by Tim Curran
And Bad Girl, totally out of her league and beyond the limits of ordinary endurance, would do the only thing she could doshe’d cut her arms and legs, paying special attention to her thighs (the black-and-blue marks were like hard-won battle scars); she’d pinch the skin at her belly and pelvis, twisting it painfully until tears welled in her eyes (this was getting very difficult to do because there simply was very little skin to grasp by that point); she’d poke herself with needles until blood ran free (every drop of blood she shed meant that much less she’d weigh); and, lastly, she’d whip herself with a thin leather belt, the edges of which she had made jagged with pinking shears (this left horrendous branching white scars on her back like forking lightning).
None of which destroyed Piggy but did manage to keep her a little unsteady on her feet like a punch-drunk fighter.
But life in the trenches was an ordeal, a twenty-four hour a day ordeal. Never for one moment could Bad Girl relax her vigilance. Piggy was always looking to fatten her up, and her own body made no attempt to hide its absolute contempt for her. It was host to an awful, demanding parasite named Bad Girl, and it would do anything to destroy her. And she, poor thing, was trapped between these two others, these opposite poles of anarchy.
Even with all this going on, the Evil Queen, of course, kept a close eye on Bad Girl from her plush throne. She was a busy lady, her days filled with court intrigue and deception, yet she always seemed to find time to make Bad Girl’s life only that much more unpleasant.
One day, after school, the Evil Queen summoned Bad Girl. She wished an audience with her. Their meeting was held in the dining room, a place of unsavory food associations for Bad Girl and nauseating memories of rushing to the bathroom to disgorge what she’d filled her stomach with.
Sitting there in her bedazzling finery, the Evil Queen studied Bad Girl with cold, cadaverous eyes. “I want you to explain a few things to me,” saith she. “There are things I’ve been wondering about and I want answers.”
Bad Girl nodded, maintaining an outward nonchalance while inside, she was anything but dispassionate. Her guts felt like they were packed in ice, her heart beating with a papery rustle. “Okay.”
The Evil Queen had set out a tray of lemon muffins (Bad Girl’s favorite once upon a time) and two cups of coffee. She always prepared the battlefield beforehand.
“You should have something to eat,” the Queen said.
“I’m not hungry. I ate at school.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
Bad Girl sipped her coffee, amazed at how good of an actress she was. Her hand did not tremble even though she badly wanted to shake apart inside.
“You don’t seem to be eating and you’ve lost a lot of weight. You’re thin, way too thin. It’s not healthy to be thin.”
Bad Girl shrugged. “I eat. I just don’t gain. I’m a teenager. I’m busy. I have things going on. There’s no time for fat to settle in.”
“And you’re a terrible liar.”
Bad Girl rolled her eyes.
Mistake. The Evil Queen did not suffer eye-rollers lightly. No sooner had Bad Girl rolled her pale blue eyes than the Evil Queen’s hand slapped her across the face.
“Don’t you dare roll your goddamn eyes at me,” she snapped. “You do it again and you won’t have any teeth.”
And Bad Girl, who’d put up with such attacks all through her childhood and had the physical and mental scars to prove it, threw her coffee cup and it shattered against the wall. “You don’t hit me! You don’t lay a hand on me! You don’t ever touch me, you rotten fucking bitch! Do you hear me? Do you fucking hear me?”
The Evil Queen seemed to grow larger and deadlier, like a puff adder. She had inflated herself, her dark eyes boiling like hot tar. She was ready to strike again, yet her voice was calm and measured. That somehow made it all that much worse. “You keep your voice down in my house. Do you understand me? If you raise your voice again, I swear to God you’ll be in a convent on Monday.”
“You can’t do that!”
The Evil Queen’s grin widened. “You’re fifteen. I can do any goddamn thing I want to you. I own you.”
With this, the Evil Queen slid her chair closer just as she had when Bad Girl was a child. Her eyes were wide and watery. They glistened like gasoline on rainwater. She loomed above Bad Girl who was terrified of her as she had been her entire life. The Evil Queen clamped a cool, long-fingered hand on her knee.
