As her fingernail caught the crack in the bus stop advertisement, a perfume bottle’s edge extruding sharply from the world beyond the pane, Emily was hit by the smell. It was like pink hearts floating through the air, a regal trumpeting that alerted the rabble that somebody worth watching would soon be here. In one of those voyeuristic slits between the metal endemic to economic urban design, The Queen walked past, her fur coat bouncing, not cruelty-free but certainly without a care. As she stared at the passing Queen, deciding if she envied her, Emily was hit with the second smell and, faster than she could avert her gaze unworthy, Emily watched herself regurgitate all over her superior’s black leather pumps. 

The second scent was overwhelming, seemingly tracing and re-tracing her, running around her, into her. It almost smelled like rotten fruit, but more profane, like something left out in the sun and spoiled. She dry heaved, she dry heaved,

She Dry Heaved. A distant “Hey” and thumbs snapping broke through the rapidly consolidating fog of nausea. Emily didn’t respond, hearing enough to perk her ears but not present enough to listen, only taking away from the exchange: “There’s something wrong.” Beads of sweat forming on her, passersby worried: “Did that girl just vomit?” Emily raised her eyes to meet The Queen’s gaze, dumbly mulling over this experiential cud before realizing two things:

1. “It’s so impolite to chew with your mouth open”; 
2. “A wrong I’ve done my superior will be met with a stronger wrong done unto me”. 

Social polity and a keen sense of it demanded Emily clench her nose, twist it tight like a guard locks up solitary. With her other hand she sifted through her pocket for some loose bills and, looking at the ground so as not to offend, shakily placed them in that outstretched, expectant palm.

“I’m sorry,” Emily muttered.

“What’s wrong with you?” she sneered.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ Breathing through her mouth the smell still stung, seeming to penetrate the mucous membrane of her cheeks, passing up towards the brain, dizzying, tricking her into thinking she could taste it. Maybe she could; she wouldn’t know. Her tongue was stuck in an arch, the tip anchored into the depths behind her front teeth, forming a levee which would hopefully deter the waters by its presence. 

Emily forced out: “I smell something really bad and I feel very sick.”

With unconfident condescension, The Queen questioned, “Then move?” It hadn’t occurred to Emily before. She stammered a weak thanks and–

Stumbling forward brought no help, stumbling home neither. Grey city-blocks were full of people staring, people not knowing, people NEEDing to know what was going on with the girl doubled-over with her hands about her face. Her vision pulsed about the crowds, thin rods of light dancing head-aches to the throb. Her gut thrummed. Faces morphed as an invisible hand covered everyone in make-up, flattering not those most beauteous elements of a person’s cheer, but rather, as a belle desperate for her former beauty prepares in haste for a ball, drawing out the sharp visage of ill health. The scent wasn’t just emulsifying the world, the whole smell rose, solidified, heavied into a monstrously decadent, rich, multi-layered cake. As it engulfed her, stifling her breath, Emily could still feel each stare piercing through the mess. ‘Some people have scissors for eyes,’ she thought.

The smell persisted home unlock strip shower no pauses just move. Soap scrubs and scrubs and scrubs but even the smell of hot water is drowned out as the world gets butter-churned.

With the bravery of a child cracking open their fingers to peek, she realized: ‘It is coming from me.’ 

Tears ran hotter than the shower head, the emotion briefly eclipsing the reasons behind it, but the moment passed and it blinded her again, she hyperventilated, liquid and air all coming out her nose. Vomit in the shower drain. ‘It’s fine, the water will wash-’ thought interrupted because it’s happening again. No no no no no.

She told herself to pull it all together and focused on the small of her frontal lobe. Race car drivers, crocheters, and the self-help crowd all know this peculiar feeling, that lightheadedness like you’re running out of air, that subtle recurrence of pure, white, comforting oblivion cathecting into whatever the eye happens to see. It’s focus, blotting out everything past, future, and self. A new student of the Mouthbreathing Academy, Emily inhaled, she focused, she failed, she inhaled, she focused, she failed, she screamed, she focused, she failed, she-

The Spirit of the Age infected her: she dashed for her laptop. Keeled over in the journey: 2-in-1 Shampoo + Conditioner with cheaply peeling label; power-cord unplugged from humidifier; Emily, herself. 

