Maybe that wasn't the best idea...

PART FIVE

I was being manhandled (or was the proper term woman-handled?) back into the farmhouse, a few minutes later. Two of them each grabbed one of my shoulders and lifted me up; my feet hardly touched the ground as I was directly toward the door. Inside was surprisingly tasteful. Old woodwork was in preponderance along with less than the usual amount of kitsch for a multigenerational household. I passed the massive kitchen where a dozen different pots and complicated mixtures were about, and also where a small television was displaying the Lifetime channel, before I was tossed into the wingback chair of a little office the next door down.

The computer monitor was one of those old school jobs with about five feet of bulky plastic behind the screen. The tower itself was an ACER relic that looked about one more crashed hard drive away from the junk heap. But ACER’s looked that way right out of the box. All things considered, I decided not to be snooty about their technology it was their magic I was here for after all. I was waiting inside that office for a good twenty minutes while Tiny’s slightly smaller cousin watched over me. Arms crossed like he was trying to stop himself from turning me over in the chair and giving me a good spanking. Soon enough Granny came into the small office shoving the giant aside when he wouldn’t get out of the way fast enough.

“Give me one good reason,” she said with an accent similar to what I had heard of farm kids from the deepest Minnesota. “Why I shouldn’t call the police and have you arrested?”

“Magic,” I replied with a smirk. “I doubt you want everyone to know what it is that you have going on here.”

“As if they would believe you,” she countered with a sour scold on her face.

“I don’t expect they would… at first. But if forced too I intend to raise a big stink around here. This body you put me in is a nice girl from a good family who never got in any sort of legal trouble. And If I keep proclaiming that something is going on here, and drop words like ‘strange chemicals’, and ‘lab’, and …’steroids’,” I said looking up at the guard with a speculative expression. “Then I think they will at least look long and hard at this operation. And who knows, this is Jersey, maybe they find a few dead bodies in one of those storage lockers you have out there. How would the local Italian benevolent society feel about you then?”

“Well then,” she answered sneering down at me. “I’ll just give you to them first wont I? Or has it occurred to you little girl that I could just turn you into a toad. Or perhaps a fat little pig and then roast and eat you! I’ve already got a crackling fire ready!”

I must admit, that HADN’T occurred to me. Though it probably should have as many fairy tales as I was raised up on, and the post graduate education I completed in trashy fantasy novels. My mind was whirling as I tried to think up a viable counter and latched on to the first thing I could think of.

“I plead my belly,” I said looking Madame Inger hard in the eye.

“Your what?” she barked back confused.

“I’m pregnant, as you well know. All those stories I’ve read, many of them talk about a magical consequence of killing the innocent. Some of them have to be true. You may be pissed enough to do something to me but are you prepared to harm my baby?”

“For a former boy, you latched on to THAT excuse right quick.” She gave me an evil grin.

“What can I say,” nodding my head in acknowledgment. “I was always quick on my feet.”

“What do you want? You’re body back I suppose,” she questioned me tersely. While looking my current form up and down.

“Justice.” I answered insolently.

“Justice is it? I already gave your girl that.”

“You’re wrong, and I’m going to explain to you why… TINY!” I shouted to the doorman as I saw him walk by the kitchen. “Go get my purse out of the car; there is something I need to show you.”

***
It took some doing, and I was growing rather tired of explaining to yet another woman why it was that I was not a complete bastard, with plans to abandon my pregnant girlfriend. What particularly irritated Inger was the fact that while Jessica didn’t have much cash she was not in fact the penniless orphan she portrayed herself to be. I’m not sure if she was more irritated at the lie or the lost money she could have charged for her services, and I wasn’t going to muddy the waters by asking.

Eventually our mutual interrogation of one another expanded into the kitchen where I was drafted to chopping vegetables while Inger supervised by switching the channel to “Grey’s Anatomy.” Since she seemed to be leaning toward believing me, and was otherwise answering my questions I wasn’t tempted to use my chopping knife to carve off a piece of witch…much tempted anyway.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” Inger continued during a commercial break. “Married her? I did a reading, a karmic audit if you will, I ran Thomas S. Ryan March 29th 1990 you came off as a complete evil asshole!”

“20th,” I corrected her while I concentrated on the delicate work with unfamiliar hands.

“What?” she asked squinting her eyes at me.

“March 20th is my birthday.” I clarified.

“This says 29th,” said Inger pulling out a piece of paper from a kitchen drawer with my name, the wrong birth date and half a recipe for apricot torte.

“That’s a 20, the loop doesn’t circle high enough for a nine,” I pointed out to her.

“Walter!” Madame Inger belted out at Tiny the doorman. It was good to finally have a name attached to all that muscle. “Did you take down this order?”

