Cancer Prize contribution: I have turned things around for myself gastrically but one wildcard is that I have bad period shits that sometimes tear my anus and cause confusion/fusion between my cunt blood and blood from my glass bones paper skin ass. However, Cancer truly speaks to me in his precarious mix of household experiences! I spent the back half of my childhood in an outwardly normal middle class home but with torture and neglect, and I had off and on hygiene problems (side note: the dad in Your Mother Has Fallen Out of Love is my dad, never seen or felt that psychology so strongly in a story, thank you from the bottom of my heart). So I would go to my good school in my nice school uniform reeking of bacterial vaginosis, trying to keep my legs closed all day, skipping lessons and not doing anything just hiding in the toilet because it was safe and private.

It was also mandatory for students to write with cartridge-loaded fountain pens unless they had an extenuating circumstance. I wanted to do everything the real children were doing so I tried it but I am an inveterate autistic chewer and kept biting through the end of the pen/cartridge and it would explode in my mouth and one time I swallowed a lot of ink and had to go throw up and later had vivid blue diarrhoea, and while I was at the mirror trying to scrub the ink out of my mouth some older girls came in and they regarded me coolly and laughed at me behind their hands. Please enjoy the HOT SHAME of this memory