Studies in the Corporeal

It was an open courtyard garden that furnished the main house. Now the house wasn't really a house, but for reasons irrelevant to an already hazy account of Clarissa's brief stay at the spatial entity in question, we shall call it a house. So when the steel gates opened and dear Clarissa stepped foot into the premises, perhaps she had, already, an inkling that she would dislike the not-quite-house. A muted, precocious girl standing at a miniscule 5'6" and 87 pounds, she resembled one of the sculptured statues in the courtyard, fragile poses in feathery stasis and what not. It was no wonder, then, that in this uneventful account of Clarissa's first meeting with Dr. Cecelia, Clarissa herself came to the house as a 'gift'— a temporary loan to Cecelia's growing collection of clinical specimens, as Cecelia the trustee herself would say. 

For all the money spent on the home, its greatest expenditure still fell upon the maintenance of these figures. Her collection was mostly of the skeletal sort, though there was bound to be one or two in the courtyard that had an adiposal nature to them. There were a few that fell into the 'unsortable' category, the girls who, despite Dr. Cecelia's best efforts, could not be 'crystalised'. These were the figures who oscillated between stealing Dr. Cecelia's clay and splitting stone off themselves. As the disobedient were hard to cure, Dr. Cecelia had little love for these fickle statues; still she would stand in her garden every morning attuned to each statue all the same, fixing them with her stethoscopic chisel. Of course, adolescents of the alternative chromosomic nature would occasionally seek Dr. Cecelia's treatments, but they were not of her aesthetic inclinations, nor were they of her medical interests. She had a rather specific mold in mind that such deviations would complicate.

Before the receptionists would let Clarissa proceed to Dr. Cecelia, they demanded an inspection— the rules of Dr. Cecelia's Rehabilitative Sanctuary for Nutritionally Troubled Girls of Ages 13-18 were that teary displays of any sort by the troubled girl in question could not be permitted. One would have assumed Clarissa to be a perfect fit. Her gaze was a sleepy one, partly because of her ptosis and partly because of how exhausting her projectile displays after breakfast this morning were. It was also a gaze hidden by an additional layer of thick spectacle lenses that rendered her eyes even smaller. Simply put, there was not much water to expect from such negligible, dead eyes that refused to meet anyone else’s. The cautious nature of our trained receptionists, however, meant that Clarissa was first led into a stuffy blue room with a singular source of light, that dingy ceiling lamp allergic to anything not fluorescent white. Standing atop the glass scale with her feet together and head down, her eyes were fixed on the way her stomach bulged so far out that the digits were obscured from her vision. On a regular day, this would have caused Clarissa some 'theatrics'; today, all she could think about was the way the cold glass numbed her feet and killed any twitching predilections they had for the door.

Only the partitioned wall separated Dr. Cecelia from Clarissa. Did the child wish to meet Dr. Cecelia? It cannot be said definitively. It is, however, rather factual to say that Dr. Cecelia had quite the reputation amongst members of The International Society for Studies in Disordered Eating and Other Illnesses of the Psycho-Gastrointestinal Variety— or, the TISDERIPGV (pronounced tissss-duhhhh-riiiiip-guh-vee) if you will. A doctor less aesthetically inclined than Dr. Cecelia might have chosen a more conventional approach to treatment, but Cecelia was the sort of visionary that unnerved well-adjusted members of normal society— she could see past the adolescent hysterics and straight into these younglings for their cold, pathologized corporeal illnesses. But as well-adjusted members of normal society are not part of the story, we shall, for all unreasonable and vile purposes and intent, neglect such beings and their very normal concerns for the psychological well-being of their fellow humans.

Invitations were often sent out to fellow esteemed medical professionals who wished to see Dr. Cecelia's curriculum vitae in-person. Men and women in stiff white, bespectacled beyond ordinary, would walk into the courtyard. They would pause before each girl, lifting an arm here and there, tilting a chin or two up, their hands thoroughly gloved. They called these "symposiums"; none of the girls here were ever cognizant enough to understand what that meant. All they knew was that every so often an eccentric consortium of starched coat wearers would drive into the compound, and it was on those days that the girls were asked out of their rooms and into a steady line arranged by descending height. 

Discerning observers not unlike our consortium will be perfectly unsurprised to discover that our Clarissa was at a perfectly abnormal weight range. This called for an intervention. Many such interventions scare aspiring psychiatrists because of the horrors associated with an adolescent girl's emotional condition, but as we have already established, Dr. Cecelia was a seasoned sculptor. She emerged from behind the partition with her pocket-sized notebook and received Clarissa with the motherly warmth of a cadaver. Her hands had knuckles reddened and callused like Clarissa's, so when she clasped the girl’s wrists and walked her out into the courtyard, it almost seemed a mirror. Now they stood in front of a plinth, ready for her induction. 

Suddenly Clarissa had the fleeting thought that perhaps the contorted faces of misery from her fellow statues weren't normal. A stream of fear flowed past her eyes and awoke them from their slumber. She looked at the airy clouds and wondered if they were not quite nice today, slowly disappearing from view. It might have been quite nice to be a cloud, she thought, to shrink smaller and smaller until it was enough to slip through the cracks in the courtyard walls and out of the sanctuary. Yes, that would have been quite nice…

  All fleeting moments are quite fleeting, however, and the girl's agitated body soon fell back into a familiar state of docility and melancholy. She was simply too tired. With Dr. Cecelia’s fingers pressing against each side of Clarissa's cheeks, she pried Clarissa's mouth open for further inspection. 

"You'll fit perfectly here, my sprouting bile fountain."