Filed under: anorexia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders, pro-ana, short story
Breakfast with the Flipper
The word breakfast, outflanked on its left by pre-heated-egg-muffin-sandwiches and on its right by Special K-plus-bowl-add-milk and enjoy, surrendered at last to diet coke plus nothing and retreated into fantasies of the 19th century where it had been told words still retained some semblance of their meaning. Miss with the Flipper advanced, filling her cup with soda as she went.
Coke, Diet 2.6 calories. That would be if she still cared about something as nonsensical as the calories in diet soda, which she didn’t. Two point six would have been rounded up to five and noted carefully down under the category: breakfast in her daily journal. Two point six (rounded to five) would then reoccur throughout the day on scraps of paper or in the margins of school notebooks as she re-counted everything starting again from breakfast, just to be super certain. A total projected daily caloric intake would be there too, below a line of tiny penciled figures, and it would be gradually revised downward as the day progressed until it reached about five hundred. Perhaps eight, if she was really trying.
Breakfast for the anorectic is not so much a meal but a condition entered into upon waking which lasts until, approximately, two-thirty in the afternoon. Or four pee em, if one is making a proper effort. Miss with the Flipper has not made such an effort for a wearyingly long time now. She could not tell you to the decimal how many calories she had for breakfast. She doesn’t count such things or keep a running total in her journal. Really the best she could do would be to estimate roughly that yesterday she ate approximately sixteen hundred calories.
Anyway, that’s breakfast sorted. An objection could be entered into the record on behalf of the word “with” as well. A modest preposition, with would not ordinarily be the sort of word to quibble. However there is a question of proximity (not to mention propriety) in applying the word “with” to the case of writing an email response to someone who is not, has never been, and never will be in the physical presence of the emailer.
Miss withthe Flipper rolls her eyes at this. Only a pedant would argue grammar. Flipper might like to argue with her grammar. It reminded her of the way the mole-faced Mrs. Fowe, her third grade teacher, used to insist on parts of speech while she embellished eyes and faces in the voids of Os and zeros in her spelling book. It hardly made a difference what games she played to make the time go faster. Miss Flip always knew all the answers anyway.
If there is a similarity between the child-girl and the adult it must be the way both of them always had the answers. Miss Flip can argue breakfast, with, and even “The Flipper”; which isn’t a name at all but rather the an alias for a nonexistent person. A marvel of this electronic age, she thinks, that one can argue with nonexistent people and have them answer you in the glowing rectangle of your laptop computer. Non-breakfast would be a sad affair indeed without its company.
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Filed under: Uncategorized
This is new, something I wrote today in my workshop. But why don’t you check out http://threenewstories.wordpress.com to see the brand new blog I’m starting?
She didn’t need new clothes. Not really. Or a new coat, either, because she had the old one her mom had given her from last year. Need is a funny thing. Not something she was comfortable admitting to.
Her two pairs of jeans were size 14- but with a big oversized sweatshirt no one could see the cord she threaded through her belt holes to keep them falling off, so that was fine. Okay, maybe the fabic was a little thin for winter but she could always wear them over her black stretch leggings if it was cold out. Maybe even do without the cord that way, a string really, which she’d whipped out with a snap of breaking stitches from one of the hooded sweatshirts.
So clearly there was no actual need to stand under florescent lighting hoping the fitting room attendant would be neither young nor thin nor stylish. No need to be cold and decked out in goosepimples as she shivered the jeans on and tried to find a sweater which wasn’t itchy. Even less need for the dress. It’s just that it looked so frickin cute there on the hanger. Like it was saying “Hiya cutie, why don’t we get to know each other better?”
The moment in the mirror, though, now that was necessary. Everyone needs to look at themselves once in a while and think “Yeah, okay, I’d do her.”
