Sweeter

Before I knew better, I took my unease and called it love. I clenched a large fist over the feeling and pried it from my intuition, cortisol leaking from the hole that once stored my bodily alarms. Defenseless, I bled adoration on the tall surfer while he groomed my newly exposed innards. My skin was stripped back to reveal a skeleton of muscles and tendons. Eyes bulging, I took the self-proclaimed love and desperately tried to touch the feeling I so desired. I struggled shoving it into my bleeding heart, only to be met with oozing unfamiliarity. I attempted to chew it up, teeth exposed and jaw jutting out to welcome the long awaited feeling. The black vile seeped through the gaps in my incisors until it was in a puddle on the floor. Stepping on the love, the unease, the intuition. Scraping it up off the floor, I found myself frantic and unsuccessful.
He took the feeling like he took his coffee: as light as possible. He stripped the segments of my being away as though he were asking for more sugar—lightly. Slowly claiming my body and mind for himself, he asked me to make it all a little sweeter. Just as he liked it. I carved a smile into the mouth of mine that was now little more than taut strings of facial muscle. One by one they snapped as I sought to become his perfect girl. Smiling wider and wider.
Three. Two. One.
Snap. The last of my face as it were: broken masses of skin hanging from the soft skull I once called mine. All that was mine was now his.
I grinned in the mirror with an ostentatious display of my furthest molars. My cheekbones were exposed, and though my dimples were spliced, the span of glee covered the path up to my ears. I was sweet, just for him. He’d see my new face and I knew he’d like it. He’d be proud of me. He had to love me, after I’d cut myself into pieces easier to chew and sweeter to swallow.

***

Madeline Fait is a second-year transfer student attending the University of Iowa. When she’s not doing schoolwork, Madeline is either listening to Taylor Swift or making another cup of coffee.