#1 - Stares

Today's words: Fat, Embedding, Waste, Myth
Today's genre:  Romance/Horror
Words: 497 

 “Is it true that you eat a six-course meal every day??”

Josie often wondered where that myth had originated. Perhaps it was the time that she took major advantage of an ‘all you can eat’ buffet at one of the restaurants in town with some friends. ‘Never waste food’ – her mother’s motto.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” was also an often enquiry, and not because people were interested in her, but because they were interested in whether it were possible for a plus-size woman to have one.

A long-term relationship didn’t come until Josie was twenty-four with a girl called Melissa. Melissa was very pleasant, cheerful, and gorgeous; someone that would get several stares when they’d walk out in public. When she’d started seeing Josie, the stares changed; they weren’t accompanied by cheeky smiles or winks, instead they were paired with downturned mouths and looks of disgust. Society would always view anything above a size fourteen as ‘fat’.

At first it was bearable – she’d ignore it because she was in love and that was all that mattered; Josie was her teddy bear and Melissa was Josie’s panda bear. She had found this amazing person in Josie and she was happy, beyond happy, she was ecstatic, elated, euphoric, right? Wrong.

One evening when Josie was asked to meet up for a date, Melissa didn’t show up and Josie went missing. The stares became friendly again. She had lost the first person who had ever been loyal to her for an extended period of time, but at least her public image had been salvaged, she thought.

A few days after Josie’s disappearance, Melissa noticed a fresh-looking scar on her waist as she was about to step into the shower. Maybe she had scratched herself in her sleep, she thought. Knotting her brow and stretching her skin out to get a better look, she froze. ‘Hi, panda bear’ was embedded into her skin in small uneven handwriting as if someone had taken a knife to her. All she could do was stand there and stare. “Where did this...?” she began out loud, lightly touching the red letters that carried no pain with them. Thinking of Josie and inhaling sharply, she quickly covered herself up with her towel.

The following day on her inner forearm in the same handwriting was another message: ‘Why did you leave me?’ She focused on the word ‘me’ and tears began to form followed by shaking. Forcefully rubbing at her skin in vain, she closed her eyes and shook her head. “It’s impossible,” she repeated. “It’s in my head.” But other people noticed the messages, too.

A sentence would appear every single day without fail. She passed it off as an artistic experiment, but when they didn’t fade or stop, it became harder to excuse.

The stares eventually took a different tone and she was looked at oddly for the rest of her life, forced into a life of solitude.

‘I’ll be with you forever, Melissa.’