I became far more discrete about telling people of the changes I planned to make to my body + the new life I hoped to embark on after I kept hearing stuff like: “No matter how much you mutilate your body or try to pretend, you can't change what you are. It's a simple fact of biology!”

And: “Instead of giving in to this sick fantasy you need to get psychological help, and learn to accept
yourself as the person God made you!”

And also: “How can you be a mermaid when there's NO SUCH THING AS MERMAIDS?!!?”

But a mermaid was who I'd always been in my heart + soul, and life as a human girl felt almost as wrong to me as being a male had. And maybe there was no such thing as mermaids, but if all went according to plan in just 48 more hours there would be: ME!

Madness?! Folly?!! Bizarre Body Modification?!!? Perhaps... But for me and for Greg---my wonderful loving mermaid-obsessed fiancee---turning me into a mermaid was absolutely the right thing to do!!

72 HOURS: A Very Strange Love Story
(with GLOO!)
Laika Pupkino - 2018
Part Two of Four

.

DAY TWO:

I woke up in a bed that wasn't my own but that I certainly recognized.

And as I came more fully awake I remembered that this actually was my bed, and my bedroom, and had been for the past 24 hours...

I'd left the keys to my old place under the concrete frog in the planter box like my landlady had instructed when I'd shut its door for the last time and caught an Uber ride here at 4:30 in the morning yesterday. My one bedroom in Tustin was far from the worst apartment in OC, but it was a dump and a hovel compared my new home in Jacinto Springs, which had been the only house for miles around until orange groves gave way to a neighborhood of big fancy houses on one and two acre lots owned by some of Riverside County's richest citizens...

I was always amazed by how quiet it was here. According to the clock on the wall I'd slept until almost nine, without being woken by somebody's car alarm going off for no reason, or the couple in the next apartment starting yet another day with an argument. And wherever my boyfriend had got off to I couldn't hear him either. The door to the master bath stood three-quarters shut with the light on behind it...

“Greg? You in there?”

Apparently not...

It was kind of cold in here. The sliding glass door leading out at our mermaid-friendly backyard was wide open; and while it looked like the tropics out there the temperature had dropped to well below torrid in the hours before dawn.

I lay there trying to remember the dream I'd been having just before waking. It seemed important that I remember it but I couldn't recall a single detail. All that remained from it was a feeling, but it was a good feeling.

The big wall-mounted TV was on, with the sound off. David Tennant was standing on some windswept cliff in a suit + tie, conversing with a police woman in one of those British checkerboard cop hats while gazing out across a small seaside village. I looked around frantically for the remote to turn the volume up, until I realized he wasn't Who I thought he was. Tennant had somehow been drained of all the wit and energy and boyish charm he was usually brimming with, and just looked depressed about everything. Probably because he was stuck with being a mere human in this series- a feeling I understood all too well. I gave up searching for the remote.

“Hey Greg! You around?” I hollered more loudly, and was about to holler again when I heard a faint: “Be there in a minute!”

Our house wasn't as huge as the three story behemoths some of our neighbors lived in, but size isn't everything. Where most of their opulent trappings had just been stapled on, this sprawling 1940's ranch house was the real deal. With a utilitarian (yet quaintly retro) kitchen the size of my old apartment, five bedrooms (two with fireplaces), four bathrooms, a glass greenhouse atrium that now housed an indoor pool (actually a continuation of our outdoor one, with a gate-thing that could be closed in winter), an attached two-car garage; and an immense living room with beams 16 inches thick holding up its high, slanting ceiling, and a big fireplace- the concrete and river stone chimney of which helped decorate the wall above it.

It was like the main room of some hunting lodge, only instead of having the dusty heads of dead animals hanging all over, it had mermaid-themed paintings, sculptures and tapestries; plus the bowsprit and figurehead from an old sailing ship, which wasn't in the shape of a mermaid (unless she was hiding a tail under that poofy-sleeved white dress) but she was pretty cool.

