Free The 100 Year Miracle by Ashley Ream

first aid kit, she found a few cough drops and popped one in her mouth. It helped, but the memory lingered.
    She picked up her pen and documented everything she’d just done. Then she looked at her watch.
    “Shit.”
    Hooper was going to be furious. She had to hurry.
    Rachel stripped off her clothes, including the muddy socks, which she tossed in the bathroom trash on the way to the shower. She soaped the most critical parts in record time. In the cold cabin, she’d gotten used to speed dressing, and it wasn’t until she stood in front of the mirror combing her wet hair back into a ponytail that she noticed the knot on the side of her head. She must have hit it when she fell. It had swollen up half an inch from her temple and was already bruising. It could have been worse, but it was bad enough, and it was noticeable.
    With gentle fingers, Rachel touched the center of the knot. No pain. She leaned closer to the mirror and concentrated. She touched it again—harder this time, hard enough to hurt a wound like that. She felt the pressure. She felt her fingers against her head but no pain. That was then she noticed she’d showered, dressed, and combed her hair. She’d done those things like—like a normal person.
    No pain.
    No pain at all.
    Rachel bent forward. Just did it—without taking a breath, without stiffening her muscles, without preparing herself, without anything.
    No pain.
    She stood up. She was almost afraid to think it, to think anything at all, lest that be the thing that burst the spell. But she couldn’t stop herself. Rachel spun around. She spun around with her arms out. She spun like a little girl would spin. Rachel spun and spun, and then she laughed. She laughed until tears streamed down her face.
    For the first time since she was six years old, Rachel was not in pain.

 
    11.
    Tilda had dropped off Harry at the Episcopal church. It was small with a newer addition on the back, painted white with a peaked gray roof and a bell tower perched like an afterthought on top. The sign out front with the moveable white letters that announced service times did, in fact, say VISITORS WELCOME , but Tilda was true to her word. She did not go in. Instead, she drove the quarter mile to the gentrified stretch of downtown, which had been far more down-on-its-heels when she’d lived there.
    Now all the buildings had been painted the same shade of white, and all the plants were green and some even in bloom despite it being early December. A public employee was up on a ladder starting to hang large red ribbons from each light post. And there was a four-foot bronze rooster that had been yoked with a real evergreen wreath in front of a fancy garden shop. Tilda imagined the flower boxes would soon all be replaced by potted poinsettias. There was probably a schedule for it by which all the shopkeepers had to abide. It was as if her downtown had been taken over by a particularly strict condo board.
    On top of it all, none of the stores carried anything practical anymore. You couldn’t buy a jar of off-brand peanut butter or a book of stamps or get someone to clean your teeth. All of those things had been moved to the uglier utilitarian buildings that had gone up in the 1960s across town. Here your options were fair-trade coffee for four dollars a cup, a designer sweater for two hundred, or a plate of pasta with “basil foam” for thirty-five.
    There was still the head-in diagonal parking that she remembered, but she was lucky to find a space, something that hadn’t been an issue before. The hardware store she liked was gone. Probably run off by the pet accessories store that had taken its place. It seemed to Tilda that any creature lacking thumbs and speech did not need an accessory of any sort, and people thinking they did were ruining everything good and worthwhile.
    In retrospect, this might have been overstating things a bit. But Tilda had used up her goodwill on thinking happy thoughts for Juno and accepting