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“Subject remains within acceptable weight range. No change to diet recommended.”
The words are familiar. Withholding of food had always been a favored punishment. It’s just that back then, she had been young enough to believe them when they claimed that her right to existence had to be earned one success at a time.
This is longer than they had ever deprived her before. But she is no longer naive enough to believe that this is meant as discipline. To believe that it had ever been about discipline.
Now, it is about pettiness. It is about spite. It is about punishing her for ever thinking she could pull one over the Farm, for daring to have held freedom in her grasp for even just a single second. For wanting to be human. They can try to hide it behind passive phrasing and clinical affect all they like. They fool no one, Serena least of all.
But regardless of what she believes, she is just. So. Tired.
Her cell has a cot but she can’t even muster the energy to drag herself to it. Would she even be able to if she tried? She had watched as muscle sloughed off her arms and form as starvation took its toll. Her body had been one of the things she had carved for herself as Sidestep, and even that is being taken from her piece by piece, day by day.
Serena curls in on herself more, one arm pulling tight around her midsection as if the pressure would alleviate the emptiness. All it does is emphasize the press of bone against fragile skin, remind her that her own wasted grip is a poor substitute for what she used to have.
(Her last birthday; Ortega had pestered and she had blurted out a random date. It became real, though, much like everything seemed to when it involved him. Warmth, belonging; life, existence, in-between moments where she could pretend that she was more than a tool…
They were at Tía Elena’s ranch that evening. Ortega’s arm around her waist as he pulled her close for a hug, then a kiss, then a deeper one that lasted until Tía Elena clucked her tongue at the pair of them and told them to sit down for dinner.
And oh, how her treacherous mind replays the dinner. The heap of steaming, sticky rice grows mountainous in its proportions. Smoky ribs strewn across the serving plates and dripping with rendered fat. The array of vegetables, grilled and steamed and boiled, an assortment of color spiced with sharp chili, flecks of crushed pepper, sprinkled cumin. And the cake, the surface of it lathered in thick buttercream frosting and dotted with syrup-glazed raspberries, strawberries, cherry halves, airy layers sandwiched between heavy chocolate and fudge…)
Hunger splits her open like a sinkhole, aching, cavernous.
She wishes she were dead.
But they won’t let this kill her. They will keep her on the brink until she breaks, and then they will have their way with the pieces leftover in the aftermath.
It’s hard, though, to bring herself to worry about that. It is hard enough to bring herself to worry about anything past the next night. The next hour. The next breath.
She is just so empty.
(In her imagination, she eats herself halfway sick. Ortega laughs good-naturedly and splits half his plate with her. She pretends not to notice that he deliberately pushes the juiciest cuts of beef, the best-rolled wraps in her direction.
Serena still asks Tía Elena for another slice of cake anyway, just so she can hear her say yes.)