But the best thing about the place was our backyard, with the big gorgeous fake lagoon surrounded by tropical landscaping, which I could see part of through the open sliding glass door. The water in it came from a natural spring at the back end of our property, which used to just flow into Citrus Creek and from there to the San Jacinto River and then I guess Lake Elsinore. I suspect that Greg had to grease a few palms down at the county Water Conservation District to obtain that permit to divert it through our lagoon on its way to the creek. And we were now responsible for any contaminants that showed up in the creek's water, so I guess adding bubble bath to our lagoon is out of the question.

A twelve foot wide sheet of water poured continuously into it from a fake rock overhang on the faux sandstone island that reared up from the lagoon as big as a house. And that shadowed space behind the waterfall I knew to be the entrance to a dimly lit but warm and inviting grotto, its rough-hewn ceiling dotted by colored spotlights and a pair of big rattan ceiling fans for summertime. A smaller waterfall at the back of the fake cavern glowed mysteriously from blue lights hidden behind it. The grotto also has a landlubber's entrance---a tunnel leading in from the side of the mountain---and I'd walked through when it was still under construction, but hadn't seen it since it was finished and the lagoon was filled.

Swimming beneath our as-yet-unnamed waterfall into the grotto was going to be the first mermaid-type thing I did in my new life. My transformation might have started 24 hours ago when I was GLOO'd into this tail covered in beautiful sparkling emerald green scales; but I wasn't going to officially consider myself a fishgirl until 8:00 Monday morning- the magic hour when the GLOO! would harden so totally that no solvent on Earth would be able to remove it.

I was sick of just pretending to be a mermaid, like I had been doing every chance I got over the past couple of years with a cheaper, less authentic-looking mermaid tail I had. Wearing that tail had always looked and felt so right; but somehow it was never enough. Not when I always knew I would have to take it off at some point and return to life as a human. I had to admit that living as a female human was ten times better than as the boy I'd grudgingly presented as for the first 22 years of my life, but the human Lori still felt like a distorted reflection of the real me.

I know most people would consider me mentally ill for believing I'm some half-human creature out of mythology. But I couldn't base my whole life on appeasing their narrow minds and uncharitable hearts, when my only reward for doing that seemed to be some tentative promise that they wouldn't call me a weirdo (unless they found some other reason to do so, and they usually did...). A mermaid was who I was; and I needed to be one---permanently and forever---if I was ever going to feel authentic and whole!

And while being the only mermaid in a world of humans might be a lonely thing, I was blessed with having Greg in my life; a man who loved me as much as I loved him, and if I was as deluded and insane then so was he. Greg had no desire to be a mermaid himself, or even a merman, but he had a total thing for my kind- to a point where regular women with legs instead of fish tails did very little for him.

When his wife Marcie---who was quite vain about her looks---realized he was finding her less and less attractive, and then found out why, this caused a resentment that led to their divorce and her trying to take him for everything he owned for “emotional cruelty” and a lot of made up physical abuse. But luckily she wasn't very credible and only wound up with half of everything he owned except his construction company (a settlement Greg felt was reasonable); and her attempts to smear him as a dangerous deranged pervert mostly fell on deaf ears. Anyone who knew Greg automatically dismissed her wilder statements, and while they might have found the one true claim she'd made a bit peculiar (“Mermaids?! Really??”) they liked him anyway...

But my sweetie and I were on the same page about mermaids. He was as taken with the idea of sharing his life and his bed with a real live honest-to-God mermaid as I was by the idea of being one; which made us enthusiastic partners in this strange and wonderful adventure.

I think we were both knew that a relationship based entirely on a species identity disorder and a corresponding fetish would probably be a recipe for disaster, but we had much more going for us than just our shared obsession. He and I truly loved each other, and not only that we really liked each other; and we were fortunate that we had the financial means and just enough real estate to turn our folie á deux into reality...

