From the fact that this isn’t their first time, I’m guessing they’re both realizing — or at least suspecting — they’re not as purely cis as they thought.”

A few days after Halloween, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey both venned into opposite-sex bodies for a few days. I heard about it from Sophia and Meredith the evening after they venned each other.

“They say they’re going to try to stay like that for a month if the dysphoria doesn’t get too bad,” Meredith said.

“How do you feel about that?” I asked. “Does it feel like they’re making light of you being trans or something?”

“Nah, I mean, it could be like that with some people, but I’m all for people trying out other bodies, whether to see what it’s like for other people or to see what kind of body they like best. From the fact that this isn’t their first time, I’m guessing they’re both realizing — or at least suspecting — they’re not as purely cis as they thought.”

“I remember,” I mused, “somebody on one of the trans subreddits talking about a theory that a lot of people are cis by default, and wouldn’t have ever known they were different from actual cis people if it weren’t for the Venn machines making it easier to experiment with gender. You think your parents are like that?”

“Yeah, maybe. We’ll see how long they stick with it this time and whether they switch again later on.”

But despite what Meredith said about their planning to stay switched for a month, they changed back just before Meredith’s birthday, which was not quite two weeks after Halloween. She had her birthday party at Metamorphoses the Sunday before her birthday; she told me she didn’t want to exclude me, but her parents didn’t want to have it at home given the sheer number of people they’d invited, friends from school, church and work. Sophia had venned into a mostly-human body for the occasion, similar to the body she’d usually worn the previous school year, but with four arms and two heads. “So I could eat with one mouth and talk with the other,” she told me.

Meredith, Sophia and I had a private little party on the evening of Meredith’s actual eighteenth birthday the following Tuesday. I had bought her a present on our last trip to Danville, Patricia McKillip’s new novel, and Sophia had wrapped it for me.

While we were sitting around chatting after she’d opened her present, Meredith mentioned, “Dad told me Uncle Eric and Aunt Vanessa are coming for Thanksgiving,” she said. “And their kids.”

“We haven’t seen them in ages,” Sophia said. “I can’t really remember them.”

“How far away do they live?”

“Atlanta,” Meredith said. “I mean, one of the suburbs around Atlanta? I forget the name. Dad and Uncle Eric used to be close, but they haven’t talked in years until just now, and I don’t know why. But apparently Uncle Eric wants to reconcile and be brothers again, and Dad invited him and his family for Thanksgiving.”

“I bet it’s going to be awkward.”

“Yeah. I asked Dad how Uncle Eric took the news about my transitioning, and he just said, ‘I wouldn’t have invited him if I thought he was going to hassle you about it, but I don’t know if he really understands it, either.’ Dad says he sent him some articles, but who knows if he’s read them.”

“Oh, great.”

“Yeah, and they asked me to change back into a human body the whole time the relatives are here,” Sophia said. “I was gonna change back for Thanksgiving dinner, but the whole five-day weekend?”

“They’re staying for five days? Where?” The Ramsey house was big enough for a family with three children — barely — but there wasn’t much extra room for guests.

“Uncle Eric and Aunt Vanessa are gonna be staying at the hotel,” Sophia said. (Even though we weren’t near an interstate and didn’t have any tourist attractions, we did have one small hotel, on the south side of town near the Food Lion.) “Our boy cousins are gonna sleep on the sofa bed in the living room, and our girl cousin is gonna sleep in my room.”

“How old are your cousins?”

Meredith shrugged. “Will and I were around kindergarten age and Savannah was a toddler the last time I saw them. I don’t think Aiden was born yet.”

“I hope it goes okay.”

* * *

On the day before Thanksgiving, Caleb came home from UNC Greensboro around mid-morning. I heard a little bit of his conversation with his parents and Meredith, but it was pretty muffled by Sophia’s door. Not long after that, the washing machine started going and ran almost nonstop for several hours.

Meredith and Sophia had the day off school, but Sophia was working a short shift in the morning before their Georgia relatives would arrive. When she came home from work, she was human again, and grumbled to me about it as she changed clothes. It was just a few minutes later when their relatives arrived.

I heard the commotion from the living room as they greeted Meredith’s family and brought in the kids’ luggage; in her haste, Sophia had left the door of her room ajar when her mom called out, “They’re here!” I couldn’t make out the details of their conversation, but it sounded reasonably cordial from the little I could hear.

