The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

MEG ELISON The Pill

My mother took the Pill before anybody even knew about it. She was always signing up for those studies at the university, saying she was doing it because she was bored. I think she did it because they would ask her questions about herself and listen carefully when she answered. Nobody else did that.

She had done it for lots of trials: sleep studies and allergy meds. She tried signing up when they tested the first 3D-printed IUDs, but they told her she was too old. I remember her raging about that for days, and later when everybody in that study got fibroids she was really smug about it. She never suggested I do it instead; she knew I wasn’t fucking anybody. How embarrassing that my own mother didn’t even believe I was cute enough to get a date at sixteen. I tried not to care. And I’m glad now I didn’t get fibroids. I never wanted to be a lab rat anyway. Especially when the most popular studies (and the ones Mom really went all-out for) were the diet ones.

She did them all: the digital calorie monitors that she wore on her wrists and ankles for six straight weeks. (I rolled my eyes at that one, but at least she didn’t talk about it constantly.) The strings like clear licorice made of some kind of super-cellulose that were supposed to accumulate in her stomach lining and give her a no-surgery stomach stapling but just made her (and everyone else who didn’t eat a placebo) fantastically constipated. (Unstoppable complaining about this one; I couldn’t bring anyone home for weeks for fear that she’d abruptly start telling my friends about her struggle to shit.) Pill after pill after pill that gave her heart palpitations, made her hair fall out, or (on one memorable occasion) induced psychotic delusions. If it was a way out of being fat, she’d try it. She’d try anything.

In between the drug trials, she did all the usual diets. Eat like a caveman. Eat like a rabbit. Seven small meals. Fasting one day a week. Apple cider vinegar bottles with dust on their upper domes sat tucked into the back corners of our every kitchen cabinet, behind the bulwark of Fig Newmans and Ritz crackers.

She’d try putting the whole family on a diet, talk us into taking “family walks” in the evening. She’d throw out all the junk food and make us promise to love ourselves more. Loving yourself means crying over the scale every morning and then sniffling into half a grapefruit, right? Nothing stuck and nothing made any real difference. We all resisted her, eating in secret in our rooms or out of the house. I found Dad’s bag of fish taco wrappers jammed under the driver’s seat of the car while looking for my headphones. Mom caught me putting it in the garbage and yelled at me for like an hour. I never told her it was his. She was always hardest on me about my weight, as if I was the only one who had this problem. We were a fat family. Mom was just as fat as me; we looked like we were built to the same specs. Dad was fat, and my brother was the fattest of us all.

I’m still fat. Everyone else is in the past tense.

And why? Because of this fucking Pill.

That trial started the same way they always do: flyers all over campus where Mom worked, promising cash for the right demographic for an exciting new weight-loss solution. Mom jumped on it like she always did, taking a pic of the poster so she could email from the comfort of her broken-down armchair with the TV tray rolled up close and her laptop permanently installed there. I remember I asked her once why she even had a laptop if she never took it anywhere. She never even unplugged it! It might as well have been an old-school tower and monitor rig. Why go portable if you’re never going to leave the port?

She shrugged. “Why call it a laptop when I don’t have a lap?”

She had me there. I could never sit my computer in my “lap” either. That real estate was taken up by my belly when I sat, and it was terribly uncomfortable to have a screen down that low, anyway. I’ve seen people do it on the train, and they look all hunched and bent. But Mom wanted the hunching and the bending. She wanted a flat, empty lap and a hot computer balanced on her knees. She wanted inches of clearance between her hips and an airline seat and to buy the clothes she saw on the mannequin in the window. She wanted what everybody wants. Respect.

I guess I wanted that, too. I just didn’t think it was worth the lengths she would go to to get it. And none of them really worked. Until the Pill.

So Mom signed up like she always did, putting the meetings and dosage times on the calendar. Dad rolled his eyes and said he hoped this time didn’t end with her crying about not being able to take a shit again. He met my eyes behind her back and we both smiled.

She just clucked her tongue at him. “Your language, Carl, honestly. You’ve been out of the navy a long time.”

Dad tapped his pad and put in time to meet with his D&D buddies while Mom was busy with this new trial group. I smiled a little. I was glad he was going to do something fun. He had seemed pretty down lately. I was going to be busy, too. I had Visionaries, my school’s filmmaking club. We had shoots set up every night for two weeks, trying to make this gonzo horror movie about a virus that turned the football team into cannibals. (Look, I didn’t write it. I was the director of photography.)

Off Mom went to eat pills and answer questions about her habits. I had heard her go through all of this before and learned to hold my tongue. But I knew exactly how it would go: Mom would sit primly in a chair in a nice outfit, trying to cross her legs and never being able to hold that position. Her thighs would spread out on top of one another and slowly slide apart, seeking the space to sag around the arms of the chair and make her seem wider than ever, like a water balloon pooling on a hot sidewalk. She would never tell the whole truth. It was maybe the thing I hated about her the most.

“Oh yes, I exercise every day!”

She walked about twenty minutes a day total, from her car to her office and back again. Her treadmill was covered in clothes on hangers, and her dumbbells were fuzzed with a mortar made of dust and cat hair.

“I try to eat right, but I have bad habits that stem from stress.”

Rain or shine, good day or bad, Mom had three scoops of ice cream with caramel sauce every night at ten.

“I do think I come by it honestly. My parents were both heavy. And my sisters and most of my cousins, too.”

That one’s true. The whole family is fat. In our last family photo, we wore an assortment of bright-colored shirts and we looked like a basket of round, ripe fruit. I kind of liked it, but I think I might have been the only one. The composition of the shots was good, and we all looked happy. Happy wasn’t enough, apparently. Mom paid for those, but she never hung them up.

She came home from the first few sessions chatty and keyed up. She posted on her timelines how happy she was to be trying something really innovative and how she had a good feeling about this one. She wasn’t allowed to say much; they made her sign an NDA. Later, I think she was glad that nobody could ask her the details.

I knew this time was going to be different the first night I heard the screaming. I had been up way past midnight, trying to edit footage of football players lumbering, meat-crazed, hands outstretched against the outline of the goalposts in a sunset-orange sky. My eyes had gotten hot and I’d had to put two icepacks under my laptop to cool down the CPU. (The machine just wasn’t up to all that processing and rendering.) I woke up at four to the sound of it, jolting upright, my heart in my ears like someone had stuffed a tiny drum set into my head. I was so tired and out of it, I almost didn’t know what I was hearing. But it was her voice. Mom was screaming like she was on fire. She did it so long and loud and unbroken that I couldn’t understand how she could get her breath at all. It was out, out, out, and hardly a gasp in.

