ASTERWICK 02 - Mira (Patreon)

10.12.26 – 5:30 a.m.

Mira Holloway’s House – East Asterwick

Mira Holloway - Previous: 5’6” 125 lbs | Current: 5’7” 132 lbs

Change since last recorded: +1”, +7lbs

Mira woke up with one foot hanging off the end of the bed and the awful certainty that something in the house had changed while she slept. Not furniture. Not floorboards. Her. The alarm on her phone buzzed against the nightstand, soft and smug at 5:30 a.m., and she slapped for it without opening her eyes. Her fingers found the phone too easily, knocking it sideways before dragging it into her palm. The motion felt wrong. Longer. Cleaner. Like her arm had become a tool she had not finished learning how to use.

She lay still under the quilt, listening. Rain tapped the bedroom window in fine impatient fingers. The old house settled around her with its usual small complaints. Somewhere downstairs, the refrigerator clicked on, groaned, and remembered its purpose. Nothing else moved. Nothing breathed in the hallway. No branches scraped the glass.

Still, Mira did not move for another ten seconds. Because her body was too loud. That was the only way she could think to describe it. Her pulse had weight. Her breathing filled more of her ribs than it should have. The mattress pressed back against her shoulder blades, calves, heels, and every point of contact seemed sharply labeled in her mind. She was aware of her thighs beneath the blanket. Aware of her stomach. Aware of muscles she normally ignored making themselves known in dense, unfamiliar bunches.

“No,” she whispered, because arguing with reality before coffee was banned in her family. She threw the quilt off and sat up too fast. The room tilted. Not from dizziness. From perspective. Her knees came higher than expected when she swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her toes brushed the floor before she meant them to. Mira stared at them, bare against the warped pine boards, and then at the cuff of her sleep shorts riding higher on her thighs.

The sleep shirt was worse. It had been loose when she stole it from a university blood drive table six years ago. Soft gray cotton. A faded red drop on the chest. A size too big, because free shirts were always either tents or doll clothes and Mira had chosen tent. Now the hem sat a little above her hips. The sleeves hugged her upper arms. When she lifted one hand to rub her face, the fabric caught across her shoulder and pulled tight enough to resist. Across the room, her red Harbor Coffee shirt waited on the dresser beside a chipped mug and a stack of folded jeans, innocent as a mouse trap.

Mira lowered her arm slowly. The skin along her forearm looked the same at first glance, pale olive under the dim room, marked by the faint scar near her wrist from the time June had decided assembling a thrift-store bookshelf required “aggressive optimism.” But the line from wrist to elbow had shifted. Sharpened. Tendons stood out when she curled her fingers. Her bicep rose under the sleeve in a compact, definite swell that had not been there yesterday morning.

She put both feet on the floor and stood. Her head did not hit the ceiling. The room did not explode. No ominous choir took up residence in the vents. But she felt the difference instantly, a small impossible notch of height that rearranged familiar space. The window latch sat lower. The dresser mirror caught more of her before she stepped closer. Beyond the glass, East Asterwick lay under a low shelf of fog, roofs and firs blurred together in the gray morning. The jeans slung over the chair looked harmless enough.

Mira went to the bathroom because panic, she had learned, preferred mirrors. The hallway was cold. The house smelled of old wood, dust, and the lavender detergent her mother had bought in bulk and then abandoned in a pantry full of practical things Mira could not imagine anyone using in that quantity. Mira flicked on the bathroom light.

The woman in the mirror looked like Mira after someone had taken the original and adjusted the appearance sliders. Not dramatically. Not enough that a stranger would point. But enough that Mira’s stomach dropped before she realized her stomach had apparently become part of the problem.

Her face was hers, sleep-soft and tense, hair mashed wild on one side. Her shoulders were not. They filled the shirt differently, giving the fabric a straightened, anchored line. Her collarbones had not vanished, but they no longer looked delicate. They sat above new firmness. Her arms were still long, still hers, but there was shape now. Not gym-influencer shape. Not glossy and posed. Working shape. Dense, awake, like strength had risen to the surface overnight and decided to stay visible.

