Кейт Эллиот - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

She came home from the first few sessions chatty and keyed up. She posted on her timelines how happy she was to be trying something really innovative and how she had a good feeling about this one. She wasn’t allowed to say much; they made her sign an NDA. Later, I think she was glad that nobody could ask her the details.

I knew this time was going to be different the first night I heard the screaming. I had been up way past midnight, trying to edit footage of football players lumbering, meat-crazed, hands outstretched against the outline of the goalposts in a sunset-orange sky. My eyes had gotten hot and I’d had to put two icepacks under my laptop to cool down the CPU. (The machine just wasn’t up to all that processing and rendering.) I woke up at four to the sound of it, jolting upright, my heart in my ears like someone had stuffed a tiny drum set into my head. I was so tired and out of it, I almost didn’t know what I was hearing. But it was her voice. Mom was screaming like she was on fire. She did it so long and loud and unbroken that I couldn’t understand how she could get her breath at all. It was out, out, out, and hardly a gasp in.

I ran into the hallway and smacked straight into Andrew, who was going the same way. We whacked belly against belly and fell backward on our butts like a couple of cartoon characters. I can picture it exactly in my head and imagine the way I’d frame it, the sound effects we could layer over the top. But in the moment, there was no time to laugh or argue. We just scrambled back up and made for our parents’ bedroom door.

It was locked.

“Dad!” I hammered my fist against the hollow-core six-panel barrier. “Dad, what’s happening? Is Mom okay?”

There was an unintelligible string of sounds from him. With Mom screaming like a steam whistle, there was no chance to make it out.

“I’m calling 911,” Andrew yelled. His phone was already in his hand.

When the door opened, the sound of Mom’s screaming hit us at full force, and Andrew and I both stumbled backward a little. The door had muffled it only slightly, but when the sound is your own mother dying, a little counts for a lot.

Dad was there, his gray hair a mess that pointed fingers in every direction, seeming to blame everyone at once. He put a hand out to Andrew, his face in a grimace, his eyes wide.

“Don’t. Don’t call anyone. Your mother says this is part of the trial she’s in. She said it’s worse than she thought it would be, but it only lasts for fifteen minutes.”

Andrew looked at his phone. “I woke up almost ten minutes ago, when she was just growling.”

“Growling,” I asked. “What?”

Andrew rolled his eyes. “You could sleep through a nuclear strike.”

Dad was nodding, looking at his watch. “We’re almost out of it. Just hold on.”

“Dad,” Andrew said, “the neighbors probably already called the cops. She’s really loud.”

Dad’s grimace widened. “I’m going to have to—”

The screaming stopped. The three of us looked at each other.

“Carl?” Mom’s voice sounded exhausted and raw.

Dad fixed us both with a stern look, oscillating between the two of us. “You two don’t call anyone. You don’t tell anyone. Your mother is entitled to a little privacy. Is that understood?”

We looked at each other and said nothing.

Mom called again and he was gone, back on the other side of the door.

I didn’t go back to sleep. I’m betting Andrew didn’t either. But we stayed in our rooms for the next three hours, until it was time for breakfast. I went back to editing footage, and I was pretty pleased with what I’d be able to show to the Visionaries the next day. The movie was going to come in on schedule. It was great to have a project, something to take my mind off the weirdness in the night. I’m betting Andrew just signed on to his game. That’s all he ever does.

I heard him turn off his alarm on the other side of the wall, followed by the sound of him standing up out of his busted computer chair with a grunt. He’s way fatter than me, so I feel like I’m allowed to be disgusted by some of his habits. Andrew can’t sit or stand without making a guttural, bovine noise. I’ve seen crumbs trapped in the folds of his neck. I used to work really hard to not be one of Those Fat People. I was obsessively clean, took impeccable care of my skin. I never showed my upper arms or my thighs, no matter what the occasion. I acted like being fat was impolite, like burping, and the best thing to do was conceal it behind the back of my hand and then always, always beg somebody’s pardon.

I didn’t know anything back then.

Andrew made it to the stairs before I did, so I got to watch him jiggle and shuffle down them, filled with loathing and disgust. I couldn’t remember what bullshit diet we were supposed to be following that week, but I vowed to myself that no matter how small breakfast was, I would eat less of it than Andrew. I would leave something behind on the plate. Let Andrew be the one to lick his fingers and whine. I was above all that. Wheat toast and cut apples were waiting for us when we came into the kitchen.

And there was Mom at the coffeepot, fifty pounds lighter. Her pajamas hung off her like a hand-me-down from a much bigger sister. She turned, cup in hand, and I saw the dark circles beneath her eyes. She was beaming, however, with the biggest smile I’d seen on her face in years.

“It’s working,” she said, her voice still rough and edged with fatigue like she’d been to a rock concert or an all-night bonfire. “This thing is actually working.”

That was our life for two weeks. Dad did his best to soundproof their bathroom. He stapled carpets and foam and egg crate to the walls. He covered the floor in a dozen fluffy bath mats he bought cheaply on the internet. He told me later that he tried to put a rag in her mouth, just to muffle her a little more.

“But I’m worried she’ll pull it into her throat and choke on it,” he told me, his eyes wide with dread. “I can’t stand this much longer. I know she’s losing weight, but it’s like I’m living in a nightmare and I can’t wake up.”

That was a year before he decided to take the Pill, and back then he was more willing to talk about it. When it wasn’t his own privacy, only hers, he would tell me how gross it was. You can see videos of it online. It was the same in that first trial as it is now: you take the Pill and you shit out your fat cells. In huge, yellow, unmanageable flows at first. That’s why they scream so much. Imagine shitting fifty pounds of yourself at a go. Now, people go to special spas where they have crematoiletaries that burn the fat down. Dad said Mom screwed up our plumbing so bad that he had to buy a whole case of that lye-based stuff to break it all down and keep the toilet flushing. That was as gross as I thought things could get, but Dad said it got worse.

Toward the end, Mom (and everyone like her) shit out all their extra skin, too. The process that broke it down meant no stretch marks and no baggy leftovers, hanging on your body like overproofed dough on a hook and telling people you used to be fat.

That was some trick, and it was part of the reason it took so long for a generic to hit the market. It was a “trade secret,” they said on the news. They also said “miracle” and “breakthrough” and “historic.” The miracle of shitting out skin just looked like blood and collagen and rotten meat, it turns out. Not less gross, but different. More lye into the S bend. More and more of Mom gone at the breakfast table.

At the end of the trial, she was a person I didn’t recognize. She was 110 pounds soaking wet. The research doctor told her that she was at 18 percent body fat and would stay that way for the rest of her life. Her face was a whole new shape, with the underlying structure very prominent and her eyes huge and wide above it all. I could see her hip bones beneath her enormous drawstring pants, pulled tight as a laundry bag around her now-tiny waist. Her collarbones could have held up a taco each. The cords in her neck stood out like chicken bones caught under her skin. Even her feet were smaller—​she went down one whole shoe size, and I inherited all her stretched-out sandals and sneakers.