ASTERWICK 04 - June (Patreon)

10.12.26 – 1:15 p.m.

Asterwick University Recreation Center – South Campus

June Park – Previous: 5’3” 110 lbs | Current: 5’3.5” 114 lbs

By 1:15, June Park had replayed the Mercer Hill run in her head so many times that the memory had started developing production values. In one version, she had simply been exhausted and dramatic. In another, the hill had been steeper than she remembered, the rain colder, the streetlights stranger. In the third version—the one she kept trying not to watch—her legs had lengthened into the pavement, her sweatshirt had gone tight across her shoulders, and the town had dropped beneath her as if she had taken one impossible step onto a larger setting of herself. That version had lasted less than a minute. It had also left evidence.

She sat behind the front desk of the Asterwick University Rec Center with a lanyard around her neck, a stack of liability waivers under one elbow, and the unhelpful certainty that her shoes fit wrong. Not painfully wrong. Just tight enough to be rude. The same went for the staff polo, which had always hung loose over her shoulders and now seemed to have opinions about her upper arms.

Dryer, she told herself. Bad dryer. Aggressive municipal water. Laundry shrinkage as a civic issue. Nothing supernatural had followed her home from the woods. Nothing had chased her up Mercer Hill. Nothing had made her bigger for half a minute and then left her with a body that felt half a click off from the one she had signed for at birth.

“June!” called a voice from the climbing wall. “Guess who finally remembered his chalk bag?” Eli Marquez stood under the wall with one hand raised like he expected applause. He was fourteen, narrow as a tent pole, and at the rec center often enough that June had stopped asking whether his parents knew where he was. They did. His mother taught chemistry two buildings over, and Eli spent most afternoons turning himself into a spider on the beginner routes while waiting for her office hours to end.

“Miracles happen,” June said. “Did you also remember how gravity works, or are we improvising that again?” Eli grinned and started buckling himself into a faded blue harness. Normally, June would have walked over, checked the waist belt, tugged the leg loops, made him recite the knot check because repetition saved kneecaps and lawsuits. Today, she looked down at the desk computer because the screen had gone briefly black and, for one awful second, showed her own reflection instead of the class schedule. Her face looked normal. Her shoulders did not.

She tugged at her polo collar. The fabric pulled back. Her pulse thudded once, hard. She thought of Mira’s voice that morning, thin with panic and trying to sound organized. I’m taller. I gained seven pounds. My abs— June had laughed because if she did not laugh, she would have had to admit that the word surge had been sitting under her tongue since midnight like a battery.

She meant to stand. She meant to check him. Instead, the desk phone rang, the printer coughed out a climbing waiver from 2019 for reasons known only to evil machines, and the memory of Mercer Hill unspooled again. By the time she looked back, Eli was already climbing.

The first shout snapped her back. It was not a scream. Not yet. It was Eli saying, “Uh, June?” in the careful tone of a kid trying not to become a problem. She looked up. He was fifteen feet off the mat, one foot smeared against a yellow hold, one hand locked above him, the auto-belay line twisted awkwardly behind his shoulder. His harness had ridden high on one hip, and the carabiner sat at an angle that made June’s stomach turn cold.

“Don’t move,” June said. Eli immediately moved. His foot slipped. The belay line caught, jerked, and jammed in the overhead pulley with a shriek of metal that cut through the whole gym. Two students at the free weights turned. Someone on the track slowed. Eli grabbed for the wall with both hands and hung there, legs bicycling once above open air.

June was already moving. The first step across the rubber floor felt normal. The second felt better than normal. By the third, she was moving too fast. Heat lit in her calves, bright and muscular, pouring upward through her thighs so hard she missed a breath. Her stride opened without permission. One second the climbing wall was across the gym; the next it was frighteningly close, the distance folding under her feet like it had been waiting for her to ask.

“Okay,” she muttered. “No. Not here.” Her body disagreed. The staff polo tightened first across her shoulders, the rec-center logo stretching as her ribs pulled in a deeper breath than the shirt had room for. Her sleeves squeezed her shoulders and upper arms. Her leggings pulled firm around her thighs, seams dragging as compact strength swelled into something longer and heavier. The floor seemed to drop an inch away from her face. Then two.

June hit the base of the wall and caught the belay line with both hands. The rope felt too thin. Her hands felt too broad around it. Eli looked down at her, eyes wide behind a crooked curl of hair. For one wild second, he seemed younger than fourteen, smaller than he should have been, as if the gym had shrunk around her and taken him with it.

“I said don’t move.” June yanked once. The jammed line snapped free so hard the pulley screamed overhead. Eli dropped six inches, then stopped cleanly. June planted one foot, braced, and felt her shoe strain at the sides as her weight settled through her legs like concrete poured full of lightning. The force should have dragged her forward. Instead, she held.

For three blazing seconds she was taller. Not giant. Not impossible enough for the room to understand what it was seeing. Just wrong. Five-eight, maybe. Five-nine if the universe was feeling theatrical. Her arms were thicker, biceps pronounced. Her polo sleeves had completely retreated upward. Her shoulders filled the shirt from seam to seam. Her legs felt coiled and huge beneath her, ready to sprint through the wall if sprinting became medically necessary.

