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The call from The Judge on an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon came as no great surprise, after what had happened on Saturday. I had even arranged for Myra Smithwick to come over and babysit for me, since Jerry was breaking in a new weekend manager at the store.

Normally, I would have asked Susan to watch them, since her Joshua and my Ashley really seemed to enjoy each other’s company, but Susan and her husband were in Kansas City at a Chiefs game, having left Joshua with Martha Pearson so they could enjoy a romantic weekend. I wouldn’t be surprised if this weekend marked the start of a sibling for Joshua. In any case, I didn’t want to saddle Martha with another charge since I wasn’t sure how long The Judge would need me.

My twins were old enough to be left on their own, but Mike and Michelle both had scout outings for the weekend. When Mike and Michelle had been Steve and Carl, a couple of my fraternity brothers, they had both enjoyed camping out. They had retained their love of the outdoors, making me once again wonder how much of their old personalities had transferred to their new identities. Not that it really mattered. They had been Mike and Michelle, my precious twins for so long now that I seldom thought about their former identities any more than I thought about my own.

Like most mothers, there weren’t a lot of people I trusted with little Ashley–especially now that she was toddling around, holding onto the furniture or crawling at ninety miles an hour all over the house. There was simply too much mischief for her to get into now that she was mobile, and I didn’t trust just anybody with her.

Then I thought about Myra Smithwick. She had taken care of Ashley before, and like most college students, she could always use a few extra bucks. I called her at her sorority house and struck pay dirt. Myra didn’t have any classes Monday since it was Labor Day, so she was glad to earn a little spending money babysitting.

It was about one when the phone finally rang. My caller ID was going nuts, unable to pin down who was calling or even if anyone was calling. The Judge’s calls always did that. I suspected he wasn’t really using a phone to call me.

“Your Honor,” I answered.

“We need you in my chambers,” he said brusquely.

“I’ll be there as soon as my babysitter gets here,” I replied.

Fortunately, Ovid is a small town, and Myra was there in ten minutes. In her white denim shorts and pink top and her hair tied into a neat ponytail, her schoolbooks clutched to her breasts in feminine fashion, it was nearly impossible for me to think of her as ever being a burly road worker just a few short years before.

“Isn’t this a little unusual to be called in on a Sunday?” she asked after I had given her all the standard instructions for handling Ashley.

“Very,” I admitted as I searched my purse to make sure I had everything I needed.

“It’s nothing bad, is it?” she asked, worried. Myra, of course, remembered who she had been and knew who The Judge really was. She had plenty of reason to be concerned, although she didn’t know that for certain and there wasn’t much I could tell her.

“Everything is fine,” I assured her with a faint smile as I started for the car. I could have added the word “now,” but if I had told her what had nearly happened to all of us there in Ovid, she would have had plenty to be concerned about.

It was a beautiful late summer day, and I regretted having such a lovely afternoon taken from me. I couldn’t even enjoy it by dressing informally either, for The Judge in his old-fashioned way, would expect all of us in dress fit for his courtroom, even though we would be in his chambers.

It didn’t bother me anymore to wear skirts and heels. I had done it for so long now that it seemed perfectly natural to me. And with my body and my trim legs, I knew I could still turn a few heads, in spite of being well into my thirties and the mother of three children. It seemed like an eternity ago that I had been male, so feminine clothing was fine by me. Still, most women would no sooner put on a skirt and heels on their day off than men would choose under like circumstances to wear a tie.

I sighed as I pulled into the parking lot. Other than Officer Mercer’s police car, mine was the only vehicle there. Well, at least there was a light court schedule for the week, so I’d be able to leave on time every day. And hopefully, my task today would only take an hour or so.

When I entered The Judge’s chambers, several others were already there. The Judge and Officer Mercer’s faces were familiar to me, of course, as was the other man’s face. I recognized Admiral Nepper, although we had never actually met. I had seen him before in other people’s thoughts. Even in a charcoal gray suit, his military bearing exposed him as a senior officer. Given the gods’ ability to live among us, I suspected he had been a military officer during other human eras as well.

The only other woman in the room was a young girl, perhaps eleven or so, with long blonde pigtails and braces on her teeth. Most people who knew Diana would never have recognized this child as Diana, the powerful goddess the Greeks called Artemis, but we had been friends long enough that I could recognize her through her twinkling blue eyes (or at least today, they were blue).

I impulsively hugged the girl. When I had drawn back, I smiled. “I see your mission was successful.”

“Completely,” the girl replied, nodding to Admiral Nepper. The admiral had been imprisoned by enemies of the gods. “Freda Jorgenson is no longer a problem.”

“But her organization lives on, Mrs. Patton,” Admiral Nepper replied, offering his hand.

I took it. Like all the gods, his handshake was firm and confident. “Please call me Cindy.”

“Delighted,” he smiled formally. One thing I’ll give most of the male gods. In spite of the way mythology portrays them as randy bastards, the majority of them are polite gentlemen of the old school. It’s often made me wonder what else we’ve gotten wrong regarding them.

“Cindy, I suspect you know why you’re here,” The Judge broke in impatiently.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Then please begin,” he commanded.

I nodded. Given what had happened yesterday, I needn’t ask whose life the gods wanted to review. Sitting myself in one of The Judge’s comfortable leather chairs, I relaxed my body and slowly drifted off into a trance...

I once thought our story began very late one late spring day as we made our way through an Oklahoma thunderstorm unlike any I had ever seen in my life, but I know now in retrospect that it began months earlier in Washington, D.C. long before winter there had ended. My wife Hannah and I had just arrived at a party at the stately British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. This was just before Hannah and I had drifted, for all practical purposes, completely apart, but I was already starting to feel uneasy with my wife’s unbridled ambition and wondered if–or more likely, when–she would decide my complacency was a detriment to her ambition.

While I tried to be supportive as best I could, I’ll admit I felt very out of place in the exquisite ballroom with its Sienna marble columns and crystal chandelier. Hannah had pretty much deserted me as soon as we were greeted at the door by an imposing butler who undoubtedly was in fact, a security man. She was drawn into a conversation with some of her colleagues from work as well as a couple of British officials I took to be part of the MI-6 delegation. It was going to be shop talk, which meant it was a conversation I’d not be welcome participating in, for while my own security clearance was every bit as stellar as hers, the National Security Agency she worked for dealt in matters we mere mortals were not even aware of. I looked wistfully at my wife, standing there in an elegant black dress that nearly reached the floor. She took to Washington power parties like a fish to water. Not me, though.

That was part of the problem, too. I could at least talk about much of my work, since much of it was public record. Hannah, on the other hand, was involved in the shadowy world of intelligence–much of which was hidden from the public. Her need to keep mum about her job put additional pressures on our already fragile marriage.

While Hannah schmoozed, I contented myself with eating and drinking. Don’t take the stories about bad English cooking seriously: the Brits could put on a hell of a party. Of course, more eating led to more drinking, and about five or six drinks later, I was standing away from the action, feeling a little warm as I tried to pull my collar away from my neck.

“Your tie a little tight?” a woman’s voice called out from behind me. I turned quickly, nearly spilling the glass of neat bourbon I was nursing to see just who belonged to that sultry voice. I found myself staring at a beautiful blonde woman who was favoring me with an amused smile. “You must be Willis Perry–Hannah’s husband.”

There were dozens of men circulating around the room in similar black tuxes, so I wondered how she knew it was me. “That would be me, ma’am,” I replied with my best attempt at charm. “But how did you know?”

“I’m Freda Jorgenson,” she laughed. “I work with your wife.”

Of course, not much later, Newsweek would run a story on Freda Jorgenson, calling her ‘The Ice Queen.’ But this was before all of that. I certainly didn’t realize I was standing in the presence of one of the soon-to-be most powerful women in Washington. Of course, the Ice Queen description could have been given to her that night, since her sparkling white dress shimmered like crystals of ice illuminated by a winter sun. There was nothing cold about her incredible face though, unless the blue of her eyes could be called an icy shade. Her face was warm though, and those eyes which would over time bring many powerful men to their knees showed only amusement now.

“Hannah told me you hate these parties,” she went on. “So I just looked for the most uncomfortable man in the room and there you are.”

“It shows, huh?” I muttered.

“I’m afraid so.”

An uncomfortably silent moment later, she asked, “I understand you work for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. What do you do there?”

I shrugged. “A little bit of everything, I suppose. I’m a nuclear engineer, so I spend a lot of time making sure the commercial nuclear reactors in this country are safe.”

“That sounds like interesting work,” she prompted.

“It’s a living,” I allowed. “It’s probably not as exciting as what you and Hannah do over at NSA.” As if I had any idea what they did there. The National Security Agency wasn’t in the habit of telling poor citizens like me exactly what it was up to. Well, I suppose I was playing my own cards pretty close to the chest, too. Over at the NRC we had a few secrets of our own.

I sort of lost time talking to Freda though. I think I did most of the talking, but I enjoyed myself for once since Hannah was occupied, as she was always occupied at parties, trying to meet, greet and enhance her career while leaving me to fend for myself on the sidelines. By the time we left that evening, I had formed quite a positive impression of Hannah’s beautiful co-worker and told Hannah so as we drove home.

“She is impressive,” Hannah agreed. “I’m surprised you noticed, though.”

“Oh?” I detected another argument coming up.

“You never seem to have much confidence in the abilities of women,” she elaborated, obviously trying to sting me. “And Freda is a very strong woman, she’s going places–and soon.”

“We didn’t talk about her work,” I pointed out. “Exactly what does she do?”

“Well, much of her work is classified,” Hannah told me smugly. I had been expecting that. “All I can tell you is that she’s a very powerful woman, and I’m very pleased to be working with her.”

“I’m sure you are,” I agreed, relieved that the anticipated argument had been blunted the minute Hannah found an opportunity to once again lord it over me about how important her job was.

If it sounds as if Hannah and I were having serious marital problems–all I can say is ‘got it in one.’ I think it all started right after Hannah found out she was barren. Before that, our marriage had been just fine, but once she learned she could never bear children, her focus turned away from family toward her career. It was a complete change of priorities, and one that I hadn’t really realized had happened until our relationship had been severely damaged.

That had been two years earlier, and each day had moved us further and further apart. Until she found out she couldn’t have children, we had sex often and spontaneously. That had changed to once a week at what had become an almost scheduled time. Lately, we had made love very seldom, the last time being two months before the party where I met Freda Jorgenson. By the time we found ourselves lost in Oklahoma, buffeted by a legendary Midwestern thunderstorm, it had been over five months since we had made love.

There was no doubt that our marriage had come to a bitter end. We had become more like roommates than a couple, and had it not been for the sudden and unexpected death of her Uncle Fred, a man she had loved greatly and I had admired as well, we would probably have already discussed the divorce we both knew was inevitable.

Why hadn’t we already split the sheets in fact as well as in deed? I’m not really sure about Hannah’s motives. As for my own, I was probably reluctant to let a twelve-year investment in each other go up in smoke unless Hannah said that was what she wanted. Maybe she felt the same way and was waiting for me to make the first move.

Although neither of us would bring up the ‘D’ word, it didn’t keep us from participating in rousing arguments, such as the one we found ourselves in after attending Uncle Fred’s funeral in a little jerkwater burg in the hills of eastern Oklahoma.

“You should stop and ask for directions,” Hannah said firmly, peering out the windshield at the ugly-looking mass of dark clouds rising to the west of us–or at least I thought they were to the west of us.

My hands gripped the wheel tighter in frustration. “And just who would I ask?” I replied caustically. “The highest life form I’ve seen in the last half hour is a cow.”

“Maybe it’s because you’ve been doubling back.”

“I have not!” Although to be honest, I had lost track of the turns I had made from one dusty back road to the next. ‘I certainly should have hit the Interstate by now,’ I thought to myself, although I was loathe to admit it to Hannah. If I had had the sun to help me determine which way I was going, I might have been okay. But given the gray pallor of the skies, I honestly couldn’t tell where the sun was to determine my direction.

“We’re going to miss our plane,” she sulked. “And I have an important meeting with Freda first thing tomorrow morning.”

“We’ll get back to Washington on time,” I assured her. “If we can’t get into National (I refused to call it Reagan more out of habit than politics), we’ll catch a flight into Dulles or BWI.”

“But what about our car? It’s at National.”

“Don’t worry about the damned car,” I growled.

Any retort she might have planned was cut off by a sudden crack of lightning and a loud rumble of thunder right on its heels.

“The storm’s getting closer,” she commented. Who needed Cassandra when Hannah was at hand?

It was indeed closer–and more violent. We had watched the sky growing ominously darker–first at a distance and then closer and closer. Speckles of rain were dotting the windshield now, but not enough to justify turning on the wipers. A few miles ahead of us though, the horizon was lost in a dark, steady stream of rain whipped by violent winds.

“Do you think it’s a tornado?” Hannah asked, frightened.

“No, it’s just rain,” I replied authoritatively. In truth, the cloud could have spawned a dozen tornadoes and we wouldn’t have been able to see them. I had been born and raised in New England, but I knew enough about tornadoes from my travels to know they weren’t always visible like they usually are in the movies. Often, they’re hidden well within clouds–maybe even clouds like the one we were about to dive into.

Then suddenly, the storm was really upon us. It was as if a curtain of water instantly closed on us, battering the top of the car like pebbles on a sheet of tin.

“That’s hail,” Hannah observed, now beyond frightened and on to terrified.

“Not quite,” I countered, watching as huge drops slammed into the windshield in such profusion that the wipers were nearly worthless. The rental car’s lights flashed on suddenly, but were practically useless with more of the beam reflecting off the stream of rain than off the blacktop of the road.

“Pull over to the side of the road!” Hannah demanded. I might have done just that if I had been alone, but moments before, she had been goading me to hurry so we could catch our plane. If she wanted me to hurry, she was going to have to accept the consequences. I ignored her and pressed on.

“You’re going to get us killed!” she screamed as the storm intensified. Again, I ignored her.

As luck would have it, she would have been right–and nearly was anyway–if it hadn’t been for the sudden image of a police car blocking the lane ahead, its red and blue flashers piercing through the downpour. In spite of the flashing lights’ warning, I almost wasn’t able to stop in time, the rental car’s brakes being far inferior to those on my Volvo at home. I had visions of hitting the police officer, who stood motionless in the path between our car and his own, his yellow rain slicker blowing in the stiff wind.

Once stopped, I managed to get my window down part way. Thankfully, the rain was blowing away from the open window. “What’s the problem, Officer?” I yelled to be heard over the din of the rain and wind.

The police officer leaned over, closer to the window. It was then that I noticed two very strange things about him. First–and most obvious–he was wearing those mirrored sunglasses favored by law enforcement officers everywhere. What made it unusual is that with the storm, it was almost as dim as twilight outside. How he could see through the mirrored glasses was beyond me. The other strange item was something about his rain slicker. At first, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but at last I had it–in spite of a driving rain, his slicker looked completely dry. I passed it off quickly as some new miracle fabric that resisted moisture.

“The bridge ahead is unsafe,” the officer told me in a flat, emotionless voice.

I looked beyond the police car stretched across the road at the metal span single truss bridge crossing a swollen river below. “It looks fine to me.”

“A tornado passed through here a few minutes ago,” he informed me. “It weakened the bridge.”

As if on cue, the bridge groaned in a sudden burst of wind. A small support beam broke loose. Too heavy to fly through the air, it dived over the side of the bridge toward the river below.

“I see what you mean,” I allowed.

“What is it?” Hannah pestered me.

“Unsafe bridge,” I muttered, turning back to the officer before Hannah could waste time by informing me that we were going to miss our plane.

“And I’m going to have to have you follow me back into town,” he added.

“What for?”

“You were approaching the bridge too fast. I’m going to have to issue you a citation for driving at an unsafe speed for road conditions.”

“What? That’s ridiculous!”

I knew better than to bluster, but I couldn’t help it. Hannah had been pestering me since we got into the car. The storm had made driving a tense and unpleasant experience. Now, a small-town cop thought he could make a little traffic fine money from an out-of-town traveller. I knew the type. We had them in small towns back in New England where I grew up, and we had them in suburban Washington as well.

“Look,” I began, hoping I might be able to just slip him a few dollars and get back on our way–assuming I could find an open road, “if there’s going to be fine, why don’t I just pay you now and save us all some time?”

“Are you trying to bribe a police officer, sir?” he asked in that same flat tone.

“No, of course not. I just thought...”

“Then follow me please, sir.”

He walked away without waiting for an answer. I noticed the side of his car was emblazoned with ‘Police–City of Ovid.’ I suddenly wondered if he could make the charge stick, given that as near as I could tell, we weren’t inside the city limits of any town. I quickly dismissed that idea, though. I knew some little towns annexed a lot of undeveloped land just to add it to the town tax rolls and trap wary drivers like me.

“Did I hear him say we have to follow him?” Hannah asked.

“Apparently he’s charging me with a traffic violation,” I growled. Before Hannah could open her mouth again (which she was about to do), I added, “And don’t tell me about how we have to get back to Washington.”

Fortunately, she had the good sense to keep her mouth shut.

As nearly as I could tell, the town of Ovid was a good two miles from the bridge. I noticed we passed a city limits sign no more than a half mile from any evidence of a developed town. I knew better than to point this out to some local judge, though. I’d probably just be told that the town limits had been changed but that they hadn’t bothered to change the signs yet. My best course of action was to pay the damned fine and be done with it.

I had a lot to brood about as I followed that tank-town cop into the ‘city’ of Ovid. Hannah was pissed at me–as usual. We’d undoubtedly miss our plane, and like Hannah, I had plenty of work piling up on my desk back in DC. I was going to out probably a hundred bucks on a trumped up charge, and unless this phony-baloney legal charade ended in a hurry, we’d probably be stuck in some fleabag motel in Ovid eating greasy fried food that seemed to pass for haute cuisine in Oklahoma.

At least the weather wasn’t as threatening, I told myself. I had turned my wipers down to intermittent since the driving storm had miraculously changed to a gentle rain as we neared Ovid. In fact, unlike the countryside we had just driven through which was strewn with windswept branches and waterlogged plants, Ovid looked as if it had been completely spared the more violent aspects of the storm. Instead, lawns and leaves glistened with abundant but gentle rainfall.

And in spite of my determination to dislike Ovid on sight, I had to admit to myself it was fairly pleasant as small towns go. Since I had grown up in the small city of Portland, Maine, I was very aware of the dynamics of small towns. If things looked prosperous in a small town, it meant something besides farming or fishing was driving the economy. Ovid had that prosperous look that said there was something in town–a business or a college, perhaps, or both–which provided good jobs and a passion for liveability. Ovid’s oak-lined streets populated by neat and trim if modest houses screamed prosperity. I found myself wondering what there was in the town to drive the economy.

When we pulled up in front of a building proclaiming itself to be ‘City Hall,’ I realized Ovid was larger than I had first imagined. Considering that I had seen no signs directing us to Ovid as we had wandered through the Oklahoma countryside, I had imagined it was a tiny, dying farm town where traffic fines were the greatest single source of town revenue. Instead, it was neat, prosperous, and showed signs of growth–a rare aspect for isolated small towns anywhere in the country.

“Follow me,” the police officer directed. He had taken off his rain slicker, exposing a neat, sharply-creased grayish-blue uniform shirt. I noted that in spite of the light rain, the shirt showed no sign of being wet. Whatever fabrics were being used for uniforms in this town, they seemed completely resistant to the elements. I made a mental note to find out what they were and order a dozen shirts out of it when I got back to Washington.

“I know you don’t want to hear it,” Hannah muttered to me softly enough not to be heard by the officer, “but we’re never going to make our plane now.”

“I’m well aware of that!” I snapped.

“I told you that you were going the wrong way,” she pressed, but I refused to be drawn into her potential tirade.

“This way,” the officer said, motioning for us to enter a courtroom.

Like the rest of what I had seen of Ovid, the courtroom was rather impressive. Of course, if they hauled in many hapless drivers like me on trumped-up charges, I supposed they could easily afford impressive courtrooms.

A judge was already sitting on the bench. I could see he was going to be trouble. He had a stern look about him, from his piercing blue eyes to the way he held himself, leaning imperiously over the bench to look down on a trembling girl who could have been no more than eight.

“Jeez, did she forget to pay sales taxes at her lemonade stand?” I whispered to Hannah. She didn’t reply but gave me a stern look as if to warn me I was in enough trouble without pissing off the judge.

“Is this form more to your liking?” the judge asked sternly, his thin lips pursed amid a neatly trimmed beard.

“But I...” the little girl began, tugging at her tiny skirt as if embarrassed to have anyone see her legs.

“But nothing, Ms. Amstrad,” the judge interrupted. “You have been warned about bullying the younger children.”

The little wisp of a girl didn’t look big enough or old enough to bully anyone, I thought to myself, wondering what she could have possibly done to make the judge so angry. His mood seemed far out of proportion to the diminutive girl before him.

“Your parents are waiting outside,” he growled, motioning for our police escort to open the door we had just come through.

I wondered where they could be since I had seen no one on our way into the courtroom. Imagine my surprise when a young couple burst through the very doors we had just come through. Like the little girl, they were slender and blonde, but there was something odd about them. Somehow, through some trick of the light perhaps, it seemed as if I could almost see through them.

“Lisa!” the woman called, causing the girl to turn and face us. I could see her eyes were red-rimmed–presumably from crying–and the look on her face was one of pure horror. Before she could speak, the woman wrapped her arms around the little girl, crying softly.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” the man said as he placed his hands on his wife and daughter’s shoulders. “It’s not like Lisa to run off like that. We were so worried.”

The judge’s demeanor was very different now, a smile across his face in a gesture of benevolence. “I’m sure you’re right, Mr. Amstrad. I’ve warned Lisa not to go wandering off like that while her parents are shopping. I’m sure she won’t do it again.”