I ran into the hallway and smacked straight into Andrew, who was going the same way. We whacked belly against belly and fell backward on our butts like a couple of cartoon characters. I can picture it exactly in my head and imagine the way I’d frame it, the sound effects we could layer over the top. But in the moment, there was no time to laugh or argue. We just scrambled back up and made for our parents’ bedroom door.

It was locked.

“Dad!” I hammered my fist against the hollow-core six-panel barrier. “Dad, what’s happening? Is Mom okay?”

There was an unintelligible string of sounds from him. With Mom screaming like a steam whistle, there was no chance to make it out.

“I’m calling 911,” Andrew yelled. His phone was already in his hand.

When the door opened, the sound of Mom’s screaming hit us at full force, and Andrew and I both stumbled backward a little. The door had muffled it only slightly, but when the sound is your own mother dying, a little counts for a lot.

Dad was there, his gray hair a mess that pointed fingers in every direction, seeming to blame everyone at once. He put a hand out to Andrew, his face in a grimace, his eyes wide.

“Don’t. Don’t call anyone. Your mother says this is part of the trial she’s in. She said it’s worse than she thought it would be, but it only lasts for fifteen minutes.”

Andrew looked at his phone. “I woke up almost ten minutes ago, when she was just growling.”

“Growling,” I asked. “What?”

Andrew rolled his eyes. “You could sleep through a nuclear strike.”

Dad was nodding, looking at his watch. “We’re almost out of it. Just hold on.”

“Dad,” Andrew said, “the neighbors probably already called the cops. She’s really loud.”

Dad’s grimace widened. “I’m going to have to—”

The screaming stopped. The three of us looked at each other.

“Carl?” Mom’s voice sounded exhausted and raw.

Dad fixed us both with a stern look, oscillating between the two of us. “You two don’t call anyone. You don’t tell anyone. Your mother is entitled to a little privacy. Is that understood?”

We looked at each other and said nothing.

Mom called again and he was gone, back on the other side of the door.

I didn’t go back to sleep. I’m betting Andrew didn’t either. But we stayed in our rooms for the next three hours, until it was time for breakfast. I went back to editing footage, and I was pretty pleased with what I’d be able to show to the Visionaries the next day. The movie was going to come in on schedule. It was great to have a project, something to take my mind off the weirdness in the night. I’m betting Andrew just signed on to his game. That’s all he ever does.

I heard him turn off his alarm on the other side of the wall, followed by the sound of him standing up out of his busted computer chair with a grunt. He’s way fatter than me, so I feel like I’m allowed to be disgusted by some of his habits. Andrew can’t sit or stand without making a guttural, bovine noise. I’ve seen crumbs trapped in the folds of his neck. I used to work really hard to not be one of Those Fat People. I was obsessively clean, took impeccable care of my skin. I never showed my upper arms or my thighs, no matter what the occasion. I acted like being fat was impolite, like burping, and the best thing to do was conceal it behind the back of my hand and then always, always beg somebody’s pardon.

I didn’t know anything back then.

Andrew made it to the stairs before I did, so I got to watch him jiggle and shuffle down them, filled with loathing and disgust. I couldn’t remember what bullshit diet we were supposed to be following that week, but I vowed to myself that no matter how small breakfast was, I would eat less of it than Andrew. I would leave something behind on the plate. Let Andrew be the one to lick his fingers and whine. I was above all that. Wheat toast and cut apples were waiting for us when we came into the kitchen.

And there was Mom at the coffeepot, fifty pounds lighter. Her pajamas hung off her like a hand-me-down from a much bigger sister. She turned, cup in hand, and I saw the dark circles beneath her eyes. She was beaming, however, with the biggest smile I’d seen on her face in years.

“It’s working,” she said, her voice still rough and edged with fatigue like she’d been to a rock concert or an all-night bonfire. “This thing is actually working.”

That was our life for two weeks. Dad did his best to soundproof their bathroom. He stapled carpets and foam and egg crate to the walls. He covered the floor in a dozen fluffy bath mats he bought cheaply on the internet. He told me later that he tried to put a rag in her mouth, just to muffle her a little more.

“But I’m worried she’ll pull it into her throat and choke on it,” he told me, his eyes wide with dread. “I can’t stand this much longer. I know she’s losing weight, but it’s like I’m living in a nightmare and I can’t wake up.”

That was a year before he decided to take the Pill, and back then he was more willing to talk about it. When it wasn’t his own privacy, only hers, he would tell me how gross it was. You can see videos of it online. It was the same in that first trial as it is now: you take the Pill and you shit out your fat cells. In huge, yellow, unmanageable flows at first. That’s why they scream so much. Imagine shitting fifty pounds of yourself at a go. Now, people go to special spas where they have crematoiletaries that burn the fat down. Dad said Mom screwed up our plumbing so bad that he had to buy a whole case of that lye-based stuff to break it all down and keep the toilet flushing. That was as gross as I thought things could get, but Dad said it got worse.

Toward the end, Mom (and everyone like her) shit out all their extra skin, too. The process that broke it down meant no stretch marks and no baggy leftovers, hanging on your body like overproofed dough on a hook and telling people you used to be fat.

That was some trick, and it was part of the reason it took so long for a generic to hit the market. It was a “trade secret,” they said on the news. They also said “miracle” and “breakthrough” and “historic.” The miracle of shitting out skin just looked like blood and collagen and rotten meat, it turns out. Not less gross, but different. More lye into the S bend. More and more of Mom gone at the breakfast table.

At the end of the trial, she was a person I didn’t recognize. She was 110 pounds soaking wet. The research doctor told her that she was at 18 percent body fat and would stay that way for the rest of her life. Her face was a whole new shape, with the underlying structure very prominent and her eyes huge and wide above it all. I could see her hip bones beneath her enormous drawstring pants, pulled tight as a laundry bag around her now-tiny waist. Her collarbones could have held up a taco each. The cords in her neck stood out like chicken bones caught under her skin. Even her feet were smaller—​she went down one whole shoe size, and I inherited all her stretched-out sandals and sneakers.

I slid my feet into them, thinking how it was like my mom had died and some other woman had moved in. Late at night, I gathered up all the clothes she had given me and bundled them into the garbage. They were ugly, but they also felt somehow humiliating to wear. I couldn’t explain the impulse. Luckily, she never asked me where any of it went. She was very focused on herself in those days.

