He awoke with a shiver.

He’d had the dream again—the dream about the stomach. This was how it went: He would be performing, in solitude, some ordinary task, such as mowing the lawn in the backyard of his former father's home, or slowly consuming fast food in an empty cafeteria, and all would be calm and fine and ordinary. And then some faceless someone­­––the skin of their face would always be stretched over any potential intelligible feature a typical face might include––would creep their way into his periphery and he would turn their direction, only to find in horror that they held in their hands a single human stomach, which he would in time always learn was his own, despite the absence of perceptible physical pain and/or visible lacerations on his outer stomach region. The pain that was felt was always psychological, in the form of a seemingly infinite, pulsating shame. At this point in the dream, he would usually consider the fact that he indeed might be dreaming. He’d once heard somewhere that one could confirm their being situated in a dream-world by finding a light switch, flicking it, and if the state of the bulb tethered to the toggle did not change—i.e., from being on to being off, or vice versa—the subject could form the conclusion that yes, they are dreaming. And so, upon experiencing continual success concerning the implementation of this method, this was just what he would do. Each time he would discover an unresponsive bulb within his proximity, his fear and shame would always vanish in the moments prior to his subsequent willing himself awake.

It was no secret that F. was insecure about his figure, and his dreams seemed to take advantage of this, reminding him on a weekly basis not to question his overall repulsed self-view. The details of the dream did not always carry over into the next. The simple actions performed would change slightly week by week, and this subtle shift of banal realisms was perhaps why he did not always immediately recognize these submersions as dreams. And this was why he felt eternally indebted to the light switch phenomenon; for without a controlled escape from the madness of dreams, F. feared that, however unlikely, he himself might eventually go mad—and he was certainly not willing to take the risk of becoming the first documented case of some potential dream-to-reality-spillover-of-madness.

F. had always felt that his face, too, lacked any semblance of aesthetic appeal. Whenever one referred to him using any term in relation to the word 'handsome', he would immediately recognize it as some form of facetiousness operating under the veil of benevolence. Of course such remarks only ever surfaced from those close to him––his mother, his father, a select few of his already miniscule cohort of undeniably attractive friends/acquaintances. No matter the intention, without fail, F. could never remove from his mind the indisputability of his perception, and would only ever manage to feel even less physically desirable and thus less generally adequate than he had already found himself to be upon undeservedly receiving such a so-called 'compliment'. For this reason he made the active decision to expose himself less and less, over the years, to the few people in his life he could have possibly once called 'friends' or 'family', reducing his social life to one might consider resemblant to that of a 'shut-in'––against which he would argue, due to the striking fact that he continues to expose himself to the outside world on a regular basis, even if it is only ever for reasons deemed necessary (i.e., work, transportation to and from work, grocery/liquor store [he is not yet so privileged as to be in a position to enjoy sustenance in the pure form of 'delivery', but of course each individual must possess some particular goal to work toward]).

He always thought he looked better when observing himself through a clouded mirror—his face being reduced to more or less a blur, the features remaining only vaguely perceptible and shrouded by a soft glow. After each evening shower, he would observe and admire this formless face he wished he had. And when the condensation would begin to fade and close in from the corners of the glass, he would always close his eyes and promptly continue to dry himself. There had been a recent instance in which he had chosen not to break eye contact with his reflected self, as the steam dissolved into oblivion. He watched his soft, blurred face slowly sharpen into detail, struggling to keep contact upon the passing of his usual threshold tolerance, unsure whether the streams of water dripping down his forehead were a result of the humid air produced by the afterglow of the shower, or of nervous sweat. As the last blurred spot vanished, he stood and stared into this stranger’s face: the acne-scars, the tired red eyes, the revoltingly convex nose, the faint trail of hair connecting the eyebrows. After a moment he could bear the sight no longer, and turned his neck in repulsion. (It is said that when a mirror is introduced into a horse's stable, a switch can flip in any given member of the herd for no identifiable reason, driving it into a state of frenzied violence during which it will stop at nothing until the mirror is destroyed, often injuring itself as a result. F., although deeply afraid of horses, could very well understand and empathize with this impulse.)

He had observed over time that there is a certain lack of seriousness with which one is taken when one does not resemble the mould. Although of course this too applies to some extent to the psychological realm, aberrations within the physical sphere tend to be much less easily concealable. As soon as he were to make any attempt at verbally arriving at any form of truth, or making really any public statement at all, he deeply felt the validity of his words to be weighed against the disproportionate dimensions of his body. It had been clear to F. that, had he possessed a physical form unencumbered by incongruity, any serious utterance he aimed to get across to his peers would be met with the facial signals suggestive of comradery, of understanding, of truly considering the potential significance of what he had said. But, due to what he could only attribute to his present condition, he felt as though everything he said or did was received with a certain breed of frivolity (i.e., not coldness, to be sure, but a hardly perceptible condescension, slight eyebrow-raise accompanied by a wry smile, and an evident rush to either return to their own sounder conclusions or simply abandon the conversation altogether). He was quite certain that this was the result of a simple collective revolt against all that is unnatural, a flash mob of social critics stopping at nothing to tame and assassinate the very notion of the uncanny once and for all.

