Stan Lee wrote, "With great power, comes great responsibility."
Lainie Lee wrote, "I may be in the service of a higher power...."Spells'R'Us
A Higher Power
by Lainie Lee
A continuing series of stories based on characters and situations created by Bill Hart
What do you do with a character who can do anything? Siegel and Schuster's Superman has been with us for more than 65 years, Bill Hart's wizard may yet be around that long. Because you don't tell stories about the supremely powerful, but stories about how that power interacts with other lives.
The wizard knew just what Aaron was seeking--and there's more than one kind of key.
by Lainie Lee
I do not own the SRU universe, I am just borrowing it. The Spell-R-Us store and wizard were created by Bill Hart.
SRU: The Spare Key
by Lainie Lee
Aaron felt beat, he'd just made it to the mall before closing. What a day at work! One errand to run and he could go home. He needed to get a new key made for his front door, his wife had lost hers again; he had given her the spare and now he wanted to replace it.
Frazzled by his responsibilities as lead engineer on the new Seek Missile team, Aaron turned into the curious little shop without even noticing that it wasn't the vacuum cleaner store where he usually got keys made.
The little bell on the door rang but the shop seemed deserted. Aaron looked around blindly for the rather fat shop owner or his equally fat wife or even fatter daughter. "Hello," he called. They certainly have been adding some odd stock for a vacuum cleaner and locksmith shop, he thought.
A little music box caught his eye. On the top of a lacquered white oval casket, stood a little porcelain ballerina, a child ballerina by the proportions of the figurine. One arm on top of her head, the other on her hip; one leg lifted and angled against the other calf; toes pointed; a look of pre-adolescent concentration on her painted bisque face; the ballerina seemed suddenly to Aaron to represent all that was fine and good about trying to do something well, even if you are doomed to failure.
He sniffed. Something in his eye, he told himself. Reluctantly, he turned from the lovely little music box and looked around again for the proprietor or one of his corpulent clan. This place is positively filled with -- junk, he thought, unable to think of another word for the clutter. Is that a wooden Indian by the back wall? A violet painted velocipede, half an harmonium, a full set of phylacteries, a sarcophagus in the shape of a suppliant Saluki? More than half of the stuff he could neither name nor discern a purpose for.
"Hello?" he tried again.
"May I help you?"
He turned to find the source of the voice, an old man who was certainly dressed appropriately for the new decor and stock. The wizard's robe, for that is what it must be, might even be part of the stock; it certainly looked old enough to be an antique. The wizard, if he could be called that since he dressed the part, reached out and lifted the little music box that Aaron had been admiring.
"I need, I need a key made," Aaron stumbled over the words. He watched fascinated as the old man wound the little clockwork on the back of the music box. Aaron saw now that the box was also a jewelry case, a small one to be sure, perhaps for a child. The little lid lifted just on one end of the oval, for the ballerina stood on the other end.
"A key?" The old man lifted a gray brow as he put the music box back on the shelf then lifted the lid and propped it open with a tiny hinged rod inside the compartment, provided, surely, for just such a purpose. With the lid open, the box began to play a tune and the ballerina began to practice her twirls.
The tune seemed familiar and Aaron frowned, trying to remember where he had
heard it before.
"It's 'The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies' you know," said the old man.
Aaron smiled, yes, it was. The movement of the little ballerina even had a jig to it, a pause to fit the syncopated spin of the delightful little holiday tune. "How, how much is the box?" he asked, suddenly, impulsively. He didn't even have a daughter and his wife was, well, she wasn't into fond sentiment.
"Two dollars," said the old man as if it were just the right price, no more no less.
"Two, two dollars?" Aaron couldn't believe it. "I expected to pay more than that for the spare key I came in here for you to make."
"You'll find the key you're looking for inside the music box," said the old man.
Startled, Aaron stepped closer to look. There were indeed, two keys inside the little compartment for jewelry. One was the key for winding the music box of course. He had seen the old man insert it into the square little hole on the back side of the lacquered oval container and wind the works with quick movements of those aged hands. But the other key, the other key was identical to the one he had been holding in his own hand since he entered the shop.
He held the two keys up, comparing. Absolutely identical. He shook his head, smiling. "You must be a magician."
"No," said the old man sternly. "I'm a wizard."
"There, um, there's a difference?"
"Oh, yes."
"Um, I do want the -- music box." Aaron reached back over a shelf strewn with gewgaws and doodads to retrieve his treasure. The music stopped when he lowered the rod and closed the half-oval lid.
"Two dollars."
"For the box? You can't be serious?"
The wizard shrugged. "When necessary. That box has wanted to go home with you ever since you came into the mall."
Aaron smiled at the whimsy, still convinced he would have to pay the old man well for such a beautiful little toy. He touched a finger to the ballerina head, such a porcelain figurine alone might go for hundreds of dollars in some of the shops in this mall. She was so perfect, so lifelike, so utterly convinced that she can do it right this time. He sighed. "I can write you a check..." he began.
The old man shook his head. "Did you ever make a thing, a thing with a purpose? A device designed to seek its own destiny? That box was made with just such an owner as yourself in mind."
Aaron started. The old man seemed for a moment to be describing the Seek Missiles that Aaron had been working on for fourteen months now. There weren't that many defense contracts being given out these days; his company had been lucky to get part of the programming contract for the top secret Seek Missile Project. Seek Missile technology was so highly classified that the Pentagon had only told the president about the project just last week, or so the rumor went.
Seek Missiles were like cruise missiles but they found their own targets. Just tell them what you wanted, an air base destroyed, or a chemical factory demolished or whatever and point them in the right general direction. They would find the nearest target meeting their parameters and deliver a payload. Maybe even an atomic one.
At least, in theory. The programming of an AI powerful enough to manage such a task had been keeping him up nights, keeping him away from home weekends, leaving him mentally and physically exhausted. He had begun to believe that a functional Seek Missile was actually beyond the capability of the current state of engineering art. But he couldn't tell anyone that; his bosses didn't want to hear it, the Pentagon didn't want to hear it and he sure couldn't talk about it with this old man. The classification of Seek Missiles being two levels higher than just top secret, he and the old man would both go to jail if he even mentioned the name of the project out loud.
The oddly dressed old man wrapped the music box in brown paper and twine and refused to take more than two dollars. Aaron left the little shop, still mystified, never to return. He didn't look back. He wouldn't have seen the store vanish in a flash of light to be replaced by the original vacuum cleaner store cum locksmith with its complement of corpulent clerks, even if he had looked. The wizard waited until Aaron was actually in the parking lot.
Aaron's wife, Roberta didn't think much of the music box. It didn't look that expensive and when he said he had paid only two dollars for it she almost dumped it into the trash can right then and there. Aaron wouldn't let her.
"I don't like it," she told him. "It is actually ugly." The expression on the face of the porcelain figurine particularly perturbed her. The child looked to be in pain, or anticipating some sort of pain.
"I, well, I didn't buy it for you, dear."
"Then who did you buy it for? We don't have a little girl, we don't have any children at all." She was using her lecturing voice, the one she had honed on six years of third graders before they were married.
"I bought it because I wanted it," was all Aaron could think to say. He opened the little half-oval lid and the box began to play "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" again.
"I bought it because I wanted it. I think it's, uh, cute." He blushed.
"Well, if it is going to make that out of tune racket every time someone touches it, you can keep it on your nightstand. I don't want to see it, or hear it. Did you get the spare key?"
"Uh, yes." He handed her the piece of shiny brass.
"I'll put it where it belongs," she said. Roberta always wanted things just so, neat almost to a fault. She kept an immaculate house and his dinner was always ready for him whenever he got home, no matter how late. He knew he was lucky to have married her for she was also a stunning woman, almost as tall as he with braided blond hair and a figure she prided herself on keeping trim and youthful.
She dressed well on his generous salary and he admired the way she looked in her periwinkle print dress as she stooped in the little pool of light spilling out the kitchen door to lift the fake rock and hide the spare key inside. He wanted to want her, but he was just so tired, so drained by the impossible project at work.
It was so unlike her to have lost her own key. He didn't question her about it because he was half afraid that she hadn't lost it but instead had given it to her lover. A lover she had been forced into the arms of by his failure to fulfill her needs. He didn't know she had taken a lover, but he feared that if he could not recover his ability to function as a husband ought, she surely would. And who could blame her?
She smiled at him as she came back inside and relocked the back door. "You look bushed, honey. Why don't you go on to bed? I'll finish cleaning up the dishes and join you soon." She pushed at his shoulder until he struggled to his feet.
He smiled tiredly, picked up his junk store treasure, paused for a brief, long-married kiss and trudged off to their bedroom. Maybe things would have been different if they had ever had children. But either he couldn't or she couldn't and they had never asked the doctors whose fault was it anyway.
He never told Roberta but sometimes, he envied her. She didn't have his worries or job stress. She had quit work when they got married, quit teaching school in anticipation of raising children. But all she had to do was housework and her little charity projects, like helping out with the orphans who stayed as foster children with the family of their Episcopalian minister.
She was good with children, if sterner than he would have had the heart to be. Sometimes they talked about taking in an orphan, too, but they had never done it. Perhaps because they were both orphans and had spent time in foster homes themselves, not always pleasant ones, either.
He dressed for bed, gray and blue striped pajamas for the nights of late fall. He sat his treasure on the nightstand, on his side of the bed. The works had run down and he fished the little key out of the compartment and turned the lacquered box around so he could insert the key into the square hole. Carefully, he wound the music box, half afraid that the mainspring on the little antique would break and deprive him of half his pleasure in his unexpected acquisition.
He lifted the little hinged rod and propped the half-oval lid open so the tinny music would continue to play. It wasn't out of tune, he told himself as he watched the little porcelain ballerina jig and spin. He fell asleep to the sound of "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" played on miniature chimes. Maybe his last thought before the darkness swallowed him was that tomorrow he might possibly be able to do something else so wonderfully right as buying the music box.
The works had run down again when Roberta finally came to bed.
During the night, the magic that had sought out the Seek Missile engineer began to work. Aaron's limbs became thinner, the trunk of his body shrunk and his manhood withered completely away. The rest of his hair fell out and his beard and his body hair too. The hair disappeared in the transformation as Aaron's pajamas shrank and changed color to fit his new form. New hair sprouted, too, but only on his head; that fine, silken blond hair that only children have. Down between his legs, a groove formed and opened into a channel into the inside of his body where other changes were taking place.
The room changed also, Aaron's clothes in the closet shrank and changed to fit his new body. The ripples of transformation spread out, altering records here and there. Aaron's engineering career disappeared, his education, his marriage to Roberta. Some of these things changed to other documents that supported his new identity. Memories changed to match records.
Aaron's company had never taken the Seek Missile contract for lack of the right talented engineer to manage it. No other company could take the contract either and so the Pentagon had canceled the Seek Missile Project. The President never did hear about it.
Perhaps somewhere a wizard smiled, knowing that his music box had delivered its payload.
When the alarm went off, the little girl yawned and stretched and opened her clear blue eyes. She so loved sleeping with Mummy Roberta, even though she knew that her privileges would end someday when her foster mother found a husband. But then they could adopt her and she would have real parents again and maybe a little brother or sister.
Roberta reached across the bed and grabbed all of her foster daughter's little tummy in her hand. "How's my sleepy child this morning," she asked, squeezing a bit to tickle the little girl into protesting laughter.
"I'm wide awake!" Erin squealed, delighted to be the object of Roberta's casual affection. She pushed helplessly at the adult hand with her six year old muscles until finally her foster mother relented.
"Okay!" Roberta said, laughing. "Now quick, what day is today?"
"It's Tuesday, Mummy," said little Erin. Her face was flushed and she still couldn't stop grinning.
"That's right, and why do we get up early on Tuesdays and Thursdays?"
"Ballet practice!" Erin giggled, she loved this game of being asked questions she knew the answers to so well.