As the little girl was led away by her strange parents, I could see the little girl turning to look at the judge with pleading eyes. But the judge had already turned his attention to Hannah and me.

“Next case, Officer Mercer,” he boomed from the bench.

For a moment, I felt a twinge of what the accused must feel like in countries where trials were held in secret. There were only the four of us in the courtroom–Hannah and me and the judge and the police officer he referred to as “Officer Mercer.” There were no court reporters, no true bailiff, or any spectators to indicate that this was a true courtroom. Still, the presence of this judge was almost regal. His black robe might just as well have been an ermine robe draped about a powerful king.

“Your Honor...” I began.

“Court is still in session,” Officer Mercer intoned. “The Honorable Judge presiding.” His emphasis on the word “Judge” led me believe it was almost a name as well as a title.

The Judge’s courtroom is different nowadays from what I’ve been told. Cindy Patton attends all court proceedings, but she was just a shade when we met the Judge, presumably not necessary in the courtroom. And of course now, Susan Jager is there to provide some semblance of defense for poor wayfarers like Hannah and me. In those days though, things were a little less civilized. And I suspect The Judge was far less constrained by protocol then.

“Willis and Hannah Perry,” the Judge stated. It wasn’t a question: he knew who we were. I assumed that Officer Mercer had called ahead, giving the Judge our names. “You have been charged with driving at an unsafe speed for road conditions. How do you plead?”

I had walked into the courtroom determined to just pay my fine and leave. Unfortunately, I had had time to think about that as we made our way to the Judge’s court. Now, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to plead guilty. To tell the truth, I was getting more than a little pissed off at the Judge’s arrogance.

“How do you plead?” he asked again.

“Not guilty!” I replied at last, ignoring my wife’s sudden gasp.

The Judge turned to Officer Mercer. “Tell what happened.”

Officer Mercer faced the bench. I noted he was still wearing those mirrored sunglasses. “Mr. Perry’s car approached the Lethe River Bridge at a high rate of speed...”

High rate of speed my ass!

“...nearly colliding with my vehicle.”

“It wasn’t like that...” I began.

“Silence!” The Judge ordered. As Hannah tugged on my sleeve, shooting darts at me with her eyes, I said no more.

“In your opinion,” The Judge asked, “what would have happened if your car had not been blocking the road?”

“Then Mr. Perry’s car would have gone onto the bridge which was severely weakened by a tornado. The results would have been the death of Mr. Perry and his wife.”

I almost pointed out that Officer Mercer was in no position to know that. It’s just as well I saved my outburst. And, of course, as things turned out, he probably was in a position to know that we would have died since that’s how things work in Ovid. We knew none of that, standing there before The Judge though.

“Then I would call that driving at an unsafe speed,” the Judge commented. “I find you guilty as charged.”

I wanted to say something, but I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. I was back to my earlier plan now–just shut up and pay the fine. Oh if only things had been that simple!

As I reached back for my wallet to pay the expected fine, The Judge rose and began to chant something in some language I had never heard before. It sounded a little like Latin, but I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was because we don’t really know what spoken Latin sounded like back when The Judge learned it–but I’m getting ahead of myself there.

I felt very strange–almost as if my body had become incorporeal, my flesh replaced by a series of tingling, almost electrical, sensations. I looked down at myself as best I could, but my motions seemed to be slowed considerably. When I managed to get a view of myself, my body was shifting inside my clothing, almost as if it were melting and reforming.

I suppose I should have been frightened, but I was too much in shock to feel any real fear. Or perhaps what The Judge was doing to me included some sort of calmative. Whatever the reason, I was curiously detached as I watched my chest begin to change under the polo shirt I was wearing. With each labored breath, my ribcage seemed to be growing smaller while two obviously feminine breasts began to form and expand beneath my shirt.

I looked over at Hannah. She was staring back at me, her eyes conveying a wordless panic as her body seemed to shimmer and shift in the same way mine was. She seemed to be growing larger, while I, on the other hand, seemed to be growing smaller until we were eye to eye. That only lasted a moment though, as suddenly, she was taller than I was, and the changes to her body were becoming more systematic.

I had seen examples of morphing programs back then, although they weren’t as widespread or as seamless as they are today. Hannah looked as if her image had been captured by such a program, although a program as elaborate as the ones today, as her dark brown hair shortened, pulling back from over her shoulders until it had become a short and neatly-trimmed man’s cut in a shade of dark blond. Her face was broadening, her nose growing more pronounced, and I could see a dark shadow appearing on her cheeks and chin, reminding me of a man’s whiskers a few hours after shaving. My God! I realized, they actually were whiskers!

Her body broadened out, her narrow waist filling in as the shape of her breasts disappeared into a broad chest. Her tee top was changing as well, to accommodate her new shape. It developed narrow stripes and became a short sleeve dress shirt. Along the front of the shirt, blue and red stripes began to form as a strip of cloth snaked down from her neck in the shape of a dark blue tie.

I was so engrossed in Hannah’s changes that I almost didn’t notice the further changes to my own body and clothing. I say almost, because as shocking as the changes happening to my wife, I could not only see but feel the ones happening to me.

How can I possibly describe the sensations bombarding me in that unreal courtroom? My waist felt as if it was being squeezed into a much smaller circumference (which it was), and the excess volume of my body seemed partially at least to be pushed toward my chest and my hips. I could feel hair trickling down over my neck, and even feel its sudden weight on my shoulders.

Although my eyes were riveted on my wife’s increasingly masculine form, I had no doubts that my own shape was now much more feminine. I even winced slightly as the sexual equipment between my legs became suddenly conspicuous by its very absence, somehow drawing up between my legs and reshaping itself into something completely alien to me.

It’s difficult to describe with any detachment what it feels like to have one’s sexual organs rearranged. I suppose most men are aware of having something between their legs, pressing against the insides of their thighs and pushed against their bodies by the constraints of underwear. Imagine these sensations suddenly taken away, replaced by an absence of any external organs, yet even in that absence, a sensation remains. As strange as it sounds, I could feel the slit that had formed between my legs. In that moment, I felt suddenly vulnerable, as if a doorway between my thighs had been opened, leaving me somehow exposed.

I was at least a foot shorter than Hannah now, but suddenly, I seemed to grow slightly. I realized as I stumbled slightly to catch my balance that I was now poised on something which had raised my heels off the floor. A sudden slight cramping in my toes told me before I even could look down, that I was now wearing women’s shoes–high heels, no less.

The rest of my clothing appeared to be changing as well. Just as Hannah was now dressed in the sort of outfit any man might be expected to wear to work, my own clothing was becoming a woman’s equivalent. I felt the strange but not exactly unpleasant sensation of nylons running up my leg, and the feeling of air on my legs where my pants were rapidly disappearing.

Something wrapped itself around my chest, encasing my... breasts. Yes, breasts–I now realized I had breasts. The something, I instinctively knew, was a bra. I could feel it cinching against my shoulder blades, adjusting as the new growths on my chest reached their final size.

I knew from a number of years of looking at women that my new breasts weren’t exactly mouth-watering in size. I was probably in the B cup range and maybe a 32 or so. Hannah had been a 34C which I knew was significantly larger. In spite of that, my new breasts felt strangely heavy on my diminished chest. At least the bra gave some relief to the tugging of my new breasts.

My shirt had merged with my transformed trousers, becoming a flowery summer dress, cream in color with a neckline designed to show off my new cleavage. I watched too numb to move, as long, medium brown hair crept over my partially-bare shoulders framing my new breasts.

“What the hell have you done to me?” I screamed, trying to make my voice sound threatening but succeeding only in emulating the sound of a frightened female–which come to think of it, was exactly what I had become.

Hannah–or rather the man Hannah had become–placed a meaty hand on my arm. “Now Martha, it’s only a speeding ticket. The Judge was really pretty lenient.”

Martha? Who the hell was Martha? I looked at Hannah, staring into the calm, masculine face of a stranger. A good head taller than me, he wore a blue sports coat with a conservative but trendy blue tie, white shirt striped in blue and red, and khaki slacks. To my alarm, he seemed quite comfortable in them.

“What’s going on here?” I yelled, turning to The Judge.

The Judge in response waved his hand absently, freezing my now-masculinized wife in place. “I think it should be obvious to you,” he replied calmly. “You are now Martha Lee Hamilton, the wife of Kenny Hamilton.”

“I’m Willis Perry, and I’m nobody’s wife!” I shot back.

“Yes, you are,” he insisted. “You are mine to do with as I please since your own lives would have ended at the Lethe River Bridge a few hours ago. It had been severely weakened by a tornado and would have collapsed as you travelled over it.”

“You can’t know that,” I protested, folding my arms over my chest in a vain effort to hide my breasts.

“But I can,” he replied simply. “And I do know it.”

As he stared at me, I could hear screams in my mind–screams from Hannah and me as water rushed into our car and tons of concrete closed in over us. I shuddered, somehow knowing that what this strange magistrate had just told me was absolute truth.

“Even if that would have happened, you have no right to do... this to us!”

“I won’t argue that point with you,” The Judge said calmly. “Simply look at this as a second chance.”

“Second chance at what?”

The Judge shrugged. “Life, marriage, career, anything you can think of. Your life would have ended and your marriage was about to fail even if you had both lived. As for your career, were you really all that happy being just another bureaucrat in Washington?”

I didn’t answer. I had to admit that my career hadn’t given me the satisfaction I had once expected, and as for my marriage... well, it was probably as dead as we would have been if we had crossed that bridge. Still, I wasn’t tired of being a man, and I had no desire whatsoever to spend a new life as a woman.

“Okay,” I finally allowed. “You have a point. Just make me a man and Hannah a woman again and we’ll try out these new lives you gave us.”

The Judge smiled thinly. “It doesn’t work that way, Mrs. Hamilton. Your wife’s ambition would be your undoing, as it nearly was in your previous marriage to her. As a man–even though he no longer retains his memories of his life as your wife–he will be much happier–and will make you happier in the process.”

“Bullshit!”

I thought for a moment I had overstepped my bounds with The Judge. His face hardened and there seemed to be fire burning in his eyes. Even the stoic Officer Mercer looked alarmed at my outburst. What the hell was I thinking? I had just called a being powerful enough to change my sex as I stood there a liar.

“I... I’m sorry,” I said meekly. Of course, I wasn’t really sorry, but I had a strange feeling any being capable of changing me into a woman could change me into something considerably more unpleasant than that.

The Judge’s expression softened a little. “Officer Mercer will take you and your husband to your respective places of work. Don’t forget your jacket and purse.” With a nod, he indicated a blue jacket designed to be worn over my dress to appear more businesslike and a navy blue purse. Both items were sitting on the chair I had been sitting in a few minutes before. “Have a good life, Mrs. Hamilton.”

We were trapped, I reflected as we got into the back seat of Officer Mercer’s police car. I had already noted that our rental car had mysteriously disappeared from the parking lot. Hannah and I were now in new bodies–of opposite sexes, no less–and I had managed singlehandedly to piss off the one person who might be able to return us to our rightful bodies.

I felt as if we had been flung into a Dean Koontz novel in one of his spooky little towns where nothing was quite right. And in fact, nothing really was quite right. Oh, this Ovid was a pleasant enough town–actually more prosperous than the small towns I remembered from my time growing up in New England. But there was something unnatural about it as well.

Most disturbing were the people I could almost but not quite see through. They weren’t exactly ghostly, but it was as if their images had been poorly superimposed over the background. No one solid seemed to notice there was anything wrong with these people though. Or perhaps they just chose to ignore it.

Also, although there were new cars and evidence of modern devices everywhere, people dressed with a formality that gave the town an artificial look–men wore suits and ties while women wore skirts and heels. There was nothing old-fashioned about their attire. Instead, the styles they wore wouldn’t be out of place in Boston or Washington. It was as if someone was making a film for the Ovid Chamber of Commerce and had asked everyone to wear their Sunday best.

Hannah–or I supposed I would have to start calling my wife “Kenny” now–smiled happily, oblivious to my discomfort. Maybe she–he–was the lucky one, I thought. According to The Judge, he had no idea he had ever been anyone else.

Or maybe not. As disconcerting as my changes were, I was still me at some base level. If I had lost all my memories, it would be the same as dying. At least I was still aware of who I had been and could strive to get my old body and life back. That was far better than thinking I had always been Martha Lee Hamilton.

Officer Mercer dropped Kenny off first. A block east of the main street (called appropriately enough ‘Main Street’) were a collection of businesses that didn’t need to be accessible to strolling shoppers–a paint store, an auto parts store, and lastly our destination: Ovid Chrysler. A small selection of new Chryslers and Dodges were displayed prominently in front of the building, with a larger selection of used vehicles off to one side. Judging from the way Kenny was dressed, I thought it likely he was a salesman. I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself. Hannah would have died a thousand deaths rather than face the loss of prestige of becoming a car salesman.

“Bye hon,” Kenny said, surprising me with a quick kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for the ride Officer,” he added as he closed the door with a wave.

It would be my turn next, I realized. Unlike my ersatz husband, I had no idea what I did for a living–or where. I thought about asking Officer Mercer, but I decided to save my breath. There was no way he would tell me anything. He seemed to revel in playing the strong, silent type.

In a few moments, we had pulled up in front of a prominent (for Ovid at least) building displaying a sign that announced it to be the ‘Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank.’ “This is your stop,” Officer Mercer informed me.

“A bank?” I murmured. “I work in a bank? But I don’t know anything about banking.”

“That doesn’t really matter,” he informed me in the deadpan delivery I was coming to expect. “You’ll learn.”

It was no use arguing. I sighed, grabbed my jacket and purse, and tried to make a graceful if not entirely ladylike exit from the car. For my first time exiting a car in a skirt and heels, I didn’t think I had done too badly. I managed to keep everything that wasn’t supposed to show from showing, at least.

I felt as if I was entering a trap as I entered the bank. What would I do once I entered? Was I a teller? God, I hoped not. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to be a teller. Besides, tellers were supposed to be cheerful all day, and I didn’t feel very cheerful at that moment.

Was I a secretary? I might be able to handle that. I was a fairly decent typist. Since all the budget cuts at NRC after the fall of the Soviet Union, we never seemed to have enough clerical help, so in self-defense, I had become a halfway-decent typist. But if I was a secretary, where in the bank did I work and who did I work for?

I half-expected everyone in the bank to break out laughing when I entered, stupidly looking around as if I had no idea where I was supposed to be, but to my relief, no one did. In fact, no one seemed to take much notice of me at all. That probably meant I wasn’t somebody really important.

I scanned the main lobby of the bank. It was arranged like most small town banks I had seen before, with a line of teller stations on one side and a series of desks on the other and a small number of offices for the bank’s executives at the rear. The décor was more modern than I had expected, denoting a successful and presumably forward-thinking bank. Nothing was ostentatious mind you, but the desks were of polished wood and the desk chairs comfortable-looking.

With some relief, I noticed an empty desk along the sidewall with a wooden nameplate atop it that included my name with ‘Home Loan Department’ in smaller letters right under it.

Home Loan Department? But I didn’t know anything about home loans, other than as a customer. Hannah and I had owned a house back in Virginia, but like most homeowners, I had merely skimmed all the papers when we bought the house and signed where I was told to sign. I had no idea of how to put together a home loan. How was I going to handle this?

Since it appeared that I had no choice except to try to play the role The Judge had saddled me with, I sighed and walked over to ‘my’ desk, removing my jacket and draping it over the back of my chair. Nervously, I sat down with what I hoped was a friendly nod to the transparent girl at the next desk.

Actually, most of the people in the bank–customers and employees alike–were semi-transparent. From where I was sitting, I could only see one other solid person. Two desks away, a cute young redhead was talking with a customer, but I noticed she looked my way once and gave me what I hoped was a knowing nod before returning to her customer. As soon as she was finished with her client, I resolved to introduce myself. Well, I suppose ‘introduce’ wasn’t quite right since she already knew me–or at least thought she did. Good Lord, this new life in Ovid was going to be confusing!

Since I had no customers at my desk–thankfully–I busied myself by going through a file or two in my in-basket. As I’ve already mentioned, as a home owner, I was only vaguely familiar with many of the documents, although I supposed they were somewhat different due to differences in real estate law between Oklahoma and Virginia where I owned–or rather had owned–a home.

I was relieved to find I was at least vaguely familiar with most of the forms. Deeds, loan documents, and personal financial statements are at least somewhat familiar to anyone who has ever bought a house. I just hoped I didn’t have to explain any of the details to anybody. I tried to remember back when Hannah and I had purchased our home. The girl who did what I was expected to do now hadn’t seemed to get bogged down in the details. I suspected at the time that others in her organization actually did most of the technical work, leaving it to her to make the borrowers comfortable with the idea that all of the details were being handled for them.

After I had studied the files for about twenty minutes, the redhead finished with her customer. Before I could go to her desk though, she came to mine. “I’ve got a couple of prospects for you,” she told me blandly. “Can we go over them in the conference room?”

The way she said it, I knew she wanted to discuss something other than loan prospects. I nodded, picking up a notepad just to make it look as if I was going to be taking down some information.

When she had closed the conference room door and we were both seated, she smiled, crinkling her pretty little freckles as she did. “Welcome to Ovid.”

“So you know?” I sighed, relieved.

“The same thing happened to me about six months ago,” she explained, extending her hand. “I’m Connie Delany,” she added.

“I guess I’m Martha Hamilton,” I replied, taking her hand while noting that it was about the same size as mine. It looked as if our femininely-shaped nails had been done by the same manicurist as well. “But I guess you already knew that.”

She smiled again. “Sure did. You’re my best friend here at the bank–or at least you were when you were a shade.”

“A shade?”

“The people you can sort of see through,” she explained. She went on to tell me something of how Ovid worked. It seemed that almost everyone who was not transparent in Ovid had been transformed by the mysterious Judge. Most of the people were shades, though. You could see them, talk to them, touch them–even smell them–but when you looked at them, there was something almost but not quite transparent about them. Eventually, some of the shades were replaced by real people who had been transformed by The Judge.

“You’ll get used to the shades after awhile,” Connie assured me. “After a time, they just seem like normal people. I guess our minds just fill in the places where you can see through them.”

“Do they know they’re shades?” I asked.

“In Ovid, you can never be absolutely certain of anything,” Connie cautioned me. “But I don’t think so. They think they are just people. Most of us who remember who we are think they’re just more of The Judge’s magic.”

Time for the big question: “So who is The Judge anyhow?”

Connie gave me a wistful smile. “I know, and I wish I could tell you, but you’ll figure it out on your own after awhile.”

Before I could ask anything else, a shade who I later learned was Judy Cartwright, secretary to the president of the bank popped in. “Martha Lee, your two o’clock appointment is here.”

“Ask them to wait just a minute,” Connie answered before I could say anything. “I’ll bring them back.”

Judy nodded and closed the door behind her.

“Martha Lee?” I asked. Calling someone by their first and middle names was so Southern. Of course, come to think about it, I and almost everyone else did seem to have just a little bit of a Southern twang when we spoke. For a native New Englander, I felt almost like a traitor to have a twang.

“It’s what we all call you,” Connie said quickly. “Right now, we’ve got a customer.”

“But I don’t know what to do!”

“I do,” she assured me. “Supposedly, you and I are cross-trained to take over for each other on vacations and so on. Just follow my lead.”

With Connie’s help, I actually managed to go through a loan closing for Fred and Allison Manchester without seeming like a total idiot. I think their real estate agent was a little suspicious, but Connie managed to whisper to me that he was one of us in that he remembered his previous life as well. I later found out that he had previously been a State Patrol officer (a male officer–lucky stiff for being able to stay male) and had been in Ovid for about four months.

Connie was right about the shades, though. The Manchesters were shades: yet they acted just like normal people. When I accidentally touched Allison’s hand, it felt as solid as my own. And in addition to being solid to the touch, they had no problem drinking the Cokes we had brought into the conference room. I could see why Ovid residents treated them as normal people and vowed to myself to do likewise.

It took an hour to go through all of the paperwork, but at last we were finished and the Manchesters were on their way to move into their new house. I guess they were so happy to get their new home that they didn’t suspect that I was as new to the whole process as they were.

“See?” Connie said brightly. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“No,” I admitted. Considering my previous life had been spent reviewing documents related to nuclear weapons safety (an oxymoron if even there was one–how could a nuclear weapon be ‘safe’?), home loan documents were a snap.

“I checked your schedule when I went out to get your customers,” Connie went on. “You don’t have another closing for a couple of days. By that time, I’ll have you completely up to speed. We can spend the time showing you how to get documents ready for the loan committee.”

I felt relieved at that. If I was going to be stuck in this new life, I’d need a job, and this looked like a decent one. I didn’t want to screw it up.

“Right now, things are kind of quiet,” Connie pointed out. “Let’s take you to the ladies’ room so I can teach you how to touch up your makeup.”

“I’m wearing makeup?”

“Of course, silly,” she giggled. “All girls wear it.”

I really hadn’t noticed. I guess part of the reason was that I didn’t really need much. Looking at myself in the mirror of the ladies’ room for the first time, I could see that I had smooth skin with just a small number of cute little freckles around my nose, full lips, and a natural blush that highlighted my cheeks. My face was framed by long, brown hair that curled just a little near its shoulder-length ends. By my own male standards, I was cute–not a raving beauty mind you, but downright cute. My figure was trim and my features attractive, but in a ‘girl next door’ sort of way rather than anything spectacularly gorgeous. I had already sneaked a look at my driver’s license to find I was twenty-two. At least I was fifteen years younger than I had been as Willis Perry.