“It finally happened,” Mom told me with tears in her eyes. “They finally made a Pill that gives you the perfect body, no matter what.”

And yeah, she could eat anything she wanted and didn’t have to work out. As long as she kept taking the small maintenance dose of the Pill, she would stay this way for as long as she lived. Which she thought would be much longer, now that she didn’t have to carry around the threats of diabetes and heart disease everywhere she went.

I remember one day I walked in and found her and Dad sitting at the kitchen table, both of them obviously crying. They tried to hide it from me; Dad ducked his face into the shawl collar of his sweater, Mom swiping her eyes with quick fingers.

“What’s up with you guys?” I asked, trying not to look.

“Nothing, honey. There’s carrot and celery sticks cut fresh and sitting in water in the fridge, if you want a snack.”

Mom’s voice was thick in her throat; she’d really been sobbing.

I ignored both the sorrow and the content of what she’d said and fished around in the cabinet over the sink until I found one individually wrapped chocolate cupcake.

“I’m good,” I said and tried to leave the kitchen.

“Honey, do you think I lost all this weight so that I could leave you guys?”

I stopped and turned on the spot like something on a rotating plate, a pizza in a microwave. I couldn’t help it. I should have just kept walking.

“What?”

Dad buried his face some more. Mom just looked at me, her eyes all shiny. “Did you ever think that my desire to lose weight was about you? Like, do you feel like I’m trying to leave you behind?”

I stared at her. There wasn’t anything I could say. How could I feel any other way? How did she not know how obvious she was? Every diet, every scheme, every study was just her trying to find a way out of being what we are. Every time she tried to change who she was, who we all were, it was like betrayal.

I looked over at Dad and realized this wasn’t about me. He was worried she was going to physically leave him, now that she thought she was hot enough to hook up with somebody else. I saw it all at once: the way she was never worried about me being on birth control, the way Dad looked at other women in the supermarket. The way all of us were so focused on what we looked like, as if it mattered, as if being thin was the only kind of life worth living.

So I lied.

“No, Mom. I don’t think about it at all, I guess. It really has nothing to do with me.”

I left them alone and went to eat my cupcake in peace. I looked at the timer I’d had running on my phone since the beginning of junior year: the countdown to the day I’d leave for college. I wanted out even then, but I hadn’t sent out applications yet. Back then, two years seemed like forever.

Mom and Dad made up, I guess. They never told us anything that mattered. Anyway, that was when the deaths started to make the news.

The averages are still debated all the time, because preexisting conditions can’t be ruled out. But people seem to agree it’s about one in ten. In each group of thirty participants in the early studies, ten were control, ten got the placebo, and the final ten got the Pill. Nine out of ten shit themselves to perfection. That tenth one, though. They ended up slumped on a toilet, blood vessels burst in their eyes, hearts blown out by the strain of converting hundreds of pounds of body mass to waste.

I never thought it would get approved with a 10 percent fatality rate, but I guess I was really naive. The truth was it got fast-tracked and approved by the FDA within a year. Mom was in a commercial, talking about how it gave her her life back, but this was a life she had never had. It gave her someone else’s life entirely. Some life she had never even planned for. In the commercial, she wore a teal sports bra and a lot of makeup. I did not recognize her at all. She stood next to that celebrity, the one who did it first. What’s her name—​Amy Blanton.

Remember those ads? “Get the Amy Blanton body!” She had gained a little weight after she had her kids, but her Before picture and Mom’s Before picture looked like members of two different species. In the commercial, their former selves got whisked away, and there they were: exactly the same height, exactly the same build. A little contouring and a blowout made them twins. Mom had the Amy Blanton body. For just a little while, people would stop her on the street and ask if she was Amy Blanton. That got old fast. I used to just walk away fatly while she pretended she looked nothing like her TV twin.

I watched Dad grow more and more insecure about the change in Mom. I saw him get mad at a guy at the gas station who checked out Mom’s ass when she bent over.

“Get back in the car, Carl. Gosh, you’re making a scene about nothing. It was just a compliment!”

Dad sat down, fuming, but he wouldn’t close his door. His ears were bright red. Andrew was playing a game on his phone, totally zoned out. I watched Dad trying to calm himself down.

“You probably haven’t been jealous about Mom since you guys were kids, huh?”

He blew out hot air through his nose like a bull. “Try ever,” he said, his voice tight.

“Wasn’t Mom hot as a teenager?”

His lips closed into a line I could see in the rearview mirror. “She was always heavy. She was . . . she was mine, god damn it.”

That sort of shocked me. He hadn’t ever talked about her that way before. And it hadn’t ever occurred to me that maybe my dad the football player had gotten with my less-than-perfect mom because he knew she’d never cheat on him. Could never. Just like she thought I could never go out and get myself in trouble. Because fat girls don’t fuck, I guess?

I looked over at Andrew, too big for a seat belt, pooling against the car door. Did fat boys fuck? Was anybody going to pick him because he’d be theirs? I didn’t want to imagine. But just as I was feeling sorry for us all, Mom slid lithely back into the car.

“Don’t be a goose, honey,” she said. She laid a hand on Dad’s knee. “You have nothing to worry about.”

That turned out to be a lie.

It was about a month after FDA approval when Dad announced to us that he was gonna take the Pill.

I couldn’t help but give Mom the look of death. He’d never have done it if she hadn’t gone first and made him worry about losing her. Andrew grunted at the news the way he grunted at everything, as if nothing in the world held much interest for him.

I hate crying, but I burst into tears. I couldn’t even yell at Mom. I just wanted to talk Dad out of it. I tried for weeks, and I ended up trying again on the day he began treatment. I just had this feeling in my gut that he was going to be one of the unlucky ones.

“One in ten,” I croaked at him, my voice wrecked by crying. “One in ten, Dad. It’s just slightly better odds than Russian roulette.”

He smiled from his spa-hospital bed with the special trench installed below. He was wearing one of those paper gowns, and I thought how stupid he would feel dying in paper clothes while taking a shit. Was it worth it? How could it be worth it?

“But the odds of dying young if I stay fat are much worse,” he told me in his sweet voice. He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, and I heard his gown rustling like trash dragging through the gutter when it’s windy. “Don’t worry, Munchkin. It’s in god’s hands.”

I guess it was, but I had never trusted god not to drop stuff and break it.

Dad made it to the third treatment. It felt cruel, like I had just started to relax and believe that he might be okay.