"Okay!" And Roberta loved the game, too. Roberta paid for the ballet lessons out of her own pocket; she spent a lot more on the little girl than the state gave her for taking in an orphan. She loved children, she loved Erin, she loved having a little girl to take care of, to be firm and loving with, to be an adult for. She promised herself she would never give up teaching; that way when Erin and any children of her own she might someday have were grown, she would still have children to lead and care for.
"So, you go make breakfast for us, Mummy," said Erin. "And I'll make the bed." One of Erin's chores was to make the bed. Sometimes Roberta had to make it again but Erin got better at it all the time. It made Erin feel proud to help Mummy around the house; cleaning and cooking, too.
"Alright, honey. Don't leave any crocodiles in the bed covers today."
Erin giggled again. Crocodiles were lengthwise folds in the sheets that made long skinny lumps under the bed spread. They were called alligators if they ran sideways across the bed. Erin hadn't left any giant aquatic lizards in the bed covers for months now.
Mother and daughter set to their tasks. Roberta got dressed quickly and eggs were frying in the kitchen while Erin struggled with the last of the bedclothes, doubly smoothing each sheet to prevent crocodiles.
Roberta's voice came down the hall. "Better get dressed, honey. Breakfast is almost ready. And I still have to braid your hair."
"Okay, Mummy." Quickly Erin stripped off her pink pajamas, all the way down to her Little Mermaid Underoos. Then she paused. The music box had caught her eye. She reached inside the little compartment and removed the key. The mainspring of the music works was almost too strong for her tiny hands but she managed to wind it enough to set the little painted bisque ballerina to twirling and jigging while "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" played out its starts and stops and syncopations.
Erin screwed up her face in unconscious imitation of the expression on the face of the porcelain figurine; the face Mummy Roberta made fun of, calling it "trying to pass a pumpkin."
In the chill fall morning, dressed only in her decorative panties, little Erin jumped and jigged and twirled. She felt happy and looked forward to ballet practice, because today was the day she knew she was going to do everything right.
Copyright 1998, 1999, 2002 by Elaine Blankenship. All rights reserved.
Andrew was afraid of the dark....
by Lainie Lee
I do not own the SRU universe, I am just borrowing it. The Spell-R-Us store and wizard were created by Bill Hart.
"The light in my bathroom is burned out," he said. He didn't quite whine.
Theodora gritted her teeth and said, "Then change it. You know where we keep the spare bulbs." She didn't need this aggravation, not after the Planning Commission meeting had broken up in shouting and name-calling and her irascible boss had almost fired her for failing to have the right paperwork for the meeting. How was she to know the PC was not going to follow their agenda but skip ahead to consider the merits of the new shopping mall.
She liked the old mall, anyway; it had lots of nice quirky shops, not like the malls in the bigger cities nearby. And it was close-by, just down the street from the city offices. She realized that she wasn't listening to her son's complaint.
"You're not listening," he almost whined.
That voice made her wish that he was still small enough to give a swat on the behind but of course she couldn't reach him through the phone anyway. "Yes I am," she lied.
"Well, it isn't the big light in the ceiling, it's the nightlight. The one by the sink, under the mirror, next to the light switch. Y'know, it plugs into the wall and it has that little blue glow. It burned out last night. I need a new one." He tended to carefully over-explain things.
"You are nineteen, Drew. You are in college. You don't need a nightlight." Why am I using such short sentences? Drew was nineteen, and a History major but, well in some ways he had never grown up. Like the nightlight.
"Yes, I do. I can't see in the dark, you know. And...." He didn't say it, but truth was, Andrew was afraid of the dark. Still. He had never outgrown a childish fear of the terrors of the night. Theodora sighed. Andrew had other problems too but she would rather not think about them just now.
"Then go get a nightlight. They sell them down at the corner market, that Quickie-Mart thing, you know."
"I looked. They want three fifty for the one I want. And I don't have it, you didn't leave me any money today." He didn't quite accuse her of neglect. "Can you stop and pick one up on your way? Actually, I saw in the paper that they are selling the same exact kind at Lamps-R-Us in the mall near you for less than a dollar."
The mall. Hmm. "Well, okay." She relented. It wasn't Drew's fault that he still had a fear of the dark. Perhaps it was hers. But it wasn't her fault that he spent all the money she gave him on video games and junk food was it? So she had to be tight with the purse strings. All they had to live on was her salary, Drew's father had been killed by an intruder twelve years ago while she and the boy slept in the next room.
No wonder the kid was afraid of the dark.
"Ok, baby. I'll stop on my way home and get a nightlight."
"Don't call me 'baby'," protested Drew.
"Well," sometimes you act like one she didn't say. "Okay, but you are my baby." Theodora smiled, a bit ruefully.
"Mom!" Andrew never quite whined on the phone.
How had she let him turn into such a disagreeable young man? Nineteen, taking history at a junior college, never having worked except a summer at a fast food stand, and of course, the thing she wouldn't think about; Theodora frowned at the phone as she and Drew said goodbye and hung up.
* * *
When the car turned in at the mall parking lot she had almost forgotten why. A nightlight? She was making a trip to the mall for a nightlight? But she parked and went in because she had said that she would. Lamps-R-Us? Was there such a store in the mall?
She thought she saw the name on the mall directory and hurried to that end of the echoing marble corridor but when she got there the shop was small, cramped and the sign did not say, Lamps-R-Us.
It said Spells-R-Us! What a ridiculous name, probably a New Age gift shop or something. She decided she would go on in and ask the store clerk for directions to the right store.
It seemed deserted at first. Well, empty of people. But full of -- odd things. A candelabra with hooves. Salt and pepper shakers shaped like Warren G. Harding. If that wasn't a ducking stool in the corner why in the world did she think that it was?
The oddest thing was the coatrack or whatever covered in some disreputable old shawl or blanket that suddenly turned around, grew a beard on a wrinkled face and asked, "May I help you?"
Theodora didn't quite yelp. "W-who are you?" she managed to stammer.
The bony old man who wasn't really a coatrack quirked a bushy eyebrow, "The proprietor of this establishment, the wizard in residence." He smiled, his teeth curiously white and gleaming in his ancient face.
"Oh." Theodora muttered. Theatre major, probably, she said to herself. "Oh, well, I'm just looking for...." She didn't get to finish.
"A nightlight?" said the wizard before she could ask for directions for the shop she really wanted.
"Uh, no? I mean, how did you know? I...."
"You must have been talking to yourself and I heard you," said the wizard. "That is certainly likelier than my being able to read minds, isn't it?" His eyes gleamed brightly, were they blue, or gray or green or...? "Hazel," he supplied, "at least, today."
Theodora almost didn't jump in surprise. "No! A nightlight? Well, of course, you don't have anything like that here, do you? No, I didn't think so, I'll just be going..."
"You're afraid of me suddenly aren't you? Fear is a terrible thing, one of the terrible things that lives in the dark, isn't it?" The old man was bent and gnarled but even so, taller than she by several inches.
Why can't I leave? Theodora wanted to ask. Why am I standing here nodding to this madman? Her hands clenched and unclenched but her feet did not move.
"Because you need a nightlight to chase away the fear," said the wizard. "Fear isn't the most terrible thing that lives in the dark, though." He studied her face, not unsympathetically, but perhaps a bit dispassionately. "Guilt lives in the dark, too."
Theodora's heart was a cold stone in her chest. Her breath came in one ragged indrawn whoop and she tried to speak.
"Did you say your child's name is Drew?" asked the Wizard with a quirk of a smile.
Had she? She didn't think so but....
The old man went on. "The one that is so afraid of the dark. The one who was afraid of the dark on a night twelve years ago, so afraid that you left your bed beside your husband and went to sleep with the child?" He didn't let her speak but nodded to himself in answer to his own questions.
"And why did you leave? Because your husband wouldn't let the child come in and join the two of you in your bed. 'The kid is seven. He's got to learn to sleep alone. You're trying to turn him into a sissy.' Is that what he said?" Theodora's neck hairs stood up, the wizard had done a perfect job of imitating Allen's voice, a voice she hadn't heard in twelve years. And he'd gotten the words right, too.
The wizard leaned close and unconscious of her action, Theodora leaned toward him. "The boy also heard your husband," the old man whispered.
She nodded. She had known that, little Drew had been crying even before the burglar had broken into the house and killed her husband. She felt her throat closing up again, the way it had on that night, the way it did whenever she thought of that night.
"Stay calm," said the wizard, calmly. "It's not fear that closes your throat, you know. It's guilt. Guilt is the other monster that lives in dark places, guilt that you are alive and Allen is dead." The wizard said nothing for most of a minute and Theodora tried desperately not to think at all. "You even feel guilty that your son is alive when your husband is dead and buried."
Tears rolled down Theodora's cheek. What sort of place was this? What sort of man knew so much about her? What was he going to do to her? Was he the devil? An angel?
"No," said the wizard. "Though I may be an agent of a higher power," his eyes didn't almost twinkle. "But then, would I know it if I were?" The wizard casually began opening drawers in a large chest and examining the contents. One drawer after another, not taking anything out, just looking in and closing it again.
The noises she made might have been laughter or sobs, she wasn't sure which.
"How long have you known about Drew wearing your clothes when you're out of the house? Your frillies and such?" asked the wizard, not looking up from his mysterious inventory.
"Years," she whispered.
"Has he ever left the house wearing them?"
She shook her head. "I don't know."
"Do you think he knows that you know?" The wizard removed something from a drawer, something small and wriggling.
Theodora closed her eyes, she didn't want to see what he did with it. "Drew knows that I know," she said, she was sure of that.
"But you never talk about it--the guilty little secret you both share. Why, you've bought things just for him and left them where he'd find them so he would stop stretching your stuff out of shape. And you never saw those things again, did you? Because he knew why you bought them."
"Why are you doing this?" Theodora asked suddenly with some heat. "Why? And, and how do you know this stuff? Drew's just a boy with a problem, and I should get him some counseling and...." she trailed off looking at what the wizard held out in his gnarled old hand.
"What is it?" she asked.
"It's the nightlight you needed," said the old man. "Seventy-nine cents." He screwed up his face like this last part hurt him to say it. "Plus tax. Eighty-seven cents total."
She gave the old man a dollar and left the pennies he offered in change lying on the counter, took her purchase and hurried out of the mall. She almost looked back to see if the odd little storefront had disappeared behind her as soon as she got out of it.
The wizard watched her go, satisfied that he had found just the item to solve her problem. He had known he had it in the shop, but of course he could have made one if he hadn't. A nightlight was such a simple thing. He scooped the thirteen copper pieces into the bowl labeled, "Need a penny, take a penny. Have a penny, leave a penny."
He smiled, yes, that particular nightlight is just exactly what she needed.
* * *
"It's pink!" Drew was definitely whining this time.
"I'm sorry, I didn't notice," Theodora sighed tiredly. "If you knew what I went through to get that nightlight...."
"It has little fairies and pink bunnies around a pink lightbulb and...and it's a nightlight for a little girl, Mom!" Drew's voice practically broke with emotion, dread at the thought of putting this object in his bathroom.
"It's a nightlight, Drew. Just a nightlight, use it or don't." She moved tiredly to the kitchen to see what he might have made for dinner. Cheeseburger mac, again.
"But it's pink! I distinctly said I wanted a blue one," Drew whined.
She glared at him from the door of the kitchen.
* * *
Later, they ate quietly. Theodora had made a bit of salad and they both drank Caffeine-Free Diet Cokes with the cheeseburger mac. In the living room the TV made quiet noises about some crisis in some far away part of the globe, a worry for presidents and wizards perhaps. They had their own troubles.
The nightlight lay on the table and they both ignored it for awhile, too.
