Growing into the Job, Post 615: A Hunt: Prelude (Patreon)

The house did not smell like Thanksgiving. No roasted turkey and sage lingering stubbornly in the dining room, no aroma of pumpkin pie. There was the almost-sweet smell of the candle the afternoon aide had lit and forgotten to blow out before leaving, but as usual the place was filled with the same sterile medicinal smell Amelia had gotten very good at pretending she didn’t notice: plastic tubing, alcohol wipes, the faint mineral smell of the oxygen concentrator humming against the wall…and morphine. Well, maybe morphine didn’t actually have a smell. Who fuckin knows? Amelia didn’t. But somehow the room smelled like it anyway.

She stood just inside the entry to the living room-cum-makeshift hospice with one hand curled around the little tripod she’d carried upstairs. Her phone was clipped into it. Nine hundred and eighty-seven people were watching. On Thanksgiving.

Amelia glanced down at the screen.

umeeelia: happy thanksgiving losers 🦃

That had been her contribution to the holiday spirit approximately thirty minutes earlier. She rolled her gum from one side of her mouth to the other as the chat beneath moved too quickly to read. “Seriously,” she’d asked them downstairs, staring incredulously into the camera. “Don’t you people have families?”

That had been at some point after eleven.

She had been sitting sideways in her desk chair in the finished basement she called an apartment, one long bare leg folded underneath her, the other planted on the carpet. Her platinum-blonde hair had been freshly washed earlier that evening, after getting back from the charity event, and blow-dried into a ridiculous amount of volume, falling in pale waves almost to her waist. She’d done her face afterward for absolutely no sensible reason except that apparently she had reached the stage of her life where she put on makeup to spend Thanksgiving night alone in a basement: foundation, contour, highlighter, smoky eyes. Mascara and a sharp little black wing at each corner. Glossy pink-nude lips. The nails, though, were the real show.

They’d been pale pink earlier in the week. Tonight she’d painted them a deep glossy cranberry because Thanksgiving, apparently, and because she’d thought it was funny. They were longer again. Sharper. She hadn’t filed them that way. Amelia had been trying not to think too much about that.

Her outfit hadn’t exactly been pilgrim appropriate, either: tiny charcoal lounge shorts and an absurdly tight white tank under a long-sleeve top, both that had once fit considerably better than it did now. The Melissssy Effect - as they’d all taken to calling the collective insanity happening to their bodies - had rendered half her wardrobe either completely obsolete or at least profoundly overmatched. Tonight’s shirt was losing the battle. Her chest strained the  fabric across its front, and though she wasn’t wearing a corset the way her cleavage bulged from her neckline she might as well have been. The shirt’s lower hem occasionally tried migrating north of her narrow waist. Her legs had changed too. Longer. Bigger. Her thighs had developed athletic definition she certainly hadn’t earned at a gym. She’d caught herself flexing one beneath the desk. Then aimed the camera at it. The chat had exploded.

Idiots.

Which didn’t stop her from doing it again. That was the embarrassing part. Not because she didn’t enjoy their attention. She did; Amelia had stopped lying to herself about that months ago. Attention meant money and Squirt, both things she could feed back into Melissa and whatever increasingly bizarre biological economy their little family had become part of. And, yeah, Amelia liked being looked at. Those things could all be true at once.

But there was another reason she kept logging on after dark. Something harder to explain. Something she didn’t especially want explained, because explanations had a nasty habit of becoming facts.

“Let’s review,” Amelia had said, crossing her arms beneath her chest and regarding the camera as though addressing a room full of particularly slow children. “You could be eating pie. You could be drinking with your cousins. You could be watching football. You could be pretending you don’t hate your brother-in-law.”

Messages cascaded upward: “CRUSH SOMETHING”“Nails please” “show claws” “rip something” “AMELIA BREAK THE CHAIR”

“Okay, first of all, I’m not breaking my fucking furniture for you,” she drawled, checking her nails and indulging the weirdos by flexing her fingers. Someone tipped twenty dollars. Amelia had stared at the notification. Then at the chair.

“Still no.”

Another tip. Fifty, with the message “It’s only an IKEA chair.”

“Fuck off.”

