Desiree by Andrew Worthington

                Andrew Worthington comes out with this troubling story called Desiree, a disturbing rumination on life as a literal giant baby. Pangur Ban Party was kind enough to share this with the rest of the world. We benefit from it. The story itself is rather insane, a bit sad, and pretty funny. You need to have the right sort of mood for it. Don’t read it before you go to bed, full disclosure it will give you dark, strange dreams, not nightmares, just unusual images. 

                The narrator begins at birth. Apparently at birth the narrator was 87 pounds. I feel a baby that large wouldn’t be born in a normal way. No, I imagine the baby bursting out like that creepy creature in Alien, only more mundane. Or less mundane, depending on how quickly the doctor moved. At least the narrator chugged a bottle after coming out of the womb, showing a certain obsession with addiction that shows itself in some of the other parts of the story. 

                What the narrator experiences is bizarre. It is a coming of age story for a giant kid, unable to control basic bowel movements or arousal. Growing up must be hard for such a massive child, one who retains all the ignorance of childhood while having to deal with being oversized. I’m reminded of that Robin Williams’ movie except this is good, and that Robin Williams movie “Jack” sucked pretty badly. Perhaps if “Jack” had gotten really dark it might have ended up like this story. 

                Candy ruins his complexion rendering him a zombie. After a bad experience at school he drops out of school and finds work in the lucrative career path of grocery bagger. Eventually he goes back to school for some unknown reason. Later he does drugs and ends up in a world of hurt, exactly what one would expect from such rampant drug abuse. He also ends up in some extremely bizarre situation involving an inability to drink water and ski masked men. 

                 By the end we have no idea what’s going on, we don’t know why he will marry his laptop, we don’t know why he buys tampons, and we really don’t know anything. What the story does end with is how happy the narrator is with objects more than experiences. Money helps him, a laptop helps him. Neither one of those things knows exactly why he is such a big person or why he’s so unbelievably odd. They simply accept it. 

                I feel happy knowing I’m not a giant baby. That cheers me up. Reading this story helped me understand that. Adding the more surreal element made me want to re-read it a few times to see why this happened. I couldn’t figure it out but that’s because I don’t have fucking big thoughts. Go here to learn more about the bizarre person named Andrew Worthington.