Connie showed me the basics of applying lipstick and checking my makeup. “If you just relax and let your mind drift while you’re looking in the mirror, something about the magic will cause you to take care of your makeup unconsciously, but I think you’ll find after awhile that it’s better to control the process yourself. It’s a little spooky to let your body do it for you automatically.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get this right,” I complained.

“Sure you will,” she replied brightly. “It only takes a couple of days for most people. I was a little slow, but I had it down within a week.”

“You used to be a man?” I asked incredulously. Connie had seemed so comfortable being a woman that I never would have guessed that she had ever been a man.

“Yep,” she replied with a grin and a nod. “I was a middle-aged, divorced accountant for the State of Oklahoma. I came out this way to do a little hunting last fall and found Ovid instead. Apparently, I was due to die in a hunting accident, so I was fair game for The Judge. Enough about that, though. Let’s wipe off that lipstick and try again.”

So with Connie’s assistance and guidance, I managed to make it through my first day at work. The only problem was that I had only spent part of the day in women’s clothing, and yet by the end of the day, my feet felt cramped in their high heels, my legs were too warm in the clinging pantyhose, and my bra had ridden up on me a couple of times, requiring minor adjustments in the ladies’ room.

So by the end of the day, I was tired, hot, and cranky. All I wanted to do was find my way home–or I should say to Martha Lee’s home–and crash. Connie was good enough to walk me to my car, which turned out to be a one-year-old white Dodge Stratus. I supposed with my ‘husband’ selling Chrysler products, having a fairly new Dodge made sense. At least it was three years newer than the Volvo I had owned as Willis Perry–although I hadn’t owned an American car in several years because I felt Volvos were a lot better. Add to that the fact that Chrysler controls are substantially different from the ones on my Volvo, so it took me half of my short trip home just to find out how to work the radio.

Connie gave me directions to my house. It wasn’t hard to find since Ovid was a pretty small town. The house turned out to be a modest little home–a ranch maybe ten years old, judging from the growth of the vegetation in the yard. Well, as long as it was air-conditioned and had a comfortable couch for me to crash on, I’d be happy, I thought.

Thankfully, the house was cool with the air-conditioning humming happily along. I spent a little time looking around. It was your typical three-bedroom ranch with a living room, family room, kitchen, and a couple of bathrooms. None of the rooms could be called spacious, but I suppose it could be deemed cosy. Having grown up in a small town, I realized that while not pretentious, the house and its comfortable furnishings indicated we were doing fairly well financially.

I stripped out of my work clothes after finding some khaki shorts and a pale green tank top. I didn’t even stop to investigate my new body after I had stripped down into my bra and panties. Frankly, I wasn’t in an exploratory mood. I couldn’t help noticing though, that I had a trim, well-built body. I might have even thought of it as being sexy if I hadn’t been so mind-numbingly tired. I’d save the body tour for later, though.

Once dressed, I located the prerequisite comfortable couch. It was in the den, which was on the east side of the house, so it was a little darker and cooler than the living room on the west side. As I prepared to lie down, I noticed a photo album on a nearby end table. The book was white, trimmed in silver, and embossed with the words ‘Our Wedding.’ There was a date embossed on it, too...

Oh shit. We were newlyweds.

In spite of learning how young I was, I had thought of my forced marriage to Kenny as just a reversed continuation of my marriage with Hannah. Since Hannah and I had gone for months without sexual contact, I hadn’t really considered the ramifications of relations with my ‘husband.’ Upon learning that I was, for all practical purposes, a newlywed, I thought back to the time when Hannah and I had first gotten married. Once a day was a minimum for sex in those days. What would Kenny be expecting?

With trembling hands, I opened the album. I told myself it was just to learn more about the person I was supposed to be, but that failed to calm me down completely, as thoughts of sex as a woman kept intruding on my mind. The album did tell me several things about my new life. Through attached newspaper clippings, I learned my parents and younger sister lived in Muskogee, Oklahoma. There were some pictures of them, and they all looked happy and attractive. Did they really exist, though, or were they just convenient pictures of people who were far enough away from Ovid not to matter in my new life?

My unwanted husband looked proud and happy in a picture taken with a fifty-something couple I assumed to be his parents. I had to admit my former wife’s new male body looked very handsome in his dark tuxedo. At least The Judge had made us both attractive. I could even detect hints of Hannah’s expressions translated to Kenny’s masculine face. It made me wonder if in spite of the radical transformation and apparent loss of memory he had experienced, something of Hannah somehow remained.

There were dozens of other pictures as well–friends, groomsmen, bridesmaids, and so on. Some of the pictures were captioned while others were not. Oddly enough, none of the pictures showed any of the wedding guests to be shades. Perhaps their transparency wasn’t visible in photographs. Maybe it took the human mind to tell the difference rather than a camera lens. I supposed it was possible no shades had attended the wedding, but given that they seemed to form an overwhelming percentage of Ovid’s population, I suspected that was very unlikely.

I was so engrossed in the album I didn’t hear the car pull up in the driveway or the man enter the front door. I nearly jumped when a male voice over my shoulder asked, “Looking at our wedding pictures, honey?”

“Oh!” I gasped, dropping the album on the floor as if I had been caught looking at something I shouldn’t have seen. “Uh... Kenny, I didn’t hear you come in.”

He leaned down and kissed me on the neck. It seemed so weird to feel the short stubble against my soft skin. “You certainly made a beautiful bride.”

“Uh... thank you.”

Suddenly his arms were around me, his hands against my breasts. Oh God–he had come home horny. This couldn’t be happening. I remembered again how it had been for Hannah and I back when we were newlyweds. Just like Kenny, I had often come home so horny I could hardly stand it. A younger, more agreeable Hannah had always smiled at me and practically raced me for the bedroom.

I suddenly realized unless I came up with a good excuse, I was going to end up in bed with my smooth legs spread. That wasn’t something I was ready for. I slipped out of his embrace and stood up. “Kenny, I haven’t even started dinner yet.”

He moved toward me, his arms embracing me once more as his chest pressed against my breasts. “Who needs food?”

I didn’t want to do this. It was a nightmare of gargantuan proportions. My wife was now my husband, younger, bigger, and more lusty than I could ever have imagined. I wanted to run and hide. The thought of making love as a woman with a man was the most horrifying thing I could imagine.

But what could I do? In his mind, I was his new wife. I suspected this was an act that had been repeated several times since the supposed marriage. Besides, he was bigger and stronger than me and didn’t seem likely to be deterred if I told him I wasn’t in the mood (And believe me–I really, really wasn’t in the mood). Could I feign a headache? How about saying it was my time of the month? No, neither excuse seemed likely to deter him. If I had been in his shoes–something I would have given just about anything to be–I wouldn’t have been deterred. And I certainly couldn’t tell him the truth. With his loss of memory, he wouldn’t believe me. I could scarcely believe it myself.

What could I do? As far as he was concerned–as far as most people in town real or shade were concerned–I was Kenny’s loving wife. Even if I resisted, I would eventually have to play the part I had been given. I was reasonably certain The Judge wouldn’t have it any other way. He had changed me into a young married woman. If I didn’t play the part, who knows what he might turn me into next?

Trying to hide my reluctance, I had no choice but to let him lead me into the bedroom. I hoped he didn’t notice my body was trembling in fear. Even if he did, he would probably assume it was just anticipation.

Strangely enough, there was something akin to anticipation as well. It wasn’t conscious. No, I had no rational desire to try out my new body with this man. But my body seemed to have a mind of its own. I suppose if I had been a woman before being transformed into a man by The Judge, I would eventually get a hard on no matter how repulsive the idea might be to me. In the same light, I could feel my nipples tingling a little and could feel something becoming warmer and damp between my legs, almost as if my body was joyfully anticipating having the void between my legs stuffed full of my man’s penis even while my mind was recoiling in sheer terror.

There was nothing to do but go along with this, I realized. Some experts advise women about to be raped to do just that. After all, when a woman is being overpowered by someone much larger than she, there isn’t a lot to be accomplished by fighting. Besides, given that this man thought I was his willing wife meant complications would ensue if I refused, and at the moment, I had plenty of complications in my life without adding more.

As he removed his suit, he took time to gently remove my clothing as well. His smooth motions and confident smile told me he was something of an expert at this. It was too bad, I told myself, that I hadn’t been given some of the same knowledge. Of course, in Ovid the penalty for such knowledge appeared to be the loss of all memory of a previous life. Maybe that would have been better, I thought. If I had lost all memories of being a male, I wouldn’t have these terrible misgivings about being drilled by a man.

Soon, we were both standing there nearly naked. Well, I was nearly naked. Kenny had just managed to take off his boxers and strip the spread off the bed, leaving me standing there in nothing but a feminine thong which I was certain would be stripped from my body the minute I was spread out on the bed.

I remember how vulnerable I felt at that moment. The thoughts running through my mind were probably not unlike the thoughts nearly all girls have before their first time with a man. Would it hurt? How would I be able to stand having a body as big as his resting on my small form? Could this cause me to get pregnant? I found out later that there is a grace period for new women during which they don’t experience periods or pregnancies, but I didn’t know that then. I just hoped my new body was on the pill.

He gently guided me to the bed, watching appreciatively as I crawled to the center of the queen-sized mattress and rolled over reluctantly until I was on my back. With an expectant smile, he removed my thong and spread my legs apart.

I tried not to look at his member. As horny as he was, I suspected it was probably about the size of a rolling pin. I fully expected him to plunge directly in, splitting me in two. To my surprise, he lay down next to me, reaching with a large manly hand to the space between my legs.

Now I don’t want to make it sound as if I was the sort of lover I feared Kenny would be. I suppose it was very feminine of me to assume the worst–that he would be an uncaring lover interested only in satisfying his own needs. Instead, he was very gentle and very concerned about me. I could only lie back in shock, letting him spread my nether lips and begin to work on my new clitoris. Against my worst fears, I soon found myself relaxing just a little, actually enjoying the feeling of his strong fingers sliding against my moist cleft.

It didn’t take him long to get me off. I was soon gasping and shivering with pleasure. Of course, part of my mind was disgusted with what was happening, but the rest of my mind was too busy absorbing the electric thrills brought on by the orgasm.

“Now!” I gasped. It wasn’t a conscious request: it was an instinctive exclamation. I know, I know–only a few short hours ago I had been male. What kind of a man suddenly finding himself in the body of a young woman would immediately spread her legs and allow herself to be violated? It’s a difficult–not to mention embarrassing–question to answer, and it was only later as I lay there in the arms of my masculinized former wife that I had the presence of mind to consider it.

As for my now-male mate, he climaxed quickly–far too quickly to get me off another time. But it felt good having him inside me, even for such a short time. If this was what sex as a woman was all about, I was suddenly not so distraught that I had given in to it so easily.

Now, as to my thoughts as I lay there with Kenny, his arm wrapped around my breasts as I used his manly chest as a pillow: I’ve always been a pragmatic person–male or female. I realized the moment I was led out of that courtroom that what had been done to us was forever. There would be no going back to our former lives. Although I had no idea why The Judge and Officer Mercer had done this to us, the scheme was far too elaborate to be a reversible prank. The sham of a trial, the population of shades, the mysterious town itself, and all of us who had been transformed into new people all hinted at some grand plan.

That being said, my pragmatic nature told me there was no use in resisting The Judge. In the words of the aliens in a TV show I had come to like, “Resistance is futile.” The sooner I accepted my new role–including the sex–the sooner I’d be able to get on with this new life I had been given.

Did I like being a woman? Of course not. What man would want to be a woman? But I was one–like it or not. Not only was I a woman, but I was also a newlywed, young and healthy. While I might have been able to resist Kenny’s advances for a short period of time, eventually I was going to have to start acting like the young bride I had become or I’d go crazy.

I had always been like that. Learning to swim, I had thrown myself off the edge of the pool one chilly June day back in New England. I was only five at the time, but I was determined not to stand nervously on the edge of the pool like all the other boys.

The same was true in my choice of a career. I was never concerned working around nuclear weapons in the military or nuclear reactors later in my civilian life. That isn’t to say I was careless, but I was never frightened around nuclear facilities like some people were.

Once again, my tendency to rush into the unknown had paid off. I still would have preferred being a man, but finding that sex as a woman was pretty satisfying, I made up my mind right then that I could live with it.

It might have been different if Kenny had remembered being Hannah. I suppose if he had, we might have both approached our life as newlyweds differently and with more trepidation. I was sorry that he didn’t remember. It was almost as if Hannah had died. But Kenny seemed to be a decent guy, and if I looked very hard, I could see a few of Hannah’s old traits in him that had transferred over to his new male identity.

Over the next few days, I managed to settle into my new existence. Once the initial shock of being a young woman was absorbed, if not entirely accepted, things became a little easier. Since Hannah and I had shared household chores (with me taking on the lion’s share as she became more and more wrapped up in her career), cooking and cleaning house were not that alien to me. To his credit, Kenny helped when he could, maybe even more than when he had been Hannah, although working in sales at a car dealer required long and unusual hours, so he wasn’t always available. By the way, I learned over dinner conversation that first night that Kenny’s boss was his father, who owned the dealership.

One good thing about my new life–being part of a family who owned a car dealership, I always had a new or nearly new car available which was always gassed and maintained at company expense. George, the Service Manager for Ovid Chrysler, would periodically drop off a different car for me, taking the old one back with him. Most of the time, it was just for service–an oil change, a wash, or just gas. But it was always nice to have a new car in top condition at my beck and call. I ended up seeing George or one of his men every week, since even if I didn’t trade vehicles (which was most of the time), George would make sure mine got washed and polished.

I blush as I say this, but I even got to the point that sex with Kenny seemed not only normal but downright desirable. Although in my mind I was still meant to be male, I had to admit that sex as a woman was very enjoyable. Kenny seemed to be an accomplished lover. Whether this was some residual memory of how to please a woman having been one, or just the luck of the draw, I didn’t know. What I did know is that the more we did it (at least once a night), the more delightful the experience became.

I knew that should–by some additional miracle–I become male again, I would look back on the times I had spread my legs for Kenny with embarrassment. But I thought that was highly unlikely. According to Connie, no one ever got changed back. So if I was stuck as a woman, I was determined to get some enjoyment out of this body–especially since Connie told me I couldn’t get pregnant for the first couple of months. However just in case, I did take birth control pills.

Connie continued to be a big help at work. Thanks to her, I managed to become reasonably proficient at my job within a couple of weeks. Even though there were far fewer people like Connie and me who remembered their real pasts than there were shades and transformees like Kenny, I ran across a few both in my professional and my personal life who helped me through my orientation.

The most helpful person in my nonprofessional life turned out to live right across the street from me. Maggie Troy was a vivacious blonde about my age (well, my new age anyhow). Her husband was a doctor–a shade, actually–who seemed to work irregular hours as well.

“Dan sees patients on Saturday mornings and tries to get home by one,” Maggie told me over coffee on my first Saturday morning in Ovid. She spotted me when we were both picking up the Saturday edition of the Tulsa World from our driveways. She had noticed that I was now real rather than a shade and had invited me over.

“Kenny sells cars,” I explained, “but I suppose you knew that.”

Maggie grinned. “Yeah, Don and Kenny have been friends ever since we moved in. So have Martha Lee and I. It always seemed to be kind of weird, socializing with three people who were shades like that.”

I took a sip of my coffee, being careful not to spill any of it on my white tank top. “Excuse me for asking, but are shades real... I mean...?” I could feel myself blushing.

“You mean can you have sex with one?” she laughed.

That was exactly what I meant. I had shaken hands with shades, and they seemed solid enough, but I wasn’t sure just how real they were. Now here I was talking to a woman who was married to one. My curiosity got the best of me.

“The answer is yes,” she said conspiratorially. “They’re just as solid as we are. I guess the sort of transparent aspect is just our mind reacting to something not quite like us. After a while, you don’t even notice they’re different. Particularly in bed.”

I blushed again.

She grinned. “Sorry, I forgot that you’re a little new at this girl stuff.”

“What?” I gasped. I hadn’t told her that I used to be male.

She laughed again. “It’s pretty obvious. Or at least it was the other day when I first saw you. You were trying to take too big a steps in heels and a skirt. You need to take shorter steps, dear.”

“Connie told me that, too,” I admitted sheepishly. It was hard to get used to walking in heels. I noticed if I just forgot about it and went with the flow, I walked more girlishly. But when I consciously thought about my new femininity, my walk reverted to a more masculine stride.

“Don’t worry,” Maggie assured me with a quick squeeze of my arm. “We all go through it.”

“You were male, too?” It was hard for me to believe that this very girly woman in her short khaki skirt, tight white knit blouse, and her perfectly made up face who spoke so casually about sex had ever been a man.

“Beard, bald head and all,” she confirmed. She went on to explain that she had been an Air Force civilian logistics analyst at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City. A potentially fatal accident on his motorcycle had made him a candidate for citizenship in Ovid.

“So it’s true that you have to be about to die before The Judge can change you?” I asked.

“That’s the rule,” she explained. “If it’s pretty certain you’re going to die, they lay claim to you and change you.”

So The Judge had been straight with me when he told me Hannah and I would have died crossing that bridge. I suppose given the choice of being a live woman or a dead man, I’d choose the live woman every time.

“Just who is The Judge anyhow?” I inquired as casually as I could.

Maggie shook her head. “Sorry. I can’t tell you. That’s a no-no to talk about here. Don’t worry, though. You’ll figure it out for yourself in a few days. Everybody does.”

As it turned out, she was right about that.

“Say,” Maggie said, changing the subject, “I know a couple of other girls whose husbands work Saturdays. Also, they used to be guys just like us. Maybe we should all get together for coffee every Saturday. It might be kind of like a support group.”

That had sounded like a good idea, and the next Saturday, there were four of us around Maggie’s kitchen table.

Maggie handled the introductions. I should explain in those days in Ovid, there weren’t the restrictions The Judge later placed on the town’s residents that prevented more than two people from discussing the magic of Ovid. Not that it would have mattered anyway, but more on that later.

“Before I introduce everyone,” Maggie began, “I should let all of you know that Martha Lee here is aware that all of us in the room used to be male.”

That wouldn’t have been a surprise to me even if Maggie hadn’t already told me. Over lunch the previous week, Connie had explained to me that sex changes were prevalent in Ovid. This seemed to be particularly true of men becoming women–presumably because more men travelled the back roads of Oklahoma than women. Of course I had begun to think there was more to it than that. A man transformed into a woman (or vice versa) would find it terribly hard to act exactly as he had in his previous life. Having one’s sex changed made it more likely that an individual would have to change to match his or her new gender or be considered a social oddity. You might even say it was socially liberating.

Once Maggie had finished introducing me, she nodded at an attractive black woman whose appearance reminded me of Vanessa Williams. Like the actress, her skin was dark but her features were Caucasian, denoting both black and white ancestry.

“Martha Lee, this is Denise Brown.”

The black woman smiled and offered her hand. I took it, noting her small, feminine hand was almost exactly the same size as mine.

“Denise’s husband is Rusty Brown,” Maggie continued. When she saw the confusion on my face, she added, “I guess you haven’t made it to Rusty’s Burger Barn. Denise’s husband owns it.”

“Best burgers in town,” Denise said with pride.

“I’ll have to try them,” I assured her, although I had already noticed that my taste in food as a woman had changed, moving away from my former male fondness for meat and potatoes toward more ‘healthy’ food, like salads and veggies.

“And this,” Maggie went on, gesturing to a diminutive redhead who couldn’t have been more than five two, “is Colleen Conway. Her husband is a dentist.”

Colleen’s appearance matched her name–Irish to the core. Her long, lustrous red hair framed a pert face dusted with cute little freckles. She rose from the kitchen chair to shake my hand, and as she did so, I noticed for the first time that she had a bulge in her tummy.

“I’m due in September,” she explained with a wan smile.

“You’re pregnant?” I gasped stupidly. Of course I knew it was possible for any of us transformed males to get pregnant. Connie had explained to me that we were all given a grace period of two or three months once we arrived in Ovid to acclimate ourselves to our new womanhood. She had warned me to be religious about taking birth control pills if I didn’t want a little surprise later in the year, and I had heeded her advice.

“It happens,” Colleen replied with a shrug and a charming little grin.

“You knew it was possible, didn’t you?” Denise asked as she sipped her coffee.

“Yeah,” I admitted, “I just... I guess I never thought... I mean... Jeez, we were all men.”

“Past tense,” Maggie reminded me.

“Have you had sex with your husband yet?” Colleen asked. Then she blushed. “I’m sorry–that’s personal. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“That’s okay,” I assured her. “I guess we don’t have much choice in that, do we?”

“There’s always a choice,” Denise told me. “But I know what you mean. Once we were given these bodies with all their hormones and put in homes complete with horny husbands, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of choice.”

“But you held off for two weeks as I recall,” Maggie pointed out.

“Two weeks, three days,” Denise clarified with a warm laugh. “But I had it extra bad. I was a truck driver from Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Old South white right down to my toenails. The thought of hopping in bed with a big black dude like Rusty was enough to scare the crap out of me. I tried three times to get out of Ovid before I gave up and let Rusty take me. Even then, I don’t think it would have happened if he hadn’t fed me about a bottle of merlot at Winston’s.”

“I only held out a week,” Colleen volunteered with a fake pout.

“Ten days for me,” Maggie chimed in.

“How about it, Martha Lee?” Denise asked. “Have you let ole Kenny in the door yet?”

“Uh... yeah,” I admitted sheepishly, more than a little embarrassed at the direction the conversation had taken.

“How long did you wait?” Maggie asked, voicing the question I had dreaded.

“Uh... first day,” I admitted, feeling my cheeks flush.

“First day!” Denise laughed. “Honey, that’s gotta be a record.”

