Buoyancy / fiction by Jeff Burt

 

“The reason the lead weights will need to remain on your ankles,” the doctor said, “is that despite increasing your density with muscle, your bones have become larger and increasing hollow, increasing your buoyancy over your childhood. 

What started as mere floatation still subject to gravity, has now been displaced, not the word you want to hear, by flight. Your ribcage, even now at twenty-one, seems to have grown so large that when you inhale deeply even the lead weights struggle with your lack of gravity. 

This is what romantic love does to a person, even one who has romantic love for a spouse of twelve years, inflates beyond measure, unties that person from the mooring of realism like a helium balloon from its docking. You are certainly not the first person to suffer the up-swelling of love, but you are the first to physically float, almost fly, from it. 

It is possible this will never change, since you seem to enjoy the state of it. Why, even today, when your phone rang that horrible “All We Need is Love,” played and if I had not had you strapped down I think your chest would have exploded. A simple call from your partner and you might have died. At the minimum change your ring tone. 

Remember there’s a reason for the saying, “keep your feet on the ground,” though I know you can’t without help. Do you have anything else to discuss today?”

“Yes, when she speaks, I have this strange tingling in every pore of my skin, and not an annoying tingling, but an enjoyable tingling. I feel like I am being injected by, or perhaps pierced by, everything I find beautiful, and I find almost everything beautiful.”

Jeff Burt has contributed to Williwaw Journal, Red Wolf Journal, Per Contra, and other journals. He won the Consequence Magazine Fiction prize of 2016.