The big man lurched over to the kitchen table and looked down at the piece of paper. “Yup,” he answered when he got a good luck at it. “I also sent you an email about it but that presupposes that you turn on your computer.”

“I don’t believe in that heathen box,” she retorted trying to gather her dignity.

“Well the heathen box believes in you,” he continued. “I use it all the time for the records and the accounts payable and receivable I keep saying you need to drag yourself out of the 19th century and at least into the 20th.”

“Is this a nine or is this a zero?” She asked tapping her finger angrily on the paper.

“A zero,” he could see the answer did not please her any, and despite the contrasts in their age and size, thought he should probably be seeing to whatever it was that would take him out of the kitchen the fastest. “Can I go now?”

“Go!” she shouted furiously. “Before I put my mark on you.”

“This is how you do your business?” I said disbelievingly after he left the room. “How the hell have you not been SUED?”

“Says the ARSONIST!” she countered replacing the paper and slamming the drawer shut.

“At least I got the right target,” I replied waiving my cutting knife in the general direction of her heart.

“That oak was older than some countries, it was wanton VANDALISM!”

“It was a good idea! It got you speaking to me didn’t it?”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have argued with my sole possible form of reclamation, and I don’t mind telling you that I suddenly felt a lead weight in my stomach as she got up furiously from the table and headed down to the basement leaving me alone with vegetables steaming cauldrons and catty women on TV. A few minutes later she was back upstairs and laid down on the table a very large old fashioned leather book with a resounding thud. She began frantically turning pages. Finally slowing down as she got towards the last third of the book. Flipping back and forth until she found her destination. She spent a good two minutes on one page staring while I tried not to jog her elbows and continued to make the dinner preparations. Finally she looked up at me, and I knew I was in for it when I saw the harridans eye begin to water up some.

“I’m sorry,” she said in an honest tone. “There is nothing that I can do, about switching you back.”

“What do you mean there is nothing that you can do?!” I shouted irately.

“It was one way, if you can find a volunteer or someone who REALLY deserves it and I’ll CHECK mind you!” she shouted in a stern tone. “I can maybe bump you out into another male body but that’s the best that I can do. The magical pathways between you and that girl are burned out. You can’t take that road twice.”

“Not for nothing, but is there some sort of gypsy supervisor I can speak to, one that I don’t know, looks like a gypsy?”

“I was adopted, and my mother trained me to be the best,” she said haughtily as she puffed out her amble chest in outrage.

“I can’t believe there isn’t something out there, what about magic rings, or cursed statues or voodoo princesses. SOMETHING!”

“There are only so many ways of doing things, no matter your particular doctrine. Magic isn’t well… magic. There are costs to everything. It’s a lot like being a scientist, such and such materials combined in such and such a way yields the desired results and it has been tested and retested countless times over the generations. If there was a way of getting around the karmetic entropy the Chinese or someone would have figured it out by now.”

“Like I’m supposed to trust a gypsy who… BOUGHT THE FARM!”

“My wagon broke an axel in the sixties,” she answered, a little too defensibly for my tastes. “And I fell in love with a local boy, do you want my help or not?”

“I thought you said you couldn’t help me.” I stated crossly.

“I can’t put you back in your body. That route has been burned out. And if you don’t want to abandon your baby to some strangers care than… I can at least make it easier on you. I can make it that you think that you have always been a woman and have all the thoughts knowledge and experience that goes along with it. It will be like this never happened.”

“And what about Jessica?” I asked quietly as I pondered that.

“You’re Jessica,” she explained trying to be pacifying.

“Tommy then! She has to be going through all the same things I am, WORSE, because she dare not tell anyone. And I… If there is no way back, than I at least have to find a way back together. She’s the father of my child and while I may just kill her I’m still sort of in love with her.”

“Oh ho!” Tiny chuckled evilly as he came in to grab a beer from the refrigerator “So you want a love potion after all?”

“Go turn a wrench or something Walter,” said Madame Inger waving her hands in a go away gesture at him. “Adults are talking.”

“Fine, fine,” he granted us as he let the door slide shut.

“You can really forgive her,” she said and shaking her head and closing her eyes corrected herself. “Him?”

“Probably not,” I admitted thinking about that one great big bad time that capped all the preceding good times. “But for the baby’s sake I can sort of… if I try real hard and squint a little, see things from her point of view. And if he crawls on his belly for a year or three I might just let him back.

“You may not need that second spell after all, you already have gal code # 4 down pretty good.”

