Chapter 3: The Grocery Store Gauntlet
The navy blue dress hung in the back of my closet like a sleepless night given form. I pulled it out, the fabric whispering against itself. It was simple, knee-length, with cap sleeves. Nothing underneath, she’d said.
The cool air of the apartment raised goosebumps on my skin as I changed. The dress slid over my head, and the interior lining felt foreign and slick against my bare skin. It clung immediately to the new contours—the narrowed waist that still ached from its sudden creation, the wider hips that made the skirt portion flare out slightly. I zipped it up the back with clumsy fingers. It fit perfectly, which was the worst part.
The mirror showed a young woman in a tasteful blue dress. If you ignored the face, which was stuck in a horrified masculine rictus, and the hands, which were still too large. The rest was… plausible. The red hair finished the picture. I looked like a very convincing, very unhappy trans woman early in her transition. The ring glinted, a silver period at the end of Mia’s sentence.
The bus ride was a study in subtle humiliation. The driver, an older man with a mustache, gave me a long, appraising look as I fumbled for my fare. “Nice dress,” he said, his tone unreadable. I mumbled thanks and stumbled down the aisle.
Every lurch of the vehicle made the dress fabric shift against my skin, a constant reminder of the emptiness beneath it. I took a seat near the back. A teenager across the aisle openly stared, his eyes dragging from my hair down to my flats and back up, his phone held low in his lap. I turned to the window, my cheeks burning, watching the city blur past. Two stops later, an elderly woman with a grocery cart sat next to me. She smiled warmly. “Off somewhere lovely, dear?” she asked.
“Just the store,” I said, my voice too high, too soft.
“Well, you look very pretty.” Her kindness was a different kind of knife. It assumed a context that didn’t exist, a story of courage and self-discovery, not of curses and shrinking rib cages. I spent the rest of the ride in a hot cocoon of silence, feeling every imagined stare like a physical touch.
Elm Street Grocery was a bastion of fluorescent light and echoing linoleum. I grabbed a basket, the plastic handle digging into my palm. The directive was simple: ingredients for chocolate chip cookies. Flour, sugar, eggs, chocolate chips. And a photo in the dairy aisle. Smiling.
I was scanning the yogurt selections, the cool air from the case raising more goosebumps on my arms, when I heard hurried footsteps.
“Erick? Erick!”
I turned. Cassie was striding down the aisle, her work blazer wrinkled, her expression a map of worry. Her eyes swept past me, then snapped back. They widened. Her mouth opened slightly, then closed. She walked right past me, her head swiveling, looking for the brother she expected—the guy in sweatpants and a slouch.
“Cass?” I said.
She froze. Turned slowly. Her hazel eyes traveled from my copper-red hair, over the softened features of my face, down the dress that hugged the new, cruel silhouette of my body. Her face drained of color. “Oh my god.”
“Yeah.”
“Your… your face. And your…” She gestured vaguely at my torso, her professionalism shattered. “The picture you sent didn’t… I didn’t get the scale.”
“It’s faster in person,” I said, the words flat. “What are you doing here?”
“Family emergency,” she said, the lie she’d told at work now our shared reality. “I came as soon as you sent Mia’s texts. We need to talk. But first… the photo. Let’s just get it done.”
We moved to the dairy aisle proper, a long canyon of milk and butter. I handed her my phone, my hand trembling. “She wants it here. Smiling.”
“Okay. Okay, just… smile.”
I tried. My lips stretched, but my eyes were dead. The expression in the preview looked like a hostage video.
“That’s not a smile, Erick. She’ll know.”
“I don’t know how to do this,” I hissed, panic climbing my throat.
“Think of something dumb. That thing the cat did. With the cucumber.”
A bizarre, breathless laugh escaped me. For a split second, a real, if frantic, smile touched my eyes. Cassie snapped the picture.
“Good. That’s good. Send it.” She handed the phone back.
