By: Reese Scott

At night she would lie in bed and try not to think of eating. It wasn’t that she was hungry at least not for food. She would try her best not to sleep because she was still afraid of her dreams even though she was much older now. Everyone always says that nightmares go away, but maybe she misunderstood the difference between dreams and nightmares. On the nights she was able to sleep, she would have those dreams. She would wake up hearing, “You look good today for a fat person.” “Hey, Jane we’re going swimming over at Mike’s house today. Would you like to come. Oh. I’m sorry I forgot that they don’t make bathing suits in your size.”

She was trying not to think about tomorrow. Tomorrow was not going to be an ordinary day. She was going to go for the first time to the place where the beautiful people go. She was going to go to a salon and do something special with her hair and even have a manicure and pedicure. When she thought of the salon she imagined the hairdresser being very kind, but before she knew it, she would be chained to a seat and all the beautiful women would come over and take pictures of her. Some posing next to her. Some sitting on her lap and she was more angry that she didn’t feel angry at this. Instead she felt in some way she deserved it because she was in the minority and like it or not the minority never does well against the majority.

This made her laugh. It made her think she was the martyr for fat women. The only thing she was angry about were fat men. Why were men allowed to grow fat, lose their hair and look unattractive. But still she would watch them walk up and down the street holding hands with some young, thin women. She had always felt that she was contaminated and even if she were thin something else would grow out of her until she was as unattractive as she was now. “A big fatty” were the words she would hear in her head. That was the nicest of all the things she would hear.

Next to her bed was a copy of the magazine called “Bazaar.” The first time she looked at it she felt faint. It was covered from the first page to the last page by women who all looked the same and all were beautiful. They were all thin. They all had beautiful hair. They all wore expensive dresses. She never knew there were so many perfect looking women. She looked at page after page hoping to find someone who wasn’t beautiful, but she finally had to give up and put it down.

She got up out of bed. Went into the bathroom. Removed all her clothes. Took out a pair of scissors and cut out pieces of all the beautiful women. She pasted them on her body until she could no longer see herself. No matter how she placed the pictures it didn’t do any good. She could still only see herself. She could see her stomach that protruded so far out she could no longer wear pants. She saw her face that had grown fatter and uglier as she had gotten older. She looked down at her legs that were now difficult to see. She looked at her eyes. And even her eyes were now ugly. She remembered when she was a child she could over hear her mother saying

“Well, she might be fat but she does have beautiful eyes.”

The End