Anastasia Jill

High Tea

By Anastasia Jill

Thea finds the bloody napkin while digging through her daughter’s trash. It sits folded and buried beneath some shampoo bottles and pads thick with acetone and watery pink nail polish. She digs deeper in the bin, foraging for something more, broken glass or sanitary napkins, to explain away the blood. All she finds is the sole, incriminating napkin. The crimson lines are straight, methodical, rehearsed. This was no accident; her daughter has indeed harmed herself.

Earlier in the day, Thea had seen candy wrappers in her kitchen and said, “You’re not going to lose more weight eating this junk.” Her daughter's head hung, as she’d been properly scolded into tiny bites and reasonable portions throughout their high tea.

Thea was not British; she is New York born and bred, the kind of people who come from hard laborers and child rearing women who lived in their shoes. She always found the concept of ‘high tea’ elevating on its own. Behaving like the upper crust made plastic cushions feel like rich breads beneath her thighs.

These are the things she tried to instill in her daughter.

They sat at the table and drank tea each weekend. Thea beamed as her girl took paltry, lady-like bites. At the time, she’d felt proud, shaming her daughter into dissent. Now in the bathroom, her wounds are exposed. Blood is heavy as concrete, dwarfing her diminutive, shuddering hands as she drops the napkin on top of the bin.

Later on, Taya sticks her head in the moldy, pube stained toilet and regurgitates the fare mother brought for their high tea. She watches finger sandwiches, mulch-thick scones, rare meats, and little cakes regurgitate into the porcelain bowl. After years of purging food, Taya is an expert on spoon feeding her toilet in bite sized globs. Long gone are the days of spilling like a burst pipe. She knows how to keep it simple, like nothing happened to the food inside her stomach.

Mother ordered refreshments special from a bakery she couldn't afford. Today the cakes were special—buttercream, with dollops of pink frosting in the shape of roses on each individual square. The once frosted flowers now floated in regurgitated remains, small uvulas gagging on the vanilla paste. Good riddance. She did not like those cakes and their rich, artificial taste. And the tea! That rotten tea, like brewed dirt and grass clippings with sugar cubes. It made her vomit warm and slick, like car oil. With a burning throat and pulpy, bloody lips, she flushes the toilet and watches the fancy foods float and tumble and eventually, churn away.

The water is opaque but the toilet looks messy. She should clean it—remove the orangey-ring around the bowl’s open face—but she can’t make her body bend over to get the brush. She cannot scrub. She cannot move. She feels her whole being crawl into exhaustion. In some ways, she thinks that she is shutting down.

She doesn’t get enough oxygen to her brain, or enough waste out of her liver, and it’s pooling in her, like stool. She feels like a walking turd, hiding her shitty nature in lacey pink tops and tights and shoes with tall heels and little plastic bows. Her belly bloats with unprocessed gas and water retention, but that will pass. The rest of her is finally skinny, but mother still isn’t happy with the girl she has become.

Taya is tired. She doesn't want to be a girl anymore—she wants to be a rat, and swim to the bottom of the septic tank, alongside the food she has wasted. Rats eat garbage, and they’re just fine. They don’t have to worry about keeping their figure. They only have to survive, and Taya knows they do it well, much better than her.

She could learn quite a bit from their squallor.

Thea gave her daughter a replica of her name—a more modern, harder version of her own cognomen. She had visions of them together, like twins durum hair and whipped cream colored skin, eyes blue as deoxygenated blood flowing through tight, rubbery veins. In the body, these deoxygenated veins can turn organs they pass through into the same sickly blue.

Likewise, she was beautiful until the pregnancy.

Her stomach inflated like she was full of helium, not baby. She gave birth, but her body never recovered. Her abdomen stretched a wrinkled sheet, pocket corners puckered against her hips, breasts sagging like worn out elastic. She imagined her organs detaching from under her ribs and bouncing around in her hulled epidermis. A U-shaped scar crossed her lower abdomen; a twisted, carved out smile that never healed right, and was still angry and scarlet two decades later. A mask of clothing and makeup gave the echo of her former elegance, but it was just that: a lesser parallel, a replica. The dresses would fall off, and she was left with slumping flesh.

She did diets, starved herself, took laxatives and ipecac. At some point over the years, Taya developed the same unhealthy habits. On one hand, Thea was thrilled. They would be demure and microscopic. But Thea still sagged; her daughter fluctuated between blimp and stick. She ignored the pain in both of them, and purchased detox teas and low calorie snacks. She bought knockoff dresses and fake jewelry, painted her nails with the precision of a neurosurgeon.

Nothing worked in the long run. She could feel herself decaying. Even her mind gave way to her senescence. She kept shrinking and expanding, just like her daughter. They would both do until they exploded, changed, or died.

When Taya was young, she was all bones and soft paste. No baby fat. No yellowed teeth. A smile like kitten lips parting perfectly at the nose. Mother loved her then, when she was a pretty girl. Then she menstrated and filled out. That was the end of that. Buxom breasts followed a belly that plopped onto her thighs. Her hips bloomed like lotus petals, fatty lumps uniting with the edge of her ilium. She jiggled when she walked, and dimpled all over when she sat.

Mother was not happy, didn’t seem to love her much anymore.

From the time that she could walk, Taya would follow mother into the kitchen, watching her eat nothing but spinach leaves and cashew bits. Underneath her clothes, Taya knew, laid the body of a naked mole rat—all rippled skin with crow’s feet, even on her gut. She cried and ran miles, but her body remained the splintered, imperfect same.