I selected the photo. My finger hovered over Mia’s contact. I took a deep breath, the air feeling tight in my newly rearranged chest, and hit send.
A second later, Cassie’s phone buzzed. She pulled it out, frowned. “She just texted me ‘He can do better.’ What does that mean?”
My own phone remained silent. No confirmation. No punishment.
“Maybe she didn’t get it?” I said, hope a fragile, stupid bird in my chest. I opened my messages. The sent folder showed the photo. I clicked it to view.
It was the first picture. The dead-eyed, grimacing one. Cassie had taken two; I’d sent the wrong one.
“No, no, no,” I breathed, fumbling to find the smiling one, to send it immediately, to explain.
The ring turned to ice, then to a band of focused, grinding pressure around my rib cage.
I doubled over. The plastic basket hit the floor, sending a tub of margarine skittering under a shelf. A low groan was forced from my lungs.
Cassie grabbed my shoulder. “What’s happening?”
“Ribs,” I gasped. “Waist.”
The pressure was an invisible corset pulled by a giant’s hand. I heard a faint, wet popping sensation deep inside me, not with my ears but with my bones. My lower ribs were dissolving, the structure collapsing inward. My waist, already narrow, cinched further, pulling my torso into a drastic, hourglass curve. The dress suddenly felt loose around my middle, then tight again as my hips seemed to widen in counterpoint. My breathing changed—it was shallower, quicker, the air hitting higher in my chest. I braced my hands on my knees, trying to drag in a full breath and failing.
Cassie’s phone buzzed again. And again. She checked it. Her face went pale as wax.
“Mia just texted me. Says to tell you that was ribs and waist, they’ve fully changed. Says you’re at thirty-four percent now.” Cassie’s voice was a monotone of shock. She swallowed hard. “Says the counter-ritual requires her physical presence and she’ll make sure that never happens.” She looked up from the screen, her eyes finding mine, wide with a new kind of fear. “She says ‘Good luck getting my pendant when neither of you will get close to me before this transformation sets.’”
With trembling fingers, Cassie typed back. I could see her thumbs moving furiously. ‘That was my mistake. I sent the wrong picture. Please, undo it. Punish me.’
The reply was almost instantaneous. Cassie flinched as she read it. “She just says… ‘No.’”
The finality of it hung in the chilly air. The pain was receding, leaving behind a strange, new hollow feeling in my core, a skeletal lightness that made me feel unstable. I straightened up, moving carefully. The world felt different. My balance was centered lower, my gait forced to adjust to the new swing of my hips and the reduced cage of my ribs.
“We’re leaving,” Cassie said, her big-sister voice crashing back through her shock. She picked up my basket, abandoned the intended items on a nearby shelf of cheese spread, and took my elbow. Her grip was firm. “My car’s out front. You are not getting back on that bus.”
I didn’t argue. Walking was a new experiment. Each step sent a unfamiliar jolt through my pelvis. The dress, now ill-fitted at the waist, flared out with the exaggerated motion. I kept my head down, a curtain of red hair my only shield, as Cassie led me out of the blinding lights of the store, away from the echoing aisles, and into the merciful darkness of her parked sedan.
She didn’t speak until she’d pulled out of the lot, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. The silence was thick, broken only by the rumble of the engine and my new, shallow breathing.
“Thirty-four percent,” she finally said, the words sharp in the confined space.
I just looked out the window, watching the streetlights bleed into streaks of yellow, feeling the ghost of my missing ribs with every bump in the road.
I just looked out the window, watching the streetlights bleed into streaks of yellow, feeling the ghost of my missing ribs with every bump in the road.
“Talk to me,” Cassie said, her voice tight. “What did Dmitri actually say?”
“The ring’s called a Bride-Shackle,” I recited, the facts a brittle shell over the panic. “He needs a personal item she’s worn for a year. The pendant. Before the full moon. Eight days.”
“And after?”
