Morph, My Story

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  My Story

  By Mark H. Jamieson

  Written by Mark H. Jamieson

  First ePublished May 28, 2016

  Copyright 2016

  Cover Art by Mark H. Jamieson

  Copyright 2016

  Version morph 2016 5-May 28

  ISBN 9781310176265 (e-published)

  Young Adult>Science Fiction & Fantasy

  Fantasy>Contemporary

  [email protected]

  mhjlaw.com

  Books by Mark H. Jamieson

  Small Steps, a science fiction novel set in space in the near future

  Ico Island, a children’s picture book

  Prom Revolution, a science fiction novella taking place on Earth in the year 2116

  The Janitor’s 13th Key, a science fiction short story at a boarding school

  Morph, My Story, a short story set in the Florida Keys

  Thanks to Julia, Sandee, Kim, David and Melissa for their help in reading drafts of this story and providing comments that made it better.

  Dedicated to my daughter who had the idea for the main character. I morphed it into this story, but know that she will write the true tale one day. Looking forward to it.

  Day 1 - Saturday

  My name is Kara. I grew up in Oklahoma, but my grandmother reminds me every day that none of our people belong in that state. So far from our true home, forced here over a hundred years ago. Never humble or shy, she lets people know what she thinks, and loves to get into debates with people. Never calls it an argument, no matter how loud she gets. Always classified by her as a cordial exchange of ideas – a debate. I proudly wear, as a reminder of her spunk, a necklace passed from generation to generation from when we lived near the sea. The strand consists of one hundred thirty-two round pieces of seashells. A number that I discovered when the string broke, and I had to reassemble it. I ran a new string through the center hole in each iridescent front and then out the dull gray back. So now I sit in this plane waiting for my chance to find my own shells on a beach, maybe at a place that one of my ancestors walked. I can find my own, and create a new necklace from broken bits to pass on to the next generation. I glance at my legs hopelessly dangling off the chair, reminding me of my condition. Why do I even think such things?

  I hate planes; to be more specific it’s all the people staring at me - the girl-freak. Flying requires me to be in public, out in the open away from the sanctuary of my home and worst of all, away from my dog - Thor. Just thinking of him calls up visions of his dark brown eyes begging me for a treat. Thor understands me. He doesn’t judge me for what I can’t do or what I look like. He loves me for me. But instead of holding him, I’m surrounded by strangers seeing me for the first time. Instead of an accepting face, tilted stares, as everybody looks too long, an impulsive pull to confirm that I exist.

  I wouldn’t mind flying without the people part. I actually love looking out the window, swimming through the sky. On this part of the flight only water below, nothing to mark progress except for clouds. Mom calls our plane from Miami to Key West a puddle jumper, maybe thirty people on board for the ride. It feels unbalanced, with only two seats on our side of the aisle and one seat on the other. I keep waiting for the pilot to say, “Everybody on the right side, especially the bigger passengers, you know who you are, I need you to lean a bit towards the center,” but she never does. There’s something strange about flying in a metal box so unnatural that brute force moves it through the air and the designers don’t care about interior symmetry. I should have added hot air balloon to my wish request, something round and balanced, flying in concert with the wind, instead of ripping through it. Can’t change that, so I’m stuck here in this heavier than air transport until we finally make it back down to dry land.

  If I make it to eighteen, I’m taking hang gliding lessons, that will be my gift to myself, only one more year and then freedom. Putting my feeble legs in the fabric cocoon, letting the wind grab the kite, and soaring into the sky. That would be perfect. Flying free and alone, instead of in this metal box with walls shaking, and everyone staring. The guy across from us can’t stop looking up from his phone at me. I think he took my picture, probably going to post it online. One of the lonely people stuck with no seat next to him. I can’t get away from his eyes, so I keep looking out my window hoping for something new to appear marking a countdown to this entrapment.

