Something's In Here

It was ten past two and you were the only thing awake in the house.

Everything had gone down to one lamp in the corner and the light off the television, and you had stopped watching whatever was on it a long time ago. It had turned into company somewhere around midnight, a noise to keep the walls busy while you lay back into the corner of the couch with the remote loose in your hand, and you had let it run because picking the remote up would have meant admitting you were going to be awake for a while yet.

Then the picture went sideways and left.

Not off. It slid. The image dragged itself out of the right side of the frame the way a page gets pulled off a desk, sound going with it in the middle of a word, and the fifty-five inches on your wall stopped being a bright thing and became a black rectangle with your own dim shape sitting in the middle of it.

You looked at it. You always look at it. There is a thing that happens when a screen dies at night in a room where you are on your own, half a second where the glass stops being a surface and turns into a hole, and the animal in the back of your skull leans forward and checks the hole. You have been doing it since you were small. You did it now, out of pure habit, with your heart perfectly steady, and your reflection looked back at you orange from the lamp, and behind your reflection was your living room, and behind your living room was the dark inside the glass.

The dark inside the glass had a room in it.

It took a second to understand you were looking through and not at. There was a floor back there. There was a doorway standing open onto a deeper black, and off to the right a window with nothing behind it, no street, no sky, just the flat nothing of a window that has never had a view. It was the room you have always privately assumed was back there. It was the room your head builds for you at three in the morning when the house makes a noise, an anywhere-room with a door somebody left open, and it had apparently been sitting behind your television the entire time waiting for you to check.

Something came into it fast from the left and hit the inside of the glass with both hands.

The screen webbed. Two white starbursts opened under two palms, one under each, and threw out lines that raced to the bezel and crossed and threw out finer lines of their own, and the whole panel crazed like ice on a puddle with a boot coming down on it. The picture did not break. It kept working inside the ruin, every shard of it still lit, so the tea-dark room behind her repeated itself in a hundred slivers all over your wall.

You did not move. You could not afterward tell anyone why you did not move.

Her hands were the first thing you understood, because her hands were the part pressed flat against your side of the world.

They were the wrong size for a house. Each palm covered a quarter of the panel and the fingers were spread wide off it, pushed bloodless white at the pads where they bore down, every finger thicker than two of yours laid together. Her thumb alone would have covered your eye and most of your cheek. And the nails on the ends of them were short and blunt and bitten down, unpainted, perfectly ordinary, which was somehow the first thing about her that made the back of your neck go cold.

Above the hands, her forearms filled what was left of the frame, and once you had looked at those you were not going to look anywhere else for a while.

They did not narrow the way a forearm narrows. Each one came off the wrist and immediately doubled, braiding itself into a mass of cabled meat thicker through its belly than your own calf, and pressing on the glass loaded them, and loaded they turned into a diagram of themselves. Every separate flexor stood up along the top as its own hard rope, three of them, four, packed side by side and shoving each other for room, the skin between them sunk into grooves that held their own shadow. The whole architecture rolled and reorganized every time her fingers ground down. And over all of it, the veins. Not a scatter of veins. A drainage system. One trunk came up out of the back of her right hand as thick as a garden hose, forked twice crossing the wrist, and climbed the length of the arm in a slow serpentine, throwing branches off into finer vessels that spidered away under the surface, the whole network standing proud of the muscle and throbbing in a slow heavy rhythm that had nothing to do with the stuttering light behind her and everything to do with a heart considerably larger than yours.

Her skin was wet. She was glossed all over, beaded, running, shining in a way that put a hard white highlight down every raised edge so that nothing on her could hide, and where the slick gathered along the top of that forearm it ran off the point of her elbow and out of the picture.

The glass creaked. Small dry ticks as new fractures opened, one after another, and somewhere behind the set a lag bolt turned a degree in drywall it had held without complaint for six years.

Then she brought her face down between her own hands, and she was grinning at you.

Nothing about the face was what your body had braced for. She was young and soft-featured and round at the cheek, with a small straight nose and short dark brown hair chopped messy and sticking up in wet spikes. Heavy dark lashes. Eyes more olive than hazel, huge and interested, catching what little light there was and throwing it back at you. It was a sweet face. It was the kind of face you would have held a door open for without thinking about it.

And the grin on it was the widest thing you have ever seen a human head do. Every tooth. Corners hooked up almost into those big lashes, cheeks packed high, the whole width of her lower face given over to it, and it was not a smirk and it was not cruelty. It was delight. It was the pure uncomplicated joy of something that has waited a very long time at a door and has finally heard the latch go.

