bodies

by Emily Buli

As I spiral inward, I pass lover after lover—their faces flaring brightly, then dissolving into the dark.

Somewhere along the line, I trade lovers for stuffed animals.

I take one with me into the closet of my childhood bedroom where I’m sleeping with the door closed because I’m afraid of open space.

It’s not the space itself that scares me, but what it represents—an uninterrupted eternity, free of walls, free of breaks, places to decompress. I oscillate between being afraid of that, and being afraid of oblivion.

“You’re such an emo,” says my fake-friend Tiffany. “Always thinking about death.”

We’re in seventh grade and it’s a half day. When the bell rings, we walk to a pizza shop. As I wash down my calzone with so much root beer it makes my stomach hurt, I keep wondering how everyone around me is so okay all the time.

“Bella is such a fucking whore,” Tiffany says with grease all down her chin. “She was pregnant and she didn’t even know it—when she sat down to go to the bathroom a freaking baby plopped into the toilet.”

“What the fuck?” says our friend Summer. “Was it alive?”

“It was the size of a golf ball.”

And she flushed it.

“She flushed it.”

And I think I hear the vortex pulling me down.

*****

A girl named Megan crystallizes in the shadows. She’s wearing so much gloss her lips stick together in strings.

“Don’t tell your mom,” she says as she closes the door to her bedroom.

She opens her laptop and shows me something strange.

It starts with a video of two women kissing, which intrigues me in a way I don’t fully understand. Megan watches on the bean bag beside me. Her eyes are like glass—red and distant as she takes swigs of hard lemonade with one hand and pets her dog with the other. It’s a poodle. Her hot pink collar reads diva.

“I’m bored of this,” says Megan, yawning.

She clicks and clicks and clicks and clicks.

With every click, my intrigue devolves deeper into horror. The room is dark and Megan’s screen is like a brand. By the time it’s burned itself into me thoroughly, I can no longer comprehend what I’m seeing, and so I don’t. And so I look at Megan’s dog instead, running my fingers through her slightly matted fur and trying to pick out all the knots.

On screen, a woman’s eyes are filled with something white. She looks blind, maybe—like she has cataracts.

Megan’s poodle yelps.

I’ve pulled too hard.

I whisper, “sorry,” as I stare into the screen at the woman with the white eyes who is staring off into the distance. The camera looks down on her from above, but she’s looking past it—into the ceiling, maybe, or somehow into the sky. Her eyes are open, but she looks like she’s sleeping. A pang stabs through me. I close my eyes and try to imagine what she’s dreaming of, but the video repeats on the undersides of my eyelids—a series of sunspots, hazy and unreal.

Megan closes the laptop.

“Sleep tight,” she says cheerily.

I take the last sip of lemonade, bitter and warm.

Within minutes, Megan is snoring. I try to count sheep, but all I see are bodies—bodies, open—bodies, twisted into unimaginable shapes. Is that where all of this is headed? Is this what being female is about?

The next day, I shave my head because I don’t want to look like the women in the video. I cry into the mirror at my developing breasts and wish hard for time to move backwards instead of forwards—for my body to reabsorb the buds on my chest and for my mind to reabsorb my body itself. I have a dream that night that I’m an alien—that I was born on Earth by mistake, and that my real form is sexless and incorporeal. I was supposed to glow. I was supposed to be a genius. That’s what my Uncle Max called me—a creative genius—and I believed him, until I found out I was meat.

Photo of Emily Buli

BIO: Emily Buli writes ecstatic fiction about memory, embodiment, and metaphysical collapse. She holds an MFA in Film, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Expat Press, Maudlin House, and God’s Cruel Joke. She can be found online @eternityc0re.