46 Hours, 33 minutes.... I could hardly wait!

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

And now I heard him coming up the hallway, whistling some jaunty nautical-sounding tune.

He entered the bedroom in his pajama bottoms and a white terrycloth Westin Hotels bathrobe carrying a breakfast-in-bed tray that held my coffee mug, a glass of orange juice and a plate with toast, bacon and big fat omelet on it.

“What's this?” I asked. Not the smartest question I'd ever asked.

He bowed and clicked his bare heels together, “Breakfast for Her Royal Highness!”

He was teasing me about the childhood fantasies of being a Mermaid Princess I'd told him about, back before we'd ever met face to face or had even spoken on the phone. We'd just begun corresponding by e-mail, and the only thing each of us really knew about the other was that we both loved many of the same mermaid stories at an online amateur fiction site called Mer-Mania.

'That's not so strange,' he had written back, 'Every little girl dreams of being a princess...'

It would be another year before I confessed that technically I'd never actually been a little girl.

I wriggled clumsily up to the padded headboard at the head of the bed and leaned against it. There was only one plate on the tray. “Aren't you eating?”

“I had Grape Nuts. I've already had my eggs for this week.”

Good, I nodded. Bacon and eggs weren't really Greg's friend. I asked, “And you don't mind watching me eat something you can't?”

“No, I like it. Somebody might as well enjoy herself...”

“Until I get fat and my tail splits open.”

“You won't. I've seen the way you eat. Even when you claim you're famished you eat about a third and wind up just picking at it,” he said and started to set the tray down across my tail, but then paused. “Or do you need to use the bathroom first.”

“I'm good. I managed to use that bedpan thing at around four. It's full, I hid it under the bed,” I said; then pointed at the sliding glass door. “But right now what I'd really like is if you could shut that!”

“It is a bit chilly. I should've thought of that,” he said, setting the tray on the dresser and it shut, “We're not quite into summer here yet so it can get kind of cool at night. Did you want the heater on?”

“That's okay. But could you get me my Where's Waldo sweater?” I asked. Greg had named it this, even though its stripes were pink and white instead of red and white.

He nodded, opened closet's left-side door partway and found it easily, since only a few of the things hanging in there were mine. This sweater, two dresses, three blouses, two skirts, my fringed suede “cowgirl” jacket, a hanging metal contraption for sticking purses on---left over from the former Mrs. Greg---that had my one purse on it; plus a few items of male clothing still in there from back when I feeling cowardly and insecure about presenting as a girl (On trips into town, I mean. I never once felt insecure about looking female enough when it was just us...).

He tossed it to me. “You going to be okay wearing it after yesterday? It's a bit snug.”

“I think snug might actually be better,” I said as I leaned forward and shrugged into it.

The nascent breasts four months of hormone therapy had blessed me with (a very small blessing) had been itchy and sore before I caught my Uber ride here yesterday, so I'd decided to wear a very baggy shirt from the clothes I'd boxed up for the Goodwill. But the looseness of it had actually made things worse, since it was rubbing across them every time I moved; and by the time I got here they were noticeably red and irritated. But going topless for the past 24 hours had worked wonders.

“Yes, snug is definitely better,” I grinned when I saw my reflection in the closet's mirrored door. The stripes crossing my chest were no longer ruler straight like they'd been when I'd worn this sweater on a visit back in March, but appeared slightly contoured, so that I looked less like Waldo and more like his late-blooming kid sister. I stuck my chest out for Greg, “I think you're right about me starting to develop.”

“I told you. It's just going to take time,” Greg assured me, just like my doctor had last week. Although I'm not sure if Greg even knew there was such a thing as Hormone Replacement Therapy before he met me. But he'd googled and wikipedia'd everything he could find on the topic since then, probably looking for side effects to worry about. He asked, “Are you sure you don't want the heater on?”