Another tip, bigger still. She’d smiled despite herself. That was how it went with them. Deep breaths in tight shirts. Flex. Turn around. Bend something. Crush something. Rip something. They particularly liked the nails. Amelia could put a soda can between two fingers now and puncture it without appearing to exert herself. Two nights earlier she’d peeled to shreds an old aluminum baking pan with her fingertips while the chat collectively lost its fucking mind.

And then there had been the rat. That hadn’t been planned. The little bastard had gotten into her sour watermelon gummies. Not just any bag, either. The giant resealable one she’d bought specifically because buying twelve normal-sized bags somehow felt more embarrassing. She’d heard rustling during a stream.

Paused. Looked toward the kitchenette. Another rustle.

“Hold on.” She tilted the webcam toward the kitchen. 

Twenty seconds later she’d found the culprit behind a storage bin with one of her watermelon gummies clamped between its tiny teeth. Amelia had stared at it. The rat had stared at Amelia. There had been, she thought afterward, a moment in which diplomacy remained possible.

Then it tried to run. The webcam had still been rolling, so her viewers saw everything. The strange thing - the thing Amelia hadn’t been able to stop replaying in her head - wasn’t their reaction afterward. Of course they’d loved it. Those freaks would probably watch her carve a Thanksgiving turkey with her fingernails and call it performance art.

It was her reaction; that’s what gave her pause. The sudden silence inside her. The speed with which she’d moved. The tiny animal darting left and Amelia somehow already knowing where it would go before it went there. Her hand coming down. Those cranberry nails hadn’t been cranberry yet, and they looked darker afterward. She remembered staring down at them. Remembered her pulse hammering. Remembered thinking she should feel sick. Instead she’d felt... 

Amelia’s jaw tightened.

…Alive.

That was the word she hadn’t allowed herself to use.

Alive.

And apparently nine hundred eighty-seven human beings had decided this was preferable to spending Thanksgiving with their families. Except Amelia was hardly in a position to judge anybody. Because here she was. Twenty-six years old, former Criminal Justice student, former Hooters girl, former dealership eye-candy with a sales quota. Former lots of things. 

But: current ersatz medical assistant, professional camgirl, occasional supernatural-energy collector and, apparently, woman capable of murdering basement rodents with her bare hands.

Happy Thanksgiving, Amelia Ekland.

Middle-school Amelia would have been so fucking confused. Her smile had faded at that thought. Because middle-school Amelia would probably have asked the obvious question: 

Where’s Mom?

And there were some questions even sarcasm couldn’t do much with. So she’d looked around her little basement apartment instead. Her place. Her lights. Her makeup crowded around the vanity. The ring light reflected as a perfect white circle in the darkened window. True-crime books stacked beside nail polish bottles. A half-empty bottle of sparkling water sweating beside the enormous contraband bag of sour watermelon gummies. Evidence, basically, that a life had happened down here whether or not it looked anything like the one she’d once expected.

She wasn’t alone, not really. She had Melissa, Stephanie, Marisela. The others. Far Horizons. They were her family now. And today had been good. The charity event had been good. Useful. There were people who’d needed them, Amelia had helped, and she had a job that - however fucking weird it had become - occasionally made people’s lives better. That mattered. It did. She wasn’t pretending to not care about that part.

But after she’d come home, after the aide left, after the house went quiet, the hole had come back. That restless dark place somewhere beneath her ribs that didn’t seem especially impressed by charity events or friendship or gainful employment. Amelia could apparently save Thanksgiving for a roomful of strangers and still come home hungry for something she couldn’t name.

Camming helped. The attention helped. Money helped. Squirt helped. Breaking things helped more. Sometimes she’d imagine that whatever she was bending or crushing wasn’t an object at all. Judging by the comments, her viewers did too. That should probably have bothered her more than it did.

“You’re all fucking weird,” she’d told them softly.

The tips accelerated. She’d laughed. And then her eyes had drifted toward the ceiling. Toward upstairs. Barry. She had gone quiet. The chat noticed immediately.

