She could eat honey.
She fought with the lid then found a spoon. The honey was sticky and thick, so sweet it made her throat itch, and she swallowed one grateful spoonful after another. When it was gone she scraped the sides of the jar clean.
Tomorrow she’d tell Carrie about the honey and swear her to secrecy. Melissa could lose her job over it, her apartment and car and everything else. Then what? She could picture the whole thing ending with her back in Iowa, with her parents, at the farm, where everything, everywhere was destined to become food.
Beef, corn, milk.
Melissa loved working with the girls—and sometimes boys—at the hospital. They all arrived with at least one secret. It was the secrets that made them push the food around on their plates, or bring it back up in private, or rush it through their systems with pills, or refuse it altogether.
Secrets about the things they’d done, the things that had been done to them, the things they desperately wanted to do.
Melissa wasn’t that much older than some of the girls. She believed this was why she’d been hired. The girls saw her as more of a contemporary, not exactly a counselor, even though she’d filled that role for over a year. Because she was young, they were more likely to be honest with her, more likely to share the secrets that made them want to be so thin, to starve themselves, sometimes even to die.
Carrie was different from the other girls. At nineteen she was a little older, her case more severe. She’d been pretty once, smiling from snapshots and school photos, with blonde hair and eyes blue as gas flames.
Her secret was different too. Different even from Melissa’s. Once, Melissa had believed there was a door in front of her, one only she could see, and if she could only get thin enough, she’d finally be able to slip through it.
The passage would transform her, making her something both special and ordinary, perfect and unattainable. And then she’d be free to go, leaving her parents and the farm, her school and the little town around it, so far behind that no one—not even she—would ever be able to see it.
That was her secret, and it had been coaxed from her at a hospital two thousand miles and ten years away, by a woman named Marilyn, with curly brown hair and round hips like Melissa’s. The secret was the key, she said, that could unlock the trap Melissa had created for herself, and eventually Melissa saw that she was right.
Eighteen months later, when Melissa finally did leave home, it was for college. She majored in psychology and earned her master’s and came to California. Now she helped other girls unlock the traps they’d created.
But Carrie was still a puzzle. She didn’t want to escape a troubled childhood or adolescence. She wasn’t interested in distancing herself from a family that trapped and embarrassed her. She didn’t care about the admiration of other girls or the attention of boys and men, or fitting in or standing out.
Carrie just wanted to stop eating. She’d been hospitalized, gotten better and worse several times before finally showing up at Melissa’s hospital, wheeled in on a stretcher, refusing to open her mouth even to speak.
Her parents had tried everything, they said, she’d been seen everywhere. They didn’t know what to do for her, but they wanted her in a hospital environment. She was destroying their family. There were two other children to worry about, and Carrie’s illness was affecting them.
It was all in the folder Melissa’s supervisor gave her one afternoon. Carrie stood five-foot-six and weighed 92 pounds. She had a BMI of 14.8, low blood pressure and heart rate, alopecia, every sign of advanced malnutrition. Her academics had been good and her IQ was high. “Scary smart,” is how her supervisor put it.
“No one expects you to cure her,” she said. Her supervisor was blonde, one of those women who polish themselves to a high gleam, and Melissa always felt dowdy in front of her, no matter what she did. “Just see if you can get her to talk,” the supervisor said, catching Melissa’s eyes with her own. “See what you can learn.”
Later that afternoon Melissa led a group. The topic was how the girls and their friends supported their disordered eating habits.
One revealed, “We competed to see who could eat the fewest calories each day.”
Another confessed, “We tried to be the one who could go the longest without eating anything.”
Yet another, “We took pictures and video of one another, looking as thin as possible, and posted them on the Web.”
They told about texting their weight morning and night, of passing along diets designed to trick their bodies into shedding just a few more pounds, sharing cocktails of supplements and laxatives, taking turns with trusted friends in front of the toilet while the other stood by in silent, supportive approval.
Melissa listened to them all, and now she had a new secret of her own: everything they talked about, everything they described, made her want to do those things again.
Juice, pastries, soda.
Carrie was too weak to move so they met in her room. She was nothing like her pictures. Now the skin hung from her bones like so much empty fabric, thin hair clung to her skull like it was wet, and her eyes, those brilliant blue eyes, bulged from sockets stained purple. She looked like a frail and frightened old woman.
The first time Melissa arrived, Carrie was watching TV. Melissa introduced herself and explained why she was there, then asked if Carrie would mind turning off the TV so they could talk.
Carrie’s eyes never left the screen, even after two more requests. Melissa ended up turning it off herself, then spent the next forty minutes asking questions that Carrie left untouched. Toward the end of the hour she finally resorted to telling Carrie about herself.
Their next appointment was the same, so Melissa simply sat and watched TV with Carrie, curious to see where things might go.
The science channels were Carrie’s favorites, especially the shows about animals. Over the course of a week or more they watched bears pulling salmon from rivers, owls and hawks plucking mice and rabbits from grassy fields, tigers separating the weak gazelle from the rest of its frenzied herd.