“If I need it I'll just grab the blanket there,” I said, nodding toward where it lie bunched up at the foot of the bed. I leaned forward and rubbed my hands up and down my tail, saying, “But what's weird is how this whole part of me down here got as cold as the rest of me; Which I wouldn't have expected with all this stuff this thing's padded with.”

“'Vitaform- the miracle space-age polymer that's the nearest thing to natural flesh',” said Greg, quoting the big fat user's manual that had come with the tail. He said, “Well if your tail got cold at 51 degrees at least we know you won't be sweltering in there when it gets up to a hundred at the end of next month.”

“But with as dense as this shit is I don't see how it wouldn't insulate,” I said. I started prodding the gleaming scales along the outside edge of my tail with my finger, feeling the spongy give of the vitaform beneath them. I stopped. “That's weird!”

“What is?”

“I felt that!”

“Well you do have legs inside there.”

“Yeah, but my leg should be over here,” I said, and poked a spot closer to the tail's center. Then I poked the side again, and then a few other places, such as right in the middle where two inches of Vitaform gel separated my right and left leg. I said, “It's really weird, but it all feels the same. Like I'm poking myself!”

“So obviously the material shifts, transferring the motion to the nearest part of you in there,” he theorized, and said, “Close your eyes.”

I did, knowing what he was going to do. He started poking different parts of my tail---sometimes hard and sometimes lightly---and asking, “Did you feel that? Did you feel that?”; and also trying to fool me by asking this when he wasn't poking at me. I assumed he was finished when he clucked, “Well I'll be damned...”

I opened my eyes, “So how did I do, Doc? Did I pass the test?”

He shook his head. “I guess so... You knew when I was poking you, even gently and clear down past your feet. But you didn't feel it when I just ran my hand over the scales. That would've been hard to explain!”

“I think I did, though.”

“Then why didn't you say so when I asked you?”

“Because it didn't feel like poking; that's what I was waiting for. And it was so faint and phantom-y I couldn't be sure I wasn't imagining it. But I thought: 'that's his fingers there...' You dragged them across my ankles, then in like a circle around my knees, then from here to right here,” I said, sliding my hand up my tail's padded hip, which felt just like doing this on my bare skin.

“I'll be damned!” he repeated,”This stuff must really transfer force, or pressure. Like some kind of pressure super-conductor, although I'm sure there's a better word for it.”

“Maybe that's what's 'space age' about it,” I said, “Unless it's the GLOO! that's doing it somehow.”

“How could it? GLOO! is just glue.”

“You're probably right,” I shrugged, but I couldn't help thinking about my friend Rae, who worked in Research & Development at the job I'd just retired from at the age of 24; and some of the bizarre theories she had about the controversial adhesive.

“So then you still want to go through with this?” asked Greg.

“Are you kidding?! I want to do this more than ever now! And I still have 46 hours to change my mind. If my legs start dissolving like they're in acid or something I'll be sure to let you know.”

I snagged the blanket and draped it over my tail, and Greg lowered the breakfast-in-bed table down over me. Doting on me like a mother hen, he picked up my plate and coffee mug and said, “These are both probably cold by now. I'll give them 40 seconds in the microwave..”

Such a sweetheart! What did I ever do to deserve a guy like this?!

"I'm sure they're fine," I said as I grabbed them back from him. “You know, if you keep waiting on me hand and tail like this I'm gonna get spoiled rotten and become totally insufferable!

“Oh I have no intention of spoiling you! After I go pick up your chair on Monday I'm going to put my new live-in maid to work!” he teased, and even did the whip-crack thing with his hand.

Which was exactly what I wanted to hear. Not the being a maid part (As much as I liked white lace this wasn't a fantasy I was particularly into; And besides we had maids that came once a week...) but just because I was eager to start doing my share of the work around here; since I'd essential become the housewife of a single-income household. I asked, “Did you say you're gonna go get my wheelchair on Monday?”

“Yeah, it's sitting down at the store with a red sold tag on it.”

