Murmansk-13

She’d long since quit ballet and dance. Having always been large boned, the onset of teenage acne had made her feel ugly and inadequate. No, not feel, she was ugly and aesthetically inadequate. During performances she was always a background dancer, hidden. When the other background ballerinas cycled forward for their moment, she’d remain choreographed out of sight. It didn’t matter that she was able to do what the other lithe, fair skinned girls could do. Even when she could do it better – plié on point faultlessly while girls half her size struggled. So she quit.

As the few physical passions were robbed of their joy and exorcised from her life, Katja slowly morphed into her mother. Relatives and family friends would visit after a period of years, unable to recognize the little girl who’d ballooned to eclipse even her mother’s girth, her skin mottled by reddish pink scabs and furious pustules. Katja imagined her mother relished her embarrassment and the complete decimation of her confidence. She would buy Katja fattening foodstuffs to ease her social rejection and salve the loneliness, enabling her to gorge away the shame. Her mother was pretty once, in a way Katja could never be – would never be allowed to be.

Only solid grades in biology and chemistry and a burgeoning interest in medicine had snapped Katja out of her personal indifference. They would never take a morbidly obese girl into the Gorky Medical Institute so she’d resolved to do something about it.

It was tough, at one time her metabolism had a predisposition to convert calories to fat. Perhaps they’d been excuses that her mind still failed to process as such. Instead of taking the bus she began walking to school, choosing healthier foods and no longer letting her mother prepare her lunches. She would run on empty for days, studying feverishly as her body consumed itself under deep belly growls. Katja suspected she would never be thin, but fit – perhaps.

Her weight was almost halved when she was accepted into the medical institute. It was a source of pride and triumph. One her mother resented through glowering eyes. Katja remembered arriving home one day to find her closet mostly emptied of what her mother called her: Thin girl clothes. What remained were the frumpy, dire dresses and furs from her most voluminous times, several sizes too big for her. ‘You don’t need them anymore Kat, you’ll soon put the weight back on. Believe me, I did. So I took them down the market.’

The message was implicit, and in the whole not incorrect. It sowed seeds that Murmansk-13 was quick to pervert.

Within a week of arrival on the station she’d given in to the air of hedonistic, nihilistic abandon of her fellow techs. Her once shattered confidence spiked as if shot with adrenaline. Katja was soon throwing herself into the nightly contraband fuelled parties with inexplicable fervour. Never wholly sure whether she, or any of the others, were truly enjoying themselves or simply being swept along by some wild undertow.

She began smoking, not just socially, but heavily. Thirty a day, so much so her index finger began to take on a hue of nicotine orange. The skin around her top lip started to pucker and tighten.

Endless late nights began to tell when she looked in the mirror, lurid purple hangdog bags bloated beneath dulled eyes. Her once vivid bright blue orbs took on a lifeless sheen, socked deep within waxen, scabrous flesh. Her face grew pudgy as her appetite swelled. Her baby face took on a ravaged mask. The station was rapidly transforming Katja into her mother in a way even Gorky couldn’t.

Now Katja pictured her mother as several G’s pressed down on her emaciated body. Smiling at the changes Murmansk-13 had wrought to her daughter or disappointed by its failure. The seeds she’d tried to sow had withered with the outbreak of infection. The rot and ruin that beset the station afterwards had turned the dials right back on Katja. Like her co-workers, she became lessened and eaten up, her body whittled away to toneless flesh and bone.

In its final death throes Murmask-13 was determined to invoke the ponderous, aged physique of her mother on Katja as if to appease the matriarch. Forcing her shrunken body into the stations diseased structure with vengeful might. You will become your mother, you cannot fight it. You will die, heavy and ugly. And unloved.

Tears sprang from her eyes as the load lifted – as the stations pestilent grip was wrestled away by the dying star, reeling it inextricably in. She’d never imagined the sickly red supergiant as a force of good, until now. She choked back a sob as Diego drifted beside her. He watched her as a dog would watch a card trick.