The Shape She Wanted

Nina hated her body.

She hated it in mirrors. She hated it in photographs. She hated it in the soft pause her jeans made halfway up her thighs, as if even the denim needed a moment to consider whether she deserved to leave the house.

She knew what she was supposed to do.

Eat less. Move more. Drink water. Sleep properly. Take the stairs. Go for walks. Stop buying vegetables just to let them rot in the crisper like small, leafy accusations. Stop treating takeaway as a reward for surviving a day that had not been especially hard, only ordinary in the way everyone else seemed to endure without garlic bread.

Nina was good at wanting change.

She was terrible at doing anything that caused it.

Every Sunday night, she became the woman she wished she was. She downloaded fitness apps. She watched meal-prep videos. She promised herself she would wake early and walk before work. She imagined the future version of herself: clean, disciplined, smiling in linen, drinking water with lemon, not breathing hard on hills.

By Wednesday, the app notifications made her angry.

By Thursday, she was eating chips in bed, scrolling through women who looked like they had never once been betrayed by their own flesh.

Nina did not want to work for a different body.

She wanted to wake up inside one.

That was why when Tessa came to work on Monday, looking svelte and sharp, she had to know how she lost the weight so quickly. Just the week before Tessa looked as if she was smuggling dough beneath her shirt.

Nina stared too long.

Tessa smiled because she had been waiting for someone to notice.

“Fish market,” she said quietly. “Back stall. New deep-sea eel.”

Nina laughed. “Eel?”

“I know.”

“That sounds disgusting.”

“It works.”

The word lodged in Nina’s mind.

Works.

Not helps. Not supports. Not part of a balanced lifestyle. Works.

The following Saturday, Nina went to the fish market before sunrise. The place stank of salt, prawn shells, and old water. She found the stall at the back, where a red-handed fishmonger was serving a line of women pretending not to inspect each other.

The eels lay in a foam box on ice.

They were glossy and black, ringed faintly with silver, coiled together so closely it was difficult to tell where one ended and another began. They looked less like animals than something practising the shape of one.

“How many?” the fishmonger asked.

Nina almost said none.

Then she imagined herself smaller.

“Three.”

At home, she cut into them and frowned.

There were no bones. No spine. No organs she recognised. Just pale flesh threaded through with dark lines, like veins in cheap marble. The knife passed through too easily, not slicing so much as separating.

She should have thrown them out.

Instead, she fried them in butter and lemon.

The smell was incredible. Clean and salty and rich. The first bite made her close her eyes. It slid down her throat with a warmth that felt like forgiveness.

That night, Nina did not snack.

The next morning, she was down almost a kilo.

She knew it was probably water weight. She knew bodies fluctuated. She knew she was being stupid.

Still, she weighed herself three more times.

The number stayed lower.

By the second week, she had bought more.

By the third, she had stopped eating anything else.

Her life narrowed into a ritual. Market. Parcel. Pan. Plate. Scale. Compliment. Repeat.

The eels did not ask her to become disciplined. They did not care if she skipped breakfast, slept through alarms, or left gym clothes folded clean and unused in the laundry basket. They did not make her sweat. They did not make her try. They simply entered her body and began correcting it.

That was how Nina thought of it.

Correction.

She could feel them after a while.

At first it was only a fullness after eating, a slow pressure low in her gut. Then the pressure began to move. It curled beneath her ribs. It slid behind her navel. At night, lying on her back, Nina could feel something travelling through her abdomen in thin, patient lines.

The sensation was awful.

It was also proof.

She would lie still beneath the doona, one hand pressed against her stomach, feeling the faint wriggle of something alive crossing from one side of her to the other. Sometimes it felt like bubbles. Sometimes like thread being pulled through cloth. Sometimes like a fist opening and closing gently inside her.

She would whisper, “Keep going.”

By the fourth week, she stopped going to the toilet.

No cramps. No bloating. No urgency. Nothing. Her stomach stayed flat and quiet. Her body, which had always embarrassed her with its damp little demands, had stopped producing waste.

Nina considered calling a doctor.

Then she put on a skirt that had not zipped in two years.

The doctor could wait.

Her veins started moving in the fifth week.

That was harder to ignore.

She noticed it at her desk while reaching for her coffee. A blue vein on the back of her hand shifted under the skin, not pulsing, not throbbing, but sliding. It moved from one knuckle to the next with slow intention.

Nina stared.

The vein settled.

She pressed on it with her thumb. Something beneath it recoiled.

