Meat

Second molar, first molar...

Second premolar, first premolar...

Everything seems in place. You look again in the mirror, counting, considering, re-evaluating. You thought that faking that overbite would convince your dentist to x-ray your skull, but they saw right through you.

Bite down again, please.

You’ve never had an operation, never broken a bone, never torn a muscle, never had a scan, never even had a serious cut. You should be thankful. There are very few times in your life where you can remember having felt any extreme form of pain. You’ve never felt burning, throbbing, aching, stinging…

Yet you want nothing more than to pick up those nail scissors next to the basin and sink them into the soft, meaty part of your forearm. To move aside muscle, to pick your way through veins and nerves, to grab at the bone, to think about the plastic skeleton in the doctor’s waiting room, and to see that the shapes of its plastic bones and your real ones are exactly the same.

What had Mark said about you before? 

Oh, baby…you’re so tight.

What does that mean? Is something wrong? Are you squeezing, clenching, tightening, without even knowing it? You don’t feel tight. 

In fact, you feel loose. Like your skin might catch on something while you’re walking and tear right off. How could he say that? Nothing feels stationary. Your insides feel like mush. Meat, swaying and colliding and sticking and slipping, every time you breathe or move. It’s unbearable. 

You can’t see it, but you know that the substance of your meaty insides cannot be human. It must be animal. Or, alien? Something supernatural?

You should double-check. That’s right. Have a feel around. Stick your fingers in your mouth, your ears, your nostrils, your eyes. On your fingertips, it all feels right, looks right. But inside it all feels wrong. Something is shifting around under your skin, between your lungs, hiding in the spiral of your intestines. Some kind of invasive and deadly parasite.  

Oh God, what if it’s you.

Maybe you are the parasite. All that remains of you could just be your mind, which could be slowing rotting like the rest of your body. No one would believe you, not unless you peeled off your flesh and held your flayed skin in front of you, to prove to all the doctors that you were right, there is something wrong with your meat.

There is a shift again and this time you realise something has made its way free from your mouth. A tooth spins around the drain. The two pointy ends of the root make it look like it's escaping on little feet, leaving bloody footprints behind it on polished white ceramic. You hadn’t noticed you’d been clenching your jaw again.

Maybe this is what Mark had meant by tight.

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