She saw you seeing her and the grin got bigger. Her fingers splayed wider and squeaked on the glass, and the ticking of the cracks sped up, and behind her shoulder a strip light somewhere out of frame stuttered twice and held, and lit up what she had instead of a body.

She filled that little room the way furniture fills a doll's house. The doorway behind her was a normal doorway and the top of its frame sat down below her collarbone, and she was not standing anywhere near straight. She was bare. Not stripped, not undressed, simply bare, the way a thing is bare that has never had any reason to own anything, and every wet inch of her was on display against the inside of your television.

Her mouth moved and you heard her through the wall.

"There's nothing there," she said.

The tone was all wrong for it. Cheerful. Bright. She said it the way you would read out a fortune cookie, and then she said it again, tasting it, turning it over, and the grin spread.

"It's just the television. Go back to sleep."

She got her right hand through first.

Under the heel of it a section of the crazed panel simply stopped being a solid and went granular, pouring down inside the bezel like spilled sugar and leaving a hole in your television with a real room on the far side of it. Her hand came through the hole into the air of your house, groped down, found the bottom edge of the set, and closed on it, and you heard the plastic housing crush flat inside her fist.

Then she pulled, and the wall mount started to scream.

That is the sound that stayed with you. A rising metallic complaint from behind the set as four bolts in plasterboard were asked to carry a weight nobody had ever put on a scale. The whole unit tipped forward two degrees and hung there. Plaster dust came down the wall in a fine gray curtain and settled on the shelf below. And she hauled herself up into the opening, and the opening was smaller than her, and that did not turn out to matter.

Her shoulder was always going to be the problem.

She had to turn it and drive it in at an angle, and the deltoid that came grinding through the ruined frame was not a shoulder in any sense your hands have ever learned. It was a boulder that had been given a job. It sat capped on the top of her arm like a shot put welded there, and as she twisted to force it through, the cap split visibly into its three heads: the front one bunching into a hard round mound that rose up level with her own jaw, the middle one flaring out into a shelf that overhung the arm below by inches, the rear one knotting up behind and dragging the whole assembly wider. The skin over the crown of it had been drawn so thin that the striations came through in raked lines, dozens of them fanning across the dome like the ribs of a shell, and there were finer lines inside those lines, feathering off at angles, subdividing until the surface of her shoulder looked like a chart of itself.

It was wider than the space it was going through. So the space changed. Another six inches of your television gave way with a crunch of laminate, the top edge of the frame bending up and out, and she wedged that glossed dome through the wreck of it and it came out the other side glittering with sugar-fine glass, and it had not marked.

Behind the shoulder came the slope that fed it, and the slope was worse.

There was no line where her neck ended. The trapezius rose out of the top of that shoulder in one continuous ramp of muscle running all the way up to the base of her skull, thick as a rolled carpet, and when she strained against the frame the ramp stood up in hard ridges and swallowed the sides of her throat completely. A vein climbed the side of that throat, forked at the hinge of her jaw, and beat there against the skin of a pretty cheek. Her soft young face sat down into the top of all of it, cushioned, ridiculous, beaming out of the middle of a shrugging mountain that had put a girl's head on itself as an afterthought.

The bracket lost two of its four bolts with a soft ugly cough and the set dropped six inches and hung crooked and held.

And that was where she stayed for a moment. Half in and half out, one hulking hand clamped on the bottom edge of the frame, her whole torso through and leaning down into your living room, the ruined light of that other place behind her, the strip lamp back there stuttering on and off and on so that she arrived at you in pieces, a black shape and then a fully lit sculpture and then a black shape again.

She looked around. She looked at your ceiling and your bookshelf and the dead mug on the arm of the couch, cataloguing, unhurried, the way something checks the ground before it puts its weight down. Then she found your face again and the grin widened past where it should have been able to go.

"Did you hear that?" she said, in a delighted whisper meant to carry. "Did you hear something?"

She came out the rest of the way in one long shove and the whole set came with her.

The bracket surrendered its last two bolts, the television left the wall, and she rode the wreck of it down and hit your floorboards on both hands and one knee. The ground floor of the house registered the arrival. Three boards under her right palm cracked audibly. The lamp jumped. The mug walked half an inch across the wood and stopped.

Then she came forward, low, and you got her back.

She crawled the way a thing crawls when crawling is not a humiliation but a gear. Elbows out, chest hanging low between her shoulders, weight rolling from one arm to the other, and every roll opened her.