“everything ok?” “where’d u go” “AMELIA” “show upstairs”

That last one caught her eye. Amelia stopped chewing. There had been another stream a few nights earlier. A mistake, probably. A rare little crack in the wall she maintained between Amelia and umeeelia. She’d taken them upstairs. Not far. Not much. Just enough that afterward she’d wished she could somehow stuff the whole thing back through the camera lens.

Barry had been asleep then too. She hadn’t shown his face at first, just the hospital bed, the oxygen tubing, the ugly practical equipment accumulating around what had once been her living room. Then she’d told them a little: cancer, stepfather, hospice.

She hadn’t told them everything. Not what he’d been like when she was younger. Not the things he’d said. Not the things he’d done. Not why Amelia could sometimes stand in his doorway and watch him struggle to lift a glass with those wasted hands and feel something inside herself remain perfectly, frighteningly still. Her viewers had filled in the blanks anyway. Or invented better ones. Men online were helpful like that.

Some of the suggestions in the chat that night had made Amelia’s stomach turn. At first. She’d ended the stream shortly afterward, but she’d remembered them. That was the problem. Tonight, about half an hour ago, she’d looked toward the ceiling again.

Then at the tripod. She’d smiled, and not because she’d made a decision. That was what she told herself, anyway. She was just going upstairs. Just showing them something. Which was how Amelia Eklund now found herself standing beside her stepfather Barry’s hospital bed at 11:38 pm on Thanksgiving night with nine hundred and eighty-seven strangers in her hand. The room was dim except for the bedside lamp and the cold blue-white glow leaking from the hallway.

Barry hadn’t moved. He wouldn’t. The last aide had left nearly three hours ago, and his nighttime medication had reduced him to something scarcely more responsive than the slow rise and fall beneath his blanket. His face looked smaller than Amelia remembered it being. Everything about him did.

Cancer had eaten him down. His cheeks were hollow. His skin had the translucent yellow-gray quality of old paper. He looked so much older than he was. Wisps of thinning hair crossed his scalp and across brows that had once glared down from what seemed impossibly high above hers. Not anymore. Now Amelia stood beside the bed and looked down at him.

The oxygen machine hummed. On the dresser sat gauze, medications, wipes, gloves. In the far corner was the package that had arrived that morning. Thanksgiving morning. Because apparently death had excellent holiday delivery. Barry had asked for it himself a week ago, in one of his increasingly rare moments of lucidity. 

The end-of-life kit sat unopened where Amelia had placed it, bland and clinical and almost offensively ordinary. She looked away. Her phone vibrated incessantly in her hand. Comments. Tips. Requests. Amelia extended the tripod legs, set it carefully on the bedside table and adjusted the angle.

Barry remained motionless. She checked herself in the little preview window automatically. Hair good. Makeup good. Shirt...Jesus. She tugged the neckline up three inches. It slid three inches back down.

“Whatever,” she whispered.

Then she noticed her nails in the screen. Long. Glossy. Cranberry-dark. For just a second she remembered the rat. That tiny burst of motion. The silence afterward. That feeling.

Alive.

Amelia slowly looked from her own hand to the sleeping man in the bed. Then she tapped the screen and turned the camera toward them both. The phone settled into its cradle with a tiny plastic click, kinda loud in the quiet room.

Amelia stood behind it for a moment, watching the image stabilize. Barry occupied the lower right of the frame, mostly blankets and the wasted shape of one shoulder, while Amelia occupied…well, most of everything else.

There wasn’t much she could do about that anymore. At six-foot-whatever-she-was-this-week, she had to bend slightly to fit herself into the shot, pale hair falling forward over one shoulder as she adjusted the tripod. The bedside lamp caught the high points of her cheekbones and made her glossy lips shine; behind her, the rest of the makeshift bedroom disappeared into bluish Thanksgiving-night darkness. Her white top looked almost luminous against it, the tank stretched drum-tight over a figure that three months ago would have seemed ridiculous even to Amelia. The little charcoal shorts weren’t visible unless she backed away from the bed. Probably for the best. The shirt was already giving the chat plenty to discuss.

She read three comments, rolled her eyes at four more, then finally found one that made her snort.

“No, I’m not waking him up.”

The chat accelerated. Amelia glanced at Barry.

“Because he’s sick, dumbass.”

Another comment.

“No.”

Another.