As it was on land, so it was in the sea. Shrimp scoured life from the ocean floor, fish ate the shrimp, bigger fish ate the smaller ones, and on and on, until it finally ended at the ocean’s surface, with giant nets spilling their catches onto boat decks and beds of ice.
Day after day Carrie watched TV, not eating, not talking, and Melissa watched Carrie. She grew thinner and more frail. The lines of her skull emerged from inside her face. Veins stood out on her arms like worms beneath the skin.
Sharks, lions, wolves.
A week later Melissa’s supervisor summoned her to a meeting with the administrative board. Melissa told them Carrie was making progress, even though she still hadn’t eaten or spoken.
Someone asked if it was time to consider next steps.
Another replied that their hands were tied in many ways. Carrie was of legal age, able to refuse treatment.
Someone else wondered if a dedicated psychiatric unit, or even a hospice, might be a better alternative.
Another suggested contacting Carrie’s parents, to broach the subject of having her committed. Then they could start tube feeding, right here, even without her consent.
Their businesslike tone said they thought she’d failed, or was in danger of doing so very soon.
“These are all good ideas,” Melissa said, and every head in the room swiveled toward her. “But they’ll all take time to implement.” She managed to keep her voice steady and meet most of their eyes. “Given that, I’d ask that you allow me to continue working with Carrie, at least until another approach can be implemented.” Outside the window a bird landed on a branch, a piece of something dangling from its beak. “I think I can help her. I just need a little more time.”
They considered her request. It would only be a few days until something could be done. There seemed to be no harm in allowing Melissa to continue until then.
When the meeting was over, Melissa too
k the stairs to Carrie’s room two at a time. The elevators were always busy because the stairs were off-limits for the girls, had been ever since someone discovered a group of them climbing up and down the flights, trying to burn off the calories they’d been encouraged to eat.
The TV was on when she arrived. An amoeba enveloped something on the screen while a voice described how the organism traps its prey.
Melissa looked down at Carrie from the side of her bed. “You have to talk to me,” she said.
Carrie stared at the TV.
Melissa weighed her options, chose the one she estimated would have the greatest effect. “They want to have you committed,” she said, “so you can be force fed. No choice. They’ll put tubes down your throat and pump your stomach full of food. Is that what you want?”
Carrie looked at the ceiling and blinked back tears, then gathered a deep breath and let it out as though she’d just made a great effort. Her breath smelled sour and sulfurous, the telltale scent of her body burning muscles and organs.
Then, finally, she spoke. Her voice was weak and rusty, and each word sounded like a rock she had to carry up a steep hill.
Carrie said, “I want to tell you a secret.”
Melissa kept her face steady. She sat down in the chair next to the bed and turned toward Carrie.
“Closer,” Carrie said.
Melissa leaned forward and tilted her ear, close enough now to hear the meaty clicks of Carrie’s throat as she swallowed.
She whispered, “Everything you eat is dead. Every time you eat, you put something dead in your mouth. Every bite. Every day.”
Melissa sat back. It was as though Carrie had inserted the words directly into her ear. They itched in there like drops of water.
She’d met girls who worried over the calories or grams of fat in every bite. She’d seen them nurture peculiar likes and dislikes the way old women cultivate rare orchids. Others maintained strict vegetarian diets or obsessed about the preparation and cleanliness of every meal. But she had never, ever heard anything like what Carrie had just said. Had never even considered it herself.
She smiled and said, “That can’t be right,” and tried to think of an exception. Not meat or seafood. At the other end of the spectrum she discovered that every fruit and vegetable she could think of, from the moment it was picked, was as dead as any flesh. Grains, too. Even dairy products and eggs fit the mold, all of them dead from the moment they left the animals’ bodies, their steady decline toward decomposition slowed only by refrigeration.
Melissa stood up. “That can’t be right,” she said again, unsure of what to do next. She walked to the door and rested her hand against the wood, then turned and said, “I’ll be back.”
She went to her office and typed “live food” into a search engine, then spent her lunch hour following the results. She saw video of factories where cattle and pigs were slaughtered and blood turned the white floors black. She read about sushi cut from live fish and served quivering on the plate. She watched Asians eating live octopus, the animals’ systems in shock from soaking in vinegar and wine but still conscious enough to curl their tentacles over the mouths opening before them, fighting life’s oldest insult with life’s oldest instinct.
She passed the rest of the afternoon in a call-and-response argument with herself, seeking an exception she could bring back and present to Carrie. Surely not all food was dead. There had to be something.
And if not an exception, at least a line of logic that would neutralize Carrie’s…observation. Melissa couldn’t bring herself to call it a delusion, because the more she thought about it, the more it wasn’t turning out to be very delusional.
Perhaps she could argue that it was only natural, that death was simply the currency of the living world, the grease that enabled every other wheel to turn. The weak fell to the strong, the large ate the small, the living consumed the dead. It was true, but it didn’t make the endless cycle it described any less horrifying.
Steak, bread, cheese.
After work she drove home past restaurants, their bright windows framing couples and families gathered at tables, eager for the feast to come. She passed supermarkets and corner stores where people bought death to take home with them, or ate it right there beneath the fluorescent lights.