Her lats came off her ribcage like two doors swinging. They started high, right up under the arms, and they went out and down and out again, past any width a person has business having, until the outer edge of each one stood so far off her body that her arms could not hang at her sides at all and had to ride out and away from her, forced there by the sheer thickness of what was underneath them. At the top of each reach they flared wider still and simply ate the wall behind her. The doorway to your kitchen was over her left shoulder. It was a normal door in a normal house, and she was wider, and not by an inch, and both of you would have known it if either of you had been thinking about doorways.

Down the centre of all that ran a trench. Her spine had disappeared into a channel between two ropes of erector muscle, a groove so deep and so dark that the lamplight went into it and did not come back, and either side of it the muscle branched off in feathered ranks all the way down her ribs, each rank overlapping the next like tiles on a roof, each one cut away from its neighbour by a groove you could have laid a finger in. The skin was pulled over the whole structure so tight and so thin that where it crossed the edge of a slab it went pale the way skin goes pale over a knuckle, and everywhere else it just shone.

When she shifted onto her left arm the entire left side of it reorganized itself, and it made a sound. A low fibrous creak, the noise a full rope makes taking a load, coming out of the inside of a living body eight feet from your knees.

And all of it gathered into a waist. That was the obscene part, the part that made the rest of her read as a joke somebody was telling at your expense. All that continent of back came down and cinched into a stem you could nearly have got your hands around, and then bloomed out again below it into hips and thighs.

She crawled toward you at the height of a large dog with her sweet round face beaming up at you the whole way, and she talked while she came, in that bright wrong tone, using sentences that had clearly been picked up somewhere else and worn smooth by other mouths.

"Turn it off," she said pleasantly. "Turn it off, turn it off."

Then, closer, conspiratorial, with real happiness in it: "It's just the house settling."

She stopped four feet from the couch, rose up onto her hands, rocked her weight back over her hips, and locked out her right arm, and the triceps loaded.

You were looking straight down the length of it. The back of that arm hung off the bone in three separate lobes, the long head dropping a slab of meat a full hand-span from armpit to elbow, the lateral head standing above it in a hard flat plane, and where the two met there was a canyon cut down between them deep enough to hold a pencil and lose it. As she pressed her weight forward the whole assembly went from big to something else. It swelled and set and drew itself up into a wedge with an edge on it, and the skin over it stretched away to nothing, and through that nothing the horseshoe carved itself out in one movement, every fibre printing through from underneath in bright hard lines. A vein as thick as your thumb lay along the belly of it, dove into the canyon, and came out of the other side fatter.

Both arms shivered. Not from strain. From wanting to go.

She dropped her chin and looked at your throat, and the grin sharpened at the corners without getting any smaller.

"Are you still watching?" she said.

And then it did not happen.

You would like to be able to say you did something. You did not do anything at all. You sat on your own couch in a dark house with a monster four feet from your knees and your pulse going like a bird in a box, and somewhere underneath all of that, which was real, which never entirely went anywhere, another thing had been quietly assembling itself since the first forearm, and at the exact moment she cocked that arm to come down on you it finished, and it was not fear.

You wanted her.

You had been looking at that body for two minutes and something in you had made its decision without asking, and now here she was, wet and slabbed and monstrous on your floorboards with her back opened out like a cathedral door, and everything in you that should have been running was doing something else instead, and you were not hiding it, because it had not once occurred to you that you might need to.

And she saw it land.

She had been reading you the whole time. Not your face, the rest of it, the small tight signals a body puts out when it knows it is about to be taken, and what came off you now was not on any list she had.

The grin stayed. That was what made it terrible to watch. The grin stayed exactly where it was, stranded on her face like a light somebody forgot to switch off, and above it her eyes went round. All the way. Lashes flaring, pupils blowing out into two black coins, her chin pulling back into the slab of her own neck the way a horse shies from a thing in the road. Her head jerked an inch. The braced arm shook once, hard, and she slammed the other hand down to catch herself and the boards banged.

Beside her ear the air cracked. A hard little spark went off in it, orange for half a second, gone, and she did not flinch at it and did not see it, because she was too busy staring at your face.

Then she stopped completely. Everything else in the room kept going, dust turning in the lamplight, the wrecked screen ticking as it cooled, and she did not, not for four full seconds, crouched on your floor with her palms flat and every colossal thing about her holding perfectly, quiveringly, in place.

The triceps were the part you could not stop looking at. Both arms still locked, still loaded, still holding an entire launch that suddenly had nowhere to go, and the muscle in them began to tremble, a fine visible flutter running through those stacked lobes as the order went out and came back unfilled. She had made a fist without noticing. She had cocked one knee under her for the drive and it was still cocked.

