Cherry
When X’s silhouette was sharp enough to knife an assailant,1 she toted a glass-bottle grenade of cherry soda into a plus size store. She was there with Y, whose fingers danced a furious strip search of the sale rack—longing for a dress that would love her back. X was a bony blip—a size 6—a nothing.2 The drink in her plastic Zellers bag sloshed with foreboding.3 Cherry soda trickled out behind her, like a telltale trail of true-crime blood: first the changing rooms, where Y tried on her dress, then out to the main store where it ranged its red chaos all over the decadent display of G-cup bras, relaxed-fit jeans.
The red liquid luxuriated in being so free, adhered itself in sticky splendor to the linoleum tile like cheap red lip gloss. The store now held a scarlet map of X’s shame. She escaped, with yet another preloved “sorry,” 4 from that perverse version of Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs.5
X crawled her way to and from and around the lovely/ beleaguered Boston, slumbered on the outbound commuter rail as it scrolled beneath the red arrow of the Citgo sign. Dreamt herself whole in 3X, 4X, 5X.6
1 A hard, triangular jaw; hips and ribs that jutted out like homes hammered into the side of a cliff.
2 All she ever wanted was Grandma’s tender, pull-it-apart roast beef dinner with singed-edge roast potatoes, candied yams, a glut of rich gravy. All of it all to herself.
3 No one knew she lulled herself to sleep at night with delusions of balloons; the expanding universe; expanding. That she once taunted the chubbiest girl in her grade with the hot flush of what she now knows to be envy.
4 Since age 9, X had sought to deny herself all pleasure: a paltry portion of Oat Bran for breakfast, endless apologies for each imagined wrong. But she never tried to be thin on purpose like the dietician, the doctor, and the psychologist all said.
5 How X would have loved to be Hansel, fat but still able to blame the witch.
6 She dreamt herself big as that Citgo sign, relentless cherry red.
Sadie McCarney (she/they)’s poetry books are The Bright Afters (ECW Press, 2026), Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking (ECW Press, 2023), and Live Ones (University of Regina Press, 2019). Their work has appeared in places including Best Canadian Poetry, Foglifter, The Walrus, Grain, GEIST, The Fiddlehead, CV2, and The Malahat Review.