“Permanent.” The word tasted like old metal. “Changes set. The ring won’t come off. I’ll be whatever this is. For good.”
Cassie swore, a low, vicious sound. She pulled into our apartment’s lot and killed the engine. The sudden silence was louder than the drive. We sat there in the dark car for a full minute, just breathing. My breath was still too quick, too high in my throat.
Inside, the apartment felt like a crime scene. I went straight to the bathroom and ripped the blue dress off. I needed to see the damage without fabric distorting the truth. The mirror didn’t lie. My torso was a caricature, a waist nipped in to an impossible degree above the pronounced flare of my hips. The bones were just… gone. The skin there was smooth, unbroken, as if they’d never existed. I traced the new, severe curve with trembling fingers. It was warm.
I pulled on sweatpants and a hoodie, the familiar fabrics now hanging wrong, sagging at the waist while straining over my hips. When I walked back into the living room, Cassie was pacing, phone in hand.
“Okay. The pendant. How do we get it? She knows we’re after her now. She’ll be guarded.”
“We ambush her,” I said, the idea forming desperate and thin. “Follow her from work. Grab it.”
“And do what? Mug her? You can barely walk in a straight line, Erick. I’m not a fighter. She’d turn you into a teacup poodle before I got within ten feet.”
“So what’s the plan, Cass? Wait for the moon to fill up and just let this happen?” My voice cracked.
“No! God, no.” She stopped pacing, running a hand through her short hair. “I don’t know. I just… I need to think.”
She pulled out her phone. “I’m messaging Dmitri. Telling him she knows we’re targeting the pendant. Maybe he has another idea.”
She typed rapidly, her thumbs a furious blur. The message sent with a soft whoosh. We both stared at her screen, waiting. The clock on the microwave read 11:47 PM. No response came. Of course it didn’t. It was late.
“He’ll answer tomorrow,” she said, but it sounded hollow.
We lapsed into a hopeless silence, the kind that fills up with every terrible possibility. The fridge motor kicked on. A siren wailed somewhere in the distance. My new body felt alien and heavy in the chair.
My phone buzzed on the coffee table. The sound was like a gunshot.
We both froze. The screen lit up the dim room, casting a pale blue glow. Mia’s name. A new message.
“One more thing. A gift, really. You get to choose this time.”
My blood turned to ice. Cassie was beside me in an instant, peering over my shoulder. Her breath hitched. Another message chunked through.
“Option A: wider hips, fuller thighs, rounder butt. Or Option B: slender neck, higher voice, slightly larger chest. Choose in the next five minutes or I’ll change all six. Clock starts now.”
I stared at the words. They swam in my vision. Cassie leaned over, read them, and went white.
“Jesus Christ, she’s—”
“Both options push me further,” my voice came out flat. Dead. “But the hips already changed. If she makes them wider, plus thighs and ass, that’s still working on areas already started. The other option hits three completely new areas.”
Cassie pulled out her own phone, started typing something to Dmitri, then deleted it. Her hands were shaking. “How far did Dmitri say you were?”
“You said maybe thirty-four percent after the waist thing. And on top of that he said after 50 percent, changes will start happening on their own at the stroke of midnight every night. Small, yes, but even if she doesn’t change me, I’ll slowly turn once that 50% threshold passes.”
“Lower body might keep you under fifty.” She was talking fast now, working through the frantic math. “Three more changes to existing areas versus three brand new systems. Voice would be—that’s permanent, you can’t hide that. And chest—”
“I know.” The five-minute clock was a timer in my skull, ticking down. I couldn’t risk the neck, the voice, the chest. Not now. Not all at once. I typed back to Mia, the letters feeling final: “Option A.”
The response was immediate.
“Look at you being all clever.”
Then the ring ignited.
It wasn’t the cold burn of the waist. This was a deep, subcutaneous heat, spreading from the band up through my hand and then cascading down my spine in a wave of liquid fire. It pooled in my pelvis, in the sockets of my hips, and began to burn outward.