She lifted the shirt. Then she forgot how to breathe. Her abdomen was not flat and soft anymore in the old way. It had structure. Bumpy, shallow blocks pressed up under the skin, subtle at rest and unmistakable when she tightened without meaning to. The line down the center of her stomach had deepened. The muscles on either side rose in even, practical ridges, as if someone had packed new material beneath her skin and asked it to arrange itself into function.

“Oh, absolutely not.” Her voice came out thin and offended. She touched one finger to her stomach. The muscle jumped under it. Mira yanked her hand back like she had put it on a stove. The scale lived under the sink behind a basket of hotel shampoos her mother had inexplicably collected. Mira dragged it out with her foot. It scraped against the tile, ugly and real. She stepped on. The numbers blinked, considered ruining her life, and settled at 132.

Seven pounds. She got off. Waited. Stepped on again. 132. She moved the scale six inches to the left, because maybe the floorboards had joined the conspiracy. 132. She gripped the sink until her knuckles went pale and looked up at herself in the mirror.

“Seven pounds in one night,” she said. Then, because she needed a second impossible fact to keep the first company, she found the tape measure from the junk drawer in the hall and stood against the bathroom doorframe where her mother had once marked Mira’s height in pencil every birthday until she was fourteen and pretended to hate it.

The old 5’6” line was still there, faint under newer paint, labeled in her mother’s neat block letters. Mira set the tape, straightened, and made herself look. Five foot seven. She checked twice. Then a third time with her heel pressed hard enough against the baseboard to hurt.

She should have stayed in the bathroom and fallen apart in a controlled, sanitary environment. Instead, the clock on her phone reminded her that Harbor Coffee opened at six-thirty and Grant Ward, her boss at Harbor Coffee, had a spiritual objection to “traffic” as an excuse in a town whose entire downtown could be crossed before a latte cooled. Mira dragged on yesterday’s jeans with the grim focus of a person negotiating with denim. They buttoned, but not easily. The waistband sat snug against her hips. The thighs pulled tight when she bent, outlining muscle that had apparently arrived overnight with no respect for her clothing budget.

The Harbor Coffee shirt was worse in a different way. Red cotton, lighthouse logo cracked from too many washes, the words HARBOR COFFEE CO. arched across the chest. It had always been comfortable enough to forget. Now it dragged over her shoulders, caught around her upper arms, and rode over her stomach instead of hanging from it, making Harbor Coffee’s dress code feel quietly upgraded from G to PG. Mira stared at herself in the dresser mirror. Work Mira looked back at her, except Work Mira had arms, a waist that looked carved where yesterday it had only looked narrow, and abs making quiet proclamations beneath the hem.

Mira went back to the bathroom to brush her teeth, and the simple motion made her bicep shift beneath her sleeve, rising and tightening in a way she had only seen on other people. That was what finally made her call June. While the phone rang, she drifted back into the bedroom and lifted the hem of her work shirt again, unable to stop checking whether the hard new ridges across her stomach were still there. June answered on the sixth ring with a voice like she had murdered sleep and hidden the body. “If this is about the cabin, I already hate what you’re about to say.” Mira turned toward the window as if the fog over the rooftops might offer testimony. “I’m taller.”

Silence. Then fabric rustled. June was sitting up. Mira could hear it in the scrape of the phone against sheets and the tiny shift in her breathing. “Define taller.” “An inch.” “People do not accidentally inch.” “I know that.” Mira looked down at herself again, which was a mistake. The muscles shifted as she bent, small ridges bunching under the lifted hem of the Harbor Coffee shirt. “I also gained seven pounds.”

Another silence. This one was not funny. Mira heard the moment June stopped being entertained by the emergency. “Seven pounds of what?” June asked carefully. “I don’t know. Muscle? Maybe? My shoulders look wrong. My arms look wrong. My abs—” Mira stopped, hating that word in her mouth. It sounded like something that belonged to people who posted videos of themselves making oatmeal.