The search engine commemorated the anniversary of Who the Fuck Cares, search:

:::: nauseau relief 
:::: how to smell better
:::: i can’tt stop throwing up
:::: disgusted by own smell
:::: nausea home cure

The WikiHows offered no particular help, but the distraction dragged time forward. The human spirit is remarkably adaptable, and though the disgust may not ever fade or even diminish, the body simply cannot perform the same reaction always. Eventually you learn how not to dry heave, how not to vomit, but never how not to be disgusted. 

Emily, cautious, tried to breathe the knot of panic back down her throat. She succeeded.

:::: nausea support forum
:::: www.dramaminedrainers.net 

Salvation by the keyboard light, Emily felt LED blue pour into her gills. As motorcyclists know, power intoxicates even knowing that the exhaust pipe spews. The monitor seemed to transform and purify the air in the room, her own personal friendly ghost. Emily looked about with newly loving eyes: those clothes stacked on clothes, that pretty face growing from the wall, that ketchup cemented on the floor plate with the ants all over. They were all gorgeous. 

Momentary celebration reignited the memory of positivity, the possibility of comfort. She thought, ‘Things must be rearranged.’

Two minutes and the humidifier’s back on and an orange lozenge in her mouth, the taste bringing back home-sick days of reading in bed. Absent-mindedly, her hands started fiddling with the memory of the tight goggles she had to wear as a girl: pink, plastic, scraping. It left her near-perfect in her left eye and near-inhuman in every childhood snapshot. Her tongue swam laps over the cough-drop, her front teeth grooving it to those same baby-marks she chewed into her old glasses’ temple grabbers. Suddenly, the taste of idleness and carbon flooded through her. She was too relaxed, not moving, and the realization, like a parental slap upon her wrist, turned her stomach over yet again. 

Knotted-up stomach acid headache. With that, the levee broke and the rapids grew, louder louder louder. Something new was here. It scraped like metal but felt like home, it stung like sunburn but felt so warm. As each moment was, it was already past, the present seeming small in the face of her inevitable future. The promise of Death had entered her mind. 

With that gunshot to powderkeg her off, Emily’s thoughts quickened like a startled horse, a cannonball loosed and arcing unaccountably through the air. She crashed into fear desire hopelessness hopefulness disgust self-immolation rebirth and kept going. Her hands whirlwinded, an introduction to the forum flurries together. Her hands stopped moving and, girded in her decision by momentum and that fearful reduction of the self any true suffering engenders, Emily posted without a second thought.

She waited. She resisted the urge to refresh and then refreshed. It’s coming up, keeps coming up, automatic conveyor belt throat, hit that digital ouroboros circle, ‘God, how I’d like to consume myself,’ she thought. She had made a companion of her new desire, collaring herself to death and forcing its every instance into one, cohesive form. Angry, rabid, biting, it was an animal for sure, one who’s unchained collar would continue to jingle, every once in a while, lest she neglect to feed it its proper attention. 

Another spew and trashplastic’s full; she migrated to the bathroom. She once again let go, only regaining the reins of herself when she stood stark in front of the mirror. She reached out to touch it, half-expecting to fall inside, but her fingernail scraped at only one of a multitude of tiny, white dots that always seemed to grow back no matter how hard she cleaned the glass. This was, of course, the perfect excuse to not clean hard. Or at all. 

Emily looked at the toilet and saw the brutal demarcation between the two eras in which she had last found herself in the frenzy of sanitation. It was never a desire which arose naturally from within herself, rather a culmination of shame that compelled her body to move towards Windex and lemon-scent. The front of the bowl was cracking, yellowed and oranged, the back a fuzzy thing that was a lot less scary to think about as long as it remained a Thing and not a Nest or a Hive. “It all comes out looking the same eventually,” Emily countered to no one in particular, and made an angry face at herself in the mirror.

