Lia

A short story

Tw: mental illness and suicide 

Lia is the first short story I wrote, inspired by several catatonic patients I treated as well as the impossible burden of Korean beauty standards I was succumbing to at the time. Hope you enjoy. 

Even without an Asian fetish Lia was objectively, undeniably, pretty. Waist-length black hair, ever so slightly upturned eyes, coquettish button nose. Pearly milk skin you wanted to drown in. You couldn’t deny she just did something to you, stirred something in you.

Growing up with Lia meant being in a constant haze of pregnant lingering. Adult men scanning her lithe figure long before I had any concept of a figure’s importance. Her mom pinching her hips and sucking her teeth when food was within Lia’s reach. Her dad laughing raucously with the other church members, gold tooth in full display, squealing about selling her to the highest bidder. Beckoning, always beckoning. “Come here and let me look at that perfect face.”

She licked her peach-stained lips and devoured the attention around her. A slight graze of your arm as she tilted her head back and laughed hard at a joke she barely heard. A tragically coy grin as she winked in your direction. The way she purposely mispronounced words as if to say, “Oh my god, how Korean of me” (The bitch was born and raised in the States!) I would die for her and kill for her and kill to be her and die to be her.

You’re worthless

When we started college, Lia spent hours examining her face and body with a tiny compact mirror. She once found an imperceptible spider vein on her thigh and erupted into tears. She cried for hours, digging at the vein with her coffin-shaped acrylics until her tender inner thigh became an angry scoured red. She looked up at me with puffy eyes, mascara deepening the hollows of her orbit. “Should I just cut it out?”

Lia in my dreams – on her knees begging me to cut off her thighs; repetitively stroking that spider vein and asking me, “Do you think I’m pretty?”

You should just kill yourself

She absentmindedly pulled at her nails one by one. “Did you see the way that guy looked at me? His girlfriend looked mad as fuck.” She focused in on her index nail and strained against the anchor of her cuticle. “Do you think he’s stalking me?” She quietly gasped as the soft, wrinkled gyri of her exposed nail bed came into view. “Oops.” She giggled sheepishly and gently placed her entire fingernail into my palm, closing my fingers around its jagged edges. “You can have this. I know you like them.”

Lia in my dreams – a vegetable peeler in one hand and a frozen snail in the other; meticulously scraping thin shards of its mucoid underbelly and applying it delicately along her entire body. The spiral of its shell unfurling into a gaping maw and swallowing Lia whole.

I woke to the sound of slow, smooth cuts of paper alternated with the aggressive staccato of fervent rips. Lia sat on her haunches, her back curled over in the darkness of our cramped college dorm. So small and innocent, like a child playing with paper dolls. Cutting out photos of women and gluing them to her pore-less cheeks, her eyelids, the corners of her mouth, her single, invisible spider vein. She turned, her eyes glowing with fever and her mouth widening with the glued women bounding upwards with her. Her bleached teeth gleamed in the dark. “Do you think I’m pretty?”

How could anybody want you?

When the ativan and the electroconvulsive therapy didn’t work, her mom took Lia to see the Korean shaman – mudang. They contorted and writhed in their bright red and gold robes, dangling their screeching bells and throwing salt in Lia’s black hair. Speaking in tongues, possessed by a child spirit, they cried at her feet and chanted about her perfect face and body. They placed daisy yellow talismans all over her room, under her bed, in her underwear. Lia casually collected the talismans and set them ablaze one by one on our gas stove. She painted herself from head to toe in daisy yellow. She beamed at me. “I’m better now.”

Just give up.

Lia in my dreams - a nasogastric tube sluggishly pumping gray-yellow fluid down her throat; her paper-thin hospital gown, her hair brittle, her eyes jaundiced and filling with tears. Opening and closing her mouth, the corners ripping under the tension of her taut face as guttural wheezes escaped from the cavity. Desperately blinking her eyes. Bending down to get as close to her lips as possible and catching the last syllables crawling out of her mouth with a trail of thick snail’s saliva - “I’m pretty.”

oo,

BitNan