It was dark by the time she pulled into her parking space. She walked to her front door with insects humming in the trees and bushes around her, and birds swooping in the purple sky above. They were part of the cycle, too. Everything was.
She hurried to the safety of her front door and scrambled to get the keys in the lock.
At the sight of her kitchen Melissa’s stomach felt sour and hollow. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and even though she wasn’t hungry—couldn’t be, really—it was important to eat. Skipping lunch had been an accident. One missed meal, once in a while, wasn’t a problem. Healthy people did it all the time, and usually overcompensated for it the next time they ate. But two meals in a row, especially when her nerves were humming and she was almost enjoying that familiar feeling of emptiness, the one that also filled her up, that was the slippery slope they warned the girls about.
She found a plate of leftovers in the refrigerator—a chicken breast, a mound of mashed potatoes, some green beans. She put it in the microwave and when it was done she sat down at the kitchen table with the steaming plate in front of her.
The potatoes seemed most appetizing, so she began with small forkfuls of those, paging through a magazine as she ate. This was something they advised the girls never to do, especially the ones who binged, because it kept them from concentrating on the meal and their bodies’ response to it. But tonight she needed the distraction. Without it she wouldn’t be able to eat at all.
The green beans were next. She ate one and then another, finding them stringy and tougher than she would have liked.
Finally, she started on the chicken breast, looking at it only long enough to cut a few pieces and spear one on the end of her fork. She put it in her mouth and returned to the magazine.
She swallowed two bites. On the third she hit something hard that made a squittering noise between her teeth. She stopped chewing and stood up from the table, her tongue darting around to isolate whatever it was.
She went to the sink and spit into it. The chicken hit the stainless steel with a metallic plop. And though she should have rinsed it down the drain then and there, she couldn’t stop herself from examining it.
She’d bitten into a brownish lump shading to black on the edges, about the size of her fingernail. A piece of gristle, a bit of bone or tendon, passed over by who knew how many hands and across how many miles until finally making its way to her mouth. Yes, it was unappetizing, but it was also nothing more than a stupid coincidence.
And yet, this wasn’t the first time. How often had she found something strange inside a piece of meat, bitten into an apple that turned out to be mealy, heard a news story about food that had spoiled or was unsafe to begin with? It happened all the time. She spit again, this time to get rid of the taste, before finally rinsing all of it down the drain.
Melissa returned to the table, her appetite gone. The potatoes had grown cold, the green beans gone drab and greasy. She picked up the plate and tipped it over the trash, scraping the surface with her knife and fork, then put everything into the sink.
She stood there, thinking back to Carrie and wondering again what to do for her. If she could find something that didn’t fit, it would be good for both of them.
She opened the cabinets above her. The nearest held boxes of crackers and cans of tuna, bags of pasta and bottles of sauce. Melissa set it all on the counter, then stood on her tiptoes to pull more items from the back. She found soup, a chocolate cake mix and matching tub of frosting, bottles of olives and salad dressing. All of it once alive, but not anymore. Now it was just…preserved. It had to be because, well, it was true. It was dead, every bit, no matter how natural or processed.
The first thing
she threw away was some take-out that had gone sour and fuzzy in the refrigerator. After that, things happened quickly. She trashed stuff that was merely old, or wouldn’t eat anyway or never really liked to begin with. And with that done, it was easy to throw out the rest.
She filled one trash bag, then two. Even as she dumped cartons of yogurt and packages of frozen vegetables into a third, Melissa knew she was touching the outer edges of rational behavior. A reasonable voice told her she’d have to eat eventually. It was the only sane, sensible option. But there was another option, whispered to her like a girlish secret. She could eat only when she absolutely had to, as little as possible. And damn whatever problems it might create.
Coffee, spices, wine.
Three bags full and the cabinets were empty, their doors open. The kitchen looked like she was moving out. She checked again for anything she might have missed, and found the honey, next to the stove, left there after she’d made tea several nights ago. Back when Carrie still wasn’t talking.
Melissa picked up the jar, turning it around in her hand the same way she was turning it around in her head, tracing its origins. It was flowers and pollen and bees, and none of them had to die for it.
Honey didn’t fit.
She removed the lid and found a spoon. She dipped it into the jar and then into her mouth, and was soon scooping out mouthfuls of the stuff and chasing the drips with her tongue.
When the jar was empty Melissa felt satisfied and somehow calmer. Happy, too, because the honey would help Carrie as well. Maybe she could even get her to eat some.
It was past ten o’clock when she dragged the garbage bags out to the trash and returned to the apartment. She was tired, everything about her felt heavy. As she walked back to her bedroom, turning off the lights behind her, she hoped sleep would be easy.
That night she dreamed of flowers.
Thunder woke her earlier than usual. For several minutes she lay in bed, the covers bunched around her neck, listening to the storm, remembering the events of yesterday and last night, reconsidering everything she’d done and was planning to do today. It wasn’t too late to step back from the edge she had walked right up to and was now leaning over. Not too late to eat something, anything, for breakfast, to go to work and talk with her supervisor and find something else to do for Carrie.
The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5 Page 16