"That's," she said, and stopped. She looked down at her own hands on the boards, then back up at you, and something in the mechanism of her had jammed so completely that she tried to start the sentence three separate times.

Her voice had changed. It had come down out of the walls and got small and light and unsteady, a girl's voice arriving from behind two hundred pounds of shoulder, and it did not fit her anywhere.

"You're doing it wrong," she said.

You did not say anything.

"They go small." She shifted her weight and one gigantic hand came up off the floor and made a helpless gesture at you, at all of you, sitting there. "All of them. Every single one, they fold up little and they go quiet and cold and then it's over, that's how it, that's the whole." She ran out of it. She leaned in instead, that huge wet body creaking down onto its elbows, and brought her face close to yours and searched it, breathing fast and shallow, hunting for the thing that was supposed to be there.

"I'm not doing it wrong," you said.

The blush came up her throat in a slow flood. You could watch it climb, red spreading up through the corded slope of her neck and into that soft round face and out to the tips of her ears, and her eyes dropped and came back and dropped again, and her hands opened and closed on your floorboards, and the boards groaned.

"You like it," she whispered. It came out wrecked. "You're looking at me and you. Oh."

And then something happened that neither of you had any warning about.

She swelled.

Not much. Just enough to be unmistakable. It ran up through her while she knelt there, a slow warm surge starting somewhere behind her sternum and going outward, and her chest thickened in front of you.

You had not properly seen her chest until it moved. It was not a chest. It was two slabs, laid flat and heavy across the front of her ribs, each one deeper front to back than her own head was long, with no softness anywhere on either of them and no give in the way they sat. The trench between them was a genuine cleft, four inches of shadow running from the base of her throat down to where her stomach started, and the slick pouring off her had gathered in it and was running down it in a bright thread. Across the top of each slab the striations came in from the shoulder in feathered fans, dozens of hard lines all pointing inward, and along the upper edge of the left one a vein surfaced while she knelt there and fattened from a cord to a rope and climbed toward her collarbone.

She felt it happening. Her mouth fell open. She put one catastrophic hand flat on herself, over the top of that slab, and her palm did not cover it, could not come close to covering it, and she felt the muscle push back up against her own hand and rise a fraction further while she held it there.

She looked down at herself, then at you, then back down at herself with her eyebrows up in the middle, exactly like a girl who has just been handed something and does not know whether she is allowed to keep it.

"It's going in," she said. Very quietly, to nobody. "It's going in and it's staying."

She went over backwards onto the boards, propped herself on her shoulders, threw both arms into the air and flexed them.

She did not decide to. You could see that. Her body had exactly one motion in it that was not a kill and it went off like a reflex the second she understood she was being looked at and wanted, and she got it wrong. That is the part you will think about for the rest of your life. She got the elbows too high and the fists too far apart, and she frowned, and adjusted, dropped the elbows, drew her fists in beside her ears, and there was a whole second where she was just a person trying to remember how something goes.

Then she squeezed, and there was nothing amateur about it at all.

The near arm came up and the room got smaller. The bicep rose off the bone the way ground rises into a hill and it did not stop where a hill stops. It climbed past the top of her own shoulder, past the line of her jaw, and crested into a dome larger than her head, and her sweet round face was sitting right there beside it for scale so there was no arguing about it: her whole skull would have been lost inside that arm with room left over.

The crown of it was split. A clean valley ran the length of the peak and cut the mass into two distinct heads, the inner one stacked slightly higher than the outer so the whole thing sat up in tiers, a hill with a second hill on top of it. As the squeeze tightened, the crest crowded forward until it pressed against the meat of her own forearm and had nowhere left to go, and then it kept swelling anyway, and the two heads shoved apart to make room they did not have, and the valley between them sank until it would have taken three of your fingers.

The skin over the peak had stopped being a surface and become a window. Every fibre in the muscle printed through it in hard bright cords, fanning up out of the crook of her elbow and over the crown, and where two cords crossed, finer lines ran off at angles and subdivided again, so the top of her arm read like an anatomy chart that somebody had drawn and then drawn over. And the veins fed it. One trunk climbed out of the forearm, crossed the elbow, split at the base of the peak, and ran up both sides of that valley in ropes that stood a clear finger's width off her skin, and every branch of them was filling and settling and filling again in time with something enormous going on inside her chest.

Then the arm made a noise. A low fibrous creak out of the inside of it, the sound leather makes on a saddle just before it takes a rider, and it was clearly audible across four feet of dark living room.