We came back and saw him on day one, down about fifty pounds and looking like someone had slapped him around all night.

“Honey, you look wonderful,” Mom cooed, kissing his cheeks and hugging him to her middle. Andrew had stayed home. I looked him up and down, remembering the way Mom had just melted to reveal the stranger within.

“You look okay,” I managed to say.

“I told you, kiddo.” We sat with him while he ate some graham crackers and drank lots of water. My parents held hands.

I skipped the second visit. The knots in my stomach were huge and twisting, and I just couldn’t face it. Mom came home whistling and very pleased with herself.

“He’s in the home stretch now! I can’t wait for you kids to see what your dad really looks like.”

I just sat there, wondering if I was real. Are fat people fake? Do we not have souls? Does nothing I do count if I do it while I’m fat? These were questions I had never really thought about before, but with both of my parents risking death to be less like me, I suddenly had to wonder about a lot of things.

I knew the minute Mom picked up the phone the next day. I could tell she wasn’t expecting the call. She stared at it just a second too long before she picked it up. My film professor calls that a beat, like a drumbeat or a heartbeat. One beat too many, and I knew.

One beat too many and Dad’s heart gave in.

Neither one of us could go with Mom to deal with the body. Andrew wouldn’t even leave his room. I don’t remember those weeks very clearly. I remember weird parts.

Mom buying Dad a new suit he could be buried in, because nothing he owned would fit. Mom saying Dad wouldn’t want to be cremated, now that he was thin. Dad’s D&D buddies looking into his casket and saying how great he looked. The never-ending grief buffet of casseroles and cake in our kitchen. The nights when I could hear Mom crying through the vents.

That should have been the last of it. Other people could die, even famous people, but the Pill killed my dad. That should have been it, end of story, illegal forever. But that’s not how anything works. The world is just allowed to wound you any way it wants and move on.

And so are the people you know.

The minute Andrew brought it up, I almost laughed. There was no way Mom was going to let him do it, after what had happened to Dad. Maybe we weren’t the best of buds, but I didn’t want him to die.

I could hear her in his room, and she was never in his room. It was permadark in there, blackout shades on the windows and nothing but the dim blue glow of his monitors to light it. I could hear them talking and I came close to the door, not quite putting my ear to it.

“I’m too old to be on your insurance,” he said. “But they’re saying there’s gonna be a generic within a year, so it’ll probably be cheaper.”

“I think that’s the best idea, sweetheart. But you’re still going to have to pay for your hospital stay. We have a little money from Dad’s insurance, so I can help you with that. It’s what your father would have wanted.”

I pushed the door open, already yelling. “No. No. No. No. It is not what Dad would have wanted. Dad would have wanted to be alive. Do you want to end up dead, too?”

They both stared at me like I had come through the door on fire.

“What is the matter with you?”

“Yeah,” Andrew sneered. “Don’t you knock?”

Mom put her hands on her hips. “This is a private conversation, kiddo.”

“I don’t give a shit,” I told them. “We just buried our dad, and you want to take the Pill that killed him. How stupid can you be?”

Andrew shrugged. “Ninety percent is still an A.”

“And dead is still dead,” I said at once. “There’s no curve on that.”

Mom came and took my elbow and walked me back toward the door. “You’re letting your emotions get the best of you,” she said. I could hear her voice trembling, and when I looked up her eyes were wet in the dim blue light of the bedroom. “I miss him too, but I don’t let it cloud my judgment. Your brother needs to do what’s best for him.”

“It’s better for him to be dead than fat,” I shot back. “Is that really what you think?”

We both turned back to look at Andrew.

Andrew would never tell me his actual weight, but I had heard him say once that he was in the “five club.” Nothing fit him but the absolute biggest shirts and elastic-waistband shorts, and he wouldn’t wear shoes that had to be tied. His fingers were so fat he could barely use his phone and finally upgraded to one with a stylus.

He sighed at us both. “I’m tired of this,” he said to me, but Mom started to cry. “I’m tired of never going out and never fitting in a chair. I’m tired of getting stared at and having to hide from people to eat. Aren’t you tired of it, sis?”

I shrugged. “I’m not tired of being alive.”

I didn’t convince him. I didn’t convince Mom. She gave him the money and he checked himself in. I went with them, only because I was worried I wouldn’t get to say goodbye otherwise.

Andrew was twenty-four when he did it, and his doctor had to get his digs in first. I remember his old-man chuckle as he lined my brother up next to the chart on the wall. “Well, son. You’re not going to get any taller. And let’s quit getting wider while we can, shall we?”

Andrew laughed with him, as if his fat self was already somebody else. Someone who it was okay to laugh at. My thin mom laughed, too. Somewhere in thin heaven, was Dad laughing? Already I was an anomaly on the streets. I’m sure it used to be hard to be fat in LA or New York. I’ve read about that. But living in Dayton, Ohio, meant always fitting in the booth at a restaurant and never being the only fat person in the room. By the time Andrew got the Pill, I couldn’t count on those things anymore. A year later, the whole world was shrinking around me, and I could already feel the pinch.

Andrew came home from the hospital looking like some other guy; a dude who played basketball and got called Slim. His eyes were bright.

“Munchkin, I can’t wait for you to do it. It’s amazing! I mean, it’s super gross and really painful, but after that it’s the fucking awesomest.”

They had all called me Munchkin since I was a kid. Not because I was short and cute, but because they said I was always munching. I hated that nickname and he knew it. He was just using it now to remind me I was the only one left.

“You look like Dad looked in his casket,” I said.

He tried for a little while to go out and enjoy his new thin life, but he didn’t really know how. He couldn’t talk to anybody. He missed his online friends and he hated the sunlight, the noise, the feeling of people always around, sizing him up. He had a new body, but it didn’t matter.

I watched Andrew go back to his gaming pod; the ruined chair with the cracked spar he had fixed with duct tape no longer sagging or groaning beneath him. The same shiny spots on his computer where he kept his hands in the same positions for fourteen hours at a time while he pretended he was a tall, muscular Viking warrior on some Korean server every day. I watched him settle right back into his old life using his new body and wondered what it was for. He really was the Viking now. He could have put on boots and left the house and had a real adventure. But adventure didn’t appeal to him.

I was stuck between them in the house. I always had been, but Dad and I had understood each other. We had been a team. I guess I was a daddy’s girl, but I was never spoiled like that. We just got along. Andrew was silent and Mom never shut up. Dad was the only one I could talk to, or sit in silence with without feeling bad.