Theodora considered the purchase of the nightlight as an episode of some old black-and-white TV show with spooky music. She tried to ignore the implications. The nightlight must be magic, but did she really believe in magic? After dealing with a wizard how could she not? She smiled a bit, conscious of her circular thinking.
Drew picked up the nightlight and turned it around a few times to look at it closely. "Why in the world did you buy a little girl's nightlight for me?" he asked, then blushed..
She shook her head. "You weren't there. Believe me, I'd have bought a cement mixer if I could have got out of that shop sooner."
"Huh? Mom. Uh, is this supposed to be some sort of, uh, message?" Asking the question obviously cost him something but she really didn't know what he meant.
"Message?" she repeated. Maybe she just didn't want to admit knowing.
"Never mind," he muttered, blushing again.
He cleaned up the kitchen while his mother watched TV and tried to unwind. Drew knew how hard she worked so he tried to do most of the housework, cooking, cleaning, even the laundry of her intimate things. Theodora let him, even though it made her feel guilty.
Guilty. Why did that concept make her remember the nightlight again? Hadn't the wizard said something about guilt being one of the terrors of the darkness and that was why she needed a nightlight?
Why had he sold her a little girl's nightlight for her teenage son's bathroom? He'd known all about it, everything, Allen's death twelve years ago. Drew's -- hobby?
If the old man really was a wizard then the nightlight had to be magical. If Drew put the nightlight up in his bathroom, what would happen to him? Would it turn him into a little girl? Did she want to turn her son into a little girl?
Drew came in from the kitchen and sat on the floor beside her chair. He rested his head on the padded arm and snaked his hand up to where she could grasp it. They watched a rerun of "Touched by an Angel" on the Family Channel.
Drew would be happier if he were a girl, decided Theodora. She remembered that even before --before Allen's murder-- Drew had been a quiet child who would rather talk with her about anything than play roughhouse with the neighborhood boys. He had seemed fascinated when she put on makeup and had once asked her, "Why are some grown-ups mommies and some daddies? Why are some kids boys and some girls?"
She hadn't known the answer then and now that she did know, she knew it wasn't really an answer to the question Drew had been wanting to ask. She looked over at him, slouching against her chair, his head just beside her elbow. "Are you going to use the nightlight?" she asked.
He shrugged. "I guess. I-I really do need one, Mom."
If he used it, would the magic in it somehow chase away the guilt he felt, they both felt for having survived that terrible night? How powerful was it? Could it bring Allen back to life after twelve years of being dead?
The insurance had paid the mortgage on the house but they had moved within the year to this smaller home and put the difference between sale and purchase into the bank. Living there would have been too painful for both of them.
Allen had been the only man she had ever loved. She hadn't even considered remarrying, hadn't dated and had given up several friendships because her friends kept trying to set her up with eligible men. Could a little pink nightlight wash away guilt hiding that deep in the crevices of her soul? Maybe if she had remarried Drew would have had a role model and wouldn't be trying on her underwear when he thought no one would know.
Maybe the nightlight would turn back time, turn Drew into a little girl that Allen could allow to sleep with them because she was afraid of the dark and it's all right for little girls to be afraid. And then they would have all been in the same bed and the burglar might have killed all of them. At least, they wouldn't feel guilty anymore.
Or would they? Maybe Allen's ghost felt guilty, too. Guilty for having sent his only child, on the last night he would ever see his father, to sleep alone with the night terrors; night terrors that proved to be, oh, too real. If they were all dead would they still feel guilty?
If magic was real, why not ghosts?
Drew stood up, "I'm gonna bed, Mom. Got an eighter in the morning." He stood so tall now, at nineteen taller than his father had been. She put her arms up and he bent to her face and they kissed each other on the cheek, a kiss goodnight. They did this frequently because they really did love one another even though they were often unhappy together.
She had kissed Allen goodnight and goodbye twelve years ago when she went to the child's room to sleep. Was she kissing her son goodbye?
"Mom?" Drew asked. "Let go?"
She took her arms from around his neck and let him stand back up. He would make a very tall girl or would the nightlight change that, too?
Drew smiled at her and then trudged down the short hall to his room. She couldn't see if he had taken the nightlight with him. She didn't ask.
If he plugged the pretty little thing into the outlet in his bathroom would the pink light change him immediately? Would his cock and balls melt and smooth out and form a crease and a pussy with an opening up inside of him where ovaries and a womb would form? Would he shrink and his skin soften, his hips widen and soft mounds of breasts swell on his chest? Would his voice get softer and lighter and sweeter? How long would her hair be and would the light change her wardrobe too, make his jeans into dresses and his sneaks into high heels? If the nightlight turned Drew into a girl, she might be very pretty and she would want nice things to wear.
Or would the light wait until Drew was asleep to work it's magic? Would he just wake up as a young woman and never know that he had been a boy who felt guilty for letting his father die?
Should I warn him? Theodora thought. Should I tell him what might happen if he uses that nightlight? Would he believe me? No.
Will I feel guilty for turning my son into my daughter if that is what happens?
She fell asleep in the chair in the living room still puzzling out what she ought to do if magic were real, if the past could be changed, if a little pink nightlight could wash away guilt and horror and change the past and make everything all right.
* * *
"Mom?" Drew's voice woke her. "Mom, you really ought to get up and go to bed, you'll have a stiff neck sleeping in the chair."
Theodora stretched. "What time is it?"
"Past midnight by a bunch."
She could see Drew smiling in the light from the windows. She closed her eyes again for a moment.
"Mom?"
"I'm awake. I had the strangest dream." Theodora shook her head to try to clear the cobwebs, something about a nightlight?
"I don't understand it but I don't think it was a dream, exactly, Mom." Drew stood there in her pink lace shortie nightgown, her long, champagne-colored hair looking deeper than mahogany in the darkness as it fell around her delicate heart-shaped face.
"You're beautiful," whispered Theodora.
Drew giggled. "Mom! Larry tells me that all the time, don't you start! It's embarrassing. I'm a model, being pretty is just a job."
Theodora grinned, Larry was Drew's boyfriend and they might be getting married in a few months. "You're not pretty, you're beautiful, there is a difference."
"Okay, but that's just genes and good nutrition and who's fault is it anyway?" Drew grinned back.
<>< />"Mine, I guess," admitted Theodora. "I married your father and he was the handsomest man I ever knew."
Drew nodded solemnly. "Daddy was a hunk all right. But...."
Theodora shook her head again. "It wasn't a dream, was it? You were a boy and we both felt very guilty about your father...."
Drew nodded and her blue eyes misted up a bit. "It's kinda like looking down two different tunnels that come from the same place. I get cross-eyed just thinking about it. And Daddy, well, this time we were all in the same bed." She wiped her eyes.
"And your father fought the burglar and the gun went off...." Theodora trailed off. "Just like the other time."
"And he died this time, too," Drew sniffed. "How can we both believe that we lived this life before, but different? It's like -- sideways reincarnation. Are we both crazy, Mom?"
Theodora stood up and embraced her daughter. "No, baby. I don't think we are, not now. Maybe a little bit before. Hey, you're still taller than me." They hugged and sniffled on each other's shoulders for a bit.
"But I'm not taller than Daddy, anymore," said Drew. "I wouldn't want to be, Larry likes me just this tall, he told me so." They both giggled a bit, Larry liked everything about Drew just the way it was; her face, her hair, her breasts, her voice, her sex.
"You two love each other a lot, don't you?" asked Theodora, smoothing Drew's longest strands away from their faces.
Drew thought about that a moment and decided her mother meant quality not frequency and it was safe to answer. "Uh huh. And you are so going to meet Larry's uncle Aaron, I'll be moving out soon and I don't want you to be lonely.... Daddy wouldn't want you to be lonely."
They were both quiet for a while.
"Daddy loved us very much, didn't he?"
"Yes. He died saving our lives, you know." Drew nodded and Theodora continued. "He always loved us both, even when you were a boy..." she stumbled on the thought for a moment. "He loved you so much," she finished simply.
"I know," said Drew. "But it's just easier to see that this time, it's like in a different light or something." They walked down the short hall to the bedrooms. "I still feel sad about Daddy, but he kissed me just before I went to sleep and then there was the noise, the gunshot.... Do you think we will forget those other lives? The unhappy ones where we felt so guilty about everything? Will we think they were just dreams in the morning?" Drew asked her mother as they paused at the bedroom doors.
"I don't know, baby." Theodora said. "But can I sleep in here with you the rest of the night? Sometimes I'm a little afraid of the dark, too. And you've got a nightlight."
Drew smiled and followed her mother into the dark bedroom dimly lit by a pink glow from the pretty little girl's nightlight.
Carl could not believe his luck. The fabled Spells-R-Us store, right in his own mall!
SRU: The Mousepad
by Lainie Lee
I do not own the SRU universe, I am just borrowing it. The Spell-R-Us store and wizard were created by Bill Hart.
SRU: The Mousepad
by Lainie Lee
Carl could not believe his luck. The fabled Spells-R-Us store, right in his own mall! He'd read about this shop on Fictionmania, his favorite website. Not that he had ever told anyone in his real world life about his fondness for gender-bending fiction of the sort found on Fictionmania. Stories where unsuspecting young men got turned into ravishingly beautiful young women who promptly went out and got themselves ravished to a fare-thee-well.
No, in real life, Carl was much too sexually repressed to admit anything of the sort. But on the internet, late at night, after reading and re-reading a few of his favorite Ficitonmania stories, well, Carl virtually became another person. And some of his most favorite stories, the ones that got him really hot, had been placed in the universe created by Bill Hart where an old wizard ran a strange little curio shop that moved from mall to mall.
But Spells-R-Us? Here? In real life? He must be dreaming, the store couldn't really exist could it? Magic wasn't real, was it? He took off his glasses and cleaned them and put them back on and looked again. The store was still there, the cheap mannequin in the French Maid costume dripping costume jewelry and the little music boxes and pinking shears and manicure sets scattered around her feet. And those high heels she was wearing! They must be eight inches high!
Carl felt a hard-on growing in his jeans. Did he dare go in? He looked away from the store and looked back, simultaneously afraid that the store would vanish and that it would not. He vibrated with his anxiety. If he went in the wizard would sell him something that would change his life, probably forever, in ways he felt sure he could almost predict. The hard-on was getting quite painful as he turned away from the store again.
He walked away, irresolute, indecisive, uncommitted.
I should be committed, he thought, as he sat in the food court later, drinking a double latte. I must be crazy to think that Spell-R-Us could possibly be real. The hard-on had faded slowly. Damn rebel dick, though Carl. What, you want to commit suicide, if I go in there I can probably say good bye to you forever. But the hard-on was definitely coming back.
Carl sighed, there was just no reasoning with a prick. I'll go back and the store will be gone, he told himself. He stood and began a meandering path to where he had seen the Spell-R-Us store. Or it will be a perfectly ordinary real store with a perfectly ordinary reason to call itself Spell-R- Us. New Age gifts or kinky sex toys or.... Medallions, potions, magic figurines, costumes that won't come off....
His dick now hard as a rock, Carl walked painfully back to where he expected, no, dreaded, to find the magic shop. Could anyone in the mall tell that he had a hard-on? Well, people don't normally go around examining the crotches of middle-aged nerds to see if they are getting erections because of frustrated transgender fantasies coming to life. But Carl wasn't sure, that last lady had certainly given him an odd look. He blushed inwardly and squirmed and invisible squirm.
Turning again, h headed out of the mall without looking to see if the special shop was really in the little corner where he had seen it earlier. He would go home and forget about this. It wasn't like he was one of those transsexual people who planned to have their cocks cut off with a knife or even a real tranvestite. Sure, he had tried on his mother's bra when he was a teenager but he had read that most boys try that at least once.
