The house was silent.
Odelia had never experienced silence so close to complete. If she strained, she could hear the occasional truck growling past in the distance, or a dog barking. But that was all.
It was eerie.
She had been alone before, plenty of times, but it was one thing to have nobody to interact with for two solid weeks, and another level of isolation entirely to also have nothing whatsoever with which to interact: nothing to do, no tasks to accomplish, no books to read, no television, no live electrical socket with which to recharge the dead battery of her finally retrievable iPhone, and no means by which to acquire any of those things.
The power hadn't been shut off at the source; they had only flipped the circuit breakers off, not called the power company. But for all the good knowing that did her, the electrical panel might as well have been on Mars instead of in the garage.
Instead of trying to use her old, dead iPhone, she could make a new one with a fully charged battery, or a battery pack with which to recharge the old one, but either would die in turn in a couple of hours. Whereupon she would have to make another... and then another... Two weeks of such discards would provide Melanie with several thousand dollars worth of eBay merchandise as a reward for her sadism.
Odelia eyed her vat of swill and the untouched hose attached to its tap, curling across the floor to her bedside, waiting to be used as a straw. Don't you do it... not one sip. That bitch is not coming home to so much as a single new pencil.
At least, she realized with a surge of relief, she could sit up and stretch without fear of discovery. Brightening considerably, she swayed upward.
But instead of swooping straight to the ceiling, she found her midsection struggling to support the weight. She tried again, flinging herself upward, but instead of rising, her torso sagged down, puddling into her abdomen, which swelled, ballooning outward until her skin felt like it might burst. With a gasp of pain, she gave up and plopped back down.
Her heart racing, Odelia forced herself to take long, slow, calming breaths. There was an explanation, she just needed to think, she just...
Of course...
When she had been able to stretch to the ceiling, she had been using the rigidity of her hip bones to brace the weight of her upper body against, but now that they were floating loose in her flesh like ice cubes in a bowl of punch, that was no longer possible.
Oh dear Christ... If the change that had increased her flexibility to that of a worm had done so by disassociating so many of her bones that her flesh could no longer support itself, had she LOST more mobility than she'd gained...? What would her life be like if she couldn't move even to exercise?
Her imagination immediately began running a slide show of horrors.
click There she was, utterly helpless, inactivity having sapped her strength to the point she was little more than a formless blob of protoplasm.
click Why, looky there! It's Odelia again, entombed in Melanie's new dungeon with a feeding tube stuffed down her gullet to drip swill through.
click Aren't those pictures of gems being strobed into her clamped-open eyes, like she's the rapist in Clockwork Orange? Why, yes indeedy, I believe they are...
click And isn't that Brian, encased in a hazmat suit, shoveling her precious, sparkly poop into garbage bags? Or could it be Courtney? My, how she's grown!
YOU ARE READING
Tipping the Scales
Chick-LitOdelia 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 '...
