I Am Beautiful

         

I Am Beautiful
A contest entry by Pacific Blue
Word Count: 567

      It's more yellow than I expected. I thought maybe it would be white or perhaps gray but the yellow took me by surprise. Mixed with the blood, it reminds of ketchup and mustard. I can't help but think of food as I make another cut. It keeps me calm through the pain. Food is my meditation.

         The knife is a steak knife as it seemed only appropriate. The incisions are small usually and I squeeze the fat out from within. On my belly though, (my horrid belly) I cut a bit wider and deeper. A kangaroo pocket. I reach inside and grab great, slippery handfuls of my fat and dump them into the tub. I have to be careful here not to cut too deep or to accidentally disembowel myself. As the blood seeps out, I staunch it with flour.. Something strikes me as hilarious that I'm using food to stop what food caused.

         I smile and cut again. My thighs now. This time I don't have to force the fat out. It oozes from the cut like pus. I watch it for a moment in it's strange, disgusting beauty. I will be beautiful too. Once this is done. Another cut. My cankle disappears slowly. The whole tub looks like it's full of runny, yellow mashed potatoes. It isn't draining as well as I figured and smells worse than I imagined. I wonder what I will do with it once this is over.

         It doesn't matter because I will be beautiful. I won't have to do anything again. I'll have men and money and fame and power and everything a woman could want. My cuts get more frequent and I'm cutting deeper. I have to get beautiful much faster. Beautiful is what is important. Nothing else matters. Not the bloodloss or the dizziness.

         How much does a liver weigh? And all this skin?  I make larger cuts and I'm grabbing more than fat now. Strange lumps of purple, pink, red and gray fall out of me in tangles. They thump against the tile so I know they weigh quite a lot. Yes and I weigh less and less. The blood must weigh something too so I'm glad to be rid of it. I'm gouging the muscles out of my left arm and I try to cut through the bone but I can't, not with this knife. I can't wrench the bones off either so I have to take the weight off somewhere else. I take it off my face; trim up my ears, nose and cheeks. I cut more out from my stomach and chop off long sheets of skin. Just like peeling an apple.

         I feel like I can look in the mirror now. The full-body mirror I kept hidden under a sheet beside the sink. I promised myself that I would only remove the sheet when I was beautiful and now it is time.

         I lean the mirror against the wall and pull the fabric from it. I gasp and cry blood-stained tears. I can see my ribs and my lungs. My legs are just about bone and my left arm is entirely bone. I'm covered in blood and my face looks so thin without all the flesh on it. It wasn't me who was ugly, it was my body. But now I am beautiful. I pass out but it doesn't matter.

         I am beautiful.