Crohn’s Star
Content Warning: Graphic language and strong imagery concerning embodiment, blood, illness, and other themes
Andy was in bed with a beautiful woman, but he was not happy. As her bare skin came into contact with his own, the gross reality of being in a body swelled, then settled on his mind. He was flesh. He was blood. He was trapped in a human skin. He was a monstrous, physical being in a paper-thin shell, and so was the woman; so was the production crew around them. It was a dark notion, irreversibly known now as a truth.
Awareness of his physicality was not new. In 10th grade gym class, Andy despised the locker room—the removal of his shirt and the exposure of his body to the world. The world, a jury of adolescent boys, had declared him too skinny. If they were to voyeuristically examine his exposure now, they would envy his position.
Over and over again, the locker room boys had said, “Eat a sandwich.” It had been repeated so often that his own voice had parroted the sentiment into adulthood. Perhaps Andy was egregiously thin in his gym shorts, worthy of shame. He always felt as if his mind was too big and his body too small—that he was a puzzle piece incompatible with the physical outline given to him at birth.
Yet Andy slides easily into the woman—a perfect fit. He knows his body will be regarded as desirable, a success, in the eyes of this perverse sexual society. His ugly body is good for something the way a singular nail is worthwhile in hundreds of miles of railroad track. Shadowed by cameras, Andy has slid into dozens of similarly beautiful women over the course of three years. Every day, he inches further, sweating and hammering, forward to a vast, beautiful frontier. But every day feels the same.
After his set, Andy dons a robe and goes to the bathroom. It might have blown his mind years ago to doggy-style a woman. It might have once been sensual or intimate. Now it was as mundane as slipping on his shoes or sitting on the toilet. One flinches before fire; one grows erect in passion. A body is just a series of motions, actions, and reactions predetermined by the flesh. Andy sits to shit.
Discomfort wriggles in his body like a worm. He could associate the pain with a parasite or microorganism, but it undeniably feels like a part of his body that is writhing. A pressure snaps in Andy’s stomach the way the gas pump suddenly clicks when a tank is full, except he is empty. A burst of malign diarrhea floods the white bowl.
A silence lingers on Andy’s eyes. It is an audible, disturbing silence. He looks down at the nightmarish color swirling in the water: scarlet. His own blood is melting into his excrement like a washed-out, red sunset.
Andy flushes the blood without hesitation, wishing he could erase the memory of it just as easily from his mind. The afterimage of red blinds his eyes. Andy had stared directly into a dying red sun, and it was still too bright. He wishes he could crawl down the drain and go away—hide not from the crew but from his own body which produced such revulsion.
The blood is not a surprise to him, only a reminder. Andy has Crohn’s Disease. It is merely rearing its ugly head the way it first reared it in college. His body, which has laid alongside dozens of women, is declaring that he is not a biological winner but a loser. His job has not cured him, and his inane sense of fame has not made his body truly worthy of envy. It is unnervingly fragile, prone to red water and insistent, sharp pain.
Andy says goodbye to his partner and the crew before hurriedly leaving work. The slowness of traffic stresses him. It feels like something unnamable is pursuing him on the freeway, and if it were to catch him, he would cease to exist. Andy calls the gastrointestinal doctor’s office about his blood, but they cannot see him until the next Monday.
Every crawling second of a sleepless night scrapes and scratches at his soul. It feels as if his intestines are leaking. The moon must be covered in blood. He would do anything to float out of his body and become a cloud.
#
Later in the month, Andy is filming with an older brunette on set. The angles of her face remind him of his 11th grade English teacher. Mrs. Daniels had always stood at the front of the room in tight, white sweaters—a memory that arouses him more than the nude body before him now.
In the periphery of his vision, Andy can observe the cameraman sipping bottled water to swallow his morning vitamins. The aftertaste of vile medication haunts Andy’s own lips; all arousal escapes him.
Crohn’s Disease.
As the brunette takes his penis into her mouth, Andy winces. Why is there an apostrophe?
Mrs. Daniels sits atop his mind the way she sat atop her stool like a throne. Her brown eyes are soft. Her voice is a beacon.
“An apostrophe indicates ownership.”
The example on the board: John’s car
“It is inherently possessive,” Mrs. Daniels said. Her eyes scanned the room, taking in the apathy and beauty of thirty young souls. Her confident aura signaled to their minds that she knew everything—the secrets of the universe, or at least of language. She could indicate ownership and make one’s spirit free.
Andy tightens his fists. He knows how to control his blood flow so he does not come quickly. His knuckles become bone white as he tightens beyond normal. He hates his illness.
