SmokeLong Quarterly

A new low for group therapy. We thought it couldn’t get worse than Christina forcing us to bake brownies. Eat brownies. She divided us up: flour team, sugar team, Ghirardelli chocolate team. Everything full-fat, oily, the granules sticking to our butter-slick hands like the wet sand projects she’d forced us to make last week. Christina saying, “What if you tried licking your fingers? Licking the spatula?” Crazy bitch. She cut us huge, fudgy slabs, no corner pieces allowed. “How does eating this make you feel,” she kept saying. Like shit, Christina. Like shit.

And now she’s asking, “If you could transform into any animal, what would you pick?”

Animal therapy, we thought, might mean a litter of kittens. Or even an old mutt, maybe with a torn ear or an amputated leg. Something to symbolize a broken body. Many of us have pets back home. We miss their warm bellies, kneading paws, how little they asked of us.

Isabelle goes first. “I’d be a stick insect,” she says.

We all cackle. Bet you regret asking us this stupid question now, huh Christina? Isabelle smirks, folding her twiggy arms over her caved-in chest. She already seems half-transformed.

Harper’s turn. Harper, the smallest, the newest. Her bones rattle as she shifts in her chair. An NG-tube snakes out of her nostril like a rope of snot. She fidgets with her red wristband. Red for rake-thin, for restriction, for radiant. Green is the “goal,” but we all cried when promoted to yellow. We hide the red curls of our wristbands in nightstands, preserved like wilted corsages.

“I want to be a whale,” she says.

We all blink. Surely we can’t be hearing her right. Or she’s making fun of us.

“A whale?” Christina prompts. Even her smile is forced, worry lines forming between her brows.

Harper nods vigorously. It feels like a miracle that her popsicle-stick neck can support the movement. “I went on a whale watching trip with my dad. It was nighttime, and the water was so still. We listened to them sing.”

For a moment, all of us picture Harper on a boat deck, clinging to the sea-sprayed railing, tilting her ear to the water. The moans, the hums, the cries. The majestic strangeness of a breaching whale, somehow able to gather enough momentum to propel its impossible size into air. And the open sky above, proof that in the universal scheme of things, a whale is still so tiny.

“Well,” Christina says. She tucks and untucks her legs. “Who’d like to go next?”

“Can I change my answer?” Isabelle says.

Christina beams. Her smiling face is round, but we only register this distantly. All our attention pivots to Isabelle.

“A bear,” she says softly. “All that fur. I want to be warm.” She rubs her arms, covered in apricot fuzz. Her lips are pale blue, but her face flushes red.

We all want to share our answers now. Fuck Christina’s one-mic rule. Let’s be Great Danes. Albatrosses. Elephants, and use our enormous ears to hear all the shit nurses say behind our backs.

But why limit ourselves to one animal? We want to be octopus-chameleon-giraffe hybrids. Gorilla-ferret-capybaras. Cheetah-sharks!

And then, all together, we feel our stomachs rumble. A leap in our throats. Our weak teeth sharpen and enlarge, enamel knitting itself back together. Our lanugo turns into feathers, scales, thick, dense fur. We are at the center of sound, bird shrieks and coyote howls and the low thrum of a whale. We molt out of the bodies we’d worked so hard to shed.