Chapter XIII
It’s so hard... not to be... hard... Cecelia’s internal voice grumbled, reverberating among her mind’s terrain. This was now the third time she’d twisted over to one side, increased her rigidity, and dropped right back into slumber, only for her imaginary snooze alarm to go off again some ten minutes later. Not wanting to get up was one thing, but as an object, she didn’t even want the responsibility of generating and using physical senses. Just a little longer...
Finally, one Cretaceous period later, Cecelia’s body heaved upwards and curled into a hollow roll. Some cracks could be heard as her outer plastic layer snapped in a scattered fashion, but Cecelia relished these invigorating quakes. It was like popping knuckles or joints on the human anatomy with stronger, more invigorating results.
Tighter and tighter she compacted, first into a wide duct, then into a skinny plastic pipe, before finalizing her shrinkage in the form of a virtually unbreakable rod. The density of her current state was impossible to ignore; she was by no means heavy like this, but her mind was eluding her, transmitting sensations that would lead her to believe she weighed more than the truck she had slept in.
Cecelia found it challenging, but doable, to muscle her ends up toward the sky and connect them, thus rendering her a hoop. Employing her tool chest as a stand, she reeled outward toward the tailgate only to halt herself as abruptly as she launched. Now a remarkably wide section of industrial drainage tubing sat in the GMC’s bed.
From here she carefully scored herself apart into a slinky, stretching and squeezing her way onto the driveway and back inside her house. Once her entire body had been drawn beyond the door frame and into the laundry room, Cecelia sluggishly collected into a tar-black ball, only to tower into her usual form, dressed properly in her work clothing.
Into the kitchen she trundled. figuring she should make herself breakfast before embarking on her day’s first job. The Ziploc bag of prepared cinnamon buns was flat like paper, however, and Cecelia only had two slices of bread left from her last loaf. She rolled her eyes, grumbling about her recent procrastination streak; it didn’t just show at home like in this case, it could also be seen at work. She knew she had a certain way of decreasing her speed the farther Mike was from her.
While her left arm extended to open the cabinet and retrieve a plate, Cecelia used her right to unfasten the twist tie holding the bag of bread closed. She then inverted the bag, the bread lazily flopping into the plate. Cecelia’s limbs then retracted to their regular length. Her fingers danced across the crust as she honed her energy, directing the boring slices of bread to enlarge and transform. They undulated and bulged, darkening in color, a sugary solution oozing into existence. Next, they rounded out and inked on themselves a swirl from which more of the sweet liquid pumped. Finally, they grew still once again, not as ordinary bread but as big, delicious cinnamon rolls.
Sharpening her hand, she sliced one of the pastries in half with her improvised knife, placing the halves into the zipper bag. Her properties restoring rapidly, she then grabbed the other plastic bag and crushed it in her hand, transforming it into an apple which she leisurely munched on while her face elongated into a horse visage. Nearly through with the crunchy fruit she almost screeched like a smoke alarm when she realized she only had fifteen minutes from now until when she was expected at work.
Firing a lithe tentacle to a cabinet, Cecelia revealed her kitchen trash can and dropped the remaining apple into it before reeling herself in, only to wriggle and bulk as she swelled into a woman-sized anaconda form. Her jaws flexed to aim at the cinnamon roll, launching in its direction with an exposed forked tongue that bloated into a monstrous tentacle in order to constrict around the innocent sticky bun. It proceeded to spring right back into Cecelia’s mouth with its scrumptious cargo intact, and as she savagely devoured her meal she restored the straightness of her jaws.
Cecelia sensed the chunks of cinnamon bun traveling through her extensive anatomy, their flow through her disrupted as she devolved into a long, doughy log. Ignoring the mild discomfort she pushed herself to melt into a grassy green sludge and scale up to roughly the volume equivalent of her native body. She gathered on the floor with a splat before beaming to the refrigerator, only to bounce off of its chrome freezer door and speed away across the hall and into the laundry room. Thrusting herself against the door to the garage she splashed upward in a tenacious tide of tentacles and gooey stalks, twisting the doorknob with an iron grip.
Cecelia flung her nimble liquid form around and past the door as it swung shut behind her, using the last of the decomposing web of makeshift appendages to pull her keys from a Command hook. She purposefully retracted them with the decaying limbs, slurping them into her body whilst rocketing to her truck’s driver door. Inadvertently forming a scorpion-like tail with the key blades as its stinger, Cecelia restrained them as she rammed into the steel door and psychically drilled a 4cm hole through it to lead into the Sierra’s cabin. Flowing across the new passageway she navigated into her seat, taking advantage of her tail’s prehensility to stick the key in the ignition, assigning an extra stalk to repair the door.
“Mmmhhh,” Cecelia whimpered as she spread herself across the unsympathetic cloth driver’s chair into a sticky translucent film. Just before resuming her normal appearance, she coated the seat’s backrest in dark gray and cling tightly, rendering herself nearly invisible to an outsider’s eye. Nnngh... fff... m-hm, I’m nothing more than a cushion, she mused internally. Seconds later she was human again, cranking the truck over and pulling out with eleven minutes to spare.
Procrastination... every human is guilty of it, including humans like Cecelia. Maybe her lazy tendencies and cunning tactics can find common ground?