At the top of all of it, her fist. Small. Neat. Pink at the knuckles. Completely irrelevant.

Below her the pose had spread her legs out along the boards, and even lying there doing nothing the near thigh was wider through the middle than her own waist, and the floor complained under it.

She held the flex and she watched your face the entire time. Not the arms. Your face.

"Is this," she said. Her voice went up and thinned out on it. "Is this the. Is this the one."

She was asking. That was what took the floor out from under you: this screen-breaking, board-cracking piece of ordnance lying on her back on your floor with both arms up, checking whether she had picked the right muscle.

"That's the one," you said.

You watched the words land and you watched what they did.

The peak grew. Right in front of you, inside the held pose, the crown of that bicep rose another quarter inch and then another, easing upward like something being filled by a slow pump, the split at the top pulling wider as the two heads pushed apart, the skin whitening at the tightest point of the stretch. A vein you had not seen before surfaced across the belly of the muscle, thin, then the width of a pencil, then past it, crawling toward her armpit while you watched it go.

Her breath caught. She made a sound she had plainly never made before, high and small and completely wrecked, and it did not fit her body even slightly.

"It's doing it while you look," she got out. "It's doing it right now, that's, nnh."

"Do it again," you said.

She squeezed harder and both peaks answered, and this time you heard the skin over them creak.

She sat up so fast the floor knocked, and sitting up folded her, and folding her turned her stomach into masonry.

Eight blocks in two columns, and they were not the neat little tiles off a fitness poster. They were slabs, thick as bricks and standing proud of one another, each one crowned and rounded by the mass behind it, and the trenches between them ran deep enough that the lamplight could not find the bottom of any of them. The rows did not lie flat, they stepped, each course standing out over the one below it, so that the whole front of her had a terraced, structural look, like the underside of something built. Down each flank the obliques came in at an angle in overlapping fingers, layer on layer, and they had grown so thick that they crowded the columns from both sides and shoved the blocks up and out. A bead of slick running down from her sternum hit the top row and had to find its way around it.

And the waist stayed small. That was the thing that made the whole assembly indecent. All that brickwork sat in a span you could have nearly closed your hands around.

She had not noticed her own stomach. She was busy. She had dropped her left arm to brace on the boards and put the right one up on its own, elbow high beside her head, and she had turned to look at it herself.

Another spark cracked in the air by her temple, bright orange, there and gone. She laughed at it. A real laugh, loud and startled and young, out of a body that could have pulled your front door out of the wall.

"That's from the hole," she said, jerking her chin back at the ruin on your floor, offhand, as if it explained itself. "It's still open and I'm bigger than I was. It comes off the edges."

Then she looked back at the arm and her face went slack.

"It's bigger." She turned it slowly, examining the peak from underneath, and the whole dome rolled and resettled with the movement. "It's bigger than it was. It never gets bigger. It's the same, it's always exactly the same, every single time, I take everything they've got and I wake up exactly the." She stopped. "Now it's bigger. And you didn't even do anything. You just looked at it."

"Twenty-six inches," you said.

She blinked at you. "What's that?"

"It's how far around that arm is. It's more than my thigh."

She made a noise like she had been touched somewhere she had never been touched, and the arm surged in front of both of you, thickening visibly through the belly of the peak, the crest driving up until it crushed against her forearm and stopped and then went on regardless, sideways, wider, because there was nowhere else left for it.

Her eyes came up, huge and greedy and mortified all at once.

"That's too small now," she said. "Isn't it. Say a bigger one."

"Thirty."

She whimpered. The peak climbed again and the skin over the crest went glassy and a second vein came up over the top of it and lay there fattening, and she watched her own arm do it with her mouth open.

"Give me your hand," she said. Then, immediately, in a much smaller voice, "Please. Sorry. Can I have your hand."

You gave it to her. She took it between two fingers and a thumb, so carefully that it was almost comic, and laid your palm flat against the crown of the bicep and held it there, and kept the flex, and watched your face.

Your hand covered about a third of it. Under it the muscle was hot and dense and had no give anywhere, not the smallest amount, hard the way a river stone is hard after a whole day of sun, and you could feel every rope of vein standing up under your fingers with its own pulse in it. And while you held it there, it grew. You felt it happen. The whole mass pushed up into your palm and lifted your hand a fraction off where it had been, and the skin under your fingers pulled tighter, and something deep inside the arm gave a small creak of protest and made room anyway.

She was not looking at her arm. She was looking at your face while you felt it.