“Your abs what?” Mira swallowed. “They’re there.” Mira pinched the hem higher, hating that she needed to look and hating more that she could not stop. “They’re not just flat. They’re raised. Like I did a few months’ worth of crunches overnight. I swear I could wash clothes on them, June.” June inhaled through the phone. “Okay. That is a deeply upsetting sentence before six in the morning, stick with the washing machine for your clothes OK?”

June made a strained little sound that was almost a laugh and almost not. “Mira Holloway, are you telling me the weird murder cabin gave you a core routine?” “Do not call it that.” “Fine. The wellness cabin. The forest’s worst Pilates studio.” “June.” “Okay.” June’s voice softened. The humor drained, leaving the thing underneath it. “Okay, sorry. I’m listening. Are you hurt?”

Mira pressed two fingers to her abdomen again, gentler this time. The muscle resisted, firm and warm. Her whole center felt packed with pressure, not pain. “No. That’s the problem. I feel fine. Better than fine, physically. Which is making me feel insane emotionally.” June was quiet long enough that Mira checked the call screen to make sure it had not dropped. “Mira,” June said at last, and the way she said it made the fog outside the window feel suddenly closer. “Something happened to me too.”

Mira stopped touching her stomach. “What do you mean?” “Last night. After I got home, I went for a run because apparently terror metabolizes into poor decisions.” June tried for the joke and missed. Her voice came out too careful around the edges. “I was on Mercer Hill, the steep part by the water tower, and I just…surged. That’s the only word I have. One second my legs were burning, and the next I was eating up the hill like it owed me money. My stride got huge. My sweatshirt pulled tight. For maybe thirty seconds, everything felt too small and too far below me.”

Mira’s mouth went dry. “Too far below you how?” “I don’t know.” June breathed out, shaky this time. “That’s the problem. I looked down and the pavement was wrong. My sleeves were wrong. My shoes hit the ground too hard. Then I stopped near the water tower, and everything sort of snapped back. My clothes fit again. My legs were shaking like I’d sprinted ten miles. I got home and my pulse was going like a drumline. My calves felt—”

The phone buzzed against Mira’s cheek with the second alarm. 5:52. She jerked it away, saw the time, and made a sound that belonged to a woman seeing a bear in her kitchen. “No, no, no.” Mira grabbed her keys from the dresser, missed them, grabbed them again. “June, I’m late.” A faint pause filled the line. Resignation, wrapped fast in sarcasm. “Right. Of course. The supernatural can wait, but Grant cannot be deprived of punctual espresso labor.” “He’s my boss.” “He is your boss who owns flannel like it was issued by the state and makes you use your customer-service voice when he says your name.”

“I do not have a customer-service voice for Grant.” Mira jammed one foot into a boot, nearly toppled, and caught herself against the dresser hard enough to rattle the mug. “I have a professional voice.” “Your professional voice gets breathy.” “My professional voice is hanging up.” “Mira.” June said her name differently that time. Smaller. The joke did not cover all of it. “We should talk about this.”

Mira looked at herself in the mirror again, then to the window, the fog pressing its forehead to the glass, and felt every reasonable part of her mind start stacking boxes in front of a door marked later. June needed her. Mira knew that. June had sounded scared in a way June almost never allowed herself to sound. But Mira could not fit June’s impossible thing into her morning without breaking something.

“Tonight,” Mira said. “Giant’s Rest. After my shift. We’ll compare catastrophic notes with fries.” A beat passed. Then June rallied, because that was what June did when she was wounded and did not want anyone examining the bruise. “Beers on a Monday? Who is this person I’m talking to, and what did she do with Mira Holloway?”

“She got taller and somehow got worse at mornings.” Mira grabbed her rain jacket. “Seven?” “Seven,” June said. Softer, but steadier. “And Mira?” “Yeah?” “Your boss is going to like you even more now.” Mira ended the call before her face could do anything unprofessional.

