Skeletal Muscle
It takes Isaac three months to eat meat again.
There was something about the way it gleamed, the way it sizzled and smelled and bled that makes his stomach churn. His therapist assured him it was a situational taste aversion, picked up from what he had been through the past four years - completely understandable, and totally reversible given time.
The assurance does little to assuage the guilt he feels when he has to excuse himself to throw up in the bathroom of an expensive restaurant (they had planned this for months) on his first real date with Ellie. Something about the way the steak shred between his teeth, muscles of a previously living thing torn apart under the pressure of his jaw…
It takes him even longer to get a full night of sleep again. Nightmares of needles and skin, of dead girlfriends and children’s rhymes wakes him up with a cold sweat and sheets around his neck. The noises of the neighbors above and below would send him into a panic of fluttering pulses and shaking hands (where’s my gun). The people around him seemed to look at him in a way, akin to an observer to a work of art. Muted awe, practiced incredulity, and an underhanded curiosity. His name was whispered in alleys, at bars underneath the safe din of conversation, in the booth next to he and Ellie when they went out to eat sometimes.
When they tried to be normal.