One More Stretch

Not for the first time, Celia realised that what she was doing would have been impossible a couple of years ago. She shouldered the unlocked door to her flat, feeling it give a few inches before jamming against some obstacle. The hooks on the back of the door were designed to take two or three coats at most and yet Celia insisted on depositing the majority of her outdoor wardrobe upon them. Inevitably the precarious load would crash to the floor the moment she slammed the door behind her in the morning, forming a near immovable snowdrift of leather and wool that would impede her way back into the flat when she returned after work. It was almost a routine, the impatient beeping of the burglar alarm timing exactly how long it took her to get through each time, threatening to explode with noise if she took a moment too long. She never did, squeezing past the gap with practiced ease, throwing her handbag into the corner of the room to free her hands and then frantically punching in the reset code by the dim light of the hallway outside, habit guiding her fingers unerringly. And then that moment, as the light switch is fumbled to “on”, when she catches her reflection in the long, dangling mirror perched on a nail next to the alarm and fails to recognise herself for just a second.

That’s how it had gone tonight. Stubbornly, Celia balanced the fallen coats on the back of the door once again, replacing a large, battered biker’s jacket, too big to have belonged to her, as it fell a second time at the door’s closing. She retrieved her bag, fishing out her mobile phone and checking it before she switched it off for the night. There was a text message she hadn’t noticed earlier: “Like to know you better. Ring me – ADE”. She sighed and deleted it with barely a thought. Adrian Martin, Processing Supervisor, was one of the few people that had worked at Silver Leaf plc longer than she had. That was at least eight years they had known each other, and now he decides he wants to know her better? Why?

Celia turned back to the mirror and smiled ruefully at the reflection. She knew exactly why he was interested. She was gorgeous, even if she did say so herself. It was as if someone had taken a woman and fine-tuned her looks until each part, each bone, each combination of flesh and muscle, was the most spectacular it could possibly be.

Which, of course, is exactly what had happened.

It had all started in a dream. Short, obese, not exactly plain Celia Kennedy had gone to bed as usual, alone. There had been nothing to mark the day as out of the ordinary. Were it not for the events of the night, her diary would have said the same as it had for the last four entries: “ditto”. She had steadily plodded through the invoices and orders in her in-tray at work, phoned agents and reps from all over the country, nodding at the pauses in identical conversations with half a dozen accents. The carefully packed salad she’d prepared that morning had been abandoned again in favour of a pub lunch. The meal-for-one she’d microwaved when she’d got home had a different label on the packet than last night’s, but it had taken five minutes to cook and five minutes to eat like all the others that week. The TV got turned off before the News at Ten like every night, the soaps she’d watched offering different versions of the same storylines. The only thought in her head as she switched off the lamp at her bedside was a weary awareness that she’d be doing it all again, with little variation, tomorrow.

Tonight, as she watched the timer dial on the microwave whirr leisurely past the three-minute mark, she could still see the dream; mark its every detail as closely as those given up by a favourite film after repeated viewings. She had only experienced this movie once, but it was still vivid enough to refuse to be forgotten.

She’d known she was asleep immediately; Celia had practised techniques for lucid dreaming before with little success, but now, entirely unbidden yet still fully aware, she was awake inside her dream. Although she felt as if she was in the bedroom in her flat, when she looked around she saw an impression, a jumbled memory of the room she’d had as a girl at her parents’ house. The walls were painted in the plain cream and yellow shades of what was now her mum’s spare room, the shelves were crowded with toys, dolls and books from various periods of her life. Celia saw Betty, the lazy-eyed baby doll she’d left on a bus when she was seven, returned from her mystery tour, splayed on top of an open toy box in an undignified manner. There’d been tears that day, as the realisation had sunk in that she’d never be seen again, a vivid, typically intense infant emotion that Celia had recalled many times, using it as a yardstick against more adult sorrows. If she could only hold her again, a gap that had persisted despite the lessons of growing up might be filled. She leaned up to move herself off the bed…

Celia couldn’t move. Panic gripped her. She’d entered her own dream perfectly aware and yet unable to act. This was no nightmare, even though she was frozen to the spot. It was frustration, not fear, which welled up in her as she saw, but could not touch, the impossible. Without thinking, she reached for the recreated doll, even though six feet of bed and three of floor separated her from its toy box perch. Before she could even take stock of what was happening, her arm snaked across the intervening distance until Betty was in the tight grasp of a hand with extended, worm-like fingers. After a moment’s disorientation, Celia’s dream self remembered the unreality of the world about her and accepted this latest twist for the advantage it gave her. As easily as bending an elbow, Celia withdrew her elastic arm until it matched its original proportions, dropping her doll onto the bed as its importance also dropped from her attention. Her focus had shifted onto something even more extraordinary than the unlikely reappearance of a lost toy.

A series of shakes couldn’t dislodge Celia from her bed, whatever force, real or imagined, was keeping her to her bed its power was absolute. Could she stretch her arm out once again?

