As the first episode of the Philippines Graphic Literary Workshop (PGLW) slowly came to its conclusion on February 28, we knew that we had one more thing that we can offer our bright young fellows: a starting platform for their creative endeavors. Here, we present one of their final outputs from the workshop. We also asked them to provide an artwork that they think best represents their stories. Read on.
@normalghurl • 6d ago
There’s something about the talk of weight that makes you a bad daughter in front of your mother.
IRL, she knows how to mince her words—chopping at women who wore themselves too fat, distant relatives who became too anorexic, female friends who turned into a snorting ad-catalogue for yoga and pilates. And only you, as her daughter, can sniff the spoiled subtext beneath all the meat of her insults: LIKE, where is my boyfriend now who would still declare me his Goddess after pressing his nose to the sweaty slabs of my flesh? Where is the man who will still swoon after finding my body riddled with post-stretch marks from an apocalyptic diet of sugary soda and supermarket salad?
OFC, mother knows best. And sometimes she’s just a bitch under the awning of the fake resto chandelier. The real dexterity of the transmutation is that she does it nonverbally—intentionally clattering her utensils against the plate. Probably thinking of her daughter as red meat, improbable if I’m too medium-cooked or well-done.
And there’s that Munchausen act: her fingers tremoring like she just came out of treatment, still anesthetized, or whatever drugs they give her at the hospital (probably Botox), performing the sick mother sick of her sick daughter while halving that thick meat.
Mother has become desiccated; 46 sits off-kilter on her, like dog-poop wrinkling in the street.
She chews, blathering, “You know our neighbor, Martha? The mother of that girl you used to play with. The one who got cheated on with a younger model? She’s bald now. Her daughter has cancer. You should visit her. After all, she was a dear friend to you. Maybe I should shave my head too, in solidarity.” She sighs theatrically, her heads shaking. “Though I don’t know how being bald will cure cancer. She’s lost her mind.”
I listen to the rant half-heartedly, scrolling through my phone, thinking of gagging her with chains. Her voice is gratingly old. Annoying fr. It’s been months since we last saw each other. The last time we met, she said I looked like a slut in my lacy stockings, forced me to remove them under the dinner table of another effacing bourgeois restaurant while everyone looked at us. She probably thought bickering with a 20-year-old girl would make her a cool mom, but she just proved the canon archetype of a boomer on neighing high horses. So again, I gallop back with her.
“God, Mom, if you’re that bothered about being bald, maybe shave your pubes too. Start your solidarity there.”
She cocks her head and I smile at her. She stops chewing. The red lipstick makes her look like a slut. She smiles back as well and it’s constipated af.
It reminds me of when I was eight and had just pissed on her favorite Egyptian cotton sheets. She slapped me and I screamed back about the random statistics I’d read on her computer, that children who wet the bed are more likely to have been sexually assaulted. I kept screaming that one until she had no choice but to pilfer a jawbreaker into my mouth. She screamed with me. What’s your damage?! What’s your damage?!
I know she wants to scream that again but instead, she rolls her eyes.
It would’ve been better if she routed to the classic infantilizing beration. She’d mutter immature under her breath. I’d ask her what she said. Instead of repeating it, she’d go, Nothing. You heard wrong, babygirl. You misheard me. I love you.
This gracefulness is vomiting.
Either she’s become mommy dearest or she’s sticking a deer bone behind my back, waiting for me to lax out so she can puncture me with it.
“Anyway,” she pecks, pinching a meaty portion of my arm between manicured nails. “What’s going on here?”
And there it is. Game on.
She rubs the plasticky stretch of flesh between her fingers, ready to flush it into a package. Staple it. Sticker price: fat.
I swear, if this turns into one of her self-help mantras she religiously adores, I will grab the steak knife and kill myself right here.
She’s into all that Boho feminine strategization shit she watches on TikTok, psychobabbling influencers recycling the same brainrot blasphemy, dog-whistling conservatives she reframes as choice feminism. She once sent me a video with huge captions about women caring for themselves as proof they’re tending God’s beautiful temple, yada yada.
I replied that the girl is a cunt and facing sex-trafficking charges of child prostitution.
She responded with a long-message power trip about the role of a woman being ripe, about menstruation being dirty because it’s how a woman releases impurity. And like, dismissing just what I said, trying to circumvent it as a sensationalized rumor. The audacity is just whatever.
I shake her off and hiss, “I know you’re dying to say I’ve gotten fat. Go on. Say it. But how are you and Dad? How’s your sex life? Is the divine feminine helping you get him out of his Xanax-inducement?”
She hisses back and we’re just snakes at this point, eating each other’s tails. “How fucking dare you? Is this one of your tantrums again?”
Her fingers haven’t strayed; her manicured nail digs into my skin. It hurts. It’s satisfying. This is her way of saying she cares, and it’s sick. And that word again, like I am still a child she needs to parent. Tantrum is her default for every unexplained trauma.
Tantrum is her explanation for the night after the high school dance. When you run to her because mothers should know best, and tell her you woke up with your silver princess dress ripped, your panties scrunched at your ankles, something throbbing in the center of your legs, and you don’t remember anything except the coke one of the boys gave you, and you snorting it, and she says, “You cannot tell anyone. You will be stoned. What have you been doing dilly-dallying like that?”