I didn't know anything about wheelchairs. And none that I'd looked at on line had seemed any more stylish than any of the others, so when I was looking through Hemet Valley Medical Supply's online catalog I just chose one that looked usable and that I could afford. I know there are people who are kinky over wheelchairs, and who when selecting one would have been guided by the same sort of aesthetic preferences and attention to detail (“Those are some sexy rivets in the stainless steel there!”) that had told me what I did or didn't want in a fish tail, and when I'd found the perfect one...

But a wheelchair wasn't anything special to me, it was simply the most practical way for a fishgirl to get around on land. Nor did the idea of never being able to walk again hold any special appeal for me. I wasn't a “trans-abled” (which is what such people call themselves) human; I was a perfectly able bodied mermaid.

It was like being a vampire. None of the three serious would-be vampires I'd met in my life had named not being able to go out in the day as one of the main reasons for their wanting to be turned. It just goes with the rest of it. But when being an immortal bloodsucker without a pulse seems like the best thing in the world to you, and you know deep down that it's who you truly are inside, then being confined to an entirely nocturnal existence is a small price to pay for getting to be your authentic un-dead self...

“So did you sleep good last night?” asked Greg.

“I sure did,” I said, “And I...”

“And you what?”

And I'd just remembered something. “I had the strangest dream though, just before I woke up.”

“What was it about?”

“I don't remember.”

“Than how do you know it was a strange dream?”

“That's something I've been trying to figure out all morning. All I know is it left me with this feeling; a feeling like-”

I was interrupted by the front doorbell, its four tubular brass bells chiming the Westminster quarters.

For as affluent as it was, the neighborhood called Jacinto Springs was not a gated community. If people wanted gates and walls for their one and two acre lots they could provide them themselves. We had, but only for the backyard, and this was only so we could have some privacy back there when we were thrashing around naked. But our whole desert-landscaped front yard was wide open. I said, “I wonder who that is at this hour.”

“Probably the damned Technos again,” again sighed Greg, “I'll go run 'em off...”

The infamous "Church of Technotology" maintained a spooky desert compound about three miles from us. They always chose the weekends to send their drones out into the neighboring communities, to knock on people's doors and invite them to a free brainwashing session in the one building on the property that outsiders were allowed into. The 20-acre complex looked like something out of a James Bond film, complete with a constantly patrolling paramilitary security force, a monorail system, and what a number of YouTube conspiracy vloggers claim is a chemical weapons refinery; so the Technotologists clearly had a lot of their A-list celebrity members' money.

And now they wanted our money too. Plus our hearts and souls and every last shred of our capacity for independent thought.

As Greg headed off down the hall I hollered, “Squirt some GLOO! on their mojo-meter and ram it up their ass!”

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Greg was gone a while. The silent television up on the wall must have been tuned to BBC America, because now it was showing a sitcom about an uncouth working class family living in one of those horrible run-down high rise apartment buildings that they would call the Projects over here. The shiftless thirty-something eldest son had brought a horse into their tiny flat, that seemed to be part of his latest crazy get rich scheme; a scheme the overweight Mother---who was obviously this family's voice of reason---was listening to skeptically. I thought: 'I should really look for that remote, if only to turn this off...'

I'd managed to finish most of my omelet when Greg shouted from down the hall: “Well it wasn't our creepy cult neighbors.”

“Then who was it?!”

“I don't know. By the time I got there they were speeding off in a van. But they left this on the porch,”
he said as he rolled a wheelchair into the room ahead of him. “Well, it corners nice...”

“Did Hemet Valley Medical Supply deliver it for us?” I started to ask, but then noticed all the odd things about it. “This isn't the chair I bought!”

“No, it sure isn't.”

“Then where did it come from?”

He shrugged, “I guess we have a mystery wheelchair donor.”

The wheelchair I'd ordered had been basic and clunky looking, and I'd selected it mostly on the basis of cost, since---like my tail, electrolysis and various body modifications---I'd been adamant about paying for all the parts of my new mermaid life that had to do with my physical self with my own modest savings. This thing was very stylish, with slanted wheels, and looked like a wheelchair out of a James Bond film. It had no motor that I could see but did have all kinds of levers and gizmos that did God-knows-what...