And now I was the only fat member of the family. Slowly but surely, even the aunts and cousins signed up to take the Pill. I started to joke with my friends in Visionaries that fat people were going to become an endangered species.

Some of them laughed, but a couple suggested we actually make a short film about that. We kicked the idea around, but mostly they wanted to film me eating in a cage while people stared. I didn’t know how that would get anything meaningful across, and they didn’t know how not to be thin assholes. So we dropped the idea.

Mom was at least using the way she had changed to enjoy the real world a little more. She wore workout clothes constantly, all bright colors and clinging like the patterning on a snake. Every day she got to enjoy the way people looked at her brightly now, eyebrows up, not searching for their first chance to sidle away.

“People just respond to me so much better now,” she said in one of her interviews. “It changes everything about my daily interactions. I’m a mother and a widow, and I don’t need a lot of attention,” she had said, smiling coyly. “But even the mailman is happier to see me than he ever was before.”

I wanted to barf when she said she didn’t need attention. She had been thirsty enough before to talk to absolutely anyone, even sign up to take injections and hypnosis to get it. Now she was always posing and watching to see who would look. Attention was like the drug she couldn’t get enough of. She still ate the same bowl of ice cream every night, sitting next to the groove in the couch where Dad used to fit. No, Mom, you didn’t need attention. You took the Pill, you let the Pill take Dad because you were so A-OK with yourself.

The Pill sold like nothing had ever sold before. The original, the generic, the knockoffs, the different versions approved in Europe and Asia that met their standards and got rammed through their testing. There was at last a cure for the obesity epidemic. Fat people really were an endangered species. And everybody was so, so glad.

One in ten kept dying. The average never improved, not in any corner of the globe. There were memorials for the famous and semifamous folks who took the gamble and lost. A congressman here and a comedian there. But everyone was so proud of them that they had died trying to better themselves that all the obituaries and eulogies had a weird, wistful tone to them. As if it was the next best thing to being thin. At least they didn’t have to live that fat life anymore.

And every time it was on the news, we sat in silence and didn’t talk about Dad.

I was just a kid when Mom made it through the original trial that unleashed the Pill on the world. It wasn’t approved for teenagers, not anywhere. Don’t get me wrong; teens and parents alike were more than ready to sign up for the one-in-ten odds of dying. But the scientists who had worked on the Pill said unequivocally that it should not be taken by anyone who was not absolutely done growing. Eighteen was the minimum, but they recommended twenty-one to be completely safe.

On my eighteenth birthday, my mom threw me a party. She invited all my friends (mostly the Visionaries) and decorated the backyard with yellow roses and balloons.

It was the first time since Dad died that the house seemed cheerful. Mom ordered this huge lemon cake at the good bakery, with layers of custard filling and sliced strawberries. I remember everybody moaning over how good it was, how summery-sweet. People danced, but I felt too self-conscious to get up and give it a try. My mom ended up dancing with a neighbor who heard the music and came through the gate to check it out. He was skinny, too, and I couldn’t watch them together.

We ate barbecue ribs and I got to tell people over and over again where I’d gotten into college. Northwestern. Rutgers. Cornell. And UCLA. Where was I going to go? Oh, I hadn’t decided yet, but I needed to pick soon.

Except I definitely had. I had wanted to study filmmaking my whole life. Everybody in the Visionaries club knew that; they had all applied to UCLA and USC. A few of us got in. It wasn’t just that it was my dream school in the golden city where movies were made. It was also about as far away as I could get. Mom reminded me that I could go anywhere in-state for free because of her job, saying it over and over with that look in her eye, the one that said don’t leave me, but I was going to LA if I had to walk every mile.

When it came time for presents, I got some jewelry from my grandmother. She didn’t come and I couldn’t blame her; she was my dad’s mom. A lace parasol from my friends, who all expected I’d need protection from the sun sometime soon. Books and music and a clever coffee cup. A fountain pen. The kinds of things that signal adulthood is about to begin.

My mom, beaming, gave me the Pill.

“I can’t give you the physical thing, of course,” she said, glancing around for a laugh. She got a little one. She handed me her iPad. “This has all of the paperwork, showing that you’ve been approved and my insurance will cover it. Plus, I booked your spa stay so that you’ll have time to buy all new clothes before leaving for school.” She smiled like she’d never killed my dad.

“I don’t . . . know what to say,” I said finally. If I said what I was actually feeling, it might mean she wouldn’t pay for school, I’d be on my own. I had to swallow it. But I’d be damned if I was gonna swallow that Pill.

The party broke up slowly, with the neighbor guy hanging around and trying to talk to Mom until she texted Andrew and made him come down and walk the guy out. I packed up all my presents. I thanked Mom as sincerely as I could. I wrapped up slices of cake for people who wanted to take them home. And I seethed.

I left for UCLA two weeks early. I told Mom I was planning to come back and take my medicine over Thanksgiving break. She said she understood my delay, that I was just worried I’d pull the short straw and that it was okay to be nervous. She put me on the plane to Los Angeles with tears in her eyes.

On the flight, it was me and one other fat kid, maybe ten years old. That was it. The woman who sat next to me huffed and whined about it until the flight attendant brought her a free drink to shut her up. It was the first time I had ever been on a plane, and I sat there wondering whether it was always as uncomfortable as this. I could see the other fat kid up a few rows, hanging his elbow and one knee into the aisle. He wasn’t even full-grown and already he was too big for an airplane seat. I wished we had been sitting together. We would have recognized each other. It would have been like having family again. Everyone else had that same Pill body.

And it was always the exact same body. No more thick thighs or really round asses. No more wide tits or pointy pecs or love handles rounding out someone’s sides. Everyone’s body was flat planes and straight lines. It wasn’t just that they were thin. They were all somehow the same.

In LA the change was striking. I had heard that even thin people were taking the Pill out there to ensure that they’d never gain any weight, but I didn’t believe it until I started seeing the change on TV and in movies. One by one, distinctive shapes disappeared. It was always the Amy Blanton body, like my mom had. The guys all had the same Ethan Fairbanks body. He once did a bunch of ads with some nobody. Only faces and hair color, a little difference in height could distinguish one actor from another. Here and there, a death. Worth it, everyone whispered like a prayer. Worth it, worth it, worth it.

