Emmie Christie’s work tends to hover around the topics of feminism, mental health, cats, and the speculative such as unicorns and affordable healthcare. She has been published in Intrinsick Magazine, Zooscape and Allegory. Emily also narrates audiobooks for Audible. In her spare time, she likes to play D&D and goes out line dancing in her hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, USA.
At five-years-old playing hide and seek, Enna folded herself into a medium handbag in a closet. Her small limbs collapsed into themselves, yielding, liquefying into a certain impossibility. No one found her for half an hour, and they gave up and called out, “Ollie, ollie, in come free!”
She snuck her hand out, unzipped the purse, and stepped out of the closet. They all gasped. “Where were you? We looked in there!” Their faces expanded in shock — bigger eyes, drawn up eyebrows, and open mouths. She never told them the truth because she shouldn’t have fit. Five years old did not equal a handbag, even a medium one.
The sensations had hooked her. Both the folding of her body, and their reactions, the contortion of their mouths.
She played by sliding her legs back behind her head to fit tighter inside of cardboard boxes. Her mother had found her and screamed that first time. But Enna just smiled up at her, upside down.
“It’s alright, I can get out!”
Over the years, she’d edged close to that feeling of dissolving, but never that full impossibility. At thirty-eight, she fit inside of a standard carry-on suitcase. The crowd gasped and cringed at how her torso bent back on itself, how her cheek pressed against the transparent inside of the suitcase. And satisfaction folded inside of her like an origami bird, always finding new ways to delight her. She loved fitting inside of things, as if she could squeeze into another kind of space, one without gravitational rules, or temperamental circus managers, or rent rising in her apartment.
Then, an anonymous note with a foot-long vase showed up at her apartment: “Try this, if you think you’re so good.”
She knew herself, the angle of her hips, the geometry of her spine. She couldn’t slip through the slender neck of the flower vase. No one could. The note meant to mock, to chide. But she loved dares, and the arching curve of the vase called to her limbs. She grinned and stuck her arm through, then her shoulders wrinkled, and she poured into the vase like a stream of creamer into a mug of coffee.
Oh, no.
Oh, yes.
Both thoughts hit her at once. And she spilled back out, no bones, no hard stops, and formed herself back up again, breathing hard. She’d chased that all her life, that anything-can-happen feeling.
But, if she did it again, she couldn’t return to the world of sharp directions. Her body trembled, even now, longing to meld back into a puddle. Who had sent her that vase? Why? Did they know her secret?
She kept working till forty-five. A long time, for a contortionist, all the while fighting the urge to just liquefy and transform into something impossible. And then the circus manager pulled the ‘old’ card, the ‘your health’ card, even though Enna had never felt closer to five years old than she had then. And the sweat on his face told her that he had sent the flower vase, to mock her, to try and force her to quit. She shouted at him, “It’s just because you want to manage that new twenty-something,” and stormed out of his office.
The rain dripped down the nylon of her umbrella, then slipped and rolled down the street into the cracks of the ground. She might just liquefy. Did she want to?
What about the roar of the crowd, that satisfaction of showing them that she could, that she’d folded all their expectations into awe? She’d fit inside the world up till now, but it seemed smaller, and restrictive, and she wanted to collapse under its weight. Was that so wrong? She’d wanted it since she’d fit into that purse at five years old. The universe had dared her to give in even back then, but she’d stepped back out of the closet and given up the chance.
And something whispered to her in the rain. No, the rain itself. “You are not bound to change. Consent when you want to, on your terms. Some of us wish we had waited longer.”
She tipped her head back. Her body trembled with the urge to melt, but she held it together, its substance, its bones. For she wasn’t done, not yet. She wasn’t old, not by the standards of rain. She’d find a new place to display her art. She’d find new ways to fit into the world, to bend in unexpected angles, to startle those stars into peoples’ eyes and drop their mouths wide.
She’d shape her future for a while yet.