Mr. Ramsey was still female, but Mrs. Ramsey had switched back to female already, though her new girl body had blue skin like the guy body she’d worn for a couple of weeks and the body Mr. Ramsey was still wearing.

Meanwhile, back in Brocksboro, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey had switched sexes again, and their new bodies had skin and hair in matching shades of blue. I wasn’t sure how many times they’d switched by then; some were on their anniversary trips, or during shopping trips when neither I nor their kids were around, but after they’d told their kids about it, they’d switched several times, usually for just sixteen hours or a day. This one was a little longer than most, lasting a couple of weeks for Mrs. Ramsey and almost a month for Mr. Ramsey, and it was the first time they’d switched for more than a day since I started living with them openly. When I came home from work to find them still switched, I asked them what pronouns they wanted me to use.

“You can use whatever pronoun fits my current form,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “So ‘he’ for the next few days.”

“I guess that sort of makes sense,” Mr. Ramsey said. “At least, let’s try it that way, and if I get uncomfortable with it, I’ll let you know.”

They and Sophia (but not Bianca) were planning to spend a day visiting Caleb at UNC Greensboro and Meredith at UNC Chapel Hill, the second to last weekend in October, and they invited me to come with them if I could get the day off work. I reminded them of the Halloween trip I had planned with Britt, Lisette and Poppy and said I wasn’t sure I could get two Saturdays off so close together, but I’d try. As it turned out, I couldn’t get that day off, but it was easy enough to work around.

My month-long Venn from the weekend Jada had come home was going to expire at about eleven on the Monday before that visit, and since it wouldn’t be convenient for me to take that day off work, when I had several other days I wanted off later in the month, I asked Jada to put Lydia in the Venn machine the evening before.

“You’d better pop Desiree in the machine about then, too,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll be in class when her venn expires.”

So Sunday evening at six, we arranged to both be at our local Venn machines. Jada got to the head of her line before I did, and she called me and put it on speakerphone.

“Setting up the machine now... door’s open... okay, any last words, Lydia?”

“I regret that I have but a zillion —”

“Smart-aleck,” I said, and felt a rush of memories. Nothing super momentous like when I’d merged after one of me applied for jobs and did chores while the other started dating Jada and shared my first kiss, but a whole month of hanging out with people who, in my other life, I hadn’t seen in a month or had never met. After a few moments, I said, “Okay, thanks, Jada. I’ll miss you. I wish I could send you Lydia sooner, but it doesn’t make sense to mail her to you when I’ll be coming to see you in person in less than two weeks, less than a week after I need her to be in Chapel Hill.”

“Yeah, that sucks. Have Lydia say hi to Meredith for me.”

I got to the head of the line then, and snuggled Desiree one more time before warning Jada and popping her in the machine. Then Jada and I chatted on the phone for a few minutes as we walked back to her dorm and the Ramseys’ house.

A few days later, after work, Sophia and I went to the library, where she split me into Lauren and Lydia again, with our usual dragon-girl and plushie-dragon forms. I venned her into a form with two heads, one of them much smaller than a normal head and consisting only of a mouth to eat with; she would breathe and talk with the nose and mouth on her main head. Because the eating-head was so small, her torso didn’t have to be significantly wider than a normal girl’s torso to accommodate it, like other two-headed forms I’d seen or worn. She also asked for a pair of tentacles below her arms. It was a tricky form to get right, and we had to go through the line several times to refine it until she was satisfied.

The next morning, Lydia rode along with Sophia and her parents to visit Caleb and Meredith while I went to work.

* * *

Mr. Ramsey was still female, but Mrs. Ramsey had switched back to female already, though her new girl body had blue skin like the guy body she’d worn for a couple of weeks and the body Mr. Ramsey was still wearing. I sat on Sophia’s shoulder while Mr. Ramsey drove to Greensboro, so I could see out the windows. Sophia stroked my back with a tentacle while doing something on her phone with her hands.

We pulled up in front of Caleb’s house in Greensboro and everyone got out, Sophia cradling me in her tentacles while she rang the doorbell. One of Caleb’s housemates answered the door, a tall, lean white guy with messy brown hair; he wasn’t visibly venned, although we found out later, talking to Caleb, that he was actually older than my parents and had gone back to school after being rejuvenated, having dropped out the first time around. He was living with twenty-year-old undergrads because he’d recently gone through a costly divorce and was looking for housing when Caleb and his friends started looking around for a fourth housemate.

