THE BODY CHANGES

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Submitted Date 12/08/2018
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I.

I was sitting in the kitchen when Lorelai came crashing in with a wild look in her eyes. I began to fold up my newspaper, but before I could put it down she was already in my face, brandishing a tooth mere inches from my nose. “I’m scared,” she cried, holding it up in the light, “it just fell out, all by itself. What did I do?” There was blood on the tips of her fingers where she’d pinched it. I could see, between them, the hair-like shock of gum that still held fast to the tooth’s root like some mossy growth. The meat was still shiny and wet.

Carefully, I took the tooth from her, scanned it, and chuckled. “No need to worry, dear. Your body is changing, that’s all.”

“Changing?” Lorelai huffed, “What do you mean ‘changing’?”

“Well, darling,” I began, “everyone’s body changes as they grow. Some of us have it easier than others, of course, but we all experience many of the same things. You’ve lost teeth before – it just took this one a little longer to wiggle its way out…” I set the tooth on the tabletop and smiled at her. “You’ll be okay. I promise.”

Lorelai was inconsolable, though. She looked at me as though I’d betrayed her, guffawed, and though she tried to follow it with words, each one was choked out by a shuttering intake of air. Eventually, the tears along the lids of her eyes spilled over and she turned away, dashing back off into the house to hide and console herself as she always did. I didn’t dare follow – not yet at least. Lorelai was a strong-willed girl, one that demanded to find her own way, even if she did ask so many questions. If I followed her now, she’d be irate – she’d throw a tantrum and not listen to a word I said for days. So, I took the tooth instead, peeled off what gum I could, and pocketed it before returning to the day’s news and my drink. The television droned on somewhere far-off in our home – another day, another string of disappearances, another storm approaching.

 

II.

Days later, I was scrubbing the last dishes in the sink when I heard Lorelai scream. I dropped the dishes and began to move, calling out after her. I found her in the bathroom, the door slightly ajar, the whitish light leaking out into the cold hallway.

“Lorelai? Dear?”

“Don’t come in!” She shrieked. She threw her body against the door and it snapped shut. I heard her clatter to the floor on the other side, sobbing.

“Lorelai, I need you to open the door for me.”

“I don’t want to!” she cried. “I don’t want you to come near me at all!”

I gripped the knob and twisted, only to feel it resist. I pressed my hand against the door softly. “But Lorelai, I just want to make sure that you’re okay.”

“Okay?! Of course I’m not okay! I’m… I’m scared.”

I shushed her softly, lowering myself into a squat, centering my face near the door as though it weren’t there at all. “There’s no need to be scared, Lorelai. I told you before. Anything that is happening to you – these changes that you’re experiencing – they’re all natural.”

I paused, but only heard sobbing on the other side. I sighed and continued: “The best thing for you to do in these situations, though, is to let me see what’s wrong. If it’s something preventable, we can look into ways to prevent it. Even natural transitions can be scary, I understand that, but sometimes there are ways to at least help diminish the problem...”

The door lock suddenly clicked and the white light shredded out into the dark. I thumped backwards and there she was, towering over me, her eyes wide with a mixture of horror and anger. She jabbed a finger toward her face and screamed: “Do you think you can help this? Do you think this is a problem we can prevent?!”

Her face was covered in a mass of boils and blisters, all of them plump and red and glistening with sweat. Her eyes were crowned in them, her lips swollen with them, and they stretched behind her ears and down her throat and up into her hairline. Her teeth flashed like daggers between them as she cried. I pulled myself up on my feet and hesitated before reaching out and pulling her close. Lorelai didn’t fight, but she didn’t return the gesture. She just hovered in my grip, her body shuddering, her cries doubling and redoubling for what felt like a small eternity. When, at least, her cries gave way to exhausted sobs, I took her carefully by the arm and walked her down the hall. Together, we found her bed in the dark, and I urged her beneath the blankets. I told her, again, that she’d be okay. I told her not to be scared. I watched until her eyes fluttered beneath their lids, her mind ferried to dreamland by the melodic drone of sirens far off in the distance.

 

III.

Gradually, Lorelai left her room less and less. Where she used to steal away into the living room to watch the news or sneak into the kitchen to raid the fridge, she now only braved the few feet that she had to cover to reach the bathroom and go back, though in time even that stopped. When I would hear her, I would hover near the door, listening as carefully and quietly as I could. Sometimes, she would be mumbling to herself. Other times, she would just quietly weep. But no matter what I did – whether through the bedroom door or the bathroom door or face-to-face in the hall – she refused to speak to me. Lorelai only met me with disdain, her eyes boring through me until I made way and she slinked, slowly, back into the confines of her darkened room.

When it had been a week since I’d seen her, I knew the time was drawing near.

On the night of the ninth day, I heard her low moans, her hoarse cries, from beyond the bedroom door. I knew the time had finally come.

When I pushed my way in, I was met by a stench of shit and sweat and unwashed skin. The sole lamp on the far side of the room was on its side, though its light still cascaded up the purple wall and across the white molding. The vanity mirror was shattered – showered across the carpeting and mixed among the strewn piles of clothing. There were nail marks scraped in the paint on the walls. The window, too, had been broken, and the warm southern air billowed in through the bars, only pushing the stench into every corner of the room. But the thing that dominated the room – the thing that I couldn’t take my eyes off – was Lorelai.

She had swallowed the corner of the room. Each arm, each leg, stretched a different direction – each webbed in an almost translucent silk and burrowing into the floor or the wall or the ceiling. Already, the shell of the chrysalis had started to fill out the spaces in between them, its blue-green sheen ribbed like molded jade, pockmarked by flashes of yellow and red and orange in aimless spatters. Her eyes met mine before swooning, orbiting the room, and finding mine again. Her tongue danced behind her graying lips. She tried to form words but all that came out was a sort of forced hiss, rising and dropping with each breath. Her skin sloughed off like dust.

Her moaning was almost hypnotic, matching the subtle gyrations of her body. I stood in awe, minute by minute, more skin becoming shell, more shell covering her up: Lorelai, my wife.

Fifty-years old – considerably older than the others, but the only to make it this far.

And as the last of her face was swallowed by the cocoon, I promised her she would be okay. As her cries were squelched by the spinning silk, I marveled at how amazing she was, at how proud I was of my work, and, perhaps above all, at how the body changes.

And as if in agreement, the storm cracked outside and the rain, itself, began to fall...

 

IV.

It's been weeks. I've been staring at Lorelai every day - tracing the curvature that's swallowed her body and wondering what's within - but it's remained a secret. I'll admit, I even thought she died once or twice, what with the face of the cocoon blackening and the thrum from within stuttering on occasion and sometimes falling eerily silent. But then, today happened.

I walked into the room and, to my surprise, saw the first of many cracks along the cocoon's edge. I can see shapes beneath it now - a slender hand, a needle-like leg, the grand sweeping slopes of folded wings. I had to hold back tears as the fullness of the thing finally dawned on me.

I - a mere old man - succeeded in creating what can only be considered an angel.

And now that I've perfected the science, with the help of my Lorelai, I will bring this gift to our suffering world: one woman at a time.

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