Mika was walking in her bedroom-tracking false topaz footprints on the oatmeal-colored carpet when she heard slight, palish knocking. A storm drew close to the nearby woods and everything seemed to have a melancholy echo. It was on a particular rainy-filled day when the house was full and the whole litter of family was home. Mika observed her little brother, Luca first. With bated breath, she watched them and at times, protected them-like when Cassie sleepwalked herself outside or when Luca had nightmares in the middle of the night-she was there, safeguarding. But she was always nearby, hovering in an invisible cloud of stealth. No one knew where she was or where to even begin to search. Though her parents worried themselves sick and had already alerted the authorities it was to no immediate avail. At first, her abstract body frightened her but now it was an eerie comfort Mika’s only desire was to control the newfound ability and morph into something more. She did all this while camouflaged among lint, casually transshape and florally vanishing. Doubly, she showered in secret when everyone was away at work or school. In the mornings, she brushed her teeth with her toothbrush sticking up sideways-haphazardly floating and in the afternoons, Mika ate quietly like a mouse when no one was in the kitchen. Mika still slept in her own bed with night sheets floating around and above her head and with her goose-feather pillow suspended in mid-air. All the while, her mind was crystal-clear. Presently she had been transparent for two whole weeks-unable to change back, powerless to regain a state of opaqueness. In a recent incident, she went limpid, after engaging in an argument with her older sister, Cassie who said she’d wish Mika had never been born. On another occasion, she went phantom when she found a boy watching her while swimming naked in the lakeside woods, behind the house. She disappeared like this, on and off in the following days-sometimes at alarming moments like while undressing at school in the corner of the locker room. Through sheer will, her body became a sheet of uncolored gelatin-she could see through to what she was standing in front of and what was mounted behind her. While scrutinizing her own distorted figure, her elbow-upper forearm-then her entire left torso went impossibly see-through. She was dressed in a school uniform, for an organization in which she was forced to wear clothes assigned to the body she had before her surgery. She cried ink-black tears unto the chiffon of her blouse, drenching the feathery breastbone of the veiled garment. When it first happened, she was carefully assessing her unsheathed body in the full-length mirror. The only good thing to come out of her invisibility-was the lack of obsessive need to look in at and examine herself. She was invisible-both to the naked eye, and to the clothed, closed one as well. She was like a ghost, trapped in a haunted space-trying to figure out how to reassemble atoms and organize particles. Mika found herself in a state of transparency and since then had been exploring her home in secret. One odd day, last week or so, she watched the shape of her arm-spoon inward and begin to melt away like ice. She prophesied that as the owner of this new body-with this cobweb or uncertainty dangling over her head-she would disappear simply-fading like an exploding star into nothingness. She thought after everything, she would at least be happier but she wasn't. Still, she could not readily recognize herself or the taut film that gathered around her flaccid stomach. She looked for the millionth time, at the body that had been-folded and unfolded like a pellucid flower since she returned home last month. Her skin was different-the stitches and incisions made her look like a practice medical dummy-perfectly threaded and reassembled like Frankenstein’s monster. When Mika looked at herself in the mirror, she was not like she once was. But the truth was that the post-partum hump, when you were still navigating gauze and getting to know your body again-getting to understand the indents, the silicone or lack thereof, the shifting fabric of your own organs-the sagging flesh and stolen body parts, in truth, was by far the worse part. Mika thought the hardest hurdle would be the surgery.
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