The Choice

            Below is a short character sketch I began yesterday and have wrapped up today. Maybe I’ll put this character in a future novel.

Ali Jo Collins blew up to three hundred pounds by the time she was eighteen. She didn’t plan on that happening, having been a skinny, little wisp as a child, but somewhere along the line, it did. And when she finally took notice, she gave up trying . . . trying to follow the rules, trying to resist all temptation, or trying to please others. The exact moment of her decision lay hidden in the cortex of her brain, cemented in grey matter that wouldn’t let go of the secret. Even she wondered at times what in the hell had happened to make her abandon all conscious effort. Who are you, Ali Jo Collins? She asked because she no longer knew.

She would latch her chubby fingers together like a lattice of fat sausages and stare at herself in the mirror. Her face was a globe, globules of fat having flattened out her features so that her mouth was a misshapen aperture and her nose a bulging mound slightly above it. Her nostrils appeared to have been widened out like soft putty onto wide cheeks that puffed pink beneath eyes that were slits. They were hidden in folds of skin tissue that clearly had slip-slided from what once must have been a normal place. The rest of her body followed suit, an avalanche of plump flesh that gravitated in soft rolls from her breasts, past her stomach and thighs all the way down to her feet, both of which were stuffed into wide, flannel slippers with the toes cut out for a little breathing room.  

Only at night when she finally slept was there an inkling of hope that she would remember the details of what had brought her to this place. In her dreams she was bombarded with images: a roller coaster with no end in sight, high in the sky, a toy boat bobbing haphazardly down a foot-wide spillway, an enormous swimming pool clogged with green moss, and a sky that swirled with dark, ominous, nimbostratus clouds. But there was something else that strode into her consciousness night after night before it slinked evasively away. It was a shadowy image, a man perhaps . . . a man, indeed, whose hands had wandered over her young body like a healer. Only he wasn’t.

Ali awoke to her own cries just past midnight when the house was dead silent and she was as alone as she ever had been. And she remembered. She had been twelve. The man had been who? Her uncle. Jolly Uncle Alvin who had lavished her, and her sister Hannah, too, with gift after gift after gift. They were small things at first: chocolate covered cherries or packets of fig bars wrapped in bright cellophane. In time, Hannah must have dropped out of favor for Uncle Alvin gave only to Ali Jo: a Barbie, a bikini, and a shiny, silver bangle. And when he presented her with a necklace with a delicate, gold chain from which a tiny diamond heart held on for dear life, he demanded a hug.

It began then. She remembered some . . . she remembered more, and then she remembered it all, and as she did her body shook with sadness, real and acute, and with shame that should have been swept under a carpet so she could no longer see because it was not hers. She realized that night, four days after her eighteenth birthday that she had bundled her emotions inside since the year she was twelve, a tight knot of fear and despair taking precedence and stealing any hope of her remaining a child. Now, at the cusp of her nineteenth year, she finally understood what she had begun thinking when she was only twelve, just thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and on. I will do what I need to do to make him go away. It had been a choice, perhaps not conscious, but pointed nonetheless. And it had worked. In short order, as the pounds glommed on to every inch of Ali Jo Collins, good, old, happy-go-lucky Uncle Alvin set his sights elsewhere and she wallowed into a new realm of freedom.

And now, finally, she could choose again. With the same, self-determination that had brought her to this place, she would take care of business. She knew what she had to do.