started to pant, to hyperventilate.
Jenna Hawkins still called her Piggy sometimes and though those times were becoming rarer, she still hated the bitch for it. Did he honestly think she was ever going to forget?
"Shut the fuck up," she hissed, and punched him in the face. She could feel every nerve ending and bone in his face, and her palm where the punch connected. She didn't pull his flesh. She could control that now. Instead she beat the hell out of him while he cried like a little girl. She punched him until his nose broke, and she could feel it, like an instinct. She could heal it too, smooth it over. It might take a while, but it was a possibility. A possibility she would never enact. She punched and punched while blood flew from his nose, his lips, and the bashes on his face. His c
heekbone broke, along with his jaw. His crying stopped, and his consciousness faded. That was another strange instinct that popped into her head. She knew he couldn't take much more.
"Listen to me Greg," she said, her voice calm. "You're not going to say a word about this, or I'll rearrange every part of your body. Understand me? You got beat up at a restaurant defending me from some jackasses. They were trying to hit on me. Alright?"
He nodded drunkenly while a bubble of blood popped out of his nostril.
"I'm sorry," he said, but his voice was thick with half-consciousness and blood.
She hitched his shirt in her much reduced hands and hauled him close. "You'll never understand how you humiliated me. I want you to understand."
He was still nodding, one eye swollen shut, when he passed out. She pulled his arms apart and smoothed his skin back to the way it should be. Then she got out of his pickup truck and walked three miles home.
The scrape and clink of silverware on tableware were the only sounds. The Swaine family didn't have the television on today, which was strange in and of itself. Instead, they ate in complete silence, glancing at one another every so often. It was driving Jenna Swaine more or less out of her mind.
"So," her father said around a giant chunk of roast beef. Jenna looked at him.
"So?" she asked, trying not to sound as irritated as she felt.
"How was school?" he asked, and forked in a dollop of mashed potatoes with gravy and butter. Even when she'd been Patricia, she had never really thrown up on purpose. Now though, watching her parents eat, she was almost tempted.
Jenna Swaine shrugged and mumbled some nonsense syllables. She picked at her food and stared at the peas moving around on the plate. She destroyed the pea pyramid, and watched them invade her mashed potatoes.
"What's that mean?" her father asked.
"Answer your father," her mother snapped immediately, without giving her an opportunity. Jenna looked between them, back and forth, then back again.
UnCommon Bodies: A Collection of Oddities, Survivors, and Other Impossibilities (UnCommon Anthologies Book 1) Page 5