“Oh, god,” I choked, stumbling up from the chair.
It happened in front of Cassie. My sweatpants, already tight, strained against a sudden, expansion. The fabric hissed as the seams were tested. A profound, aching pressure built in my lower back, a feeling of tectonic plates grinding and rearranging. My center of gravity dropped again, violently, and I threw out a hand to steady myself against the wall.
My hips pushed outward, the bone broadening, the flesh swelling to follow. A new, heavy fullness settled at the back of my thighs and erupted from my rear, a surge of tissue that made the sweats stretch to a ludicrous, tight drum-skin. The change wasn’t subtle. It was an architectural overhaul. I felt the weight of it, the impossible new mass, with every ragged breath.
Cassie just stood there, hand clamped over her mouth, eyes wide with a horror beyond fear. She was watching her brother disappear in real time.
The heat receded as suddenly as it came, leaving a throbbing, unfamiliar body in its wake. I was panting. The sweatpants were painfully, comically tight across my new lower half, the waistband now ludicrously loose in comparison. I took a step. The motion was a wide, unavoidable sway. The weight of my new thighs brushed together with a soft, shocking sound.
My phone buzzed once more, the final verdict.
Mia had written: oooooh. Cassie was there to watch this one.your hips are childbearing size after that, I cant wait for you to carry our child.
I didn’t need her description. I could feel the truth of it, a devastating new geography of my own body. Cassie’s phone chirped a second later. She looked at it, her face ash-gray.
“She texted me too,” she whispered. “It just says ‘Now you see it. My soon to be wife, fit for children'"
Cassie’s phone tumbled from her fingers, hitting the carpet with a soft thud. She didn’t move to pick it up. She just stared at the space where it had fallen, her breathing shallow. “Fit for children,” she repeated, the words airless and flat.
My own phone buzzed again in my hand, a violent, insistent vibration. Then Cassie’s, on the floor, lit up with a simultaneous, ghostly glow.
We looked at each other, a silent, shared dread passing between us. The silence in the apartment was no longer empty; it was thick, waiting to be filled with whatever fresh horror Mia had concocted. I looked down.
The message was a block of text, a wall of casual cruelty.
MIA: THATS RIGHT CHILDREN. FUN LITTLE TID BIT FOR YOU TWO. I WAS BORN A HERMAPHRODITE. FEMALE ORGANS AND MALE, HOWEVER I AM INFERTILE AND CAN'T MOTHER CHILDREN, SO I HAVE TO SIRE SOME INSTEAD.
A cold that had nothing to do with the apartment’s temperature seeped into my bones. My eyes scanned down.
MIA: DON'T WORRY THOUGH, BECAUSE ONCE MENTAL CHANGES START TO HAPPEN; UNFORTUNATELY WHEN EVERYTHING ELSE IS TRANSFORMED WILL IT TAKE EFFECT, YOU WONT MIND BEING A WOMAN AND SOON TO BE WIFE AND MOTHER.
Several laughing emojis followed, pixelated jeers.
MIA: OH ALSO ITS TIME FOR A NEW WARDROBE DONT YOU THINK. BAG UP ALL HIS MALE CLOTHING TOMORROW AND TAKE HIM SHOPPING. SHE'LL NEED JEANS, SKIRTS, SHIRTS AND VERY FEMININE ONES AT THAT, UNDERWEAR AND LETS SEE.
A pause happened in the text, mimicked by my own heart stuttering in my new, cramped chest.
MIA: OH AND LET GET HER SOME BRAS. I HAVE A FEELING SHE'LL NEED SOME SOONER OR LATER. MIGHT NEED MULTIPLE SIZES. I WANT MY WIFE STACKED, BUT CHANGES WILL BE SLOW. LOL
I read it. Then I read it again. The words “mental changes” dug into my brain like a burr, but the rest—the clinical, possessive planning—was a nausea made of letters. Sire. Mother. Stacked. My vision tunneled, the screen blurring.
