Metamorphosis

 She sat quite placidly upon a park bench eating the kale chips her mother baked her. The salt always seemed to sting her fingers finding its way into the smalls cracks and splits, almost certainly caused by hours of flipping through the dry pages of aged books. Even now she was headfirst into a love story between a dusty cowboy, who was known for being the best gunslinger, and the poor daughter of the town whore, who has sworn her to the mayor's son for her own selfish gains. She flipped the page, the sheet crackles and snaps, and she is once again aware of the ache in her hands.
  Heaving a heavy sigh she shuffles the book to the bench beside her. Raising both hands to her face she squints to inspect the small sores. Her palms nearly rest against the ample apples of her cheek,as her eyes are very weak, she can feel the peach fuzz of her own face brush ever-so-gently, yet still the contact deepens the ache.
  Her breathing hitched for a moment out of shock. These hands were alien to her, not at all her own. All her life, Lila, had always had tiny little knots of hands. Her fingers jutted out like swollen summer sausages, and the skin had the blotchy complexion that even mimicked the swirled raw red meat and white suspended fats of salami slices. The kids from the playground would always taunt her for her weight. They'd moo as they passed by. Had she not also seen parents turn their pretty doll faced daughters away from her, as if fearing she'd pass on her "sausage shape syndrome" like one would head lice or chicken pox? She was never angry at the kids who laughed and played, and never included her, she was only disappointed. She knew she could be a fun person. Her adventures have been numerous; she's been to the battlefields of legends, explored the depths of the sea, and learned the names of the clouds in the sky, and travel to places exotic and secret with people who never were and would always be, and led the most interesting lives. Would she never be able to add 'making a real friend' to that list of accomplishments? She would only have to content herself with the characters in her imagination, those introduced to her by people such as J.K. Rowling, Roald Dahl, Mark Twain, and Judy Blume. These friends only came to visit for an allotted time, and when the pages ran through they left forever, except on those occasions when she dreams vividly of their company.
   This moment felt more like any dream she had ever had before. Her sausage fingers seemed to elongate, the fatty tissues thinning in the joints. She bent them slowly. Altogether and then separately, fanning them up and down, like one might do once their hallucinogenics began to cause a tracing effect. Her veins appeared to raised against her skin, a dark Violet hue. Her pallor had taken a strange pink, lavender hue. Lila thought to herself that small crescents of purple across her fingertips, and beneath her fingernails, looked to be bruises left by minuscule fairy feet that had trampled across her while she read. This thought made her giggle although the real mystery of this phenomenon left her feeling uneasy and fearful. The giggle seemed to grab hold of her and she chittered on, the giggling trickling into a deep laugh. Her sides began to ache.
    She fell to her side, grabbing her side in pain and struggling to catch breath through her endless laughter. Suddenly she felt as though a gust of wind had blown through her body penetrating her very skin and expanding her lungs, though her laughter never broke. She wrapped her arms around her midriff, realizing at once that her hands reached round elbow to elbow, a simple feat she'd never defeated due to her generous girth. Her mother always told her she'd thin out, but she was sure she had meant gradually, not in in a bone-seizing seizure on the Sutton Street Park bench.
    Then she ended her laughter abruptly, and sat alert, her ears keen to the sounds of laughter not her own. She only saw the outline of the boys appear a minute after she'd hear them approaching.
    "Ooh it's Sausage Sally!" The boy sang the tired taunt.
"No it's Beef Stick Susan!"
   "No way that's Porky Patty!"
"Hippo Heidi"
   "Fat-Oh my!" The boys stopped suddenly.

  She cowered away, she knew they'd realized she had changed. Changed right there, it was the most ultimate form of vulnerability. It was like the time her cousin (her mother's sister's daughter, who took every opportunity to let Lila know she was an adopted freak.) Amanda and her had gone to the pool and Amanda had taken Lila's clothes while she was in the bathroom and Lila waited there til her mother came looking for her, four hours later.