“What part of the word ‘hospice’ is confusing to you?”

A tip notification chimed. Amelia looked back into the camera with a flat blue stare. “Fifty dollars doesn’t make it less stupid.” Another fifty arrived almost immediately. Her mouth twitched.

Okay. It makes it slightly less stupid.

The bedside oxygen concentrator continued its steady mechanical breathing. Somewhere deeper in the house the refrigerator compressor kicked on. Barry made no indication whatsoever that there was a six-foot-plus blonde standing beside him broadcasting what was sure to be his deathbed to hundreds of strangers. His mouth hung slightly open. Each breath produced a faint dry hitch at the back of his throat.

Amelia’s smile faded. She hated that sound. Not because it frightened her. That would have been easier. No: it irritated her. That realization came with enough ugliness attached that she immediately looked back at the phone.

“He’s completely out,” she said.

Someone asked “how out?”

Amelia looked at Barry again. “Like, freight-train-through-the-living-room out.” She reached toward him and snapped her fingers once beside his ear. 

Nothing.

“See?”

Of course the chat loved that. She straightened and folded her arms, inadvertently creating another surge of comments that had nothing whatsoever to do with Barry. Amelia watched them stream upward with the easy contempt she’d cultivated over the weeks of camming.

“GOD” “she got bigger again” “stand next to him” “LOOK AT HER” “queen” “hes so tiny next to u”

“mark him”

Amelia’s eyes stopped. She chewed once. Mark him. That one had appeared during the other upstairs stream too. She glanced toward the dining table across the room. Most of Barry’s old things had disappeared from it, gradually replaced by hospice supplies, but Amelia had dropped her purse there when she’d come upstairs earlier.

“You’re such fucking creeps,” she murmured.

She walked across the room anyway.

The camera followed none of this, of course. For several seconds the viewers got an empty patch of bedroom, the hospital bed, Barry’s sleeping profile, and Amelia’s bare legs crossing briefly through the rear of the frame. Her movements had developed an unconscious feline smoothness lately. She hadn’t noticed it herself, but other people had. Longer legs, longer stride. An easy rolling confidence through the hips. The new strength in her body had eliminated dozens of tiny hesitations she’d never realized she possessed. She didn’t navigate around furniture anymore so much as expect furniture to get out of her way.

At the table she opened her purse and found the lipstick. Cranberry. Close enough to her nails that Amelia laughed quietly when she noticed.

She returned to the bed. The chat immediately understood.

“No,” Amelia said, already uncapping it. “This doesn’t mean it was your idea.”

It absolutely had been their idea. She leaned toward the phone and carefully refreshed her lipstick using its black screen as a mirror, tracing the color over her full lower lip, pressing her lips together, then tilting her face one way and the other to inspect the result.

“Happy?” she asked the chat. 

Apparently they were, judging by the alerts. Amelia looked down at Barry. This close, she could see how badly illness had changed him. The man in her memories had been broad through the shoulders. Not enormous, not really, but he’d seemed enormous to a twelve-year-old girl. Even bigger when he was angry. There were memories in which Barry seemed to fill doorways. Now Amelia could have picked him up. That thought arrived without invitation. She looked at his narrow chest beneath the blanket and realized it was literally true.

She could pick him up. Probably with one arm. Something cold and pleasurable moved through her stomach. She bent over him.

“Don’t make this weird,” she told the camera.

The comments became instantly weirder.

“Jesus Christ.” “Whats she doing”

Amelia placed one hand beside Barry’s head, lowering herself carefully. Her hair spilled forward in a platinum curtain, brushing his pillow. She hesitated perhaps half a second before pressing her lips against his forehead: 

Mwah. 

She deliberately made the sound louder than necessary. When she lifted her face, a perfect cranberry mouth-mark remained stamped above his brow.

The chat detonated. Amelia stared at the mark. Then laughed.

“Oh my G-d.”

It looked ridiculous. Barry, terminally ill and unconscious beneath a hospital blanket, wearing Amelia’s lipstick like he’d been attacked by someone’s aunt at a wedding. But, as ridiculous as it was, it didn’t stop her. She kissed the other side of his forehead. Mwah. Another mark.

