Christina

I named her Christina. She began as they all did—a greasy secretion that shimmered and then solidified into a milky coat of wax. It reminded me of the hospital where we were only allowed to write with crayons because you couldn’t puncture someone’s larynx with a crayon. I spent my time there in the TV room with a box of Crayolas. I peeled off their labels and skinned their naked bodies with my fingernails. I did the same thing to Christina, leaving little white curls of her at my feet.

If not for the hospital, we never would have met.

I saw the poster on my way out. I delivered my discharge paperwork to the reception desk, where the friendly blonde nurse who had admitted me two weeks before was working.

“Feeling better?” She asked. Her tone was so upbeat, I didn’t want to disappoint her.

“Much,” I said. That made her smile. She told me to have a wonderful day.

The world outside was so bright and cold and sure of itself that I hung around in the lobby for a bit just to gather courage. There was a community bulletin board near the sliding doors, and that’s where I saw it.

CLINICAL TRIAL – PAID

Looking to lose 50 pounds or more? You could be eligible to participate in a paid clinical trial for Vitalex.

Maybe I would want to kill myself less if I lost 50 lbs.

***

They told me it would happen, but still, it was a shock. The wax thickened and hardened. It fell in warm clumps where my joints met. They asked me to collect as much as I could. I saved the clumps and scrapings in dated plastic containers that I refrigerated and delivered to the lab at my weekly check-ins.

At the end of the trial, they gave me my check and asked if I wanted to keep my “production” now that they had no use for it. The trial lasted 6 weeks. No one ever said the word “fat”.

She weighed in at 54 pounds. The day I took her home, I searched for “Vitalex Production” on TikTok.

A skinny man in some seaside village sat beside a behemoth mound of yellow tallow. It glistened in the sunlight. He called it Davi and ran his palm over its wet back. Something in his expression touched me. A private smile lifted his lips. His eyes were soft and watery. He opened his hand so wide, splaying all his fingers out, like he couldn’t get enough.

I looked at my tub of gray production and grimaced. It wasn’t a good look for her, the five-gallon storage bin. And she needed a name. I named her Christina because of the obvious religious parallels. Immaculate conception and all that, and the fact that my own name is Mary.

I bought her an aquarium and wrote messages on the outside with those markers people use to write on car windows:

You’re beautiful.

Welcome to the world! It sucks.

My mood lifted. It was good to have somebody to talk to. 

A week in, and there was a smell. A cross between earwax and the inside of a belly button. I kept a cinnamon candle burning all day, and that seemed to do the trick.

After a month, the mold appeared in little green freckles across her sallow face. Something had to be done. It was the right thing to do, the only thing to do. I had to take her back.

 I’d made Christina over the course of a decade. A few pounds every year, most of it in the past 18 months when nothing stirred my appetite except ice cream. I bought it in gallon tubs and attacked it with a spoon every few hours. It took time to make her, and it would take time to remake her.  The idea was both frightening and a comfort. I missed and was repelled by my old body. But this new body presented its own set of challenges. Even though I was smaller, I found it harder to hide. Men’s eyes were everywhere—as omnipresent as the sun or the sky, another element that could kill you from exposure.

I put her in everything. Fried eggs in the morning, a scoop stirred into my coffee where the fat would rise to the top and form an iridescent film. I plopped spoonfuls of her into empty Cool Whip containers and set them out for the stray cats. But it wasn’t enough. I needed more mouths.

Misty was the only person I could think of. We’d exchanged info in the hospital, careful numbers copied down in red crayon. She was thrilled.

I made a feast. Two dozen buttermilk biscuits, brown butter gnocchi with fried sage, and a spice cake with buttercream frosting. Enough for us both to feed off the leftovers for days. I didn’t hide Christina or make any effort to conceal her role in the meal, and Misty didn’t seem to mind. One might say it brought us closer. When I hugged her, I said to myself, “I love you, Misty. I love you, Christina.”

It took a month. On our last morning together, I drank my coffee slowly. By then, Christina had a warm, earthy taste, like morel mushrooms. When the coffee was gone, I scraped the sides of her tank with a spatula and set the remains out for the cats. It was a cool spring morning, the dew shone silver on the grass. The cats were waiting for me, their fur shiny and clumped with grease. They wrapped their stout bodies around my ankles and let me scratch behind their ears. When they’d licked the bowl clean, they looked up at me with sorrowful, expectant eyes. I held out my empty hands.