Free 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad

Notre Dame
or this carnival documentary he loves that takes a cold hard look at the mutant humanity behind sideshow acts. Or we listen to jazz, also my suggestion. I’ll lie there in my slip, let him go on and on about dissonance. It isn’t charming or funny anymore. It just is.
    I no longer look at myself in the mirror on the way to the bathroom or the kitchen. I lie in my slip, never naked in front of him now, and I watch him, oblivious to my existence, playing the harmonica, for which I have now acquired a dull loathing, filling my room with its terrible, earsplitting whine. I watch him smokemy cigarettes, his thin freckled chest with its odd hair tufts, exhaling and inhaling.
It’s over
forever on the tip of my tongue, but when he sits up from my bed to say, Well, I should probably get going, I stare at his severely stooped knobby back, his shoulders hunched up around his ears, and when I open my mouth what I say is, Can I come with you?
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    From where I lie on his bed, I watch Archibald stumble, half-naked, toward the record player on the opposite end of his basement apartment, a single low-ceilinged room lit by chili pepper lights he told me he stole from a Mexican restaurant. I don’t know how long I’ve been in his basement, lying on his shitty green bed, stoned and naked and full of salt. Days? A week, maybe? There are Chinese takeout boxes all over the bed and table. Schoolbooks I brought with me but haven’t opened. I have no idea what time it is and I haven’t been to class or work in days. We’re playing the Peggy Lee album, the song “Is That All There Is?” by my own request for the ninth or ninetieth time. From a great distance, I hear Archibald ask me, “Are you okay?”
    â€œI see why you love this song. It’s great.”
    And I do see. In fact, when I hear Peggy Lee’s voice fill his dark, ugly, low-ceilinged room festooned with its blinking red lights, the fog clears. I well up, float, am buoyed by the circus sounds, the trumpets.
    Like every time I came over, I came over intending to end it. Twice I opened my mouth to say it. Twice what came out was, Let’s order Chinese.
    Now I’m just lying here spinning, my mouth open and parched from MSG, too stoned to move, watching two of him walk back toward me.
    I don’t know when the knocking starts. Is it distinct from the music? Or maybe the music has a door? The song has a door someone is pounding on with their first? Weird I didn’t hear that before.
    â€œIs that someone knocking on your door?” I ask.
    â€œLing can get it.” Ling is one of his five million housemates.
    But the knocking keeps going.
    â€œI don’t see why I have to answer,” Archibald says, talking to the air around him like it’s accusing him. “It’s one in the morning.”
    The knocking continues, acquires bass.
    â€œYou sure you shouldn’t get that?” I slur.
    Archibald stands up and makes his way toward the sliding doors. I hear him trudge slowly up the stairs. “Is That All There Is?” is still playing on repeat. Over and over again, Peggy Lee getting existential about the circus, about a fire, about love and then death. How many times have I heard this song? I continue my upward drift to the cracked popcorn ceiling, in a swaying motion, hearing voices, hushed and hissing, then louder, closer. In the song? No. Upstairs, it sounds like. I should get up, see, but my limbs are lead.
    Suddenly a woman is marching toward me. Archibald pulls her back but she shakes him off, she won’t be stopped. She is a giant woman out of the circus, out of my nightmares of the circus. But she’s familiar. One of our customers, in fact. One of Archibald’s. She came into the store recently and asked me for a book about dachshund care. Didn’t have the title. Insisted I search by subject. Nodded absently while I read off listings. A