She always liked how she looked best when she was angry, a leftover from caveman days where a snarl was synonymous with power. Snaggletoothed, she would say to herself, equal parts in love with her knotted incisor as with the mouthfeel of the word itself. In her fanciful days, when a jealous obsession with close friendships brought her, naturally, to the concept of the coven, she had imagined her tooth the sylvan medium on which some bygone witch had carved some devilish runes.

Tracing up, her nose presented an issue for her, its length befitting a creature of her grandeur but robbed of its birthright by a thinness which left her feeling pinched. Emily liked to tell herself she would have been beautiful if she hadn’t received a highschool soccer kick to the face, shattering her nose and “harming its development.” 

She pulled on the lock of frizzed-out-dead hair which seemed to drift magnetically to the top of her nose, a victim of the heat blast of a hasty blow-dryer (not in the haste of a work morning, no, Emily would never shower in the morning. There was something about the whole thing that felt so violent, to go from the dark, murky dreams to the blinding pounding of the shower. It was exhausting, a continual pummeling, a loosening of dead skin and, therefore, a loss of herself). She showered at night, when she had already numbed from the accreted losses of day-to-day life. 

Nonetheless, night proved its own difficulty. Her infrequent bodily cleanses led to the soap and shampoo always at once, wet hair wet body wet day. And that wetness, resting coiled nested in the hoodie sleeve pocket like wet spaghetti in the sink drain stopper, the whole thing was simply too much. To sleep on it wet would be to consign herself to the feeling of an octopus adrift in the seaweed, cut off from its eight legs and left to observe, floating like a balloon aimlessly through the aqueous sheets and pillows, tossing and turning but never moving up or left or anywhere real. Her final acquiescence to the withering touch of the hairdryer came many years after it had first occurred to her that she could spare herself the damp affair; for although discomfort could move her, she was motivated even more by laziness.

Her eyes moved down her frame, raising her shirt with the sensitivity and hesitancy befitting a crime scene corpse, only to discover her stomach: Normal. Impossible. She turned sideways. Nothing. She turned forward. Nothing. She jutted out her stomach to see if the flex of her muscles would somehow dislodge some secret from inside her. She sucked back in to see if constriction smoked it out. Nothing.

A vague anger began to bubble up between her teeth. Invisibility is a terrible curse, let no dreams of unaccountability deceive you. With her heart, she experienced a magnitude insurmountable, inescapable, unexplainable solely by the phantom trickery of the brain she had spent her whole life confined inside; she felt something physical. It was from this exotic physicality, its visceral bursting forth, that she could so readily believe what she felt to be real. To have this fact, no, to have this Truth fail to manifest or make itself plain, to not only obfuscate itself from the world but from Emily herself was simply too much to bear. 

More than that, her last hope of fighting vanished with the absence of another fighter, an antagonist to point her anger at and punch. Without it, directionless, all that negativity just moves like water, filling the form of its holder, a suffuse, shitty alcohol throughout the bloodstream. How can I rise to meet the occasion if there is nothing and no one to meet? 

She saw left only the option to lie down and accept the invisible, noxious cloud. It goes further: what is invisible is, often, not real, and so the terrible thought entered: ‘Is it me that’s wrong with me?’

Denial lingered as her last possibility, but she had to find out positively, she had to make certain, to prostrate herself high above the crowd and turn herself out and say “Look! Here I am! Tell me what’s inside me!”; she had to go to the balcony.

It was never much of a place to stand, much less be. The balcony was a concrete, manila block that offered less a breath of fresh air than a pigsty burp. The building’s face was blighted: the balconies punctured and bloated like positive allergy tests in aberrant uniformity across.

From the railing Emily’s eyes lowered three stories, eager to begin. There’s a phrenology of character familiar to all the nosey and imaginative who live above the second floor: in it, the eyes “read” the scalp and from it derive a plethora of impressions of a person’s kindness, irritability, timeliness, etc. Today, Emily only saw the bane of any cranium contriver: a hat.

“Hey!” she called. Then, “Hey! With the red hat!”

