Marrow Days

She fell for it, Ceta thought as, in one motion, she lightly gripped her friends’ fist with five left hands and gently shifted her weight so that, with a slight twist, Gamma’s own strike carried her into the air, over her partner, where she landed at Ceta’s heels in a pile.

- - -

The two sat sweating at the end of the dojo floor, looking into the garden, legs swinging over the flagstones.

“So… how are my… kids?” Ceta began awkwardly.

Gamma looked down at her oversized forearms, easily the largest single parts of her body. As she looked down at the grayed skin and large bumps and craggly seams, completely different from the rest of her healthy, red skin, and fresh igneous seams, the eyes on her arms looked back up at her, each a different pastel color.

Gamma looked up and smiled, beaming through her shark-like teeth. “’t’s OK. Heh, though I can’t walk straight through doors anymore!” She rapped on arm around Ceta and leaned her head into the other girl’s body, each of the eyes all over it a different pastel color. “Ya did good.”

Gamma’s massive fist plunged forward. Her partner dodged to the left, so Gamma pulled her outstretched arm across to make time for her next punch with the right.

After a few more moves, slowly circling inside the dojo, Gamma saw Ceta leave an opening. In a split second, she shifted forward, swung her tail to the left, and went all-in with her right hand, fast despite being nearly the size of a microwave, an upward curl on her lip.

With her body lying on the bed and her head in its pot, Maria lightly smiled in relaxation as she soaked in the sun and the TV. All was calm, despite the din of modern entertainment, when her phone chimed. Maria took it out of her pocket, unlocked it, and held it out at arm's length to look at it: Ceta calling. A vine took the phone the rest of the way to Maria’s green tipped ear.

“Blargh … oh, just watching tv … yes, I’m practicing, Busier-than-thou! … yeah, bu-but does it really have to be live? … I know… Ok, bai!”

Into the living room burst a large ball of flowing ebon black hair. Hair pulled hair, and someone’s mouth was holding someone else’s finger as the young teen and the older teen embraced one another in inelegant combat, horns locked. A ballet of hands and claws and feathers of hair.

Oh the joys of sisterhood.

Two large, strong curls of brown neatly picked up and separated the two girls like kittens gripped by the scruffs of their necks. A third brown strand formed out in Helvetica: ‘What did you do wrong? Reproachful intonation.’

“Mother!!”

A second later, the girl’s mother burst through the open bathroom door, instinct allowing her to splatter slightly on the door as she pressed on it at full attention. She stared down at her daughter in the tub, performing triage and try to find what it was that was the matter.

The girl’s mother stopped and smirked, her mouth twitching as she tried to figure out how to say the obvious. “Honey, tha-that’s normal,” she chuckled.

“But Mom, I’m leaking!” Belise said from the tub, her eyebrows knitting from the sudden lack of seriousness on her mother’s face, “How is this normal?”

“Honey: you know how I get cranky and say ‘it’s that time of the month’?” Her mother changed tone and posture in caricature as she quoted herself. “Well, you’re a woman now, and this is your time of the month, my little goo.”

“It’s fine I’m leaking?”

“Yes,”

“And more hungry these last few weeks?”

“Yes, that too.”

“Oh.” The girl flowed up, “Well I guess I was done anyway.”

“Well, clean up and come out,” her mother shut the door. Belise looked into the mirror, seeing the back wall of the bathroom through her deep cobalt blue translucent body, and thought about how different she looked since when she was only a foot tall, barely able to hold shape, and cyan.