A few minutes later, Sophia returned with Meredith and a younger girl, maybe around fourteen or fifteen. Savannah, presumably. Savannah was carrying a sleeping bag and Sophia and Meredith were carrying a small suitcase and a duffel bag, which they set down in a corner by the closet door.

“Is there something you want to put in the restroom?” Sophia asked her.

“Hang on a second.” Savannah unzipped the duffel bag and took out a large ziplock bag full of shampoo, conditioner, brushes and so on and said, “That can go in the bathroom, I guess.” She made no move to leave or ask where the restroom was, though. She looked around at the wall decorations — the periodic table, the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous poster, the DNA molecule artwork — and at the bookshelf and the desk, her eyes alighting on the dinosaur models and me for a few moments.

“What kind of dinosaur is that?” she asked, pointing at me.

“It’s not really a dinosaur,” Sophia said, looking dismayed. “It’s made up, but sort of based on theropods — the kind of dinosaurs that birds are descended from. Tyrannosaurus is probably the best-known —”

“Yeah, I know.”

“But anyway, it’s mostly a Chinese dragon with some theropod features.”

“It looks cool, anyway. I see a lot of books about dinosaurs — are you going to be a paleontologist?”

“No, I’m going to be a geneticist. And maybe a vennologist, or whatever we wind up calling scientists who study the Venn machines.”

“Oh, cool. I’m the only one in my family that can use the Venn machines — I mean, except for Mom and Dad. Will can’t get them to work for him and it pisses him off that I can. But I can’t do it very often because we don’t have one close to home. After I get my driver’s license...”

“When’s that?” Meredith asked.

“Next July.”

I did a little math: assuming Georgia let teens drive unsupervised at sixteen, like North Carolina (which I verified later), that made her a year and five months younger than Sophia.

“What all have you venned into?” Meredith asked, finally sitting down on Sophia’s bed now that it was clear Savannah wasn’t in a hurry to return to the living or dining room where the rest of the family was gathered. The others sat down too, Sophia in her desk chair and Savannah at the other end of the bed from Meredith.

“A cat and an ocelot. And a seagull. That was when we went to Jekyll Island for vacation, and there was a Venn machine not too far from our hotel.”

“Do you have trouble keeping control when you’re in animal form?” Sophia asked.

“A little at first. I got the hang of it, though. I wish I had more chances to practice. And I got my body fixed up — I wasn’t this pretty last year.”

Sophia nodded.

“What have y’all venned into? You can both venn, right? I know Meredith can...”

Meredith mentioned a few of the centauroid bodies she’d worn on different occasions, as well as the griffin kitten, but didn’t mention her transition. Then Sophia talked mostly about her science project and how she spent most of her time these days as a life-size porcelain doll, as well as a few of the other forms she’d tried.

“And you can walk around and talk that way?”

“And attend classes and wait tables and drive, yeah. If we have time and your parents will let you, I can show you what it’s like.”

“Maybe so. I’m not sure if I’d want that, but it might be interesting to try for a little bit.”

They kept talking for a lot longer, and the conversation drifted from venning to their jobs, school, and college plans, until Meredith’s mom poked her head in and said it was time to wash their hands for supper.

“I’ll show you where the restroom is,” Meredith said to Savannah, getting up.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Sophia said. Once Meredith, Savannah, and Mrs. Ramsey were gone, she whispered to me, “I’m sorry. I didn’t expect them this early, and I know we were planning to let you stay in Meredith’s bedroom this weekend so you wouldn’t have to pretend to be inanimate as much, but now that she’s noticed you here... I think she’d notice if you were missing.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

“Sorry,” she whispered again, and went to wash her hands.

I read a few dozen pages, carefully listening to the sounds of conversation so if I heard people approaching, I could get back in the same position Savannah had seen me in. It was over two hours later when the girls came back. Savannah got her pajamas out of her suitcase and went down the hall to the bathroom to change, which allowed me to turn my back while Sophia changed. That hadn’t really been necessary most of the time while I’d been her roommate, as she’d been a living doll, not changing clothes all that often and not having anything to hide when she did. When Savannah returned, they blew up the air mattress that Mrs. Ramsey had brought in earlier in the day, and Savannah unrolled her sleeping bag on top of it and got in as Sophia got in bed. But though they turned off the light, they didn’t go to sleep right away.