“Get away from me,” Bad Girl breathed, nearly in tears, but lacking the strength to get away herself. The Evil Queen’s eyes held her in a hypnotic grip the way a snake will hold a bird with mindless fascination. Her hand was cold on her bare leg.
“There are rules and you will follow them,” the Evil Queen told her in a hissing whisper. “And the first is you do not lie to me. The second is you do not roll your eyes. And the third is that you never, never, never backtalk me. Are we clear on this?”
The Evil Queen’s hand had slid up Bad Girl’s leg to her thigh, pushing her shorts up. If she looked down, she would see the scars from the cuttings.
Bad Girl felt increasingly uncomfortable.
And it was then that she smelled something perfectly awful that reminded her of the county faira hot, almost putrefied stench of rotting hay and manure and closed-up barns.
Pig piss, Bad Girl thought. Pig shit.
Yes, that was the smell. When you visited the hog barns in the August heat, this was what you smelledthe nose-reaming, hot, acrid stink of pig urine and pig feces. The dining room was pungent with it.
And there was a good reason for it: Piggy was sitting in the chair in the corner, her legs spread to expose her flaccid privates. As Bad Girl watched in shock, a stream of piss struck the flowery carpeting and expanded into a dark, reeking stain.
“She’s got you right where she wants you, Little Miss Twatly,” Piggy said, breathing hard, gripping her huge oily tits. “You better do what the Queen says or her hand’s going to slide up and up until she finds that juicy peach between your legs and gives it a good twist.”
“No…”
Piggy giggled. “Yes, oh yes! She’s done it before and you remember, don’t you, how it hurt? How such things can escalate until her hands are all over you, pinching and poking and scratching?”
“Shut up,” Bad Girl said.
The hand tightened on her thigh painfully, nails digging into her skin. “What did you say to me?” the Evil Queen asked.
And Bad Girl wanted, of course, to say, I wasn’t talking to you, but didn’t. Instead, she mumbled, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. I like that,” the Evil Queen said. “Anytime I ask you anything, you don’t know. You just don’t know.” By this point, her face was so close to Bad Girl’s own, that she could have kissed her.
Something that wasn’t lost on Piggy.
“Now she’s got you! First her lips on yours, then her tongue! She’ll slide it in deep, real deep and you’ll like it! You’ll really like it! You’ll beg for more because the Queen really knows how to use her damn tongue…hoo, boy! Does she!”
Piggy was beside herself by this point. She was breathing hard and snorting, drool running from her mouth. She was rapidly sliding the pudgy first and index fingers of her right hand in and out of herself.
“I’m only going to have this conversation with you once,” the Evil Queen said. “I want to see you eating. I want to see your attitude improve. I’m tired of your crap. If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to stage an intervention, and trust me, you won’t like it. Consider this your last warning.”
With that, she clutched Bad Girl’s thigh painfully and exited the room, leaving Bad Girl there listening to Piggy get off…convulsing and slamming her head against the wall. And how much of that was real and how much was nothing but fluff blowing through her mind, she could not say.
Chapter Six
Her biggest fearother than the Evil Queen staging
an intervention and tearing her room apart and finding out just what she had been up towas that Piggy was loose. Somehow, someway, Piggy had escaped the mirror despite her best efforts to keep that monster imprisoned in the glass. That was bad. Not only bad, but scary and threatening and worrisome.
Bad Girl knew enough about Piggy by that point.
Piggy had power over her.
Piggy could make her do things she did not want to do. More than once, Piggy had forced her to touch herself, to make an exhibition of herself before the bedroom mirror. And she was certain that once, at least once, Scary Girl had been watching the entire time. The possibility disgusted her, but she was nearly sure of it. But Piggy had controlled her, she had not been able to stop until she came. The idea that Scary Girl was excited by that was beyond contempt.
