She reached out with her remaining arm. The clay. The untouched block of Italian marl waiting on the wheel.

It was a word she had found in a medical textbook years ago. The visible changes in a body after death. But the textbooks were wrong. This was not after death. This was during . The body deciding, cell by cell, that it was tired of being a noun and wanted to become a verb. To drip. To pool. To finally be honest.

She pressed her liquefying palm into the clay. The clay received her. No, it welcomed her. They traded textures. The last thing she saw, before her optic nerve dissolved into a pretty amber swirl, was the wheel spinning.

By day four, she could no longer wear clothes. Fabric felt like a lie. She sat naked on the tarp-covered floor, watching her left hand slowly liquefy. The bones remained for a while—delicate, ivory-like, more honest than the skin had ever been. She arranged the fallen flakes of herself in patterns. Mandalas. Rorschach tests. A map of a country she had never visited.

A reclusive sculptor, whose work has long been obsessed with the rigidity of the female form, wakes one morning to find her own flesh beginning a slow, deliberate bloom of decay—a process she soon realizes is not death, but a long-overdue metamorphosis. The first sign was the bruise.

“Thanatomorphose,” she whispered, or tried to. Her tongue had become a small, sweet jam.

On the seventh morning, Iris looked down. There was no “down” anymore. Her pelvis had widened into a basin. Her spine was a graceful, arching root. Her heart—still beating, absurdly—rested in a cupped palm of dissolved ribs, pulsing like a ruby in a bowl of cream.

The Soft Escape

The landlord knocked on day six. She didn’t answer. He would have seen her through the mail slot: a seated figure, torso still mostly intact, face a half-melted cameo, one eye still blinking—still thinking —as the lower jaw detached with a soft pop and slid down her chest like a tear.

Not a body. Not a sculpture.