***

I stayed for dinner, I wasn’t getting any better offers and the state of the money in my borrowed purse dictated that I not turn down too many free meals freely offered. We sat down together at the same kitchen table I had done all the prep work on and it looked like Nazi propaganda poster, me looking right at place next to all the blond haired blue eyes gypsies. I had taken part in many a family dinner over the years. Both the awkwardness’ of dysfunctional gatherings like Jessica’s, and the abiding love of my own extended families events. I could tell just from the manner they passed each other bowls of heaping food that this was a family that loved and worked well with each other. It made me incredibly homesick. The idea that Madame Inger was lying to me, out of some inherent evil spite was losing traction by the second. These were good people.

We took desert to the garden, the Madame and I, and sat down with our apple pie on a pair of Adirondack chairs to watch the last little bit of my pyrotechnic show whittle down to its smoking embers.

“I won’t take that spell,” I said placing my fork on the little plate after every last bit of apple goodness had been consumed. “The girl-ing or whatever it’s called… Some things a man has to do on his own.”

“It won’t be easy,” she offered.

“Nothing worth doing is.” I allowed. “But with sufficient will and a reasonable amount of guts I might just be able to come through this merely miserable. Half the whole damn world figures out how to be female and I was always a quick study. You give me something that makes me forget and maybe I don’t remember something that should never be forgotten.”

She took my dainty had, and I was still royally pissed off that I even had dainty hands, and gave it a pat with her own epic paws. Inger then picked up my plate and her own and walked inside to clean up. I was left alone on that wooden deck watching the sunset and my own Civil War reenactment of Sherman’s march to the sea... Ol’ General Sherman was a hell of a fighter, even for an army puke. It was said by his captured enemies. “Sherman will never go to hell; he will flank the Devil and make heaven, DESPITE the guards!” I sure could have used a bit of that tactical wizardry now. Being that normal wizardry seems to have failed me. But as many ways as I figured it in my head, I couldn’t seem to find a way to flank fate herself.

Madame Inger came back outside holding a bottle, it was about the size of a Pepto-Bismol bottle and had about the same sickening color.

“This potion,” she said setting it by the railing next to me. “Will let you have an easy pregnancy, take a capful a day and it will cut down on the nausea, swelling, and all the rest. Not remove it entirely, even magic have limits, but It will help make you feel it is the joyful experience it should be.”

She looked back out toward the nearby lake and started up a corncob pipe with one of those noxious tobacco strains bred not for its value as a stimulant but for its properties in chemical warfare.

“In the coming days you may need something else from me and I want you to know you can ask for almost anything. I’m so sorry, I’ve never made an error like this before, when I crafted that spell, the powers… it just felt so RIGHT. Perhaps the fates have something in store for you, and you’re being a young lady will be all for the best.”

I looked at her face, and due to our respective heights now I looked UP at her face and after pondering that for a while said simply….“Go fuck yourself, you evil witch.” Then I gathered my purse and starting off for Bob, and an uncertain future. What can I say? I was raised by Marines, who were only distinguished from wolves by their worse table manners.

But I still took that preggo bottle as I walked away.

***

I got the hell out of Jersey as soon as I could, probably faster than was wise because I got a big scare when I thought I was being pulled over by a state trooper for speeding but my heart started beating again when the cruiser passed me by and raced away down the road probably responding to some Sopranos wannabe’s triple homicide. I had no long term plans at the moment. And was reduced to the classic survival properties list, food, shelter, fire… although perhaps I had done enough fire for one day. I still had a room at the school till the end of the month, even if it was in the women’s dorm. So I set a course north and headed back to the sight of my greatest triumphs and recent tragedies.

I was well past bed check, when I got to Exeter. And while they were looser with year round students coming and going after the school year was over they still put up a bit of a fuss when you came back after midnight. I put on a crestfallen look and did my best to look like I was about to cry to the rent a cop at the front gate and a few seconds later he passed me through, and I drove toward the residence halls…. Sucker.

My own room was empty of everything but the furnishings that came with it. I had boxed up everything I wouldn’t be needed for a long while and sent it into storage at Aunt Alane’s place. Jessica I knew still had most of her accouterments since the plan, back when we were planning things together and not against each other, was for her to come back for a few days when I went to plebe summer.

I got out of Bob, taking my laptop case and my new, never to be sufficiently damned purse, (there had to be some way of combining those two items in one unit) and left the luggage behind. I wasn’t in the mood to drag enough gear for a safari up three flights of stairs and I figured she had to leave some pajamas behind for me to change into. The trip up to her room was familiar enough, I had done it hundreds of times over the years. Once past the common room through the door into her bedroom proper things got a little weird. I had only actually been inside the room about half a dozen times. Usually while moving things that required a certain amount of testosterone powered muscle mass. I had NEVER been inside her room alone and always had the door jammed open so the house mother could check in from time to time and make sure none of her charges were not being ravaged.

