(cannibalism i guess? i dunno. i'm tired, man..)
Sonya’s father was a stringbean and her mother was a twig, and they hadn’t had her so much as assembled her from spare paperclips. They were the kind of folk who were too busy crossing off boxes and organizing next year’s calendar and they simply didn’t have the time for hunger. Sonya’s father ate pretzels and her mother drank tea, so they taught Sonya to eat crackers. She had landed between them seamlessly, so the whole ordeal came with no turbulence whatsoever.
She learned her mother’s formula for folding clothes and the calculated way her father closed doors when he was in a hurry. She memorized ‘how to be’ and then how to learn the new ‘how to be’ when the’ how to be’ changed, and she made quite fine itemized lists. She was developing into the image of a fine young lady, the kind to sit quietly at the table with her legs crossed while her parents talked and to divide her crackers into perfect quarters.
She never questioned this, as it was the only means of existence she ever knew. In high school, she was fully operational. A perfect system of input, process and adaptation. She kept tabs on what charms to hang from her bag and what music was popular, and always seemed to know what to say to who. To uninformed observation, she was quite the average girl. Life fit in a perfect, evolving formula, and she didn’t really care for it this way or that, for it all tasted the same to her.
On a Thursday night, however, this changed. She was sorting homework, organizing by due date and class, and secondarily by how much cumulative class attention they accrued, when she was momentarily disturbed by the sting of a papercut. She had- rather automatically- done what she had seen her teacher do last week, and quickly pressed it in her mouth. Warm red burgeoned and blossomed in her processors, seeped and dripped down her throat into the space below her ribcage and pressed an indent like a finger into clay. She was flesh. She lapsed, clamped her teeth around her thumb, and made harsh work of bleeding it until it was a wretched white pruned little thing that had nothing left to give. The hole felt full, and she was, suddenly, a new machine. She had found she was integrated, embedded in the sinew of organism. And then she went to bed and tried to set it aside.
The next day at school the hole was bigger. The size of a quarter. In algebra, she became certain it had begun to scream, for she felt it reverberate in the halls of her flesh and steel. It held the warmth of its gathered vitality, but it leaned into her as though to whisper truths etched just below her skin walls. This was not how to be. Hidden below, incomplete, entangled. She was something yet unknown to her. Over her long division and variables, she wedged her fingernail between her teeth and worked meticulously, inching and carving around the edges, prying away the grip of the dry skin until it relinquished it in one long, thin piece. The absence below was a garden of soft pink that flowed with abundance. She operated, one by one, left to right, chewed into smaller pieces and sent away to where they settled the screams for the moment, but pressed the hole larger. Her hands softened, she carried on.
When the hole next returned, it was the size of a golf ball, and it accompanied its demands with sharp jabs and the feeling of hordes of tiny lacerations. She could feel the movement of some great migration inside her. In the bathroom before tennis practice, she took a single strand of hair and sent it alone down the chamber of her throat. As shoes squeaked on gym floors, she worked with great precision, row by row, devastating at first one at a time, then with greedy handfuls, sparing no expense. She splurged efficiently and gluttonously, the dry grit between her teeth soothed best when accompanied by bits of pulp. She worked from scalp to brow, and when carelessness slipped a strand from her hand, she recovered it from the floor with haste. She left cleaned, renewed, and ravaged from top to bottom.
Then the hole was the size of a tennis ball, and it waited until she’d seen her parents sign the papers to itch away at her. On the perfect white sheets of her new bed, she took initiative and peeled the tape off her fingers with her teeth, slinking the flesh off from the bone below in heavy, chunky bites that fell down the chute like trash bags. Freshly cleaned, the operative segments of her hands were slim and efficient, sharp at the tips, but terribly messy. She found they were not so apt at holding a pencil, but that was fine because she didn’t really feel like drawing.
Ms Finch asked her to draw what she thought she looked like, but Sonya didn’t know the answer to that, so she just turned the paper in as is, more concerned with the due date than the contents. She’d left enough of her on the page regardless and was tired of hearing her talk. And besides, the hole was about the size of a skinned rabbit and had gotten to work throbbing against her ribcage. Under the table, she sliced around the edges of her ears with her fingertips until they slid right off, trailing nerves like the top of a newly carved pumpkin, and pulled until they unplugged and fell the whole cacophony silent. They slid down her throat like pasta and she felt nothing more about it.
In the busy, very bright room, she heard it whispering to her in gummy, nonsensical pleas. When it ached this time, she flexed her tongue and lent it her teeth, one by one in a parade of blood and pulp, to which it finally replied. “Little more… Little more.. When they leave..”
So when they left, Sonya did as it said. She unfurled her digits and peeled off the excess from tarsal to teres. She worked carefully around skeletal supports and sliced in neat, even quarters, for her mother had taught her how a lady should cut her food, then swallowed it down in thick gulps that moved down like molasses, swelling her throat to full.
When she could no longer move her arms, it whispered once more to her, engorged to a healthy size. She could feel jabs like knees and elbows against her interior. The rest of her had withered to stiff, wiry nothings that could barely support the weight of her swollen chest. Stripped ribs fractured and poked against her restraints, and in a last cry, it pressed fingers against the base of her throat passage.
“I am almost full.. Little more…”
So Sonya unfurled the mandibles from her jaw and latched onto the top of her skull, pinching and drawing back until her face stripped off like a thin sheet of dough, and she dropped it down just the same. Greedy, eager giggles bubbled from her throat.
“Come... I want to see it. To be whole.. I am almost ready..”
And so Sonya at last plucked the eyes from her skull and dropped them down the pitch black, for who could truly stop her now? And for a moment before their destination, she could see what was nested snugly inside. Sonya was beautiful. All natural, pulsing ripe flesh and blood. She couldn’t have drawn it if she tried.
When the doctors came back, they found what she had left behind. If they had asked, it probably could still have done their calculations for them. But Sonya was gone. When her parents found out, they held each other close and shook their heads grimly.
“It’s a shame...” Her mother wiped the dry crease of her eye. “We thought we were raising a fine young woman.”