The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

I watched Andrew go back to his gaming pod; the ruined chair with the cracked spar he had fixed with duct tape no longer sagging or groaning beneath him. The same shiny spots on his computer where he kept his hands in the same positions for fourteen hours at a time while he pretended he was a tall, muscular Viking warrior on some Korean server every day. I watched him settle right back into his old life using his new body and wondered what it was for. He really was the Viking now. He could have put on boots and left the house and had a real adventure. But adventure didn’t appeal to him.

I was stuck between them in the house. I always had been, but Dad and I had understood each other. We had been a team. I guess I was a daddy’s girl, but I was never spoiled like that. We just got along. Andrew was silent and Mom never shut up. Dad was the only one I could talk to, or sit in silence with without feeling bad.

And now I was the only fat member of the family. Slowly but surely, even the aunts and cousins signed up to take the Pill. I started to joke with my friends in Visionaries that fat people were going to become an endangered species.

Some of them laughed, but a couple suggested we actually make a short film about that. We kicked the idea around, but mostly they wanted to film me eating in a cage while people stared. I didn’t know how that would get anything meaningful across, and they didn’t know how not to be thin assholes. So we dropped the idea.

Mom was at least using the way she had changed to enjoy the real world a little more. She wore workout clothes constantly, all bright colors and clinging like the patterning on a snake. Every day she got to enjoy the way people looked at her brightly now, eyebrows up, not searching for their first chance to sidle away.

“People just respond to me so much better now,” she said in one of her interviews. “It changes everything about my daily interactions. I’m a mother and a widow, and I don’t need a lot of attention,” she had said, smiling coyly. “But even the mailman is happier to see me than he ever was before.”

I wanted to barf when she said she didn’t need attention. She had been thirsty enough before to talk to absolutely anyone, even sign up to take injections and hypnosis to get it. Now she was always posing and watching to see who would look. Attention was like the drug she couldn’t get enough of. She still ate the same bowl of ice cream every night, sitting next to the groove in the couch where Dad used to fit. No, Mom, you didn’t need attention. You took the Pill, you let the Pill take Dad because you were so A-OK with yourself.

The Pill sold like nothing had ever sold before. The original, the generic, the knockoffs, the different versions approved in Europe and Asia that met their standards and got rammed through their testing. There was at last a cure for the obesity epidemic. Fat people really were an endangered species. And everybody was so, so glad.

One in ten kept dying. The average never improved, not in any corner of the globe. There were memorials for the famous and semifamous folks who took the gamble and lost. A congressman here and a comedian there. But everyone was so proud of them that they had died trying to better themselves that all the obituaries and eulogies had a weird, wistful tone to them. As if it was the next best thing to being thin. At least they didn’t have to live that fat life anymore.

And every time it was on the news, we sat in silence and didn’t talk about Dad.

I was just a kid when Mom made it through the original trial that unleashed the Pill on the world. It wasn’t approved for teenagers, not anywhere. Don’t get me wrong; teens and parents alike were more than ready to sign up for the one-in-ten odds of dying. But the scientists who had worked on the Pill said unequivocally that it should not be taken by anyone who was not absolutely done growing. Eighteen was the minimum, but they recommended twenty-one to be completely safe.

On my eighteenth birthday, my mom threw me a party. She invited all my friends (mostly the Visionaries) and decorated the backyard with yellow roses and balloons.

It was the first time since Dad died that the house seemed cheerful. Mom ordered this huge lemon cake at the good bakery, with layers of custard filling and sliced strawberries. I remember everybody moaning over how good it was, how summery-sweet. People danced, but I felt too self-conscious to get up and give it a try. My mom ended up dancing with a neighbor who heard the music and came through the gate to check it out. He was skinny, too, and I couldn’t watch them together.

We ate barbecue ribs and I got to tell people over and over again where I’d gotten into college. Northwestern. Rutgers. Cornell. And UCLA. Where was I going to go? Oh, I hadn’t decided yet, but I needed to pick soon.

Except I definitely had. I had wanted to study filmmaking my whole life. Everybody in the Visionaries club knew that; they had all applied to UCLA and USC. A few of us got in. It wasn’t just that it was my dream school in the golden city where movies were made. It was also about as far away as I could get. Mom reminded me that I could go anywhere in-state for free because of her job, saying it over and over with that look in her eye, the one that said don’t leave me, but I was going to LA if I had to walk every mile.