“Hey, we’re Caleb’s family. Is he awake yet?” Sophia had texted him when we were getting close, but he hadn’t replied.

“Yeah, I’ll check if he’s out of the shower yet,” the guy said. “Come on in and sit down.”

We went in and sat down, Sophia’s parents on the sofa and Sophia and I on one of the chairs. Two little boys in pajamas with abstract spiraling patterns suggesting they were venned were sitting about six feet from the TV and playing a first-person shooter of some sort; they said a distracted hi without putting down the controllers or taking their eyes off the TV. The tall guy went looking for Caleb, and Caleb came into the living room a couple of minutes later, looking fresh and clean, unlike the rest of the house.

“Hey, everybody. Y’all about ready to go? And, uh, which one of you’s Mom and which is Dad?” He paused. “And I guess I’d better not assume that you’re Sophia and the plushie in your lap is Lauren, either.”

“I’m your dad,” Mr. Ramsey said, “and you guessed right about Sophia and Lauren. Do you want to introduce us to your housemates or show us around before we go to breakfast?”

“The two brats trying to murder each other over there are Jerry and Mike — they’re usually taller — and the guy who answered the door is Rich. He’ll be gone to work by the time we get back.”

We went back out to the van, and drove to IHOP where everyone but me ate a respectable amount of pancakes. Sophia was disgruntled to find that, because her esophagus had no connection to her diaphragm, she couldn’t suck her tea through a straw and had to lift the cup to her eating-mouth, which was a little tricky at first as she had no eyes on that mini-head and wasn’t entirely used to the new body yet to make sense of what her proprioception was telling her about where her eating-mouth was. But after spilling a bit of tea and getting a syrupy bit of pancake on her top, she managed to get the hang of it. After cleaning the syrup off, she typed furious notes on her phone about ways to improve the form.

We talked about what Caleb was doing lately in and out of school, and he asked after Sophia and me and his parents.

“Are you spending a lot of time as a plushie lately?” he asked me.

“About half. Usually one of me is staying in Jada’s dorm room as a plushie while the other one is living with your parents as a dragon-girl, and working and all, but I don’t want to split up for more than a month at a time, so my self that was staying with Jada timed out and merged with me a few days ago, and then I decided to split for today because I had to work but I wanted to come see you and Meredith.”

“Well, it’s good to see you, even if I’m only seeing half of you. Sophia, what are you doing for your science fair project this year?”

When we got back to the house, all of Caleb’s housemates were gone; Rich had gone to work, and apparently (according to a text he’d sent Caleb) he’d given Jerry and Mike a ride to the Venn machine on his way to work. Caleb showed us around the place. There was a treehouse and play fort in the backyard, as it had apparently belonged to a family with young children at some point before the new owner turned it into a student rental. “That’s what gave Jerry and Mike the idea to try venning into little kids,” he said. “I’m gonna join 'em sometime when my schedule lets me.”

“You totally should,” I said. “My girlfriends and I have venned into little girls and used the playground at the Catesville Mall a couple of times. They have a block of time set aside for teens and grownups venned into kids, the last hour and a half before the mall closes. It was a blast.”

“I’ve been meaning to go do that sometime ever since I venned you and Meredith into little girls,” Sophia said. “I talked to Julianna about doing it, but she thought it was weird.”

“Maybe we can do it as a family sometime,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “Maybe when Caleb and Meredith are home for Thanksgiving or Christmas?”

“Not Thanksgiving, no thanks,” Caleb said. “You’re not getting me near a mall anywhere around Thanksgiving weekend. But maybe after Christmas.”

“Let’s plan on it,” Mr. Ramsey said.

After the tour, we sat around the living room chatting until Caleb had to leave for work. Then we left to visit Meredith.

* * *

It took another hour to get to UNC Chapel Hill. Sophia texted Meredith when we were getting close; she met us in the visitor parking lot near her dorm, and got in the van.

“Hey, everybody,” she said. “...Uh, which one of you’s Dad and which is Mom?”

They laughed. “Caleb had the same question,” Sophia explained.

“Well?”

Mr. Ramsey seemed like she was about to say something when Mrs. Ramsey put a hand on her shoulder. “See if you can guess,” she said. “If you can figure it out by the end of lunch, let’s see... we’ll take a load of laundry home and bring it back by the end of the day tomorrow.”

“You’re on!” Meredith said, her eyes lighting up.

“Do you want to guess which of us is Lauren and which is Sophia?” I asked.