Harbor Coffee Co. sat on the corner of Mill and Alder, in the renovated brick shell of what had once been a saw-blade ordering office and was now a place where students bought lavender lattes under the watchful eyes of century-old logging photographs. The front windows glowed warm against the rain when Mira pulled up at 6:17, which meant Grant had beaten her there by at least half an hour and would pretend that was normal human behavior.

She checked herself in the dark reflection of the Volvo window before getting out. Mist had flattened her hair into something marginally less theatrical than bedhead. The red shirt still did what the red shirt had no legal right to do. She tugged the hem down. It rose back up a fraction, stubborn over the new firmness of her stomach. “Traitor,” she told it.

Inside, the shop smelled like roasted beans, wet coats, and the lemon cleaner Grant insisted was “bright” and Mira insisted was “floor juice.” The espresso machine hissed behind the counter. Indie folk murmured from the speakers. Grant Ward stood on a step stool beneath the menu board, one hand braced against the wall while he rewrote the seasonal special in chalk.

He had rolled the sleeves of his dark flannel to his elbows, because apparently the man considered forearms part of the uniform. Rain-dark hair curled at the nape of his neck. There was chalk dust on one knuckle and a small crease between his brows as he considered the word cardamom like it had personally failed him.

Mira hated that she noticed any of that before she noticed the mop bucket in the walkway. She caught it with her shin, swallowed a curse, and entered the shop with all the dignity of someone losing a fight to cleaning supplies. Grant looked over his shoulder. His mouth twitched. “Morning.”

“That’s what the clock claims.” Mira stepped around the bucket and shrugged out of her jacket. The motion tugged the shirt tight across her back. She pretended not to feel it. Grant turned back to the board and added a careful swirl beneath MAPLE CARDAMOM LATTE. “Then I’d like to file a complaint with the clock. It failed to warn me your entrance would include assault on my mop bucket.”

“The bucket started it.” “It has been warned about that.” He stepped down from the stool with easy balance, bringing the faint scent of chalk, rain, and coffee with him. “You okay?”

It was the steady way he asked that did the damage. Not suspicious. Not managerial. Just Grant, noticing the half-second too long it took her to answer. He had noticed things from the day she walked in with donation-box cardboard dust on her sleeves and a résumé folded into fourths because she had printed it at the library and didn’t own a proper folder. He had given her the job after one interview, one coffee she had not paid for, and one careful conversation about flexible hours while she handled “family matters.” He never called them her mother’s things unless she did first.

Mira found this thoughtful in a purely professional way. The same professional way she noticed his hands were broad, his beard never quite decided whether it was staying, and his laugh sounded like gravel deciding to be kind. June’s accusation about her customer-service voice was slander. Probably.

“I’m fine,” Mira said, too fast. Grant’s eyes dipped to the scuffed toe of her boot, then back to her face. If he noticed the shirt, the shoulders, the fact that she felt like she had been assembled one size up, he was polite enough not to make it obvious. “Fine usually comes in ten minutes earlier.”

“Fine overslept.” “Fine looks like she wrestled a weather system and lost.” Mira tied her apron too hard behind her back. The knot bit into her waist. “Fine is going to make coffee now.” Grant lifted both hands. “I would never stand between a woman and her coping mechanisms.” “That is wise,” Mira said. “Coffee keeps the local population from achieving its final form.”

“I thought that was zoning meetings.” Grant glanced toward the front windows, where rain blurred the empty sidewalk and the first gray shapes of commuters had not yet appeared. “We have twelve minutes before the professors arrive and start correcting the spelling of Guatemala on the bean jars.”

