Guts
by Emmanuelle Christie
The first time I tried a pill my stomach- a horse drugged to run on a bad leg- careened out of my body, broke apart, and died. I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands clamped over my knees until I could feel my organs again, too-heavy and sulky in my bones. I hated alcohol for the sandbags it weighted me with, the way my body dragged through molasses and disembodied laughter. In luminous wine spills like the bruises rose under my clothes and my teeth felt blunt in my mouth. I wouldn’t touch pills again, I wouldn’t smoke or drink. But every bad girl deserves a vice. Every bad girl needs a sword to throw herself on: pain reminds us bad girls that we’re alive.
My vice becomes emptiness, the sharp beautiful hollow of an empty stomach. I don’t like food for the same reason I don’t like drugs or alcohol: like everything else food is a substance. Hunger is a lemon-flavoured Popsicle. Hunger is ice water. Hunger is a cold spoon. Hunger is a deep sea crystal cave. Or the citric remnants of Sour Patch Kids. Hunger is the opposite of human. The lived-in taste of mouths, like hoarder’s bedrooms. The reek-salt crevices of human bodies where nobody goes. Hunger tastes like the opposite of genitals.
In a circle with other girls I listen to my stomach crack and groan. Hunger is a fickle mistress with narrow hips and perfect skin. I lust after hunger in lecherous and unholy ways. I et my body break for her because the agonies she gives me run out of my mouth with the self-emptying sweetness of sugar-thick spit. I relish my emptiness with the puffed-lip hedonism of a libertine. Spread on our shared therapeutic couch in stifling summer heat, wearing only underwear under my sundress, open to the choke-smell of powdered lemonade and bad sunlight drifting as libidinously over my skin as a teenager’s hands.
We are given pads of paper to sketch with, Crayolas instead of pencils. I find black and draw a corpulent outline, vaguely human shaped, and fill it in from crown to heel, except for a perfect white egg in the middle, in the guts. A red mouth like a wound.
“What’s this?” our therapist asks.
“Me,” I say, knowing this will get me a good grade in therapy. “Before everything, when I was better.”
“Interesting. Why did you put her in your stomach?”
I shrug.
“Did you eat her?”
“No. That’s just where she lives.”
Clara, with chin-length bleach-silver hair, sweats vodka and draws hands over and over, phalanges like buttered sausages, greasy with graphite. Her skin is polished like sugar and her lipstick is perfect cherry red, as if she does not pop laxatives like a ruined starlet. She gives me a sennoside in the bathroom, I suck cold water from the tap.
“I hate it here.” Exhaling mint vapour towards the cracked window. “Sitting in a circle talking. Like that does anything.”
“Who made you come?”
“My dad.” She rolls her eyes. “Like he’s trying to say sorry for everything.”
We are just alike, Clara and I, reflective and luscious like two halves of the same fruit, two buds from the same tree. We have traded our history like recipes. Passed back and forth I have learned what made Clara, the hands that moulded her into shape, and she has learned how my fear, kneaded properly, becomes straight-edge. For me it was at a party. For her it was in someone’s basement, just a regular night when she was cracked open and turned into something else.
My mother is late picking me up. Clara and I sit on the curb watching licorice tar bubble in the heat, sweat glazing our skins.
“I think it’s going to rain,” I say. “The air is so heavy.”
“Yes. I think there’s a storm coming.”
She leans across my body to point at the sky, the bruise-darkness of an incoming deluge. Her hair is a butterfly kiss against my upper arm. When she leans back it slides down to my wrist and leaves instructions for how to make me shiver. I let her tongue seek my lips and trace the shape of my mouth, smooth as eggshell and slick as yolk. I open my mouth for her. My guts are quiet for once, satiated and full.
Emmanuelle Christie was raised in British Columbia and now lives in Toronto. They hold a degree in literature and now study theology at the University of Toronto. Their work has been published in Pedestal Magazine and Acta Victoriana. They can be found on Twitter @_itcannothold and Instagram @itcannothold.