Tipping the Scales

Tipping the Scales, Chapter 20

Pencils, each and every one a Dixon Ticonderoga green and yellow ferruled number two soft lead, sprayed out of Odelia's ass, rattling against the wall of her bedroom like a hailstorm.

"MOM!" Brian yelled, "SHE'S DOING IT AGAIN!"

For the past two weeks, Odelia had created nothing but pencils. They were good pencils, first rate even, but hardly what Melanie had expected, hoped and planned for.

Odelia was pleased as punch with them.

Having been forced to eat hadn't been her downfall after all. In fact, it had provided her with the means to devise and pursue a different, less painful, avenue of defense.

One advantage of eating again was that her hunger had retreated to the point of clearing the cobwebs from her mind. Another was that she felt reasonably energetic again. Each day with her stomach full had left her feeling a little better, a little stronger, and a lot less inclined to accept her fate.

Melanie, she decided, had won a battle, but not yet the entire war. She did not fool herself that it hadn't been an important victory, but she'd be damned if she'd concede. Not yet, and possibly not ever.

Odelia had never known, never even suspected, that she might have so much fight in her. She'd never stood up to... well, to anyone. Ever.

Maybe it was the hopelessness of her situation enabling her to act recklessly. Why not be heedless of all consequences when you're doomed anyway?

Or maybe she'd always been braver than anyone, including herself, had given her credit for.

Either way, bravery was little use without an avenue by which to express it, so as soon as her hunger eased, she had set her reactivated brain to the task of finding one.

Now that food was once again flowing down her throat, she couldn't stop her body from producing objects out the other end, but those objects didn't, she reasoned, have to be what was on the pictures put in front of her.

Her first creations, the light bulbs, had been working copies of the burned out bulb she'd been looking at in the bathroom's fixture. Her next had been based on television images, and then she'd moved on to print advertisements, but always she had used a visual image of a desired object to spur creation. Until the day she had needed a new television remote, it had never occurred to her that these images weren't a necessary component of the mysterious process taking place inside her.

When making the remote, she hadn't even used a mental image. She had remembered the sensation of picking it up and holding it, of pressing its soft rubbery buttons. She had felt its memory clearly in the palm of her hand, and out it had come, an exact copy.

The process had worked equally well when she'd decided to make an iPhone for her own use.  She'd remembered how they looked, and how it felt to make one, and boom--there it was.

So, Odelia reasoned, if she could manage to hold the sense memory of a thing in her mind and ignore whatever visual distractions were put in front of her, she ought to be able to produce whatever she wanted, thwarting her tormentor.

Her TV had been returned, hooked up only to a DVD player rather than cable, with a piece of masking tape blocking the sensor of each device so no remote could turn them off. This set-up was currently treating her to a glowing close up of a Judith Leiber evening bag, a cunning little thing made of crocodile leather with eighteen carat gold hardware.

Odelia rolled an imaginary pencil across her fingers, all six of its sides clunking forward, then clunking back, until the memory of holding that pencil was so strong she fancied she could actually feel its smooth planes and jutting angles pressing into her skin. A flex of her abdomen later, another several dozen Ticonderogas shot forth like porcupine quills.