Once upon a time I quit being fat. I say "quit" but it's not a habit; once you're fat you're always fat, even if you lose all the weight, even if you shrink into a raisin with breaths and wants and bones you're still fat. Let me start over.

*

Once upon a time people quit seeing me as a space-devouring breath-object and instead began to see me as a body, something to desire or ignore, a zealous convert who wouldn't shut the fuck up about their god Grilled Chicken. Fatness lingered over my unfatness, a loquacious ghost reminding me how great life was now that people stopped throwing petals at me.

*

I say "petals" but I mean stares, I mean people staring at me, I mean the eyes are flowers and their stems brandish hungry sabers skinny folks call "thorns" or more passively reference as "thorny."

*

When my body was so thin I could slip through the brambles of others' gazes I became convinced mirrors were were not physical reflections but some sort of optical illusion, the propaganda posters of my hopes. I would often wake up in the middle of the night with one word on my tongue: probiotics. Friends would say I can't believe at me a lot, then I got new friends. I'd show them old pics, and they would be all like no way this used to be you no way.

*

Now that I'm a dad I'm starting to get fat again. I can push a finger into my gut and my digit's dimple lingers like the impression on a couch cushion recently abandoned by an ass. People say they think I still look great, and that "still" places its teeth around my Adam's Apple. I think they prefer the old, skinny me, so they choose to only see the old, skinny me, who is like another ghost hovering, just as loquacious as the ghost of my fatness past, though my skinny ghost won't stop asking me if I want to smoke a cigarette after we eat the shit out of some kale.

*

If anything, fatness comes with a hyper-awareness of time. Not just nostalgia, not like me remembering my childhood, my brother singing fat boy, fat boy, until tomorrow over and over again until I cried or bludgeoned his body until he cried. What I mean is that when you're fat and then not fat (but always fat) there's no tomorrow, there's no until, just day after Groundhog Day of fat boy, fat boy.

*

I have this dream where I am alone at a banquet. I sit at the head of a long table. There are candles, napkins with lustily high thread counts, knives and eating utensils to arm a garrison. A silver, domed platter is placed in front of me. I remove the dome. Beneath it, I am on a platter, fat, naked, shorn. Well this is awkward, my dinner-self says to my eating-self. I slice off a bit of leg. How do I taste? my dinner-self asks. He begins to sing; he keeps singing even as I work my way up his toes, his shins, his thighs, his cock. Not the lungs, he implores. I need them! But I eat his lungs anyway, and it doesn't matter, even as I chew through the still-pumping gristle of his heart his voice fills the dining hall—until tomorrow fat boy fat boy. When I'm done, his skeleton rolls off the table, stands before a mirror on the wall, posing. Beautiful, I say, but the skeleton finds a glob of flesh stuck to its elbow. Disgusted, it yanks it off, then beckons me. Obediently, I fall to my knees and open my mouth.

*

When I wake up I am so goddamn hungry. My wife sleeps, her lips moving slowly, as if to a song on the radio she barely knows. On the baby monitor my daughter sits up and looks around her room. It's too early to call tomorrow "today" yet. Behind me a ghost says, hey.

Todd Dillard has work in or coming from Split Lip, Pidgeonholes, Atticus Review, Nimrod and others. He lives in Philadelphia.

Read his postcard.

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