“One time,” Mira said. “Three times. Same professor. Different pens.” Grant leaned one hip against the counter and folded his arms. “Can you restock the Sumatra before we open? Delivery guy stacked it in the back like he was building a shrine to back injuries.” Mira’s stomach tightened at the word back. Not from pain. From memory. From June’s voice saying everything sort of snapped back. She turned too quickly toward the storage room and felt the apron pull across her waist, the knot digging into muscle that felt newly installed and insultingly present.

“Sumatra,” she said. “Sure. How much of a shrine are we talking?” “The big bags. Three of them. Top shelf is empty, but use the hand-crank hoist. Delivery guy parked it by the mop sink.” Grant paused. “Seriously, use the hoist.” “I was going to.” “That answer came too fast.” “You accuse a lot for a man standing near a mop bucket crime scene.” “A man learns patterns.” Mira pushed through the swinging door before he could see her smile.

The storage room was narrow and overpacked, all metal shelving, cardboard sleeves, syrup bottles, and the bitter green smell of unground beans. The delivery had been dropped in a leaning stack near the mop sink. Three burlap bags stamped SUMATRA MANDHELING in black ink waited on the floor like sleeping animals. The 50lb mark was cleanly stamped on the bottom. Beside them stood the old hand-crank shelf hoist, its yellow frame chipped, its small platform lowered and ready, as practical and accusatory as a parent pointing at a raincoat.

Mira stared at the hoist for exactly three seconds. Then she stared at the first bag. Fifty pounds was not impossible. Fifty pounds was a bag of dog food, a stubborn suitcase, half a person if the person was June and furious about being used as a unit of measurement. She had lifted fifty pounds before. She had just never liked it. She put one hand on the burlap and felt the dense shift of beans inside. The bag gave off a dark oily smell, bitter and grassy at once. Her fingers curled into the rough weave. Yesterday, she would have dragged it onto the hoist platform, cranked it up, and pretended not to be annoyed by the squealing gears. Today, the thought of the hoist made something hot and contrary open in her chest.

She bent her knees, got both hands under the bag, and lifted. At first, it was exactly as awful as fifty pounds should have been. The bag sagged in the middle, dragging at her fingers. Coarse burlap scraped her palms. Her lower back complained in a familiar, sensible way. Mira grunted and got it to her knees, then to her thighs, hugging it against her apron while the beans shifted like wet sand.

Then her body answered. It started low in her stomach, a hard tightening that pulled through her waist and up under her ribs. The ridges she had stared at in the mirror clenched beneath the shirt, not flexing so much as locking into place. Heat ran across her shoulders. Her sleeves bit into her arms. Something under the red cotton bunched, swelled, and settled, dense as rope under skin.

Mira froze with the bag against her body. Not because it was too heavy. Because it had stopped being heavy enough. Her breath came in once, sharp and startled. The weight rested in her arms with an ugly, impossible ease. She could still feel it. She knew it was there. But the strain had moved somewhere else, behind the effort, like a hand had slid under the bag to help and forgotten to let go.

“Mira?” Grant called from the front. “Hoist making that death noise again?” She stared at the unused yellow frame beside her. “Yep,” she called, voice too high. “Very threatening.” “If it bites you, bite it back.” “Solid workplace policy.” Mira adjusted her grip, braced for the old familiar fight, and curled the bag upward.

It rose too smoothly. Her elbows bent. Her biceps tightened into hard, startling curves beneath the sleeves. The fabric strained, seams pulling at the edges. Mira made a small sound she hoped the opening espresso machine covered, then pushed the bag onto the top shelf with both hands. It landed with a heavy thump that shivered the metal rack.

For a second, she just stood there with her hands still raised. Her arms felt full. Not tired. Full, as if the muscles had taken a deep breath and were waiting to see what else she would ask of them. The apron knot pressed into her stomach. Under it, her abs held firm and bumpy, each ridge awake beneath the fabric. As she lowered her arms, the cotton of her shirt pulled taut across the new width of her back, catching over muscles she hadn’t needed the words for yesterday. Lats, maybe. The hand-crank hoist sat beside her, untouched. Her shirt did not settle the same way it had before. Neither did she.