I looked suspiciously at the bulky square mechanism the seat rested on. “Is this an ejector seat?!”

“Sure looks like it could be,” said Greg, “Have you made any enemies lately?”

I shrugged. “A few loudmouth detractors at work since I came out. But I'm sure they're just glad I'm gone.”

He held up an envelope; a pink greeting card sized one that was stuffed so full of papers they were sticking out of the end in a fat wad, and said, “This was sitting on it.”

“What's it say?”

“Didn't read it. It's addressed to you,” he said, handing it to me.

When I saw LORi the MERMAiD!!! written on the front in purple ink, I gasped. “Bless her foxy little heart... she DIDN'T!”

“Who didn't do what?”

“My friend Rae who works at Yoyodyne. I think she built this!”

“She makes wheelchairs?!”

“Or maybe only customized it, but it's definitely from her,” I said, and held up the envelope, “You see how she dotted the i's and the bottoms of the exclamation points with little hearts? Last week she was making fun of me for doing that. Telling me: 'I swear, Lori! You're such a Girly McGirlface!'”

“Really?” he chuckled, like he found my girly little hearts amusing too, “What were you writing?”

“Uh, you know... just doodling in the break room,” I said vaguely, feeling silly now about how I'd filled a whole page with:

♥♥♥ LORi + GREG! ♥♥♥
♥♥♥♥ GREG + LORi!!! ♥♥♥♥
♥GLOO!♥GLOO!♥GLOO!♥GLOO!♥GLOO!♥
♥♥♥♥♥♥ MERMAiD LUV 4-EVER!!! ♥♥♥♥♥♥
...that I'd hardly even realized I was doing.

“Funny she drove all this way and didn't stick around,” said Greg, “I would've wanted to meet her.”

“I wish she had too. But I guess she figured this 72 Hours is kind of like our mermaid honeymoon, and she didn't want to intrude.”

“So you told her where we live?” he asked. “It's okay if you did, but I got the impression you were being hush-hush about all this. I mean with your Hawaii story and all...”

“Y'know, I meant to give her my new address but it slipped my mind. But I did file a change of address with the post office; she must've got it from that.”

“She hacked the U.S. Postal Service?!”

“Maybe, or she hacked a spy satellite. She's a total mad scientist genius---chemist, physicist, wheelchair designer---she can pretty much do anything. It's a good thing she never wanted to take over the world, or we'd all be speaking Furry.”

“Speaking what?”

“Never mind, that was a joke,” I said. I pulled out the folded note Rae had included and read it aloud: “Lori, my luv: Sorry I didn't get this to you in time for your farewell party. But here's the present I promised. For being a good friend. For never judging. For helping make those two years we worked there together fun. For being you... A fish might not need a bicycle but when she's on land she needs some kind of wheels; so here are yours. Enjoy. This was cobbled together from a couple of my failed prototypes; but it should be better than anything you could buy. Rather than have to write up a manual for it the blueprints should explain its different features + how they work-”

“Blueprints?”

“I guess that's what these are,” I said and handed him the mass of paper that filled the envelope. As he sat down on the bed and started opening the giant sheets of blueprint paper on it I continued reading: “Anything you don't understand, you got my addy. You're my beta tester for this model, so let me know what you like and what you don't. And since it is a protoype, please eat these blueprints after studying them [have enclosed condiment for said]-”

I shook the last thing in the envelope out onto the bed, two packets of Taco Bell hot sauce. “A little joke. But she is does sound serious about we should destroy them somehow. And then she just signs off with: 'Be Strange but don't be a stranger. Rae.'”

Greg shook his head, “So she just whips you up a wheelchair. You made some really good friends at that job!”

“I never told you about Rae?”

