The geologist is pregnant. She decides to transform her every molecule. The world presses on her body and she worries she isn’t solid enough to protect what’s forming inside. Her atoms do not seem to bump hard enough against other atoms. It’s why she became a geologist. She is fascinated by the universe’s sturdiest things. Now she thinks of carbon sucked into the earth, where stone takes its time worming inside. Thinks of turquoise veins snaking into riverbed clams. Of quartz working diligently to replace ancient tree flesh, piece by piece, with itself. So she infiltrates her own body. First, the hardest parts: her tooth enamel, the mineralized bone of her femur, the petrous pyramid wedged into the base of her skull. These she reinforces into a lattice, highly ordered and dense. The softer parts she works into corundum and silicate: her blood cells rubying, her fat topazing, the dome of her cornea glazing over with a thin layer of sapphire. Billions of years pass as she works her way around herself. The seat of her pelvis swirls over with agate, ready to harbor new weight. She cooks her worry in her head to turn her brain tissue a brilliant green-purple alexandrite. When she is done, she looks the same as her old self, but she is chemically distinct. Deep in the pear cave of her, the child is forming into an element she has no name for. One that will bubble to the surface and react with the atmosphere in ways she cannot fathom. But now she is heat and pressure, time and place. A safe harbor for potential energy. For now, she is sturdy enough to carry what she needs.
Hana Rehman is an MFA candidate in fiction at Virginia Commonwealth University. Originally from Georgia, she now lives in Richmond, VA. She has taught creative writing and currently serves as the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Fellow, helping to organize an award recognizing debut novelists.