The JRB presents new short fiction by Megan Ross.
Sweet Meat
‘Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.’—Virginia Woolf
Gabriel’s friends had warned him about me. They told him that I would make a terrible wife and it was his fault for not listening to them in the first place. For a start, I am all wrong. It is not a matter of standing or wealth, because I have both, but my proportions. I am swollen in all the places that a woman is simply not meant to be swollen. I have poor lymph drainage so my ankles look like twin flotation devices. My calves disappear into my knees, which in turn melt into my orange peel thighs. As for my middle, it would not be an exaggeration to say it is simply unacceptable.
Were Gabriel to take me as a wife, his friends argued, he would have to tear down his entire home and rebuild it to suit my body and its accompanying movements. After all, like all good men, he had built a house with two bedrooms. He crafted it for a woman of petite proportions, whose angles correspond with all the right strictures of mathematical rulings laid out by the government. Gabriel’s lounge had two armchairs, a papa-sized recliner with a footrest and a mama-sized spindly-armed wingback that would reinforce excellent posture and enforce narrow hips. The woman he selected would never be seated for long, as she would have duties, and these were not to include lounging around. The bed was polished oak, a bed strong enough for a man and his woman, and the bath was fitted with the finest stone, perfect for dainty feet to press against the taps.
But I … I am a large woman. My belly falls over my waistband like a waterfall. You might even hear me before you see me, as my feet are large and swollen enough to make a sound. What might my parents have been thinking, there are people who have asked. Why would they raise a girl like that? In truth, my parents built me like a city. Large and unforgiving and ready to take up space. As a teenager I grew tromboned and celloed in my middle, doublebassed in my thighs. I had a period, unlike my classmates, and it was heavy for two straight days. The people in our circles were horrified. They saw the lunchboxes my parents packed for me, the sweetmeats and the fruity delicacies and the nuts. And they asked themselves: what was at the source of this inappropriate feeding?
Was it pride?
It must have been, these people thought, because my mother and father loudly proclaimed it. A morning course of sweet cheeses and soups thick with chicken and mutton and all the glistening fatty jewels of animal flesh was followed by a 10 a.m. tea of apple slices and peanut butter and stewed fruits with cinnamon and sugar. Lunchtime was a smorgasbord of only the most succulent morsels of animal, accompanied by fatty broths, sugared figs and cheese preserves. To treat me, my father enlisted the help of the country butcher, who delivered to him glistening slabs of lamb fat. My parents dared to feed me the culinary jewels that were meant for a son. Perhaps, then, the question is this: what could my parents expect but a girl with the size and attitude of a man?
In truth, my parents were different and I knew this. They had their own wealth and so had no reason to marry me off to a wealthy suitor. Even when they should have produced a boy they stopped at one child and enjoyed raising her, me. My parents relished spoiling me. I just don’t think it crossed their minds to make me appetising to a man. I think they loved me so much that they wanted more of me, as much as there could possibly be. And, as fate would have it, the world had produced a man who craved a woman just like me. Someone of girth and fortitude. My husband Gabriel longed to be enveloped in the fleshy folds of his wife. He wanted miles of me. Perhaps that is what made him extraordinary: he was not afraid of being smaller than me and did not doubt that I would be a wonderful person to begin a family with.
I think my husband thought himself able. I think he dreamed himself worthy of a woman of my size. But he was neither of these things.
Which men are?
*
For our first anniversary he chose not to take me to dinner. Perhaps this was the first sign, but I ignored it, at my peril. He gave me a sheaf of paper and asked that I write him a letter, and he would do the same. We sat opposite each other at our circular dining table and I wrote to him, telling him a story from my childhood. When it was time to swap our letters, I opened his and, with a shock, dropped it. I composed myself and picked it up. It was a drawing, not a letter. Around the centre was blank space but in the middle of the page was a wide-open mouth, and above it a single eye. I grew cold. There was something menacing about the mouth, and as for the eye, it threatened to erase me with its intent gaze.
I looked up at Gabriel and he just smiled.
‘Dinner?’ he asked me, and he handed me a plate of ruby red cherries.
*
The next year passed without worry. The strange anniversary dinner was behind us and nothing else had happened that would alert my attention to the fact that not everything was right in our home. I suppose there were one or two odd things. He insisted that I take his name, for a start. In the tradition of his people I also took a new first name, so that the name my mother had given me at birth was no longer in use. I never heard it again, although there were times I dreamed my husband was calling me by it.
‘ ,’ he’d softly croon into my tingling ears. ‘ , come and lie with me,’ he’d moan into my neck.
Then there were our meals: we no longer took them together, and he insisted I eat standing up in the kitchen, and not at the dining room table with him. I noticed that the plates were growing smaller, in increments of centimetres, so that by the time of our second anniversary, I was eating on a saucer. The house itself grew brighter. My husband hung great mirrors on every wall, the pillars pressed with a satin wallpaper that reflected back the exact tone of my skin, so that wherever I looked, I was there. It was as if Gabriel had blown my body apart, shard by shard, and was living in the centre of an exploded view of me. Our house became a shrine to my flesh, and so it took me longer than it should have to realise that I was no longer as robust as I once had been.
