She looked once more at her reflection in the mirror and thought, Why not enjoy it while you can?
Then it hit her: How in hell was she going to explain this at work on Monday?
Like my new clothes? I think they make me look like a new person, don't you?
She rubbed her temples, realizing that she had chosen to keep her own hair.
She liked that very much; liked it right down to the ground.
The pleasant, seductive numbness of the painkillers began to pour over her body, and she decided to go lie down for a little while.
She was just putting her head onto the pillow when she noticed that all six matryoshkas were displayed across the top of her dresser. She tried to remember when she'd taken them apart and arranged them this way.
She stared at them, noting after a few seconds that their shapes were now oddly uniform, all like gourds growing progressively smaller, right down to the baby who was no longer a baby but Amanda as she'd been at four years old; the next showed her as she'd been this morning; the next, as she'd been a few hours ago; the others, so silent and still, illustrated the rest of the stages of her transformation, the last and largest of them a sublime reflection of the woman who now lay across the room staring at it.
She felt so soft...
...In the room the women come and go...
...and it was so good to feel this soft, and sexy...
...Talking of Michelangelo...
...no guard now, no hardness, my sisters, I understand how you feel...
...a breath, a sigh, then—drained and exhausted—she felt herself falling asleep—
—in the room the women come and go—
—and was startled back to wakefulness by sounds in the upstairs hallway; slow, soft, almost imperceptible sounds; tiptoeing sounds.
She breathed slowly, watching her breasts rise and fall in the shadows, imagining some lover passionately kissing them, tonguing the nipples—
—the front door opened, then closed.
She sat up, holding her breath.
Looking around the room, she saw that her closet door was now closed; it had been open when she’d fallen asleep, and her bedroom door, closed before, was now standing wide open.
Jesus Christ, she hadn’t been out for very long, just a few seconds, wasn’t it? Just a moment or two but the time didn’t really matter a damn, ten minutes or ten seconds because someone had been in here while she was asleep! She jumped off the bed and ran into the hall, saw that the bathroom light was on, and kicked open the door. No one was inside— —but the sink was empty. Just like the bathtub. And the laundry hamper. And the toilet tank and the portable cooler and all of the mason jars. She stormed back into her bedroom and snapped on the overhead light, then flung open her closet door.
She stared at her wardrobe and knew instinctively that something was missing; she couldn’t say what, specifically, had been taken, but she knew that the whole didn’t match up quite right.
She sat down on the bed and stared at her reflection in the mirror hanging on the inside of the closet door.
Damn if she wasn’t still a stunner.
Then she saw the matryoshka dolls behind her. No longer uniform in shape, they had returned to their original, disparate forms—a gourd, a pyramid, an oval, a pear, an egg, a seashell—but each of them now had one thing in common, one characteristic they hadn’t shared before:
None of them had a face.
Amanda took a deep breath, then checked the clock.
It was only twelve-thirty. The clubs didn’t close for another two hours and she wanted to be seen, to be admired, to feel pretty and wanted on this night.
It was nice to actually have the option for once.
She thought she knew what was happening, maybe. Maybe it would only be a matter of time, less than a few hours, and maybe she had all the time in the world and would be this gorgeous for the rest of her life, but either way she was going to make this evening count, goddammit!
She dressed quickly, purposefully choosing a pair of old jeans and a blouse that she knew she’d outgrown over a year ago.
Both fit wonderfully, hugging her form tightly, accentuating every wonderful curve. She threw an old vest on as well—which did wonders for emphasizing her bust—then unbuttoned not one, not two, but (for the first time in her life) three top buttons of her blouse, showing just enough of her freckles and cleavage and the slope of her breasts to make anyone want to see more. She checked her face in the bathroom mirror, under the harsh, unforgiving glow of the fluorescent light. No wrinkles, no bags, no blemishes; she needed no makeup. She looked...delicious. That made her smile, and brought a sparkle to her eyes. “What say we go out there and win one for the Gipper, eh?” She giggled, then Sparkle Eyes Amanda flowed out into the night.
6. The Water Doesn’t Know
Taking a shortcut through town in order to get to her pub before it closed, Amanda was driving down the side street which served as the location of the Altman Museum when she thought she heard someone scream—
—and knew she saw a figure running from behind the museum.
Later, she would remember feeling frightened yet oddly detached from herself—much like the state she’d been in after fleeing the church earlier.
She knew this wasn’t the safest area of the city, even during the day, but she nonetheless watched from a place outside her body as Sparkle Eyes pulled into a parking space beside the museum, got out of the car, and walked toward the small plat at the back of the museum that served as an ersatz-park where artists whose work was too big for indoor exhibition often displayed their pieces. Sparkle Eyes walked up to a bench that sat near the park’s entrance. Sparkled Eyes looked down at the thick sketch pad that was lying face-down in the grass. Sparkle Eyes kicked the pad over with her foot to see what the artist had been sketching—
—and that’s when Amanda found herself firmly reunited with her new body, because the pages facing her were covered not with drawings but with wide slashes of blood—as if whoever had been sketching had suddenly had their throat cut—
—or lost their hands, she thought.
She looked around, nervous, and only then realized that the sculpture of the grieving women that had been such a crowd-drawing showpiece for the Altman was gone.
In its place, a new bas-relief piece had been incorporated into the museum’s outside back wall.
Looking once more at the blood-drenched sketch pad lying at her feet, Amanda approached this new piece.
For a moment she forgot to breathe, she was so stunned by what she saw.
A massive curtain of bluish-gray flowstone hung before her, its surface shimmering and shifting like sand beneath incoming waves at high tide. She had no choice but to think of it in terms of liquid, for everything about the image embedded in the curtain seemed to ripple.
The piece was of a woman, lying on her back, naked from the center of her chest upward, her hair cascading to the left as if draped over a pillow. Her arms were crossed over her center, the right slightly higher than the left, and her hands, their fingers slightly bent as if about to clutch at something unseen, unknown, were pressing down against the rest of her body, which was hidden underneath a wide sheet.