Кейт Эллиот - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

The tiger snarls, but Emmy hesitates. This sin is beautiful, like breaking winter. Sharp edges and frost too deep to thaw. For the first time, she doesn’t want to give it away. It came from her; it belongs to her. And the coldness feels good, it feels clean and hard and right.

Voices ring nearby. Twigs snap under approaching feet. The tiger tilts its head, waiting. Come, its eyes say. Take. Eat.

With the woods her table, Emmy lifts the coldness to her mouth. She holds it on her tongue, savoring the sting before swallowing. It runs through every vein, down to the tips of her toes.

“I think she went this way!”

The tiger smiles. A gentle, calm smile, one that knows her. She recognizes that smile, but she’s never understood it, not really. As the coldness spreads, Emmy loses herself in the tiger’s golden gaze. Her bones crack, her blood freezes to stopping.

It all happens in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.

Then she rises, glorious, the sunlight shattering on her fur.

My mother took the Pill before anybody even knew about it. She was always signing up for those studies at the university, saying she was doing it because she was bored. I think she did it because they would ask her questions about herself and listen carefully when she answered. Nobody else did that.

She had done it for lots of trials: sleep studies and allergy meds. She tried signing up when they tested the first 3D-printed IUDs, but they told her she was too old. I remember her raging about that for days, and later when everybody in that study got fibroids she was really smug about it. She never suggested I do it instead; she knew I wasn’t fucking anybody. How embarrassing that my own mother didn’t even believe I was cute enough to get a date at sixteen. I tried not to care. And I’m glad now I didn’t get fibroids. I never wanted to be a lab rat anyway. Especially when the most popular studies (and the ones Mom really went all-out for) were the diet ones.

She did them all: the digital calorie monitors that she wore on her wrists and ankles for six straight weeks. (I rolled my eyes at that one, but at least she didn’t talk about it constantly.) The strings like clear licorice made of some kind of super-cellulose that were supposed to accumulate in her stomach lining and give her a no-surgery stomach stapling but just made her (and everyone else who didn’t eat a placebo) fantastically constipated. (Unstoppable complaining about this one; I couldn’t bring anyone home for weeks for fear that she’d abruptly start telling my friends about her struggle to shit.) Pill after pill after pill that gave her heart palpitations, made her hair fall out, or (on one memorable occasion) induced psychotic delusions. If it was a way out of being fat, she’d try it. She’d try anything.

In between the drug trials, she did all the usual diets. Eat like a caveman. Eat like a rabbit. Seven small meals. Fasting one day a week. Apple cider vinegar bottles with dust on their upper domes sat tucked into the back corners of our every kitchen cabinet, behind the bulwark of Fig Newmans and Ritz crackers.

She’d try putting the whole family on a diet, talk us into taking “family walks” in the evening. She’d throw out all the junk food and make us promise to love ourselves more. Loving yourself means crying over the scale every morning and then sniffling into half a grapefruit, right? Nothing stuck and nothing made any real difference. We all resisted her, eating in secret in our rooms or out of the house. I found Dad’s bag of fish taco wrappers jammed under the driver’s seat of the car while looking for my headphones. Mom caught me putting it in the garbage and yelled at me for like an hour. I never told her it was his. She was always hardest on me about my weight, as if I was the only one who had this problem. We were a fat family. Mom was just as fat as me; we looked like we were built to the same specs. Dad was fat, and my brother was the fattest of us all.

I’m still fat. Everyone else is in the past tense.

And why? Because of this fucking Pill.

That trial started the same way they always do: flyers all over campus where Mom worked, promising cash for the right demographic for an exciting new weight-loss solution. Mom jumped on it like she always did, taking a pic of the poster so she could email from the comfort of her broken-down armchair with the TV tray rolled up close and her laptop permanently installed there. I remember I asked her once why she even had a laptop if she never took it anywhere. She never even unplugged it! It might as well have been an old-school tower and monitor rig. Why go portable if you’re never going to leave the port?

She shrugged. “Why call it a laptop when I don’t have a lap?”

She had me there. I could never sit my computer in my “lap” either. That real estate was taken up by my belly when I sat, and it was terribly uncomfortable to have a screen down that low, anyway. I’ve seen people do it on the train, and they look all hunched and bent. But Mom wanted the hunching and the bending. She wanted a flat, empty lap and a hot computer balanced on her knees. She wanted inches of clearance between her hips and an airline seat and to buy the clothes she saw on the mannequin in the window. She wanted what everybody wants. Respect.

I guess I wanted that, too. I just didn’t think it was worth the lengths she would go to to get it. And none of them really worked. Until the Pill.

So Mom signed up like she always did, putting the meetings and dosage times on the calendar. Dad rolled his eyes and said he hoped this time didn’t end with her crying about not being able to take a shit again. He met my eyes behind her back and we both smiled.

She just clucked her tongue at him. “Your language, Carl, honestly. You’ve been out of the navy a long time.”

Dad tapped his pad and put in time to meet with his D&D buddies while Mom was busy with this new trial group. I smiled a little. I was glad he was going to do something fun. He had seemed pretty down lately. I was going to be busy, too. I had Visionaries, my school’s filmmaking club. We had shoots set up every night for two weeks, trying to make this gonzo horror movie about a virus that turned the football team into cannibals. (Look, I didn’t write it. I was the director of photography.)

Off Mom went to eat pills and answer questions about her habits. I had heard her go through all of this before and learned to hold my tongue. But I knew exactly how it would go: Mom would sit primly in a chair in a nice outfit, trying to cross her legs and never being able to hold that position. Her thighs would spread out on top of one another and slowly slide apart, seeking the space to sag around the arms of the chair and make her seem wider than ever, like a water balloon pooling on a hot sidewalk. She would never tell the whole truth. It was maybe the thing I hated about her the most.

“Oh yes, I exercise every day!”

She walked about twenty minutes a day total, from her car to her office and back again. Her treadmill was covered in clothes on hangers, and her dumbbells were fuzzed with a mortar made of dust and cat hair.

“I try to eat right, but I have bad habits that stem from stress.”

Rain or shine, good day or bad, Mom had three scoops of ice cream with caramel sauce every night at ten.

“I do think I come by it honestly. My parents were both heavy. And my sisters and most of my cousins, too.”

That one’s true. The whole family is fat. In our last family photo, we wore an assortment of bright-colored shirts and we looked like a basket of round, ripe fruit. I kind of liked it, but I think I might have been the only one. The composition of the shots was good, and we all looked happy. Happy wasn’t enough, apparently. Mom paid for those, but she never hung them up.