“Kenny and I...” I stammered. “I mean when Kenny was Hannah, he–she–was my wife, and...”

“Well, that makes a difference,” Maggie interrupted. “I guess you two were soul mates, even if Kenny didn’t remember being your wife.”

I supposed we were, although the months of marital strife had clouded that fact.

“And you’re newlyweds,” Colleen pointed out. “I mean, what would Kenny have thought if you had said no? A girl can’t claim to have headaches for days on end.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Denise added, patting my hand. “You would have given in eventually anyway. I think it has something to do with the magic. After awhile, you just start to feel natural in this form, and the sex? Well, let me tell you, honey, once I got used to Rusty, I kicked myself for waiting so long!”

I was more than a little surprised. “So everyone finally decides they like their new lives here?”

“Don’t you?” Maggie asked.

That was a hard question to answer. Given the marital problems Hannah and I had been experiencing, the last few days with Kenny had been like a return to our real newlywed days when I had been the man. Kenny was proving to be an enthusiastic lover who was, it must be admitted, far more interested in my pleasure than I had been for Hannah. I still had demurred when it came to blowjobs, but that hadn’t stopped him from orally pleasuring me. And as for the blowjobs, well...

In a way, being immersed into my new life and my new sex had been far easier than I would have ever expected. Even my job was gratifying. It was sort of nice to be helping people buy their homes, and my co-workers–especially Connie–were far friendlier and much more relaxed than my co-workers at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Instead of a soulless bureaucracy I had worked in for years, my co-workers at the bank–especially Connie–seemed more like family.

“I suppose so,” I admitted reluctantly.

“Would you change back if you could?” Colleen asked pointedly.

“Yeah, I would,” I told them without stopping to think, shocking them just a little.

“Are you serious?” Maggie ventured.

“I can’t believe you’d be willing to change back after taking Kenny on the very first day,” Denise commented.

“But you just said you liked your new life here,” Colleen pointed out, hopefully.

“Look,” I began to explain, “I’m not saying this is a bad life. Kenny treats me well and my job is good, but don’t you ever get the idea this was done to us just to satisfy the perverted pleasures of The Judge and his gang? If that’s all this is, I feel like I’m being manipulated and I don’t like it.”

“I suppose we all have felt that,” Maggie allowed, refilling our coffee cups for us. “But what can we do about it?”

“Nothing,” I replied, putting a little sugar in my coffee without thinking. As a man, I had preferred my coffee straight, but now I seemed to crave a little sweetness in it. “This is just what I mean,” I told them, explaining how my taste in coffee had changed.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Colleen agreed. “I was Jewish–Orthodox, no less. Now we attend Mass regularly, and I really, really crave bacon and ham–especially since I got pregnant.”

“Yeah,” Denise sighed. “When I was a trucker, I lived on fried foods. Now I can’t stand them–too unhealthy, I guess.”

“But you eat Rusty’s burgers,” Maggie laughed.

“Sure,” Denise grinned, “but just the small size and nothing but mustard. Oh–and a salad instead of fries.”

“So you think this is all just a big game that Jup–ack! I mean, The Judge is just playing a big game with us to see how we react to these lives?” Maggie asked.

I should mention that I didn’t know at that moment that The Judge was really the Greco-Roman god Jupiter: that came later. But I did file Maggie’s little problem with saying his name away. It helped me understand who we were dealing with later.

“Who knows?” Denise shrugged. “Who cares? This is where we are and who we are now. We might as well make the best of it.”

“Well, we’ll have to save this discussion for another time,” Colleen said, rising. “Danny–my husband–will be getting home from the golf course pretty soon, and I always like to have lunch ready for him.”

Danny, unlike Kenny or Maggie’s husband, didn’t work Saturdays, but he and Denise’s husband apparently played golf together every Saturday morning. My God, what good little housewives we all were, I thought to myself. I was more than a little horrified. There was Colleen–formerly a man–pregnant and worried about getting home to make sure her hubby got his lunch. Was that what I’d be turning into? I had meant it when I said I’d rather be a man. Sure, the sex was fun as a woman, but the consequences–pregnancy, periods, all that disgusting stuff made it a little hard to accept. And as for leaving my friends and rushing home to fix Kenny lunch after a hard morning of golf... forget it!

At least I had a career, I thought as we all left. Apparently, Denise helped Rusty with the restaurant’s books from home, and Maggie I had discovered was a part-time instructor at Capta College, but neither were full-time jobs. Colleen, on the other hand, had already quit her job as a receptionist in a dentist’s office and was already settling down to be a full-time mom. Her husband, the dentist in whose office she had worked, was only open Monday through Friday, leaving his Saturday morning to desert the little woman and hit the links while she had to fend for herself. The thought of being a sweet little hausfrau while hubby went off to play wasn’t a pleasant one for me.

Oh, I was already getting used to being a woman. It wasn’t as if I had any choice, was it? Yes, I cooked and cleaned, but with Kenny’s help. But if The Judge expected me to be a good little Stepford Wife, he was going to be disappointed. Maybe I’d start a women’s lib movement in Ovid. That would frost The Judge’s balls.

Maggie dropped by later that afternoon. Kenny was still at work, as was her husband, so we had plenty of time to talk.

“I’ve talked to the other girls,” she told me after we had settled down on the patio with a glass of lemonade each. “They enjoyed this morning and think it’s a good idea to meet every Saturday.”

“Sure,” I agreed with a wan smile. “But did you all decide I needed some serious girl lessons to fit in?” I was still embarrassed about my admission of having sex with Kenny the day I was transformed. They must have all thought I was gay.

“No!” Maggie laughed. “Don’t worry: you’re not saying anything different from what we all said right after we got here. Even after I gave in and had sex with Don, it took me three more weeks before I could bring myself to wear a dress. Denise told you she tried to get out of Ovid three times. And Colleen tried twice.”

I just nodded. I had already tried once by that time, but I found as I drove out of Ovid and over the hill that all roads led right back to Ovid. Someone told me later that Ovid was situated in some sort of dimensional pocket universe. In any case, getting out of Ovid seemed to be next to impossible.

“Eventually, you get used to it,” Maggie went on. “I’ve been here a little over a year now, and I find that some of my former life is becoming almost like a dream. You’ll get that way, too, eventually.”

But I didn’t want to lose the memories of my male life. I might be a woman now and even make love like a woman, but Willis Perry was still a big part of my personal identity. I hoped she was wrong, but I suspected she was right. It would be impossible to hang on to Willis too tightly when everything that happened to me now said I was Martha Lee.

She was right as it turned out. Over the summer, things settled down into a routine so normal that I sometimes found myself wondering if I ever had really been Willis Perry. There’s nothing like a good old period to make you really feel like a woman, and I had my first one in July. As strange as it felt the first time, that too, became routine quickly, repeating itself in August and September. By October, I had actually gotten used to them.

As I said, the periods drove home the point that I was now and probably forever would be a woman. I was thankful that I had taken my friends’ advice and religiously took my birth control pills. Kenny was starting to hint that if I wanted children, he was ready, but I certainly wasn’t. The idea of giving birth was more frightening to me than anything else I could ever imagine, and the periods were stinging proof that I was now not just female–but a fertile female.

This dread was not abated in the slightest when my friend Colleen finally delivered in late September. She was a couple of weeks late in delivering (not an unusual situation for a first child, I was told) and near the end looked like the Goodyear blimp. Just watching her struggle to move around at our last Saturday meeting before she gave birth was tiring.

The Monday after that gathering, she delivered a seven pound four ounce baby boy named Daniel Jonathon Conway the Third. A few weeks later, she was joining us for Saturday coffee once more, her new baby in her arms–and at her breasts. Watching her nurse, I felt my nipples respond. It was much like the strange tingling a man gets when he sees another man kicked in the balls.

We were sitting together in my kitchen, which for some reason had become our standard meeting place. I think it was because on a whim, I had ordered some premium coffee from a little company back east, and all the girls had taken an instant liking to it. Someone must have suggested we meet at my house for the coffee, so I kept ordering it and they kept coming. I couldn’t even recall when we had all agreed to do that, but it was fine with me.

“He’s so cute!” Maggie squealed as Colleen expertly held him to her exposed breast where the tiny infant sucked contentedly.

“Isn’t he though?” Colleen smiled with the natural pride of a new mother. “I never thought I’d be nursing a baby, though.”

“You thought you’d be the father, huh?” I grinned as I poured coffee for everyone.

“Well...” she drawled, a little embarrassed, “not really. I... I was gay when I was a man.”

“I didn’t know that,” Denise said, surprised. “Then this being a girl thing was no biggie for you.”

“Au contraire,” Colleen smiled. “I was homosexual–not transsexual. I was perfectly happy being male. I probably had as much trouble with finding myself female as you did. Although I’ll admit giving blowjobs was a little easier.”

“Ew!” Denise and Maggie exclaimed together. I kept quiet. Yes, I now gave blowjobs to Kenny, but I didn’t like to think about it. I had avoided them as long as possible, but Kenny finally directly asked me to give him one–“like you used to when we were dating.” It was difficult to say no–especially since he had been pleasuring me orally with no hesitation. I could have pointed out that when he gave me oral sex, there was nothing substantial to swallow, while when I did it for him, it was messy and the taste was not exactly like a vanilla milkshake.

“Girls, I have an announcement to make,” Denise said, thankfully changing the subject. “I’ve got a bun in the oven.”

“You?” Colleen gasped.

“Well I couldn’t let you have all the fun, could I?”

“Congratulations,” I replied, smiling as best I could. “When are you due?”

“Next April,” Denise told us. “I hope we can still talk about all of this like we are when I get further along.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Haven’t you heard?” Maggie countered. “The Judge has made it so only two people can discuss the magic of Ovid at once. I guess there was some trouble over at the high school that caused him to restrict our freedom of speech.”

“But that would mean we couldn’t be having this conversation right now,” I pointed out. “Maybe you heard wrong.”

“No,” Colleen broke in as she pulled back her blouse to allow her baby to nurse. “I heard the same thing. Besides, I saw it in action while I was in the hospital. For some reason, we must be immune from The Judge’s latest edict. Maybe it’s because we’ve all been here so long that we got grandfathered in.”

“I wish I were immune to some of his other actions,” I sighed.

“Poor Martha Lee,” Denise cooed with a hand petting my bare arm. “You still don’t like being a girl?”

“It’s okay,” I allowed. “I guess I’m starting to get used to it. I would just like to stop pretending I’m someone I’m not. Besides, when my parents or Kenny’s parents come over, it still seems so weird pretending that they’re real and not shades.”

“I agree with that. I still have a hard time treating a couple of shades as my parents,” Maggie chimed in as she poured herself another cup of coffee. Then she looked down at her watch. “Oh my lord! I had no idea it was so late.”

“What time is it?” Colleen asked.

“Nearly noon,” was Maggie’s reply. That surprised me, too. It seemed as if we had just begun our conversation. The three hours had gone by very quickly, but that always seemed to be the case.

After everyone had gone, I tidied up the kitchen and noticed the florescent bulb over my stove was out. Kenny kept spares in the basement near his workbench, so I decided I’d change it myself.

‘One good thing about Kenny,’ I thought as I made my way down into the basement–Kenny’s personal sanctum really where I seldom went–‘was that he really was a good guy.’ While I was sorry that Hannah had been effectively erased when she was turned into Kenny, I had to admit that we got along far better now than we would have, had Hannah retained her memories. Hannah had become overbearing enough without giving her the strength and status of a man to lord over me.

In fact, Kenny had retained some of Hannah’s better qualities. Whether that was just part of the way The Judge had transformed her or sheer happenstance was beyond me. Still, there were times when he reminded me of the things that had initially attracted me to Hannah. Like her, he was intelligent and personable, but those aspects had not been adversely complemented with Hannah’s feminist belligerence or her quick temper. Perhaps it was his new male identity that had made him more mellow. As a man and the heir apparent to the family business, he didn’t have anything to prove as he felt he had when he had been Hannah.

And as for the way he treated me... well, let’s just say that Hannah was quickly turning into an emasculating bitch where as Kenny was a supportive and affectionate mate. Of course he had no way of knowing our sexes had been reversed, but the way he treated me had made my transition so much easier–even if he wasn’t aware of it.

As I rummaged through the basement utility cabinet in search of a new bulb, I realized that although I still would prefer being male, I knew that would never happen, and being Kenny’s wife was better than being Hannah’s husband.

I sighed. No bulbs. I looked around the basement alcove where his workbench was located, and...

What was that door doing there?

Recessed in the concrete of the foundation wall was a simple wooden door painted gray to match its surroundings. What it was doing there was completely beyond me. It seemed to have no purpose, since any room it led to would be beyond the house itself. Perhaps it was an unused storm cellar, I thought. Given the violence of tornadoes in Oklahoma, it might have been built to escape the storms.

Of course, there were no tornadoes in Ovid. The Judge and his minions would never have allowed them. It had only taken me a few days in Ovid to glean the true nature of The Judge, Officer Mercer, and the rest of the gods of the ancient world. Their identity had seemed incredible to me, but I suppose no less incredible than having one’s sex changed with the wave of a hand.

So what was the purpose of the door? I would have to ask Kenny later.

I sort of forgot to ask later, though. Kenny came home with a broad smile on his face. “Dad gave me a raise,” he announced proudly. “Let’s go celebrate.”

Now I should probably point out that at that particular moment, I had been a woman for several months, and while I had reconciled myself to a lifetime in skirts and heels, there were certain things about being a woman I had come to dislike. First on that list was obviously periods, but considering the alternative of pregnancy, I put up with them. The second thing was ultra feminine attire. In spite of what I just said about skirts and heels, I tried to wear them as little as possible, favoring jeans, shorts, and other acceptable women’s casual wear when I didn’t have to go to work.

And finally, I hated to cook. Even back in the days when I had been the man, I had not cared to take my turn at cooking any more than I had to, often suggesting we eat out rather than suffer in the kitchen. Now though, while Kenny helped with a number of chores around the house, he had proved himself to be completely inept in the kitchen. The reasonably good cooking skills Hannah had were somehow lost with her memories in the transformation. I was expected to do all of the cooking now.

It was my hatred of cooking that caused me to more or less happily don the aforementioned skirt and heels with a smile on my face when Kenny suggested we celebrate at Winston’s. Ovid’s best restaurant had been a happy surprise in our virtual captivity in Ovid. Frankly, it was a better steakhouse than any I remembered from the DC area. Sure, the menu itself was pretty pedestrian, but the steaks were absolutely succulent. I was actually elated as I wiggled into a sexy little blue skirt and donned a pair of three-inch heels.

One thing led to another that evening. The wine was great and the steaks were absolutely magnificent, but I think it was Kenny’s suggestion to enjoy a brandy after the meal that got me in a super-horny mood.

Okay, I suppose this takes some explaining. If the Sex Fairy fluttered into our home and offered to switch our sexes back to their original settings, I would have happily re-grown a penis and immediately jumped whatever woman Hannah became. However, I had learned that our bodies have needs of their own which can’t always be stifled by our minds. The body The Judge had given me was young, pretty, and thoroughly addicted to sex with my husband.

Once we got home, I could barely contain myself, and Kenny knew it. In moments, we were both naked and rutting like wild animals in our bedroom. We didn’t have time for much foreplay, as we had both been ready the minute we walked in the door. No–we were actually ready before the check came, but this was the first chance we had to satisfy each other.

Sex as a woman for me had become strangely liberating. It was actually nice to not have to ‘get it up,’ and although, in my opinion, female orgasms are not as explosively satisfying as male ones, they do have the benefit of lasting longer and creating some mind-blowing aftershocks.

The only problem with the steamy sex that night–complete with four incredible orgasms for Kenny (a record so far) and at least six for me–was that I seemed to have forgotten something...

Something like a pill.

I’ve been told it’s okay to skip a pill every now and then, while others have told me that just missing one can mean an unexpected addition to the family. Actually, I had missed a couple of pills. In fact, I had gotten a little careless about taking them of late. I had gotten very busy at work, and with all the pressure simply spaced them. Now, it had cost me big time.

In the weeks I had been introduced to my female body, I had realized vaguely that I was now capable of becoming pregnant. The thought was naturally alarming, but mostly theoretical–or at least it had been until I experienced my first period. After that first time, I was very careful to take my pill at the same time every day. I had no desire to get pregnant. But as I became more used to my new state, I forgot to worry about motherhood and became just a little cavalier about taking my pill. Even seeing two of my best friends succumb to motherhood hadn’t been sufficient warning.

I guess girls who grow up that way get the rules drummed into their heads pretty hard: take your pill, don’t let him take advantage of you, don’t have sex until you’re prepared for all of the consequences. I had the disadvantage of having too much of a male mind stuck in a female body. While I worried about getting pregnant, I hadn’t worried about it enough to be religious about taking my birth control pills. Now it had cost me.

“Pregnant?” Maggie asked at our first Saturday coffee after I had seen the doctor.

“Does Kenny know yet?” Colleen asked.

“Oh yes,” I sighed. “He and his parents are absolutely ecstatic.”

“But you’re not,” Maggie guessed. It probably wasn’t too hard to figure out, though.

“Actually, I’m scared shitless,” I admitted, slumping over my coffee. If anybody but Maggie noticed, they didn’t let on.

“That just leaves you, Maggie,” Denise sang out cheerily.

“I’m in no hurry,” she sang back.

“Is it... bad?” I asked Colleen. When she looked a little confused, I clarified, “I mean the pain.”

“While you’re pregnant, it’s more uncomfortable than painful,” Colleen explained. “As for birthing... well, let’s just say that you shouldn’t let them talk you into natural childbirth. Demand all the drugs they offer to give you.”

My face must have turned pale, because she hastened to add, “Hey, don’t be scared. It really isn’t that bad.”

I can’t remember what else we talked about that morning, but at least we got off the subject of pregnancy. I think if we had continued on the subject, I would have hyperventilated. Later, I couldn’t even remember what else we had discussed. I figured I must have still been in shock.

Connie was excited when I told her Monday morning at work. “We’ve got to have a shower for you!” she squealed when she had me alone in the lunchroom.

“How come everybody is so into all of this girl stuff?” I asked her. “I mean showers, babies, weddings... Sometimes I think I’m really the only one around here who still remembers being a man.”

“We all remember,” Connie assured me. “It’s just after awhile, it isn’t important anymore. You know you’ll never be male again, so why not just learn to enjoy who you are now?”

“I don’t know,” I sighed. “I’m really not exactly unhappy. In fact, I think I was growing used to all of this being a girl–until Kenny knocked me up, that is.”

“I’ll buy you lunch,” she suggested. “We can talk about it.”

One thing I began to realize after becoming female is how women like to talk to each other about their problems–even women who used to be men. Maybe it was a good thing more men were transformed into women than the other way around in Ovid, for a woman transformed into a man would probably go crazy trying to find another man to talk over problems with. Women seemed to enjoy talking to each other about whatever was bothering them.

Most of my problems I talked over with either Maggie or Connie. They were very different as friends went. Connie was fresh out of college–at least in her new Ovid identity if not in her former male life. She was still into the dating scene, but was starting to settle down with a grad student from Capta College. If it hadn’t been for the fact that they made it a point to spend every Saturday (and presumably Friday night) together, I would have invited her to our little coffee group. I usually talked to Connie about professional things but not a lot of personal stuff. We never discussed the details of our marital problems in our former lives, and since she wasn’t married as Connie, we just didn’t have a lot of personal information to exchange. Besides, Connie was pretty happy with her life as a girl and although she was very competent at work, she seemed to enjoy playing the ditzy young redhead with her boyfriend.

Maggie, on the other hand, was more grounded. Her background working for the Air Force in her previous life was part of it, but she told me once that she had been in her forties before she was transformed. She had been single as a man–divorced twice. Once she became a woman, she vowed to herself that this marriage was going to work no matter what. She and Dan got along great, in spite of the fact that her husband was a shade, so I would often confide in her about more personal issues–particularly the sort of issues that involved marriage, home, and... well, sex.

So this lunch with Connie was going to be a little different, because I knew she wanted to talk to me about issues Maggie and I would normally discuss. I had to keep telling myself that in spite of her youthful appearance, Connie and I were both Baby Boomers, and when she gave me any advice, it was actually coming from a contemporary.

Neither of us had an appointment until the afternoon, so we decided on an early lunch at the Greenhouse. We managed to get a booth near the back of the restaurant that was isolated enough from other early lunch patrons that we could speak openly.

“You seem to be having some problems with this whole girl thing,” Connie commented as soon as our iced teas had been delivered and our orders placed.

“Sometimes I like it very much,” I admitted, stirring a little sugar into my tea. “But sometimes, it’s just...”

“Terrifying?” Connie supplied.

“No!” Then, after a moment’s thought, “Well, maybe just a little.”

“Lose the man in you for a while and talk to me woman to woman,” Connie suggested with a little smile.

That brought me up short. When I thought about it, I realized she was right. I wasn’t a man anymore, but I was still trying to act like one. That was what was frightening me. Some part of me still considered that I was a man, and men simply didn’t get pregnant. Since I was going to be a woman–and now a mother–for the rest of my life, I’d better start acting like one and confiding in my female friends.

“Okay, yeah, I’m terrified. I... The sex is, well, fun–I’ll admit that.”

Connie smiled again. “Aren’t multiple orgasms fun?”

I nodded, blushing a little. “And I love Kenny. I mean deep down, he’s still Hannah–my wife. Every now and then, I see him do something that reminds me of Hannah. And frankly, Kenny has Hannah’s ambition, but it’s channelled toward running a successful family business rather than climbing the bureaucratic ladder in Washington. I guess it’s a lot healthier situation than we had before if you think about it.”

“It sounds absolutely great to me,” Connie said. “A lot of women would be happy to trade places with you.”

