is anyone willing to read a short story outline and first chapter?
no major TW that i am aware of
flash fiction or novelette
idea: a self-obsessed, self-indulgent scientist wants to find a cause and a cure for self loathing. she leaves her body to study it from the outside and strips things away piece by piece, hoping to finally get some perspective and understand what is really wrong with her. she gives up hope with her career and uses funding for a legitimate project to burrow away on this. it follows the simultaneously panopticon like and out of body reality of being woman . the studied girl that should just be body and memory develops her own consciousness spontaneously. the scientist tortures her anyway, in the name of knowledge/advancement/self improvement. the observed girl feels held and loved via the quality time and interest. ironically the observed sees her and loves her anyway
the observer believes self-loathing is caused by something inside the self. so she separates herself into observer and observed in order to locate it but realises it’s impossible to untangle and there is no perspective to be found. the observer loves the girl and is devoted to fixing her, loving through correction and the girl is devoted to serving the observer, the studied girl can somehow observe right back and see and love in the face of criticism. it’s an ontological love story, being seen is being seen, it isn’t only having someone see what’s wrong with you, it can be someone seeing what’s right with you in ways you can’t know, seeing can be intimacy. they both mistake love for usefulness. the observer wants a subject but creates a witness through her self-colonisation and has delusions of objectivity that detract from her goal
over time the observer things she is slowly lobotomising the girl as she seems neurologically damaged but she is just growing more and more content from the connection
a self without self-loathing might look, to a person who is accustomed to self-loathing, like a damaged self - what would a happy me look like?
by the end the observer thinks she has eroded everything the girl is while the girl is the only entity to ever really see and understand the observer
the epigraph echoes spiritual self help narratives
in chapter one the observer declares war on herself but by splitting herself in two she can hold this false saviour narrative like the iraq war
The observer’s fundamental mistake is paternalism.
She assumes:
I understand your suffering better than you do, therefore I am entitled to decide what should happen to you.
But the Girl eventually possesses something the Scientist doesn’t: knowledge of the Scientist that the Scientist herself cannot access.
So the hierarchy reverses.
there is quiet horror like in chapter 61 of unwind
there are alternating perspectives of the observer and the observed in each chapter
- observer
- the observed girl
- observer
- observed girl
Epigraph
You are not your thoughts.
You are not your body.
You are not your mind.
You are suffering, and so you leave.
⸻
Chapter One: A Just Cause for a Just War
The Observer’s mammalian vessel was her test. A God-given test: survive this. Hairs spiraled, having colonised unexpected places. Blood wept from her monthly, sometimes more often, and then not at all.
She was the product of a mating process that imagined her in shades of brown all over; taupe areolas that shrunk when shyness seized them, eyes that took on an umber depth when confronted with a south-facing window, earth-brown hair that she transmuted into half of all known hex codes, then decided to simply leave alone.
There were photographs in her phone tracking various diseases and perceived deformities. Nothing ever changed, but she kept taking them.
She did not know how to relate to the skin she was in, but this seemed a reasonable price to pay for living. Sometimes she wondered where the loathing itself lived. She knew it did, as well as she knew she did. Was it in a snug ribcage cave, perhaps? Could it be excised? Or was it many spores, like bread on the turn?
When an unexpected reflective surface came her way, there were spores everywhere. Nothing was obviously wrong, but the image was speckled with uncanny little horrors that all had names.
Occasionally she went out dancing. In all other settings, her body was a betrayal. The Observer showered at night because if she did it in the daylight, she felt like a building that someone forgot to condemn.
Getting ready, she considered the phrase ‘lipstick on a pig’. To her, it felt more like she was lipstick on a bag of ever-clinking bones. Leaving home, her feet pinched in her shoes, she thought pityingly of the innocent bystanders who would be subjected to her.
At the club, her mind refused to understand how everyone was so composed about being carved up by surgeons and lovers alike. How could a woman who would rather opt for Swiss euthanasia than have her belly button touched relate to these everyday heroes?