Her stomach turned.

Then Lauren from accounts walked past and said, “God, Nina, you’re tiny.”

Nina lowered her hand.

“Thanks.”

After that, she noticed the movement everywhere.

In her wrists, where the veins tightened and loosened like black thread drawn through a hem. In her neck, where something fluttered when she swallowed. Behind her knees. Along the inside of her thighs. Once, in the bathroom mirror, she watched a line travel from her collarbone toward her shoulder and disappear beneath the strap of her bra.

It made her feel sick. Constantly. Not vomiting sick, though sometimes that too. Deeper sick. A crawling wrongness. A sense that her insides had become crowded with strangers.

But she was losing weight.

Fast.

Her cheeks hollowed. Her arms narrowed. Her rings spun loose around her fingers. The softness under her jaw retreated. Her old clothes began to sag from her.

Every awful feeling had an answer.

Yes, something is moving inside you.

But your waist is smaller.

Yes, your veins shift when you are not looking.

But your thighs don’t touch anymore.

Yes, your stomach twists at night like a bucket full of bait.

But people are finally noticing.

When Tessa invited her to the work party, Nina almost didn’t go. It was for the end of quarter, held in a bar above a restaurant, the kind of place with gold lights, high stools, and mirrors behind every bottle. Nina had always hated work parties. Too many cameras. Too many group photos. Too many chances to be tagged from behind.

But this time she had a little black dress.

Not an oversized dress. Not a forgiving dress. A dress.

She bought it one size too small and got into it anyway.

The mirror did not punish her when she looked.

It still told the truth, but for once the truth was bearable. Her collarbones showed. Her waist curved inward. Her face looked pale and severe. Her eyes were too large, maybe, and there was a grey tint beneath her skin, but with lipstick it looked deliberate.

Tessa saw her at the party and grinned.

“Look at you.”

Nina smiled. “Look at us.”

They drank sparkling wine neither of them finished. Nina could no longer tolerate alcohol. It burned her throat and made the things inside her restless. She held the glass anyway because it gave her hands something normal to do.

People complimented her all night.

She collected each one carefully.

“You’ve lost so much weight.”

“You look incredible.”

“What’s your secret?”

“You have to tell me what you’re doing.”

Nina smiled and said, “Eels.”

Most people laughed.

Some didn’t.

Around nine, the pain started.

It began as a pinch low in her abdomen, sharp enough to make her grip the edge of the bar. She smiled through it while someone from payroll told a boring story about Bali. The pinch became a twist. Then a pull. Something inside her tightened hard and dragged downward.

Nina crossed her legs.

Another pull came, deeper this time, as if a hook had caught behind her pelvis.

She excused herself and walked to the bathroom with tiny, careful steps.

The women’s bathroom was all black tiles and warm lighting. Music thudded through the walls. Nina locked herself in the furthest stall and lifted her dress.

Her underwear was wet.

For a moment she thought she had started bleeding.

Then something moved against the fabric.

Nina pulled her underwear down and saw a black worm hanging from her vagina.

It was thin and glossy, no longer than her finger, writhing blindly against her thigh.

She made a sound so small it barely counted as a scream.

Another followed it.

Then another.

They slipped out of her in wet threads, dropping into the toilet bowl, curling on the seat, clinging to her skin. Nina grabbed at toilet paper and wiped frantically, but they kept coming, sliding from inside her with soft, muscular persistence.

A pressure built behind her anus.

“No,” she whispered.

Her body opened again.

Worms pushed out of her in a dark knot, forcing their way through with a pain so sharp her knees struck the stall door. They fell into the bowl in looping strands, splashing, twisting, climbing over one another. Some sank into the water. Others reached upward, tasting the air.

Nina sobbed into one hand.

The pain was unbearable.

And still, some part of her noticed her reflection in the polished metal toilet-roll holder.

Her thighs looked so thin.

The thought disgusted her.

It comforted her.

The worms kept coming.

Her gut cramped hard enough that she doubled over. The movement inside her was no longer subtle. Her abdomen churned in visible waves beneath the tight black dress. Lines crossed under her skin in every direction, travelling up toward her ribs, down into her pelvis, along her hips. Her veins rose, blue-black and shifting, no longer pretending to be veins at all. They slid beneath the surface like living shoelaces.

Nina tried to stand.

Something climbed her throat.

She clapped both hands over her mouth.

A worm pushed between her lips.

Then another.

