Bennie’s fingers reached for more cake.
Just one more piece, she thought.
She drooled as the cake approached her face, eyeing the dense fudge icing slathered on the 5 layers of Dutch chocolate. She quickly bit into the cake, front teeth gliding through the whipped cream topping, cutting through all the layers of chocolate cake and icings, and finally mucking through the bottom, denser layers of darkest fudge. Icing so chock full of sugar it seemed gritty as it dissolved sloshed around her teeth, her tongue soaking it up like a dry towel. The sugar was soothing, she felt herself lulled by the chocolates, tricked into thinking there was nothing else in the world. She shoved the front of the cake further back into her mouth so that she could fit more in, chewing with her cheeks pushed out like a chipmunk storing nuts. She rolled her eyes upwards, holding her hands up so none of the cake stuck there would drip off and be wasted.
Mmmmm, she thought. And not much else.
Only too soon, the piece was gone. Just one more slice, she thought, and reached for more cake. She felt a pang of guilt at how much food she was eating, so she took a slightly smaller piece this time. This allowed her the right to scrape encrusted icing off the platter with her finger, which she did quickly, anticipating the cake she held in her other hand.
The second piece was gone in three bites. The whole thing was in her mouth, oozing out the little pucker that was her mouth. She swallowed the cake in huge throatfuls, feeling it stretch the walls of her esophagus on the way down. She wiped cake off her face, and then dragged her tongue over her upturned hands until they were spotless and sticky. Benny used her wet finger to pick up the crumbs that had spilled on her mother’s spotless counter and floor. She washed her hands as she licked her lips, digging her tongue along her gumline to peel off the icing that had pasted there.
She reached for her milk glass. She chugged all 16 ounces of it in one breath, quickly pulling milk out of the glass, gasping in between gulps, purposefully choking herself on it. The thick liquid washed all the chocolate away and left a thick film on her tongue, coating her teeth like smoke. She was breathless as she set the glass down, but smiling, satisfied.
She was alone in the house, but if anyone had been home, they would’ve rejoiced to see her eating something. Benny was 5’10” and 120 pounds. She hadn’t been to a doctor in 3 years, but all her friends said she was underweight. She knew they were wrong, naked you could see she still had a few pounds left to lose. She wanted to look good in a bikini by June, but every time she looked in the mirror she saw fat hanging off her body in folds: under her chin, off her arms, and on her belly & thighs.
Benny was enjoying the bloated feeling she had given herself. She was starting to get sick, though, from the thought of all the food in her stomach, a bit of a headache from the sugar rush. The dairy & sugar churned inside her, bubbling up her throat threateningly, and she swallowed it down again. The cake was the first thing she had eaten that day, and she realized she was about to puke it up.
She ran to the bathroom and crouched over the toilet in a stance that had become familiar to her over the past year. The rich cake was reacting violently with her dry stomach, she had never been able to drink milk and keep it down.
With a small cough from her, they both flew the wrong way out her throat, joyously free of the bile that would digest them. She could feel each piece of cake tripping over her uvula in its mad rush to leave her body, food arcing out of her body in a mottled black and white foamy mess. She kept one ear trained to any noise outside the bathroom door, in case anyone had come home and she was too busy barfing to hear them. She retched until she couldn’t, choking as gently as she could. Air coming in her throat burned, and she could taste the bile as the smell drifted into her nose. She stuck her fingers down her throat, enticing her body to throw more cake into the toilet, but it was empty.
The bathroom reeked. The fumes of bile wafting up from the bowl were nauseating, and a couple of times she dry-heaved, thrusting her head forward like a sick cat, but her throat was too tight to let anything through
Bennie couldn’t see very well, the light was too bright for her eyes. The room pulsed, things wavered around. She closed her eyes and pressed herself against the cool toilet to wait for things to settle inside her.
She peeked into the toilet bowl, curious to see what had come out of her body. Black islands of cake, still topped with shiny icing, bobbed in the murky water. The milk and the porcelain matched each other in brilliant white.
The toilet contained a shipwrecked meal, now floating in Bennie’s bile like a liquid urn. She blinked a little, amazed at how big the chunks of food were, and flushed it away.
She stood up to go and slowly, gently, made her way to the kitchen sink to get some water. She had left no evidence of her aborted meal. Food was gone, her clothes weren’t dirty, and as soon as she brushed her teeth she wouldn’t smell like vomit. There wasn’t a speck of spew on her: Bennie was good at what she did.