His elbows went out in defense, a diamond formed between them and his fists. From above it looked as if the violent mandibles of some beetle had come out by happenstance, an automatic by-product of a tickle to the abdomen that any talented zookeep could readily duplicate. Emily knew then she wouldn’t find help here, arms already up in defense, heart already closed. But what of help? She already considered herself beyond saving. Instead, she would make a demonstration, for the sake of posterity, who’s she couldn’t tell you, but the notion that there wouldn’t be throngs combing over her corpse, her life, well…

As protest to her lonely sufferance, her fingers went down her throat and her throat was out, falling, tumbling, splat.

“What the fuck?” said the passer-by, backing up with a terror only befitting an encounter with an object whose size, nature, and intention remain unknown. He looked up; Emily smiled. “It’s vomit!” she trumpeted, “I can’t stop vomiting!”

The passer-by looked up at her, redundantly placing his hand on the brim of his hat before realizing with embarrassment that there was nothing he wanted to see. The only sense he got was that something was miserable about the whole situation, the type of misery you fear, as a doctor keeps distance from a patient after catching a glimpse of greedy infection behind their wailing, gnashing teeth.

Emily smiled because he was afraid. Emily stopped smiling because she realized she was smiling because he was afraid. Emily did not want to think about that anymore, so she went inside.

Her brain began to turn over her stomach when a digitized bugle heralded the arrival of the first forum notification.

Emily ran so her world’s a blur, a mess, a mistake, no, not vomit again, but really not again this time, for Emily now had a distraction to give herself over to. She sank into her screen.

:::: BakuganSliders1: heyyyy i saw your post “I’m vommit
ting all the time and can’t stop” and i was wondering if
you wanted or need to talk to somebody??? idk what’s like
going on but i can listen if you wan me to??

Yeah. I’m sorry. I don’t really know what’s wrog :DeathBelle::::
*wrong with me
I just am nauseous all the time I dry heave like
something’s trying to come out of me but never
does. I wish I could turn my stomach out like a frog
and pick out all the things that are bothering me. I
can’t even tell what they are now.

. . .

Three dots, Emily could see them practically vibrating in nervousness from the anticipation she beamed into them. Like a mother must leave her newborn in the cradle, the dots disappeared all at once; Emily felt the worst, the cataclysmic, the apocalyptic Alone Again. Something about screens conjures up the fantasy of object impermanence, the idea that everything is nothing and nothing is everything, that a pixel is green, red, blue, and colorless all at once. In that moment, the line between life and death, on and off, softens and opens, a porous membrane, while the sides it divides grow super-saturated until it is impossible to occupy both at once without burning up in the heat. 

Resurrection: three dots again.

:::: BakuganSliders1: oh gosh that sounds really hard :(((

Oh? That’s it, that’s all the world had to offer her in recompense, in comfort, in hope for her future, in alleviation. More sensical to believe in dramamine than people, at least a chemical’s got a set name and compound, drilling into your brain, forcing you to be better. ‘I will never speak again,’ Emily thought. But a frustrated want is not so easily dropped, a sense of injustice demeans the rational, elevating rather an impulse to one-up the world. 

To reduce something to powerlessness: do to yourself what it may do unto you. Do it first, faster, and harder. Bitterness guided her hands now.

:::: BakuganSliders1: oh gosh that sounds really hard :(((

Yeah. It is. It makes me feel pretty hopeless. 
Maybe things won’t get better. 
Maybe I’m probably better off dead

What a miserable line to skirt between truth and untruth, what a feat of trickery. Emily felt pride in herself. It wasn’t a lie, per se, suicidality being a reflexive thought at this point, as natural as The Heave, but it wasn’t not a lie either. It’s all about the between the lines, the implication of your life being in another’s hands now, the truth of your experience included. Dulcet, soothing, and taciturn as only the government’s most entrusted executor can be, she cleansed herself of responsibility for the prisoner (herself) and waited for the instruction of anyone who spoke with authority. She knew this was no way out, but a final act of aggression against the whole state of affairs. “And why shouldn’t I act out, if the world refuses to coddle me,” she thought, hoping that a ratcheting of stakes would force Life, in desperation to preserve its Beautiful Emily, to intervene.