“A little. You told me you had two best friends there---Rae from R&D, and I think the other one's Kelli---who both surprised you with how supportive they were about your plans to marry some decrepit old gray-haired deviated pervert you met on line, and be his live-in pet mermaid-”

“HEY!” I scolded him for putting himself down like this. “Your hair's not that gray!”

“I see what you did there,” he muttered, giving me a smirk like 'Don't be a damn smart-ass!”; and said, “But you did say how nice these two co-workers were when you told in them about your plans, when some of the others you confided in freaked the hell out; and that not being able to see Kelli and Rae every day was the one thing you regretted about leaving that job. We should have them over sometime. I mean we do have the best pool this side of Palm Springs.”

“Really?! I was going to ask you if I could.”

He held up both hands. “This is your home. These are your friends. You don't need my permission to invite friends over. I trust your judgment. It's not like you're going to be bringing the Manson Family home for dinner!”

“The What Family?” I asked. Sometimes Greg mentioned things from 'before my time' that I'd never heard of. And other times I just pretended I hadn't, to tease him. He wasn't buying this one.

“Or the Barrow Gang... Or Lizzie Borden, who I dated for a while, by the way. You know, because I'm such a decrepit old... What was that you called me?”

He was using his goofy Mr. Magoo voice again. I giggled, “I didn't call you that; you did!”

“Oh. We'll you see? That comes with the territory, me bein' such a senile old... What was my name again?”

“Oh come on! You're acting like you're ancient. You're 58! Astronauts go into space at 58. And not just once---to see if he'd explode or something---there's been so many that it's not even a novelty anymore. They send them up there because they're experienced at what they do! The same reason they raised the retirement age for airline pilots from 60 to 65. Not to mention all the people 58 and a lot older who have climbed Mt. Everest!”

I shrugged out of my stripey sweater. It was already too warm in here to be wearing it. A swirl of graphics on the TV caught my eye. The British sitcom had ended, replaced now by a spinning globe with giant letters orbiting it spelling out BBC WORLD NEWS; then three serious people sitting behind a big serious angular blue formica desk-thing, who were preparing to give us the bad news...

I told Greg, “I think you're only feeling funny about being 58 because of us, like it makes what we're doing improper or something. Although if we were really worried about being proper I think our age difference would be about the least of our worries; which are only worries if we worry about what other people are gonna think. Anybody who would see us together and think there's anything unwholesome or inequitable going on; Well then they obviously don't know the first thing about us- who we are or how we wound up together! I didn't fall in love with an age and you didn't fall in love with a genetic sex. We both overcame our hangups about minor stuff like that because you and me, we're like the missing piece to each other! We belong together! And if us finding each other wasn't some serious cosmic-destiny shit, I don't know what is!”

“I know! I feel the same way. But how long-”

“Oh, that! You mean the: 'It's all good for right now but what about in ten years?' thing?”

He said somberly, “Realistically, it is something to think about.”

“Realistically? When have we ever been realistic?! My God, just look at us! I mean look at me: Wheeeeeeee I'm a MERMAID! I squealed as I started wriggling around in a way I knew he loved, “And look at you, getting all turned on about me being a mermaid!”

He shrugged, grinning despite himself. “I guess we are kind of absurd.”

“Kind of? There's not one thing about us that's realistic, and yet this is the realest thing either of us have ever had!” I said, then gestured at the silent news program on the TV---where an orange-tinted ogre was standing behind a podium with an eagle-emblem on the front of it; making grotesque Mussolini faces and looking infinitely pleased with himself---and said, “And the world has gotten so ridiculous we fit right in! You and me, we're the way of the future! We're the way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future! The way of the future-”

Greg bust up laughing when he realized I was imitating Leonard Di Caprio in one of hix favorite films, where Di Caprio played a famous 20th century businessman named Howard Stark, who had a neurological disease that made him get stuck saying the same thing over and over. And Greg---who usually wasn't quite this silly---started quoting another OCD incident from the movie, grabbing two of Rae's blueprint pages up off the bed and rattling them at me, going: “Show me all the blueprints... Show me all the blueprints... Show me all the blueprints... Show me all the blueprints-”

Caught up in the weirdness of this moment I impulsively lunged at Greg- or tried to. With this tail I had now it wasn't the mightiest or most graceful lunge, and I only wound up halfway in his arms. He pulled me the remaining halfway to him and we fell back laughing insanely.

