The 'no pooping' end of Odelia's hunger strike was going fine. Unfortunately, the 'no eating' part was giving her fits, and should she succumb to the longing, the all but unendurable lust of appetite, eventually trinkets would resume pushing out the other end of her digestive system no matter how she strained to prevent it.
Unless...
Unless her bowel became impacted, clogging like a drain full of hair. If enough pressure built up behind the clog, her intestines might even rupture, gifting her with the sweet mercy of death.
She giggled. What a lovely idea.
Her pleasure was offset somewhat by the self-disappointment it occasioned. Ever overoptimistic, she'd expected to hold out more than three days before reaching the point of suicidal ideation.
It was tempting to consider death by constipation too impractical a notion to count, but it did. While not the most lethal of weapons, constipation could kill, and occasionally had. Take Elvis... The King died on his throne, having strained so hard to poop it gave him a stroke. Of course, he had accomplished his unusual feat with the aid of lots and lots of drugs that paralyzed the muscles of his digestive tract, and Odelia had no access to such things.
Too bad they didn't advertise opioids on TV the way they did Viagra. If she could see a few tablets, maybe she could make some...
But they did advertise other things that might be useful.
Rat poison, for instance.
If she was going to indulge in such thoughts at all, she might as well be honest enough to admit that suicide was her true end goal. Poisoning was a far more traditional and effective route to the afterlife than constipation, and all sorts of poisons were marketed to the public, from pesticides to caustic cleaning compounds. But...
Damn it all to hell!
If only she could accept the idea of swallowing something that had come out of her ass! No matter how she tried to get past this aversion, she simply couldn't. Her throat closed up at the mere mental image.
Well, that was okay. It wasn't as if poison was the only practical agent of self-destruction she was capable of creating.
What about a knife?
Raising her arms, she tried to touch her hands to one another across the swollen expanse of her torso. Trembling fingertips brushed one another, pattering like moths skittering across the surface of a hot light bulb, until finally her forefingers managed to hook onto one another. But there they stayed. Try as she might, neither arm could budge another millimeter.
Slitting her wrists was clearly out of the question.
If she stabbed herself in the side, would it be possible to saw her way through enough blubber to hit a blood vessel?
For that matter, did her strange new interior even have such vulnerabilities? There was no way to be sure all her alterations were concentrated in the digestive tract. They could be everywhere, throughout every bodily system. What if she slit her throat and all that came out was a stream of wrapped candies and tiny toys like she'd cracked a piñata?
Come to think of it, how could she be sure anything she tried would work in the way intended? It was even possible that instead of ending her torment, a suicide attempt would accelerate it. For all she knew, her novel digestive system might relish poisons like a car engine given high test instead of medium.
YOU ARE READING
Tipping the Scales
ChickLitOdelia has spent most of her life so firmly under her brother's thumb that she might as well have been an insect trapped in a chunk of amber, but now, at long last, something is happening to her. Too bad it's not a nice, normal, something, like a '...