And for the rest of that night, you live your life like a film reel, shuttered into another palette. In those scenes, her dialogue makes sense. You dote on it, trying to piece together a tattered girlhood, fingering the lacuna left between your legs.
I smile at her over my uneaten half-done steak, blood pooling on ceramic. I grit my teeth, still smiling, my gums aching so much I want to pull every tooth out.
“How fucking dare you, Mother.”
She releases my skin, leaving a crescent-shaped welt, and spears another chunk of meat to her mouth. Chewing. I stare at her sagging jowl. Aging is supposed to be graceful, but hers looks like prosthetics peeling from bad glue.
Once, she visited my apartment unprompted. I was wearing something slutty, a VS lacy brassiere and stockings. I didn’t know who was knocking; thought it was one of the boys my roommate invited. And there she was. Defiled. Disappointed. Dismayed at the sight of her daughter when I opened the door. She said nothing and left immediately, but the air stung, and in my mouth the word melted into prostitute. Mothers truly know how to handle the blunder of youth against the diminutive carcass of their aging bodies.
After she left, I strutted to the mirror and my rib bones jutted like knuckles gripping a steering wheel. Still, her voice screeched inside my skull: prostitute, prostitute, prostitute.
I inhale. Deeper. Until my lungs press against muscle, against bone. Deeper again, until pain scratches my abdomen and I exhale. It only takes a man, a wet string of spit glazing over my body, to feel beautiful again after this. To redeem myself from her.
“Do you ever feel undesirable, Mother?” I blurt out suddenly.
“Excuse me?” She shifts in her seat.
“Do you ever feel unfuckable, Mother?” I repeat, making use of the language she hates.
Her fork pauses mid-air. “Why would you say that?” She’s looking around now, smiling so hard to throw off the juicy salaciousness of our conversation.
I giggle. “God, just be honest. I’ve fumbled with boys before. I am not your little girl anymore.” Her face reddens, and it’s palpably laughable.
“Lower your voice.”
“There’s a certain agency in needing them to need you, you know.” I prod on my meat.
“You sound sick.” There’s no steak left on her plate, just blood.
“Sometimes they like being slapped. Sometimes they slap back. Then I slap harder. It escalates.”
She’s wide-eyed now, watching her daughter get naked in the slab of meat-grinder, just laying there, waiting for the machine to plummet down to serrate me. She’s eerily quiet like time had made her blood pressure stilted.
“It always ends with their faces bloodied and me still on top,” I finish. “They say sorry though. Because it’s not my fault. Because they like it. The boys.”
She leans in, almost-pleading, “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Is it wrong to lord over their fantasies? To wreck them with precision, Mother? Look at what you did to me, Mother!” Everyone is looking at us now. The machine has turned on inside my head, and it’s a bloody fest.
“Enough.”
“Ask the boys if they latched too much on their mother’s tit. Ask Father if he has residual Mommy issues.” I say, watching her flinch, “Ask him, these men, if they want to suffer the same affliction of wanting to beg again for their mother’s affection, or just ask them if they want to be choked and end up coughing after sex.”
“Stop it right now.”
I shrug. “Maybe the answer is in their throats.”
Her face hardens.
“Sometimes,” I continue, my voice steadier than hers, “I think you would have loved me more if I was a normal girl. If I was obedient. Remember when I asked you to just give me a dinosaur toy for my birthday, and instead, you said that Barbies are for girls, don’t be such a pick me! Why were you such a bitch, Mother?”
Her hand tightens around the knife. “How dare you.”
“And then, when I finally escaped the house you call your womb, I realized, with a deflated misery, I was becoming like you.”
“Don’t you blame me for your—”
“There’s a deep-seated need in me I can’t satiate,” I cut in. “My mouth has teeth, everything I am is with teeth. Those teeth in me want to bite.”
“You need help. You’re being dramatic.” She looks around the table, and there’s the wine. She grabs it immediately and drinks.
“I think a girl needs more than herself because what do we really have other than our hunger?”
“Stop talking.”
“If hunger is a bitch, then what does that make me? A dog-prowling hag? Maybe you, Mother?”
The waiter hesitates near our table, then retreats.
“What’s bitchier than a bitch, anyway?” I ask. “Maybe sex. Everything is about sex, really.”
She looks like she might slap me.
“Or maybe it’s a mother. Contrary to the belief that fathers fuck up their daughters,” I say, “sometimes it boils down to your mother. It all boils down to you, Mother.”
Her lipstick is pale red, “How fucking dare you.”
And the steak bleeds.
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#motherdaughter #bodyimage #girlhood #trauma #hunger #femininerage #notatantrum #normal girl #hellisateenagegirl #girlblogging #mommyissues #mommydearest #lanadelrey
Aries Amian (she/her) is a trans individual who longs for city life. She indulges in freaky queer art and gets her claws into making zines that talk about the taboo, especially the things that shouldn’t be taboo at all, like sex. Currently studying linguistics, Aries writes essays and stories through the lens of queer linguistics and theory. Some of her poetry and short fiction have been published in indie literary magazines, including Motheaten Mag, Rage Zine, Midsummer Zine, Opal Age Tribune, and others. Connect with her at Instagram: @transmutya.exe
More details on the artwork:
suckfick, 2026
Najai Johnson
Oil Painter and Multidisciplinary Artist
Website: N4j4i.com
Instagram: @N4j4i
