Over time, they add up. All the things that make Leggy decide she wants to lose weight.

 1. Comfort. The way a book resting on her lap doesn’t hurt. In fact, sitting doesn’t hurt. Reading almost feels natural. No bones protrude through her mass of flesh, so Leggy can be sure she has more than necessary.

 2. The mirror. Is this really only one thing? It is one glance in it, time and time again, always one glance at a time. The mirror, that reflection that hungers and never fills, sees all and absorbs nothing, spits back into the face of whatever was looking. What an example, what a shimmering beacon of light to emulate.

 3. James. Or Mark. Or Phil, or Barry, or Jeff, or Tommy, or Adam. Or Casey or Donald or William or Amelia or Clare or Taylor or Tracy or Jaimie or Julian or George or Sam or Jo(e) or, Adam. Or Adam.

4. Photographs, the old ones. And the new ones. The puzzle box lid that swears that’s the piece, that picture of her is the one that belongs there, right between the Christmas tree and the Easter basket—Leggy in a yellow swimsuit on the beach at thirty. It swears it fits seamlessly up against a photo of her at sixteen years old, when it was mindless to run up and down the stairs for a week until her prom dress would zip. The jig-sawed edges disintegrate against the pressure to fit. Damn it.

 5. Food. The way it slides down her throat, smooth and creamy, silky like chocolate mousse and satisfying like curds of ricotta in lasagna. The way it catches in the lump where her Adam’s apple never formed and reaches its spaghetti tendrils all around her cartilaginous tracheal rings and squeezes and suffocates with a delicious revenge. Honestly, she doesn’t like the taste of sugar anymore anyway. Indulgence is disgusting.

 6. Energy. A sedentary lifestyle has nothing on the exhilaration of running on a treadmill for three hours a day, pounding ankle and knee joints to rubbery dust, rain or tungsten shine. Bodies learn to be what you need them to be. If you want yours bouncy and buoyant, you shove it out to sea and try to drown it.

But whatever gets her there, whatever the straw that breaks her lack of resolve, once she’s decided, it’s decided. If Leggy wears a trench coat, she will walk in the rain, so put it on her when the drought of July parches the ground and boils the air. She picks up the pieces, she moves. She levitates a calorie, orbits a carbohydrate and low-fat yogurt around spinach, sirloin around high-intensity interval training. Her sweat is the salt that balances her blood pressure, and her bleeding coughs in brisk air are replacements for a nightly glass of wine. Animals have never known control like this; perhaps it’s woman that makes us human. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-hahahahaha! Now that would be insane. Like the chicken before the egg. If the chicken came first, she’d have to have been female, and when did a woman ever come first?

Then she’ll wear that decision like a trench coat until it fits, until she forgets what she wears underneath it. One woman told Leggy that lingerie underneath a trench coat was her fantasy—the act of wearing it, that is, no big hullaballoo over who would see it, but she probably had her thoughts about that. We have to believe she did. Black lace would be the best. The kind that shows the stomach but fondles the hips with sheer ebony filigree and intricate flowering. The kind that catches the delicate flakes of dry thigh skin and slides across exfoliated arms. Would she wear garters and stockings? If she wants to sell the trench coat illusion, she might wear tall black leather boots that hug her calves without pinching, and she’ll need those stockings for that. But a bare leg, well. Is she the right weight?

But then who is she when she’s decided to lose the weight and it’s gone like that slip of paper with a phone number—who was she supposed to call? The gummy polyurethane of the bar counter was the worst writing surface to push pen and paper up against; she remembers pushing it. She remembers wanting to be pushed up against too—maybe the hallway wall, lit by falloff from the orange neon “Pool” sign where the picture frames were too cheap for anyone to care if their sharp corners jabbed her back and she slapped at them with her eyes closed, knocking them to the ground.

Who is she, then? Is she the woman who tries everything at a party, from the sweet and sour meatballs to the lines of cocaine in the basement bathroom—away from those who don’t want to know? Or is she the woman in the bedroom, piled with fur-lined coats on the bed, hiding? Hiding because that person is here, did show up—hell, of course he showed up; it’s his party—but she doesn’t know if she is allowed to reach for his sweaty hand with hers or if her hopes are better off ignored. Restricted like frozen pig carcasses hanging behind the vault door of a walk-in freezer. Waiting behind the front counter of the butcher shop where customers know what they want—ribeye or intestine or an entire half a cow—and know what they want to pay, as if it were them, not the push-key cash register, that invented the system. Is she the woman who nibbles, licks the iced-over body in there with her, since the two of them found themselves together? Once Leggy’s done the dirty work—hauled her weight in a body bag out the back door, left a black trail of its skid marks on the concrete—well, what then? Is she supposed to keep dying? What if she comes back—too alive?

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Loria Harris’s poetry and fiction are published or forthcoming in Oyster River Pages, Club Plum, JAKE, and more. Her poems have received the Alyson Dickerman Prize and the Jim Haba Award. Loria holds an MFA from Lindenwood University where her fiction was nominated for the MFA in Writing Award, and she currently reads for Iron Horse Literary Review. Find her on IG at @looksbooksandloria or on Bluesky at @loriaharris.