I made it a few months at UCLA. My classes were cool and I started to make friends right off. But little things kept piling up. I went to the student store to buy myself a UCLA hoodie and they had nothing that would fit me. It wasn’t even close. I looked at the largest size in the men’s section and even then it would have clung to me like the skin of a sausage. I decided I could live without that ubiquitous symbol of college life, but I was pissed. I even thought about buying one just to snip the logo out and sew it onto a hoodie in my size from Walmart.

Then Walmart stopped carrying plus sizes altogether.

There were no desks on campus that I could sit at. A few of the classrooms had long tables with detached chairs and those were all right. But the majority of my freshman classes were in those big lecture halls, with the rows and rows of wooden chair-and-desk combinations. I couldn’t wedge myself into one to save my life. My first or second day I tried really hard in the back row and just got a big bruise over my lowest rib for my troubles. I sat in the aisle, on the steps, or against the back wall every day. There just wasn’t any space for me.

My dorm room was the same way. The bed was narrow and I could hear the whole frame groaning the second I lay down. The bathroom was so small that I could touch both walls with my thighs when I sat on the toilet. My roommate was so thin I knew she hadn’t taken the Pill—​she still looked too original. But over the course of the first week, I realized that was because she never ate. I asked her to lunch a couple of times, but she always said no. I couldn’t save her. I was working on how to save myself.

Days ticked by and Thanksgiving break was bearing down on me. My mom kept calling, telling me how great it was going to be when I went back to the school in my ideal body.

“I don’t know that it’ll be my ideal body,” I told her. “It’ll just be different.”

“Don’t you want to go on dates like the other girls?” Her voice was so whiny I could barely stand it.

I looked across the room to the other girl I lived with. She was in her bra, and every time she breathed in I could see the impressions of her individual ribs against the skin of her back. She was doing her reading and sucking on her bottom lip as if her lip gloss might offer some calories.

“I don’t know that I want anything other girls have,” I told her. But that wasn’t true. Most girls had fathers.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Mom said. “Come on home and let’s get you squared away.”

“Soon,” I told her, counting the days until I had to let them try to kill me for being what I am.

I had been there about a month when I knew I wasn’t going to make it. The stares had become unmanageable. I wasn’t the last fat girl in LA, was I? People on campus avoided me like I was a radioactive werewolf who stank like a dead cat in a hot garage. I remember one time I tried to take a selfie to send home to the Visionaries and someone gasped out loud. In the picture, I could see him, mouth open like he’d glimpsed a ghost.

And in a way I guess I was. I was the ghost of fatness past, haunting the open breezeways of UCLA. I was what they used to be, what they had always feared they would become. I became obsessed with the terrible power of my fatness; I was the worst that could possibly happen to someone. Worse than death, had to be, because somewhere my dad was rotting in a box because that was easier than living in a body like mine. I knew when I frightened people and I pushed my advantage. I took up their space. I haunted them with my warm breath and my soft elbows. I fed on their fright.

It was early November, and I could not adjust to the lack of seasons. It was still warm and sunny like June on the California coast. I missed home, but the idea of home repelled me. I needed comfort.

I walked myself over to the cheap pancake house and ordered the never-ending stack and coffee. The all-you-can-eat pancake special was always a favorite with frat boys, and its popularity had only increased since the Pill hit the market. People who really loved to eat could finally do it without worrying that it would ruin their lives.

The hostess tried to seat me in a booth and I just rolled my eyes at her. I was not about to eat my weight in pancakes with a Formica tabletop wedged just beneath my sternum.

“A table, please.”

She stuck me in the back, next to the restrooms. I didn’t care.

My first four pancakes showed up hot and perfect and I asked for extra butter. When they were just right (dripping, not soaked and turning into paste) I shoveled up huge bites into my waiting mouth, letting it fill me as nothing else did. Who could care that they were the last of their kind when the zoo had such good food?

And yeah, people were staring. People are always staring at me. That was a constant of my existence, and I was used to it. I ignored them. I slurped up hot coffee and wiped the plate down with the last bite of cake.

“Hit me again,” I said, and the waitress took the plate away. A few minutes later, another fresh hot stack of pancakes appeared.

I didn’t know how many times I could do it, but that was the day I was going to find out.

And then a man sat at my table.

He was perfectly ordinary, with brown hair and brown eyes. He had the Pill body underneath his tan suit. I looked him over.

“Can I help you?”

He stared at my mouth for a minute and I waited. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” he finally asked.

I rolled my eyes hard and started to butter my pancakes. I was going to need more butter. “Fuck off, creep.”

He put a hand against his own chest. “Please, I meant no disrespect. I’m being sincere. You’re so lovely. So rare. I haven’t seen a woman like you in almost a year.”

I waved to the waitress but she didn’t see me. I debated. I’d rather have the butter, but if the cakes got cold before it showed up, it would hardly matter at all. I scraped the dish that I had and began to cut up pancakes and ignore my visiting weirdo, hoping he would go away.

He cleared his throat and ordered a cup of coffee. “Please, allow me to entertain you while you eat and I’ll pick up your check.”

I sighed. Few things were as motivating as free food. So I let him sit.

He asked me about cinematography, about why I had come to LA. I talked in between cups of coffee and plates of pancakes.

“I had all these ideas about the story only I could tell when I got here. The things that were unique to my experience. It’s funny now, because there was nothing unique about my experience. I guess everybody thinks they’re one of a kind.”

He glanced over his shoulder a little, then pushed the cream pitcher toward me for my coffee. “Look around. You nearly are.”

I shrugged. “I guess. But there’s no way to tell this story so that people will understand it. You ever see the way fat people on the street are shot for news stories? Headless and limbless and wide as the world, always wandering like they’ve got nowhere to be. That’s the only story people know. We were always a joke, we were always invisible. And now, we’re going to disappear. Because we were never meant to exist in the first place.”

“Are you?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow. “Going to disappear?”

“Who the hell are you?” I finally asked.

He sighed and finished his coffee. “I can’t tell you that. But I can show you something that might change your mind.”

I don’t know why I said yes. Maybe I was dreading going back to school where nothing fit. Maybe I just didn’t want to answer the question of whether I was going to take the Pill. Maybe it was just the way he looked at me—​really looked at me. Not like I was a problem to be solved or some walking glitch in the way things are supposed to work.

I got into a strange man’s car outside of the pancake house and I let him show me.

The club was up in the hills, just off Mulholland Drive. It was in this gorgeous house, built in the golden age of Hollywood for some chiseled hunk who had died of AIDS. The lawn was perfect and I could smell the chlorine in the pool the minute I stepped out of the car. The neighborhood was the kind of quiet where you know that even the gardeners muffle their equipment.