“What?” Cassie whispered. She had snatched her phone up, her knuckles white around the case. “What does it say?”
I couldn’t speak. I just turned my screen toward her. She read it, her eyes darting back and forth. When she finished, she made a small, choked sound in the back of her throat, like an animal caught in a trap.
“Hermaphrodite,” she breathed. “Infertile. She’s… she’s building you. As a… a vessel.” The clinical term sounded even worse in her horrified voice. “Sire. Oh my god, Erick.”
The weight of my new hips and thighs, the unnatural cinch of my waist, suddenly had a terrifying, specific purpose. Childbearing. The ridiculous, painful transformation had a blueprint, and Mia had just handed it to us. It wasn’t just about humiliation or control anymore. It was about procurement.
“Mental changes,” I finally managed to say. My voice was wrong in my ears, but the terror in it was pure, unaltered Erick. “She said ‘once everything else is transformed.’ The ring, the percentage… Dmitri said after fifty, things start on their own at midnight. Is that the trigger? Is that when she starts… rewriting me?”
“We don’t know that,” Cassie said, but it was automatic, hollow. She was still staring at the word ‘stacked.’ “We have to get that pendant. We have to.”
“How?” The word exploded out of me, fueled by a rising tide of panic. I gestured wildly at my body, at the sweatpants straining over a shape that was no longer mine. “Look at me, Cassie! I can’t blend in. I can’t run. I sway when I walk. She knows we’re coming for her. She’s literally texting us her life story because she knows we can’t do a damn thing about it!”
The truth of it filled the room, suffocating and absolute. We were pinned. The clock was ticking down to a moon phase, and with every hour, my body was being morphed into the specific, functional form Mia required. A form that was, according to her, now over a third of the way complete.
Cassie’s pragmatism finally crumbled. She sank onto the arm of the couch, her face in her hands. “I did this,” she mumbled into her palms. “I introduced you. I thought she was just… clever. A little mean. I thought it would shake you up.”
“You didn’t know about the magic ring, Cass,” I said, the anger draining away as quickly as it came, leaving only a vast, cold exhaustion. “This isn’t on you. It’s on her.”
“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is!” she snapped, looking up, her eyes red-rimmed. “What matters is that tomorrow, I have to take you… shopping.” She spat the word like it was poison. “For jeans. And bras. And we have to bag up all your clothes. And we have to do it, because if we don’t, she’ll just change you anyway, probably something worse.”
The directive was a perfect trap. It forced compliance, forced normalization, forced Cassie to participate in the erasure of her brother. It wasn’t just a task; it was a ritual of surrender.
My phone buzzed again. A single, follow-up message.
MIA: Mall opens at 10. Send pics from the fitting rooms. Ciao.
The casual sign-off was the final twist of the knife. This was just a fun errand for her. A day out.
I looked at Cassie. Her expression had hardened into a mask of resigned fury. The big sister, the protector, was being ordered to dress her sibling for the slaughter. “We’ll go,” she said, her voice devoid of all emotion. “We’ll take the pictures. And we’ll find a way to get that pendant before the week is out. Even if I have to rip it off her neck myself.”
She stood up, the movement stiff. “Get some sleep. Such as it is.” She walked to her room and closed the door, leaving me alone in the living room with the ghost of my old life and the crushing, tangible reality of the new one.
I didn’t sleep. I sat in the dark, my hands tracing the drastic inward curve of my waist, resting on the unsettling swell of my hips. Sire. Mother. Mental changes. The words chased each other in a sickening loop. The ring was a cold, immutable fact on my finger.
When the first gray light of dawn bled through the blinds, I was still there, sitting vigil for the person I was, as the person I was becoming took deeper, irreversible root. The mall awaited. The fitting rooms awaited. The rest of my life, measured in cup sizes and inches of hip, awaited.