By Fida TK.
The worst part was that he had asked me, easy, without any sort of pressure or anything like that. He said, can I take it all with me, and I said yes, a little stupidly maybe, and so he got my toes and my spleen and my soul in his arms and walked out of my room, and there I was on the bed, a rough-cut blob without any of the parts you are supposed to have.
“I’m an idiot,” I say.
“You’re horrific,” Mariam agrees.
“I can’t get up.”
“I know.”
She wipes the sweat off my forehead and throws a blanket on me and starts to clean, but the stink of everything is a lot, so she tells me she’ll check on me later and then walks out.
Living with Mariam is great because she deals with the last of everything without complaint, when I leave the butts of our vegetables in the fridge or the end of the bread on the counter.
Then I am alone in the bed, rolling around in sweat and bagel crumbs, assembling a horizontal lifestyle that lasts hours or days or several life sentences, impossible to tell. The light fades and then burns through the window, and crumbs and peels and the odd fork feel sharp against my back, and I can’t stop thinking of a great number of tangled griefs, like my head has been spooled out and is now a fractured static television. Channel surfing: a hairy mole above my left kneecap, a bitter fight in the park, a heatwave last month that saw my skin go from brown to browner, not tan or golden but the kind of dark that gets aunties shit-talking. And then, how I always forget to moisturize my elbows, and again back to that time with the nightgowns, I feel bitter and superficial and jealous of everyone, and I am bloated all the time, and I judge other people for being bloated. My teeth aren’t that straight. A deep, vicious need to be seen, so I destroy every possibility for stability, so it seems that people are always happier after having known me. Unchecked cavities, probably. And one thing sticks out the most, the worst of it all: how did I think that anyone could ever love me when I am a huge outfit repeater?
“Being an outfit repeater is not a bad thing,” Mariam tells me, later. She leans in my doorway and watches me. “It’s actually better for the environment.”
“I don’t care about the environment,” I reply. Then I deflate. “Yes, I do. I’m just—”
“It’s okay. The environment understands.”
“I always wear the same thing. That’s why—”
“Flannel pyjamas? Black t-shirt?” She contemplates it. “Yes. I know what’s wrong with you.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“You’re bisexual.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t try to make me laugh.”
“Sorry.”
She leaves my room to make a sandwich and calls after me to join her, that it’s been enough blobbing around. So I get out of the bed, finally. And the heel of my toeless left foot touches something wet, it is a pile of dirty socks and underneath is a brain, mine I guess, I guess he forgot it, in the middle of all the taking, so I take it in my hands, this part of me that has attempted to camouflage as a cotton undergarment. I squeeze as tight as possible until the last few tears pour out of my eyes, and my nose and mouth, and drip onto the squishy pink folds all covered in lint. The brain cringes at me. I wish I joined the others, it says. And I reply, I wish he left my tits instead of you. Then we argue for a while about what to do with each other.
“Who are you talking to?” Mariam says as she comes in again. Then she sees what I’m holding and screams.
“What is that?”
“My brain.”
“Okay,” she says. “At least you have that.”
“Useless shite it’s been.”
“We’ll wash it,” she suggests. “After we clean your room and get you stitched up.”
We put the brain in the laundry bin. Then we chuck dirty spoons in the sink and old fluffy tissues in the compost, I scrub a vomit stain off the carpet floor with the three fingers I have left. When my room becomes a room again we lay out what we have found on my bed: a few toes, some nipple hairs, a buttock. Still no breasts.
Mariam drags the recycling bin towards us, with her left hand. A sewing needle in her right.
“You haven’t even eaten yet. ”
“You did it for me,” she says.
Then she gets to work. Weaving garbage into my flesh with her flesh against mine. It hurts even more than the taking, but of course these things do. I think, but without a brain of course, so maybe this is not even a thought—but I think about how none of the stuff like dry elbows will matter now, that this kind of ugliness is more of a transparency. When Mariam finishes, she turns me towards the mirror and we stare at our reflections together, her, with tomato tins for hips and thighs, and me, cardboard where he cut out my spleen. Egg cartons for toes, an arm of glass, plastic for a soul.
“What do you think?” she asks me. Her voice is soft. Quiet.
“I don’t look like a girl,” I say.
“Did you ever like being a girl?”
“Not really.”
Then we take my brain and the dirty socks and put them in the washer. And now, only this: life happens, real touch, unspeakable but onwards, moments of flinching beauty, soft pain and sore kneecaps, sorrow and everything else, all at once, I don’t know how to explain it properly, I know it’s not making sense, detergent kills as much as it mends. Please return my spleen. I have to go now, I love you, always, at least this version does, infinitely so—insane, what happens I mean, when you finally do your laundry— And it feels— And it’s all—
“You know,” I say. Suddenly I feel emotional as I watch Mariam clear up the kitchen. “You’re not so bad. Far as flatmates go.”
Her mouth twitches. Then slips into a thin strip. I help her now, washing the sewing needle in the sink. Folding everything back in the kit. We clean the table together, mop up the blood. The wood is stained even deeper than before. The washer is almost done with its cycle, my brain will be ready in half an hour. So we kill time, rolling cigarettes, splitting a sandwich.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fida TK is a bartender based in London. They enjoy writing sad fiction and drinking hot water.
