Free Faerie by Eisha Marjara Page B

to think that I was just another patient to tend to, a chore to accomplish, and was no more special than anyone else.
    I got up and lumbered slowly to the door, my bottom sore, and went cautiously into the lounge. It was empty. Inching my way to the nursing station, I heard a strange noise from inside. I peeked through the main door. From behind a filing cabinet, I glanced down the hall and into the nurse’s bathroom. The door stood slightly ajar. I saw Patricia’s back shaking in spasms as she coughed. Morning sickness, I told myself. That explained why she’d left abruptly. She stood upright, turned swiftly, and caught me looking at her. Tears streamed down her cheeks. I jumped back and returned quickly to my room.
    By midday, when lunch arrived, I was served by another nurse. “Patricia had other business to tend to,” I was told. I asked if she was sick, but she shrugged. I shifted my focus and spent the rest of the day as I usually did: registering calories, burning the ones I digested, and disposing of the rest—and making dead certain no one noticed.

    â€œLila, Lila.” The bed boat rocked and the sky opened onto another strange realm where a flock of numerical digits flew over the horizon and a sea nurse called my name. “Lila. It’s snack time.”
    The biscuity odour pulled me from my watery dream. There was Nurse Patricia, who I was delighted to see. I sat up, realizing that I had been napping for an hour; my diet of solid food and cocktail of antidepressants had made me tired. I calculated the caloric difference that an hour made between being awake and burning calories and drifting in the make-believe sea of excess calories, and I decided to do jumping jacks for an extra seven minutes once staff met for report. I had it all figured out before I was fully awake.
    Patricia lingered for a bit. “How are you?” she asked. “Have you been to the bathroom?” Her manner was cool again. I told her that the Colace was working.
    â€œGood,” she replied without meeting my eyes, and began walking to the door.
    â€œIs everything okay?” I asked.
    â€œWhy, yes,” she said with exaggerated surprise. She could see from my sidelong glance that I didn’t believe her. She came back and sat down next to me.
    â€œThe other day when I had to, you know, relieve you of your pain …” She paused and lowered her voice. “I got quite upset.”
    She told me that she became physically sick from seeing my body, my emaciated buttocks, throbbing blue veins, the dark bruises on my lower spine (from innumerable sit-ups), my bleeding anus. All the parts of me that I had become blind to had made her sick.
    For the rest of the day, I thought about what she’d told me, and her words troubled me in ways that I struggled to understand. This was the effect that my appearance had on a professional who I thought would be desensitized to the sometimes gross physical signs of patients’ illness. But I also felt a strange satisfaction that my body could provoke such a reaction. I had succeeded in creating a body that was so skinny that it was hideous enough to drive people away.
    Why did I feel that way? Why was I half living? I was teetering over a dangerous chasm, between life and death, between those two universes, and I didn’t want to belong to either. But at some point, I would fall one way or the other.

14 . A Measure of Secrets and Loathing
    The diet of solid meals created more than just constipation; it created an unsolvable riddle. Unlike liquid nutrition, the solids couldn’t be expelled from the bowels or thrown away as easily. I had accumulated a stock of soggy sandwiches and mouldy muffins whose odour led staff to believe it might be coming from exhaust fumes blowing from the main kitchen. I used the new diet to justify my more frequent bathroom trips so that I could dispose of the stockpiled rotting food.
    After breakfast, I waited