4.6

 

Not the name she was using now, but the one her parents had put on her birth certificate, the one she was so desperate to be rid of, she'd paid a solicitor an absurd amount of money to write and submit a deed poll to change it legally, then sent certified copies of the document to every institution that mattered, from her bank and all the governmental identity documents to her old school, the latter partly in case she needed to use then as a reference, but mostly to annoy them because she'd removed the name that, according to them, God had granted her with. By their definition, Roisin was not her Christian name at all, but her Satanic one.

Which was fine by her.

Looking closer at what was, in essence, an animated block of stone, she could make out two distinct forms the figure changed to as it rotated. One was her face and figure as she wished it to be: slim, athletic and undeniably female and the other was her as she was before; heavily overweight, large breasted, short-haired and with a face not even her own mother could love. Or father, come to that.

Roisin sank to the floor, feeling suddenly dizzy from the pounding of her heart against the back of her sternum. She didn't care about the dust, the dirt, or the irritating pieces of stone dust impaling her large backside like a piece if grit in an oyster, only coated in something other than mother-of-pearl. The nails of her clenched hands dug into her palms, and for the first time she was glad she'd neither grown them out not had acrylics attached, else they'd be poking through the back of her hand now. How was this possible? Leaving aside the physical impossibility of animated stone, how could anyone carve what she was with what she one day intended to be? Ovid's Metamorphosis had nothing on this. This was some Next Level, Harry Potteresque bullshit, only without the vehement anti-transgender sentiment attached. Quite the opposite since it seemed to embrace the duality of her existence.

How did he know? Why had Paul been so confused when she arrived, if he'd had this amount of foreknowledge? All good questions, none of which she would find answers to by sitting in a bloke's dirty bedroom she had no permission to be in, staring at a sculpture that couldn't exist. She felt as if the writhing figure were alive somehow, and looking at it too long would seal her form into one shape or another, and she might not like which.

She came to herself when the pain behind her right eye became so intense she had to tear her gaze away from the block of stone. She looked around the room in an effort to distract herself. Paul's bedside alarm clock told her it was 11:53, and the light though the gap in the curtains signified she'd been in what she could only describe as a fugue state for less than twenty minutes. She had no idea what time Paul was due home, and she had to get out of his room before he discovered she’d broken the promise of not snooping.

But first, evidence. She hurried back to her room for her phone. There was no available credit displayed on the front screen, but that didn't stop her from taking photographs and using the Wifi connection from one of the neighbouring houses that Paul had cracked the password for. She looked out of her window to the road outside, checking he wasn't walking up, about to come in and catch her, then hurried back to his room. She took a dozen photographs, trying to time each press of the virtual button with each of the changing iterations of the sculpture, then a thirty-second video of the whole sequence from start to finish.

Lowering her phone, she was tempted to reach out and touch the sculpture, to assure herself that what she was seeing was real, but she stopped herself. Every fantasy book she'd ever read related the woes of touching magical objects, from Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland to Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy, with the heavy-handed warning of Tolkien in between. She quivered with indecision. Here was the very embodiment of something magical in her life, and one magical thing implied the existence of others. What were her chances of finding a oil lamp with a genii trapped inside, who might grant her one wish. She only needed one. She wasn't greedy.