My nameless escort walked up the stone path toward a wide, shaded, black front door. He looked back over his shoulder, glancing at me.

“You coming?”

I was.

It was dark inside the house at first, my eyes adjusting from the bright sunshine slowly. After a few minutes, I saw that it was merely dim. The living room was furnished beautifully, sumptuously, with a clear emphasis on texture and deep padding. The room was empty except for one woman, sitting on a chaise longue and reading a book.

We approached her and she looked up. She was an absolute knockout: a redhead with full lips and built like an hourglass that had time to spare. Her dress clung to her, making a clear case that she enjoyed being looked at. She was not walking around in an Amy Blanton body. She was an original.

The man I came in with tapped his fingers on the top of her book and said, “In the chocolate war, I fought on the side of General Augustus.”

The redhead nodded, not saying a word. She shifted in her seat and reached for something I couldn’t see. Behind her, a bookshelf slid sideways, revealing a deep purple tunnel behind it.

I nodded to her as we passed, and she smiled at me with a hunger I couldn’t put a name to. I had no idea where we were headed.

We walked through a series of rooms. The entire house was decorated in the same style as that first room: sensual, decadent, and plush. As I got to see more of it, I realized that everything was also built wide, sturdy, and I’d never think twice about sitting in any chair I saw.

In every room I passed, I saw the same thing as I peered through the door. There was a fat person surrounded by thin people staring at them. Some of the onlookers were crying, some were visibly aroused. Different races, different genders. All well-dressed. All nearly identical in those Pill bodies. A tall fat woman was lounging, shrouded by veils in a Turkish bed, nude and lolling and made of endless undulations of honey-colored flesh. She fed herself grapes while someone was making her laugh. Ten people sat around her bed, watching.

A fat man, as big as Andrew used to be, was dipping his gloved fists into paint and punching a blank, white wall. He was being videotaped and photographed, lit gorgeously while people murmured praise and encouragements.

In one room, a short Black woman whose curves defied gravity ran oil-slicked hands over her nudity, smiling a perfect, satisfied smile. Two men stood near her, their mouths open, hungering endlessly, asking nothing of her.

We came to an empty room that had a round tub at its end and a set of low stone benches. The domed ceiling made our footfalls sound epic. The water had steam rising off it, even in the warmth of the house, and smelled like the sea.

“Salt water,” he said. “Much better for your skin. Would you like to take a dip? You don’t have to talk to anyone or do anything, but some people may come join you. How does that sound?”

“I don’t have a bathing suit.”

His smile was slow and he dropped his chin like he was about to share a conspiracy. “Have you looked around? Nobody will mind.”

“What are these people getting out of this? I don’t need this.”

He pulled out his phone and showed me the app that the house used to keep track of money. Each fat performer had an anonymous identifier and a live count of what they were making.

“Maybe I could persuade you to work for a couple of hours, just to see what you think? You’ll make the house minimum, plus tips.”

I watched the numbers climb up. “Just to sit here? I don’t have to touch anybody? Or even make conversation?”

He nodded. “We’d prefer that you work in the nude, but you don’t even have to do that. Just enjoy the hot soak. What do you say?”

It sounded weird as fuck, but I wanted two things immediately. First, I wanted the money. If I was going to go home and refuse the Pill, I was pretty sure I was going to need it. Second, I wanted to go back to the room where the boxing painter was being filmed. I itched to get behind a camera in this place, to tell the story of the endangered species of fat people. Not like the Visionaries had wanted it, but the way I wanted it. Like this. Dark and rich and seductive.

I got into the water in my bra and panties. I may as well have gotten naked; they were both white cotton and went see-through in the water. I tried not to think about it. I dunked my head, sat on one of the submerged steps, and soaked with my neck laid back against the rim.

I could hear people coming and going. I could hear the things they whispered to me. Voices in the salty dark called me rare and magnificent and soft and enticing. I said nothing. I didn’t even hint that I could hear.

After a few hours, my nameless handler came back with a fluffy, soft towel the size of a bedsheet that smelled like lavender. He thanked me and showed me how to download the app to get paid.

I had been there for three hours, and I had more money than I had ever had at one time, in my entire life. He watched my face very closely when I saw the number.

“My name’s Dan,” he said softly.

“Do you own this place?”

“No, I’m just a recruiter. I’m going to give you my number.”

I watched him type it into my phone as “Dan Chez Corps.”

“What makes you think I’ll call you?”

I thought he was going to remind me of how much money I had just made, but he didn’t. He kinda shook his head a little, then asked, “Where else are you going to go?”

He had brought me replacements for my wet underthings, much nicer than the ones I was wearing. They were exquisite and well made and carried no tags.

“A gift from the house,” he said, before leaving me to change. They fit like they were made for me.

I went back to the dorm and watched my roommate twitch in her sleep. Her side of the fridge held a single hard-boiled egg and a pint of skim milk. My bed groaned beneath me as I lay down, still in my fancy gift underwear.

I dreamt about my dad.

The laws changed that year, but they wouldn’t go into effect until January. They weren’t making it illegal to be fat, exactly. But it was as close as they could get. It was going to be legal to deny health insurance to anyone with a BMI over twenty-five if they refused the Pill. Intentional obesity would also be grounds for loss of child custody and would be acceptable reason for dismissal from a job.

Where the law went, culture followed. Airlines were adding a customer weight limit and clothing manufacturers concentrated on developing lines to individualize the Pill body. Journalists wrote articles on the subject of renegade fats. Could their citizenship be revoked? Should parents of fat children be prosecuted for abuse if they didn’t arrange for them to receive the Pill as soon as possible?

I submitted a treatment to my short film class detailing my desire to film a secret enclave where fat renegades performed for the gratification of a live Pilled audience. My professor wrote back to tell me that my idea was 1. obscene and 2. impossible.

The Friday before Thanksgiving break, Mom called.

“I’m so glad we’re getting this done before the change in airline policy. Can you imagine having to come to Ohio by train? Anyhow, your Aunt Jeanne is coming in for the holiday—”

“Mom. Mom, listen. I don’t want to do it.”

“Do what? See Aunt Jeanne?”

“No, Mom, listen. I’m not going to take the Pill.”

She was quiet for a minute. “Sweetie, we all took it hard when your father passed. I know you must be worried about that, but they say there’s no genetic marker—”

“It’s not just Dad. It’s not just the odds that I might die. I just don’t want to do it. I want to stay who I am.”