:::: BakuganSliders1: no no please
don’t hurt yourself  i can’t imagine how
hard it must be right now but have you
gone to the doctor? have you like
talked to anyone in person?

            and like also respond quick
bc im worried.

            if you can

i dont really have insurance :DeathBelle::::
Or friends. Or like anything.
I told a guy on the street about it and he got
scared, its just incessant not stopping i always
feel bad.
I just want to know what’s wrong with me.

im so so sorry im trying really hard to figure
out a way i could help but im not really a
doctor i just have ibs

have you looked at any of the breathing
techniques that r on the main thread? they
were super helpful for me but also sorry if you
already have i dont mean to assume or
anything like that

“””Breathing techniques””” are not going to fix
my fucking stomach or my brain or my
whatever is wrong with me
like if it was as easy as “just breathe different”
do you think I’m stupid enought to just
fuckingass??????

They don’t know how to help. They don’t know how to help. They don’t know how to help. Repetition breeds the habituation of idea (as if nausea hadn’t already taught her that enough). Emily held her forsakenness, searing hot hot hot the terrible truth. That invisible feeling crept back in and she felt her body flicker out for just a moment, back to a place where there was no stomach to feel yet. It was not a relief, for there was no part of her present to enjoy the respite. 

Emily sat back and waited and waited and waited and Horrid Bitch isn’t responding, Horrid Bitch is just like the rest of them. She thought, “Pixels and people are only different because of the bodies we drag along with us.” And what a weight! Titans would have buckled, mountains would have crumbled from just a moment in her skin. Five minutes more with the thought and any lingering affection she had for reality was gone. Emily would’ve uploaded her consciousness online, to that lonely zone with no other persons, a downgrade from the lonely flaneurs who once made friends with the portraits lining a gallery, for the materials which people cast themselves in online reminded one always of cardboard. She began to click aimlessly, search around, the forum creaking like an old French arcade, when another ping rang out.

::::BakuganSliders1: sorry i was microwavving
  food but like your outlook seems pretty hopeless.
  i cant imagine how hard it must be to live with
  all thats going on. im really sorry :(

‘There it is!’ Emily thought, ‘He submits to the cruelty of the world!’ Momentarily, she thought herself a prophet/mechanic/optometrist who could install headlights into the blind eyes of those around her and let them x-ray into the cold heart of things. Her chief truth, her one commandment: things are always bad and will never get better. The acceptance of her own message, combined with a mixture of righteous fervor and physical exhaustion, led her

From the top of the ziggurat to yell
 to the awaiting crowd below:

“Maybe The Feeling Will Go Away If I Just Break The Part The Feeling’s Coming From”
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Look at the lined horde above, each body thin as rail, each face too small to notice, perfect for listening, perfect to die with no one to notice. The Prophet moves to find her voice, an animating vigor into a corporeal machine rapidly buckling and bending under duress.

There was only one matter left undecided, nose or stomach, nose or stomach. The vomiting had led her to begin to view the intestines as hell, but a more thoughtful tracing back recalled to her that the scent birthed the nausea, not the other way around. The nose never was her favorite anyway. 

Suddenly, the memory of that other scent, that heavenly aroma which nearly levitated her off her feet, overcame her with a point: the nose has served you well before. The stomach, practically a mechanical trash-compactor, had never done anything for her but gesture towards insecurity in the days of youth, raw despite the exaggerated distance instantiated by polite conversation. With that, it was decided: the stomach would have to go. If that didn’t work, well, she didn’t expect to care much about losing a nose after that. 

She skated down cyber-ice, at least there she felt she could move. She did pirouettes with her pointer-click, backing beat with her spacebar.

