'Tapes'

1.
A teacher once told me about what tapeworms could do to a kid. Wash your hands. Only then can you eat. A tapeworm would get inside you if you didn't make sure of that. And when night falls, as you lay in your bed, an adult tapeworm would crawl out from you through your sphincter, to explore the world that’s outside of your body.

2.
What do you know about tapeworms? Do you remember what you were taught in school? This is what I recall about its body structure--to put it simply--the head would latch on to an intestine with teeth-hooks, and from there body segments filled with eggs would drop off and new ones would grow. A chain of self-replicating events, all happening inside you.

3.
How far will you go to make yourself beautiful? What if the costs were hidden?

4.
Imagine a beauty product that would enable weight loss. A tapeworm head, waiting to be ingested in each pill capsule. What happens is it will take off, this miracle of a pill, with groups and groups of women, as one after another begin to lose weight upon taking it. They’ll even begin to feed their children with it, those with weight issues.

5.
Imagine a day when they find out what they've really been doing to themselves, to their own family.

6.
A fool would say, “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.” But what if I knew firsthand what would be involved? I would take each angle of the matter into consideration. It would never be too late; its progress would be in plain sight. I’ll know what I’m doing.

7.
I do this because I’m a loving parent, the only one she has, I tell myself. I want to know how far I can take it before I introduce this method of weight loss to my daughter. I know she has always, always wanted to be beautiful. In other words, thin.

I've read that the tapeworm can even travel into the regions of the brain, liver, muscles, even eyes. But I also think of what it means to be anorexic, bulimic.

8.
I dream of the tapeworm inside me. I dream that it is breakfast and that we’re sitting at the marble table in the kitchen passing plates, filling our cups with milk. After that, the tapeworms inside me and my daughter would slither apprehensively out from our mouths to drink from our cups, like kittens, before retreating into our bodies once again to sleep.