Turn 163 of 228
Encourage him to start makin designs, except bathrooms cause we don't need them. Skip to the triplets first birthday. Their development has accelerated even further
"Then start designing," Lena says. "Not bathrooms. We don't need bathrooms. We haven't needed bathrooms in months. Design everything else — doorways, ceilings, floors, corridors, sleeping spaces, eating spaces, spaces for bodies that don't fit in the world that exists. Design the world that fits us."
Marcus opens the laptop. The screen glows. The cursor blinks on a blank file — not the platform design, not the furniture. A new file. The first line he types is *ACCESSIBLE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR NON-STANDARD BODY TYPES: PRELIMINARY FRAMEWORK.* The yellow nails on the keys. The 760 pounds shifting forward in the steel chair. The face in the blue light is the face of someone who has found the thing that is his.
Six months pass. The warehouse changes. Marcus's designs cover the south wall — pinned printouts, blueprint sketches, structural calculations in pencil and ink. Doorframes scaled for nine-foot and twelve-foot bodies. Reinforced concrete flooring rated for 2,000-pound live loads. Ceiling heights mapped to body trajectories — he's charted the growth curves, Lena's and Diane's and the triplets', and the ceiling heights on the blueprints climb from sixteen feet to twenty to thirty. Corridor widths that accommodate a body that fills a standard doorway. Open bays without doors. Sleeping platforms with integrated thermal regulation. Eating surfaces at variable heights. Communal spaces designed for bodies that don't sit in chairs. No bathrooms. Anywhere. The word *bathroom* doesn't appear in any design. Marcus draws a red line through every conventional plumbing fixture in the reference materials and writes *NOT NEEDED* in thick pencil above it.
The triplets turn one. They are not babies. They are not toddlers. They are not children. They are something that doesn't have a word in any language Billy Jo can find.
June is four feet eleven inches tall and weighs ninety-two pounds. She runs the length of the warehouse bay — sixty feet — in three seconds. She doesn't jog anymore. She sprints. She climbs the shelving to the ceiling — twenty-four feet — in forty seconds, the bare feet finding every bracket, the yellow nails hooking every edge, the body moving with the fluid certainty of someone who was never told that walls are obstacles. She talks in paragraphs. She talks while climbing.
"The ceiling has a crack near the northwest corner and I think it's getting wider because I've been watching it for two weeks and the gap was this big and now it's this big and Da should fix it before the concrete falls because if it falls on Iris while she's writing I will be very angry."
She holds her fingers apart to show the crack width. She is one year old. She is monitoring structural integrity.
Iris is four feet seven inches and weighs eighty-four pounds. She has filled seven composition books. Billy Jo brings her new ones every Tuesday — the same composition books, the same marbled covers, but the contents have evolved. The early pages are large uneven letters — *JUNE CLIMBS. LEFT FOOT HEVY.* The recent pages are organized. Indexed. Iris has created her own notation system — symbols for observed behaviors, a color code using markers Marcus brought home, marginalia in a shorthand that Billy Jo hasn't been able to fully decode. Iris sits on the platform against the south wall, the eighth book open, and writes while the warehouse moves around her.
"Mae consumed 4,200 calories today. That's fourteen percent more than last Tuesday. The growth rate is accelerating. I've charted it. The curve is exponential, not linear. I need to tell the one with the machine."
She says *the one with the machine* because she still calls Billy Jo that, even though Billy Jo told her to use her first name three months ago. Iris uses the name in person but writes *THE MACHINE* in the notebooks. She is one year old. She is conducting independent longitudinal research.
Mae is five feet two inches and weighs one hundred and eight pounds. She is the tallest. She is the heaviest. She is the biggest. She eats everything Carl puts in front of her and then she eats what's left in the fridge and then she eats what's left on the floor. Her belly is round and taut and she rests her hands on it the way Lena rests her hands on hers — the gesture of someone who is comfortable and wants to be more comfortable. She doesn't walk to the fridge anymore. She strides. She occupies space. She looks at Lena's belly — the twelve-foot belly, the 1,450 pounds, the surface she slept on for the first six months — and she says:
"I'm going to be bigger than you, Mama. I'm going to be the biggest. I'm not stopping."
She says this the way June talks about exploring and Iris talks about studying — with the absolute certainty of someone describing a fact that has not yet happened but will. She is one year old. She has gained sixty-two pounds in six months. The curve Iris charted is exponential. Mae is the curve.
Billy Jo sits on the warehouse floor with the laptop. The study is one hundred and twelve pages. The yellow nails on the keys. The drawl when it comes is barely audible.
"I sent the twelve-month data to the NIH as a supplement," Billy Jo says. "Twelve-month developmental assessment. Three subjects. Height, weight, cognitive function, motor function, linguistic competency, health metrics — all optimal. All beyond any existing framework. I told them the review model doesn't apply. I told them there is no model. I told them the data is the model."
She closes the laptop. Looks at the triplets — June on the ceiling, Iris in the notebook, Mae at the fridge.
"They haven't responded. Week eleven. The window closes next week. If they don't respond, I submit to the journal directly. The twelve-month data publishes alongside the original study. Peer review. Public record. The world finds out."
The hum is steady. Three heartbeats. Stronger now. Louder. The triplets are one year old and they are becoming what they are and the becoming is not slowing down.