No, he hadn't worn women's clothes in years, not since a frat party in college for one of those silly drag dance routines. For one thing, he looked ridiculous dressed as a girl. He stood 6'4" with broad, rounded shoulders and a pot gut from a life in front of a keyboard eating Fritos and swilling Pepsi. His hair had receded and he had taken to wearing a little moustache and scraggly goatee, as much to avoid shaving as to reaffirm his masculinity. If he gained six more pounds he would weigh 300.
He paused with his hands on the push bar of the exit door. The hard-on was gone, his inventory of his physical shortcomings had quelled that. He was 37, not quite a virgin after a ludicrous encounter with a Tijuana prostitute back in the eighties but he hadn't even had a _date_ in almost four years.
Not much of a man, he told himself. I'm a virtual transsexual, a digital transvestite. He frequently signed on to chat lines as Carla, or Carlotta or Charlotte, some feminine version of his name. And there he had hot, passionate, cybersex with anyone who could spare fifteen minutes of electronic lust.
An accomplished one-handed typist, sometimes he did this five or six times a night, his stamina for this sort of sex surprising him. He went through a lot of Kleenex but he came a good healthy wad, at least the first time, and still climaxed time after time. Sometimes, he swore, more than one climax per encounter. Like a real woman.
He had tried having cybersex as a male but it was dull, disappointing, even painful when his wanking hand produced only friction and not frissons. He hated having to fake an orgasm on the keyboard for his partner. And it worried him that the woman he was digitally shagging might be another man. That made him feel -- queer. It didn't bother him to take it in the virtual ass from someone claiming to be a man, or someone claiming to be a woman wielding a two-foot long dildo, as long as he, Carl, was claiming to be a woman.
Well, it bothered him, but not while he was doing it. And so, he lived, online, as a cybernympho, a virtual bimbo an electronic Fanny Hill.
How had he got back in to the mall? And there was the storefront, with it's tackily arcane lettering spelling out the logo he loved. Spells-R-Us.
He pushed open the door and stepped inside.
"Well, it took you damn long enough," snarled the wizard. "I've a good mind to send you home without selling you anything, Carl."
Of course the wizard knew his name. "Uh, sorry, sorry, I'm sort of scared and well, am I dreaming?"
"No, you're a goddamned character in a short story on Fictionmania, and you know as well as I do that you aren't dreaming. Here," he handed Carl a paper bag.
"Uh, what's this?"
"It's what you came here for, now beat it. I have to get the shop packed up. I'm re-opening in downtown Reno tomorrow night." The wizard began packing bottles labeled Miracle-Titty-Gro into a carton on the floor.
Carl clutched the bag, his fingers spasming, his voice broken, his face sweaty and cold. "W-what do I owe you?" he managed to squeak.
"Oh, right." The wizard frowned. "I have to charge something for the magic to work, don't I? Ah, give me whatever you've got in your left pants pocket and we'll call it even."
Carl checked. "All I've got is a Sugar-Free Orange Spice Ricola Throat Lozenge." He held it out.
The wizard coughed experimentally and clutched at his throat. "Gimme," he said. He popped the medicated candy into his mouth without unwrapping it then deftly spit out the paper. "Beat it, now, don't make me tell you again," he warned.
Carl left quickly, it is very dangerous to anger wizards.
"Oh, shit, oh, fuck, oh, piss, oh, hell," he sang a little mantra all the way home. "Oh, cocksucker, motherfucker, goddammit to hell!" What had he done? What was going to happen to him? What had the wizard sold him and what would it do to him? His prick was stiff again, the hard-on demanding at least part-time attention and Carl drove mostly one-handed, ran two stop signs and barely missed the fence post as he turned into the drive of his apartment building.
The front of his pants had a wet spot as he staggered upstairs. Inside his cluttered studio flat, he finally opened the paper bag and took out his magical treasure. It was a foamed rubber rectangle with rounded corners about nine by ten inches. One side was black, like a wetsuit, the other had a picture of a cartoony, big-busted blonde wearing next to nothing. Big dangly earrings, long artificial nails, a corset and impossibly high heels. She had one hand in her mouth and one at her shaved crotch and the look in her eyes said she was just about to come from the job she was doing on herself.
Carl had often imagined looking just like such an over-endowed, over-sexed bimbo as he played his cyberfuck games. Now, his loins ached as he contemplated the object he held. "A mousepad?" he whispered. Would this object somehow transform him into the nympho of his virtual self?
His groin ached. How was he suppose to use this? Well, duh! It was a mousepad, its use was obvious. He plunked himself down at the computer screen and, without thinking it through, without pausing to consider what might or might not happen, he replaced his old Bullwinkle mouse pad with the new one.
Then he stopped, shivering, shaking as a climactic, orgasmic, shudder racked his body and caused him to spurt a good two-ouncer into his jeans. He was vaguely surprised to discover himself to still be -- himself -- after that one. Turning into a girl ought to feel that good, oughtn't it?
What the hell was he doing!? He pushed himself away from the desk and almost turned the chair upside down getting away from the computer. Gasping, he staggered to his little kitchenette and contemplated his face in the mirror on the back of the door to the tiny bathroom. Fat, nearly forty, bearded, bespectacled, Carl. Still himself.
"Shit!"
But what did he want? Did he really want to be turned into a bimbo, a slut, a whore, a nymphomaniac who only thought of where she was going to get her next cock and into which orifice? Well?
Manfully his dick tried to get hard again but it was too soon for the delicate bio-hydraulics of his erectile tissue, too soon after that last soul-satisfying, self-shattering, orgasmic, cataclysm-in-his- pants.
This is supposed to be a short story, he reminded himself. I've got to get on with it, make up my mind, decide what I really want, figure out what I'm going to do.
He drank a glass of water.
If I turn the computer on and put a mouse on that pad it is going to turn me into the woman in the picture. Maybe forever. Sometimes the wizard gave things that could be used more than once, things where the magic wore off after a bit but could be reactivated. Actually, a mousepad would seem to be ideal for such a reusable magic talisman.
Carl calmed down a bit. That would be pretty cool. He could use the mousepad when he went on line as Carlotta, the uninhibited party girl who would fuck anything; one of her cyber-lovers had been a pony! Carl blushed remembering that one. Must have been hell, typing with hooves.
No, wait.
He was getting reality and virtuality confused but maybe he could use the mousepad to actually turn himself into a girl when he was pretending to be one online. Yeah, that would be great.
If it would be so great, why wasn't he getting a hard-on again? Not even trying to, the little wad of flesh at his groin was completely uninterested.
But let him think for just a moment, just a flash of consideration, a fleck of reflection on the idea of being _stuck_ as Carlotta, _trapped_ in the body of a bimbo, _living_ the _rest_ of his --her-- life as a slut -- agh! Now, he'd done it, hard as a rock again, painfully hard after two other recent explosions.
"You suicidal little sonofabitch," he accused his penis.
The wizard had given him a piece of magic that would permanently transform him into the girl he wanted to be; he knew it, deep down where his id lurked and yammered in the darkness, where desires are palpable and reason is a higher function yet to be evolved; he knew it. Use that mousepad and he could say goodbye to his dick and balls. He'd have a sweet, wet little cunny, hungering to be filled by any cock that came along.
"Why am I such a perverted little wretch?" he whimpered. Because he wanted it, he wanted the magic to take him and stretch him and compress him and mold him, mind and body.
He caressed his chest where little fat pockets imitated womanly breasts. Sometimes he played with them, with his typing hand, while his wanking hand brought himself to climax and he murmured _to_ Carlotta, and _as_ Carlotta, loved and lover, all complete in one self.
He imagined it. Imagined the rush as the magic took hold, shrinking him. His muscles would melt away, not that he was any great mass of masculine power, but Carlotta was girlishly weak, helpless to resist anyone if they wanted to force her into an act not of her choosing. Not that she would balk at much of anything. His waist would shrink, and shrink even more as the magic transformed his clothing into Carlotta's corset, squeezing him, compressing him. How narrow was her waist? Nineteen inches, seventeen, fifteen, for God's sake?
How had he got back over here staring at the cartoon on the goddamned mousepad again? And those jugs! Breasts, hooters, mammaries, cantaloupes, what the heck is bigger than cantaloupes? Watermelons? He imagined the blossoming of such massive milk factories on his masculine chest. Were his nipples getting hard now, fer chrissake? He moaned.
I'm sitting here at the computer! I'm out of control! His hands trembling, he flicked the switch on his power strip and the gateway to virtual space revved up, going through its digital checklist. In a moment, the mouse would begin to be operational.
How will I make a living, he wondered. Carlotta is damn near illiterate, she sure as shit won't be able to write code for a living. He remembered telling someone online that "she" had repeated the fifth grade so many times they put a brass plaque on "her" chair.
"I'm thirsty!" he shouted spontaneously and leapt to his feet, heading for the kitchenette's tiny refrigerator and one of his cans of Pepsi-Cola. Everything is going to be different, he said sipping his cola and imagining the magic changes rippling down his body.
The urethra at the tip of his dong would move down as the tube of flesh shrank and curved. His balls would pull themselves up into his abdominal cavity and migrate up near his kidneys to become ovaries. He had done a lot of reading on the physiology of sex. His scrotum would split open and a vagina deepen into a womb, while his penis continued to shrink until it was just a nub, a clit at the top of his little slitch. Twitch. Twat. Cunt, cunny, pussy, monkey, _girl-thing_.
He breathed in, inhaling a bubble of carbonation, then, bursting into a coughing fit. He wondered if he could figure out a way to pound himself on the back as he staggered around, coughing and choking before finally getting control of himself. Boy, now there is a hell of a way to get rid of a hard-on, he thought, wiping his eyes.
The monocular eye of his computer accused him of neglect from across the room. Cyclops and Noman, all-in-one. A vulva in chips clothing, God, I can't take the punishment! He snorted, clearing the last of the sputum and phlegm out of his breathing passages.
"Waddamigonnadooo!" He wanted to howl, but kept it muted for fear of what the neighbors would think. Carlotta, his cyberself was a slut, a bimbo, a nymphomaniac. She wouldn't even be able to make a living as a whore for giving it away!
"I'm gonna die! I'm gonna have a heart-attack and fucking _die_ before I'll sit in that damned chair!" What man really wants his fantasy handed to him on a platter? "He sold me a magic transformation for a _coughdrop_!? On a mousepad! It can't be real! Can't be!" He realized he was crying, sobbing, weeping -- like a woman.
Staggering he made his way to his bed, right beside the computer desk but psychologically millions of miles away. Collapsing, muttering, moaning, shivering, exhausted, defeated, depressed and soon, asleep.
Hours later, he woke to see the still accusing screen of his personal daemon, the screensaver had blinked off and the sudden flood of light filled the room. What had made the screensaver exit? Confused, at first he couldn't fathom it at all, lost still in a edges of a dream in which he had been run through the halls of his old high school, naked and pneumaticlly female and pursued by the entire football team, once the mortal enemies of all nerd-dom.
But the glowing screen brought it all back to him, the mall, the shop, the wizard, the purcahse. Terrified, he watched the cursor move across the busy-ness of his desktop background, cavorting Bunnies around the Playboy mansion Pool. Was the mousepad moving the mouse on its own?
The cursor moved toward his internet phone icon and he heard the click of the mouse. He almost jumped out of his skin but nothing really happened until, moments later, the face of the SRU wizard formed in the herky-jerky movement of a low bandwidth webcam. "What the hell are you doing lying in bed, Carl? It's almost midnight!" The wizard grimaced and pointed at the hourglass on his wrist in six frames per second it looked really kind of funny and Carl smiled in spite of himself.
"Midnight?" he murmured the question.
"The witching hour! You have to be using the mousepad at midnight for it to take effect. Now get your ass up and get into this chair."
"You mean it wouldn't have done anything if I had used it this afternoon? How come you never tell anyone everything about the things you sell?" But he began to move, sitting up and rubbing his face and eyes.
The wizard snorted. "Ever hear of dramatic tension? Get over here."
