Milk Fed

by Melissa Broder

But in their equation of thinness with goodness, my mother and Ana were so like-minded. My mother persuaded me to stay thin by insulting me. Ana did it by insulting everyone but me. This absence of rejection felt like an embrace.

I could feel her opening an emotional spreadsheet that began with the womb. This was why I never confronted her. Now we’d have to go traipsing through it together, cell by cell, until I retracted everything. But what if I just refused to traipse? “I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.” I closed the spreadsheet.

She really exists, I thought, as though up until this point I’d thought the yogurt shop were an alternate reality, which vanished along with everything in it when I left.

I’d thought about getting a rug, but I couldn’t commit. I felt that committing to a rug would mean I existed on the planet more than I actually wanted to exist.

I was fully famished, and I didn’t know whether it was food or sex I wanted. Maybe I wanted both. All of this eating seemed to have made me more sexually charged, awake. But what was waking up, exactly: my pussy or my soul? I was scared of my soul. What if my soul was monstrous? If a person had a monstrous soul, should she still follow it?

There were three rolls of fat, and I covered all of them with kisses, imagining the rolls as big lips, my upper lip falling between two of them at a time, my tongue extended just enough to taste what was inside. Then the space between her rolls became like pussies to me, and I thought, How incredible, she has so many pussies, so many places to explore.

Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances, I thought, remembering my college textbooks. More like behaving imaginarily under truthful circumstances.

The woman who had carried me inside her for nine months had become a stranger. Even those women whose mothers loved them unconditionally, that love too had an end. Still I wanted it. I wanted a love contingent on nothing finite. I wanted a love without end.