Control
CW: eating disorders, body dysmorphia
Mom and I sip on coffee on opposite ends of the dining room table. She sits, frozen, attentive to the scratch sound of my knife running along a slice of toast. “Doll,” she says, her smile curdling with the butter melting too slowly across the bread. My knife clang hits the edge of my plate. I stare at the bread in front of me, watching the crumbs trapping themselves in the butter like flies. “The hospital trip?” I ask. “The incident,” she replies, “You’re,” crunch “losing control.” I look at her, trying to swallow the wad of chewed-up bread. Trying not to think of how I look “like a cow chewing cud.” My mind flashes back to a party she took me to in middle school. How elegant she looked that night. How, with my braces and freckles, I could never reach her perfection. How, when I grabbed a cupcake, I enjoyed the sweetness of sugar melting like frost on the roof of my tongue. How that sweetness turned to bile when I saw Mom’s nose crinkle, creating the only blemish in her appearance. “Doll,” she said to me, “you need to slow down. If you’re not careful, you’ll balloon. In this world, we can only control ourselves. Don’t lose that…” I look at her now, trying to find a crack in her facade. A flyaway hair, a chip in her nail, a crumb on her side of the table. But she is marble, her stone eyes ripping open my wounds. I take another smack bite of my toast. “I’m trying not to think of these things anymore,” I reply, “and I’ve never felt so much control in my life.”
Reese Bentzinger is a poet based in St. Louis, Missouri.
The Marbled Sigh 