Then the surge broke. It retreated in a rush that stole the strength from her knees. Her shoulders narrowed. Her sleeves loosened. The floor came back up toward her. The rope went ordinary in her grip, but June did not trust ordinary yet. She stayed braced until Eli reached the mat and unhooked with shaking hands. “You okay?” June asked, because staff training was stronger than a personal apocalypse. Eli nodded too fast. “Yeah. I think. That was—how did you get over here so fast?” “Motivational terror,” June said. “Very advanced technique. Do not attempt without supervision.”

The joke landed well enough. The students went back to pretending not to stare. Eli’s face kept its color. Nobody screamed. Nobody pointed. Nobody said, Hey, June, did you briefly become a different scale of human being next to the climbing wall? That was good. That was excellent. That was the sort of silence a person could build a denial system inside.

Then June looked down. Her shoes still pinched. Her leggings still pulled at the thighs, not much, but enough. The hem of her polo sat higher on her hips than it had twenty minutes ago. She tugged it down. It moved, then crept back over the new firmness at her waist. Her reflection in the long mirror beside the weight racks showed June Park again—short, damp with sweat, black hair escaping its ponytail, expression furious enough to classify as weather. But her shoulders had kept a little of the width. Her legs had kept a little of the power. The room had not quite returned to its original height.

She made it to the staff bathroom before she let herself breathe wrong. The door locked with a tiny metal click that sounded inadequate for the scale of the problem. June stood in front of the mirror above the sink and put both hands on the counter. Her arms were trembling. Not with weakness. With aftershock.

There was a height chart taped to the wall for summer-camp intake, cartoon otters climbing numbers in cheerful increments. June had mocked it every week since May. Now she kicked off her shoes, backed against the wall, and flattened her hair with one nervous palm. The otter nearest her eye line smiled in betrayal. Five-four.

She stepped away. Stepped back. Checked again. Still five-four. Half an inch more than Mercer Hill had left her with, and a full inch more than she had been yesterday morning. Half an inch was nothing. Half an inch was posture, hair volume, bad tape placement. Half an inch was also exactly the kind of thing she would have noticed sooner because June had spent her entire adult life being five-three with the defensive posture of someone willing to fight for every quarter inch. She stepped on it barefoot. The dial swung, wobbled, and settled at 118. She stared until the number blurred. Four pounds since yesterday morning. Half an inch today. Not a transformation. A receipt.

She lifted the edge of her polo and dared a peek before she could talk herself out of it. Her stomach was still mostly hers, flat from running and stubborn genetics, but there was a new firmness under the skin, a shallow gathering of muscle low across her abdomen that had not been there yesterday morning. Her thighs looked subtly heavier above the knee. Her calves had a runner’s line that had become something denser, as if the hill had left fingerprints inside her muscles.

For two seconds, the fear had company. A shameful, sparking little thrill. On Mercer Hill, she had felt fast enough to outrun the shape of her own life. At the wall, she had crossed the gym like distance was negotiable. The power of her momentary new self was useful. That was the dangerous word. Not monstrous. Not cursed. Useful.

June rinsed her face in cold water until her skin went numb, then texted the assistant director that she had a migraine and needed to leave early. This was not technically a lie. Her whole life had become a headache with legs. She checked on Eli one more time, made him redo his harness under direct supervision, confiscated his chalk bag for “emotional accountability,” and left the rec center through the side door before the afternoon fitness class could ask why she looked like she had tried to fistfight a treadmill.

By five p.m. the rain had begun again as June arrived at the Giant’s Rest. The bar occupied the ground floor of an old brick hotel downtown, all dark windows, warm lamps, and a carved wooden sign of a sleeping giant stretched along a mountain ridge. The place should have been quiet this early in the week. Instead, it hummed with professors, mill workers, students pretending they were not students, and the wet wool smell of Asterwick deciding not to go home yet.

June spotted Mira in a corner booth beneath a framed photograph of the old mill pond. For one second, all of June’s rehearsed jokes vanished. Mira looked like Mira had always looked, except slightly rearranged by impossible math. Taller in the booth. Shoulders cleaner under her jacket. Face pale with the terrible relief of seeing someone who might understand.

June slid into the seat across from her and winced when her thigh brushed the underside of the table sooner than expected. Mira noticed. Her eyes flicked down, then back up. “You first,” Mira said. June opened her mouth. A joke arrived, bright and useless. She swallowed it. Outside, rain scratched softly at the windows. Inside, the warmth of the bar pressed close around them, human and ordinary and not enough.

“I got bigger at work,” June said. “And I don’t think I shrank all the way back to normal.” Mira did not laugh. June had been counting on at least one helpless, disbelieving laugh, the kind Mira produced when the world became too stupid to respect. Instead, Mira reached across the table and placed one hand flat beside June’s wrist, not touching her, just close enough to prove she could.

