You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

She was cut to my shape and size like a trapdoor: similar enough that I could imagine myself into her, different enough to make that fantasy a form of escape.

I didn’t see the promised biotransformative subexfoliation, but I knew something had happened because my lips stung and I smelled like lemon-lime soda.

C was suited to his life and to the historical period within which his life unfolded. He didn’t long to return to a simpler time, or to destroy the current time, or to build a better future.

And at times when the inner corners of my eyes burned and I knew I was about to spill, I had only to look over at him and his utterly normal grin to feel like I had grossly misread my own situation. Then whatever feeling I was feeling would hollow itself out, so that all I felt was that I no longer knew what I felt.

This is happiness, I thought as the air-conditioning droned behind me like a single monstrous insect. My face tingled or was falling asleep on one side. I had hoped happiness would be warmer, cozier, more enveloping.

We were behaving exactly like people behaved, there was nothing wrong that I could name, but for some reason I wasn’t feeling that unalone feeling you were supposed to have when you were with someone else.

She moved like someone in convenience store surveillance footage, someone who hopes they are being watched.

I did a layer of primer and applied the foundation, rubbing it on in small circles as if I were buffing or sanding. A zone of creamy, skin-colored skin eked away at my own. It ate up the jaw, the chin, the nose, the forehead. I was looking more like myself every second.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You’ve always got yourself to keep you company.”

“I don’t remember what happens when I’m alone. It’s like all that time just happens without me. It’s like being a chair or a table.”

“Is there any way I can help?” I asked, hoping there wasn’t.

Sociologists said it was social, psychologists said it was psychological, and some religious nut said they had heard a call from God to leave behind their wicked lives.

I knew then that we were going to have a fight. I wanted to excuse myself before it happened, leave my body behind to field it while I did something else, something completely else.

Wanting things was a substitute for wanting people, one of the best possible substitutes.

Loving someone was no guarantee of how they would treat you. All it did was raise the stakes.

I was a great girl, he said, but I had a downward trajectory. I had been doing less and less each day, and the things I did do I regarded with trepidation, as though they might turn on me.

With a product like Kandy Kakes, the ingredients are spelled out for you on the wrapper—every part accounted for, its caloric and nutritional content tabulated. But what sorts of ingredients went into a piece of fruit? An orange wasn’t a type of food so much as another entity, looking out for its own interests, secretive and sealed, hiding its insides from the outside world.

To this end, you might ask yourself: WHO IS MY SECOND EYE AND HOW AM I GOING TO GOUGE THEM OUT?

I wanted it so badly that I almost thought it could save me from all the other things I wanted.

YOU ARE THE ONE WHO DID THIS TO YOU

A PERSON IS JUST A BABY GHOST