Her father’s assurances meant nothing to the woman who hated herself. Then Taya gained weight, and mother lost her mind. She’d force feed her some days, then send her to bed without dinner the next. The former led to immediate expulsion, with the latter, she’d go to the fridge after her parents went to sleep and ingested whatever was in the fridge. Come morning, mother would cuff her, rubbing her nose in the empty shelves. Cold air smacked her face while mother struck her back. “Look what you’ve done Taya!” she would bark, just like an errant dog. “Look what the fuck you’ve done, you fat pig!”

By fifteen, it wasn’t enough to abdicate her food. She hurt too much for that, and began to cut her stomach with the razors her father left in the medicine cabinet. They were of humble means, but he owned an expensive shaving kit, with manually inserted steel blades. They left neat lines along her belly, like a fine brush with garnet paint. This helped her, at first. Years passed, and it became a habit. Purging and cutting and dealing with mother—the daily routine, well into her college years. She moved out after graduation, but Mother still came to her apartment on Saturday afternoons at 4 p.m. for their high tea. It was a tradition, misplaced in their family. But mother helped with the rent. Taya couldn't tell her no, especially when mother valued their high tea.

As she explained it, there is a difference between afternoon tea and high tea. Terms used interchangeably, an aristocratic homophone; neither answer to their misnomers, their sobriquet. High tea, the more respectable of the two, will not shake hands with its more somber yet casual daughter.

Saturdays are the only days she cuts now. She still has the razors she stole from her father hidden in the back of the medicine cabinet, in an empty Zyrtec box. It sits behind her toothpaste. She takes it out and holds it in her hand.

She leans over and sees last week’s napkin unfolded in the trash. Her blood stares back at her, like claw scratches across tissue. So, mother knows, and has not said anything. For once, she puts the razor away without marking herself, and returns to tea.

The Larsons were not a historically wealthy family, but the illusion of class was a sweet, saccharine elixir. It was more filling than milk and butter, a second womb implanted on the tongue to nurse an elite diction. One day, they would be opulent.

Thea believed that, until today.

Her daughter has a sallow jawn and a distended belly. Thea wondered where she was cutting. Were those lines also distended, possibly infected? She wore short sleeves, so it couldn't be her arms. Skirts came with the thinner legs, their unremarkable, freckled skin. No cuts were showing. That only left her stomach, the enlarged balloon that comes and goes beneath the fabric of her shirt. Her daughter is rotting away. In fact, She no longer saw a woman, but a foul, sour smelling vermin.

After they finish, Taya says, “I need to go to the bathroom,” and leaves the table without pause. The toilet flushes, and the apartment smells like rotten, acidic things. There are a few seconds of silence, followed by coughing, the stutter of a faucet followed by the slow washing of hands. Taya returns and her eyes are wine-rimmed red and veins bulge in the edges of her cheeks. She forgot to tuck her shirt in. Thea sees the marks on her stomach, confirming her suspicion.

Thea sets down her cup and asks, “What have you done to yourself?”

Mother’s question settles over her, a steady word stream interrupting their once stagnant brew.

“Are we finally doing this?” Taya says.

“I suppose so,” Thea concedes.

Taya sits in silence, the tea cup poised in her trembling hand adjacent her chest, a breakable, fragile heart that has somehow escaped her body. She stares at her mother—equally tense, palms flat against her silken tablecloth. Mother’s nails are painted fool's gold. A sliver of green skin sits on her wrist from a cheap bracelet. The edges of her sleeves are frayed and worn with wear. All of her mother seems deceptively small at this moment.

Taya doesn’t know how to handle this, and she thinks back to the rats. She researched them to no end, and knows they learn to adapt in the worst environments. She once read an article about scientists studying a rat that had managed to escape its lab. It ended up miles away in a completely different city as per its tracker. They never captured it again.

Taya cannot stay beside her mother, so she closes her eyes and pretends she is a rat. She shrinks down to nine inches and crawls under the hem of her skirt. She drops the ground, a dirty scab on the pristine, white tile floor. She scurries and jumps between mothers fake leather shoes and the woman shrieks, “Ah, a rat!” A reprised verse of her once shrill, “You fat pig!” She will chew her way through the walls—things are harder to see with rat eyes—and end up back at the same toilet, chasing her food down the pipes and drains until she is emptied underground. She is a rat, she has no sense of direction. But she knows how to swim, better than most mammals. She has hefty incisors. They are the heaviest thing about her right now. She will fight off prey and traverse the sewer system until she is far away from here.

She runs as fast as she can—eight miles an hour at best—but the whole time, there is squeaking over her shoulder, like glass on glass, or the scrape of a fork on a gaudy plate. The tip tap of high heels is on her tail, literally. Taya keeps running. No one can catch her in her natural habitat. This is her one chance of escape.

Eventually, she will see sunlight, and vacate through a storm drain. Her head bobs along the water, high above the hole. She has, somehow, ended up on the other side of Manhattan. She is finally on the street, and the footsteps catch up with her. They were not heels, but talons. It is her mother, a rat too; beady eyes, pale fur, the same saddened state. A strip tea pools their mouths, coating their fangs in fine, hantavirus leaves. They are slights of each other—pocket sized, excreting urine and scat. They scamper down the street with their tiny hairy bodies, finally free of stomach scars, cellulite, and human fat.

Anastasia Jill (they/them) is a queer writer living in Central Florida. They have been nominated for Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and several other honors. Their work has been featured or is upcoming with Poets.org, Sundog Lit, Flash Fiction Online, Contemporary Verse 2, Broken Pencil, and more.