Turn 23 of 23
Let the wish finish what it started
The wish has been finishing what it started for over a decade. It does not rush now. It works the way it has always worked — slowly, steadily, the way a river cuts a canyon, the way a glacier flattens a mountain. Lena lies in the dark behind her closed eyes and feels it in every cell: the gentle, ceaseless pressure outward, the softening, the expansion, the becoming-more that has been the only constant in her life since the night she whispered a wish in a bathroom mirror and meant it more than she knew.
The voices above her have organized into something with structure. Mara is on the phone — not the phone she called for help with, but a second phone, personal, her voice low and shaking. Lena catches fragments through the haze: "I don't know how to describe it" and "she's not — she's not in distress, that's the thing" and a long silence on the other end. The paramedic has found a pulse in Lena's wrist, buried deep in the flesh of her forearm, and is counting under his breath. His gloved fingers tremble against her skin. She can feel the trembling the way she feels everything now — from a great distance, through layers of warmth and fat and the thick insulation of a body that has become its own environment.
A fart rolls out of her — long, wet, seismic — and one of the firemen says something sharp and short and moves closer to the broken window, breathing the outside air. The paramedic doesn't move. He is professional enough to stay, or horrified enough that movement has become impossible. Lena's body doesn't care which. Her body releases another belch, low and resonant, and the vibration travels through the floor and the walls and the amber air, and the containers on the carpet rattle softly against each other like wind chimes in a dead city.
The wish presses. Her flesh yields. The expansion is so slow now that it's invisible to anyone watching — but Lena feels it, the way she has always felt it, not as change but as continuation. The couch frame beneath her groans. The carpet beneath the couch frame compresses another fraction of a millimeter. Her left side, pressed against the wall, meets resistance and the resistance gives way the way everything gives way to the wish — not dramatically, not suddenly, just a slow, patient yielding, the wall accepting the pressure of her body the way a riverbank accepts a rising river. She is filling the room. She has been filling the room for years. And the room is almost full.
Mara's voice comes through the haze one more time, thin and cracked and close — she has moved nearer, standing at the edge of where Lena's body meets the carpet, looking down at the face that sits atop the vast landscape of flesh.
"Can you hear me?" she says. "Are you — are you in pain?" Lena's mouth opens. Not to speak. A belch, soft and low, curls out of her and dissolves. Her eyes stay closed. Her body expands. The wish hums. And Mara stands there with tears on her face and her hands at her sides and no protocol for what she is witnessing — a woman who asked for comfort and received it so completely that comfort is all that's left, comfort and warmth and the slow, endless, irreversible becoming that will not stop because it was never asked to stop, because the wish was granted, and the wish is still being granted, and Lena lies in the center of it like a stone at the bottom of a warm sea that has no floor and no surface and no end.