Dietland

by Sarai Walker

“Fat women are not controlled. They are defiant, so they are unfuckable.”

There was a phantom woman in my mind that I was comparing myself to, and I had to force her from the dressing room. When she was gone, I looked at my body, the body that had kept me alive for nearly thirty years, without any serious health problems, the body that had taken me where I needed to go and protected me. I had never appreciated or loved the body that had done so much for me. I had thought of it as my enemy, as nothing more than a shell that enclosed my real self, but it wasn’t a shell. The body was me. This is your real life. You’re already living it. I removed the clothes and stood naked before the mirrors, turning this way and that. I was round and cute in a way I’d never seen before.

“This is a different war, not an official one, but who decides which wars are legitimate?”

“Virginia Woolf once wrote that it’s more difficult to kill a phantom than a reality,”