“A lot of women didn’t used to be men,” I pointed out.

“True.”

We were both quiet for a moment as our lunches were delivered. I looked down at my small chef’s salad and at Connie’s sesame chicken salad. Would we have ordered lunches like this when we were men? Oh, I ate salads for lunch upon occasion–primarily when I was trying to lose a few pounds. But now, salads for lunch seemed to be the order of the day. Like all women, natural or transformed, there seemed to be a primal urge to stay slim and sexy. Besides, now that I was pregnant, I’d really have to watch my weight carefully.

“So you weren’t ready to get pregnant,” Connie stated after a few moments.

“No,” I admitted, thinking about how good a glass of wine would be right now. But of course, that was out of the question–it wouldn’t be good for the baby, would it?

“I think it’s exciting,” Connie announced.

I nearly dropped my fork. “Exciting? More like horrifying.”

She laughed, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. “Just think, Martha Lee. You’ve got a brand new person growing inside you. You’re doing something the strongest, smartest, most powerful man on the planet could never do, no matter how hard he tried.”

“It sounds like you should be pregnant instead of me.”

“That time may not be very far away,” she grinned, holding up her hand so I could see her new engagement ring. “Greg finally proposed.”

I smiled weakly. I hadn’t even noticed her ring, and I was sure now that she had been flashing it at me all morning hoping I would notice. “Congratulations,” I managed.

“Would you be my matron of honor?”

That hit me like a bolt out of the blue. “But... I’m pregnant.”

“So?”

I think I stammered out a few semi-objections, but Connie would have none of it. “Don’t worry. This isn’t going to be a big affair. Vera March is going to make sure the dresses get here quickly.”

She didn’t have to explain about that. Everyone knew Vera March was a goddess. If Vera said the dresses would be in quickly, then they would be.

“Neither of us have families nearby–real or contrived. Since all of our friends are here, we thought we’d have the wedding just before Thanksgiving.”

“Why are you so happy about all of this?” I finally asked.

“About what?”

“About being a girl... and getting married... and me being pregnant,” I listed off.

Connie looked pensive for a moment before replying. “Martha Lee, back when you were a man, did you enjoy your job?”

“It was okay,” I replied carefully.

“Did you love your wife?”

“Sure.” That was said with a little more conviction, but there were some reservations in my voice. Connie picked up on them with ease.

“Where were you going to be with both of them in five more years?”

I laughed uncomfortably. “If you take The Judge at his word, it wouldn’t have mattered since both Hannah and I would have been dead.”

“But let’s assume you had both lived,” she pressed on. “Where would you be?”

Over the weeks and months I had been a woman, Connie and I hadn’t discussed a lot about our former lives, but at least a few facts had been exchanged, perhaps more than I had realized. I had told Connie more than I probably should have about my marital problems and my frustrations at work. Now, she had me. I couldn’t stonewall her this time.

“Okay,” I admitted. “Hannah and I were having problems. She wanted a career–not a family. We were already getting on each other’s nerves, so I suspect we would have ended up splitting the sheets. But I would have still had my own career.”

“A career I sense you weren’t all that excited about,” she countered. “Didn’t you tell me rather than protecting the public, you often felt you were just shuffling paper?”

“Every bureaucrat feels that way sometimes,” I replied smoothly if not completely convincingly. “You should know–you worked for the government, too–at least a state government.”

“Yes I did,” she agreed. “The difference is that I didn’t have a family. My wife left me several years ago, and working in the field I was in doesn’t give you much of an opportunity to meet potential mates. Martha Lee, I was bored stiff with my life.”

Suddenly, Connie clammed up again. This time, I could see she was struggling as to whether or not to tell me something. At last, making her decision, she asked, “Martha Lee, do you remember when I told you I was due to die in a hunting accident?”

“Yes?”

She looked down at the table, unable to look me in the eye for a moment. At last, gathering her courage, she looked up at me. “It wasn’t going to be an accident. I went out there in the woods to kill myself.”

“Kill yourself?” I gasped.

She nodded. “My marriage was finished. There were no children: I hadn’t wanted any... then. My job was boring and I was feeling very, very trapped. It didn’t seem as if I had anything to live for–no family, no real close friends, no fun at work... Does any of this sound familiar?”

‘Too familiar,’ I thought to myself, but I said nothing.

Without waiting for my reply, Connie continued, “I got arrested by Officer Mercer for hunting without a license. He dragged me back before The Judge, and the next thing I knew, I was Connie Delany.

“It was weird at first, but you know that. There were even less of us then though–transformees, I mean. So I had to teach myself how to be a girl–how to dress, how to act, how to apply makeup. Believe me, I used the automatic mode a lot.

“After a couple of weeks, being Connie started to seem sort of normal. It was kind of nice to have friends. Apparently the shade Connie was a popular girl, just out of college with a new job and lots of friends. Pretty soon, I found there were plenty of things to do around here–events at the college, nice little restaurants, even a beach out at the lake–and there were plenty of friends to enjoy it all with.

“And then I met Greg...”

She smiled when she saw the look in my eyes. I had assumed she had been saddled with Greg from the moment she was changed into a girl. “You mean you started seeing Greg voluntarily?” I blurted out.

“That’s right,” she confirmed. “I know: it was different for you. When you were changed, you already had a husband. You had to act the part of a girl sexually or there would have been complications. I didn’t have to–but I wanted to!”

“You wanted to be... intimate with a man?”

“I haven’t found any lesbians around here,” she drawled, “and I don’t think I’d like to be one anyhow. When we all got changed, we got changed all the way–physically and mentally.” As I tried to think of something to say, she pressed on, “Are you going to tell me you don’t enjoy sex with Kenny?”

“It’s... okay.”

“Martha Lee, quit trying to fool yourself. You’re a woman, and you’re going to be one for the rest of your life. Don’t you understand that? Learn to enjoy it. No one here in Ovid will think any the less of you for it.”

I started to feel a little choked up as I realized she was right. I had been fooling myself–or at least trying to. It was funny. It wasn’t as if I had been some sort of a macho jerk who thought women were an inferior species. It was just that I had spent a lot of years thinking of myself as a man and it was hard to give up on that idea. If I had found myself married to anyone other than Kenny, who I still considered to be Hannah at some unexplainable level, I would have found it difficult to even pretend to accept the role I had been given.

I suppose that luncheon with Connie was something of an epiphany for me. For the first time in the months that I had spent in Ovid, I realized with certainty that I wasn’t just acting like a woman–I was a woman, from the ends of my long, feminine hairdo to the tips of my little pink-painted toenails.

And the strange thing is that for the first time since my transformation, I felt comfortable with it.

So from then on, my life became more normal and decidedly mundane. At times, I could almost forget what it had ever been like to be a man, especially when I was lying on my back in bed as Kenny made slow, satisfying love to me.

As Connie had predicted, I still wasn’t showing on the date of her wedding, and I actually flushed at the compliments I received for being such a beautiful matron of honor. I found my reactions increasingly more feminine, and I honestly didn’t mind.

With so much to think about–my pregnancy and my newfound acceptance of my new sex, I sort of forgot about the locked door in the basement. Oh, every now and then I would go down to Kenny’s private domain, consisting of enough power tools and a work area that would have been the envy of both a professional carpenter and a professional machinist, just to get a hammer to hang a picture or something equally innocuous, but for the most part, I stayed out of the basement. Even when I did remember about the door, something–such as a not-so-gentle kick from my developing baby–would cause me to forget about it.

Our Saturday coffees continued, but all of us spoke less and less about our former lives and began to discuss things so bland that I couldn’t even remember most of our conversations. I supposed we talked about babies and being pregnant and our husbands and the latest fashions available at March’s Department Store, but I really was unable to remember any of the conversations in detail.

Everyone told me how lucky I was to have most of my pregnancy over the cooler winter months. Maybe so, but I certainly didn’t feel lucky. Instead, I felt like a huge fat cow through most of the spring. I was determined to make little Rachel Jean (Yes, we knew it was a girl) an only child, just so I would never have to experience anything as uncomfortable and degrading as being pregnant again.

Yes, I know. Many natural women feel the same way, and eventually, they get over it and want to do it again. I couldn’t say for certain that I wouldn’t be just like them, but the diminishing male portion of my brain made a strong case for never getting knocked up again.

I was so busy over the winter months that I didn’t have a moment for a spare thought. Things as inconsequential as the unexplained door in the basement didn’t even show up on my radar, what with visits from both my family and Kenny’s family over the holidays and the extra work I had to take on at the bank while Connie and her new husband were on their honeymoon.

Of course, my family didn’t really come in from out of town–or at least so I was told. Common belief among the transformed of Ovid was that our out-of-town families came into existence just to visit us. Shades served that purpose, but after awhile, one gets used to them and thinks of them as just normal people. I could even call “Mom” and talk to her any time I wanted to, and if I concentrated hard enough on my mother, father and sister while they were with us from their ‘home’ in Muskogee, they seemed real to me, their transparency becoming almost indiscernible.

Kenny’s parents were around for much of the holiday period as well, and while Kenny’s father was still a shade, his mother became real. She had been a very elderly woman, so becoming middle-aged was no hardship for her. Saying that, obviously she remembered who she had been, and we quickly became good friends. She was even there at my side in the spring when little Rachel Jean was born.

Weeks became months and months became years. After Rachel was weaned, I had almost forgotten what it had been like to be male, so taken by motherhood as I was. And like other women before me, I quickly forgot the pain and discomfort of childbirth, getting pregnant again when Rachel turned three. So much for having an only child.

My little Saturday coffee klatch had become sacrosanct, each of my neighborhood friends still participating in the weekly ritual, in spite of the fact that among us, we now had seven children with the eighth one (my little boy-to-be) on the way. He was due a couple of weeks after Labor Day (How appropriate!) Of course, I had had to endure a summer pregnancy, so now I knew what the others had meant when they told me how lucky I was to be pregnant with Rachel over the winter.

Life was as pleasant as pleasant could be. Kenny was now pretty much running Ovid Chrysler as his parents–now both real (although his father was one of the ones who had lost any memory of a previous life) preferred to travel and enjoy a life with fewer responsibilities. I stayed busy as well, volunteering for a couple of charities and even helping on a couple of committees at our church.

Then, suddenly and without any warning, the shit hit the fan.

“Did you hear what happened last week?” Maggie asked, suddenly losing her train of thought as either Gary or Larry screeched when Rachel yanked a ball out of his hand. I think it was Gary, but I couldn’t be sure. Maggie’s twins were absolutely identical. Maggie had been the last of us to give birth, but she did it with a vengeance, producing two very active twin boys.

“Rachel, give him back the ball!” I called, turning back to Maggie. “No, what happened?”

“We got invaded!” Maggie exclaimed. “The Navy sent in a Seal Team.”

“The government knows about Ovid?” Denise asked as she placed some of her wonderful homemade pastries on a plate.

“I heard from Danny there were at least twenty of them,” Colleen chimed in.

“More like ten, according to what I heard,” Maggie replied. “Of course, most people in town think it was just some sort of a training exercise.”

“What did The Judge do with them?” I asked, grabbing one of the pastries. It seemed like this time while I was pregnant, I just couldn’t get enough to eat. I’d be lucky if I ever fitted back into my regular clothes again.

“I don’t know for sure,” Maggie admitted. “I heard at least one of them was turned into a little girl.”

“Maybe they all were,” I suggested, actually hoping that was the case. I had known a number of Seals during my government career. More than once, they had provided information on foreign nuclear sites. While I had to admire their professional talents, I was always a little put off by their macho attitudes. I’m sure if I were to meet one after my transformation, I’d be even more put off. The thought of an entire Seal Team turned into little girls in pink dresses and white shoes was an evilly delicious vision.

“We’ll find out eventually,” Debbie chuckled. “After all, Ovid is a small town.”

Yes it was, but it was getting larger and more prosperous. Vulman Industries had gone on a hiring binge, bringing in new families every week. Some of them were not even transformees. I suspected even these unchanged residents were somehow mentally adapted to Ovid. Otherwise, why would they possibly move to a town that wasn’t even on the map? Most of them seemed to be scientists and engineers, leading all of us to suspect that Vulman was doing something besides providing mundane parts for the auto industry as their local literature declared.

I can’t remember what else we discussed that morning, but I do remember vividly what happened afterward. Kenny came home early, just as we were all gathering up our children and saying our goodbyes. When I asked him why, he grinned and replied, “Dad has decided to retire completely. He and mom are going to travel more and play a lot of golf. You’re looking at the new general manager of Ovid Chrysler.”

“Oh honey, I’m so happy for you,” I said, hugging him joyfully. This was what Kenny had been working for. Of course, we knew his father would turn over the business to him eventually, but we had figured it would be at least five more years before he let go of the reins completely. As I’ve said, Kenny was like Hannah in that he was very ambitious. Apparently he had done better than his father had imagined he would, and his parents had decided to kick back in retirement.

All the girls congratulated us and headed home. When it was just Kenny, Rachel and me, I decided, “We should all celebrate.”

Kenny smiled, “It’s already been taken care of. We have a seven o’clock reservation at Winston’s–a reservation for two, by the way. My folks are taking Rachel for the night. We can pick her up after church tomorrow.”

There was nothing male about the thoughts that suddenly ran through my mind. I had moved beyond all of that. Motherhood had instinctively taken its toll on the remaining portion of my male sense of identity. Now, my thoughts were that it was a shame I was so far along in my pregnancy that Kenny and I couldn’t take advantage of our rare evening without a child to slow us down. I’d simply have to give him the very best blowjob of his life and be satisfied with oral stimulation from him. That thought alone would have sent me over the edge a few years earlier. Now, I looked forward to it.

The other highly feminine thought that came to the surface was that I didn’t have much of a choice of anything to wear to Winston’s. This was a special night, and I wanted to look special. That wouldn’t be easy in my condition. Still, Vera March had found something for me two months earlier–a simple black maternity dress that managed to be both modest and sexy at the same time. I had worn it to Winston’s before, but Ovid wasn’t like Washington, where Hannah would have rather died than wear the same dress to two parties in a row.

I was getting ready to go that evening while Kenny, already dressed in the navy blue suit that made him look so dapper, took Rachel over to his parents’ house. The dress, as hoped, still fit well, and I was just finishing off my outfit by slipping into a pair of black heels I had gotten to go with the dress. The heels were slim and sexy, but the shoe was a little wider than I usually wore–a concession to my gravid body which had spread my feet out a bit.

As I was slipping the shoes on, the left one felt odd, the heel suddenly shifting, nearly causing me to fall over. I grabbed onto the doorsill, barely avoiding a painful fall, but one look down told me the heel had nearly broken off.

I stepped out of the other shoe, and with difficulty, managed to pick up the damaged one. The heel had just been tacked into the sole of the shoe, and the tiny nails remained unbent. That was good, for it meant the shoe could be repaired well enough to be worn just that one evening. That was a relief, because they were the only shoes I could still wear with my dress that looked good. What a woman I had become!

Since Kenny wasn’t back yet, I decided to fix the shoe myself. After all, as a man, I was certainly familiar with how to wield a hammer. And it wasn’t as if I would have to pound a three inch nail into a two by four. A few gentle taps and the heel would be as good as new–at least until I could get the shoes in for a more substantial repair. Besides, in another month, my body would slowly start to return to normal, and my other shoes would fit properly once more. I’d probably end up giving this pair away.

I was so intent on fixing the shoe that I didn’t notice anything else in the basement. Then, after the tiny nails had been tapped back into place, I saw something I hadn’t expected. At first, my mind didn’t process what I was seeing–only that something was different. Then I realized what it was: the mysterious door was slightly open.

I looked at my watch. I still had plenty of time to get ready, and the opportunity to look beyond the door obviously didn’t come often. I had to see what was inside. It wasn’t that I was expecting to find the room filled to the ceiling with hidden treasure. I was just curious what the room was for and thought that there might be something in there to tell me why someone had gone to all the trouble of building it in the first place.

The room was dark and had a little musty smell. As I fumbled for a light switch I hoped was there, I thought that what I would find would probably be mouldy scraps of wood or old broken-down appliances or something equally mundane. Maybe the room was built as a bomb shelter–a relic left over from Cold War paranoia. When I found the light switch and illuminated the room in unexpectedly bright fluorescent lights, I gasped at the realization of how wrong I had been–and how right I had been, for it was, indeed, a relic of the Cold War after a fashion.

There, sitting on a stainless steel table, was a device I was intimately familiar with:

An atomic bomb.

Contrary to what a layman might have expected, the device on the table looked nothing like the common conception of an atomic bomb. For one thing, it lacked a casing. After all, the outer skin of most atomic bombs was designed along with its fins to make it sail through the air to its target. This bomb was not designed to go off after being dropped from a plane. With nothing but the house above in its way, it could be exploded right on the table and take out all of Ovid with destructive energy to spare. Add to that the unique nature of Ovid, which seemed to wrap around itself in some sort of dimensional pocket, and it was likely the bomb would do far more damage than it would in a conventional landscape where the force of the explosion was allowed to dissipate.

Carefully, I inched toward the bomb, my trembling hand reaching out to the exposed cylinders where fissionable material would be stored in two sub-critical masses ready to be slammed together to form an atomic explosion. I didn’t fear radiation from the bomb. If there was any leakage, I (and my unborn child) had already been exposed to a potentially lethal dose. To my relief, an examination of the cylinders showed them to be empty. The bomb was inert, with no fissionable material in evidence.

In spite of that, the bomb was nearly complete. I estimated that only the radioactive core needed to be added to make it a lethal weapon. And there it was, sitting in my own basement.

I began to think about how Kenny would disappear in the basement every now and then. He liked to work with his hands–ironic since when our sexes had been reversed, Hannah barely knew which end of a hammer to use when hitting a nail. Kenny’s little work area was a credible machine shop if used right. I knew that because I was very familiar with every piece of equipment he owned.

But how had he built the rudimentary weapon right under my nose? Hadn’t he lost all of his previous memories? Surely The Judge hadn’t given him the knowledge and the skills to build a formidable weapon. After all, The Judge was a god: surely gods had no use for atomic weapons.

Then I remembered conversations we used to have when I was with the NRC. There had been a real fear back in the days before the fall of the Soviet Union that nuclear bombs could be smuggled into our cities in suitcases. The old joke went that the Soviets could probably build enough bombs, but did they have enough suitcases?

This was no laughing matter, though. It matched current concerns about Moslem terrorists being able to build a bomb and set it off from a fixed location with no delivery system required. The agents who built the bomb would be trusted citizens called into action after being dormant for many years. They were called sleepers.

It was hard to imagine Kenny as a sleeper... or was it? When Kenny was Hannah, she had worked for none other than the Ice Queen herself. Now, Freda Jorgenson was one of the most powerful women in our government. Could Jorgenson have known all about Ovid and arranged for Hannah and me to be stranded here, hiding the fact that my former wife actually remembered everything of her previous life? Had Kenny been fooling The Judge and, by extension, me for the past four years?

I was shocked out of my thoughts by the front door slamming. Oh shit! Kenny was home! Flustered, I shut the door to the hidden room, hoping he wouldn’t notice anything amiss. Then, collecting myself with a deep breath, I made my way up the stairs.

“Oh, there you are,” he said smoothly when he saw me come out of the basement. “What were you doing in the basement?”

He sounded so casual. Had he forgotten that he had left the door to the secret room open? I had to act nonchalant and assume that to be the case. I held up my repaired shoe. “I had a heel come loose. I just went downstairs to pound it back into place.”

“Here, let’s see,” he said, snatching the shoe out of my hand and inspecting the heel, trying to move it with his hand. Did he suspect that I was lying? I wasn’t entirely lying, of course: I had actually fixed the shoe. “It looks like you did a pretty good job,” he commented, examining the shoe from various angles. “You should have let me work on it, though. You shouldn’t be climbing a lot of stairs in your condition.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I responded with a nervous smile. “Just give me a few more minutes to get ready.”

Dinner at Winston’s should have been a fun experience, I thought as I fussed with my steak. Since I had been pregnant, I had been ravenous, but that night, after my discovery in the basement, I could barely eat my food. Kenny noticed it, too.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“What? Oh, yes, yes I’m fine,” I lied. “It’s just that the baby is kicking a little.”

Actually, the baby was kicking quite a bit, but that normally didn’t detract from my appetite of late. ‘Quiet, Junior,’ I thought to myself, and to my surprise, the kicking let up. Just a coincidence, I told myself.

He eyed me with concern. “Do you want to leave?”

“No!” I replied quickly. I wasn’t anxious to go home again–not to a home where the downstairs houseguest was a nearly-completed nuclear weapon. “I’ll be fine.”

Kenny looked at me sceptically, but eventually settled down to finish his steak. I wished, and not for the first time that evening, that I could drink wine. Alcohol might have dulled the pain of betrayal I felt over Kenny’s basement activities.

I put on a brave front for the rest of the evening. I even worked up enough courage to give Kenny the blowjob I knew he had been anticipating all day. He reciprocated, of course, but I didn’t get off, to both of our disappointments. I was just too upset about the bomb.

As I lay there in bed, trying to get to sleep, I tried to think of what to do about my discovery. In the months and years since our transformations, I had come to love Kenny as much as I had loved Hannah in our previous lives. Unlike my tumultuous marriage with Hannah, our new lives together had gone much more smoothly. In spite of this, my mind told me I needed to go to The Judge and tell him that somehow, Kenny wasn’t what he seemed–that he was building a device destructive enough to destroy all of Ovid.

But I loved him. Damn it all and damn me, I still loved him, in spite of what he was doing. How could I betray him?

I suddenly had compassion for women throughout history who fell into the trap of loving men who, while tender to them, were a danger to all around them. For Hitler, there was Eva. For Al Capone, there was... I don’t know–Mrs. Capone. For Kenny, there was me.