  It’s Mom that can’t stand the actual flying part, two glasses of wine in Oklahoma, one on the flight to Miami, and then none in Miami airport, not enough time. Now a rushed glass of wine as we won’t be in the air long, and Mom recognizing the need for efficiency, finishes her drink long before the flight attendant returns to pick up trash. She’s to my left in the aisle seat, forcing herself to stay calm, which makes it worse. With her own problems she’s ignorant of the man’s continued gaze at me.

  I’m unique, Mom can’t relate. At my age she wanted to be famous, to be in movies or TV. As a kid she had her face on cereal boxes across the country. They still make the multicolored treat today, but she bans it from our house. Says that it doesn’t meet her standards, but an empty box with her face sits on a shelf in the extra bedroom. Never got her movie or TV show, just a picture of her smiling face behind a spoon hovering over a giant delicious bowl of sugar-coated spheres that I’m not allowed to eat. Strange seeing your mom as a kid. She had a different life. I’ll never sell cereal with my face, not the kind of look that sells stuff.

  Instead my face made a little boy cry once. Looking out from his school bus window he became the unlucky one that caught a glimpse of me riding in the backseat of our car. A forgotten myth, a sign of something lost, whatever he thought, he couldn’t turn to his friends to share the discovery. His face locked in by the sight. Just one of those things that pulls you in without letting you go and then I screamed at him through my open window. The wall of noise broke the spell and his face jerked away. I don’t know if I made that precise boy cry at that moment, but I know it happens, maybe not to him or maybe not then, but in nightmares perhaps or in the retelling to younger brothers or sisters. It must. That’s how all horror stories begin. The telling and retelling of something true until the layers and layers of embellishment create fantasy, the wolf becomes a werewolf, the hitchhiker becomes a serial killer, and the shooting star turns into an alien spaceship. At some campfire I’m no longer a girl riding inside a car, but a monster tied down in the bed of a truck attempting to break free.

  When I was eight, the doctors thought that I had juvenile systemic sclerosis, as my skin tightened and thickened. At thirteen they thought it was something else. Now after years of tests all I know is that I’m going to die. They say I’m unique, my body hardening from the outside, a genetic flaw. One of the first signs of my condition straying from known diseases was the loss of use of my legs. My source for walking, running, and jumping have slowly lost all function. I can’t feel them anymore and they don’t respond to any commands to move. As I’ve continued to grow, they’ve remained small and shrunken as the interior muscles and bone fade away. I blame my mom and dad, and all of their family before them. Whoever committed the dark deed in the past that unwrapped my DNA and inserted this lethal concoction cursed me.

  I found in the basement in a shoebox of old family pictures, a family standing next to a horse drawn wagon. Riding in the back under a blanket was a girl with long dark hair covering her face. Hair like mine, but purposely combed forward. No names or labels to identify the people in that picture, no year either, but something in their faces. Blankly staring, everyone but the girl - face covered. I wish that I could see her face, see if she has the scars and bulges that mark mine. There has to be another person like me out there, now or in my past. I don’t want to be clas
sified as unique. Having a doctor say that you’re unique means they don’t know how to make you better.

  My skin now cracks and bulges as pockets filled primarily with calcium try to emerge from within. When they break through, exposed portions look like fresh water pearls with no business on my skin. Gray striations crisscross my body connecting the deposits that tend to clump just under my skin. Simple constellations over the years have evolved and grown into weaves of overlapping lines. Across my face the hardening pulls and elongates my skin, a smile hurts and laughing rips thin wounds that harden a bit more each time. I live with anticipated pain tampering any joy and in self-defense I wear my stoic frown. I’ve learned to hold it in, the hardening of my skin inadvertently forming an emotional shield.

  On this trip at each airport the other passengers wait for me when boarding the planes. Their entrance to the plane delayed while they push me in on my wheelchair, families craning their necks to see what privileged person enters first, and in disappointment they see me, an honor that I would abandon, yet that option never a choice.

  “We’re almost there,” Mom announces to the ceiling somehow hoping that we really