They named it after its discoverer. It was not colon cancer that he had. It was not COVID. It was Crohn’s Disease. Burrill B. Crohn fucking owned Andy’s body. Before he’d been born, his body had been owned, and his genetics named like how continents are named after colonizers.
Andy almost wishes he had cancer instead. People donate to cancer charities. They put sad little bald children on television to garner sympathy. Andy would’ve been paraded around on tragic tropes and heralded as a hero if he had cancer. No one gives a shit about bloody shit. No one understands the intestines, Crohn’s, or Colitis, not even the doctors. The locker room boys, the world, would mock his raspberry diarrhea.
The brunette stares into Andy’s eyes, or more so, the camera over his shoulder. He knows enough to sense that she is annoyed. He’s taking too long.
His body can not come, not now. Andy despises his life. It is Crohn’s Disease, not Crohn’s Condition, not Crohn’s State-of-Being. His existence is a disease. Underneath the skin in which he walks and the pills he swallows, he is nothing but an error.
Andy focuses on Mrs. Daniels. He was still a child in her room. He was still healthy in her room. Naïve, innocent, enamored, and human. She stared at each student with love.
If he’d been diagnosed with Crohn’s in 11th grade, Andy believes she would have loved him still. She believed in words, not bodies. He could’ve been an eight-legged alien, and with a smile, she would’ve said, “Hello, Andy. Did you have a good weekend?”
Andy wants to cry, but he comes for the camera at her infinite kindness.
He wasn’t diagnosed in time to tell her or to tell anyone who would actually care. Andy first saw blood in the spring of his sophomore year of college. Disoriented, he failed his classes and dropped out.
The world still spun.
The pharmaceutical pamphlet illustrated the horrifying effects of his prescribed steroids. Yet, when Andy voiced concerns over his mental health, his doctor effectively told him to shut up and swallow. There was no autonomy in front of a white coat. But the doctor was right; Andy could bleed and die, or he could swallow his pill and what life had given him. He was owned by the disease itself and owned by Big Pharma. There was no running because his body was the cage.
Andy had no choice but to rebel and push his horrible body to success. In the gym, he could sculpt it beautiful with masculine muscle. In bed with an erect cock and a woman, he could be beautiful for a camera and a hundred-thousand eyes. His body could be something worth living in.
As he comes, Andy closes his eyes. He can not watch the brunette woman lick up his sperm. She swallows it with the pained, horrible motion in which he swallowed his Prednisone steroid that morning. He’d shut up and taken his medicine again for his current flare, “fixing” his body, but still, it was not beautiful.
He wonders if he’s ever felt truly content in his body in his lifetime. Maybe before the diagnosis. Maybe.
The convulsion of loss ripples throughout Andy’s body. Crohn’s was a rock thrown into the lake of his soul, forever disrupting him.
A pounding emptiness spreads from his penis to chest. He’d came in dozens of women since starting porn, but Andy was not a star; he felt more like a circus monkey, a prop for the main attraction, but his semen was held up to the camera and presented as appealing. Outside of the sterile set of pornography, no woman would want his white mass of worms. Crohn’s was hereditary, a body horror passed down from parent to child.
The convulsion in his penis was the realization of lost children. His work resulted in sharp hollowness, an anxiety that family and life were denied by purposeless sex. However, the denial was justified in Andy’s mind. Those swarming, lost masses of children would bleed and cry the way Andy had bled and cried—they’d be slaves to science and capitalistic pharmaceuticals from the moment of conception. It was not a life he would wish on anyone.
Andy went home feeling somber. His stool that night was solid, still tinged with red, but not diarrhea, thanks to the steroids.
In the darkness of his room, Andy could not sleep. The feeling of loss was utterly overpowering. The jarring sensation of ejaculation echoed in every one of his horrible cells. A meteor was coming, and he was forever bracing. Crohn’s owned his soul.
He wept for his present, his past, and his future. He cried out for the simplicity of Mrs. Daniel’s English classroom. Andy died a little thinking of children unborn and children to be born, passing through blood and tears, with or without someone to care for them.
He wondered if his own father had felt a similar convulsion, unaware of Andy’s Crohn’s during conception, for still, a star had shot out of consciousness into a forever black beyond.
Read an excerpt by Aaron Skye Pharr in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Author
Aaron Skye Pharr graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a B.A. in English in 2021. While earning his Masters in Teaching, he was nominated to the Teachers of Promise Institute in March 2023. He currently teaches English 12 and AP Literature and Composition in Henrico County, Virginia. In 2017, Aaron was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis. Encouraging vulnerability and discourse about illness is a pillar of his writing and teaching. Visit his website at: https://aaronspharr.com/.