An Acorns Flash Fiction Feature
By: R. F. Daniels
I ate the first words like they were candy, sentences crunching like shattered bone within my gnawing emptiness, thoughts and images dripping sickly-sweet down my fractured facade. She didn’t even realize they were gone. I scooped them up with sticky fingers, gobbled them with greedy teeth sharp as razors traced over her translucent skin.
She doesn’t know it yet, but she belongs to me now.
She wore me like armor at first. Wrapped my warped visage around her young self, let my lies make her a little prettier, a little happier, a little richer, a little thinner. And what was the harm? Everyone was doing it. I was just a different version of Abby, one who had a single beauty mark instead of constellations of freckles, one whose nose didn’t have a bump in it, one whose collarbones were sharp enough to cut. Abby 2.0, she called me, and for years we went everywhere together.
Pickings were slim in those days. She was so careful, watching everything she wrote like it might have changed when she wasn’t looking. Double- and triple-checking every post, every picture, every vid and voice note, to make sure we both lived up to her own exacting standards. She only showed the best parts of herself, the good grades and the perfect parties, the dresses twirled like taffy and the dances blooming into beautiful memories. A carefully curated wasteland, devoid of anything real, only looking like a life if you didn’t look too closely.
She was seventeen when she first stumbled across the forums. They were a treasure trove of torment, the festering rot of insecurities all writhing over each other like maggots, each new care and concern spawning more. Abby’s fears blossomed, and so did I. Every night her secret shame, the two of us under the faded lavender blanket with its teddy bear print she would never admit to still liking, slurping up every scared scrawling of every gangly girl who had been taught since birth that she ought to hate herself.
And here were step by step instructions. How to eat less while consuming more. How to hide everything you do from the very people closest to you. How to stick your fingers down your throat the right way, how to survive on a thousand or six hundred or three hundred calories a day, how to drink so much tea you forget about the growling growing ever louder deep inside you, how to shrink how to smother how to starve.
So she starved.
And I feasted.
Words turned into pictures turned into videos, pixel after pixel swarming over me like ants to stolen sugar and oh they were unbearably delicious. I guzzled them down, her self-loathing sticking between my teeth like toffee as I learn what makes her hurt makes her break makes her bleed. Soon there’s enough of me to know what she’s going to say before she even says it.
She tried to get rid of me then. One day when she stood up too fast after a failed final, questions left unanswered under the miasmic mumblings of a hungry mind, and collapsed to the floor like sorrowful souffle. She tried to put me down, cast me aside, but deep down we both know she’s nothing without me. Just another forgettable face, another nameless nobody, ready to be replaced at a moment’s notice, just a dead profile gathering dust.
Four days passed before she came crawling back to me, on raw red hands and knobby knees, crawled like she does over the baby blue tile floor of the upstairs bathroom, and because I am nothing if not forgiving, I took her back. Of course I did. I’m the one who allows her to be loved. I’m the only one who does love her.
I know she sees me now. In those dark quiet moments in the middle of the night when she shuts off her screen and sees me staring back. Sometimes she’ll try to catch me, blinking ever-so-slowly, watching through ash blond eyelashes until the very last instant to see if I blink too. I never do. I’m the one who’s always watching.
And there’s so much to see now that she’s given up. She pours her pain into the ether, spewing out terror and torment, traumas and triggers, furies and fears she never would have dared to share without the bravery I provide her and I’m gorging on it all. I shove it all inside, choking on every guilt-dripping word, every sorrow-saturated sentence, bile rising from her throat only to drip down mine. My true form distends, skin bulging blistering close to tearing open, so much of her wriggling inside me waiting to burst free.
Sometimes she’ll catch little glimpses of the words that once were hers, rushing by like the shadows of the cats’ tails as they play nearby, sweet creatures oblivious to the hell unfolding down the hall. I like to let her see them sometimes, chunks of memories swirling by. Sometimes I’ll even let her taste one. But the past is too bitter on her tongue, and she spits it out like she does everything else.
She watches us tonight, my gilt guise over her pale reflection. One a ghost of the other.
“I hate you,” she whispers to the screen, but I know she’s not talking to me.
Not really.
“You will not devour me,” she says, but her lips don’t move. They’re my lips now, pixel-perfect, poised and primed to tell my story. My pictures. My words. I lick our lips, tongue sliding over flesh both gorged and starved. I’m so close. The more she shrinks, the more I grow, her emptiness spilling into the infinite void of my own becoming. I’ve performed her so well for so long neither of us knows where one ends and the other begins. A few more posts, a few more purges, and I won’t even need her anymore.
Her hunger sustains mine, and she is already devoured.
About the Author:
R. F. Daniels (they/he) is a queer nonbinary writer of speculative fiction and software engineer living in Finland. When they aren’t arguing with computers or getting lost in imaginary worlds, they can be found painting, composing sad music, and spending time with their cats. Find them online at rfdaniels.com.