For Dareen, waking up was a bummer. Her breasts were still there, high and firm, blocking the view of the rest of her. Under the covers (she was modest even when alone) she tried to extend her hands around them, then grabbed what she could of each and moved them around on her chest. So big and round and firm, not wobbly like before. Some guy would be in heaven grabbing these. And on top of the twin mountains, the big dark brown nipples, poking up into the blanket.
She looked at the sun outside her window, rising over the towers of downtown Atlanta, and thought of her commute. Tuesdays and Wednesdays she didn’t go to the new library in Alpharetta, she took the subway to the main branch downtown. How am I going to go to work with these things on my chest?
She decided she’d call in sick today. Maybe tomorrow she would have the exact same problem but she needed time to think. She took a shower without being able to look down and see her feet. Drying herself off she saw that her pubic hair had acquired the same violent tinge as the hair on her head.
Elly seemed surprised to see them too, the huge shrouded mounds under Dareen’s bathrobe as she came out. Maybe Elly was hoping that she had been dreaming as well. Elly was watching TV in the kitchen eating cereal. The TV was on the Cobb News Network and the news anchor was saying, “Some of these immigrant cultures have this worship of violence that makes me sick”.
“How could you watch this?” Dareen said, grabbing the remote off the table. It was a point of contention with them.
“I think it’s funny,” Elly said, giving her stock answer.
Dareen changed to another news channel, ordinarily not any use because the same company owned all the channels in the city, but at least on this one they happened to be doing the local news and weather. It would be another steamy July day in Georgia, humid and 90 degrees. The roommates munched their bran flakes in time with the cadence of the weathercaster’s standard sing-song. He mentioned the “severe ion-type storm last night” and Dareen broke her rhythm to say, “Duhhhh! Like tell me about it”, in imitation of the lilt from her teenage years.
Coffee was sipped, toasted buttered, fingernail polish examined. It was in the middle of the first sentence that both girls looked up again. “The perpetrator, who turned himself in, told police that a flying naked woman had carried his car to the police station. He is being kept at Modoc Psychiatric Center for observation. Well Cindy,” the newscaster said to his co-anchor with a smirk, “that sounds like something out of a dirty comic book.”
“I am naked woman, hear me roar and carry cars around,” Cindy said in her dipsy Southern-belle accent, and they were onto the next story. Routine joking around.
But not for Elly and Dareen, who stopped munching and looked at each other for a long moment.
Elly was thoughtful. She understood that Dareen would not want company. Elly’s mother was supposed to visit from New York that weekend but before Elly left for work she called to postpone the visit with a story about her car needing repairs. Then she was off to her job at the computer store where she was the purchasing manager. She had moved down here for that job two years ago. Smart girls were in demand everywhere and, though she liked New York, Atlanta was the happening place for young folks these days. As for Dareen, Atlanta was the only place she had lived since her family had immigrated when she was two years old. Actually she grew up in Dunwoody, a suburb; she was the youngest of six kids, all moved away from the area now -- she had two brothers in the Army -- except for her. She usually stopped in with her parents a couple of times a month. Though that next visit would have to wait for awhile.
She spent the morning in a funk, watching TV, reading newspapers online -- she liked reading papers from overseas, you got so much more news that way -- and periodically looked down at her chest, wondering when those big things were going to go back down to normal. But they didn’t.
And those super powers. She was forced to believe it really happened. “This is too much for me, Allah, I’m just a normal girl. If it really happened then I’m unique, the only person in the world who could do that.” With a trace of black humor, prompted by the newscaster’s little joke, she thought of herself as being a “Super Hero” last night, like Superman or Wonder Woman. But what kind of super hero flew around naked? The most distinctive thing about those comic book creations was always their costume. She had no costume. A pretty blah super hero.
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