"How come you can see me? I don't have a webcam." Carl stood and staggered to the computer desk. Taking his seat he suddenly recoiled from the mousepad as if he had seen a snake.
"Like I need a webcam. You are such a wuss!" the wizard accused. "Put your hand on the mouse!"
"No!" Carl whimpered. "I'm afraid!"
"You don't want to become the woman of your cyber-dreams?" asked the wizard, sweetly.
Max Headroom, that was who the wizard was moving like, not like a real webcam but like that cartoony character from the old British sci-fi show. Carl's thoughts veered, anything but think about what he was actually doing, putting his hand on the mouse. "Well, I do, I mean, No! No, I don't! At least, not forever!" He tried to pull his hand back but he couldn't move it.
"Who said anything about forever?" The wizard smiled.
"Nobody," admitted Carl. "But there are 128 stories about you on Fictionmania, I think I know your sense of humor."
"131 now, counting this one. Drat," complained the wizard. "I shouldn't have made that deal with Mindy."
"W-what deal?" asked Carl. He tried to keep his hand very still and glanced at the clock nervously, it wasn't accurate, actually showing the time as a minute or two after midnight.
"I promised Mindy to sell something to every one of my Fictionmania fans if she would display the resulting stories. But it isn't working out well, you're my first and you aren't co-operating," the old man glared from the computer screen.
"Why me? Why did you pick me first!" Carl tried to keep the whine out of his voice.
"Your name is Carl Aals? Right?" said the wizard, patiently.
"Uh, oh, yeah." He nodded, getting it.
"So, if you don't get with the program, nobody else gets their transformation either, 'cause I ain't got time to talk everyone into doing what they really want to do in the first place."
"C-can I make a deal with you?" asked Carl. Involuntarily, his hand twitched.
"Hah! You moved the mouse! You're using the mousepad! I've got you!" the wizard cried in triumph.
"No-o-o!" Carl almost fainted. "N-no-o! Wait! Wait, wait, wait, please woncha!?"
The wizard seemed to have a cramp in his moustache or maybe it was just the jerkiness of the Real Player video. "What kind of deal? Huh? I already made this mousepad just for you. Doesn't the broad-ass bimbo look just like what you imagined her looking?"
"Yes. B-but, I'll starve to death if you turn me into HER, she hasn't got enough brains to come in from the cold!"
"But that's what you want," the wizard pointed out. "Deep down, right where it matters, right where it hooks into the pleasure center of your brain. A beautiful, brainless nympho is exactly what you _really_ want to be."
Carl cursed under his breath. His traitorous dick was getting hard again. "A-a person can want something and know that it isn't a good thing to have. I mean, fantasies are supposed to be fantasies, aren't they? If, if you make them real they aren't fantasies anymore and, and," he realized that his logic was breaking down. "Oh, shit."
He closed his eyes and trembled. "Just don't make me too stupid to live!"
The wizard chuckled. "So you are saying that what you really get off on is pretending to be a brainless nymphomaniac bimbo with a body like a wet dream?"
"Uh," Carl dithered. His mouse hand was also his wanking hand and the need to jerk off was so strong that it paralyzed him since he couldn't let go of the mouse or lift it from the pad. Stealthily, he dropped his typing hand into his lap. This would almost be a first.
"I asked you a question," the wizard reminded him.
"Uh," Carl stammered again. "Yeah, I guess so, I like my fantasy being a fantasy, I mean, I would really like to experience it b-but permanently? The reason it excites me so much is _because_ it is so scary." His hand stroked the tumescence in his trousers, his pants were already stiff there from the last ejaculations he hadn't cleaned up after.
"Click!" said the wizard. Or did he? Had the sound come from the mouse?
A surge seemed to come from the hand resting on the mousepad, a magical energy that traveled faster than thought or desire. Certainly faster than Carl's typing hand trying to stand in for his wanking hand.
The fingers changed first, long nails growing out as the bones became more slender and the skin softer. The nails first blushed and then turned bright red as they reached the queenly length of two inches past the ends of the fingers.
Traveling up the arm, the magic melted the rough curly hair into smooth flesh, the muscle and bone changing at the same time from manly, if nerdy, meatiness to delicate feminine grace. Funny elbow that bent the wrong way, smooth cylindrical upper arm with hardly a hint of a bicep, soft shoulder that was still squarer than it had been; it all happened in an instant but Carl still had plenty of time to watch.
The magic jumped to his feet he realized, his now tiny, arched feet in their impossible platform sandals with the itsy-bitsy, perfect little ruby-tipped toes. Then his smooth hairless ankles, shins, rounded calves, dimpled knees, led up to long shapely thighs with the only real muscle his new body would ever have; enough muscle to clasp a lover tightly between them. He felt his ass pillow under him, soft and round; it would jiggle with every step he would take, "like Jello on springs."
The wizard watched with interest from the computer screen as the magic leapt now to Carl's head. The thinning brown thatch blossomed into goldenrod curls, falling down behind him, past the roundness of his ass, almost reaching the floor. Smooth forehead, arched brows, shell-like ears dangling hoops heavy enough to be real gold and at least six inches across. Tip-tilted nose below cornflower blue eyes hiding behind sable lashes and periwinkle lids. A big delicious mouth with plump ruby lips opened and Carl murmured, "Fuck!" his voice breaking upward in the middle of the word as the racing magic turned his thick Guntherish neck into a delicate Hepburnian column, his nerdy croak into a bimbo trill.
Down his chest and his other arm the magic still flowed, breast swelling, larger and larger, did any alphabet have enough letters to confine them in cups? Bigger and bigger, bigger than his new head, heavy enough to sway his back if it weren't for the rigidity of the corset forming around his tiny waist and the support of the built-in demi-cups. Carl felt his back arch and stiffen and the muscles of his trunk wither away, he'd never even be able to sit up now without his pretty prison.
He gasped as the corset constricted his diaphragm, forcing him to breathe by expanding the already impressive proportions of his very mammalian chest. His waist shrank to the tiniest measure possible for function, a mere thirteen inches with a three-inch verticality like the stem of a cocktail glass. Carl cringed to hear the gasp come out as a giggle, the magic had touched his mind already and he knew that his intellect would shrink at least as much as his waist. "Feelth funny," he said in his new, sugary, soprano lisp.
Down the trunk past the straitened waist and the swelling of the loins, and down the typing-cum- wanking arm toward the last tower, the citadel of his masculinity, the magic cataract of transformation poured and flowed. His naked hips widening to match his thighs and rounded ass, Carl tried one last time to grasp the passion root, the stiff pink carrot that had given him so much pleasure in his life.
But it shrank away from his fingers with their long daggerish, blood-red nails, leaving only one last drop of male love-fluid on the fingertips of a hand that would never type again, not with those nails. The piss-hole slid down the shaft even as the shaft melted away, leaving only the nubbin of the clitty above the cleft left by the receding testes and the splitting of the ballsack. Inside other changes completed the transformation, the balls became egg-heavy ovaries and the new vagina opened onto the new babybed. It had never been Carl's fantasy to get pregnant but it was certainly possible now for Carlotta.
"I'm me!" she whispered.
"Cogent if circular," observed the wizard from the computer screen.
"Waddaya, 'thpeck, I'm not too bright, y'know," she dimpled at him and giggled then got distracted investigating the bit of Carl-cum still clinging to her fingers. "Ooo, tasty," she lisped around her finger.
The fluid seemed to electrify her, the nipples showing above the corset-cups erecting like rosy- brown sunflowers seeking Apollo loins. Her little twat swelled with blood and the miniature prick of her clitoris crinkled and twitched above a flood of girl-juices. "I am tho damn horny!" she said, sounding awed but pleased.
"Of course you are, dear," the wizard muttered. He seemed to be consulting a list just out of sight of the non-existent web cam.
Carlotta giggled as she worked one hand almost entirely into the cleft at the center of her being. "Um, ooo, um." With the other hand she teased her nipples, her lips and played with the hoops in her ears. "I need to cum, oh, I need to cum," she whimpered. "Oh, I'll never be able to cum enough!"
The wizard smiled slightly as he made a mark on a sheet of paper. "Having fun, Carl?"
"Uh huh," she gasped. Then, breaking character for just a moment, "Thanks, I guess. Oh! Oh! O- o-oh!" She shuddered, orgasming as she contemplated a lifetime of pretending, being forced by the magic to pretend to being a brainless, nymphomaniac, blonde while still retaining enough mind to keep herself safe and enough memory of being Carl to make it still sweeter. "I-I wasn't expecting an ending quite like this. "
"Oh, this isn't the end," said the old man. "One down, and maybe a million or so to go." He looked up, smiling at some wizardly thought. "Better not wait up for me, Steve."
The End?
Spells'R'Us: The wizard offers Simon a fresh start...
I don't own the SRU Universe, Bill Hart does, I'm just borrowing it.
Copyright 2002 by Elaine Blankenship.
Originally posted 2005 March 13
"Have you got a refill for this ink pen?"
"Just a minute, Simon." said the old man. "I'll be right there."
Simon stood at the counter a moment more then looked around at the odd little shop. The strange items on the tables seemed to want to speak to him of odd places and stranger origins. He shrugged, fantasy was not on the agenda today, he needed a refill for his pen so he could fill out employment applications.
Somewhere behind the back counter the old man who owned this little shop puttered with some task and wasted time, Simon's time. Simon suppressed his irritation, he didn't want a meaningless confrontation over the old man's inattention to business.
He tapped nervously on the counter top with the empty barrel of his eighty dollar Cross pen. Forcing himself to stop, he examined the pen to make sure he hadn't damaged it. It was the only pen he had and he needed it.
"I know I've got one somewhere," the old man called from the back part of the store.
"A refill?" asked Simon, surprised. He hadn't thought the fellow had heard his original request.
"Yes." The strangely dressed old man slapped the little package down on the counter. "Seventy-nine cents," he said. Then, after a moment, "Uh, what state is this?"
"State?" Simon stared at the package blankly, so little for a refill for the gold-barrel pen he had gotten for his thirteenth birthday almost fifteen years ago?
"Yes, state! Don't tell me I'm in Canada, damn it, I know I'm not because I had to pay five dollars for a Molson with lunch! Now, what state are we in?" The old man petulantly grabbed the pen refill back.
"Hey! I need that!" Simon looked up, startled and more than a little annoyed but frightened a bit by the old man's action.
"Then tell me what state we're in!"
"Uh, California." This guy was weird, and now Simon wondered just why he had chosen to come into a shop called Spells'R'Us looking for a refill for his pen anyway. It hadn't looked like a stationery shop from the outside, and looked even less so from the inside.
"It's not," said the strange old man. "California, huh? Damn, highway robbery, I call it. That's six cents tax, you owe me 85 cents." He handed the little blister pack with the ink refill in it back to Simon.
"Not...what?" Simon took out one of his last dollar bills and handed it over, his qualms about buying such a cheap refill for his expensive pen forgotten in his confusion. He couldn't really afford a more expensive refill anyway.
"Not a stationery store." The wrinkled lips creased in a grin, "Nor a stationary one for that matter, but we always have what our customers need. Have a nice life, Simon." He dropped the change into the younger man's hand.
Confused, Simon backed away with his purchase and stammered a good bye. "Uh, have a nice -- day?" the California-ism sounded even more inane after the old man's strangeness.
Simon fled, not quite running and definitely not looking back over his shoulder.
Down in the food court, a bit more calm now, Simon bought an Orange Julius and a Relish Dog and sat down to eat lunch before filling out the applications he had collected during the morning. The dog and drink took the last of the cash in his wallet and even the fifteen cents change he had gotten from the strange shop, but it was comfort food and he didn't feel bad about spending it. He ate slowly, enjoying the tastes and dreading the work and embarrassment of filling out the applications.
