(Rose)
The sun and the sky made me dizzy.
It feels like winter here is still warmer than the warmest of England’s summers.
The city reefs are lush. Oceanic lush.
In the distance there is the Amazonian lush still visible.
I don’t believe we will find a working boat in these ruins around here. They’re too old and decay too advanced.
There’s no clouds above. I feel warm, and melancholic for a moment.
I’m sure we could live around here for a while. But something from the east churns inside my veins even now.
Nokarlık swims around like a fish now. She’s enjoying it.
I wish you could have seen her.
My bones ache. I stretch, making a few popping sounds. I keep thinking about the time when azure channels stretched below a golden city, and we were fishing with bows and weightless threads.
It was a world and many lives away...
The sun is blinding me.
It feels unreal, but this is simply another day.
~
I dove and swam in the caves of the building sunk into a coastal reef just below.
It’s another underwater city, with more oceanic blue tints.
My shunt, the trick on my lungs and circulatory system, is still partially active. My body is slowly turning back to normal I can feel. It’s interesting to notice this ever-changing aspect of biological mechanisms.
I can still enjoy a good minute or two below the surface holding my breath.
The shining surface is azure too here. A sheet clouding the sky when you’re below.
In the ruins, I find only mould, algae and corrosion. Above, I find my merry daughter.
She found and collected a lot of bugs and other unidentified plants or small animals to taste.
I get the impression she has a sweet tooth for things that are soft and squishy like jelly.
She tries them all. She barfs most of them back. I’m caressing her back and holding her shoulder. I’ve become more lenient against that habit of hers.
I love you.
My heart bumps a little more heavily inside my chest as I care for you.
~
We slowly make our way back to auntie Blume, or surrogate mother as she says.
The other part of me, struggling with her ideal and pragmatic life.
She is smiling rather well though. A very bright and familiar smile.
She cooked. Nokarlık wolfs down the food. She’s not picky yet. And she eats more than humanly possible, in the old days.
R – I am curious about your body now.
N – ?
R – Let’s see how tall you can grow tomorrow, hm?
Nokaranlık is puzzled and Blume intrigued.
I’m pretty sure we will never find neither boat nor computer here anyway. So we’ll test something else instead.
The full extent of her hidden power.
~
Blume is standing on top of a reef, the summit of a skyscraper above water.
I’m on top of the next one.
Between us, closer to me, Nokarlık is in the water listening to my voice. She’s a little anxious. I probably would be too.
She struggles for a few minutes, but then, it unlocks.
At the unreal speed of a body soft and quiet moment, she began to grow.
In shallow waters she pushes around, her feet reached the sand and rubbles. She grew a good head above me without any other noise but the sea. Her face is about as big as I’m tall now.
She became seemingly bald as the pelt didn’t follow the same way.
She lost balance and clung to my spot. Her hands as big as me held the roof of that building to avoid her fall.
I touched and reassured her. I could feel her heartbeat.
Where is the organic limit to a human architecture? What size or volume? Nightmare would know.
I don’t think she would have made this child able to grow to a size where its organs, circulatory systems or skeleton would be unable to support it. I have faith in her for doing her work right. But the details of such metabolism are beyond me. All I can do is observe and think.
N – Ros...
Her voice sounds very different. I’m not sure why, but her size changes it deeply.
I hold my hands against one of her fingers. It’s warm and feels like a normal body, though the skin feels now like a very hard and thick leather.
R – You can do it Nok. I’m with you.
Nokaranlık removes slowly her hands, adjust her stance and grows even further.
She was already at least ten metres tall. Now she reaches easily twenty... She’s gigantic.
Her weight seems odd I notice. She’s unstable on her feet.
She crouches down in the water, to reach my height. She sits in the shallow waters really. I would have to swim to reach her.
N – I feel weird...
Her voice is. I help her focus on deeper breaths and recover from her dizziness.
Her scalp itches, she scratches it regularly. I can’t see what her pelt became. It seems gone inside her skull.
I hold onto her finger. The hard skin leather feels like a tree, but seems otherwise still normal.
I warned her, and use a knife to make a cut through her skin.
I remove a pound of skin, without reaching nerves or blood. She barely felt anything.
I dig the flesh deeper till I hit a vessel. The blood looks more fluid and travelling at higher pressure. But it’s also more reactive to coagulate the minimal wound rapidly. It itched her more than anything.
She goes to lick her finger while I bag the large block of skin flesh that I ripped out for later analysis.
N – Not eat Ros?
R – No I won’t eat you. Though I would love to pinch your giant cheeks!
She brings an open hand to me to hop on. Alright... I climb a finger and reach a wide palm. It briskly rises me to her face. I felt the acceleration and almost lost balance.
Her eyeballs are huge. It’s spooky. I notice that her eyelashes have disappeared along with her brows. I check closer as she closes an eye for me.
The hair is still there, but it has not turned gigantic. So it seems to disappear. That’s intriguing. All parts of her body can change size, except for hair. Her body can store and make appear duplicate cells of everything, even dry skin, except that.
Her eyes still seem lubricated normally as she blinks. Her body is adapted for such size there too.
Then I check her teeth. Her open mouth is as I expected. As normal as a giant mouth can be. Damp, smelly, fleshy.
Though something did change. They grew in proportion, but their black colour turned into a pale greyish enamel. They are harder to my touch now, but might still be soft to hers. Her jaw muscles could probably break rocks now.
She twitches. I’m tickling her as I examine her like that.
But we’re good for today. I tell her we can return to normal for now.
She extends her hand a little further but not much down.
She looks at me funny as I stand there on her hand, holding onto her fingers.
I know that look...
It’s a cat’s look.
R – No... Nok, no!
Before I can do anything, I’m plunged into dark and hot flesh. The moist walls wrestle me around.
I don’t have time to properly panic as I can’t believe what has just happened to me.
I get constricted until I can barely breathe.
I fall into a pool of acid where I definitely can’t breathe.
Now I panic.
That can’t be how I meet my fate!
Everything suddenly is shaking. A shockwave hits. I’m crushed again.
Then I feel like my entire body is crushed, dissociated, and kept whole at the same time.
For a brief moment, I feel like I’m lying in a void, without gravity. It feels... odd.
I know what happened.
She shrunk back.
She crushed me into another space...
I can’t believe it.
A minute ago, I could still feel the warmth of the air and hear the waves.
Now it’s just an empty void, and probably not much of a real body left to feel anything again...
~