I cried myself to sleep that night.

The next morning wasn’t much better. When I got up, I looked over at Kenny, still snoring peacefully. How could he sleep so soundly, knowing what he was doing in our own house? How could he possibly do this to us?

Then it hit me–Freda Jorgenson. While not officially acknowledged, it was pretty certain that the Ice Queen was responsible for much of what passed for homeland security. It was possible that she and her associates knew all about Ovid and the actions of the gods. If that were so, could she have convinced the government that Ovid posed a danger to the nation–a danger large enough to warrant its extermination?

I couldn’t imagine any motive that Kenny could possibly have that would cause him to build anything so lethal though, even if the government demanded it. Kenny simply wasn’t the sort of person who could exterminate an entire community. Hannah might have, I thought ungraciously, but not Kenny. What hold did Freda Jorgenson have over him? For I knew in my heart (woman’s intuition?) that she was somehow implicated in this. Where else could he be getting the parts? Given her position, she could have easily supplied him so long as she knew that Ovid existed. Getting something into Ovid wasn’t difficult at all. Getting something out was the problem.

For that matter, how had he managed to build it? Oh, the parts were no problem. For the more technical components, there was Freda. With the small machine shop he had in the basement, any competent engineer could have made the other parts. Given that the bomb didn’t have to be transported or dropped, it didn’t have to be particularly elegant. The only really hard part about building a bomb is procuring the explosive materials to detonate it. Thankfully, that part was missing. What I meant was where had Kenny developed the expertise to build the bomb?

Of course, I could have been completely wrong about any involvement from Freda Jorgenson. Still, it made sense. She was high up in NSA now, and Hannah had worked for her–practically worshiped her. If anyone would have commanded Kenny’s loyalty and had access to whatever was needed to build an atomic bomb, it was Freda.

And that brought up another question. It was obvious our government knew about Ovid. How else could the Seal incursion be explained? But the question is why would the US government entertain setting off a nuclear device on US soil–especially so close to populated areas even in the name of national security? Ovid might be sitting in some sort of pocket universe, but it was obviously somehow tied to the outside world as well. I estimated that even a fairly small bomb could be nearly as catastrophic to the surrounding area as the meltdown of a medium-sized reactor.

And what would it take to trigger a nuclear explosion, I wondered? Well, several pounds of fissionable material for starters. Then, the non-nuclear trigger would have to be positioned–not a job for amateurs certainly. Even if everything was done as crudely as possible, the explosive package and its casing would not be light–perhaps eighty to a hundred pounds, given the crude design. I began to breathe a little easier. I would certainly notice if Kenny came home lugging a hundred pound package. And it wasn’t the sort of thing you could hide in your briefcase.

But even if that were the case, how could Kenny have forgotten his life as Hannah and still performed a sleeper mission like building a bomb?

I stood there momentarily paralyzed in the shower as I realized the answer to my question: Kenny still had all of Hannah’s memories.

Tears now mixed with the soothing water of the shower as I realized what a fool I had been. Hannah–as Kenny–had been toying with me over the years, pretending that he had no memories of his feminine past while he watched me play the role that had once been his.

I looked down at my protruding belly. Now I was carrying his child–his second child, no less. What was to become of us? Did Kenny plan to get us out of Ovid somehow before destroying the town that had been our home? Or were we supposed to be obliterated in the nuclear explosion, unsuspectingly going about our daily lives until Kenny pushed the button.

I couldn’t allow that to happen. Kenny had to be stopped before the bomb was any further along.

As my tears dried, I towelled myself off and began to formulate a plan. The Judge would have to be informed, of course. While love for Kenny had prevented me from going to The Judge already, that love was undoubtedly a sham. I had to tell The Judge. I could do that at church that very morning. I had seen The Judge frequently at services at First Baptist where our family attended. I would pull him aside and tell him about the bomb.

I tried to act normal as we ate breakfast and prepared to leave for church. Kenny was surprised that I didn’t want to sleep in, but he dutifully got ready for church without any apparent suspicions.

The service seemed to go on forever, but I think that was just because I was so anxious to see The Judge. He was seated next to Mark and Vera March, which made sense, I suppose, since according to most myths, they were family. I watched him as the service went on, wondering why he even bothered to attend church. After all, wasn’t he supposed to be a deity in his own right? How did that reconcile with his attendance at a Christian church?

Whatever the reason, I was glad he was there. Otherwise, I would have had to wait until Monday to try to catch him before he held court since to my knowledge, none of the gods had houses in Ovid. I didn’t want to wait any longer. Eventually, Kenny would detect something wrong in my mood. I couldn’t let him suspect that I knew he had retained his memories.

He was a good actor: I’ll give him that. He never said or did anything which would have made me suspect he had retained his old memories. I even began to have doubts about my conclusion regarding that. But how else could the bomb in the basement be explained? Rachel was too young to build it, and I certainly didn’t recall building a nuclear weapon in between changing diapers and fixing dinner.

“Good sermon,” Kenny commented as Reverend Wallace marched down the aisle as we sang the recessional.

“Yes, it was,” I agreed, although I honestly couldn’t remember a word of it.

Kenny waved at his father and mother, sitting across the church with Rachel between them. “Oh, Mom wants us to join them for dinner. I forgot to mention it to you. Let’s go talk to them.”

“Sure,” I agreed, not really concentrating on what he was saying. “There’s someone I have to see first.” Before Kenny could reply, I let go of his hand and pushed my way through the crowd toward where I had last seen The Judge.

While The Judge seemed eight feet tall when facing him in a courtroom, his stature was really not a great deal more than average. I doubted if he topped six feet. Unfortunately, there were many men taller than he, making it very difficult for me to keep an eye on his movements. Add to that the large crowd milling in the narthex and I was afraid I was going to lose him.

Then I spotted Mark March and caught a glimpse of Vera March’s magnificent golden hair. The Judge was with them, just going through an exit. I dove for the nearest exit, sure now that I’d be able to catch his eye out on the more thinly crowded steps.

But I was wrong. When I stepped out of the church into the warm summer morning, there was no sign of The Judge or Mark and Vera March. “Where did they go?” I asked myself out loud.

“Who?”

I looked around to see Trisha Yamamoto standing there, her pale yellow dress complementing her smooth Asian complexion. There weren’t many Asian families in Ovid, and Trisha’s family was the only one I knew who attended our church. From what I knew of her, Trisha was a very promising student, just getting ready for her final year of high school. I had known her since last year when her family had moved into a bigger house out toward Vulman Industries.

“Oh...” I stammered, “just... uh... The Judge.”

She giggled, “I’ve noticed he doesn’t leave church like we poor mortals.”

So Trisha was one of us who remembered who she had been. I hadn’t known that.

“So he doesn’t... uh...” I didn’t know how to phrase it.

“No, he doesn’t,” she replied, pushing a strand of lustrous black hair away from her beautiful face. “I’ve noticed it before. When he leaves church he just sort of disappears. All of... them do.”

“I’ve got to talk to him,” I told her. “Where does he go when he’s not... here?”

Trisha just shrugged. “Nobody seems to know. If anybody did, it would be Cindy Patton. I think I saw her inside.”

“Thanks. Trisha!” I turned and rushed back into the church–or rushed as much as any woman a couple of weeks away from delivering a baby can.

Cindy was chatting with Susan Jager, a local attorney who I understood took on a lot of the cases of newcomers to Ovid. I had met her on a couple of real estate closings where the borrower had insisted upon having an attorney present. I had come to like Susan and respect her as an attorney. I couldn’t help but wonder if she would have been able to talk The Judge into handling my case better. Maybe if she’d been my attorney, I’d still be male and not the pregnant wife of a sleeper agent intent upon blowing up Ovid.

I had known Cindy practically since she arrived in Ovid. In addition to going to church and serving on a church committee together, Rachel attended the same day-care as Cindy’s youngest, so we had talked while waiting to pick up our kids. Kenny and Jerry–Cindy’s husband–had worked together on some Chamber of Commerce projects, and the four of us often sat together at Chamber dinners and other functions. While Cindy was certainly not among my closest friends, we knew each other well enough that I felt I could confide a little in her.

“Cindy, can we talk for a moment?”

She must have seen the worry written on my face, for she turned quickly and told Susan, “I’ll see you later today and we can take care of that.”

Susan nodded, her expression equally serious. “Nice to see you, Martha Lee.”

“You too, Susan.”

I shot a glance over my shoulder, just to make sure Kenny wasn’t watching me. I didn’t see him, and hoped he was still inside the church with his parents. It wouldn’t do for him to see me talking with Cindy: he might get suspicious.

“Cindy, I have to see The Judge–right away!” I pleaded as soon as I had her full attention.

“Martha Lee,” Cindy began slowly, “I’m sure he’ll be willing to see you tomorrow...”

“No! Not tomorrow,” I protested. “You know more about him than anyone else in Ovid. You can find him wherever he is. Tell him it’s urgent.”

Cindy put a comforting hand on my arm. “Martha Lee, I’d get him for you if I could. I’m just his assistant, though. He doesn’t tell me where he goes most of the time. Is it a problem Susan or I can help you with?”

I didn’t want to panic Cindy by telling her about the bomb. If I had thought for a moment that she was lying about being able to reach The Judge, I might have told her, but I was sure she was telling the truth. Cindy was like me and so many others. She was one of The Judge’s subjects–not a god. But I had to give it one more try.

“Isn’t there some way you can reach him?” I insisted. “I mean, surely an emergency would bring him back. What if there was a danger to all of Ovid?”

“Martha, I don’t know what has you so worried, but I can tell you this: The Judge has set up a pretty elaborate defense around Ovid. If anything tried to endanger Ovid, he’d know about it,” Cindy assured me. “I can make sure you get in to see him before court tomorrow, but that’s the best I can do.”

It figured the gods would be so smug that they would believe only they could detect any true danger to Ovid. I was certain that if a plane were to drop an atomic bomb on Ovid, the response would be swift and decisive. But apparently they never anticipated that one of their ‘citizens’ could fool them. They never for a moment believed it was possible to smuggle a dangerous weapon into Ovid and assemble it one piece at a time. This was hubris on an incredible scale. And why not? Hubris was after all, a Greek word for excessive pride. It stood to reason that gods who originated in Greece would fall prey to it.

“Cindy,” I said softly, “are you sure it’s the best you can do?”

“It is.”

“Then I’ll be in The Judge’s office at... what... eight?”

“Eight thirty,” Cindy corrected.

I nodded and headed back to find my family. I supposed it would be safe to wait until tomorrow. After all, Kenny would be with me at his parents’ house most of the afternoon. I’d help his mother cook dinner while Kenny and his father watched a football game on TV. The earliest he would be able to work on the bomb would be evening, and if I had to, I could keep him occupied during that time.

Besides, it wasn’t as if the core of the bomb was just sitting around the house somewhere–was it? I didn’t think so. Judging by the size of the assembly where the core had to be cradled, it was a fairly large item. Monday morning would be plenty of time to warn The Judge. I just hoped that I could hide my fear from Kenny for another evening.

It was time to face him. I took a deep breath and forced a brave smile as I turned to rejoin my family. I wanted to run away and hide somewhere until I could see The Judge Monday morning. I could always stay with Connie...

No, I couldn’t. Kenny mustn’t suspect a thing, I realized. If he thought for a moment that I knew what he was up to, I couldn’t imagine what he would do to me. Anyone capable of vaporizing thousands of people–people he had come to know as friends and family over our years in Ovid–would be able to snuff me out without a second thought. So I forced myself to move as if nothing was going on back to where Kenny stood talking with his parents.

I had been fortunate in drawing the in-laws I had, I reflected as I forced a smile toward Kenny and his parents. Jude and Larissa Hamilton were far nicer than Hannah’s parents had been to me. Hannah’s parents had constantly interfered in our marriage. From their lofty perch in Philadelphia society, they had ceaselessly pushed Hannah in her quest to succeed while they scoffed at me, a lowly mid-level bureaucrat who was obviously not fit to marry their talented daughter.

The Hamiltons, on the other hand, let us live our own lives, content to be doting grandparents and helpful relatives. Larissa was always very friendly, but never forced herself upon me. Jude mentored his son, helping him to become the businessman he had once been. Together, Kenny’s parents had a warm, loving relationship they planned to carry right on into retirement, where they would probably spend the winter months in a warmer clime, returning to their home in Ovid often to enjoy the company of their only child and his family.

Of course, it was all fiction.

Kenny’s parents were shades, albeit very nice shades. I fully expected that when they travelled, they would simply fade from their temporary Ovid existence, coming back only when needed to complete their roles. It was possible that I was wrong. Perhaps shades really did have a life outside of Ovid. It was possible that once out of Ovid, they appeared as normal people to anyone who saw them. If anyone knew the true nature of shades, they hadn’t conveyed it to me. It was one of those mysteries of Ovid I’d probably never solve.

“We were about ready to come looking for you, Martha Lee,” Larissa called out, releasing Rachel’s little hand so she could run to me.

“Sorry,” I apologized as I lifted my daughter into my arms. “I was talking with Susan Jager about some matters at work.” Well, I had talked to her for just a moment, so it wasn’t completely a lie.

“She’s a fine attorney, don’t you think so Kenny?” Jude commented.

“Absolutely,” my husband replied. Was it my imagination, or was he looking at me suspiciously? No, it had to be just my imagination. ‘Calm down Martha Lee,’ I told myself, or Kenny will know something is going on.

“We’ve even started using her as our personal attorney,” Larissa added brightly. “She seems so much more caring than Henry Wilcox anyway.”

“Now let’s be fair Larry,” Jude chuckled, using his pet name for Larissa, “Henry is much too busy working for the college to do much outside work anyway. He just did our legal work because he was a personal friend. He even recommended Susan to us. And yes, Susan is a sweet young woman.”

I thought about the way everyone did business back in Washington. It seemed that no one could make a move without a room full of lawyers looking over their shoulders, each charging at least half a thou an hour. Now here was Jude, a successful businessman by all accounts, whose need for a lawyer was so small that he had depended upon an old friend–golfing buddy actually–for his small legal needs. I wondered what he would think if he knew that his new attorney, who he thought was ‘sweet’, had been one of the top criminal lawyers in the country before her transformation.

“Well let’s get over to the house,” Jude urged, looking down at his watch. “We’ve got the early game today.”

“You seem kind of distant today,” Kenny remarked as we drove the short distance to his parents’ house.

‘Of course I’m distant, you idiot! You’ve been lying to me these past few years. You’ve been building a nuclear weapon in our basement while pretending to be a good father and husband. And to think, I had actually come to love you... to be willing to be a woman for you... to spread my legs for you and bear your children!’

Naturally, I didn’t say any of that. What I said was, “I’m just a little tired, with the pregnancy and all...”

He nodded. “I understand. Someone told me boys are harder to carry than girls.”

And I was even willing to name him after you! Now, I’d sooner name him after Adolf Hitler. At least Hitler for the most part had never looked into the eyes of those he killed.

“Just a few more days,” he commented.

My blood ran cold at the way he said it. “A few more days?”

“Of your pregnancy,” he clarified, pulling up to the curb. “What did you think I meant? You look upset.”

“No–I’m fine,” I lied, unbuckling my belt and getting out to help Rachel out of her car seat.

“I’ll get her,” Kenny volunteered. “You shouldn’t be lifting anything as heavy as Rachel. Are you sure you’re all right? We could always go home.”

“I’ll be fine,” I reiterated, trying unsuccessfully to hide the tension in my voice.

And I was fine–or at least better–once I got into the house. Kenny joined his dad in the den to watch the Chiefs who were playing in an early game on the East Coast. They had a full day of football planned. While Oklahoma lacked an NFL team, most of its residents supported either Kansas City or Dallas–or both. That Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs played an early East Coast game while the Dallas Cowboys were on the West Coast with a later game. That meant six hours of football–six hours in which I wouldn’t have to pretend to Kenny that everything was all right. Thankfully, Martha Lee wasn’t supposed to be a big football fan, and to be perfectly honest, I really had lost much of my interest in the game after my transformation.

Larissa and I retired to the kitchen. Larissa had never cared much for football, and while I had been a fan of the New England Patriots before my transformation, I had, as I said, found football to be less important over the years. Besides, sitting in the kitchen discussing (we never gossiped–we discussed) what had happened in Ovid over the past few days felt much more normal than sitting and counting the hours until I could see The Judge.

For a while, I was actually able to lose myself in Larissa’s news. While Maggie and the rest of my coffee klatch usually discussed what was really happening in Ovid with all of the machinations of the gods, Larissa knew none of that, telling me instead what most residents of Ovid probably regarded as the true reality of Ovid.

As the day went on, I found myself growing more and more envious of Larissa and Jude. True, they were shades, but they didn’t know that (Or at least I think they didn’t know that). To me, they just seemed to be a couple in late middle age who had raised a successful son, built a thriving business in a pleasant little town, and were now preparing to spend the rest of their lives doing what they wanted to do–travel and socialize with their friends and family.

Watching Jude and Larissa as they briefly but warmly touched each other and looked momentarily but meaningfully into each other’s eyes made me pine for a life I had never quite come to accept and appreciate, but now...

Now, the life I might have had was about to come to an end.

Looking back over the years, I thought it was ironic that I had squandered a second chance. When Hannah and I found ourselves in Ovid, we were two lost souls whose attempt at love and happiness had somehow taken a wrong turn. Our marriage had become loveless, childless, and hopeless. Had we somehow survived the bridge disaster and returned to Washington, we would have split up within months–maybe weeks. Nothing could have prevented that.

What would have happened then? Well, Hannah would have probably gone on to a stellar career, mentored by the Ice Queen, possibly marrying someone else–probably someone as ambitious as she was. Together, they would have been the toast of the Washington bureaucracy.

Me? I would have probably plugged along at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, just one more lonely drone in the hive of government. I suppose I might have even remarried, but it wouldn’t have been someone I felt about as I had once felt about Hannah. We had met in college, back when I was young and ambitious and before I discovered that pushing paper for a living only dulled the mind and blunted ambition.

In our new roles, I realized only now that we had become the persons we were meant to be. Hannah–now Kenny–could be ambitious, growing the family business, garnering the admiration of his parents, and providing for his growing family. It was a role Hannah would have loved, perhaps accepting it voluntarily if given the chance. Of course, I had thought she had lost all of her previous memories, but now that I knew her to be a sleeper agent for some unknown power, I realized she had merely continued travelling the path to professional success she had always wanted.

As for me... When I was first transformed, I saw myself as a man jammed unwillingly into the body of a woman. Sure, I had participated in sex as a woman, even coming to enjoy it, but in many ways, I was simply continuing the role I had settled into as a man–plugging along, taking the path of least resistance. The world I had been thrust into saw me as a woman, so that’s what I would become, albeit reluctantly.

I had continually told myself that if given the opportunity, I would gladly become a man again, but now, as my stable and comfortable life was about to be disrupted–perhaps forever–I realized just how lucky I had been.

In the past since my transformation, there had never been a moment in which I experienced an epiphany in which I took joy in being a woman. When I first felt the pleasure of sex as a woman, a voice in the back of my mind told me how messy periods would be and how painful childbirth was. When I first looked at myself in the mirror and saw how lovely I was, I could only think of what a pain it was going to be to apply makeup and tend to long hair. When Rachel was born, all I could think of was that Kenny as Hannah should be going through the discomfort instead of me.

Now though, these were golden moments, to be treasured, for there would be no more in the future. Once I had told The Judge, I would have no Kenny to look lovely for. When I delivered our second child, there would be no Kenny there to hold my hand and tell me I was doing fine. And as for the sex... I couldn’t see myself getting interested in anyone other than Kenny.

Of course, I could not tell The Judge what I had found in the basement, and all of those things would go on for a little longer, but it wouldn’t be the same. I would always know the bomb was there, ready to be detonated the minute the core was installed. And there was little doubt in my mind that the bomb wasn’t just being built as some sort of perverted deterrent. Clandestine bombs were made to be used–suddenly, relentlessly, and insidiously. I had no idea who had spurred Kenny to build the bomb, but whoever they were, their obvious goal was to obliterate Ovid and everyone in it.

I just couldn’t allow that to happen–even if the price was any hope of a future with Kenny.

I did my best to join in the conversation at dinner, but I didn’t do a very good job of it. The situation was so preposterous–there I was, sitting in a scene that seemed to be a valid subject for a Norman Rockwell painting, and yet sitting next to me was a man who might soon become the biggest mass murderer in the history of the United States.

“How are things at the bank?” Jude asked, slicing a generous portion of meat from the rib roast in the center of the table.

“Fine,” I managed to answer, pretending to be occupied with cutting up Rachel’s dinner into smaller pieces.

“I saw Rachel Tilton the other day,” Larissa chimed in. “I played golf with her at the club.” She sighed. “I don’t know how that woman does it. She looks like she’s thirty years old.”

“She’s got old Charlie acting like he’s thirty, too,” Jude chuckled.

“Jude!” Larissa admonished.

“Well she does.”

I had to smile to myself. Rachel was a transformee and a former male as well. We had become friends and the Tiltons had become Rachel’s godparents. Rachel was even named for my boss’s wife. Of course, Jude and Larissa had no idea that Rachel Tilton was now a different person than the one they had known several years earlier. The former male had replaced Rachel a few months after I came to Ovid.

“Barry Hartman–the kid Jennifer Tilton has been dating for a while–worked this past summer for me as a lot boy,” Kenny added. “He’s a good kid. He and Jennifer both want to go to Capta next year. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them get married.”

Yeah, I wouldn’t either, I thought, if Ovid wasn’t vaporized by your bomb before then.