I dropped my bags on the desk next to the bed. And turned toward Jessica’s closet, there was plenty there but nothing that I would care to spend the night in. Turning to the chest drawers, after several attempts I discovered the section she kept her night clothes in. I skipped past the nighties and the cutesy wootsey pajamas and locked in on a T-Shirt. It appeared Jessica’s larcenous tendencies towards me had been going on for some time. I uncovered in her possession my Flogging Molly t-shirt that I had assumed I had lost last year. I pulled it on over my head and it was considerably oversized on my new frame. The affect was more like a dress than the hard rocking Celtic punk look I was used to sporting when I wore it. The thin material also clearly showed the outlines of my bra which rather reminded me that it was irritating me. I pulled up the shirt and reached back to the clasp trying to undo the strap and quickly realized that I needed an advanced tutorial for that sort of things. Removing the shirt I then took care of what I needed to, and, breasts freshly unbound, put my t-shirt back on.

I decided to keep the panties on, I had never been comfortable sleeping naked and it appears that habit had carried over to my new body. Plus as much as it pained my delicate masculine ego to admit I just felt vulnerable to have my… thing, uncovered. I knew intellectually the best protection against something like rape was a distrustful disposition and a loaded gun. But there was something psychologically soothing about having something, however thin and dainty, between the cruel world and my holiest of holies. The earrings I remembered to remove in time.

The wedding ring, I decided to keep wearing.

Sleep did not come easy. The previous evening, I had been too bone weary both in body and soul to stay awake. Once my head hit the hotel bed’s pillow I was out of it for a solid 10 hours. Now my head hitting the pillow was rather the problem. I couldn’t seem to get the right angle where my head would be rested and it would not be snagging or yanking on the hair I had inherited. Surely, I thought, this problem had been solved before? And I turned the lights back on to scan around the room for a solution. Soon enough in the attached bathroom I saw a little basket full of the rubber banded things Jess called scrunchies and headed back to bed. The hair was tied off into a pony tail and I was able to rest it over my left shoulder and lay down reasonably comfortable for the moment.

Of course, I couldn’t just fall asleep directly on my back like that. So after a few minutes of trying I leaned over on my side, the position I usually fell asleep in, most often abetted by a handy pillow I would crush to my chest and pretend was Jessica. Now when I tried hugging a pillow I couldn’t get my accustomed angle as there were two not so little blockades in the way. And just when I thought I had the situation sorted I changed positions a little bit and pinched a tit. Irritated beyond belief I threw down the pillow I was hugging onto the carpeted floor and slammed on the lights again. If I wasn’t going to be able to sleep in this body I might as well try to use this time to find a way back out of it.

I powered up Jessica’s laptop and hooked into the school network. And I quickly accessed the remote server that Dan Gruenke had set up in second year so as to get around the firewall and filters. Son let me tell ya, when you are a guy trapped in your girl’s body and you try to do a Boolean search for ways out of it you come across some strange shit.

It seemed that, wonders never seizing, that there was not much serious scholarly work done on body theft. Soul transference, mind swaps or any other such combination I could think of. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t stuff there. But what I did find were psychic charlatans who would do and say just about anything for $9.95 a minute and an even larger selection of fiction and wish fulfillment fantasy. It seemed if ever I could bring myself to trust one of these mooks with the care and feeding of my son or daughter there was any number of people in the transgender community who would take me up on Madame Inger’s offer.

Something to ponder for later.

But as far as finding, reputable magical or mad scientist alternatives to the ‘burned magical pathways’ Inger was referring to, I could find none after hours of searching. Disgusted with myself and the people of the internet in general I powered down the laptop looked at the clock flashing 5:44 and thought I just might be tired enough for sleep. One last lurch toward the bed on rubber sleep deprived legs and I managed to make it without serious incident. Turning off the lights I was even able to nestle into a comfortable position with hair and boobs and back just so, in a perfect slumbering goldilocks moment. I was starting to feel a small measure of peace and was about to drift off finally into the warm embrace of the sandman when…

MY GODDAMNED PHONE STARTED RINGING!!

Angered beyond belief I threw the covers once more on the floor and walked over to the purse Jessica had left me and dug out her hello kitty monstrosity of a cammo phone. I had only received two calls since our transfer, both of them from Jessica’s girlfriends asking about plans for after graduation. And I was in no mood now to answer, and at oh freaking dark early, to say I wasn’t planning on heading off to the Caribbean with Joanie and the pussycats. I built up a steam of righteous rage and prepared to lay into the poor unsuspecting interloper when I recognized the phone number on the caller ID

It was my own.

Fumbling to unlock the phone before it finished ringing I nervously answered.

“He… hello?”

“Tommy!” my former voice shouted back at me frantically. “You have to help me! I think I broke your penis.”