“How much?” Mira asked. June stared at a nick in the tabletop, picking at the edge with one thumbnail. “Today? Half an inch. Four pounds. Since yesterday morning? One inch. Eight pounds. Thank you for subscribing to my horrible newsletter.” Mira shut her eyes. “Mine stayed. All of it. I woke up like this.” “Rude of your body to skip the preview period.”

“June.” “I know.” June looked over at her friend. “I know. I’m doing the thing where I keep talking so I don’t scream.” Mira’s expression softened, but not into comfort. Into recognition. “Since the cabin, I’m up an inch and seven pounds. Or I was this morning.” June went still. “Was?” Mira leaned back against the booth and glanced down at the new smooth rise across her chest and shoulders, suddenly self-aware. She adjusted her shirt and scrunched her shoulders trying to look smaller. It didn’t work. “At work, I lifted a fifty-pound bag of coffee like it forgot to be heavy and since then, everything fits worse. My shoes never signed up for my new feet, apparently.”

June blinked. “Grant saw?” “Grant heard me lie about using the hoist.” “So emotionally, yes.” Mira gave her a look. It was almost normal. That almost made it worse. “And you? Did anyone see?” June thought of Eli hanging above the mat, of the rope burning across her palms, of the mirror catching the wrong version of her for one electric instant. “A kid saw enough to ask how I crossed the gym so fast. I said motivational terror.”

Mira breathed out through her nose. “I don’t think that’s in the staff manual.” “It is now. I may even put it on a laminated poster.” For a moment, the joke held between them like a match in rain. Then Mira looked toward the bar, toward the windows, toward nothing June could see. “Do you think it was the cabin?”

June wanted to say no. She wanted to blame mushrooms, gas leaks, contaminated trail mix, one of those university research departments with too much grant money and not enough supervision. But the word cabin pulled at something under her ribs, the same place the surge had started before it ran down into her legs. “Yes,” June said. “And I bet we were not the first.” Mira’s eyes snapped back to her. “Why?”

A shadow fell across the table. “You two ready, or are we still solving the world’s problems?” the bartender asked. June and Mira went quiet at the exact same speed. The bartender stood beside the booth with a notepad in one tattooed hand and the kind of calm attention that made June immediately regret every word she had said above a whisper.

She wore a fitted black Giant’s Rest button-up, dark hair pinned in a loose, messy knot, a few strands falling beside a sharp cheekbone. Ink climbed both forearms and disappeared under her sleeves. Behind her, the bar’s warm lamps caught the silver hoops in her ears and the old sign over the taps: THE GIANT’S REST, EST. SOMETIME IN ASTERWICK.

Her gaze moved from Mira to June, then to the way they both kept their hands close to themselves. Not suspicious, exactly. Worse. Professionally unsurprised. Like she had overheard breakups, confessions, bad alibis, worse poetry, and enough late-night theories about the woods to have developed a private filing system.

“Giant Fries,” June said too quickly. “Please, Rhea.” Mira blinked. “And two Foggy Ales.” The bartender wrote without looking down. “Same as college, then. Except now one of you looks like she could carry the keg.” June and Mira both went still. The bartender glanced between them. “That was a joke, Holloway. Try breathing.”

“Great joke,” June said. “Loved it. No notes.” “You always had notes, Park.” The bartender tucked the notepad in her apron and turned away before June could answer, boots quiet against the old wood floor. June waited until she was behind the bar again before leaning closer. “How much of that do you think she heard?”

Mira looked toward the taps, where the bartender was already pouring a dark beer without looking back. “Enough that we should not say murder cabin at restaurant volume.” June lowered her voice. Around them, Giant’s Rest kept being loud in the exact wrong way, glasses knocking, chairs scraping, someone laughing too hard near the dartboard.

June leaned in and started talking barely above a whisper. “Anyway, back to what I was saying, because this whole thing feels like a pattern we walked into, not one that started with us.” Mira looked down at June’s hands. “Your surges come and go.” “Mostly.” “Mine doesn’t.” Mira said it flatly, but her knuckles whitened around the edge of the booth. “And if yours leaves residual behind every time—” “Then I’m going to end up in one of those Asterwick folktales,” June said. Mira shot her a worried glance, then looked down at herself like she was afraid the same thing might already be happening to her.

Rhea finally returned with their two beers and set them down without comment and returned to her duties. Mira reached for the beer, missed it by half an inch, and bumped the glass instead. It rocked, sloshing foam over the rim before she caught it with both hands. She stared at the spill as if it had betrayed her.

Then she said, very quietly, “We go back.” June’s first answer was automatic. “Absolutely not.” Mira looked at her. June held out for three seconds. Four, heroically. Then she looked down at her own hands, at the extra strength still sitting under the skin, her own clothing not sitting right anymore, and sank back into the booth. “Fine. But if the murder cabin has office hours, I am not respecting them.” Mira’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “This weekend?” “I hate you,” June said, and this time her voice shook enough that both of them heard it.