This time, with the effect expected, Celia found she could extend her reach very quickly. Both of her arms responded to her whims, twining and touching around the dream bedroom with ease. Her legs also had this elastic property, Celia laughing as she outperformed even the most able yoga guru by crossing them behind her neck. Was this ability limited to her limbs or was her entire body able to perform these feats?

With rather too much enthusiasm she shot out her neck, her head shooting out like a ballistic yo-yo. The stretch happened so swiftly that her head ricocheted off the ceiling, causing Celia to yelp in pain in spite of her rubber skull. The shock knocked her off balance and instantly she registered that she had woken herself up. A wash of notions swept through her half-asleep mind: Betty, the lost doll was here, somehow snatched from a dream; she was in her bed, apparently only minutes after she had fallen asleep; her neck was five feet long.

Her neck was five feet long.

That was how the impossible had become real, literally a dream come true. Sometimes it seemed like it must never have happened, trapped in this mundane post-elastic world as she was. Then, like tonight, she would play a well-worn videotape she had made with the loan of the office camcorder. The static speckled picture, a victim of the dirty tape heads on her

steam-powered VCR, would occasionally clear to reveal the larger Celia (yes! She had looked like that once. That was real too…) twisting her body in impossible ways. Snaking in and out of her clothing, ballooning and lengthening her torso, giggling madly as her body obeyed her every casual thought. The frame whip-panned as a tentacle arm wrapped around the camera and whirled it to and fro, shots from near the ceiling, running along the floor, from out of the living room window, her undulating form captured through the glass as if chanced upon by a Peeping Tom. While watching, Celia would find herself twitching in sympathy, trying to recall those impossible sensations, willing her body to recreate the magic she had once taken for granted.

Nothing.

Celia got up from the sofa and switched off the television with the remote, something she’d only recently got used to doing again. The plastic tray of her anonymous ready meal ended up in the bin and she made her way to the bathroom. Unconsciously, she tugged at her fingers. The search for even the slightest elasticity had dominated the first few days after she lost the power to stretch. Now it was reduced to an unthinking ritual, an unwillingness to completely concede the ability had vanished. But it had, and her knuckle woefully cracked as if to emphasise the solidity of her once pliant skeleton.

It had been three weeks since she had last stretched, a longer period than that when she had possessed that amazing dream spun ability. Celia had prided herself on how quickly she had gained mastery of her power. How she now wished she had had the opportunity to practice and develop it over years instead of the frustratingly short time she was given. It had taken no more than a day to learn how to extend and retract any part of her body with barely a thought; a further day to understand the subtleties of her changed body to the point where she could reshape it with a minimum of effort. As she willed herself to mimic shapes and objects, people she knew and famous faces she’d envied, she’d hit upon the plan to invent a new version of herself. Over an evening with a helpful bottle of burgundy she’d decided how she’d like to look. Plastic self-surgery as flab was tightened and curves were emphasised. The size of her bosom was reduced and firmed up to compliment her slimmer figure. She spent a couple of hours on her face, refining the arch of her nose, the angle of her chin, the gentle curve of her forehead. Then, when she had assumed her ideal form, she relaxed into her original shape, the blueprint for perfection indelibly marked in her memory. She would take a week to change into that body again, the gradual alteration still appearing strange to her work colleagues, but occurring so slowly they would hardly perceive it happening. It had been Friday afternoon, during a quick drink to greet the weekend with a few of her friends, that a final squint had banished all sight of the old Celia Kennedy.

And then the illness had come. It was ridiculous, nothing more than a mild flu. At the time Celia had put it down to the amount of time she had spent naked revelling in the freedom her unfettered form allowed her, carelessly neglecting the simple idea of keeping warm. She had woken in the middle of the night, a groggy, somehow less real mirror of the dream that had granted her powers. Running a temperature and with a pounding headache she had tried to stretch her body downstairs to fetch some pain relief. And failed.

At the time she had just put it down to a lack of strength, the joints that she had ignored as a matter of course aching under the assault of the bug. But when the symptoms had subsided the ability did not return. No gradual loss of stretchability, no sense that the power was leaving her, just a sudden absence. Her reshaped body simply acted as if it had been the one

she had been born with, with all its expected limitations. She tested herself regularly to no avail. She even tried to recall the dream, but with Betty the doll now seemingly part of the real world she couldn’t find a way back to the strange version of her bedroom where she had discovered her amazing powers.

Now in her real bedroom she was preparing to go to bed as usual, alone. In the pale, not-

quite-warm-enough glow of her underwatted bedside lamp Celia hid within the folds of a dressing gown once owned by a much larger woman. Tomorrow she would dispel all thoughts of her elastic past and concentrate on living in the here and now. She’d erase the tape and cease torturing herself over something she’d never recover.

Tomorrow…

She threw off her gown and positioned herself directly in front of the mirror hanging on her wardrobe’s door. Tonight she would try and reclaim the Celia of old. She might have a body the envy of her peers, but it wasn’t the one she wanted. Forming an image in her mind of the way she was before, she disappeared inside herself and tried to summon the power that she refused to believe could vanish without explanation.

Her eyes met those of her reflected, altered self and she concentrated. And wished for one more stretch.