Piggy’s power extended in other directions, too. And one of them was food. She was certain Piggy could make her eat if she wanted to. It was important to be on guard against such a thing. Piggy wanted her fat. She wanted to sink her in pounds of flab and gallons of lard. The idea that she might be forced to eat at night when she was supposed to be sleeping, unnerved her.
It could happen.
And she might not even be aware of it.
Her weight worried her. She thought about it all the time and even when she wasn’t aware of it, she was still thinking about it. It had become the center of her universe. Now that Piggy was no longer in the mirror (where she/it had gone, was a mystery), she took to standing naked in front of the one in her bedroom. It was full length. She would study her body in detail, fingering the protruding ribs, the clavicles that jutted like skin-wrapped broomstick ends, the wings of her pelvic bones, and her spinal vertebrae that were a ladder leading to her projecting scapulas.
Though she should have been concerned or even frightened about her skeleton pressing through her skin, she was secretly excited. This had been her goal all alongto release her inner self, to set the beautiful skeleton beneath free, to liberate her true self.
As thin as she was (she had just managed to slip beneath ninety pounds), she was far from satisfied. Her skin offended her, and sometimes she fantasized about peeling it off. And worse, the fat beneath it. She loathed the materials she was composed of. Even her face, which was never knockout pretty but very cute in its own rounded way, began to offend her. She wanted to take a sharp knife and scrape it down to the bone. She was now reaching the point of malnutrition, and her thinking was more jumbled than ever. Her sense of physical integrity no longer existed, and she was incapable of seeing herself as a living, functioning organism that needed energy in the form of food to survive. The idea of her metabolism was an abstract concept. She saw herself as a fairy-like being, an ethereal wispy fey entity that was moored to her skeleton that badly needed to escape the flesh, the body, the form, the dreaded toxic shell that encompassed it and poisoned her very existence.
Sometimes she could tolerate the smell of food, but quite often the odor of it sickened her. The feel of it, the texture of it against her tongue made her stomach involuntarily heave. She knew that soon, very, very soon now, she would not be able to take any solids. That simply putting something as simple as a slice of cheese or a cracker in her mouth would cause her to spontaneously throw up.
Her goal then was close.
Very close.
Chapter Seven
It was about this time that Scary Girl began acting strangely. That is, strangely even for her. Scary Girl’s behavior in the glass palace could be disconcerting on a good day. She was a loner that was often very difficult to track down and when you did, when you met her face to face, she rarely said what she meant. Very often speaking in riddles as if there was something she knew she wanted you to find out about. She was hardly the Evil Queen’s favorite, if the Queen indeed did have a favorite, which was debatable.
But one day, all that was pushed aside.
Bad Girl woke up and discovered Scary Girl sitting in the corner of her room, her haunted eyes even more haunted than usual.
“What,” Bad Girl began, somewhat shocked, “are you doing in my“
“It keeps happening,” Scary Girl interrupted.
Clutching her blankets tightly and feeling the dread of her sister coiling around her, Bad Girl asked, “What keeps happening.”
“Every night now for the past three days.”
“What?”
“At night.”
“Yes?”
Scary Girl licked her pale lips. “At night, at night it comes.” She breathed in and out slowly as if she were trying to calm herself. “I’ll be laying there, sleeping or almost asleep, and I’ll be aware that someone is in the room. They are watching me. I can see their eyes in the dark…red and glowing. They keep whispering something. I think…I think they say my name.”
“A dream,” Bad Girl suggested.
But Scary Girl shook her head. “No, no, no…it’s not a dream. The whispering. It comes from everywhere. It surrounds me. It’s inside my pillow and at my ear. And sometimes…sometimes it says, ‘You better not tell…you better ever not tell.’ That’s when I see the shape. I see it standing over me.”
Bad Girl was sitting up now. She was not naïve; something like this could mean many things and none of them were good. She went over and sat by her sister, holding her in her arms, amazed at how cold she felt, how frail. So insubstantial as if she barely existed at all.
