Key Component

By T. R. Siebert

The first thing you need to understand is that you don’t have a body. You are a body.

They pulled you from your mother, kicking and screaming, and you haven’t found silence since. You are too much.

Too much to handle, too much to hide. They tell you as much, with words and in a myriad of other ways. Too large to overlook, too obscene to see. You fold yourself into yourself and cannot escape the confines of it.

The ship wasn’t built for you like you were built for it. In most hallways you have duck to not hit your head on the ceiling. You avoid chairs with arm rests because you know you won’t fit. You haven’t slept comfortably in a bed since you were ten years old. Back then, you had nightmares in which you never stopped growing until you pushed against the hull of the ship, bursting through it into the never-ending void of space.

You move, and the world breaks around you.