Instead of making me feel better, the dinner table conversation was making me feel worse. Every sentence seemed to remind me of what a wonderful place Ovid was, filled with wonderful people who would all be dead if I didn’t do something about it.

The evening was convivial enough that fortunately no one really noticed how little I had to say. Kenny and his parents managed to keep the conversation going, so I was required only to throw in an occasional comment. They didn’t even notice my relative silence or the worried look that I couldn’t always hide.

Fortunately, Kenny was tired when we got home that evening. He got ready for bed while I put Rachel down for the night, and by the time I got ready for bed, Kenny was already snoring peacefully away. I was glad of it. Making nice all evening with a spouse who was preparing to end all that I had come to cherish was not something I wanted to do.

The thoughts of what could happen made for a restless night. Even when I did drop off to sleep, my dreams were plagued with thoughts of destruction. I dreamed I had gone to the basement to destroy the bomb only to find Kenny there, grinning malevolently as he prepared to push a button setting the horrible device off. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t seen a button anywhere on the bomb. It was only a dream, but it was a dream that brought me up gasping for breath, and a dream worrisome enough that my unborn son kicked me hard, disturbed from his pre-natal slumber by the tension in my body.

But dawn came at last. Rachel was up earlier than usual, so I had to foist her off on Kenny while I got ready for work. As he took her gently from my arms, I couldn’t help thinking that it might be the last time he had the opportunity to hold his daughter in his arms. I nearly cried at the thought.

As I showered, I began to wonder if I was doing the right thing. Oh, I don’t mean there was any way I’d allow the almost-finished bomb to remain in existence, but perhaps if I talked with Kenny... tried to reason with him, I could get him to give up this insane project. If I could only make him see how he was not only wrecking his life, but the lives of everyone around him as well.

By the end of my shower though, I had reluctantly decided against it. If Kenny was truly committed to whatever cause that had compelled him to build the terrible device, he might turn on me and kill me to prevent my going to the authorities.

Could Kenny kill me? I really didn’t think so, in spite of everything. I hoped he couldn’t. But I was the female now–smaller, weaker, and unable to defend myself properly should Kenny attack me. No, as much as I still loved Kenny, I had to think of others–Rachel, our unborn son, and all of the rest of my new friends and family who would be harmed if I made the wrong decision.

“You look great today, Martha,” Kenny told me with a smile. By the time I had joined him in the kitchen, he had already gotten Rachel set up with her favorite breakfast of Honey Nut Cheerios and a sliced banana. She was happily gulping down a sippy cup of milk.

“Thanks,” I said absently, trying not to notice how handsome he looked sitting there in his sport coat and tie. “I’ll take Rachel now.”

“No, you look like you could use some help today,” Kenny said, scooting back from the table, leaving the last of his juice, which was all he ever had for breakfast. “I’ll drop her off at day-care.”

“Yay! Daddy’s taking me to day-care!” Rachel laughed, her eyes twinkling at her father as she raised her arms to him. It was all I could do to keep from crying.

Actually, I did break down and cry as soon as they left. My family was in ruins. In less than an hour, I’d see The Judge and Kenny would be... what? Changed? Killed? Whatever happened to him, he would be lost from us forever. Maybe The Judge would provide me with a new Kenny–a shade perhaps or someone newly transformed. But it just wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t be my Kenny.

I had to wait until my eyes dried to do my makeup. Time was slipping by, and I wondered if I was intentionally if subconsciously trying to be late so as to miss The Judge. Somehow, I managed to pull myself together in time, with just the tiniest tinge of red still in my eyes. I didn’t think The Judge would notice though. I was just picking up my purse and keys when the doorbell rang.

‘Who could be calling so early in the morning?’ I wondered. Then I looked out the front window and saw George there with a loaner car idling in the driveway. Then I remembered. George was due to take my car in for an oil change and a wash. I had been so rattled after finding the bomb that I had completely forgotten about it. I threw open the door after a quick look at my watch. If I was able to get rid of George in five minutes, I might still be in time to see The Judge.

“Hi, George.”

“Hi, Martha Lee,” George said in his syrupy Oklahoma twang. As nearly as I had ever been able to tell, George had no memories of a previous life, but his love for cars and his skill working on them led me to believe he was doing what he must have done before his transformation. “You need me to gas your car up, too?”

“Oh would you, George?” I said, handing him the keys. “I hope you don’t mind, but I have to run. I have an appointment. Can I get the keys for the loaner?”

“Right here,” George said proudly. “I got a nice little Stratus for you today,” he added, pointing at the red coupe he had driven over in.

“Thanks, George!” I called out, locking the door and heading for the Dodge, nearly stumbling in my high heels. “I’ll have more time to talk to you later.”

“Better slow down,” he cautioned. “I don’t know how you women walk in those shoes anyway.”

It was a question I still asked myself sometimes.

I pulled into the parking lot at City Hall with two minutes to spare. There was a knot in my stomach the size of a basketball as I slid out of the car. Except for church and an occasional sighting of him on Main Street, I hadn’t seen The Judge since my transformation, and as for speaking to him... well, who would want to talk to a being who could completely overturn your life with a few well-chosen words in something resembling Latin?

“Am I late?” I blurted out as I came to a halt in front of Cindy’s desk. I instinctively brushed back a stray lock of hair, hoping I didn’t look too dishevelled.

“Right on time,” Cindy said with a smile as I entered her office. “The Judge likes that. I’ll see if he’s ready for you.”

She got up from her desk and headed for The Judge’s chambers. She was so calm and cheerful. I wondered how she could do it–working for a god every day. Wasn’t she afraid of him? Everything I had ever heard about the gods led me to believe they were nothing if not capricious. Yet Cindy had been in Ovid nearly as long as I had and had worked for The Judge all of that time.

Who knows? Maybe The Judge just liked having a sexy little blonde sashaying around the office. Cindy was a few years older than I was–or at least older than Martha Lee was–and yet she maintained a very nice figure for a woman who had borne three kids. Oh, she could probably stand to lose a pound or two, but I only hoped I could look as good as she did in another decade–assuming, of course, that we all had another decade to live.

“He’ll see you now,” Cindy said when she returned. She looked down at my feet. “Nice shoes, by the way.”

Cindy was so darned feminine. It seemed that almost every time I met her, she would comment on something I wore. “Thanks,” I replied, knowing how to continue the ritual. “I got them at March’s last week.” I daintily lifted my foot, turning my ankle slightly so she could get a better look at my three-inch black pumps. “They were on sale.”

“I’ll have to see if they have that in my size,” Cindy told me, completing the feminine exchange. “Would you like some coffee?”

“No thanks.” I would have loved some, but I was so nervous I was afraid I’d spill it all over myself. Or worse yet, I might spill it all over The Judge. I wondered what I’d end up being if I spilled a cup of hot coffee all over a god.

She led me into The Judge’s chambers. The god was reading a thick document as I entered. He looked up from his large oak desk and disarmed me with a pleasant smile. “Martha Lee, how good to see you.” He rose and took my hand, covering it with his other hand. I nearly jumped away, unsure about allowing a god to touch me, but his hands felt warm and dry, and I felt somehow comforted by the gesture.

“Sit down,” he directed, motioning to a comfortable leather chair angled his desk. He didn’t go back behind his desk, choosing instead to sit in a similar chair, partially facing me. “Now what can I do for you?”

I actually became light headed. I had expected the gruff, humorless justice I had faced the day of my transformation. Instead, I was presented with a fatherly gentleman who seemed nothing like the image of a god I had come to expect. Perhaps the gods were more like us than we realized–friendly and happy one day and distant and sad the next. There was so much we didn’t know about them.

“It’s about my husband...” I began when suddenly and without any warning, I began to sob.

The Judge actually looked alarmed. Drawing on his divine nature for the first time during our meeting, he produced a tissue out of thin air, much in the manner of a stage magician. I accepted it gratefully. “I’m sorry,” I began between sobs.

“Your husband, you say,” he prompted when I was a little calmer. “Is Kenny all right?”

I shook my head. “No... I mean, yes. Physically, he’s fine, but he’s... he’s...” I just couldn’t get it out.

“Please,” The Judge said in a comforting tone. “Allow me...” He placed the fingers of his right hand gently against my forehead. I didn’t understand at first: then I realized he must be reading my thoughts, but there was no evidence of that. Instead, what he did seemed to calm me down enough to speak again.

“Kenny has a... a... bomb in our basement,” I managed to blurt out.

He stared at me, dispassionately at first, as if the statement had been so ridiculous that it didn’t require any reaction at all. But that soon turned to confusion and finally to alarm. “A bomb?”

I nodded, and managed to whimper, “Yes... a bomb. A nuclear bomb.”

“Nuclear?”

I nodded.

The Judge leaned back in his chair, and to my amazement, a small smile played across his lips. “Yes, that’s exactly what she would do.”

“What who would do?” I asked.

“You already know,” was his reply. “Don’t you?”

“The Ice Queen?”

“Of course. Officer Mercer!”

“Yes, Your Honor,” a voice came from behind me. I turned to see Officer Mercer standing there. I knew he hadn’t been there a moment before. So myths of Mercury’s incredible speed were true after all. I wondered where he had been before The Judge had called him.

“Please check Martha Lee’s basement. You’re looking for an atomic bomb in a storage room just next to the work area.”

“At once.”

And as suddenly as he had arrived, he was gone. I thought I detected a slight blur passing through the doorway, but I wasn’t certain.

“What’s going to happen to Kenny?” I asked hesitantly, not really wanting to know the answer.

The Judge’s face turned grim, to my dismay. “I haven’t decided just yet.”

“Your Honor,” I began, “I didn’t want this life you gave me, but I’ve come to appreciate it... and to love Kenny. Please, don’t do anything to him. I... I...” Then the tears began again.

The Judge was surprisingly gentle, leaning over and putting his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he soothed me, “it will all work out fine.”

In retrospect, he didn’t exactly promise me anything. Had I been clear in my thinking, I might have asked, “Fine for whom?” I didn’t, though. I sniffed a little and nodded my head in silent thanks. I’m sure now that The Judge did more than just soothe me with comforting words. After all, the powers he could exert over our minds and forms were considerable. I’m sure he wanted me calm when I went home, so as not to trigger any suspicions on Kenny’s part.

On the other hand, he seemed quite sincere. Like many Ovid residents, I had read quite a bit about the Greco-Roman god he was supposed to be. While Jupiter could be quite arbitrary much of the time, he seemed to have a genuine affection for humans. I like to think that when he touched my shoulder that day, he really wanted what was best for me. It’s probably something I’ll never know for sure, but in that moment as he comforted me, I felt an intense loyalty to him. Although to this day I have no idea why he created Ovid or why he chose to populate it with otherwise-doomed humans, but I have much more faith in his judgment than before.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” he told me calmly. “Just go home and try to act normally around your husband.”

“He’s not a bad man...” I broke in, trying very hard to believe it myself.

The Judge nodded. “I know he isn’t. He may not even be aware of what he’s doing. The important thing is not to alert him to any suspicions you have. If someone else is controlling him, they may become aware of your suspicions and take unadvisable action.”

Yeah. Unadvisable–like vaporizing the entire town.

“But what about the bomb? I don’t want it left under my house.”

“I’m afraid it must remain there for the time being,” The Judge replied. “To move it would alert those who wanted it built.”

“Oh, right.”

“I can assure you though, that we will make certain the bomb is never armed. You have my word on that. Now that we’re aware of it, we can monitor it closely.”

I sighed, “All right. I just want this over quickly. I swear I’m so nervous I feel like the baby is coming any minute.”

As if to emphasize my words, I felt a sudden and very determined kick from my womb. It was almost as if my baby could understand every word I was saying.

“There’s one other thing I need to do for you,” The Judge said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s likely Kenny is working on the bomb while you’re in the house. I’d like to put a little spell on you. When he tries to hypnotize you or put you to sleep, the spell will make it look as if he succeeded. But you will be able to remember everything that happens around you.”

I was naturally suspicious of any spell The Judge might use on me. Just look what had happened the last time he did. “Is this really necessary?”

The Judge nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

“All right,” I sighed, bracing myself for what came next. Although he muttered a few words just as he had when I had been transformed, nothing seemed to happen this time except a momentary feeling of warmth. “Is that all?” I asked as the feeling went away.

“That’s all,” he replied.

“Well, that wasn’t so bad.”

“Do you need anyone to drive you home?” he asked solicitously.

I shook my head. “No, I’ve got to get to work.” I gave him a little smile, contrasting with what had to be tear-stained eyes. “If I don’t go to work, everyone will suspect something is wrong.”

And go work I did. I left The Judge’s office as quickly as I could, stopping only to look at my face in the restroom mirror. What a damned girly girl I had become, I silently admonished myself. The old me would never have broken down in tears, even if I had been Will turning in Hannah to The Judge. Of course, I reminded myself, Willis and Hannah had been a lost cause. Kenny and Martha Lee weren’t–or at least hadn’t been until I’d discovered that damned bomb.

Thankfully, I got out of City Hall without seeing anyone too closely. I had repaired my makeup, but I was sure my eyes were still a little red. I turned the air conditioning in the car up to maximum, aiming the vents directly at my face to remove the red. By the time I had parked in the bank’s employee parking lot, my eyes looked fine. I just hoped nothing happened to set me off crying again. I was afraid it wouldn’t take much.

“Where were you this morning?” Connie asked me as I slipped my purse into an empty desk drawer.

“Dentist,” I lied.

I tried not to look her in the eye, but I could tell she was looking at me with scepticism. “I thought you just saw the dentist a couple of weeks ago.”

“Just a follow-up visit,” I elaborated, trying to make it sound as if it wasn’t a big deal. Fortunately, Connie didn’t ask anything further. If she had, even with The Judge’s conditioning, I might have yelled out at one of my best friends to tell her to mind her own business. I just wasn’t in any mood to explain my actions.

I was able to throw myself into my work. Fortunately, it was due to be a busy week. I was trying to get as much out of the way as possible before I went on thirty days of maternity leave. I tried not to think about the bomb and succeeded for a while at least, but the engineer in me came to the surface in the hour between my only loan closing and lunch with Connie. What remained of Willis Perry, trained engineer, had some serious questions to ask.

Of course, I was intimately familiar with nuclear weapons. Anyone who has ever worked with nuclear energy has studied the design. For that matter, anyone can build a primitive nuclear device. The hard part is obtaining the fissionable material for it. Essentially, the bomb in my basement was similar to the famed Little Boy bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima. That bomb was about as primitive as an atomic bomb can be and still function. In the Little Boy, a sub-critical core of highly enriched uranium weighing about eighty-five pounds sits at one end of the bomb while a projectile weighing fifty-five pounds or so is slammed into it with high explosives. The resulting mass becomes critical, producing a highly inefficient but extremely destructive explosion.

In the Hiroshima bomb, less than two percent of the fissionable material actually produced an explosion. The result was the equivalent of about fifteen thousand tons of TNT. I estimated the shockwave from the bomb would be sufficient to reach the edges of the suspected pocket universe containing Ovid, reverberating back upon itself several times in the process. Ovid would be obliterated.

But The Judge hadn’t seemed overly worried. Could it be that gods would be able to survive a nuclear blast? No, I doubted that they could. Otherwise, why would someone go to the trouble of nuking Ovid? Surely the evil minds that had plotted the building of such a weapon knew the nature of Ovid and its best-known inhabitants.

‘But why would anyone want to destroy Ovid? Or for that matter, why would the gods bother to create Ovid?’ Those last two questions I had to set aside. The more important question was ‘what was The Judge doing to stop the bomb from being completed?’

As I said, he didn’t seem overly concerned, but in retrospect, I think that might have been an act for my benefit. After all, he knew I would be extremely upset, and I’m sure he wanted me to be as calm as possible since I would have to not let on to Kenny that I suspected a thing.

Perhaps as I sat there worrying about it, he or more likely Officer Mercer was at my house dismantling the device. Hopefully, I would come home and find the terrible weapon gone.

But would Kenny be gone, too?

I was sickened at the thought. I still loved Kenny in spite of everything and didn’t want to lose him. I wanted to think he was nothing but an unwitting pawn, doing the bidding of some unknown master–most likely the Ice Queen. But maybe that was hoping for too much. Maybe he was doing it willingly.

But why would he do it? That was still an unanswered question–one of many, but one of extreme importance to me. Did he believe in what he was doing? Was he doing it in return for some reward–possibly a return to his old female life (or one similar to it, given that I now understood that in the outside world, we had never existed)? Or was he being blackmailed? I wanted so much to tell him that I knew and that somehow we could work everything out.

“Are you okay?” Connie asked at lunch.

In my mind, I was calculating potential yields from roughly a hundred and forty pounds of enriched uranium. Skills I hadn’t used in several years were pushing to the front of my mind again. I had thought I would be able to carry on a reasonable conversation with Connie over lunch, but my concerns were too important to listen to my friend with my full attention.

“I’m sorry, Connie,” I said sincerely, toying with my fork in a salad that would have normally tasted wonderful. “It’s just...” I didn’t know how to explain. How do you tell one of your best friends that your husband has been busily building a nuclear weapon in your basement? As bizarre as Connie surely knew that things could be in Ovid, that would be a hard one to swallow.

“Is the baby okay?”

There was a look of alarm on Connie’s face. I recognized it well. Connie was three months along with her first child, and like me and probably most of the former men in Ovid, the idea of childbirth was daunting to say the least.

“The baby’s fine,” I assured her, feeling the little guy shifting around inside me. “I’ve just been so... busy lately, with work and family.”

“Is your mother coming in for the delivery?” she asked. Of course we both knew that my ‘mother’ was really a shade who supposedly lived in Muskogee. She and my ersatz father and sister visited occasionally, and I even chatted with them on the phone. I couldn’t help but wonder where they went when they left Ovid. I knew our trips to visit them were all in our minds, so I wasn’t sure if they came into existence just to see or talk to us or if they really lived in Muskogee, completely innocuous as far as the real residents were concerned. Ah, another mystery of Ovid.

“She and dad are coming after the baby’s born,” I told her. “Right now, they’re back east. My sister is attending Ohio State this fall.”

Connie nodded. Of course she knew it might be all a Judge-inspired fiction as well, but we all played along. It was the easiest way to cope with the fantastic nature of Ovid.

“If there’s anything I can do to help...”

I made a brave face and managed to smile. “Thanks, Connie, but I’ll be fine. Kenny’s mother is going to be there with me.”

But would she be there after The Judge and Officer Mercer had hauled her son off to an unpleasant fate? Or would she even know about it? Maybe Kenny would disappear from everyone’s memory, just as Willis and Hannah Perry had disappeared from the minds of those who had known us outside of Ovid. I nearly cried again at the thought.

“If there’s anything I can do to help,” Connie offered, “let me know.”

I was very touched. “Thanks, Connie.”

Later, I wondered why I hadn’t invited Connie to our Saturday morning coffee. I had made a couple of feeble attempts, but usually I assumed she had something better to do with her time. She and her husband continued their pattern of outdoor activities after their marriage, so even the times I had offered, she had declined to attend.

I found myself yearning to meet with the women who had become my Saturday morning compatriots. And by Saturday, I might be in a delivery room. Maybe, I thought, I should take a day off and invite all of them over for a special coffee. Yeah, that would be a good idea. Denise just worked a few hours a week doing the books for her husband, and Colleen was currently taking time off from work until her little ones got a bit older. Maggie didn’t work outside the home at all, and I was pretty well caught up at work for the moment. We’d have a special gathering!

It was too late to bake anything, but I could go by Duggan’s IGA after I picked up Rachel and get a coffee cake at their bakery. It wouldn’t be as good as homemade, but their bakery was pretty good.

Connie was with a client as I called the rest of my friends. I had fully intended to see if she could get off work tomorrow morning and join us, but then I decided that wouldn’t be a good idea since she would be needed to cover for me. The rest of the girls thought it was a great idea, so we were on for nine o’clock. By that time, all of our husbands would be off to work, so it would just be the four of us and the kids.

I rushed around like a madwoman but still got home in time to fix a simple dinner for my family. First, I had to go get my minivan back. George had it sparkling like new. He even changed out Rachel’s car seat for me. Then I picked up Rachel at day-care and shot by Duggan’s to get a coffee cake and something quick for dinner.

It wasn’t easy, but I got through the evening without raising Kenny’s suspicions. Maybe I was just so frayed from such a busy day, coupled with the feeling of being tired that comes from lugging a nearly-term baby around. In any case, Kenny did notice I was stressed, but obviously chalked it up to baby and work. He left me alone to relax and even did the dishes for me.

I did go out to get a little fresh air. It was dark and getting late, and anyone else might have missed him standing there completely still in front of some tall bushes a couple of houses away. I didn’t miss him though, but to be honest, I was looking for him. Only Officer Mercer could stand there so straight and so tall. He was watching the house. I wondered how he could determine if anything was going on from so far away. Then I realized from the position he had taken that he had a clear shot of our basement window. If Kenny went to the basement to work on the bomb, Officer Mercer would be sure to see him.

But what if Kenny sneaked downstairs without turning on the light? I smiled to myself. Maybe Officer Mercer could see just fine in the dark. There was nothing in any myth I had read about the gods that said they could see well in the dark, but nothing said they couldn’t either. If I had to make a bet, I would say they could see in the dark just fine.

Relieved that someone was watching out for me, I made my way back inside, checked on Rachel to make sure she was asleep, and got ready for bed. Kenny was watching something innocuous on TV but managed to come in and kiss me goodnight. I almost wished that he hadn’t, since it reminded me again what a great husband he had become.

Thankfully, I dropped off to sleep at once, exhausted from a busy day. Tomorrow would be a very different day, I promised myself.

I had no idea then just how right I was.

