Watching TV and then the aftermath (Flash fiction)

There’s this morbidly obese girl on this music video. She’s only in the video to mime the lyrics and act as an implicit source of ridicule. So we can laugh at her and say, “Agh look at how fat she is!”

I switch channel. Cheryl Cole’s on it. She’s pulling a very serious face in the middle of her sassy, laden-with-attitude dance routine. I imagine the morbidly obese girl’s face as transplanted onto Cheryl’s body; her entire torso begins to balloon like a juice-filled blueberry. Buttons pop, the waist expands. The dance routine continues but now she’s laboured and out of breath.

“Agh, look at how fat she is!”

This is my life. I’m reduced to someone who flicks through music channels. I push the buttons in a sort of zombified state. I have a tendency to comment on all the videos that I see, such as denouncing shite lyrics as commercialised waffle, or lusting after all the symmetrical faces of sexy women who I’ll never meet nor know. I pull my plums when it gets too much. And then afterwards I worry about my testosterone levels.

Some time later

In the gym I’m really pushing myself on the treadmill. The pursuit of “bettering yourself”, as one might say, but for all I know by losing fat I could only be revealing a deeper layer of ugliness. With lost weight it is likely the face will become more sunken in, the skin pasting itself to an unruly, misshapen cartilage. All my harboured fat stripped away like a sculptor chips away at a lump of stone to reveal his 'vision'. Beauty is not skin deep. Beauty is...subject to narcotics and beer goggles.