Growing Pains

It’s been too many days since she’s felt discomfort, so her body compensates, shifting and cracking and creating chaos within itself. At night, she lies awake for hours with strange aches running through her legs that she twists and stretches and convulses to escape. She throws her arms above her head, points her toes toward the far wall, squeezes her eyes shut, and she’s ten years old again and alone in the dark with these same demons in her body, pulling her apart, stretching her out, destroying her from the inside, she thinks, only to wake up the next morning and find nothing’s changed. 

She’s barely slept in a week, since this started. But two cups of coffee in the morning and a layer of concealer under her eyes do wonders, and no one on her work calls has suspected a thing yet. One by one they compliment her on the throw pillows on the couch behind her, and each time she thinks about telling the story of the time her mother visited and said something mean about how much money she’d wasted on such useless items, but she can’t separate that memory from what her mother said when she decided she was too old for her stuffed animal collection, so she smiles, says thank you, and refrains. 

It’s 35 degrees outside, but tonight she turns the AC all the way up just to feel something from outside herself, and it works. Instead of stretching, feeling like her bones are growing outward and inward at once, her body curls in toward itself, trying to keep warm, shivering relentlessly until she falls asleep.

It’s colder here than it used to be and brighter the white sunlight on the snow is blinding but here is the bend in the creek where they ran as children she and her cousins the ice is thicker than ever she knows because at the swimming hole it used to be translucent showing the water running deep and dark but now it’s just ice thick and white with bubbles in the surface and sticks frozen halfway in and she skids across not worried that it might break because it won’t because it can’t and she wonders how long has it been since they came here in the summer when they rode inner tubes down the creek with their legs sticking up toward the sun scratched by dead branches and rocks and once in a while a cow skull and their shoulders burnt brown they tried not to think about the parts of them that stuck into the river or about the eels and big fish with sharp teeth and other sorts of things that they knew lived in deep dark water even though the adults said they didn’t but now the ice is thick and she’s safe and she slides out into the middle and closes her eyes and spins and the air is cold on her cheeks colder than it’s ever been and her closed eyes sting and her breath must look like a cloud in the air but it’s all still and perfect and when she opens her eyes there’s no cloud and the snow is sparkling pristine and there are no footprints anywhere and the sun is brilliant and the sky is blue and the ice is smooth but when she bends to look just a little bit closer she can see the cracks spreading from where she stands and the deep dark water still there just below the surface.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN REDLINE ZINE, ISSUE NO.1 (MAY 2020)