You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

concentrated on the biting and chewing. My body didn’t want to: it felt like the food was filling me over, pushing against the backs of my eyeballs. What occurred to me then as I crouched on the warehouse floor, my mouth full, was that living wasn’t a matter of right or wrong or ethics or self-expression. There was no better way to live, or worse. It was all terrible, and you had to do it constantly. I bore down, I tore in. I held my fingers over my mouth to steady the lips and keep the food from reversing. I held the image of the shark in my mind, tearing tearing tearing at the body of a seal.

Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative.