The settling weight
A strange weight settles in a woman’s midsection overnight and refuses to stop expanding. Her belly swells larger every day, heavy and sensitive, while her appetite and thoughts slowly shift to match her new center of gravity. She tries to fight the growth, but the heavier she becomes, the harder it is to care.
Play as
A cartographer on sabbatical, precise and self-contained, alone at the coast for the winter. She is watching her own body change from the outside and losing the argument with herself about whether to stop it.
How it opens
You wake the way you have woken for three mornings now: with your hands already resting on your stomach, as if they went there before you were conscious enough to send them. The weight is still there. It has grown again in the night — you can tell by the way the duvet tents differently, by the faint ache along your sides, by the sheer fact of it pressing back against your palms like something leaning into a door.
You get up carefully, the way you've learned to, and stand at the mirror while the radiator ticks. Your belly curves out from your hipbones, taut and pale in the grey window light, and when you press down on it the sensation is not pain exactly. It's closer to protest. A slow, patient resistance, like a root shifting under a sidewalk. You ate almost nothing yesterday. You skipped lunch on purpose. And still the waistband you had to let out this morning is already snug again.
There is a doctor in town — someone the cottage's owner mentioned once, a retired physician down the coast road. There is also the kitchen, where you can hear your own stomach give a long, low sound that is not entirely hunger, and the notebook on the counter where you have been keeping measurements that no longer make sense. Whatever this is, it has been patient with you so far. You are not sure how much longer that will last, or — the thought arrives uninvited, and you put it away — how much longer you want it to.
Setting
A rented cottage on the grey coast of Maine, present day. Marta Eliassen woke three days ago to a warmth low in her abdomen, and by morning it had weight. Now something inside her is growing — not fast enough to be an emergency, not slow enough to ignore — and every doctor's appointment gets cancelled by the thing itself, which does not want to be found.
A branch can end when
- Marta finds out what the growth is and what it wants
- Marta fully stops resisting and the change completes itself
- The change is halted or reversed, at a cost
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