You, Thin!

by Jessica Hwang

About the Author: Jessica Hwang’s fiction has appeared in Moss Puppy, Uncharted and Tough and is forthcoming in Pembroke Magazine and Shotgun Honey. Her stories have been longlisted for Litmag’s Anton Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction in 2022 and The Masters Review 2022 Flash Fiction Contest. Her short story A Place like You was a finalist for the Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction in 2022. You can find her at jessicahwangauthor.com.

Excerpt

If somebody had told me that someday I’d be a member of a cult, I’d have laughed in their face. I’m not the type, I would have said. I’m too skeptical, I’m too faithless.

Of course, the magazine adverts and newspaper inserts didn’t call it a cult—they called it a weight management program.

My sister, Elizabeth, went missing a decade ago. In 1996 cell phones weren’t the norm yet. The only person I knew who carried a phone around with them was my supervisor at the call center, Chuck, who thought he was about eighty-five percent more important than he actually was. Chuck reeked of CK One and had a habit of rubbing up against female employees while reaching to check overhead cubbies for contraband; granola bars that might attract mice or stolen office supplies stuffed into purses or coat pockets—boxes of ballpoint pens and tins of coffee pilfered from the break room.

I knew where Elizabeth had gone—the problem was she hadn’t come back. Elizabeth’s roommate, Renee, had called me and said, “Is Elizabeth with you?” and I’d said, “What do you mean?”

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