At first they talked about supper and the tensions they’d noticed between their parents. Savannah asked Sophia if she knew what their dads had gotten mad at each other about, and Sophia admitted she didn’t know, either. “I was too little to remember it,” she said. “I think I was three the last time we came to y’all’s house, and I don’t really remember it like Meredith does. And she doesn’t remember it well enough to know what happened. Whatever argument our dads had might not have been in front of us kids, or it might not have even been during that last visit. Could have been on the phone or social media six months later.”

“Yeah.”

“There is one thing, though. A couple of nights ago, Dad told us not to say anything to y’all, especially your parents, about church. So if I had to guess, I’d say they had an argument about religion.”

“Is your family religious?”

“Some of us more than others. But yeah, we’ve gone to church as long as I can remember. A couple of years ago we started going to a more liberal church after some things happened and Mom and Dad had big arguments with some of their friends at church.” The vague way she’d worded that, I guessed she was avoiding giving away that Meredith was trans in case Savannah’s parents hadn’t already told her; if she was a toddler back then, she wouldn’t remember Meredith as a boy.

“Was it because Meredith came out as transgender?”

So they had told her, apparently.

“Yeah. I guess your parents told you about that.”

“I think they were more talking to Will. He’s old enough to remember when she was a boy, and Dad told him she was a girl now and warned him not to talk about stuff they did when they were little boys.”

“Hmm. While we’re merrily tramping through the minefield of stuff our parents warned us not to talk about, can I ask if your parents have used the Venn machine or if they naturally look like that?”

“Yeah, they’re younger than they were last year, but they didn’t want to get too much younger and look like they were too young to have kids our age. I think it was a shock for Mom and Dad to see your parents looking so young, even though they’ve seen pictures.”

“It was kind of freaky for us at first, but we got used to it months ago. Have your parents ever switched sexes or changed into animals or things like that?”

Long silence. “Not that I know of,” Savannah said. “I guess probably not. As far as I know, they haven’t done much with it besides get younger and lose weight. They’re okay with me using it, though, as long as I follow their rules. When Mom venned me into a seagull when we went on vacation last summer, I tried to talk her into letting me change her into one too, but she refused.”

“Huh. Mom and Dad were cautious about it at first. They grounded me and Meredith for using it without permission and they didn’t use it, or let us use it again, until a whole year had passed and we knew more about what you could and couldn’t do with the machines. And then they gave us some rules about using them. But after that, they made each other younger and eventually started experimenting with other stuff.”

“Like switching sexes?”

“Yeah. They kept it private and short-term, and didn’t tell us about it until just recently.” She told Savannah about how her parents had come to Metamorphoses for lunch as two single guys, and confessed the spying to her and Meredith at supper that night. “And then a few days later they spent a week as the opposite sex. And I think a little younger than usual, too. Mom told me it was going to be a whole month, so Dad could experience having a period, but Dad bailed early because your dad wanted to talk on the phone and he didn’t want to do that with a girl voice.”

“Huh. What rules do you have to follow?”

“We can’t venn with anybody we haven’t known for at least five years. And if we make a change for more than a day, we have to discuss it with them ahead of time. It was a real ordeal to talk them into letting me change into an animate doll for this school year.”

“I’m only allowed to venn with Mom or Dad, or maybe Will later on when he can use the machines. They didn’t say anything about what you can change into?”

“No, not really.”

“Mom and Dad won’t let me venn into anything inanimate — not that I really want to. I don’t know if they would consider a living doll to be against the rules, though.

“I won’t tell them if you won’t.”

“Let me think about it. Who knows if we’ll have a chance.”

They were quiet for a while, and I thought they might have fallen asleep, when Savannah said, “Sophia?” very quietly.

“Yeah?”

“Do you think it would be okay if I ask Meredith some questions about transgender stuff?”

Pause. “Yeah, if you’re respectful and you back off if she’s uncomfortable with it. Maybe you should look stuff up on the Internet first and ask her only about the stuff you didn’t understand?”

“I have looked stuff up, but some of it’s kind of confusing. There’s a girl at my school who’s transgender, but the Venn machine won’t let her use it yet. I don’t really know her well, but she’s a friend of a friend, so sooner or later I’ll probably be spending more time with her, and I’d like to not mess up and say something wrong.”

“Okay. Just ask her sometime tomorrow when it’s just us girls around.”

Quiet again, and before long, regular breathing. And then cute little snores.

My new 22k-word novella, “Smart House AI in Another World”, is available now as an epub and pdf from itch.io. It will appear on Scribblehub, BigCloset etc. in a few months.

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