Finished, he bussed his table then sat back down and took the paperwork from the folder he had been carrying. He ripped apart the blister pack and took out the dull gold-colored pen refill, more slender than the one the Cross had come with. "Cheap," he sighed. Opening the Cross he took out the old ink-barrel and tossed it then slipped the new refill inside. Nothing tingled or flashed or warned him in anyway.
The first blank on the application was his name. He could fill that out truthfully, at least, and so he did. "Simon K. Brent." What the? He stared at his name on the page.
The purple ink didn't change color to any sort of comforting black or blue.
"I, I can't turn in an application written in purple ink!" he said out loud. He retrieved the blister pack from the trash and scanned it indignantly. "Majik Brand Universal Ink Refill" it said. "Color of Ink: Loving Lavender."
He considered storming back to the little shop and confronting the strange old man who had mysteriously called him by name and hadn't seemed to know what state he was in. No, that sounded as bad an idea as any other he had had in the last few years. Confrontations made his knees tremble and his bladder feel weak anyway.
He debated internally borrowing a black or blue ink pen from someone to fill out one of the other applications, but the sand had all run out of him. How was he going to get a job now, anyway? All the forms had the same questions.
"Who was your last employer?" Pacific Federal Savings and Loan.
"Reason for leaving?" Fired for embezzlement. Sure, someone would hire him after reading that, written in purple ink, no less!
He bit his lip. Well, they hadn't pressed charges. He wouldn't go to jail but they had made him put his signature on a piece of paper admitting his crime. And he could always lie on his employment application. After all, he was an accused thief, why stick at lying?
The glare from the big window at the end of the food court made his eyes water. He wiped them with a napkin and a trembling hand and sighed. His lips curved around a sour smile, it wasn't an expression that suited him.
He sat back down at the table and stared at the application for a moment then went to work, filling out blanks with complete and total lies. Maybe no one would catch him out. Maybe he'd be able to get a job and put his past behind him.
The purple ink bugged him though. It seemed sort of girly. Like maybe he should be dotting his i's with little hearts and flowers.
Damn it.
He'd just done that very thing on the second application; he'd filled in the name blank with 'Simone' and drawn a little heart for the dot! He shivered a bit, he must be worse off than he thought, acting out even trivial impulses.
And misspelling his own name.... When he'd been younger, the kids at school had teased him by calling him Simone. He'd been small and weak and sort of pretty with full dark eyelashes and curly hair. It had especially hurt when the girls used the wrong name because he had thought that many of them were his friends.
He still had those physical traits, of course; the mop of curly black hair, the clear, pale skin that made his lips seem redder and fuller, the long dark lashes framing the bright blue eyes. At five foot seven and only 130 pounds, Simon was often mistaken for a teenager even though he had passed his 27th birthday a few months ago.
And in dim light, like in bars, he'd sometimes been mistaken for a girl. Which was one reason he stayed out of bars.
He sighed and started to crumple up the application but again, the futility of his situation sapped his will. What he needed was a brand new start in life.
A strange, mad, desperate idea began to form in his mind. He went back to filling out the applications, chuckling grimly. "It's just a joke," he told himself. "These applications are ruined with this purple ink anyway. What does it matter what I write in the blanks?"
The person Simon described on the applications was almost entirely fictitious. He got a little silly, even; he changed his birthday from May 3 to March 5 and made himself ten years younger. I'll be a Pisces instead of a Gemini, he mused. Pisces are more trustworthy, aren't they? He had no idea, really.
His birthplace he changed from Westminster, California to Westminster, England. He wasn't even sure that was a city. And with a little smiling flower instead of an X, he marked the box beside the F for sex. Female. He grinned nervously and folded the applications.
He sat for awhile and sipped the dregs of his orange drink, trying not to think at all. Why bother? Thinking wasn't going to get him out of the mess he found himself in.
A little dazed, he wandered back through the mall, dropping off the applications in the various in boxes and slots of the stores where he had picked them up. He wasn't sure why he did that, just completing the joke he thought. No one was going to look at an application filled out in purple ink, not seriously.
But now he had no money, no real hope of a job and not even bus fare for getting back to his cheerless apartment.
He'd have to call his mother and ask for another loan. And listen to another lecture about how he'd ruined his life. Maybe that was why, in filling out the fictitious applications he had listed his father's younger sister as his only parent, or rather the only parent of Simone K. Brent. "I think I would rather be Aunt Gloria's bastard daughter than listen to another lecture," he thought.
He decided to walk home to his apartment from the mall, what choice did he have? Even if he called his mother, he'd get an answering machine at this time of day. The self-pity felt like gumbo clinging to his feet and making every step seem to be up an endless hill.
He had to pass near the edge of the downtown area, going this way. Maybe he should have come downtown instead of taking a bus to the mall, he wouldn't have had to walk so far back. And maybe he could have found a real refill for his pen instead of a purple one from that weird store.
The police-station-city-hall-and-jail complex intimidated him and he went two blocks out of his way to avoid walking near it. I'm not a criminal, he told himself, I just made a mistake.
Then he stopped and stared. Right there, across the street, between Fernando's Bail Bonds and Klesowitz Pawnshop, there it was. The freaky little store from the mall.
Was it a damn chain of franchises? Spells-R-Us?
He stared for a bit longer then shook his head. Maybe he could go in and get a refund on the crappy refill he'd bought. The now used refill that he hadn't kept the blister pack from and had never even got a receipt. He snorted.
It would be smarter to go to the pawn shop and sell his worthless gold pen. The metal alone should bring thirty or forty dollars. Not that pawnshop, though, not the one next to the strange little store. There was another pawnshop in the next block. He started walking again.
A man dressed in a slightly rumpled business suit staggered out of a bar and looked at him. Good grief, thought Simon, it's not three p.m. and this guy is drunk.
"Heysa?" said the inebriated businessman. "Is it dark out yet?"
"No," said Simon. Now why did I bother answering him.
The drunk fell into step beside him, "Well, then, I guess I'm lucky, huh, yes indeed." He grinned a sloppy loose-lipped grin at Simon.
"I don't know you," Simon began. What did this guy want?
"Oh, that's okay," said the drunk solemnly. "I don't know you either, and I kinda prefer it that way."
Simon picked up his pace, but the drunk stayed with him, more than half a foot taller he had no trouble keeping up. Maybe I should guide him into a telephone pole, thought Simon.
"How much?" said the drunk suddenly, grabbing Simon by the upper arm.
"How...much?"
"Yeah, you know? How much do you need?"
"Do I need?" Simon struggled against the grip, an edge of panic in his voice.
"Yeah, what's your rate?"
Simon had a terrible feeling that he knew what the man meant now. With a gurgled shriek, stifled by stuffing his free hand in his mouth, he broke away from the man and stumbled backward. Horrified and ashamed though he had certainly done nothing wrong, he stared at his accoster and walked backward till he stopped up against a parked car.
"Don't be that way," said the man. "You need money don't you?" He stepped forward, reaching into his pocket to pull out a wad of bills. "I got money, you got what I need."
"No, no." Simon ran.
He heard what the man called him as he ran away; an accusation, an assumption and a form of address. His face burned and he yelped again as he crossed a street without a light, dodging through traffic.
"I'm not," he whimpered. But he didn't slow down until he went around the next corner. "I'm not that desperate," he told himself. "Not yet."
He stopped to get his breath and his bearings. Where had he run to?
Or had he run anywhere? There was that damned shop again.
Spells'R'Us.
But this was Abraham's Pawn and Music on one side and a laundromat on the other. And it faced Fifth Street, not Broadway. He looked around, dazed, disoriented. He certainly knew where he was, he'd grown up in this town, he could name all the streets and knew most of the businesses.
And before this morning, he'd never seen a store called Spells'R'Us, never heard of it, there couldn't be three such stores in his hometown. One in the mall, one downtown and one on a side street.
What. Kinda. Thing. Was. Happening. Here?
His brain started and stopped and stalled out completely. He just stood and stared at the sign for a long while. Finally, he shook off his paralysis and decided that not thinking, especially not thinking about a store that seemed to be following him was a good thought; but not thinking about that...what should he be thinking about?
Money. The drunk had been right in one thing, he did need money. A few dollars would give him enough to eat so that he didn't have to call his mother for cash, for at least a few more days.
He had a gold pen, with a crappy purple refill in it, but the barrel was real gold. And there stood a pawnshop. With a sign in the window that said, "We Buy Gold."
He crossed the street and went through the door.
"Hello, again, Simon," said the old man.
It almost looked like a pawnshop inside, with all manner of odd things; nameless stringed instruments and handmade silk kites decorated with pictures of pandas; bottles of unidentifiable oils and a stack of hats that might have been worn by Davy Crockett, Henry the Eighth, Shaka Zulu and Cleopatra; all manner of objects whose purposes he could not imagine and a stuffed dog as big as a pony lying on the floor next to the very familiar old man..
"I'm..." Simon began.
"Yes," said the old man. "You're back in my shop."
"How..." he tried to ask.
"You just walked through the door," said the old man. "I'm a wizard in answer to that next question."
"God," said Simon.
"A chance resemblance, I assure you," said the wizard.
The dog showed teeth in a grin and Simon realized that it was a real live wolf, not a stuffed animal at all, and that it probably weighed twice what he did. The grin was not reassuring in the least, being made from ivory teeth more than two inches long.
"If you squeak like that again," warned the old man, "you might be mistaken for a mouse."
Simon stood very still and made not a sound.
The wizard and the wolf looked at him contemplatively and speculatively, respectively. The wizard spoke first, though Simon felt sure that the wolf had just been about to say something. "Are you sure your aunt would want a teenage daughter?" asked the old man.
Simon tried to think. Aunt Gloria had once confided to him that she had had an abortion while in college, a decision she had felt was necessary at the time but still had bittersweet feelings of lost attached to it after all these years.
"All right," said the wizard. "You obviously get along with her if she told you that."
I did not say that aloud, Simon told himself.
"No, you didn't," agreed the wizard.
Simon made a noise, not a squeak, more of a moan.
"You wanted to sell the pen you had just bought a refill for?" said the wizard.
It wasn't exactly a non sequitur, somehow this whole thing was about that refill. Simon nodded cautiously.
"Lemme see it," said the wizard.
Simon handed the gold keepsake to the old man in the bathrobe.
The wizard unscrewed the barrel and removed the refill, "This is almost new," he said. "It could last you for years yet." He pocketed the gold pen and took out another more colorful object. A cheap plastic pen with a pink and purple barrel and a yellow cap shaped like a daisy. Opening this unlikely writing instrument, the wizard inserted the nearly new refill. "I'll trade you," said the wizard, holding out the assembled gewgaw.
Simon stared. There could hardly be a more girly pen on the planet. He didn't make a move to accept it and the wizard suddenly snatched it back.
"Maybe you can't afford it," he said.
Simon either shook his head yes or nodded it no.
"You didn't steal the money, did you?" said the wizard more kindly.
Simon gasped.
"Your drawer came up short and they bullied you into signing a confession, didn't they?"
"Yes," Simon croaked. "They said otherwise they would call the police and I would go to jail." His eyes filled up with tears and he didn't even care that the old man stood there and watched him cry. The wolf put its head down on its paws and looked away.
"They haven't come under my jurisdiction," said the wizard. "Not yet, anyway, I rather hope they do. Or he does. One particular vice president in that bank...had a thing for you, did you know that?"
Simon's ears tried to crawl together on top of his head to join his eyebrows. "No!"
The wizard grinned and shook his head. "And you, you're no damn good with money anyway, are you?"
"Uh."
"A bank was the last place you should have been working, you gave the two hundred dollars to one Mrs. Maria Luz Gongora, instead of a pair of tens."
"I did."
The wizard nodded, "She bought presents for her grandkids and pads for her bunions, then she lit a candle for you and confessed her sin to a priest. He told her to take the money back, but she couldn't, she didn't have it."