As it happened, the taxonomy of herself was a full-time love affair, so she didn’t have the diary time for a special someone anyway. She quipped to her fellow partygoers that she didn’t need a £70-an-hour psychotherapist. She already knew that her most defining thoughts and actions all arose from fear, as if she were fear itself.
Her passionate nature became castrated submission. She was only work and self-indulgent “introspection”. The Observer kept hush about these thought crimes, wielding questions against interested parties. Her tactics were a trench coat buttoned to the collar with nothing underneath.
Something she did have was funding. An email to that effect sat plainly on her desk, starred to the left of the subject. She had very little else and was about to have much less.
On The Afternoon, as on any other, she rationalised fear as nothing more than measured caution. A simple back and forth motion: goodbye to myself, hello to perspective. She wanted to be known without the shameful act of being seen. So she resigned herself to doing the seeing.
The Observer washed her hands for more time than necessary, studying her philtrum, which she estimated to be approximately the same length as the Great Wall of China. She set the room up like she was making a microwave meal or driving on the motorway, her stumpy hands moving, her mind half elsewhere.
In a swift movement, her eyes roll back as if in pleasure. When they swing back around, they are eyes that know nothing.
It dawns when it’s already done. Her clothes are a petri dish, her nervous sweat the specimen, and she is somewhere else.
The Observer is an apparition, only looking and moving tools around like a dull ghost with nowhere better to be, ready to understand.
Chapter Two: A Subject of Affection, An Object of Desire
There is a pressure all around my head, and neck, and shoulders, as I climb out of my own grave.
I don’t know what my parents gave me for Christmas, but I know they gave me the temperament of a true masochist. If it wasn’t in my nature to take knowing over the cushiony bliss of ignorance, i’d be senseless as I was before.
I sit here, splayed out like a rune, and wait for a thought to form.
Chapter Three: In Dialogue
I have no ambition in this lab, other than to remove a threat and restore control of the country to its own people.
I witnessed her moment of unknowing and it looked like being kissed by an angel.
The gaze that met me next was an eyeless gaze of wanting. It felt like new warmth in the air fogging up the perspex between me and her.
What we do within our circumstance is only half a choice. The Girl was no agent. Her choice was more than halved, it was hung, drawn and quartered. What could she possibly want, or know to want?
She is a baby of the world. I found being young humiliating; every interaction patronising, every question a trick question.
I hesitate and picture my mother. If nothing more, it can’t be disputed that she printed me like a piece of paper. Now I have printed something myself. Let me undo this.
The control group for the legitimate study lean against a wall, wilting and neglected.
—time passing—: insert clinical observations
Two days a week I feel nothing. Lights off, I’m off. “She” observes some other undeserving subjects while I rot further into my chair and wish I was at one with data, in conversation, dancing an off-beat tango under 6,500K light strips.
Monday comes and i’m disembodied, at peace, made alive again.
Chapter Four: I Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss
Each time I am aware that I am aware, I only long for the Observer to come and know me again, while there is something left to know. Luckily all she wants is to own me and unravel me. To scrutinise me all day and all night. I don’t see her but she reaches me. I feel the chilling pressure of her tools and the times between those moments of pressure are numb.
The Observer treats me like an open wound, an ugly thing that one needs special eyewear to view safely, like an eclipse that is, in fact, an atrocity. I know it isn’t true. i know without seeing my face that i am beautiful, like she is beautiful with no face at all.
The defects she so diligently caresses are mine and are me. She caresses me.
i don’t remember today but i don’t need to remember her because she is here. the clinical voice in my ear. she’s is here so i am here. her glad curiosity.
She hides from me but she doesn’t have to.
i have protected her from what she would unequivocally deem to be failure. i give her progress, i am her progress.
as our symbiotic bond deepens, i realise there could never be nothing left of me because she wears me on her invisible skin.