The mirroring also created something of an insect’s eye, so that it was impossible to create a full image of myself in one mirror without the edge of the next mirror tearing my reflection in two. This had the effect of a strange doubling, while simultaneously distracting me from my own body. I was everywhere I looked, and yet when I tried to see myself I was lost in the prismatic view.
Gabriel was delighted by this. He danced through the house, waltzing with an imaginary partner, singing songs from our favourite Italian films and whistling as he bumped into me in the passage.
With my distorted vision I no longer knew what I looked like. At night, I caught my husband in the dressing room, although I said nothing to him about it. It was only when I found a needle and thread at his bedside that I realised he was sewing my clothes tighter so that I would not notice I was shrinking. I could feel the wire in my brassiere tearing at my rib cage but I thought I needed new underwear, not appreciating that it was because every bone in my chest was close to piercing my skin.
Gabriel soon took to rewarding me for my smaller meals, and this pleased me. In a strange way I felt more deserving of his affection, which he metered out in measured doses of kisses, here and there. We rarely met each other in the bedroom anymore. Instead: these small tokens of love. Petaled in tissue papers, blooming in mauve and green. Such icy treasures. At first, he replaced the sticky rice or roast potatoes on my plate with a string of pearls, or a pair of diamond earrings. A rhinestone hair slide. A silver anklet. Jewelled amulets filled with lead so they pulled my neck forward in a stoop, a rounded mound forming between my shoulder blades like a plateau. As I shed more weight I was granted bigger treasures with enough shine to coax my hunger into submission. They became more valuable as time went on. Soon he was serving up entire platters of jewellery, which he insisted I wear all at the same time. For my ears this was difficult, as I had only pierced each one twice. But he would not hear of this, and sent for a jeweller to pierce several new holes in the flesh and cartilage of both of my ears, dangling from them rubies and emeralds and sapphires from far-off lands. It made sense then that the furniture suddenly seemed more accommodating, with space between my body and it. On my side of the bed alone I felt I was drowning in a sea of blankets.
I lost all desire. Instead, I was becoming the desired. As vast as his hunger and sharp as his bite. The diamonds hung around my shoulders like small piranhas.
Snapping at my neck.
*
At first I thought it was clever. And kind. Gabriel took a sieve to my food, removing the fat, the waste, the cholesterol. Cleaning me of every excess molecule glooped to my blood, every stickling rind of pig or flake of pastry cleaving to my insides, flushed. My parents had done me a terrible disservice, feeding me like that. Filling me with all these foods I would never eat again. I didn’t see them much anymore; Gabriel didn’t like me visiting them. He said I was different when I came home and most nights when I had gone to my parents for a meal we ended up fighting. He began to tell me that they had never loved me, that they simply doted on me because my mother couldn’t have any more children. At first I believed him. I had no reason not to. But when I thought carefully I remembered that I loved my father and my mother. I felt whole when I was with them. On each visit, like clockwork, my father would brew chocolate on the stove while my mother baked scones, and after that we’d sit together and talk about our days and our lives and how we were all doing.
But Gabriel didn’t like this. He didn’t like any of it: the way my parents spoke to me, the attention my father paid to my words. What my mother thought about food and how big the portions were. What did they expect, he’d say, on the drive home from their house, fattening you up like that? Don’t they know how ridiculous it is? At first I’d argue. I’d point out that he had loved how big I was. That it hadn’t only not mattered to him in the way it did to so many other men, but that it had appealed to him. Taking up space had defined me, and he had been drawn to this.
My husband, who once relished the way I spoke of glacé cherries in Christmas trifles and encouraged me to eat more, consume more, cook more, now resented my love of suckling pig. He began to wish me the kind of woman who preferred the apple.
*
Stomach pains often woke me. I’d sneak out from underneath the plush duvet, barely able to lift the covers, and descend the stairs to the kitchen. There, I’d lie down on the marble floor, which was as cold as a mausoleum, and gazed up at the still life of fruit bowls and pitchers of creamy milk adorning the kitchen walls. I’d imagine plucking a grape right from the paint. I could almost taste the cinnamon sprinkled across a cooled milk tart, or the custard I’d make from a litre of milk and cornstarch. Perhaps I could make a batch and store it in one hundred secret bottles? Store them in gloomied corners around our home. As I grew heavier with jewellery I became weighted with memory, too: memories of wine, its corky scents; liquorice, unquiet tongues of chocolate and ash.
There was a night when I dreamed of a banquet. I was naked, and my old size, and I strode across the hall and began to help myself to the feast. Mushrooms soaked in mescal, each gill pleated with fat and thin slices of raw springbok soaked in merlot. Chicken feet done in abalone sauce and juniper, seeded buns stuffed with crispy fried shrimp, pastries of peach and custard, preserved egg with fistfuls of coriander and cream of jasmine; steamed fish head with lucky bean sauce and icy mango pudding to follow. I woke up crying. I licked my tears. I relished their salt.
