You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

It was a meat cycle, and when I ate spaghetti with meatballs or chicken noodle soup for dinner, I went to bed certain that participating in the meat economy meant that I would be eaten, too, someday, by something larger than me or maybe by many things much smaller.

B didn’t really eat. Maybe she was saving her stomach for something that didn’t yet exist.

C was great at watching TV.

C was suited to his life and to the historical period within which his life unfolded.

C bought a hot dog from a sunburned teenage girl who sat behind the counter watching a game show where a woman applied makeup to a man who I decided might have been her husband.

I loved his face, his bland white good-looking face.

He made things suddenly, instantaneously normal, just by explaining them.

“Do you think we look alike? B and me?” “Well, if I had to describe you and her with words,” he began cautiously, “I guess they might be the same words.”

We watched channel seek when we were upset, because it was like experiencing several dozen small attachments and losses that you could maybe prevent but definitely would not do anything about.

it wasn’t called a disorder until it started happening to well-off white people.

She looked like the girls on TV commercials, thrilled at the condition of their outsides.

The ratio of actual sex to chatting, joking, and eating snacks in this fantasy is about one part to six.

I stared at the flowers. I worried about them, their deaths serving as decoration for birthdays and dinners.

I made the least of my situation.

Had Michael’s veal-related accomplishments left him with a sense of purpose fulfilled?

when left alone she wouldn’t do the sorts of things a human body normally does when it takes up space.

I had everything I needed here: peace, quiet, pamphlets.

I held still. Any movement I made would be proof that time was passing.

It was his ability to trouble me that made me prize his comfort.

I knew that I looked like somebody in need of desperate, anonymous help from strangers.

Feed a man a fish and he’ll imagine himself content, allow him to purchase a wide range of non-fish items and he will feed for days.

Here at the United Church of the Conjoined Eater, we believe that there is nothing more hazardous to yourself than being yourself.

He was of average height, or at least not of a height anybody would comment on.

I wasn’t much of an expert on myself anymore.