As always, as soon as Courtney shut the door behind her she headed straight for the television to tap the sound down from brain-piercing to merely annoying.
"Ah, relief at last..." Odelia smiled wanly at her niece. Courtney stared back with great interest.
"You are fatter."
Odelia cocked an eyebrow at her. "You only now figured that out? Aren't you the same girl who told me about my miles of butts?"
"But now you are fatter like this," the little girl clapped her hands in front of her as if about to pray and then slowly pulled the hands apart, spreading her arms wide. "And you are fatter like this." This time she layered one hand on top of the other, dropping the bottom one while raising the top.
Well, Odelia thought, it's finally happened.
She was not surprised. It was inevitable that her lengthening torso would eventually be noticed and commented on by somebody. If anything, it was amazing it had taken so long to happen.
Not only was she unsurprised to be found out, she felt more relieved than she did frightened.
The phenomenon had worsened to the extent that most of her legs now dangled beyond the bottom edge of her mattresses, and the hem of her toga fell high enough on her thighs to threaten indecency. If no one had noticed soon, she would have been forced to point it out herself by requesting a change in the design of her garments.
"You are fat and now your fatness has started to get fat too," the little girl said, her eyes wide and unblinking. "If your fatness's fatness gets fat next, do you know what way that will go?"
Odelia raised both eyebrows at that. "No, and I dearly hope not to find out."
"OK. I will not tell you." She plunked down onto the rumpled blankets Melanie had bedded down in for the past week and crossed her legs.
"Ummm... honey?" Odelia licked lips suddenly gone dry. "Do you know if your mommy has noticed my 'fatness's fatness,' too? Has she said anything about it?"
"Only when I asked. I asked what would happen if your fatness's fatness got fat, and she said maybe you will start rising up toward the ceiling next, and that she hopes you do because then," she slipped into her Melanie voice, "you will have to start producing, so we can build on to the house before you overflow it and get squeezed through the windows like toothpaste." She paused. "Uh-oh," she said. "I was not going to tell you."
"That's okay, honey," Odelia murmured, her mind racing.
This was a scenario Odelia's overactive imagination had hitherto spared her.
Surely she would die of suffocation long before there was enough of her to test the structural integrity of the building. Her lungs would be crushed under the burden of the flesh bearing down on them, her chest no longer able to rise and fall, and that would be the end of her.
Not that she could be certain of that. Logically, her heart should have given out months ago, but it hadn't. If her heart could take the strain, why would her lungs prove different? Maybe she really would end up being squeezed through the windows like toothpaste.
Panic gripped her as tightly as if the walls, floor, and ceiling were already squeezing her flat on all sides, and Odelia found herself vigorously shaking her head from side to side as if it was an etch-a-sketch in need of erasing. She bit her lip hard, using the pain to focus and clear her mind.
YOU ARE READING
Tipping the Scales
ChickLitOdelia has spent most of her life so firmly under her brother's thumb that she might as well have been an insect trapped in a chunk of amber, but now, at long last, something is happening to her. Too bad it's not a nice, normal, something, like a '...
