Free Whenever You Call by Anna King Page A

turn into babies themselves. More like a low-level warmth and fullness. They were bigger, I was sure of it. Yet my bras and blouses fit just fine.I put down the mug of espresso and lifted both hands to fit under my boobs. I hefted them upwards, testing as if they were tomatoes or melons growing on the vine. Yup, no doubt about it, they weighed more.
    My conclusion was obvious, if disconcerting. Mr. Rabbitfish was making my breasts grow. Or, umm, my fantasy about Mr. Rabbitfish was making my breasts grow. I picked up the cordless phone I’d carried out with me and called Jen at the office.
    I said, “Can you talk?”
    “Sure,” she answered in what can only be called a trill .
    “You just trilled.”
    “Did I?” she trilled.
    “Please stop it,” I said. “I have enough bizarre things going on without you starting to trill.”
    Silence.
    “Don’t you want to hear about the bizarre things?”
    “Absolutely.”
    Of course, now the idea of mentioning that my breasts were growing seemed stupid, especially given that I hadn’t heard an update on the one-and-only Tom Callahan for twenty-four hours. He’d called Jen on Sunday morning to tell her that he’d had a great time and he was seriously planning to seriously pursue her. I think she just trilled back at him, but I’m not sure.
    I said, “Do you have any news?”
    “Tom’s coming over tonight.”
    “Please don’t say you’re making dinner.”
    “He’s bringing Indian take-out.” She sighed heavily into the phone. “I think we might make love.”
    That’s when jealousy struck. I was so disgusted that I would harbor even a smidgen of jealousy at Jen’s happiness that I immediately decided I would have to cut off one of my rapidly growing breasts by way of atonement. Though how, exactly, the offering of my breast would mean squat to Jen wasn’t clear. The image of lopping off a breast, rather than making me think of breast cancer, instead conjured up visions of myself as an Amazon warrior woman with a bow-and-arrow slung across my gleaming chest. I blinked and focused on the tulips poking their little heads out of my sometime garden.
    “Are you nervous?” I said.
    “Not really.”
    “How come?” This was the moment when I might have asked if she was a virgin, except her lack of nervousness suddenly suggested that I’d been silly to think she’d never made love.
    “I feel like I’ve known him forever, almost like he’s you , except in a man’s body.”
    This was possibly a weird thing for her to feel, or possibly a healthy thing. I wasn’t sure.
    Jen said, “How was the first day of bar tending school?
    So I told her all about it, including the discomfiting beauty of the instructor, Al.
    “Do you think you might sleep with him?” she asked.
    “Of course not!”
    “It’s been a long time for you.”
    “I’m not doing the random sex stuff anymore. Those days are over.”
    “What if he asks you out on a real date?”
    “He’s not going to.”
    “Umm,” she murmured, obviously disbelieving.
    “So, there’s something else going on.” I told her about the e-mails from Mr. Rabbitfish and how my breasts were growing heavier by the minute.
    “By the minute?”
    “Practically.”
    “If your bras still fit, then it’s in your imagination.”
    This was where Jen the Lawyer and I, Rose the Writer, split company. The imagination, for her, was bullshit. But for me, the imagination was real. Of course, this was also why I was becoming a bartender, so that I started to experience real real life instead of the real imagination.
    “It may be in my imagination,” I said, “but I’ll bet if you could plop my boobs onto a scale, they’d weigh more.”
    The weight of my breasts.
    My breasts wait.
    See why I had to stop writing? The treachery of words had begun to sabotage me.
    Jen said, “I really can’t talk any more because I have to get home, but I think this Rabbitfish person is scary. You don’t even know his name! This is exactly