A small part of F. was almost envious of those who fell within the category of obesity. He, for one uneducated reason or another, assumed that obesity was a matter of genetics or some other abstract immutable cause, that it was not a trait in any way preventable by the one who possessed it. And so he felt as though it was unjust to pass judgment on those who possess a quality such as this, for the shape of their bodies do not belong on the list of things within their control. Although this is very much not the case in our little pale sphere of appearance-based judgment, he firmly believed it ought to be. (Nor are his sentiments plausibly the case re: obesity, as even F. was somewhat aware how reductionist his theory was, and from time-to-time scolded himself for allowing himself to believe that he had it worse than this multitude of strangers suffering via actual unfabricated means. These episodes of mental self-laceration never did last long, as he also was aware of the essential nature of self-preservation, and one cannot adequately carry on all that well if one is putting others' suffering above and even at the expense of one's own self-pity.)

But why he felt a sort of envy was that, unlike his more proportionately rounded-off counterparts, he felt that his own body was one of malleability, and perceptibly so—that is, that he possessed some amount of control over how his body happened to be shaped, and that the inconsistency inherent in his figure's proportions stuck out like a cartoon goose egg. Passersby could stare and point and laugh all they liked without violating any real or imagined systems of social justice. If F. was to catch one of these visual, auditory or physical blows to the gut, that was his problem; if he were to join the rest of the planet in getting regular/any exercise, maintaining a healthy diet, and not drinking himself unconscious every other night, he would not find himself subject to these justified hate-crimes. But this was a lifestyle he had grown stubbornly accustomed to—as much as he’d promised himself he would take steps to implement change, he knew himself, along with the general state of the human condition, all too well—and the thought of any kink in his routine with the primary motive of physically bettering himself was enough to induce a sort of pre-emptive longing for the comfort of the life he’d once had (i.e., his present life) and was forced to change due to powers predominantly outside of himself (i.e., societal beauty standards, perceived peer pressure, etc.). If he were to choose to begin to take the steps to make these adjustments, he could only live with himself if he did so in an unreactive manner, for reasons originating within his own soul, because he truly wanted it for himself. And so F. had long ago resolved to stick to his moderately self-mutilative routine, at least until the external world offered his internal world any sincerely convincing, long-term alternatives.

He wondered if youths viewed his bodily proportions as a living, breathing, protruding cautionary tale, just as, having once been a relatively thin young man himself, he had in the past viewed those with figures akin to his present self—just as, he was sure, others within his physique's demographic without a doubt view those whose mid-sections stick out more horizontally than they, who in turn most definitely view those larger than themselves, who... (Those fitting into any of the above categories he had always half-urged to question personally the lifestyle each had undertaken to achieve this particular result, so as to avoid it with his every molecule, which, with one glance at his current state, it was safe to assume he would have abandoned any such vow, were he to be lucky enough that one of these gentlemen were to be so kind as to illuminate him.) As much as he understood the likelihood that youths might in fact view him in this light, he deeply wished they could recognize that his inner life was—or at least had the potential of being—as rich and complex as the next thin person, that his body shape was in no sense indicative of who he was as a human person. Yes, the ideal would be that they were cognizant of this, that the physical could translate the mental at the receiving end of a glance. But, of course, this was not the case, and if anything, judging by their general expressions in response to a nervous glance from F., youths felt nothing more than an amalgam of pity and mirth.

So, as is customary for the many who desire self-modification, and who are privileged enough to have access to all the necessary resources to implement change, F. found himself at a stalemate with himself, holding on to as much hatred as love with respect to his own preventable suffering.

It was as ordinary as any other day—F. was walking in a slight rush to work. He sought out the closest proximal bathroom to the conference room whose meeting he had just become mildly late for. He examined himself in the mirror, self-critical of the quantity of sweat that seemed singular to himself, speculating his stomach’s mass as what must be the primary cause. In the midst of this self-scrutiny, he noticed an isolated stomach, sphincter and all, floating beyond his reflection, over by the urinals. Before he allowed himself to become in any way startled, F. recognized the reality in which he found himself situated to be a dream, and, to be certain, started toward the light switch by the door. He flicked the switch, as casually as in any other dream, more than confident in the fact the amount of light will remain unchanged. But the light went out. In a panic, he hit the switch once again. The light flickered back on. The stomach continued to loom behind his reflection, slowly hovering closer toward his body, dripping what looked like a combination of blood and body waste onto the bathroom floor, and producing the incomparably foul, singular odour one might expect it to.

F. clenched his eyelids with such a force that pain became the most prominent sensation, and then dug the fingernails of both hands into his cheeks in an attempt to implement a sort of perverse mode of gate control theory—i.e., distracting the self from experiencing extremely unsettling external stimuli by way of the self-infliction of extreme physical pain. Tears somehow escaping his entirely sealed eyelid barrier and likely merging with the fluids produced by the stomach which were now swimming around his shoes on the tiles below, he desperately, repetitiously murmured to himself, ‘This is a dream. I’m going to wake up. Wake up. Wake UP.’ He had no other choice than to be convinced that this improvised, previously untested method must be eventually successful, that it was only a matter of repetition quantity, word order, intonation, or some other variation he would inevitably come to try.

However, as with most attempts at self-assurance, he knew at once that this was simultaneously an attempt at self-delusion. The issue with self-delusion is that, by definition, it cannot operate when the subject is cognizant of its delusory nature. His light-switch crutch had collapsed under his own weight. He now understood that he could no longer simply shut this experience off; his was now a reality in which such phenomena could occur, and for the first time he had embraced the near-certainty that the stomach was no longer an entity he could escape by means of his waking life—he was at once approaching that threshold into madness he had always so deeply feared, and yet in some sense had always known to be an inevitability.

He awoke with a shiver.

Mason McConnell is an independent musician, film editor, and short story writer from Calgary, Canada. Under the influence of Kafka, Borges, and Beckett, Mason aims to capture in his stories the absurdities, uncertainties, and intricacies beneath the surface of everyday human experience.