"How do you know..."
"Don't ask," warned the wizard. He held up the pretty purple pen, "I want more from you for this than just a stick of gold that someone gave you."
Simon stared. "What. What do you want?"
The old man put the pen in Simon's hand and wrapped both of their fingers around it. The wizard's hands were old and wrinkled but surprisingly soft, his grip was firm and he held Simon fast.
Staring directly into his eyes, the wizard told Simon, "I want you to go home, take this pen and go home to your apartment. You don't have the money to pay the rent and you'll be out on the street in another week, so I'm going to help you out."
The wizard's voice was not loud but it roared through Simon's mind. "You've got a yellow t-shirt and a grey pair of sweat pants and a pair of black shower thongs. Go home, take all of your clothes off, even your underwear and put those things on."
"What?" asked Simon feebly.
"Don't worry, you'll be able to remember these instructions. When you're dressed, gather up everything you own that's in that apartment. It will probably only fill two or three garbage bags. Take it all down to the Goodwill box on the corner. Everything except the t-shirt, the sweat pants, the shower flops and this pen, give the rest of it all away. Don't take anything else with you, lock the apartment with the key inside."
He let go of Simon's hands and stepped back. "You'll have your fresh start, Simon. If you want it badly enough."
Simon opened his mouth, but the wizard shook his head. "No more questions, follow instructions and the refill in that pen will last you a lifetime, a new lifetime." He didn't say it unkindly but firmly.
Simon turned, dazed. He looked for the door.
"Funny thing about lifetimes," said the wizard. "They're not like yardsticks, no one can know exactly how long one is until they've measured it end to end. A life is more like the ink in a ballpoint pen, sealed up, ready for use, finite but of unknown length.
"Even mine," he added sadly but whether sad because it would turn out to be too short or too long, he didn't say.
Simon staggered toward the door. The wizard's voice followed him. "That new refill should last you a good long time, use it and have fun with it. It's got purple ink, you know, just for the fun of it."
Opening the door of the shop, it struck Simon as bizarre that outside it was still afternoon, still summer, still his hometown.
"It's a genuine Majik Universal Replacement," said the wizard, smiling, as he closed the door.
How he made it home, Simon could not have described. The few blocks to his apartment seemed an uncrossable gulf when he looked back. He'd been in some other country, a strange land ruled by an old man in a dirty bathrobe.
He put the purple-red-and-yellow pen on his little kitchenette table then sat and stared at it a while.
A new start. "If I want it," he said out loud. Enough to give up everything.
He went to the bedroom and found the yellow t-shirt, and the grey sweat pants. He took off his clothes, even his underwear and put on the shirt, too small in the shoulders, and the pants, too loose in the seat. He found the shower flops in the bathroom and he put those on. They fit as well as such things ever did.
He found two garbage bags and moved around the apartment, gathering things that belonged to him. His clothes and shoes, a few books, some food from the cabinets, some bathroom things, it made a very meager pile. He'd lost a lot of his stuff when he'd had to move from his last apartment for non-payment of rent. The flops made slapping noises against his feet as he walked about.
He took his wallet from the pants he'd worn to the mall and looked through the contents. No money, some old receipts, his driver's license and social security card. An expired credit card, his student ID from college five years ago. A picture of his mom and dad, with his two older brothers behind them and he and his sister kneeling in front.
He cried for a while and then he dropped those things into one of the trashbags.
The pretty purple pen he clipped to the neck of the t-shirt then he took a last look around and added a few small things to the bags. They seemed very heavy as he carried them out to the stoop. He turned the lock so it would latch, then he threw the key into the fireplace and pulled the door closed behind him, locking himself out.
He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment then he picked up one bag and slung it over a shoulder and picked up the other bag, half carrying it, half dragging it in one hand, he set off toward the Goodwill store.
The instant he stepped off the stoop, he felt it begin happening. At first, his hair just itched a bit and then his face. He stopped to wipe his cheeks and chin and lips with the hem of the t-shirt and he wiped away most of a day's growth of beard, leaving his face smooth and soft.
He suddenly pulled the t-shirt down as he felt itching begin on his chest. "This can't be real," he murmured.
After a moment, nothing more seemed to happen so he picked up the bags and began his journey again. Across the parking lot of the apartment building and onto the street, he carried and dragged the bags full of his old life. "They're getting heavier," he complained.
His nose itched, then his ears, then his fingers.
He stopped at the sidewalk and ran a more delicate hand through his now shoulder length hair. His chest still itched but he did not scratch there, instead he rubbed his eyebrows and felt hairs that might have been plucked fall away.
"This can't be happening," he told himself. "I'm not turning into Aunt Gloria's daughter." How could something so impossible be the most likely explanation?
He struggled to shoulder one bag and drag the other a few more feet. The bags had gotten bigger as well as heavier. He felt a drawing, pinching sensation in his pants and remembered that he had no underwear on. "That's not it," he said, pausing again to rest. "My balls are shrinking away."
He looked down the street. The Goodwill boxes weren't visible but he knew where they were, more than a block away. "I'm not going to make it." He felt like crying. If he couldn't carry the bags two blocks would he be stuck halfway between lifetimes?
He picked the bags up again and struggled on. His throat spasmed and he knew that his voice had most likely gone up an octave. The t-shirt that had been tight in the shoulders was now loose there but getting tight across the chest. "I'm growing boobs," he told himself in his new voice. "Breasts," he corrected himself with a bit of a grin. Guys called them boobs when the girls weren't around.
Do girls call them boobs or boobies when it's just girls? he wondered. "I'm probably going to find that out."
The sweat pants were tighter across his rounder ass, the flops looser on his smaller feet and he had just felt his dick pull up inside him when the car stopped at the curb. "I'm all sweaty," he thought.
Two guys got out of the car and smiled at him. "Where you going? That isn't trash is it?"
She shook her head. "Um, no? It's for Goodwill." She pointed down the street and realized that she could feel her boobies bounce when she moved like that. "Stuff that belonged to my--cousin," hardly a pause,"he's dead."
They frowned to be polite. "Sorry," said the nearer one. "We just thought you looked like you could use some help?"
She bit her lip on a giggle. This was funny. These guys thought she was a girl. Well, wasn't she? "Um, yeah, I guess I could? I mean, I could if..." I'm not sure? Do the rules allow me to have help? she wondered.
The two guys each took a bag and smiled down at her. They're huge, and I think I've shrunk some more, she decided.
"I'm Andy," said the moose with the crewcut, "that's my brother, Tony."
"'Lo," said the other moose.
They walked toward the Goodwill bins, and she walked between them, feeling tiny. Most of the remaining changes seemed to be internal, she decided as she felt things rearrange inside. I wonder what it's going to be like to have periods?
"What's your name?" asked Moose Number One.
Simone, I hate that name, she thought. What does the K, stand for now? "I'm Karen," she said.
"Do you live around here?" asked Moose Number Two.
"Not exactly, well, not close?" she said. Where do I live now? she wondered. Maybe I'll remember.
With the help of two beasts of burden, the trip to the charity boxes took hardly anytime at all.
As the bags fell into the bins, Karen felt the last of her old life topple into the abyss of never-was. Suddenly afraid, she grabbed the pen clipped to the collar of her yellow t-shirt and held it tightly. She closed her eyes and sighed in relief.
"You hadn't lost it," said Andy. "That's a cute pen."
She smiled remembering and repeating what the wizard had said, "It's got purple ink, just for fun."
The boys laughed and she giggled to hear them laugh.
"What are you doing tonight?" asked Tony.
She blinked. "Um, I'm seventeen, guys?" she said. Seventeen. Yes, I'm seventeen, she repeated to herself.
"When's your birthday?" Andy asked quickly.
She laughed again, "Not till March?"
"Six months," moaned Tony, "I'm dying."
"You guys are silly," she said. "And I'm all hot and...um, glowing?"
They grinned at her.
Uh oh, she blushed as she realized what she had said. They don't really care that I'm only seventeen and sweaty. She said aloud, "Have either of you got a phone I can borrow? I need to call my mom?"
With a show of reluctance, Andy handed her a phone. Do I know the number, she wondered? But her fingers were already tapping it out.
When Gloria answered she felt like babbling but restrained herself, "Mom? Can you come pick me up?"
"We can give you a ride," offered Tony.
"Where are you?" asked Mom. "I didn't even know you'd left the house!"
"Um, I took some stuff to Goodwill," she had the pen in her other hand again and she clicked the button in the middle of the yellow flower. "There's two guys here that want to give me a ride."
"I'll be right there," said Gloria. "Stay put."
"Yes, ma'am," she said to her mother. "I love you, Mom."
"I love you too, dear, but don't get in any car with boys you don't know."
"I won't." She disconnected and handed the phone back to Andy.
They talked about nothing much in great detail while Karen waited for her mom. Gloria drove up in a brown BMW and glared at the two young men as Karen got in.
Andy handed her something before she closed the door. "My number," he said. "You can call me on your birthday?"
She grinned and nodded.
Glory pulled away from the curb and tried to scowl at her daughter, "You could have been in big trouble there, young lady."
"Mom! They were nice, they helped me carry stuff."
"Well, just you don't get carried away. I swear you're going to make me old before I'm forty. You deserve a good scolding, you know?" said Gloria.
"You're not Aunt Beth, Mom, you're no good at scoldings."
"Maybe I should take lessons from her," said Gloria. "Except that then I'd have to listen to her scold me for letting you run wild."
They both giggled. "Oh, Mom, you know I'm too chicken to do anything really bad?"
"I know," agreed Gloria. "But I worry about whether you have good sense sometimes."
"Can I go to college next year, Mom?"
"See what I mean? What brought that up? Were those two college boys?"
Karen nodded.
"Well, we'll see."
"Okay."
"You need to bring your grades up," reminded Gloria as they drove through the downtown area.
Karen made a face. "Okay," she said. I did it once, I can do it again, she thought. Then she turned her head quickly, trying to catch a glimpse of a storefront she thought she had seen out of the corner of her eye.
"What?" asked Gloria.
"Nothing," said Karen. "Mom, don't get in an accident, okay?"
Gloria turned back to her driving. "I won't."
Karen smiled, thinking about things that never were and things that now might be someday. What will it be like to feel a man inside me, she wondered. Will I like it? What will it be like to be married, to be pregnant, to have kids to take care of?
She sighed happily, the future looked scary but with a potential for joy it had not had before she bought a refill for her favorite pen.
She took it from where she had clipped it again to her t-shirt. Do I have a diary, she wondered? Sure, I do, full of hearts and flowers and smiley faces drawn in purple ink, just for fun. She giggled.
Gloria smiled at her. "What's funny?"
Karen grinned, just then remembering something else, "I'm not wearing any panties."
"Karen!"
The end.
Hal needed something from the wizard, even though he didn't know exactly what it was...
SRU: A Higher Power -5- The Pardon
by Lainie Lee
The shabbily dressed man hurrying through the holiday shopping crowd slipped into the first door he came to. Hal David figured it must be a side corridor into service areas of the mall where he could hide for a bit. The little bells ringing took him by surprise, it was a shop?
He looked around, a weird, dimly lit little shop full of odd things. A very lifelike carved and painted leprechaun perched on a toadstool the size of a hassock. A painted fan bearing the image of a Chinese dragon adorned with a forked beard like a cossack. A brass demiurge carrying a basket full of haddock. A porcelain stallion standing in a miniature gilded paddock.
He shook his head in wonder, what the hell was a demiurge, anyway?
"It's a magical being, sort of an angel or a fairy or a djinn; but not quite any of those, more powerful and much to be feared, a maker of worlds," said a voice.
Hal looked up; an old man wearing a dingy bathrobe blinked at him owlishly from the end of the aisle. Hal didn't think he had spoken his question aloud but he must have; how else could the old man have answered him?
