MICEALA MORANO
CW – disordered eating, drowning
Escapology
Math Class
The girl counts calories, calculating the circumference of her bust, waist, hips, thighs. The formula for perfection eludes her, the equation undefined. The wishes she makes to the meteors come back marked return to sender. Through the telescopic lens of her eyes: too much girl, an endless universe. She wishes to take scissors, cut down the sky to a finite cloth, let the air collapse into a brilliant star.
Physics Class
The girl calculates the trajectory of her bones as they supernova, blooming from her pale frame. As the teacher drones on about motion and mass and flight, her phone glows, heavenly light radiating from under her desk. On Tumblr, she types thinspo. Meanspo. Low-cal. Everything okay? If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disor-
She sips Diet Coke, carbon bubbling at her chapped lips, asks the internet how many calories are in diet coke? do skinny girls drink diet coke? do skinny girls drink? do skinny girls-
Psychology
In the waning days of a burning summer, she is bundled in two coats, shivering as the cold hollows her bones. She asks the teacher to turn up the thermostat and is sent to the nurse’s office. She detours to the girl’s bathroom, forges a signature on the note, leaning weakly on the tile. In the mirror, the girl shrinks. Her wiry hair floats to the tile. Her nails, a shock of red against pale skin, crumble at the slightest touch. When she returns to class, the teacher shows flashes of beautiful girls on the board, calling them malnourished and sick. Birds, preparing for flight. She draws them in her notes, imagining the margins of her body erased.
English
The class learns about synonyms. Synonym for anorexia: folding. Erasure poetry. Synonym for bulimia: flight. Purging sins. Synonym for body: bones. Synonym for disorder: control. Synonym for denial: girl, drowning.
Art
Each year, the teacher asks the class to sketch portraits of beautiful people. The same assignment comes back to haunt the girl. She is stuck sitting beside the same girls who can wear bikinis to the beach, girls who can fit into one-size clothes. Rivers of silken gold flow down their backs and bones poke at their wrists like needles. What perfect thread they were made from.
Each year, the girls draw self-portraits, their faces reflecting in the glossy mirrors of their phones. At the end, they are given As, gold stars. When the girl looks into their eyes, she sees universes.
Memory ricochets back to her every time. A meteor, burning as it hits her. The first year, she made the mistake of drawing herself. The teacher called her portrait distorted, pinning her body to the wall like a dead, flightless swallowtail, drawing out lines, pointing out imperfections as if preparing her for plastic surgery. From then on, she leaves the page blank. Each year, the teacher says her portrait looks so heavenly. The girl dreams of becoming air.
Talent Show
See: all the girls saying look how small I can become! Ballerinas slice through the air, their brisés and pas de ciseaux showing off moon-white bones. Choir girls soprano their voices to C6, faint on the stage as air leaves them like a promise. Jealousy sits heavy like a peach pit in the girl’s chest. When it is her turn, she enters from stage left, carrying a clear glass box, filled with water.
Escapology
In escapology, the goal is to escape from restraint, to disappear. As the girl steps into the box, she imagines bones unfurling in the night, pale star jasmines cast against a background of deep blue. She imagines God’s face, an empty plate, and then herself, fitting flawlessly into a pale pink leotard. The whole act of being empty is nothing new to her. Burning alive begins in the stomach, moves to the delicate parts: hair, nails, teeth. Anything for the applause, for the flight before the fall. The audience cheers as she slips into the box with room to spare, her vertebrae clinking against the glass. Finally, she unfolds, her hair floating on the surface, her limbs stretching out to leave fingerprints on the glass, to say I was here despite the subtraction of the self. It is then she realizes escape is futile. If she somehow leaves the box, she is still trapped: a pinned swallowtail, on display for the world, always acting, always burning. The stars are burning air. The girl dreams of becoming a heavenly body.
The audience doesn’t begin to scream until she is motionless, her body a still life, suspended in blue.
Miceala Morano (she/her/hers) is an emerging writer whose work is published or forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Hooligan Magazine, Paper Crane Journal, and more. Her work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and she was recently named a Foyle Commended Poet by the Poetry Society of the UK, as well as Arkansas Scholastic Press Association’s 2021 Literary Magazine Writer of the Year.