She sighed like I was a child who had asked for the ninetieth time why the sky was blue. “This doesn’t change who you are, Munchkin. It only changes your body.”

“I’m not coming home,” I said, flatly.

There was a lot of yelling, with both of us trying to be cruel to the other. I’d rather not remember it. What I do remember is her crying, saying something like, “I gave you your body. I made it, and it’s imperfect like mine was. Why won’t you let me fix it? Why won’t you let me correct my mistake?”

“I don’t feel like a mistake,” I told her. “And I’m not coming home. Not now, not ever.”

I remember hanging up and the terrible silence that followed. I remember thinking I should turn my phone off, but then I realized I could just leave it behind. I could leave everything behind. I took my camera and my laptop and left everything else. I didn’t even take a change of clothes.

I borrowed a phone from someone on the quad, making up a story that mine had been stolen. She waited for me as I called Dan. I told him to pick me up where I was.

The car arrived ten minutes later.

The redhead buzzed me in without asking for a password, which was great because I couldn’t remember what Dan had said. Down through the purple hallway and a woman I’d never seen before shook my hand and told me I could call her Denny.

Denny had a Pill body, hidden away beneath a wide, flowing caftan and a matching headwrap. She showed me to my room, my king-size bed, my enormous private bath, my shared common room and library. She gave me the Wi-Fi password and explained the house’s security.

“You may stay here as long as you like. The house will feed you and clothe you. Your medical needs will be seen to. Your entertainments will be top-notch. You may leave anytime you wish. Your pay will be automatically deposited into your account as it comes in, without delay.

“However, you must never disclose the location or the nature of this house to anyone via any means; not by phone call or text or email. You may take photos and videos, but we have jammers to prevent geotagging of any kind. If you are found in violation of this one rule, you will walk out of here with nothing but the clothes on your back. Is that clear?”

I told her it was. She left and returned five minutes later with a new phone for me. I signed into my bank account—​the one my mother wasn’t on—​and set about creating a new email, a new profile, a new identity.

I eased into the work. I ate cupcakes and I danced in a leotard. I read poetry aloud while sipping a milkshake. I lounged in a velvet chaise nude while people drew me and painted me. I began to speak to my admirers and I watched my pay skyrocket.

I met the house’s head seamstress: a brilliant, nimble-fingered fat woman named Charisse. She had an incredible eye and hardly had to measure anyone. She made me corsets and skirts, silk pajamas and satin gowns, costumes and capes and all manner of underwear.

I realized when I had been wearing her work for months that some of my clothes were a little too small. My favorite bikini cut into me just so, just enough to accentuate the flesh it did not quite contain. I filmed myself in the hall of mirrors, wearing it and trying to understand what it meant.

Some of my gowns were a little too big, though I could remember the exactitude with which I was fitted. I made short clips showing the gaps in the waist and hips, the way I could work my whole hand in between the fabric and my skin.

Charisse was too skilled for it to be an accident. The implication became clear.

All around me there were heavenly bodies in gowns and togas, a stately fleet of well-rounded ships gliding alongside the pool or lying silkily in our beds. We were beautiful, but we were all aware of a subtle campaign to make us larger, ever larger, more suited to satisfy whatever it was that brought the throngs of thin whispering wantons to our door.

In twos and threes, we began to talk about what it meant. About who we could trust. About who was running this place, and why.

The lower floors of the house were a brothel. Somehow I knew that without being told. There was a look in the older fat folks’ eyes that let me know it would be waiting for me when I was ready. Nobody pressured me. Nobody even asked. One day I just headed down the stairs. Cheeks were swabbed at the door and everybody waited fifteen minutes until they were cleared. I got my negatives and went through.

I’d never had sex before. I think it happens later for fat kids. While everyone else was trying each other on, I was still trying to figure out why I never fit into anything. I don’t regret that. I can’t imagine doing this out in the world where I am the worst thing that can happen to somebody.

I didn’t know what it would be like. I hope it’s this good for everyone, with a circle of adoring worshippers vying for the right to adore you, to touch every inch of you, to murmur in wonder as you climax again and again until nap time, when you are lovingly spooned and crooned to sleep. I luxuriated in it for a long time, not thinking about what it meant to only touch thin people, to only be touched by them. I watched my bank balance climb. I didn’t ask myself what they saw when they looked at me. I existed as a collection of nerves that did not think.

I stopped thinking about going home. I stopped thinking about the Pill. I stopped thinking. I became what I had always been and nothing more: my fat, fat body.

When I came back to thinking again, I found it did not make things easier.

I have been here for three years now, and I don’t think I can ever live anywhere else. Outside, they tell me, there are no more like me. Only in places like here, where a few of us fled before the world could change us. Nobody is allowed to bring us food presents anymore; everyone is too worried they’ll try and slip us the Pill. Someone might actually be that upset that I exist. I don’t think about that either. I don’t exist for them. I accept their worship and forget their faces completely. It’s always the same face anyhow.

Sometimes I point my camera at that face and ask them what they’re doing here, what do they want, why did they come seeking the thing they’ve worked so hard to avoid becoming?

They mumble about mothers and goddesses, about the embrace of flesh and the fullness of desire. It sounds like my own voice inside my head. I think about my dad, about god’s hands. Would he have been one of these? Would he have come to miss my mother’s body the way he first knew it?

I think about showing this film in LA. I think about Denny telling me I can leave here anytime. I think about how I could leave my body anytime, too, how any of us can. I think about Andrew, about how he left his and gained nothing at all. How I used to see him as the enemy when he was just me.

Deep down on the lowest floor, in perfect privacy, the fats make love to each other. There is a boy who came only a few weeks ago, an import from one of the countries that’s taken to the Pill slowly, so we have a lot of recruits from their shores. We had no common language at first, but we’ve worked on that and discovered an unmapped country between us. He’s so sweet and shy and eager to lift the heaviness of his belly so that he can slip inside me and then drop it on top of mine, warm and weighty like a curtain. He whispers to me that we don’t ever have to go back, that we can raise darling fat babies right here, that we’ll become like another species. Homo pillus can inherit the earth, while Homo lipidus lives in secret.

“But we’ll live,” he whispers to me as we conspire to remake the world in the image of our thick ankles. “We’ll live,” he says, his tongue tracing the salty trenches made by the folds in my sides. Belly to belly, fat against fat.

“We’ll live.”