“Happy Thanksgiving, Barry.”

His temple, Mwah.  His balding scalp, Mwah. His cheek, Mwah. Amelia began giggling despite herself, and that was what transformed the whole thing for a few minutes from something strange and uncomfortable into something stupid enough to be fun. Every time she straightened to check the screen, hundreds of comments begged for another one. Someone tipped twenty dollars for the top of his head. Someone else paid forty for his nose.

“His nose?”

The viewer confirmed.

“You’re paying forty dollars for me to kiss an unconscious cancer patient’s nose?” And immediately, as another forty-dollar tip appeared, Amelia stared into the camera. “You people need financial advisors.”

She did it anyway. Soon she’d made another $600, and Barry’s face and head were decorated with cranberry kisses: forehead, temples, scalp, cheekbones, one near the corner of his mouth. Amelia stood over her handiwork with her hands on her hips, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. “There. Beautiful.”

“YOUR PROPERTY”  “Marked” “he belongs to Queen now” 

She liked that. 

“more.” “put your hand on his face” “claws”

That last word changed something, slightly. Amelia’s smile remained, but her eyes dropped from the chat on the phone to her right hand. Her nails seemed particularly dark beneath the bedside lamp. They were, for sure,  unquestionably longer. She spread her fingers. The cranberry polish reflected tiny white crescents of light. What had once been carefully maintained acrylic-looking nails now extended well beyond anything practical, except Amelia knew they weren’t acrylic. She had discovered that conclusively after ruining two expensive files and the cutting edge of a manicure clipper.

Her own nails. Her own impossible fucking nails. She touched her thumb against the index nail. Tick. Hard. The rat flashed through her memory. Not the whole thing. Just the resistance. Then the sudden absence of resistance. Amelia swallowed. The chat continued.

“show claws” “scratch something” “do it next to him” “scratch him”  “just a little”

Her gaze moved slowly toward Barry’s exposed arm. The blanket had slipped low enough that one arm rested outside it, palm-up beside his body. It looked nothing like the arms she remembered. Now it was thin, loose-skinned, bruised in several places from needles and IVs. Blue veins wandered beneath translucent skin.

Watchers watched Amelia stare at it, and the chat raced upward. Tips appeared - ten, twenty, fifty. Someone sent a hundred. Amelia’s eyebrows rose.

Wow.

Another hundred. She looked toward Barry. Then back at the camera.

“You understand that’s a person, right?”

The hypocrisy of the question struck her almost immediately. She had kissed his unconscious head three dozen times for money. But that was different, wasn’t it? Those washed off. Amelia looked at the smears of lipstick on his forehead. Then his arm. The room seemed quieter now. Even the chat had become something abstract, silent words pouring endlessly across a six-inch screen. Behind them were hundreds of men sitting in hundreds of bedrooms and apartments and childhood guest rooms and hotel rooms, hiding from their families on Thanksgiving night to watch Amelia Ekland decide what she was going to do. The thought should have disgusted her. Instead, irritatingly, it made her feel important.

She became acutely aware of being watched. She felt the shirt stretched across her chest, struggling to contain her. Her strong legs. Her lips. Her nails. Her size. Her power. Barry’s helplessness. Every part of the picture suddenly seemed to belong to her, and she wanted to show them. They were begging for it. Something inside her tightened. Amelia walked around the tripod and stood beside the bed.

“Just so we’re clear,” she said, looking directly into the lens, “you didn’t talk me into shit.”

She lowered her hand. Her fingertips came to rest on Barry’s forearm. His skin was warm. That surprised her. Some irrational part of Amelia had expected him to feel cold already. She let her fingers travel lightly toward his wrist, nails barely touching. Four faint white lines appeared behind them and vanished almost immediately.

Barry didn’t move. Amelia looked at his face. Nothing. She did it again. Slightly harder. Four pale trails remained this time. Her breathing changed, she heard it herself. A slow inhale through her nose. The chat noticed too.

“again” “LOOK AT HER FACE” “she likes it”

“Shut up.” But Amelia didn’t remove her hand. She drew the nails back toward herself. The sensation traveled strangely through them. They weren’t merely harder than normal nails. They were sensitive in a way she couldn’t explain, almost as though the pressure at their tips traveled directly into her fingertips, her wrist, her forearm. 

