Whale Girl

My friends called me whale girl. They said I ate like a whale, that I looked like a whale, and that I smelled like one too. I asked them what a whale smelled like, and they wrinkled their noses and said: “You.”

I was an ugly girl, and a fat girl, but I didn’t feel like a whale and so I swatted away their remarks like flies as they flew at my face.

“I am not a whale”, I said, but my friends just grinned with their red mouths and ran fingers along their already sweaty hair. They were skinny: their legs were separate from each other, and the skeletal outlines of their figures were redolent of those cadaver-type creatures — lacking blood and brains — you often see wandering around in low-budget horror movies. I asked them why they wouldn’t eat, and they said it was because they didn’t want to look like me.

I liked to eat: I ate anything: I crammed my mouth with food until my eyes and belly bulged, until everything tasted white and soft like cement, and, like cement, filled the gaping hole in my stomach for a while.

I was walking along the street one day with my friends. They were laughing about something, and kept pinching the thick dimpled flesh of my upper arms. Then, quite suddenly, they ran away from me to the other side of the street. They stood there gawking at me, looking all the while like sick, gaudy flowers growing out of the pavement, swaying on their skinny legs. They shouted at me: “Look at your feet if you can, whale girl!”

I couldn’t see my feet because of my belly. The black holes in their red faces opened again, and the gasps of hysterical air they were sucking in were really their hands clawing at my ears. I fell to my knees.

“Whale girl! Whale girl!”, they shouted in a chorus. “Can’t even see your own feet! Go back to the OCEAN!” They began throwing stones and pieces of rubbish at me, anything they could find lying in the gutter. I stared at the ground, feeling sick.

After a moment of this a hole like the girls’ hungry, angry mouths began to open in the ground. Their words and shrapnel were falling into this hole, but the hole just chewed them and continued to grow. I peered further into it. The dirty brown mass of the earth was splitting open: their chant was coagulating in the mud, forming a yellow liquid which churned and belched like stomach acid. I saw my three-ice-cream-scoop-and-waffles-with-syrup-and-bacon-and-eggs breakfast dissolve in this acid, along with insects and the stones and the rubbish the ground had consumed. But the acid began to dissolve the earth as well, and soon it was fizzing away to nothing.

Above the pounding of my friends’ voices I heard the wet, empty sound of lapping water. I saw that an ocean was being revealed, way down deep in the hole. There was no light in there: it was a black, silent, empty world, soft and profound as a baby’s sleeping mind, or the word blubber.

I turned towards my friends to tell them what I’d found, but all that was left of them was a sad group of dead pansies, sitting in a flower bed on someone’s lawn.

I wanted to go and eat a double cheeseburger with fries. I wanted to starve my body into thinness, to too feel the glory of being able to touch your own bones. I wanted to step out in front of a bus, to feel the thud of death ricochet through the body which McDonald’s and Hershey and Ben and Jerry had all played a hand in making.

Instead I jumped head-first into the hole.