I

She’s small-town pretty. Five foot seven and still waiting to grow up. Sick of her own scent and so bored she could eat her face. Last summer (the one that’s fading) she had sex with a senior and she thinks she lost her naivety by default. It had been by a cornfield in his car. (Husky silky ripe corn.) The beer had made her feel blurred, like she had been smudged. A divine cartoonist changing his mind perhaps. She likes to think she likes a drink.

She’s slightly scared of becoming like her mother (who bakes peanut butter chiffon pies and sleeps in a patchouli-fugged floral bedroom) but she thinks she’s too horny for that to happen. She thinks life will start in technicolour over the county line but the highway’s tarmac’s too hot to follow.

II

She can feel every one of her ribs now. Comforting smooth like talismans. She can see her sternum raising the skin halfway between her nipples into a tiny third point with each draughty breath. Feels the ribs attached to it through her tiny tits. Her thorax angled with broad ridges like the dents from huge loving hands that were too tight. And the hollow below the vertiginous drop to a concave stomach. The individual ribs make shadows in poor light like the pattern of veins on a butterfly’s wing. She sees the curve of her shoulder sockets in sharp contrast to the bleak pseudo-famined clutter of bare bones that seem to balance on one another to provide a fragile support for her heavy head.

She pinches folds of her own skin. Toys with them and rolls them between tired finger and thumb. She abhors the substance of her self and takes the same perverse pleasure in bruising it that others have. She thinks she’s fat and that the she’ll be free of it one day.