“What happens then?” she asked.
Scary Girl said the shape with the red eyes would press her down on the bed and lay on top of her, crushing her with its weight as it rubbed itself back and forth against her, muttering something she couldn’t understand or didn’t want to understand. It went on like that night after night.
“This house is haunted by that thing,” Scary Girl admitted.
“What is it? A night-hag? A dream witch?”
Scary Girl just shook her head. “It could be those things. It could be.” She looked around as if it might be hiding under the bed or peering from the closet. “I don’t think it’s just me. I think it goes after Good Boy, too. I hear him moaning in his sleep. I hear his bed creaking. I hear her awful voice saying things to him.”
That was how it began for her, she admitted. She heard strange commotion in Good Boy’s room and, curious, she stood outside his door and listened. The door was open a crack and with the moonlight coming in, she could see a dark shape on top of him and one night…one night it said, “I smell you out there. I’ll lie with you next.” And true to its word, it did.
“What should we do?”
Bad Girl did not think Scary Girl had ever come to her like this before with fear in her heart. She had never asked for anything. And now that she had, Bad Girl did not know what to tell her.
“Should we tell the Queen?”
But Bad Girl shook her head. The Evil Queen was the last one they wanted to tell because she would never believe. That’s what she said to Bad Girl, but her reason was more along the line that she feared the Evil Queen was behind this witchery.
After that, she kept watch. For many days there was nothing, as if the hag was afraid to show itself now that she knew about it. Then one night she drifted off, knowing she had made a terrible mistake. She scrambled down the corridor and she could hear it in there with Good Boy, pressing him down, riding him in the dark watches of night. But she could not open the door. Despite the fevered pitch of gasping and moaning, she could not turn the doorknob.
The next thing she knew, she awoke in her own bed, bathed in moonlight. The bed was moving. The room was shaking. Her back was arched and she was covered with sweat. Right before her, in the mirror, Piggy was masturbating frantically, forcing her/itself into one orgasm after another. It kept going on and on and on until Bad Girl screamed out in her delirium, “STOP IT! MAKE IT GO AWAY!”
And then it did just as the sun began to rise. Piggy had abandoned the mirror and there was only her own reflection in it, naked and
panting, her damp hair plastered to her face. That’s all there was. That’s all there ever really was.
It was at this same time, as things grew darker and more desperate around her, that events began to cycle out of control. She had been coasting for days without food, pushing herself closer and closer to malnutrition and somewhere during this, she lost contact with herself. She forgot what it was like to feel okay or good, that sense of health most take for granted. And more so, the concept of fullness became alien to her. She could no longer remember what it was like or what such a concept might entail. She was a void. She was emptied out. There was nothing left inside her. She had become an empty drum and if somebody had wrapped their knuckles against her abdomen, it would have echoed.
She had reached the point that she could not get through a single day without a bout of cold sweats, manic shivering, or dizzy spells that pitched her face first to the floor. Her mouth tasted like blood and the tepid perspiration that bubbled from her pores carried a sharp, chemical odor to it like tannin.
Then one morning that was neither bright nor cheery, she woke in the early dawn gloom of dampness and mists, her body shaking and feverish with hot, acidic sweat, the memory of a nightmare haunting her bones. She tried to forget it, but she could not. The image of the Evil Queen, naked and shuddering on her knees, as she sucked the glistening rod of Good Boy deep into her throat was offensive.
She ran palsied fingers over her emaciated body, investigating every hollow and valley and minute crevice, of which by then there were many. She traced the scars of cuttings, needle marks, and belt lashings…and then, in the very back of her mind, she could hear Piggy laughing, laughing cacophonously and triumphantly because the joke, you see, the punchline, ha ha ha, hee hee hee, ho ho, was revealed: she hadn’t been punishing Piggy by torturing herself, she had only been punishing herself and the only one who did not know that was her. The very idea made Piggy laugh and laugh until Bad Girl screamed with a dry, broken sound.