“I’m staying home today,” I announced to Kenny. Sitting there at the kitchen table in a wine-colored t-shirt and maternity overalls certainly showed him I wasn’t planning on going to work.

“Don’t you feel good?” he asked solicitously, taking my small hands in his large ones. “Do you want me to stay home with you?”

I shook my head, my ponytail flipping back and forth emphatically. “No, I’ll be fine. I’m just tired from yesterday. I’ll just keep Rachel home from day-care today and putter around the house.” I could have told him the girls were coming over, but I didn’t want to admit to playing hooky.

“Well,” he drawled dubiously as he grabbed his sport coat, “call me at the office if you change your mind. I can always change my schedule around.”

Sure, I thought. Sell a car here; build a bomb there. Schedule changes are no problem. “I’ll be fine.”

The minute I heard his car start, I jumped up (or as much as a pregnant lady can jump up) and grabbed some of my special coffee. I noted I was getting a little low on coffee. I’d have to order some more. All the girls thought it was great, but Kenny didn’t like it–too mild he had told me. He preferred to get a cup of bitter, strong mud at the office. Oh well, all the more for us, I thought, carefully measuring three scoops of beans into the grinder.

Maggie was the first to show up–without her twin boys.

“Where are Gary and Larry?” I asked, handing her a cup of coffee.

“Babysitter’s,” Maggie replied. “I’m getting my hair done and having lunch at the country club today.” That explained why she was wearing yellow heels and a matching dress.

“Aw!” Rachel called out from in front of the TV where Barney was singing one of his inane songs.

“Maybe you can play with the twins later today,” I told her.

“Okay!”

“Don’t worry,” Maggie told Rachel. “I talked to Danny’s mom and she’s bringing him and Monica over.”

“Yay!”

“And Denise is bringing Carla and Misty,” I reminded Rachel.

“Yay!”

Maggie and I looked at each other and giggled. “I think Rachel looks forward to these gatherings as much as we do,” Maggie grinned.

I grinned back. Everything felt almost normal. I almost–almost–forgot about what was lurking in the basement. And by the time that Colleen and Denise showed up, I really had forgotten about it.

It would have just been a normal morning if it hadn’t been for...

I felt strange. The four of us were sitting there in the kitchen while the kids were all in the den being mesmerized by whatever cheery little show PBS Kids had running. We had talked about what we always talked about–husbands, kids, the latest Ovid gossip (or at least as much as we could talk about without involving the nature of Ovid’s real rulers) when the conversation drifted down to nothing.

We all sat there, just staring out into space. For me, it was as if I was observing our group from some other vantage point. I knew instinctively that this was The Judge’s spell to counteract any hypnosis kicking in. I began to feel panicked. What was happening? Kenny wasn’t even here. How could we be falling into a trance? I was completely alert but I was like a passenger in my own body. And judging from the looks on my friends’ faces, I wasn’t alone.

“All right,” I heard myself say. “Maggie, you watch the kids today. You’re not dressed for this.”

“Yes,” Maggie replied tonelessly, rising from the table to go into the den. Once there, she broke into a normal-looking smile. All of the children accepted her presence but continued watching TV.

I nodded in satisfaction that the children wouldn’t disturb us.

“Denise, Colleen, we need to get the core out of the van.”

What?

“Be sure to wear the gloves next to the package,” my voice admonished. “The containers are safe, but the gloves will give you a better grip.”

Denise and Colleen got up from the table and headed to the garage. My body turned and walked toward the basement door. The odd thing was how little anxiety I felt. I suppose anxiety is, to a great extent, forced upon the mind by the body, and my body was perfectly calm. Unfortunately, that also seemed to mean I had no mental control over my body. It was a little bit like the experience I had encountered when Connie first told me how to put my body on automatic. That had been very helpful at first, allowing me to dress, do my makeup, and a score of other mundane feminine chores without thinking about them. The big difference was that then I could will my body back to my mental control. Right now, I was nothing more than an unwilling passenger in my own body.

I took the key from its hiding place in the back of the drawer of Kenny’s workbench. Without even looking at the lock, I slipped the key into the keyhole and pushed open the door to the storage room where the bomb awaited me. I felt my face contort into a smile at the sight of the weapon. And at last, I could feel another presence with me in that room.

It really came as no surprise to me when I realized Freda Jorgenson was sharing my mind. Thanks to The Judge’s spell, I was still alert albeit helpless as the Ice Queen made deft adjustments to the trigger mechanism of the bomb, preparing it to receive the core. How many times had she done this to me? Dozens or more, I suspected–probably every time the four of us got together for coffee.

I found if I concentrated very hard, I could actually detect some of her surface thoughts. The patterns of her deeper mind seemed not so much hidden to me as they were incomprehensible. I began to suspect that the Ice Queen was not entirely human. I also suspected she wasn’t really in my mind. Her thoughts were of the surface variety: Go there. Do this. I think I had just enough of her mind overlaid on mine to do assigned tasks but nothing else. Was she like The Judge? Maybe. There was no sense in speculating about that now, though.

By sorting through her surface thoughts though, I was able to see how she had done this to me. It went back to that party at the British embassy where I had first met her. We had been talking together–that much I remembered–when she began slowly and stealthily to take control of my mind. I hadn’t even realized it was happening: neither had anyone around us. It was as if she had somehow removed us from the room without physically moving us. It was just as if people saw us but didn’t really take notice of it. It was a neat trick: I had to admit that.

“Remember this number...” she was saying to me as I sat there completely open to her suggestions. I did remember it, too. I still knew it: it was in my phone file upstairs. It was the name of a small, premium coffee roaster near Washington... a firm I had done business with since arriving in Ovid. They made the best tasting coffee. I used it every week for our coffee klatch.

I have no idea to this day how the coffee worked, but now I do know the results. All four of us would drink our fill, be discussing all the things that women friends discuss when they get together, and suddenly lose track of time. It was then that the Ice Queen struck. After exerting direct control over me, she would extend it to the others through some special bond the coffee created. That was how the four of us were able to carry on conversations about the nature of Ovid that other foursomes were unable to do. It was because for all practical purposes, we were linked, as if we were of one mind.

I heard the door to the garage close. Colleen and Denise would be coming in with the first part of the core. I had told them to get it out of the van. But how did it end up in the van? I wasn’t sure, but I had an idea. It’s amazing how many ideas were coming to me now that I was trapped here, a passenger in my own body.

It had to be someone at Ovid Chrysler–probably George. He always serviced my car personally. It would have been easy for him to store the parts needed for the bomb in my van. They were probably shipped in as car parts–an extra alternator here, a new transmission there. Auto parts could be heavy and bulky. No one would think twice about a package being trucked in from Mopar, and as service manager, George could easily divert any ‘extra’ parts.

So was George one of Jorgenson’s minions, or was he just another unfortunate puppet like me and my friends? I hoped I’d have time to sort that one out. The fact that the core was being installed wasn’t a good sign. It was foolish to have a nuclear weapon just sitting around in Ovid unless Freda planned to use it soon.

Colleen and Denise were average-sized women, and the core parts were heavy, especially with the shielding around them. I suspected the shielding was there more to avoid detection and not for our safety. After all, there appeared to be no remote transmitter on the bomb. I suspected it would be manually triggered, and that none of us were expected to survive the experience.

“It goes right here,” I heard myself say, pointing to an innocuous-looking cradle at one end of the bomb. Once in place, the cannon assembly could be reseated. Then the other part of the core would be inserted in the cannon. A trigger could then be attached, and in no more than an hour, the bomb could be ready to fire.

It wasn’t an elegant device: it didn’t have to be, I realized. So what if it was inefficient? How efficient did it have to be to take out Ovid?

I wondered if the gods could be destroyed by the blast. Probably, I told myself. Otherwise, Freda Jorgenson wouldn’t be wasting her time blowing the rest of us up, would she? I didn’t think so.

But how had she known that I would be available in Ovid to build the bomb for her? Granted, I was the perfect person to build the bomb. Anyone with my professional background could do it. But how did she know I’d be trapped in Ovid? For that matter, given the number of transformed people who lost the memories of their previous lives, how would she know I wouldn’t be affected?

As far as making sure I wouldn’t be affected, maybe she had done something to me–a spell or something. Or maybe she had the ability to recognize who would retain their memories and who would not. Or maybe she just took a chance on me, and if I had failed to be able to help her, maybe someone else bound for Ovid could.

So the burning question, I realized as I watched helplessly as my hands nimbly fitted the target portion of the core into place, was how did she know I was coming to Ovid in the first place?

Before I could address that, a sharp pain shot through my side.

“Are you okay?” Colleen asked.

“Fine,” I heard myself answer curtly. “The little bastard just kicked me!”

Way to go, Kenny Junior, I cheered to myself. If the bitch who has taken control of my body has her way, you’ll never be born, so you might as well get your licks in now. As if in response, he kicked again. Maybe he really could hear me. I was finding the bond between a mother and her unborn child almost defies description. Add to that the linking ability my mind must have developed to bend my friends to my will, and...

“Maybe you should rest,” Colleen offered. I could see she was as helpless to stop what she was doing as I was, so I suspected that the advice was less from concern for my body than it was for completion of the mission.

“I said I’d be fine,” my body responded, but if she felt what I felt, she wasn’t as fine as she let on. “Get the rest of the core.”

“At once!” Colleen and Denise replied in unison.

I might not be able to control my body, or influence its actions in any way, but perhaps in this subordinated mental state, I actually could contact the baby. ‘Kenny,’ I thought as hard as I could, ‘are you there?’

What came in response was not so much a word as a feeling: ‘Here... here...’

I hesitated. To be honest, I was actually surprised to get an answer. Maybe all expectant mothers can communicate with their unborn children if they can shut enough of the outside world off. I was completely shut off, relegated to a tiny part of my mind while Freda’s persona called the shots.

‘Here...’

‘Kenny, kick me really hard.’

Nothing happened. I began to think what I had thought I heard in my mind had been just wishful thinking. Then I realized that Kenny was not mature enough to really understand me. When he had responded to me, it was nothing more than a reaction to my call. He probably had not really said “here.” Instead, my mind had interpreted his wordless response at the correct term. When I told him to kick, he probably had no idea what it meant. I had to show him rather than tell him.

I was losing track of what my body was doing. I wasn’t sure if Colleen and Denise had brought the rest of the core in yet or not. I didn’t dare lose my concentration on Kenny, though. If I did, I wasn’t sure I could get it back.

I tried to visualize movement: I tried to make Kenny realize what a kick was.

Kick!

There it was! Or was it just coincidence? I tried to convey my thoughts to him again.

Kick!

“Oh no!” I heard my body groan.

I was aware of my surroundings again. Colleen and Denise stood there in front of me, worried looks on their faces.

Kick! Kick!

I felt something wet–something I had only felt once before in my life.

“Her water broke!” Colleen gasped.

Making a baby (sex if you will) is lots of fun–even (or maybe even especially) for a former man. Holding your newborn baby in your arms for the first time is a feeling of awe and accomplishment unmatched in human experience. But having a baby...

Don’t let anyone fool you. Having a baby is pure hell.

While I might have no physical control over my body, that did not mean that I didn’t feel the pain. I felt it very well, thank you very much. Little Kenny was ready to be born, and now, he was in a battle for possession of my body, and whatever power had assumed control of me to assemble and arm the bomb would now have to fight an imperative far older than mankind. It was prevalent in nearly all living things. The will to be born simply could not be denied.

But that didn’t mean the force that had taken control of my body wouldn’t try. It knew–as did I–that the finishing touches of the bomb were only minutes away. If it could hold on to my body for perhaps fifteen more minutes, the bomb could be triggered.

‘More, Kenny, more!’ I urged as my body lurched to finish its task. But when I picked up the other part of the core, it was too much for me. Red searing pain shot through the lower half of my body. I moved my arm toward my abdomen. Freda’s persona didn’t do it: I did!

“Where are we?” Denise cried out, looking about in confusion.

“I don’t know,” Colleen replied, equally dumfounded.

Whatever power my interloper had held over them must have been jarred loose by the pain. Did that mean I was in control? I tried to move my mouth. My lips trembled, but I managed to utter one word: “Ambulance...”

While Colleen supported me, Debbie, no longer stunned, shot up the stairs.

It was then that I passed out.

“She’s coming around,” a woman’s voice said somewhere in the blackness.

The world began to reassert itself around me. I could feel myself lying down–not on the cold, hard concrete of my basement floor, but pressed against a hard mattress. The voice I heard was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.

“My baby...” I managed to mutter. I felt as if I had a wad of cotton in my mouth, though. How long had I been out?

A hand patted mine. “The baby’s fine,” the voice assured me. “He weighed in at six pounds, eleven ounces. Not bad for a couple of weeks early.”

My eyelids felt as if they had weights on them. Only with all the concentration I could muster was I able to pry them open. A smiling woman’s face looked down at me, surrounded by long blonde hair.

“Cindy?” I asked, just above a whisper. She nodded. I had known Cindy Patton since shortly after she had come to Ovid and started working for The Judge, but I didn’t know her well. What was she doing here?

She must have read the confusion on my face. As if to answer, she stepped aside, letting me see The Judge standing there. “Your Honor, I didn’t know about... about...”

My mind was still too dulled by whatever drugs they had given me, but I wanted to tell him that I had no idea that I had built the bomb.

The bomb!

Had anyone told them about the bomb being nearly finished? What had happened after I passed out? “Bomb...” I managed, but it sounded a little more like “bumb” in an old Pink Panther movie.

The Judge actually smiled–a rare occurrence in my experience. “The bomb has been disposed of,” he told me. “I’ll tell you all about it when you’re better.”

I was in no position to argue. Before I could say another word, I drifted off into a dreamless sleep.

Kenny was there the next time I awakened. He was dozing uncomfortably in a chair at the foot of my bed. From the rumpled condition of his shirt and the day old growth of beard, I guessed that he had been sitting in that chair for some time.

Daylight was streaming in the window, and as my eyes focused on the scene outside, I could see the big oak trees of Atlas Park basking in the morning sun. Everything outside looked peaceful, normal, and I sighed as I remembered vaguely something The Judge had said about the bomb being “disposed of.”

I felt better than I had upon first awakening–whenever that had been. My mind was clear, and although I was sore from giving birth, it seemed as if the pain wasn’t as bad as it had been after delivering Rachel. I began to realize how resilient the human body–particularly the female human body was. A short time ago, I was lumbering around with a baby in my body, contractions wracking my body so severely that I had lost consciousness. Now, here I was, resting comfortably in bed with only a faint reminder of the discomfort of childbirth.

I looked over at Kenny, realizing how wrong I had been about him. If The Judge had taken me at my word when I first told him about the bomb, Kenny might have been taken from me. And given that I was the sleeper agent and not him, the Ice Queen’s plot might have come to fruition, with Ovid now nothing more than smoking nuclear waste.

I felt suddenly an emptiness–a warning of what life would have been like without Kenny. I had loved Hannah when I had been a man, and while Kenny had no memories of being my wife, whatever composed his soul was still Hannah’s. We were soul mates, I reminded myself, bound together by some force perhaps not even the gods fully understood.

“Martha Lee?” a woman’s voice called softly from the door. I looked over to see a nurse in aqua scrubs. At her side was Rachel, peering up at the bundle the nurse was carrying. The bundle squirmed and managed a tiny little grunt. A tiny little fist ventured over the edge of his blue blanket.

Kenny was suddenly alert, rising to his feet to take our new son gently from the nurse’s arms. Cradling him deftly, he brought him over to my side. “Do you feel like meeting Kenny Junior?” he asked with a proud smile.

My nipples ached instinctively. “Can I feed him?” I asked.

“Do you feel up to it?” the nurse asked.

“Yes.”

I opened the front of my gown, allowing a full breast to come free. Taking our son from Kenny, I gently drew the baby to my nipple, watching with a smile as he instinctively moved his lips in preparation for nursing.

I gasped just a little as his mouth latched onto my nipple. The feeling of nursing was not quite pain and not quite pleasure, but an odd merging of the two as he began to draw milk from my body. I smiled at Rachel as she watched me nurse, thinking about how someday, she too, would have a baby and be a mother. She would grow up expecting to do this, as I had not, but we would share the pleasure as only women and mothers could.

Kenny put an arm around Rachel, his other hand touching my arm. “I love you,” he said gently. “I love all of you.”

“I love you too,” I replied softly.

This was the first time all four of us were together, touching as a family. I knew in my heart it was only the first moment of many. Whatever had possessed me was gone now: I could somehow feel that there would be no more tasks attempted for the Ice Queen. Whatever power she had held over me and my friends was gone, destroyed when her mission had failed. Ovid and all her residents–human and godlike–were safe for now.

I prayed silently that it would always be so.

The images of Martha Lee’s life faded away, and I found myself staring into the eyes of The Judge seated across the desk from me. I felt the stirring of others around me, almost as if the gods were awakening just as I was.

“Can we be certain Freya has lost her hold on this woman?” Officer Mercer asked from behind me.

“I detected no presence at this time,” The Judge said thoughtfully. “It would seem that once the baby decided to be born, a conflict between Freya’s immediate orders and Martha Lee’s instinctive female behavior developed. Since the instinct to give birth is one of the strongest we have ever encountered, it was the winner of the conflict, throwing off the conditioning of our former enemy.”

“Former?” I asked.

“Freya is in custody now,” Diana explained. “Of course, as far as Washington is concerned, the Ice Queen has resigned for personal reasons. The announcement is being made about now.”

“What will happen to her?” I asked, thinking to myself that no punishment was bad enough for the woman who had targeted my family and even tried to incinerate Ovid and all of her people. Even the gods would have been destroyed in a nuclear explosion.

“What we have done with her is not your concern,” The Judge said brusquely. “Suffice it to say she will cause us no more trouble. The concern now is to subdue the rest of her ilk who would pitch this world into war and chaos.”

I just nodded. I knew he would tell me nothing more. I had known–as had a fair number of us in Ovid–that the gods sought to prevent a cataclysmic event in our world. Exactly how they would do it was still a mystery though. In any case, it was obvious that there were other gods from other cultures who disagreed with The Judge’s plan and were willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to stop it.

“Thank you for coming in today,” The Judge added, and I knew I was being dismissed.

No one else said a word as I walked out, but Diana followed me out. “You did great!” she assured me in the hall.

“Thanks,” I replied with a sigh. I was a little tired. Usually when I reported on one of The Judge’s cases, I only had to cover a few days. It was very rare when I was required to go back so far and summarize so much. I wouldn’t have even been able to do that if I hadn’t accompanied The Judge to see Martha Lee in the hospital. My ability to chronicle people’s lives was normally limited to those I had seen in the courtroom. Martha Lee had been transformed before I ever got to Ovid, so it was a new and tiring experience for me.

“Diana,” I asked, “I know you can’t tell me everything that’s going on...”

She nodded at that.

“...but could you at least tell me one thing–is this all worth it?”

“Very much so,” she told me seriously. Then, after a pause, she added, “Don’t worry. You’ll get a chance to see that some day.”

“I hope it’s soon,” I murmured. “When my family is endangered, I get very worried.”

She reached up and took my hand. “You’ve become like family to me, so I worry, too. But trust The Judge. He knows what he’s doing, and he knows just what needs to be done.”

I managed a hint of a smile and nodded. “Okay, Diana.”

“Lunch sometime this week?” she asked brightly.

“If you promise to be a little older by then,” I replied, trying to match her cheery tone. “I don’t want to be the only one drinking wine at lunch.”

Her form shifted before my eyes. “How is this?” she asked with a grin. The woman she had become was about average height, no more than thirty with long, dark blonde hair and a femininely athletic figure.

“Great,” I replied, “although looking at you is a terrible reminder that I need to lose about ten pounds.”

“Nonsense,” she laughed, giving me a squeeze. “You look just fine.”

Yeah, but not as good as her. It was amazing how a few years ago, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a girl at all, and yet here I was now, dying to look like my goddess friend.

“See you next week,” she promised with a wave, heading back into The Judge’s chambers.

As I walked to my car, I thought about how much I would have liked to have been invited to the meeting she was attending. The new enemies of Ovid had already tried to blow up just Susan’s and my families. Now they had upped the stakes, opting to try for the destruction of the entire community. While I had confidence in The Judge and the rest of the gods, I had worked with them long enough to know that as powerful as they were, they did have their limitations.

For example, I had always assumed that the gods used me to peek into the minds of Ovid’s transformees simply because the role of chronicler was beneath them. However, when The Judge had rushed me over to visit Martha Lee while she was still unconscious, I realized how much he needed me.

Since I had not been present at Martha Lee’s trial, I had no natural connection to her as I did to the ones whose trials I attended. It seemed to be that attendance that linked them to me. The Judge had been most insistent that I link with Martha Lee though, leading me to believe I was essential to the effort to learn her story.

But the gods–some of them at least–could read minds to varying extents. That much I was sure of. What I gathered they could not do is fully understand us as humans without the amplification of a human mind–my mind. Without my help, their interpretation of Martha Lee’s thoughts might not have been enough to tell them the full story–or permit them to say with any assurance that Martha Lee was no longer under the influence of the Ice Queen. I doubted if they could understand the nuances of the human mind without someone like me as an interpreter.

Something I thought of though, as I drove for home and my family, was to question just how Freda Jorgenson had learned that Hannah and Willis Perry were slated to be sent to Ovid. The Judge, I knew, relied upon the Oracle to predict the deaths of humans destined to be new residents of Ovid, but how had Freda known?

It was possible, I supposed, that our enemies had their own ways of knowing of impending deaths, just as the gods used the Oracle, but there was another possibility as well. It could be that someone in Ovid was telling them–someone in The Judge’s own trusted inner circle.

And if there was a spy, I had a pretty good idea who it was...

The End