:::: how to break stomach
:::: how to stop stomach
:::: how to get rid of stomach

The sites reeked, page after page of indomitable smell. It came off the pictures, it came off the people. They claw at themselves and something comes out, never what it was they dug for, rather the odor of malfeasance, the failure of the contract between the soul and the body. They do this for the same compulsion Emily had, not understanding that emotion is no picky house-guest, nesting wherever there’s room to spare. Emily read:

In the ascetic of medieval times was the birth of modernity. In that act of self-castigation, the turning of the lacerative from the external to the self, the New Growth was borne. A revolution, quietly midwifed by men who censured the very world around them, showed us that more than just our bones can grow porous and aged, but rather that our hearts too sicken with time. So call forth the new ascetic! The one that understands that to build one must first level, destroy, clear ground and make way for what’s coming next, she is the new man! She is rebirth. The flames nipping at the witch’s heels are no match for her powers of self-immolation, wait and watch her phoenix herself anew! Emily, she is you, and I am me, and I am in charge, and my stomach is not me, and I am in charge, and my stomach is not me, and I am a circus, and my stomach is not in it, and I am a circ

Get it out Get it out Get it out get it OUt get it out

PURRge! Make it cute! Make it glamour! Make it sexy! I always played the part of Marie oh so well, I will eat cake, one day, when the cake is not so heavy and the head not so full. Guides to:

:::: how to make fingers into a trigger
:::: how to make your stomach likke ammo
:::: how to make your mouth a gun

But that last one’s already known, bubbling, saliva overproduction is a not-uncommon symptom of nausea she spits at her computer screen and the water runs the dust down with it. There is nothing underneath the grey now, but I didn’t even know that there was grey there. How can I yearn for the absence I’ve never felt? Spit spit spit spit spit spit spit spit spit spit spit spit no 

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::////////////////////////////////////////////////////i am firing/////////////////////////////i spray water all the time/////////////////:::::::::::::::::::::::::it comes from inside of me but when i wipe it off the monitor it gets clearer////////////// it comes from inside of me but when i wipe it off i get clearer/////////i am firing, inside of me?////////////////////but i have no mouth there////////////i am firing, outside of me?////////but i am not there///////////////i am there/////////////////////i am only outside of me/////////////i can only clean outside of me///////////////////////////i will nurse myself clean again / I will maintain the health of my plumbing / I will lower the cholesterol which crusts my walls / I will beat back microscopia that want to sully me / I will make it mine / I will make it mine / I will make it mine / I will

I arrived staring into the bathroom mirror. I don’t know how long I’d been there, wasn’t much to see, me, crusted from weeks of bad sleep and wearing that same stupid sweater I put on every morning. Whatever.

The toilet was cleaner than I remembered. It was Passover, the hand of God coming into only my filthy home and leaving it beautified, polished, gleaming, vanquished. It smelled like home for the first time. But just the toilet bowl. The rest of the place was still an outhouse.

I was still annoyed at myself for the sweater so I went back into my bedroom and rummaged through the pile of laundry I’d spent the past few weeks guiltily nudging into the crack between my bed and the wall. Pulled out an old T-shirt I hadn’t worn since soccer. Something I could get roughed up in.

I don’t know where it’s come from, this sense of distance from where I was yesterday. 

I was supposed to catch the bus. 

I can feel myself though, not just someone else feeling it for me.

Habit led my absent mind to open a laptop. I didn’t like what I saw in there. I read chat log messages and whispered to myself,

That’s not me, that’s not me, that’s not me.

She was someone handed a weapon and frustrated by its weight; she was someone cowardly and afraid. She was someone who hated the people who couldn’t help her, she was someone who hated the air.

That’s not me, that’s not me, that’s not me. 

She was lazy and unclean, leaving the apartment a mess, a life a mess, a mess amiss. She was an environmental pollutant, a black mold, hocking up spores for the sake of seeing herself replicated.

That was me, that was me, that was me.

I felt penitent. I walked back to the bathroom and felt I could bounce, so I did. I lifted each foot heel first, bending the tensile arches so as to move it as a U, shoulders pumping up and down. I swear I looked like the inbetweens of classic animation, blurred in motion. Back, under the sink, I rediscovered the cleaning supplies I bought when I first moved in. I was going to start on the bathtub first, maybe that spot of orange in the corner that looked a little like sea foam, or that chin I always try to grow out into a whole face. But whenever I try to imagine it, there’s something about its shape that just screams “Un- '', unformed, unfinished, un-something’d. I guess “Un- '' usually becomes something by just waiting. 

Things tend to come into detail. It just makes me angry to look at. I’ll probably scrub it out before that happens.

—Audrey Henry