She pressed down. Barry’s skin puckered beneath them.

One nail caught. Amelia stopped. There was an instant - one tiny, clean instant - in which she could simply lift her hand. She knew that, she felt herself know it. Then she pressed. The skin gave. Barry didn’t wake. A pinpoint bead of red appeared beneath Amelia’s index nail, and something black and electric snapped through her.

Amelia gasped. Actually gasped, mouth opening around a little involuntary sound as the sensation shot from her fingertips through her arm and down the length of her body. Her spine straightened. Her thighs tightened. Her toes curled inside her six-inch heels. For one bewildering second she thought of Bliss.

It had happened enough times now that every woman around Melissa recognized it: that bright impossible rush accompanying another increment of change, another little rewrite of the body. Amelia had gained six inches that way. Six fucking inches. Her chest had ballooned absurdly. Her legs had lengthened. Strength had collected beneath her skin. Bliss was weird, sure, but by now it was familiar weird.

This wasn’t. Bliss felt bright, warm, shared with the others. This felt like midnight electricity, private, predatory. Hers. 

Amelia jerked her hand away. The camera caught everything. She stared down at herself.

“What the fuck?” Her voice came out breathless. Barry’s arm bore one tiny red break in the skin. Nothing, barely anything. Amelia looked down at her legs. Something felt wrong. No, not wrong, but different. Her shoes. Her toes were suddenly pressing hard against their ends. She flexed one foot experimentally.

Too tight.

“No fucking way.”

The chat was moving so fast now that individual messages became nearly unreadable.

“SHE GREW” “DID YOU SEE THAT” “Again” “do it again” “MORE please” “MORE MORE MORE”

Amelia backed away from the bed. Her heart was pounding. She looked at Barry, then at her hand, then back at the phone. She knew that sensation, it was almost a memory. But it had been Stephanie, not her. The story Steph had told her about the night at Red Dog’s surfaced abruptly: Stephanie growing as she’d fought back against her ex and his rapist friends, getting bigger every time someone struck her, becoming something enormous in the middle of a college dive bar while Marisela watched. Growing to defend herself.

 Amelia had always assumed the rules were basically the same for all of them, because why wouldn’t the universe at least have the decency to be consistent about its bullshit? Would she be like Stephanie, growing to protect herself?

Apparently not. Her gaze returned to the single bead of blood on Barry’s arm. Are the rules for me backwards? Not defense, but…

The thought was horrifying. Would she grow from hurting things? For as weaponized as her nails had become, and though she’d been out on Marisela's hunts, observing, learning, she’d never drawn blood from another person with them. Well, I take that back. She and Angie had gotten into a scuffle at the grand opening gala, and Angie had left with some nasty scratches across her face, but Amelia had been pretty fucked-up aggressive on one of those red BOOMpops and…maybe hadn’t noticed? The thought was fascinating. Mostly, if she was being honest, it was fucking thrilling. I can get huge? Her phone chimed with another tip.

Amelia looked at the screen:

“again.” “find out” “you want to”

Amelia stared at that last one the longest. Her jaw tightened.

“Fuck you.”

She reached for the phone. For a fraction of a second her thumb hovered above the button. She could leave it on. They would love this; that thought came quickly. Underneath it, though, came another thought she liked more because it was hers and not theirs: So would I.

Amelia ended the stream. 

The screen went black. Suddenly there were no comments, no tips, no audience. Just Amelia, Barry, the hum of the oxygen concentrator and one impossibly small drop of blood shining on his arm. For several seconds she didn’t move. It was remarkable how much emptier the room became when nobody was telling her who she was supposed to be in it.

No scrolling comments. No little animated hearts crawling obscenely up the side of the screen. No tips chiming because somebody in Ohio or Nebraska or wherever had decided watching Amelia breathe in and out was worth fifteen dollars. No strangers telling her what they wanted. Just the low blue-black glow of the phone’s lock screen fading to nothing.

Barry breathed.

Hhhh. Pause. Hhhh. The oxygen concentrator answered with its steady mechanical hum. Amelia looked at him. Then at the tiny bead of blood on his arm. It was already beginning to flatten. She wiped it away with her thumb. Nothing happened.

