Emergence, Part Two: In the Looking Glass

((Now, readers, a big choice is up to you! Is the strange man a concerned father and the narrator an 18 year-old high school senior? Is the man a boyfriend to a college aged live-in roommate? Or are they recent high school graduates who just tied the knot after learning of the pregnancy? Or something else? You make the call!

Love,

Charlotte))

Wherever I was, I was not alone. I scrambled up onto my feet and rushed to close the bathroom door. With my heart thudding in my chest I poked and twisted the knob trying desperately to activate a lock. My fingers were smaller and a bit more dexterous but the absolute terror in my gut made even the simplest motion hard to pull off.

At some point I remember thinking, “Why am I locking the door? Whoever is out there won’t just come barging in on me no matter what their relation to me.” But this rational line of thinking was soon overwhelmed by fear. I needed to know myself better before I could interact with others.

Finally there was a satisfying click, I was safe. I turned around and put my back to the door allowing my head to rest against it. My breath came in ragged gasps and I was even sweatier now than before. Lord it was hot in here.

“Honey, everything alright?” the strange man said, his voice sounded through the door just inches from the top of my head.

I leapt away from the door. The way his voice had come from above made me realize that I was probably shorter than I used to be. There was no way of guessing how much so as the fixtures and cabinets of the bathroom were unfamiliar to me. Despite some notable additions, on the whole I felt much smaller.

I hazarded a response. “I’m fine,” I said, feeling the way the air of my lungs passed up and out of my altered throat. It filled the air with an unfamiliar tone. It was lighter, crisper, beautiful and entirely feminine. I wasn’t sure why it surprised me so much, after all the rest of me was so feminine now too.

“It’s just that I thought I heard you crying…” the man pressed.

“I’m fine,” I repeated with a bit more firmness. I was far from fine but I wanted some time to myself. “I just… need a moment.”

Once again I walked over to the wall and bent at the waist. Even this simple action was compromised by a total lack of functioning abdominal muscles. I put one hand on my lower back while the other searched the wall for the hole. It was no use. The wall was solid, it looked and acted as a wall should.

I heard footsteps walk away from the door. Apparently I’d sounded calm enough to dispel his curiosity. My curiosity was only starting to grow. Without recourse to my old apartment, my old life and my old body, I wanted to know more about who and where I was.

I approached the sink and looked in the mirror. A stranger stared back at me.

She had dark brown hair that fell in a short bob. Her hair was straight and well cared for, it shone in direct light and framed a youthful face. I had always been terrible at guessing age but I figured I was either in my late teens or early 20s. Which made me roughly 15 years younger than I had been minutes before. There was a solid chance I had become half my actual age. I didn’t know how to process this fact.

I had large eyes that were a washed out blue gray color of a sea after a storm. My nose was tiny and slightly upturned. I had round cheeks that had been tended to with some makeup. With a closer look I could see just a few raised bumps of concealed irritations. My lips were full and after I licked them they looked glossy. This face was good looking in a cute, girl nextdoor kind of way. But who was this person?

I took a step back and admired my body. There was no way to be modest about it, I had large breasts, no doubt enhanced by the pregnancy. They protruded from my chest in two buoyant looking orbs, the upper portions of which were exposed and hefted together for an eye-catching amount of cleavage. The sweat that had formed there made the cleft gleam.

I stared at them warily, as I might have looked at a buxom young woman who passed by me at the mall or near the subway. Her youth made me uncomfortable. Normally I would have avoided staring at a woman like this for what was there to be gained? Even if she was something like 23 years old, which I doubted, it would be creepy of me, a man in my late 30s, to look at her as a viable sexual partner, let alone approach or talk to her.  

In my head I could hear my good friend Paul’s voice, “Look but don’t touch and everything will be fine.” I wonder what he would say about this. “Look but don’t feel yourself up?” I had to get over this prudishness. This was my body after all. And now, well, now I could stare as long as I wanted to.

Below was my belly, a large but nowhere near full-term bump. I had enough friends and relatives that had gone through pregnancy to know that what I was looking at and feeling was most likely somewhere around two thirds of the way there. As such I could feel the baby taking up space from the inside as it hung or was suspended or cradled, it is an odd sensation to describe. At the moment the baby wasn’t moving but I could still feel it in there, an alien, a parasite, so strange.

Where my belly rounded down there came a pair of skimpy jean shorts that clung to my hips and behind. I turned to the side and saw my ass stuck out farther than I imagined it would. The denim seemed to struggle to contain all of me back there. My thighs were full and my legs on the short side. And there were my small feet with their painted nails.

On the whole this person was plenty cute but mostly unremarkable. Easily the most exceptional thing about her was her breasts which looked to be 2 sizes too big for her petite-ish frame and might have been partly the cause of her finding herself in her current condition. It was all too easy to imagine a young woman like this drawing the lustful gaze of some hot-blooded high school senior with one thing and one thing only on the mind. That is, if she was in fact still in school and not beyond it by now. But I had no idea. Either way she’d never hurt for attention, good or bad.

So this is who I was now, but who was she? I reached in vain inside of my pockets which turned out to be empty. I glanced around the room for something, a cell phone maybe, anything. But it was no use. Whoever this was, the bathroom was not going to reveal her identity to me. I stared at my face in the mirror as if looking at myself long enough would force the reflection to say something. She didn’t. I sighed.

After yet another check of the wall I recognized a dull ache in my bladder. I had to pee. This was unsurprising as I imagined quite a bit of my guts were all cramped by baby. I walked over to the toilet and saw that the cover was up and the seat was down. It was a clue of sorts. Either this bathroom was mine and mine alone or whoever I shared it with was close to me and respectful enough to keep the seat in a lady’s preferred spot.

The strange man out there in the rest of the apartment… was he my husband? I checked my hand. No ring. Well that didn’t prove anything. I might have taken off the band sometime during the pregnancy as my fingers started to swell up. Was the man my boyfriend? Could he be my father? The only thing I knew was that he worried about me so that was good, right?

I unzipped my shorts and felt immediately uncomfortable. Like I was undressing a stranger. It felt wrong to me to take this woman’s clothing off, and I had to keep reminding myself that this woman was me, however temporary my place here, oh God how I hoped my time here would be very brief!

So I tugged low my shorts which were so tight that they partially removed my underwear as well. The former fell to the floor while the latter clung to my upper thighs, moist with sweat. Soon I’d need a shower. I stood there stupidly, preparing to do my business, hand reaching down for something I no longer had. Interior muscles began to relax and then I mumbled,

“Oh no!” as my hand kept grasping at air. I spun around, crammed my underwear low and sat with an audible “Ooph.”

From there nature took its course. There’s little to add other than my sense of relief and the feeling that my hips were indeed wider, my position on the seat was a bit more bottom heavy. I slouched a little, my front felt so full of bulges. When it was over I made a mental note to clean up after myself by dabbing at my groin with some paper.

With my shorts and underwear back in place I took one last look at myself in the mirror as I washed my hands. I’m not sure if it was the slow acceptance of my current condition or what but I cracked a smile. I was cute. I dried my hands and made for the door. It was time I met the strange man.