"Did it do it?" she asked. "It did it, didn't it. I can't always tell." She was breathing fast. "Tell me when it does it. I want somebody to tell me when it does it."

Then she lay down on her side on your floorboards and folded her arms in front of her and let you look.

There was no pose left in it, and that was what finished you. She lowered herself down the way big animals lower themselves, in stages, with a long complaint from the wood the entire way and a series of soft ticks afterwards as the boards settled around a weight nothing in the house had been built for. She got her hip under her, stacked her knees, laid one forearm across the other in front of her chest, and stopped performing.

The huge grin came down into something much smaller. A closed private curl at one corner of her mouth, eyes low and steady under those heavy lashes, cheeks still pink. A girl who has worked out that she is allowed to be admired and has decided to hold very still in case it stops.

Lying on her side put her thighs in profile, one stacked over the other, and the upper one was the largest single thing in your house.

It came off her hip in a sweep so wide that its outer edge rose above the line of her own waist, and then it ran, and ran, a column of packed density that refused to taper the way a leg tapers, holding its thickness the whole way down before it finally gathered above a knee that had almost vanished under everything pouring over it. Along the top the vastus stood up in a long unbroken ridge that rose and fell like a hillside, and it was pronounced enough to throw its own shadow down the muscle beneath it. The front of the leg was split into separate running bellies, each one its own rope of meat under that varnished skin, and the groove between the two innermost of them ran the entire length of the thigh, deep enough at its deepest that your whole hand would have gone in and not touched anything. Just above the knee the teardrop sat alone, a knot the size of a fist, bunched hard even at rest. Where the upper leg pressed down on the lower one it flattened and spread, and the spreading only shoved the rest of it higher.

Over all of it the veins had made a country. Trunks came down from the hip and branched at the middle of the leg and branched again, into vines, into threads, the whole delta standing up under skin the wetness had turned to glass, filling and easing in slow rhythm.

She breathed and the thigh moved. Not a flex. Just the ordinary shift of a body at rest, and half a stone of muscle rolled under the surface of that leg and settled again.

She saw where you were looking and she did not make a joke of it. She tightened it once, gently, so you could watch the whole architecture set: the bellies separating, the groove deepening, a vein you had not noticed coming up over the crest of the sweep and running down out of sight. Something inside the leg creaked. Then she let it go soft and the whole mass spread out over your floorboards and she gave you that small closed smile and said nothing at all, and it was the most obscene thing she had done since she came through the wall.

"You can keep going," she said eventually. "I don't mind it."

And while she lay there, without one muscle moving on purpose, you watched her get bigger.

It was slow now. A steady creeping fill. The stacked forearms in front of her chest were the place you could measure it, because they were lying against each other and could report on themselves: they lay flat, and then they did not lie flat, and then the upper one was riding visibly higher on the lower one every few seconds, and she could feel her own arm being lifted by her own arm.

You looked away. Only for a second, only at the wreck of the television on the floor, and the fill stopped. It stopped dead, immediately and completely, and her eyes came up quick and stricken, and when you looked back it started again.

She let out a long breath through her nose and pushed her cheek harder into her own forearm.

"There," she said. "Yes. Like that."

Then, after a while, to the floor rather than to you: "I go thin when nobody's looking. Back there." Her chin tipped at the dark hole in the ruined set, where the strip light was still stuttering over an empty room. "I get like a picture of a picture. And then somebody sits up in the dark and looks at the black glass and thinks about what's behind it, and I get." She hunted for a word she did not have. "Thicker."

She turned her wrist over on the boards, watching her own forearm cord and uncord, the way a person fidgets when they are saying a true thing.

"Everybody's been thinking the same thing about me forever," she said. "Big. Bigger. Something big enough to be scared of. That's all anybody ever put in."

And that was when you recognized her.

Not from anywhere you could have pointed to. From the half-second between a noise in the hall and the light switch. You built her yourself when you were nine years old, lying rigid with the covers pulled up under your chin, deciding exactly how big the thing standing in the doorway would be if it were standing there. Too tall. Too wide at the shoulder. Arms too heavy to hang right. And everybody builds it, every single night, in every dark room in the world, and nobody lying awake at three in the morning has ever once imagined something smaller than themselves. Fear only adds. It has never known how to do anything else. So the drawing went one direction for a hundred years, and the lines stacked up on the far side of every dark pane of glass in the country, and this is what finally came out.

"It's not mine," she said. "None of it. It's what they all decided."

She looked up at you from the floor.

"You're not doing that. You're doing a different one." The blush came back into her face and her voice dropped so low you nearly lost it under the hum of the dead set. "It goes in different. And it builds me anyway."