“Hmm. You wouldn’t ask that unless it was a trick question. That’s totally the kind of body Sophia likes, and — oh, I see. Neither of you’s Lauren, the plushie is Desiree, right? And Lauren’s hiding somewhere...” She twisted her head around to look in the back of the van.

Sophia and I giggled. “Guess again,” she said.

“Hmm... I’m not gonna guess again until the end of lunch. What do I get if I guess right?”

“You’ll get your birthday presents a day early,” Sophia said.

“We’ll probably come see you the weekend before your birthday,” Mr. Ramsey said, “since the weekend after is so close to Thanksgiving.” (Her birthday was going to fall on Wednesday.)

“So how are you going to get me my birthday presents early?” Meredith asked me and Sophia, “if you’re only going to see me for a few hours the weekend before my birthday?”

“We’ll mail them so they arrive at your mailbox the day before your birthday,” Sophia promptly replied. I giggled.

“...Three days after my birthday party,” Meredith said slowly. “No thanks.”

We went to a nearby Greek restaurant that Meredith recommended. I’d talked with her on the phone several times, mostly in the first two or three weeks of the semester, but as freshmen weren’t allowed to have cars on campus, she hadn’t come home since the semester started. We had a lot to catch up on.

“Hunter came to see me last weekend, and we went to see a movie at the Silverspot,” she said. “And Caleb came to see me a few weeks ago, and took me out to eat, but otherwise I haven’t been more than fifteen minutes’ walk from campus since August. There’s a lot to do here; I’ve been to the meetings of like five different clubs, off and on, but I figure I’ll narrow it down to about two by midterms.”

“Are you involved in the Venn club?” Sophia wanted to know.

“Kind of. I don’t meet up with them every time, about every two or three weeks. They meet at the Venn machine near the planetarium every Saturday when it’s not raining...” She told us about what she’d venned into the last time she went (an okapi-taur), some of the people she’d met there, and what they’d venned into. She told us about the other clubs she’d gone to meetings of, and people she’d met there. She told us about her roommate, other girls on her floor, and people she’d met through her classes... just thinking about all those people she’d apparently made friends with in barely two months was indirectly triggering my anxiety, and I asked her if she wouldn’t mind me snuggling in her lap while she ate.

“Sure,” she said. “You won’t mind if I drip some tzatziki on you, will you... Lauren?”

I gasped. “You guessed it!”

She giggled. “You weren’t trying very hard to hide it, honestly.”

I shrugged my wings. “I guess so. Anyway, these venned plushie bodies are pretty impervious to stains, so drip as much food on me as you want.”

After Meredith had filled us in on everything that had happened to her lately — or at least everything she was willing to talk about in front of her parents — she asked how things had been going with us. I told her about merging memories with Lydia for the second time a few days earlier, Sophia talked about her science fair project, and we mentioned that Mr. Paget was opening a second restaurant. “He’ll be focusing most of his attention there for a while, so we’ll have a new manager at the original location,” I said.

“He’s the same guy I’ve been dealing with on the evening shift,” Sophia said. “A pretty decent guy, if not quite as friendly and approachable as Mr. Paget. I think it’ll be fine.”

I started serializing my novelette "A Girl, a House and a Secret" on Scribblehub a few weeks ago, and I keep procrastinating on posting it to BigCloset. I'm not 100% sure I want to. BigCloset's interface is just so clunky compared to a modern site like Scribblehub, and it's getting to be a hassle selecting the categories, keywords, rating, character age, etc. for every chapter of a long story when I should be able to select them once for the story and make posting individual chapters really simple. So don't expect it on BigCloset any time soon, but maybe at some point. I've got three other stories scheduled to appear on Scribblehub in the coming months, which will appear in their entirety there at one chapter a week even if something happens to me, and once I finish the final drafts of my works in progress (four stories finished in first or second draft at the moment), I'll schedule them as well.

The Translator in Spite of Themself, which was only available from Smashwords and itch.io for a while, is now available from Amazon in Kindle format as well. It's a first contact portal fantasy from the point of view of a sapient portal, with gender-bendy elements.

My new trans mermaid short story, "Carpet-Bound," is available from itch.io in epub and pdf formats. But you can get more stories for your money by buying it as part of the Secret Trans Writing Lair Mermay Bundle, with eight mermaid and summer-themed stories by trans authors for $8. (It is scheduled to appear in my short story collection False Positives and Other Stories on Scribblehub in May 2024.)