Chapter 3

Work passed uneventfully. My job was not very taxing even if I was a bookkeeper for a stationery store. Maureen, my boss, hated it when I said stationery, because she claimed to make custom textiles for special occasions. She made paper. Paper is stationery. Somehow she always sighed when I gave her that logic. Still the day passed quietly with just some simple accounts payables needing attention.

Since the scene on the train in the morning, I had avoided thinking about my knitting. Telling myself it was all just muscle memory at work. My hands could knit an afghan in my sleep probably. How I completed such a large one in half an hour was pushed firmly aside until I got home.

Stirring a pot of sautéed onions, bell peppers, and garlic together I wondered what else to add. Rather than bother with browning ground beef I opened a can of kidney beans I had bought for chili months ago. Some rice and water soon followed and dinner was simmering under a lid quite nicely.

When John came home he found me peddling the stationary bike in the basement in shorts and a tee shirt of his. I was fretting about the weird things that kept happening when he walked in looking slightly freaked out himself.

"Karen, something strange is going on here."

Nodding my head I looked at him, and almost fell off the bike. His beautiful silvered temples were gone. Shiny and healthy blondish brown hair was in its place, blending into the rest of his hair so well it looked completely natural. It took a moment for my pedaling to slow down as I sat there blinking at his younger looking profile.

"You are right John, something strange is happening but I don't know what, or why!"

We sat down together on the weight bench and looked nervously around, as if we could find something else to talk about and avoid this situation. Still it was not just going away like I tried to believe it would. Sighing I started at the beginning.

"I burned my finger on the pasta pot yesterday. It was pretty bad and I could feel it would probably blister. But I don't even have a red mark. I thought to myself that I wasn't going to just let myself accept a burn and thought about freezing it out of my skin. Then you got home and I pushed the incident aside, telling myself that it hadn't been that bad."

Taking a deep breath I lay back under the bar like I had last night. John's weight had been left on it since last night and looked to be about 150 pounds. Looking up at it I did what I had done when I first came down here. I placed my hands where they belonged and pushed. The weight came up easily as if I had been working out my whole life. The bar went up and down twelve times before being placed gently back in the holders. John had leapt up to stop me but now stood staring and blinking at my head.

"Last night I finished the shawl that had three days of work left to complete it. This morning on the train I knitted an afghan, one long and wide enough to cover the back of the couch. In thirty minutes."

Standing I made my way back to the bike where I got on. It seemed so easy to pedal and I just went as fast as my legs wanted to go. Pushing the display button I watched as the mile marker ticked off one mile every two minutes.

"I came down here to get a head start and realized how easy the things you had me do yesterday were. Despite the risk I tried to lift your bar and found it a challenge at first that got easier and easier. Then I moved to here where I discovered that I can out pedal this bike's ability to keep up."

Looking at her husband with scared brown eyes, tears gleaming in them, she covered her mouth with both hands while the bike whined in protest at the speed.

"I don't know what's happening."