Illustrated by Claire Warhover
1
2
‘
BITE Illustrated and Adapted by Claire Warhover From Carmen Maria Machado's "Eight Bites"
I don't remember getting fat.
2
4
My three sisters had gotten the procedure. When we went out, they ordered large meals and then said, "I couldn't possibly," but for once, they actually meant it. That bashful lie had been converted into truth vis-a-vis a medical procedure.
7
I was tired of the skinny minny women from church who cooed and touched each other's arms and told me I had beautiful skin, and having to rotate my hips sideways to move through rooms.
I was tired of looking into the mirror and grabbing the things that I hated and lifting them, clawing deep, and then letting them drop and everything aching.
As they put me to sleep, my mouth fills with the dust of the moon. I expect to choke on the silt, but instead, it slides in and out, and in and out, and I am, impossibly, breathing.
12
13
14
Back on earth, Dr. U is inside me. Her hands are in my torso, her fingers searching for something. She's loosening flesh from its casing, slipping around where she's been welcomed.
15
16
Afterward, I sleep and sleep. In the watery light of morning, dust motes drift through the air like plankton. I have never seen the living room so early. A new world.
17
A new woman does not just
18
slough off her old self,
20
21
22
23
The house is filled with something else. It moves, restless. This thing occupies hidden parts of the house with purpose. If I drop my ear to the wallpaper, it breathes audibly. Even now I can hear it. Behind me. Above me. Too large to perceive. Too small to see.
I want to know it and I don't know why. 27
I wake up because I can hear a sound like a vase breaking in reverse: thousands of shards of ceramic whispering along hardwood toward a reassembling form.
28
29
A tremor ripples her mass. I do not know I am kicking her until I am kicking her. I find myself wishing she would fight back, but she doesn't. Instead, she sounds like she is being deflated. I leave her there until I can't hear her anymore.
31
Sometimes, if I sit very still, I can hear her gurgling underneath the floorboards. She is around, even when she is not around.
I will die the day I turn seventy-nine. Arms will lift me from my bed. They will be mother-soft, like dough and moss. I will flood with grief and
I will curl into her body, which was my body once, but I was a poor caretaker and she was removed from my charge. 34
35
By loving me when I did not love her, by being abandoned by me, she had become immortal. She will outlive my daughter and my daughter's daughter, and the earth will teem with her and her kind.
Their inscrutible forms and unknowable destinies.
38
39
‘
Made for Visual Stories at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis in Spring . Text has been adapted from the story "Eight Bites," originally written by Carmen Maria Machado. Helvetica Neue used for page numbers. Special thanks to John Hendrix and Madeline Valentine for helping shape this project, and to Shreyas R. Krishnan and Edward Kinsella III for their guidance. 40