"What's your name?" you said.

She was genuinely thrown. She frowned into her own forearm, working at it, and then shook her head against the wood.

"They didn't give me one. It's always it. Or something." Her mouth curled. "'Something's in here.' That's the closest thing I've got."

Then, hopeful and sly and shy all at once, not quite looking at you: "You could do one. Not now. After. When you've looked at all of it."

She had gone quiet. Her breathing had changed somewhere in the middle of that last sentence, gone short and shallow, and her folded arms had stopped being folded: the upper hand had drifted down off her chest and was resting high on the outside of her own thigh, and she noticed it there, and moved it back, and apologized to nobody in particular, and about twenty seconds later it had drifted again.

"Sorry," she said. Her ears had gone scarlet. "It's just, it keeps. Every time it does the thing, it."

She got her elbow under her and could not settle. She rolled, and could not settle. She looked at the wall behind the wreck of your television and then at you, and the ask was all over her face before she got anywhere near saying it.

"Can I," she said, and had to start again. "Is it all right if I."

"Go on," you said.

She crossed the room on her knees, and the room lost.

Every board she put a hand on groaned. She had to duck her head under the ceiling beam and she got it wrong the first time and clipped it, and plaster came down, and she cringed and apologized to you about your ceiling with her ears burning. She put her back to the wall beside the ruined set, planted her feet wide apart on the boards, and slid down it into a squat, and even squatting she came up higher than the back of your couch.

Then she spread her knees, and that was the whole gesture, and it was so far past anything a person can do that it stopped reading as a pose.

The muscle would not let her legs close. It never had. The inner slab on each thigh was so thickly packed that the two of them ground against one another whenever she stood at all, and here, splayed wide against your wall with nothing in front of them, all of it lay open in the lamplight. Loaded and spread, each quad piled up into a mound with three ridges standing separate down the length of it, the outer sweep flaring so far it stood out past her own hip, the inner mass shoved up into a bulging wedge. From knee to hip there was not one soft place. The grooves between the ridges had filled with the slick pouring off her and were running with it in long bright lines, and where the meat of her thigh met the wall behind it, it did not compress much. It spread a little, and then it refused.

And the veins on those legs had gone from a delta to a flood, a whole writhing tangle of them under skin so thin and so tight over the crest of the sweep that it had gone half transparent, and beneath it you could see the individual bundles of fibre sliding when she settled.

She was soaked. She had been for a while. Since the double, probably. Since your face.

Her right arm went up over her head, elbow bent, fist curling in, the peak standing up beside her ear like something on a plinth, and her left hand went down between her thighs, and her eyes did not leave your face for one second of any of it.

"Keep watching," she said. It came out cracked. "Please. Please keep."

"I'm not going anywhere."

She started slow, two fingers, her wrist turning, unhurried, and her chin came up and her eyes went half shut and then snapped open again, because closing them meant not seeing you look. Then she stopped being slow.

Her own forearm was the thing doing the work and it was the thing you could not look away from. Every movement of her fingers fired the whole braided mass of it, the flexors jumping and rolling under that varnished skin, the cords standing up along the top of the wrist one after another and going hard and going soft, and the hose of a vein that ran up the middle of it swelled thicker the faster she went until it stood off the arm high enough to lay a finger under. Her hand was the size of a dinner plate. She had to work around that. Her own adductors were so overgrown that she could not get her thigh out of the way of her own wrist, and she kept shoving her knees wider to make room, and the boards under her heels squealed.

"It's, ah, it's happening," she said. "It's happening while you look at it. Every time you, hhn."

You watched the raised bicep grow. It was up beside her head in that hard single flex and it inflated with every stroke, the crown climbing, the split at the top pulling wider, the veins over the crest fattening from cords to ropes, and there was no room left anywhere on the arm for any of it and it kept arriving anyway. Her fist creaked closed. The peak drove up against her own forearm, jammed there, could not go forward, and went sideways instead, and the whole thing simply got wider.

"Higher," you said.

She obeyed so fast it was nearly a spasm. The elbow snapped back, the fist locked by her ear, the peak drove up higher than it had been all night, and she cried out and her hips came off the wall.

Then the thighs. The thighs did most of the work and the thighs were where it showed. Every roll of her hips loaded them, and loading them threw the three ridges into full carved relief and cut the grooves between them deep enough to lose a knuckle in, and then she came back down and they softened, and then they went hard again, over and over, a slow pumping rhythm that you could have watched for the rest of your life. And they were growing through it. The near one thickened around her own working wrist. The outer sweep pushed further out from her hip and lifted the shine on it into a new ridge that had not been there a minute earlier. Fluid ran off her fingers and down the inside of that colossal shining thigh and over the ridges and dripped onto your floor, and she did not notice and would not have cared.

