Adan

BEAST
4 min readOct 3, 2023

Adan decided to stop eating.

For a while Adan had been depressed. He didn’t know why, but he had a hard time getting up. It was a hassle. He had a hard time going out. He had a hard time picking up groceries, and cooking, or even ordering at a restaurant. He would start walking and stop thinking, looking at every restaurant and none of them seeming right.

Adan had a hard time sleeping. It took effort to go to sleep. He had a hard time bathing, and watching television and being awake. So Adan thought he’d solve all of his problems and just stop eating.

Adan sat on his sofa for weeks. He had enough money for rent for about half a year. He wasn’t eating anyway, so his money went much further. As he sat on his sofa he watched his fat waste away, then his muscles. He could see his bones poking through his skin, weird angles making ridges and sharp points. Tendons working, shaking with effort as he adjusted his position.

Finally the skin became translucent, then sloughed off. Adan saw the dry bones beneath his skin, and then the skin was gone. When Adan finally got curious enough, he stood and went to a mirror. Where he had once had a face, he now had a skull. While Adan felt numb, the skull smiled at him. So Adan tried to smile. But it made no difference.

Adan went outside for the first time in six months, convinced people would stare at him. But it felt like people saw right through him. He strode around stark naked, rattling as he went, chattering at people with his rickety teeth, but no one heard a word.

Adan kept walking and walking. Eventually he ended up in the countryside, then a town. He walked to the bottom of a lake and sat there for a while, watching fish swim between his ribs. He walked to the oceanside, then up along the coast until he could catch a boat to Europe. He saw all the buildings, and looked at all the people, but no one would interact with him, not that he knew the languages. He walked from the Pyrenees to Kamchatka, then tried walking across the ocean and got swept away in the current. For a long time he floated in the ocean. Eventually a whale ate him up and he sat in the belly of the creature until it spat him out somewhere along a coast. Adan walked ashore and dripped dry fast. He was a skeleton after all.

Eventually years passed. His parents died, his friends. But he didn’t feel much about it. He wandered and wandered and wandered. Then, one day, he found himself in his old city, on his old block. He walked into his apartment and there was a family there, but they didn’t notice him.

Adan sat on their sofa and felt very, very tired. So tired, in fact, that he kind of felt hungry. Adan stood up, went to the fridge, and grabbed a bag of cold cuts. He started eating. It felt good. It was maybe the first thing he’d felt in decades. Then he grabbed a pastry from the counter and a bottle of beer from the fridge and downed them both. He realized he was thirsty. He drank and drank and drank, and found there was skin on his bones.

Adan ate until the family went to sleep. Then he kept eating. Muscle swelled under his skin, veins roped themselves around his limbs. Adan touched his face and felt lips and eyes. He smiled and it was a real smile, so he smiled wider. He ate and ate and ate and eventually the family woke up and found him in a pile of all their food. The dad screamed and kicked at the naked man grinning over their counter until he left and was picked up by the police.

The police had no record of this man. Adan looked in their rearview mirror and saw an unfamiliar face staring back at him. He kept grinning all the way to the station, where they gave him clothes and tried for an identity, but he didn’t remember who he used to be, and he didn’t look like that person anyway.

The police finished scratching their heads, helped the strange man register with the state, and sent him on his way. He got a job, and an apartment, and a car. He found a wife, and had three children, two which loved him and one which resented him. He kept grinning all the while. As Adan greyed he made many friends who loved him very much, and a few enemies who despised him.

One day, Adan swallowed a part of a chicken bone that pierced his innards. He began to bleed out without knowing, and died a couple days after. He was buried, and his skin rotted away, with the fat and the muscles and the tendons. And then the bones fell to dust.

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BEAST

Extremities of experience define the scope of thought. I enjoy media examining that edge. I read, write, watch, & search.