“Okay,” she whispered.

Her voice sounded different without an audience. She stood beside the hospital bed in her ridiculously little white top and charcoal shorts, suddenly conscious of every inch of herself. Her platinum hair had fallen messily over one shoulder. Her lipstick was still perfect except for the faint smudging at one corner from all the stupid kisses. Her legs seemed to go on forever beneath the hem of the shorts, newly lengthened muscles tight and athletic beneath smooth, tan skin.

And her shoes hurt. Amelia looked down. Her toes were crushed against the fronts. She slipped one heel out. Then the other. The relief was immediate. She stared at the shoes sitting neatly beside her bare feet. They were pretty, new pumps she’d picked up last week. 

She kicked one across the carpet. It struck the baseboard with a soft thunk. She almost laughed. Barry slept through it. Amelia looked toward the phone. The black screen reflected a pale suggestion of herself: blonde hair, white shirt, bare legs. The tall shape of a woman standing beside a dying man’s bed.

There wasn’t anybody watching now. That mattered. She needed it to matter - maybe more than she wanted to admit - because otherwise she could tell herself it had been them. The comments, the tips, the escalating little dares. Maybe it was them that made her shoes suddenly not fit. Hundreds of anonymous voices pushing her one millimeter farther than she’d intended to go. Except now she’d turned them off. No goblins, no money, no Melissa getting fed from whatever energy Amelia could squeeze out of them. Just her.

So Amelia turned back toward Barry.

“For science,” she murmured.

Marisela would understand immediately. She would approve. That was worse. Or better. Amelia hadn’t decided.

Barry’s head had rolled slightly toward the window. Her cranberry lipstick covered his forehead and scalp in ridiculous little stamps, making the rest of him somehow look even worse: hollow cheeks, slack jaw, papery complexion. He looked so small. That was the strange part. There were nights from childhood when his footsteps coming down the hallway had seemed to shake the house. She remembered learning the difference between the ordinary opening of a cabinet and an angry one. Remembered voices, her mother’s, his. Remembered becoming very good at determining how much he’d had to drink by the way he put his keys on the counter. Kids got good at stupid things when they had to.

And now she could see his collarbone. Amelia’s mouth tightened. Her right hand rose. She examined her nails. They had lengthened again, there was no question about it now. Each one extended in a glossy cranberry point, elegant until you looked too closely and realized elegance had nothing to do with what they were for. 

She placed them against Barry’s cheek. No pressure, just contact. His skin shifted beneath their tips. 

Amelia waited. Nothing.

“Come on,” she whispered.

She drew them downward. Four pale tracks followed. 

Nothing. Her eyes narrowed. Harder. The tracks pinkened. Barry’s breathing didn’t change. Amelia stopped at his jaw. There, that threshold again, she could feel it, and not, like, metaphorically. There was an actual resistance beneath her fingertips, the tiny physical insistence of skin refusing the edge.

Her pulse quickened. A voice: Do it. Not the chat. Her. 

Amelia pressed. The resistance broke. She pulled. Four thin red lines appeared. The response inside her was immediate.

“Oh-!”

Her knees nearly buckled. Amelia caught the bedrail with her left hand, the metal complaining beneath her grip as that same dark current tore upward through her body - stronger this time. It came from fingertips to shoulder, shoulder to spine, spine to exploding outward into every muscle at once. Her scalp prickled. Her back arched. Her breath caught somewhere high in her chest.

She felt her perspective change, literally. The bed seemed to drop. Not much. An inch? Two? Impossible to tell. But the mattress was lower against her thigh than it had been.

 Amelia stared.

Oh my G-d. 

She looked down at Barry. The scratches shone crimson across his cheek. She had done that. And she had grown. Nobody had seen. Nobody had paid her. Nobody had encouraged her. Amelia’s breathing became shallow.

This is proof of concept.

That phrase arrived with such absurd clinical neatness that she almost laughed. Instead her fingers tightened around the bedrail. Metal creaked. She released it quickly.

“Jesus.”

She knew she shouldn’t use that name. It actually did feel kinda wrong. 