"Yes, you must have," agreed the wizard. "Otherwise, I'd have to be a mind reader, wouldn't I, Hal? Now, get out of here, we're not open yet, it's hardly half past the Cenozoic."
Puzzled by that remark, Hal glanced at an ornate clock showing the faces of the Oriental moon; it read a quarter 'til two. "I'm sorry, I didn't even know this was a shop," said Hal. He meant to ask how the old man knew his name but the fellow interrupted him.
"I just told you," the grumpiest old man said. "Now, again, get out. It's much too early for me to be working, I need my rest. I've got carpetlag from visiting my colleagues in Wonderland and Oz; Trellia can make you tired just listening to her twining her tales around her branches." He yawned, showing more and better teeth than could have been expected in the mouth of someone who looked older than the sort of oak planks that have been seasoned long enough to be hard as stone.
"I beg your pardon," began Hal, growing more and more confused. Had the old man said Australia? Had he said Wonderland? Had he said tales or tails? Had he really said Cenozoic? Had Hal known the bronze figurine was a demiurge when he didn't even know what a demiurge was?
"You beg my pardon, do you?" scowled the wizard. "What have you done? And it's brass, bronze would be redder more than goldener. Golden. More golden. Now you've got me doing it."
"Doing what?" asked Hal cautiously.
"Thinking like a mortal idiot," growled the wizard. "So, you want my pardon? But am I the one you committed a crime against?"
Hal's heart froze. This old man scared him, he knew too much and....
"And I really can read minds," warned the wizard. "So don't even try anything, I'll turn you into a snuffbox shaped like a toad and fill you full of flies faster than you can say remacadamize."
Hal stepped back. The wizard stepped forward; sparks like miniature lightning glanced from his eyes.
"I never done nothing to you!" Hal said, taking another step toward the door. Even the mall security cops seemed less threatening than this crazy old man with eyebrows like thunderheads.
"Meaning you've done everything!" stormed the wizard advancing like a cold front with scattered flurries of ire. "You just hadn't got around to it, had you? Casing the joint? If you came in here to nibble on my cheese, you will regret it."
"Cheese!?" Hal's eyes could not get wider and if his bowels got any looser he would need to change pants. "No, no, I'm a dip not a booster!" What was he saying?
"You're a pickpocket not a shoplifter? I should turn you into a rooster, or something worse. That's not a pocket you're carrying under your arm, it's a purse. Is that your swag?"
Hal nodded nervously, a tic so violent he almost couldn't talk. "I tried the dip but I had to snatch the bag; Miss Mark twigged and I thought she'd roust the heat. I just ran in here 'cause I didn't want to get nicked."
The old man put a finger beside his nose and smiled. "Looking for Easy Street is asking to get tricked. You're a thief and a rascal, your crimes are many and various. You asked for my pardon. Why should I give it to one so nefarious?"
"I'm not a bad guy," said Hal in a weak voice. "It's just sometimes, I don't seem to have a choice?"
"Next you'll be blaming your peers for leading you into a life of crime," scoffed the wizard. "This will be your third strike, you're looking at twenty-five years. Don't commit the offense if you can't do the time."
Hal staggered. The old guy was right. "I'm forty two now, I can't go to jail again, I'd be older than dirt if I lived that long," he protested. "You won't turn me in?"
"You're singing the wrong song. You've never repented, you feel no remorse. You steal and you lie as a matter of course. Still, I will say, in your defense, you've never used a gun, not even a knife."
"I ain't going to neither! Even though nothing has never gone right in my life," said the miscreant sadly. "But it ain't true that I'm not sorry for what I've done. Sometimes I feel bad."
"Badly," said the wizard. "Don't add bad grammar to the list of your sins. I'm a wizard, nothing more; not a syntax collector, among the many things I'm not; neither father confessor, nor window dresser, not chicken inspector nor what I said before!" He hit a high note and held it for a moment.
Hal just stared at him, too stunned to be amazed.
The wizard took a deep breath and sang rapidly, "I am the very model of a modern magi general, with incantations to turn a mortal into animal, vegetable or mineral. And while I sometimes do indulge in stunts a bit theatrical, I've never quite before descended to the operatical."
"What never?" sang the chorus.
"Wrong play," said the wizard, "And that is just about enough of that. See what happens when you wake me up before I've had my wisdom nap? We almost fell out of reality into a Gilbert and Sullivan universe." He shuddered and made his beard quiver indignantly.
"I'll just leave now," offered Hal. He looked around nervously for the chorus. Where had they come from and where had they gone?
"No," said the wizard. "You begged my pardon and I haven't quite got around to giving you that boon. What's in the purse?"
"I--I hadn't looked yet?" Hal put the handbag on one of the counters and opened it up. "Uh, it's full of jewelry and makeup, most of it still on the store cards." He grinned sheepishly, "What do you know, Miss Mark was a booster!"
The wizard nodded thoughtfully, "There is no honor among thieves after all. You stole someone else's swag. She never rousted the heat but probably took a powder out the other end of the mall." He looked into an invisble distance briefly then nodded in satisfaction. "In fact, the little lady is on the bus now, cursing her luck."
"This is schlock," said Hal, examining the loot. "She was young, probably a thrill junkie. You know, stealing just for the high she gets?"
"And what about you, Hal? Why do you steal? It surely hasn't gotten you the good things in life?" The wizard looked over Hal's shabby clothes and runover sneakers.
"I get by," said Hal. "Well, most of the time?"
"You mean when you're not living off crime you're living off charity," the old man drove the sad truth home with a sneer. "Are you sure you want my pardon, you inconsequential recidivist?"
Hal had no idea what that last part meant but he protested again, "I ain't never done nothing to you!"
"A triple negative makes all come out even but I warned you once already about bad grammar. I'll give you my pardon, Henry Ambrose David, if you truly want it."
Hal felt his face collapse around his fear, he knew now that he had stumbled into something as dangerous as being the witness to a mob hit. He nodded cautiously, "Whatever you say, I don't want no more trouble." Getalong Hal, that's what they had called him in prison. He began backing toward the door again.
"My pardon," the wizard insisted. "Do you want it?"
"Yes!" said Hal, his terror once again threatening to loosen his sphincters. "Yes, please?" His habit of polite respect to figures of authority granted his speech more grace than he usually possessed.
"Freely asked and freely given," said the Wizard. "I pardon you, Hal, from your life of crime and despair. You need a second chance, a new start and someone to guide you and give you moral instruction." The old man gestured with two fingers and spoke a word in a language no one on this world had ever spoken before.
The changes came so quickly they left Hal breathless; he felt his slight paunch shrink, his bald spot disappear. His beard stubble shrank into his skin, as did most of his body hair. His limbs became slender, his shoulders narrow and his waist narrower still.
"What's happening?" he asked in a small voice that ended in a squeak because his voice box had suddenly changed. His eyebrows thinned as the hair on his head grew down to his shoulders then to his waist, then braided itself into two pigtails. His lips grew softer and rounder as his nose grew shorter and smaller. His balls retracted into his abdomen and his penis shrank to a tiny button. At least, that's what it felt like had happened.
His clothes began to change, too; his ratty jacket became a red blazer and his food-stained shirt became a pretty white blouse with simple ruffles at the neck and wrists. His hands, slim and graceful now, reached up to feel his new face. The dirty boxers in the once-blue pants he wore became sparkling white cotton panties under a plaid skirt. His threadbare socks and worthless sneakers turned into white knee-high stockings and penny loafers.
He felt a slit open into a new place between where his balls used to be. His now youthful, feminine voice cried out again, "What's happening?" just as small pubescent breasts sprouted on his chest. Her chest.
Little gold earrings shaped like hearts flew out of the stolen purse and pierced her ears. "Ouch?" she yelped. The wizard chuckled.
"What did you do to me?" she asked in a tiny schoolgirl voice. Tiny was right, the wizard towered more than a foot over her now.
"Given you a new opportunity to learn proper behavior," said the wizard. "I pardoned you right back to when you first stole something in the fifth grade. We won't count the jelly beans."
"I--I'm..." she stammered.
"You're ten, and you're an orphan in a Catholic girls school," the wizard informed her and she knew it was true. "The nuns are good to you but they're very strict, if they catch you with a purse full of stolen doodads, you won't be able to sit down for a week."
She backed away from the handbag, "I don't want it!" Her hands flew to her ears, remembering that the earrings from the bag had made now-healed holes in her lobes.
"You can keep those," said the wizard. "You had a little money in your pockets, from doing chores. I'll see that the rest of this stuff gets back to where it belongs." The bag and swag therein vanished with a modest, if slightly indecent sounding, "Poot!"
"I'm a girl?" she asked, one hand feeling of her chest and the other pressing her skirt to her thigh. Soft brown hair in long braids tied with ribbons, clear rosy complexion blushing in her confusion, neat little school uniform and long coltish legs, she didn't yet know what an adorable little pixie she had become.
The wizard smiled at her, his ancient face creasing in lines of benevolent amusement. "Yes, you are. You'd better go, you don't want to spoil your outing by being late back to the bus. Your friends will be waiting for you."
"I've got friends," she said wondering and she knew their names, Karen and Cindy and little Sarah who talked with a lisp and couldn't say her own name plainly. The nuns would get Sarah speech therapy, just like they had gotten braces for Cindy's teeth. "What's my name?" she asked.
"You're Alison Hildegard Stuckey, and you're going to hear Sister Elisabeth Mark calling that name out if you don't get going." The old man made shooing motions and she drifted toward the door.
"Stuckey? My sister married a man named Stuckey years ago," she murmured. But the memories of Hal David seemed like something she had seen in an old movie.
"That's right, they were killed in a car wreck on their honeymoon; only this time it happened after they had lived long enough to have a daughter. You're your own niece, Heidi."
She smiled and almost giggled. Heidi for Hildegard because there was already an Alison in her grade at school. She liked it and her pigtails bounced with her pleasure. Her blue eyes danced and she gave the old man a wide smile, showing the gap where she had lost a tooth only last month.
"Go," said the wizard, raising his arms like a conductor. "They'll put you on restriction if you're late. Those nuns are tough. I wouldn't want to mess with them." Which was true, religious with a true vocation had a power proof against wizard spells. He could only affect them indirectly as he had done now, and only if he worked no harm.
This particular order took in children that weren't even Catholic; since Heidi's mother had been Jewish they would offer her the opportunity to study her heritage in a few years. The wizard looked forward to see his latest client growing up to become a teacher herself, and a wife and mother before discovering an unknown love of music and talent for songwriting in her old age. At least, that was one possible path the future could take.
In the there and then, ten-year-old Heidi spun quickly, sending her pigtails flying. The little bells jingled as she paused at the door. "Should I thank you?" she asked, looking back.
"You should. I've given you the opportunity to grow up to be something other than a sad little thief; take care and do it right this time. The nuns will show you the way and correct you if you get off the path."
Somehow it all made sense to her; all fear had dropped away and she felt only awe and wonderment. And gratitude. "Thank you, sir," she said politely and discovered that she knew how to curtsey. The bells jingled joyfully again as she shut the door behind her.
"You're quite welcome," said the wizard, purposefully a beat too late.
"Who were you talking to?" asked Dannie coming up behind him.
The old man looked at his latest apprentice, "Just a little girl who had lost her way; she was polite and begged my pardon, so I gave it to her." He kept the smile out of his voice and off his face though he knew she could sense his satisfaction.
"You gave someone something," Dannie said doubtfully, yawning the sleep out of her own voice. She looked to be in her teens, a shapely girl who had once been a client of the strange old man herself. She stretched, deliciously unaware of how she looked when she did that. Sometimes she reminded the old man of a cat. Now she smiled a question at her boss.
"Freely asked and freely given, even the devil knows the path to heaven," said the wizard mysteriously.
"Oh. Okay," Dannie didn't feel curious anymore. "I'm hungry. Are the mastodons all dead, already?"