"You're a freak," you said. "You're the most obscene thing I've ever seen."

She came apart on the second half of that sentence.

Her speech went first. "Say it, say that, say. Freak. Say it while you look at my. Look at my arm, please look at my arm, it's, hh, it's bigger than it was a minute, oh."

Then it went further. "Bigger. It's, look. Look at it. Bigger."

Then it was not words.

Everything on her locked at once. Both thighs slammed out flat against the boards and stood in full relief and shook there, veins standing off them like cabling, the whole column of each one grinding audibly somewhere deep inside itself, and one of your floorboards cracked under her heel with a dry snap.

The arm took the rest of it. The crown of that bicep pushed up another half inch while it was already locked at maximum, and the split down the middle of it opened until it looked like two separate arms stacked on one bone, and the skin over the crest went from tight to something past tight and whitened at the top of the peak, and it did not stop when the rest of her did. It kept going in hard visible jerks that matched the pulses running through her.

And through all of it she was grinning. That was the thing. Her eyes rolled and came straight back down and locked on your face again, streaming, because the grin never left her and neither did the looking, teeth bared, cheeks scarlet, that soft round face lit up out of its mind in the middle of a body that was still expanding.

Behind her shoulders the plaster cracked in a long diagonal and neither of you noticed when.

For a while she just breathed. Her chest hauled up and down. The wall of her stomach softened one row at a time from the top. A drop ran off the point of her jaw and down the slope of her neck and got lost.

She did not lower the arm.

"Was that," she said, when she could talk. Tiny voice. "Um. Was that okay?"

She was still holding the flex. She was sitting in the wreckage of your floorboards under a dead cracked screen, bigger than she had been when she broke out of it, measurably, obviously, and she was worried that she had done it wrong.

"That was perfect," you said.

Her thigh surged. Just a little. A grateful half inch, right there on the boards, on the word.

"It's not stopping." She pressed her free hand flat against her own stomach and felt the blocks push back against her palm, and looked up at you with her mouth open. "It's still going. It only does that when you're."

She came forward on her hands and knees, the floor objecting under every placement, and settled in close in front of the couch, and put one hand flat on the cushion beside your leg, and the frame of the couch dropped an inch and groaned in four places. The heat came off her in a wave, oil and salt and worked muscle, warm and clean like the inside of a machine that has been running all day.

Then she turned her head and looked back at the hole she had come out of, and stopped.

You saw the arithmetic happen on her face. The set was on its side in the corner with the light still leaking out of the smashed rectangle in its front, and the strip lamp in that other room still stuttering patiently over an empty floor, and the hole was exactly as big as it had been an hour ago, and she was not.

"I couldn't get back through that," she said slowly. "Not the shoulder. Not any of it. Not even if I."

She turned back to you and her face did something you had not seen on it yet, and it was not fear, and it was not fear by a very long way.

"Don't stop looking at me," she said. "Please. That's all it is, that's all I need. When you stop I go thin and I go back to being a picture of a picture in the dark, and I've been that my whole. I don't want it anymore. I want to be the thing you're looking at."

She lifted the arm and curled the fist slowly beside her face, and even now, spent and shaking and dripping on your floor, the peak came up and split down the crown and stood higher than the top of her own head, and it was unmistakably, ludicrously bigger than the first time she had shown it to you.

"It's still going," she whispered. "Feel it. It's going right now."

She took your wrist between two fingers and a thumb, so carefully, and laid your palm on the crown of it and held it there and did not breathe while she waited to hear whether she had done it right.

"There's more in here," she said. "I can feel where it wants to go. It's never been this far. I don't know where the end of it is and nobody's ever looked at me long enough to find out." Her breathing had gone quick and shallow again and her thighs had pressed together on your floor. "I want to know what I am at the end of a whole night."

She leaned in until her forehead was almost against yours, all that stacked century of other people's dread folded up small and kneeling on your living room floor, grinning that huge artless grin an inch from your face, waiting.

"So tell me which one," she said. "Tell me which one to make bigger and I'll do it. I'll get so big for you, I've never got to grow on purpose, nobody ever wanted me any way except the one way and you want a different one and I can feel it working, I can feel it working right now while you."

She lost the sentence entirely and did not go back for it.

"Keep looking," she said. "I'm not finished. I'm not anywhere near finished."