Distend

Expand; swell out (v.)

At any given moment:

There might be a woman who eats a piece of blueberry pie everyday to unwind from work who finds that her pant-suit pants no longer fit.

There might be a clown that ties a large balloon to a canister of helium for a little girl and the girl watches in wonder at the latex as it stretches--the color becoming deep and three-dimensional as it expands and hits the sunlight.

There might be a physicist working the late shift at a supercollider who falls asleep at the dials and wakes to a strange sound and sees an explosion of gaseous particles on his screen, a spectrum of hues arrayed in sparkles and helixes and waves moving outward and won't know if he's dreaming.

There might be a man whose 5oth birthday is tomorrow, and as he sleeps in his bed next to his wife the night before dreams of squirrels that drink lemon-flavored seltzer and inflate into balls of fur, their fuzzy tails dangling in the breeze as they float upward into a sky made of viagra.

There might be a teenager who feels the fall of his father from the position of hero-leader he has always occupied and a terrible, open meadow of possibility unrolls before him, distending into four horizons that surround him, and cries himself to sleep for what simultaneously feels like no reason at all and every single reason he's ever known.

There might be a Japanese college student from Hiroshima that visits the Museum of Science in Los Alamos, New Mexico and sees the black and white footage of the atomic bomb being detonated, the flash and expansion and columnal cloud rising out of the desert ground, which gives him that strange sensation that a mind feels when it opens up.