She stands in front of the full length mirror, clutching handfuls of stomach fat. It is mapped with hundreds of slight, soft red crevices, and she has to fight the urge—always—to dig her ratty nails into them and just TEAR. She wants to rip her stomach apart at the unsightly seams, to spill her fat-ass guts all over the floor of the trailer. She wonders if Scott would even notice, or if he’d just wonder why in the fuck there wasn’t any food waiting. He probably wouldn’t, she figures. Notice, that is. He’d probably squish through her lard-ass guts and switch off his clothes before grabbing a beer and leaving. He’d go to Dirk’s up the road because Dirk lives close and Dirk doesn’t have a fat wife—or any wife—so Dirk can play video games and look at hot women on computer porn and do whatever he wants. He can have pizza for dinner on a Tuesday, even if it isn’t a special occasion, so why wouldn’t Scott go there?
She hates her life. All of it. She hates the marriage, she hates the kids who are AWFUL—they fight and cuss and get kicked out of school, and T.J. started smoking even though he said he didn’t, even though he’s only eleven. She hates never having enough money and not having a job of her own, and not being able to set up any of the bills to pay automatically because there may or may not be enough money in the account on any given day. She hates not even knowing if they have enough to pay the light bill at all, really.
For a while, she had Facebook. She was able to keep up with everyone from Bayside, which was nice, but it was hard as shit, too. Because she found Zack and she they were “friends” on there, but all of his post updates were like, “so happy to be seeing March of the Penguins with my two Girls,” and he’d put a picture of his wife and their daughter and it just about made her puke.
That used to be HER Zack. And now he was a salesman of some kind who made nice money and drove a sweet Avalon and she lived in a fucking trailer with an uneven floor and a nightmare husband who barely noticed her, and when he did, it was mostly to hit her. She had some nightmare kids who stole shit when she took them grocery shopping and seemed destined for a path not unlike that of her or their daddy.
It made her cry. A lot.
So thank God they couldn’t pay for the internet any more, and she couldn’t be on Facebook. Fuck Facebook, she thought. Fuck the internet.
She was a fat, loser cow and she didn’t deserve that sort of thing, anyway.
She sat on the edge of the mattress and cried some more.
PONY SHORTS 