Like Trees in a Storm ~ fiction by Anika Carpenter

Standing, Sylvie is ten feet tall, but the photographer wants her seated on her front step, back pressed into the lintel of the doorframe. Sylvie’s limbs are taut as the handles of an overused carrier bag, and creak like trees in a storm. “Does it hurt when your muscles lengthen, when your bones elongate?” the journalist asks. Sylvie thinks about the millions of women worldwide, who, like her have been growing inexplicably since hitting fifty; women who are no longer able to drive, use a mobile phone, hug their children. “Like hell,” she says.

The magazine article is not as was promised. Its focus is the potential for a leviathan fashion house, the increasing demand for vast swathes of fabric, and oversized crockery. It posits that Sylvie must miss shopping, dining out, lingering embraces. Her answer to this, “I can reach to replace the broken bulbs of street lights, walk fearful people home at night, make my presence felt in the moonlit parks that were once empty,” is omitted. As is the pressing follow-up question, “And how do you feel about the controversy surrounding your sister?” Readers do not learn that Sylvie’s sister never spoke to her of the dizzying heights to come without celebrating the power of small gestures, the changes that being immoveable can bring about.

Grown women die on their feet. The city where Sylvie lives is peppered with statuesque corpses, towering monuments of petrified flesh warming in the sun. Her sister passed away in the plaza, her colossal form casts a shadow over luxury apartments. Her feet are a meeting place for lovers, her shoulders a platform for teens who, angered by demolition plans, climbed up to protest. From their elevated position, they watch ageing giantesses stepping carefully over hospitals, schools, playgrounds. They tune in to the sky-high conversations of their elders, pick up on attitudes that make the stratosphere spark. No one can get them to come down. The teens refuse to let Sylvie’s sister end up like the tallest woman on record, majestic as a thousand-year-old redwood, toppled like a 1960s high-rise. They will do what they can to stop another implosion, another cloud of billowing dust, another mound of rubble destined to become a beachless island that no one would ever choose to live on.

At the end of the interview, the journalist wants to know if Sylvie has a dream holiday. “Some kind of yoga retreat,” Sylvie says, uncurling herself from the door step, stretching. She adds, “I’d like to die in tabletop pose, end up a jasmine-covered hangout, a shelter.” But the journalist has packed her notebook away, turned off her recorder.

Anika Carpenter lives and works in Brighton, UK. Her stories have been published by Ellipsis Zine, Fictive Dream, Gone Lawn, Janus Literary and others, and have been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Prize and the Bridport Prize. You can find her via her website www.anikacarpenter.com.