*
Trojaned by gifts, I was trapped in the weak cage of my bones. Starvation weighed on me. My periods stopped. They had been half-hearted for a while, as if, like a dying car engine, my ovaries were offering up their last spluttering attempt at fertility.
*
I grew too weak to feed myself. Gabriel would prop me up in bed, nursing me with teaspoons of nasturtium broth.
It took two years before I was Gabriel’s desired weight. I had been whittled down to even smaller than our neighbour’s wives, and for this I was offered the greatest treasure so far: a cover for Skin magazine. In our first telephonic interview, a journalist immortalised me in text, laying out the body of copy that would accompany the images, which will be taken today.
*
Today. I am here now.
This morning I managed half a lemon. Gabriel served it on a bed of mauve seaweed, in a clear soup. After the lemon I was given dessert: a half open shell—a clam—and inside resting the most delicate, beautiful pearl I had ever seen. I gazed at it, adoringly, as if it were my child.
The seed of all the love inside of me.
*
The stylist and his assistants dress me head to toe in ultramarine. I wear a shiny coat of lapis lazuli and slip my feet into pumps encrusted with sapphires. Barely able to sustain the weight of all these jewels, they carry me into the studio, resplendent in loops and chains of precious metals. Whole planets have been excavated to bring me such finery. The assistants help me to my feet.
I totter. I lurch. Just before I fall they place me on a stool in front of the camera.
The camera consists of a series of mirrors and light designed to trap, divide and frame me, mass produce me for millions, but the photographer is here for murder.
‘The gun metal background will coax the light from your eyes,’ he says. Before him, in the centre of the studio, is a low table on which a bowl of glass fruit has been placed. It is a decoration, but the mere sight of the bananas excites me. I picture peeling back the skin and launching the fruit into my mouth. I imagine the texture of its flesh meeting my tongue.
‘Yes! Yes!’ the photographer cries, snapping away at his camera excitedly. I feel apple crunch in my mouth. Glass splinters piercing my gums. I imagine swallowing, and feel a rush of vomit fill my throat.
‘This is it!’ The photographer cries again, in near ecstasy. ‘Yes, ! Give it to us.’
Finally I imagine the red apple coming apart in my mouth like a heart. Like a petrified piece of flesh broken off from a statue. My stomach lurches. I taste blood. Dots dance in front of my eyes. I can see very little now. I hear even less. There is just a drone, and the click click click of my bones knocking against each other, of the camera capturing my perfect form. I shiver and my necklaces and bangles knock against each other. Clink clink. Clink clink.
I would do anything for a mouthful of food. I would tear that glass apart to reach its imaginary centre. To taste its sweet bitterness. To feel the acid irritate the sores on my gums. But it doesn’t matter anymore. With the shutter’s final flash, I am frozen, immortalised. The people in the room crowd around the camera to see the parts of themselves reflected in my jewellery.
*
I was once a bigger woman. Now, I am no less. I am simply transformed. A golden, shimmering, sparkling thing. I am starving, and might not make it to another day. But it doesn’t matter, because right now, I own all that I was. I shine, I sparkle. I miss my parents. I miss stories. It takes the last of my energy to lift my index finger to my lips. I think of my mother’s beef stews, of the cinnamon stick crocodiles floating in a sea of milk tart. I tear at the acrylic tips on my fingers and spit the glittering crescents to the floor. Saliva fills my mouth. I swallow. With my teeth I rip off the nail until I cut into the cuticle.
With a flourish, the photographer spins his screen around. The magazine people rush to him. The women clamber to look at the screen, gasping at the perfection of the image. My ecstatic composition. They envy the way each jewel reflects the cold pallor of my skin. The men look at me with wonder, with desire. They think that they look at me but all they see is themselves, all they feel is their pork chop sides, their fish and chip middles.
Everyone scrambles to telephone their friends, and I am left alone.
They do not notice as I remove the four sets of earrings from my ear lobes or the twenty rings off of my fingers or the jewel-encrusted septum and nostril rings I pluck from my nose. I shift in the seat and feel something tear in my hip. I bend down to take off the glass slippers. The jewel-like fruits around my neck. The cloth is like a shimmering dessert. I am almost naked, almost nothing. I suck my finger, tasting who I am in my second incarnation. My blood tastes nothing like I expected. It is a fruit tart made with the first season’s apples. It is more delicious than any meal. I look down at the pile of jewellery, filled with longing for all the love and hunger it took to earn.
With every piercing removed my flesh whistles with holes. I am just breath. I slip out of the room without anybody knowing, leaving the hunger there, the jewels. I am glorious. I am transformed.
I walk in the direction of the market.
~~~
- Megan Ross is a South African writer, journalist, author and graphic designer. She is the author of Milk Fever (uHlanga Press, 2018). She is a recipient of the Brittle Paper Award for Fiction (2017) and an Alumni Award for the Iceland Writers Retreat in Reykjavik (2016), and a finalist for the Gerald Kraak, Miles Morland, Short Story Day Africa and Short.Sharp.Stories awards.