Her eyes returned to Barry’s face. She should stop. Obviously, she knew that. She had the answer. Whatever the Melissssy Effect was up to, whatever evolution had done to her, whatever bizarre little rule had been written into Amelia Ekland’s changing body, she’d found it. Stephanie grew when someone hurt Stephanie. Amelia... Amelia grew when Amelia hurt somebody else.

“That’s fucked up,” she whispered.

But a smile tugged involuntarily at one corner of her mouth.

“That’s really fucked up.”

Barry slept. Amelia’s thumb brushed his cheek. For one strangely quiet moment the gesture was almost tender. She remembered her mother upstairs here in this same house. Different room. Different sickness. Different years. Hospital smells, pill organizers, insurance calls, and Barry being Barry through all of it. Barry and his hands. Funny how somebody could shrink down to almost nothing and still take up that much space in your head.

Her nails touched him again. This time she didn’t pretend it was accidental. She dragged them down his cheek, drawing more blood. Barry’s head shifted faintly against the pillow from the force of it, but he didn’t wake. 

Amelia shuddered. Another surge. Her shoulders rose. Her legs lengthened perceptibly beneath her. The hem of her shorts seemed suddenly higher. The white shirt drew tighter across her torso, fabric trying to accommodate a body that had just changed its mind about what size it was.

Which, Amelia realized, was sort of the story of her life lately. She looked toward the dark window. Her reflection floated there: tall, then taller, platinum hair framing a face flushed with excitement, blue eyes brighter than they had any right to be. Barefoot now because even her shoes had become obsolete in the space of a minute.

Amelia stared at herself. “How tall am I?”

Nobody answered. She laughed once under her breath. Then looked at Barry, at the red lines down his cheek. A practical thought finally managed to surface through the exhilaration. The aides.

 Amelia froze. “Oh, shit,” she moaned. She leaned closer to inspect his cheek. Eight unmistakable scratches. Not pillow marks. Not dry skin. Not anything that disappeared with a washcloth. Her eyes moved toward the bedside table: gauze, wipes, medication bottles, all the ordinary administrative crap of dying. What the hell was she going to tell the aides?

He scratched himself? With what? Barry barely had the strength to lift a cup. Amelia straightened. The room seemed smaller now. The ceiling hadn’t actually lowered, obviously, but she was suddenly aware of it in a way she hadn’t been before. A few more inches and she’d be getting acquainted with it.

Her gaze traveled to the front doorway. Then back to Barry.

“Maybe they don’t need to come tomorrow.”

The sentence slipped out before she could examine it, and Amelia blinked. “Yeah,” she answered herself, as she chewed thoughtfully at the inside of her lip, “we’ll do that.”

She could handle him, tomorrow, Friday. Feeding him, medication, cleaning him, turning him. Jesus, turning him. She could probably reposition Barry with two fingers now. The idea should have just made caregiving feel easier. Instead it made him look even more helpless. Amelia rested her palm against his sallow cheek. For all the ugliness that had passed between them, the touch looked almost affectionate.

“Don’t worry,” Amelia whispered.

She wasn’t entirely sure which of them she was talking to. Her thumb moved slowly beneath his eye. Her nails rested along his jaw. One pressed. A tiny crescent of red welled beneath it. Amelia inhaled. There it was again: that promise. Not Bliss, but something else, something that wanted something. Something hungry. 

She looked at the phone. For perhaps three seconds she imagined turning it back on. The chat would lose its collective fucking mind. Tips would pour in. Money, squirt...

Her gaze returned to Barry. No. This part wasn’t theirs, or even Melissa’s. That realization was somehow more unsettling than anything else that had happened tonight.

She picked up the phone, carried it across the room and placed it facedown on the dresser. Then Amelia returned to the bedside. Barry slept beneath the cranberry kisses she’d given him for strangers. The marks she gave him next belonged only to her, and she wanted more. She had already stopped pretending she was still just conducting an experiment, and decided something. He would wake up tomorrow - or maybe not - covered in her scars.

How big could she get?

She looked down at her hand, and drew her claws. 

===================================

thanks for the help in embosoming Amelia in the image to readers/friends Frag and ElephantPorn