They forced themselves over her tongue, slick and muscular, wriggling against her teeth. Nina gagged. Her stomach convulsed. More came up, not vomited but sent, rising from inside her in a thickening column.

She turned toward the toilet, but the worms spilled from her mouth before she could bend. They slapped onto the tile floor, hung from her lips, slid down her chin. She tried to bite through them and felt them tighten, pulling at something deep in her chest.

Her nose began to burn.

Worms threaded through her nostrils in pairs, black and shining with mucus. They dangled over her upper lip, writhed, then curled back toward her mouth as if trying to return.

Nina screamed through them.

Outside the stall, someone knocked.

“You okay in there?”

Nina tried to answer.

The worms shifted in her throat.

“I’m fine,” she said.

Her voice came out wet and crowded, but recognisable.

The door opened. Not the stall door. The bathroom door.

Voices. Laughter. Heels on tile.

Then silence.

A worm slid under the stall partition and curled around a woman’s shoe.

The woman screamed.

Everything happened quickly after that.

Someone ran. Someone shouted for help. Nina tried to pull up her underwear, but her hands shook too badly and the worms inside her wrists tugged her fingers in the wrong directions. One finger bent backward until the knuckle cracked. She did not feel it properly. There were too many other pains competing.

Her abdomen split along a pale stretch mark below her navel.

The skin opened neatly, like a seam coming undone.

Underneath, there was no fat. No muscle. No red complexity of organs.

Only worms.

They filled her in braided ropes, black and grey and shining. They looped where her intestines should have been. They formed a pulsing knot where her stomach used to sit. They threaded up through the spaces between her ribs and down into the hollow of her pelvis. Her veins were not carrying blood anymore. They were occupied, stretched into tunnels, packed with slender bodies moving in the wrong direction.

Nina looked down at herself and understood.

The eels had not helped her body lose weight.

They had been eating the body.

All the heavy parts first.

All the shameful parts.

Stomach. Bowel. Womb. Liver. Lungs.

Anything soft.

Anything needy.

Anything that made her human.

The stall door swung open.

Tessa stood there, pale, one hand clamped over her own stomach.

For a second, they only looked at each other.

Then Tessa’s nose began to bleed.

A black thread slipped through the red.

“Oh God,” Tessa said.

Nina wanted to warn her.

She wanted to say hospital, ambulance, run, cut them out, kill them, do anything.

But then she saw Tessa’s blouse hanging loose around her waist.

Saw the delicate bones at her throat.

Saw the shape both of them had been promised.

The worms in Nina’s mouth withdrew just enough for speech.

“They’re working,” Nina said.

Tessa stared at her.

Nina smiled.

One corner of her mouth split.

“They’re working.”

By the time the ambulance arrived, half the party had fled into the street. The other half lingered near the bathroom entrance, filming, crying, calling people, warning people, watching.

Nina came out on her own.

Almost on her own.

The worms held her upright beneath the dress. Her legs moved strangely, knees jerking as they learned the arrangement of bones. Her abdomen was open, but the black fabric hid most of it. Worms slid from beneath the hem and dropped onto the floor, then climbed back up her calves like obedient pets.

Her face had changed.

Her cheeks sagged where the flesh beneath had gone. Her eyes looked enormous and wet. Something moved under the skin of her forehead, pushing briefly against the surface before disappearing into her hairline.

Lauren from accounts sobbed when she saw her.

“Nina, please sit down.”

“I feel light,” Nina said.

And she did.

She felt awful. She felt ruined. She felt hollowed out and occupied and wrong in every possible way a body could be wrong.

But she also felt light.

The number on the scale would have been beautiful.

Paramedics entered through the crowd. One reached for her arm. The worms inside Nina’s wrist tightened, and her hand snapped away with insect speed.

“No hospital,” she said.

“You need help,” the paramedic said.

Nina looked around at her coworkers.

All those faces. All those people who had complimented her. Asked for the secret. Wanted the miracle without seeing the cost. Behind some of their fear, she could still see curiosity.

Good.

Curiosity was where it started.

Her abdomen opened wider.

The dress tore from sternum to pelvis. The colony inside leaned outward in glistening ropes. Worms spilled over the waistband, down her thighs, across the polished floor. They caught her before she fell, holding her in the shape of a woman.

There was almost nothing left of Nina now.

Eyes.

Brain.

A mouth they could use.

The rest was hunger wearing the outline she had hated.

She raised one trembling hand to the room.

“You should try them,” she said.

The worms shaped her smile carefully.

“They’ll make you perfect.”