The kids called her fat face. And when she looked in the mirror, she saw they were right: her cheeks were as thick as thighs, her eyes pushed in plump like buttons pinching back the fabric of her overstuffed head.
She decided her face needed to diet. So she stopped feeding it attention.
She wore a scarf like a burka and hid behind sunglasses.
She avoided eye contact. Especially with mirrors.
She blinked. Often. She thought of this as a form of exercise, a way to melt away the cheek fat.
But mostly she just ground her teeth and did jaw exercises, which required many private conversations with herself at night, alone in a dark bedroom.
All this was much to the consternation of her mother, who listened intently at the door, trying unsuccessfully to make out the language.
Miraculously, the fat-faced girl reached her goal in just three weeks.The kids began leaving her alone, targeting other people's faces. Perhaps this was because she had become sallow and pale and scary.
Soon, she found herself facially anorexic. Her button eyes now sank inside her cheeks like peachpits in empty pie cans. Her complexion soon waned; the black rings around her eyes triplicated concentrically. And her fat face was still there after all; she discovered it had moved to different parts of her skull, as if the cellulite had displaced to places where she'd pay more attention to it.
It now hung in hammocks of flab from her jawline and neck, like the dangly skin beneath an octogenarian's biceps.
At least that's how the poor girl saw it. In her mother's eyes, she was simply thin.
A week later, her mother could take no more of her daughter's privacy and selfishness. She confronted her as she was gorging on Cosmo in the bathroom. The daughter confessed to spending sleepless nights with Vogue. She was bingeing on images of models between purges of attention, puking up pretty in ugly wet chunks. She knew she needed help and cried out to her mother.
But when they finally approached the hospital, racing in her mother's Cadillac, it was too late: mother went over a speed bump and her daughter's fat face fell right off the bone, sloughing down from her earlobes and chin and slurping into her lap before spilling on the floor of her mother's fine luxury car.
Before they covered her with a sheet, Mother thought she looked impeccable, like perfect teeth polished to the color of clean whitewall tires. When she returned home, she scooped her daughter's remaining skin off the floor mats and poured it into a shiny jar to place on her mantel. Everyone who visited was mesmerized by their reflection within its grotesque beauty.
Fat Face returned their gazes, feeding, pressing up against the glass a little more tightly with every passing day.
Song of the Day:
(Bedroom Hymns - Florence & The Machine)
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