NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “No Flesh over Our Bones” by Mariana Enríquez
NOTABLE WORKS
REVIEW: “No Flesh over Our Bones” by Mariana Enríquez
Reviewed by Belicia Rhea
Short story in Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez. Hoggarth, 2017.
Trigger Warning: This review addresses eating disorders and mental health.
Synopsis
“No Flesh over Our Bones” by Mariana Enríquez follows a narrator obsessed with a human skull she finds in the street. She then isolates with it in her room, fantasizing about becoming a skeleton.
“A week after giving up food, my body changes. If I raise my arms my ribs show through, although not much. I dream: someday, when I sit on this wooden floor, instead of buttocks I’ll have bones, and the bones will poke through the flesh and leave bloodstains on the floor, they’ll slice through the skin from inside.”
Obsessed with her own vanishing, she suddenly views her boyfriend as lazy, then fat, then “obese.” She lies to her mother about her fascination with the skull, claiming it’s for a non-existent Halloween party—posturing perfection, her controlled state of mind, her performative socialization.
Review:
The skull can be read as an allegory for many things, but I love it for its surface simplicity: a girl awestruck by the beauty of being skeletal, with dying. The first time I read this story, this imagery devastated me, as someone who crawled out from several years of severe eating disorders. I identified with this narrator who does not want to be fat, does not want to be seen, does not want to be alive. Surface storytelling often depicts anorexia and bulimia as being vapid, superficial behavior driven by vanity. Enríquez rises above this, revealing the true nature of these behaviors as an obsessive self-regulation, offering a strange freedom of autonomy.
In my own experience, the body change becomes nearly irrelevant, and the mental fortitude takes stage. Disordered eating is significantly hard work. The diligence required gives a moralistic feel. Self-starvation is misery on the body, the brain, on basic functioning. You quietly fight against the reality that at some point, you’ll have to eat again. It’s a battle you’ll never win, that will never end, for as long as you live. As counterintuitive as it sounds, this is very emboldening. The fatigue and delirium becomes a frenzied haze in dogged pursuit of your goal, and brings a false sense that nothing is more powerful than your will.
An often-neglected detail that Enríquez captures is the secret righteousness, as seen with the narrator’s cruel judgements of her boyfriend. There is a purity complex inside her self-hatred. I certainly experienced this. We tell ourselves that we are masters of control. That our wasting away doesn’t directly affect anyone, doesn’t risk others’ lives, break any laws. The skull depicts the desire to rebel against physically existing, while still feeling ambitious about the ability to haunt each day as a waif, and see how near one can come to blacking out and
collapsing onto the sidewalk. It’s a unique shame that also holds the hand of pride. This is its great danger. When someone notices the physical deterioration, the behavior is further reassured. Good, I am getting closer to death. Yes, thank you for noticing.
“No Flesh over Our Bones” depicts the reality of how people with disordered eating experience significant suffering and reminds us that these actions are not necessarily driven by appearance. On the deepest, most unconscious level, someone is testing to see if they even want to be alive.
Belicia Rhea writes dark fiction and poetry. You can find her at beliciarhea.com and read more of her work in Nightmare Magazine, Ligeia Magazine, and various anthologies. Her debut novella Voracious is out now from Dark Matter INK.
