Chapter 1: The Back Deck Revelation
The plastic weave of the wicker chair dug into my back through the thin cotton of my t-shirt, a familiar discomfort. I took a long pull from my beer, the taste barely registering. From the other side of the chain-link fence, the pulse of Andrea’s music was a distant thump, competing with the chirp of crickets in the overgrown grass.Her porch light was a hazy moon in the gathering dusk.
“You’re stuck, Justin. Like a bug in digital amber.”
Andrea leaned against my deck’s railing, the wood groaning softly under her elbows. She’d come over with a six-pack and that look—the one that meant she’d had an idea.
“I’m comfortable,” I said, adjusting my glasses. “There’s a difference.”
“Comfortable is a three-year-old sofa. You’re petrified.” She popped the tab on her own can.“You work from your living room, you game in your basement, you order groceries online. Your most meaningful relationship is with your fictional elf wizard in Eldoria.”
“Keldor is a nuanced character.”
“My point exactly.” She leaned forward, her freckles seeming to darken in the fading light.“I’m taking you to the Renaissance Faire tomorrow. With Marcus.”
I groaned. Marcus, her brother, was a well-meaning guy.“Andrea, no. The smell of fried turkey legs and earnest lute music… it’s not my scene.”
“It’s not about the scene.It’s about an environment.A change. A… catalyst.” Her eyes, usually the color of faded denim, held a glint of something conspiratorial. “And I’ve got a pre-catalyst. Something to… grease the wheels.”
“I don’t like where this is going.”
“It’s a spell.”
I stared at her. A firefly blinked lazily between us, tracing a meaningless arc.“A spell.”
“Yeah. I found it on this forum.The people were… very serious.It’s a perspective-shift thing. Like, become someone else for a day to see your own life clearly. A mental palette cleanser.”
“You want to do magic.From the internet.” I took another drink. “What, does it involve eye of newt? Because I think the pet store closed an hour ago.”
“It involves words, and intention, and this.” She pulled a crumpled printout from the back pocket of her jeans.It was covered in a dense, Gothic-looking font. “It’s supposed to last twenty-four hours.No permanent effects.Just a… shift. Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?Your inner elf wizard?”
It was the loneliness talking, I knew. The part of me that was tired of the silence in my two-story house, tired of the same four walls, the same routines.That part whispered, Why not?It was louder than my skepticism.
“Fine,” I sighed, the word tasting like surrender. “What do I have to do?”
Her grin was victorious.“Just stand there.Be open. Repeat after me.”
I heaved myself out of the clinging embrace of the chair, my knees popping. I stood on the warped deck planks, feeling foolish, the warm evening air suddenly feeling like a held breath. Andrea smoothed the paper against the railing, squinting in the porch light.She began to read. The words were alien, guttural one moment, sibilant the next. They didn’t sound like a language; they sounded like the concept of change given sound. A deep, unnatural chill crawled up my spine, unrelated to the temperature.“Now you,” she said, her voice unusually tight.
I parroted the phrases back to her, my tongue clumsy around the syllables. As I spoke the final word, a pressure built in the center of my skull, not painful but profound, a density that spread downwards.Then, the world rearranged itself.
It was a visceral, inward suck, as if my entire body had been pulled through a keyhole from the inside out. My vision blurred, then snapped into a sharper, different focus. The deck railing was suddenly level with my eyes. I gasped, and the sound was wrong—higher, softer, a puff of air that felt strange in my throat.I looked down.The first thing I noticed was the chest. Two impossible, soft weights rested against my ribs, straining the fabric of my t-shirt. My old, gray Starward Gaze logo tee was now a pale lavender, softer, hanging differently. It draped over pronounced curves I had never possessed. I felt a dizzying, unstable jiggle as I took a shallow breath.My hands flew to my face. My glasses were gone, but my sight was clear—sharper, in fact. My cheekbones felt higher, sharper under my fingertips.My lips were full, oddly sensitive.I stumbled a step, and the world tilted. My center of gravity was lower, centered in my hips.My balance was all wrong.
“Justin?” Andrea’s voice was a razor slice of horror.I tried to speak. “Wh-what—” The voice that came out was undeniably feminine, smooth where mine was reedy, yet laced with my same bewildered inflection.I looked past her, toward the sliding glass door. Reflected in the dark glass was a stranger. A very short young woman with a cascade of honey-brown hair, a face of exaggerated, doll-like beauty, and a body that seemed engineered for male attention. Huge breasts swelled against the shirt, tapering to a waist I could have spanned with my hands, then flaring out to rounded hips and thick thighs that strained the seams of my now-pink sweatpants.The pants stopped too high on my ankles. My feet, inside my socks, felt tiny and precarious.The sensory overload was crippling.I was aware of every brush of fabric. The tight band of a bra underneath the shirt, the maddening, floss-like presence of a thong between the cheeks of an ass that now had a pronounced, soft swell. A breeze washed over my legs, and I realized with a jolt that they were completely smooth, as was my arms, my everything.A profound, bare sensitivity was everywhere.And then the clothes itched. The bra straps dug, the thong was an intolerable wedge, the waistband of the sweatpants pressed on a stomach that was flat and soft in a wholly new way. I was drowning in the physicality of it.“Oh, my god,” Andrea choked out. She was pale, her hand over her mouth.“Justin? Your… your hair… your face… your… everything.”
I moved, and the movement was a revelation.Each step sent a cascade of tremors through my new body. My chest bounced, a heavy, rhythmic motion that made my face flush with heat. My hips had a sway to them I didn’t intend.The world was too loud, too bright, too close. I felt exposed, hyper-visible in a way I’d never experienced.
“Make it stop,” the new, high voice pleaded.It was my fear, my panic, filtered through this alien instrument.
“I… I don’t know how!” Andrea whispered, rushing forward but then stopping, as if afraid to touch me.“It was supposed to be mental!A perspective shift! Not… not this!”
We staggered inside, my small, unfamiliar feet whispering on the laminate. My house was different. The framed Eldoria map was still there, but next to it was a poster for a band I didn’t recognize. The pile of sneakers by the door was replaced by a collection of dainty shoes and boots. In the bathroom, my single toothbrush stood next to a lineup of skincare products—serums, moisturizers, things with French names. The reflection in the mirror there was no less shocking. Huge, green eyes stared back from a perfectly proportioned face, wide with a terror I knew intimately.
I clutched the counter, my slender fingers with their neatly filed nails gripping the cold porcelain. The sheer, overwhelming female-ness of the body was a prison.I was a mind pinned to a piece of curated anatomy. And beneath the terror, another feeling, insidious and unwelcome, uncoiled: a sharp, specific awareness of Marcus, of Andrea’s boyfriend Dave, of any male shape. It was a magnetic, gut-level pull that felt separate from me, a wiring in this new flesh that both repelled and fascinated the part of me that was still Justin. The loneliness had a new, terrifying shape now, and it was hungry.Andrea was hyperventilating behind me, scrolling frantically on her phone. “The forum… the post is gone.It’s just… gone. Like it was never there.”
I turned, the motion another cascade of unsettling sensations. The world felt softer, more tactile, and infinitely more dangerous.This wasn’t a shift in perspective.This was a demolition.
“Twenty-four hours,” she said, her voice desperate, clinging to the original script. “It has to wear off in twenty-four hours.Right?”
I didn’t answer. I was too busy listening to the deafening silence of my changed house, and the too-loud, frantic beating of a heart that was not my own.