The Accidental Alchemist

A woman devised a skincare routine which may have sounded complicated to some but was not any more complicated than the thousands of skincare routines completed daily by the women in her city. She first scrubbed her face and neck with a jet-black charcoal scrub. It was gritty, rough, and left an ashen residue in her pores. As a result, she had to add a step two: a gentle cleanser for after the exfoliation. Even after she added in a second step, she spent a portion of her day removing bits of charcoal from her hairline that settled like inert lice. She assumed some people used the same two products she did. After all, she didn’t go out of her way for skincare. She did the bare minimum. All of this was normal.

But what wasn’t normal was that this woman was getting younger. Not like younger-looking, radiant, healthy, glowing, wrinkle-free, luminous, dewy, or any of the other words you would use to describe those who slather themselves with wet, sticky gels morning, noon, and night. Younger as in she de-aged. Wrinkles disappeared, sure, but her nose and ears and chin shrank, too. Amazed, she scrubbed her whole body with the charcoal scrub and washed it immediately with her nondescript drugstore brand cleanser to find that after a week of daily scrubbing and cleansing, she even shrank an inch, prompting her to conclude that she was indeed getting younger, and unlike Benjamin Button, she could likely control the process, and she found that the more she tinkered with the routine, the more she enjoyed the control she could wield over herself.

This routine was her philosopher’s stone. She was her generation’s accidental alchemist, and she was ready to do everything she could to protect her little secret, which meant devising a plan, first of all, to never de-age too quickly so as not to arouse suspicion. If others knew what she could do, they would line up around the modest block she called home and wait, and wait, and wait until she relented. And then what? Would everyone be young with her forever? There would be no fun in that.

The plan was far more complicated than the procedure itself. After a year of testing, she learned that a week of scrubbing and cleansing gave her one year back. She could do this week-long cleanse once a year in order to maximize time in the current iteration of her life. She learned quickly if she went back too far in time, so to speak, the process sped up. In other words, it was like generating a reverse growth spurt once she got young enough. She thought of that hypothetical moment as a point of no return. If she ever got past that point, the woman surmised that she could become too young to understand her own routine and plan. That was the curious part, her memories remained, but as if it were some cruel joke, her wisdom and understanding of the world diminished ever so slightly.

If someone had asked her in all the years she gave herself another repeated year, “What have you learned?” The answer could have been, “Nothing.” She had the knowledge (facts and figures and dates), but her understanding of context, of cause and effect were not quite what they used to be. And so she was doomed, both on purpose and by accident, to repeat history and her 29th year more specifically.

If her family noticed the strange fact of her unchanging face and body–and they surely would–she planned to disappear and begin life anew in a city where no one knew her secret. She kept her name, and her passport. After all, this was not a consequence-free world, and she needed access to her bank accounts and investments and all the institutions that knew her by a number. In other words, she could disappear, but she couldn’t do it effectively if there was a single person out there who still wanted to find her.

And why didn’t her old loves, some children, younger cousins, ever come looking for her? They accepted her disappearance as a direct result of what they thought was simple narcissism. She never told them where she was going, so why should they bother to find out? On top of that rather selfish reason, her old families knew it was difficult to find someone who didn’t want to be found. She had a name that was difficult to google in its banality, and she had always kept separate accounts, PO boxes, and uncrackable passwords to email inboxes. Before she disappeared, she was ebullient, always youthful, clean-smelling and then, she wasn’t.

Three hundred years passed in this way. The first two hundred in a constant ebb and flow of building relationships and then abandoning them; the final hundred in a state of quiet observation. The world had changed after all in ways almost imperceptible. Borders were formed and reformed, religions were toppled or revised, some television channels went away and still other television channels emerged from the ashes of the ones that had been lost.

There was only so much one could observe of the world before the repetition and the loneliness took a toll. No one would listen to her 300 + years of muddled experience because they would have to believe her first. They would have to come to terms with the fact that a woman had stumbled upon a secret to eternal life held in the combination of two skincare products. She could offer them nothing more and nothing less than this small secret.

So if there was no one to talk to, no family to raise and learn from, no interest in becoming old and going through the process of decay she had so expertly staved off, there was only one way to go into the future: backwards. For her, it was only logical to do what she had so carefully avoided and accelerate her body’s youngening until she could no longer stop it.

After one week, she was a whole year younger, a week after that, she was 3 years younger, a week after that, she was 6 years younger, and a week after that, she turned 7 years old. Luckily, she was the kind of 7 year old who could read and wanted to follow instructions, so the note she had left with instructions for washing a face would work, and sometime in the following week, she would die…if her hypothesis was correct, that is.

During her brief time as a 7 year old, she met another girl remarkably like herself. Bright, knowledgeable eyes glistened out of her young face. Her name, too, sounded antique and old and familiar. They said hello, both explained why they weren’t in school, and where their parents were, why they were alone, and where they were going. They swung on the playground swings, musing, as children do, letting their feet scrape the wood chips slower and slower until it was just their toes planted on the ground and the rest of their bodies pivoting lackluster around a single point.

________

Magdalena W?? is a Polish-American writer and filmmaker. Her first novel, Return on Investment, won Fiction Attic Press’ debut novel prize in 2016. Her second novel is a draft on her computer, and her web series, My Astronaut, is currently floating around YouTube.