Thinning by M. Ran O’Wain

He wondered if anyone had noticed his thinning, the sharpening of hips and crescent-bones beneath his eyes. He heard: You are so skinny often; when he didn’t, he had doubts. Not that he was ever overweight, no, his compulsion (as his psychiatrist was in the habit of calling his behavior) had begun when, well: it doesn’t matter, he thought, that sort of normalizing for the concerned therapist and the concerned mother had nothing to do with what to him simply felt necessary.

His reflection in the mirror above a porcelain sink stained with use: pressing two fingers against his uvula. The tears came just before the ever-shedding epithelial cells—his tongue pressing into top teeth when he said this word, like pausing close to the skin of a lover’s belly—produced a thin coating of bile. There was something in the purposeful way his face contorted when the heaving surfaced that he loved to witness, but after months of purging, catharsis took much longer to arrive. He tasted cheap beer and cigarette smoke, Bulleit and three slices of cheese pizza that he had eaten earlier while watching a terrible comedy with a friend from university. He had been too drunk to drive home and he was irritated now that he hovered over another’s toilet instead of his own.

For how long he knelt first on the blue tiles and then fighting to stop a tightening esophagus and wrenching abdomen I do not know, but his whispered plea could’ve easily been obscured by passing freighters on the interstate below my apartment windows. When I heard his voice, the clock read three a.m. and yet the story I withheld during the day flickered continuously at night (here my brother and I ignore one another and here we enter a party shoulder to shoulder) and whether it was of love or anger or one of severed rapprochement, the mimetic-cinema of our growing up worsened before sleep. This is just to say that I had been lying with my eyes closed on the cusp of memory and dream when the young man, an acquaintance whom I liked but knew very little about, called my name.

I found him sweating and shirtless and I left him, filling a large glass with water and grabbing a limp, untoasted piece of white bread from the kitchen. “Nibble, slowly. At least drink.”

“Will you stay? I know I’m—it is—gross.”

I slid against the bathtub and stretched my legs out across the tiled floor, my toes touching the arch of his bare foot. He looked so young; he was. I thought of my brother while watching this pale and heaving twenty year old. I was not there when my brother died but I was familiar with his bathroom and could easily picture him in pain the moment his aorta dislodged from his heart in the middle of the night. He was twenty-nine—my older brother—a year younger than I was when I insisted this sick man eat bread. It was my secret pain. I rarely shared with others but as my guest drank water, resting one arm on the toilet, the streetlights a full and present moon, I felt calm. Being here, with him, I was grateful he’d called out for help in the night and I was there to answer.

“Can I smoke if we open the windows? Usually helps.”

I lit one of his cigarettes and stood watching the cloud collect against my lint-packed screen before handing it to him. My mind caught on the word usually. I waited. I would listen only if he wished to share.

“I do this sometimes,” he said. In his eyes, I saw something like desire but not for me; his longing was private. He shifted and smiled and held his hands out as if to offer me a gift. “Well, nightly, really. I wake up happier when I am empty.”

# # #

Randal O’Wain holds an MFA from Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Currently, he teaches creative writing at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His essays and short stories have appeared in Oxford American, Guernica, The Pinch, Booth, among others.

Photo: Kelly Austin

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