  "What's wrong with her?"
"She's must be sizzling out here in the sun. She's like a pork sausage, her skin is popping!" The boys exclaimed. She felt humiliated and got up from the bench, knocking the remainder of her kale chips onto the ground and began running from the park. Running!! She had never ran before. Her walk had always been more of a waddle, like that of a penguin. She felt a relief come over her realizing it had to be a dream, because she could never run. And she certainly could never run this fast, or this easily, as though the wind was moving her. The panic returned as she looked over her shoulder to see the boys chasing after her, yelling out. She couldn't make out their words, as the beating of her own heart seemed to triple both in speed and volume. The only thought she could grasp was that she needed to run from them.
   Her foot caved beneath her as a cramp seized her left calf. She turned grasping at it, screaming first in pain then in horror. That luminous pink skin had peeled and cracked and she could peer into the muscles of her leg. Except, it wasn't muscle at all. Her mother was a great teacher and had bought biology sciences books for Lila to read for her home-schooling, and the pictures of legs didn't look like hers did now. Where the calf muscles should have been was instead so sort of scaly skin with tiny black fuzz where one should expect bones. The shape of the muscles was almost like that of the small capsules of juice found in oranges. The pulp before the pumping. And it was, pumping. She felt without a doubt that soon that capsule would burst, no, hatch...like an egg buried away inside her.
   Scared and unable to comprehend this horrid nightmare, she could think of no better solution than to just keep running. 'I just want to fly away. I just want to fly away from it all.' Her mind screamed out. Suddenly all she could see was the blurry flash of scenery, pulsing like out of focused Christmas lights. Memories flashed through her brain then, memories of her childhood. She remembered her mother picking her up and the ground was damp and the grass was sweet. She remembered getting the flu. She had laid in bed for over a week. Those days had become a muddle of colors, sounds, and lights. The sensations clouded with pain and delusions that amounted to nothing but feverish dreamscapes. She remembered her mother telling her she was 'sent' to her. "Lila," she said, "You aren't like the other little kids, it's true. That doesn't mean you aren't as wonderful. The best is still ahead of you. You fell from the sky as a dewdrop onto a pink rose petal. I collected you up in a vial and drank you down, and wished for you and now you are here."
    Her mother never would talk about how she and Lila really ended up together. Lila had read books about orphans. She read about deserted kids, and nasty orphanages, and kissed her mother and told her thank you every night for saving her. She was Madeleine and Mother was her own Ms. Clavel. She'd ask from time to time, "Am I really adopted like Amanda says? Who is my father?" Always her mother would respond with the story of a dewdrop and a rose petal.
    Now, with the winding throwing her hair in the wind, Lila felt as though she could remember the dewdrop and the rose petal. Not the rehashing of  the tale as it had been told for years and years. No, she was remembering the event itself. She remembered floating above the world, the wind was on her face as it was now. Suddenly she began to plummet from the sky the overwhelming downward pull of gravity was liken to being stuck beneath a waterfall. Then she felt the sweet caress of velvet and the smell again of grass and air pregnant with pollen. She remembered the fall and the delay of her cry thereafter, only now understanding that  not until then did she ever have a voice, or a form.
     NO, Lila wasn't the same as the others. Lila was a fluid, Lila was a specimen of life itself. An ever changing leaf on a tree, the breath between seasons. The metamorphosis. Suddenly she felt her feet lift gently off the pavement, her clothes cascading to the ground in shreds and ribbons. She spread her arms and felt them melt away. She caught a rainbow of colors dancing from the corner of her weak eyes, and in her last moment of self awareness, smiled inside at her wings.
      The boys below all came to the spot in the road where Lila vanished and stared in awe as thousands of pink rose petals caught flight in the wind, swirled then scattered softly across the sweet, green grass and some landed lightly on the toes of their tennis shoes and kissed the creases of their wrinkled foreheads. And they all held their breathes for a moment as they watch a delicate butterfly climb into the clouds.