As our tittering subsided I looked him in the eyes and said, “So let's not worry about in ten year. Ten years might not ever get here. For you, for me, for any of us. All we have is right now. And right now, you know what I want to do?”

“I have a pretty good idea,” he said and started kissing me, in a hungry way that told me he wanted to do it too. And so we did.

We did it mermaid style, until the sea cows came home...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

It was almost noon when Greg let out a guttural cry and after one final sustained and straining thrust rolled off of me and onto his back.

I might have been worried, the way he was gasping, but he was laughing. “Holy FUCK! This just keeps getting better and better!”

“Yeah it does,” I grinned, rising up onto my elbows. I was gasping a bit too, not so much from exertion but because I was finally getting some air. “So you wanna go again?”

“You've got... gotta be joking!” he panted, watching the ceiling fan spin lazily above us. “It's gonna be a couple minutes... 'til I can even move... My God, you're insatiable!”

“It was easier for me. You were the one doing all the work.”

“You did your share,” he said, turning his head to stare at me in awe, “How the hell did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Keep going like that! I mean don't you need to breathe?!”

I knew what he meant. What we'd just done had been my favorite sex act, and if anybody deserved the label cocksucker I did. But I'd never understood why this was supposedly such a terrible thing to be. I loved doing it, and Greg and my three boyfriends before him had all remarked on how good I was at it.

It might have been the fact that it felt so right to me that accounted for my low gag reflex (something else they'd each remarked on), but suddenly this morning my response threshold wasn't just low, it was non-existent! And discovering this I'd really outdone myself. It was glorious, being able to give myself over to what I enjoyed so much without a single time-out!

His spent member was right where I could reach over and give it a squeeze, making a last drop of nectar well up from it. I said, “I guess not... I guess I needed this in me more. You know how oral I am!”

“Oral?! You're esophageal!” he laughed, “I was worried, you were going to asphyxiate if I didn't ease up for a while, but you wouldn't let me! You kept holding on, pulling me down into you. I don't see how any human being could go that long without air!”

“Maybe it's because I'm not a human. Because I'm finally becoming the mermaid I always felt like I was!”

I sometimes suspected that Greg was less committed to the delusional part of our new life together than I was. That in the rational part of his mind he thought what any sane individual would---that a person couldn't really be a mermaid---and that what we were embarking on was merely a very immersive role-play game. I suspected that for him a really good fantasy was enough. And that if he'd never said this, it was because he knew that challenging my belief that I was a mermaid would wound me as deeply as telling me or any other transgender woman: “Nope! Sorry... You got them big old hairy Y chromosomes; you'll always be a guy!”

But now he was looking at me like his own bedrock beliefs had been upended, and he was thinking: 'Holy Shit!! Maybe she IS turning into a mermaid!!' Because my exponentially improved deep-throating skills weren't the only strange part of our making love this morning.

As I'd said earlier I'd noticed how sensitive my tail seemed to be as I poked and prodded at the spongy stuff encasing my legs; And it seemed even more so now. When we were taking a break at about midpoint in our lovemaking Greg had tried an experiment:

“Okay,” he instructed me, “Let's try this again... I'm going to trace letters on different parts of your tail with my finger, and you try to tell me what I'm spelling.”

I closed my eyes and started reciting back what I felt: “Let's see... That's an M... and there's a C- no wait! It's an E... and there's an R... and another M- Oh for fuck's sake!! I could've guessed that one!”

Which got us both laughing.

But I'd definitely felt these four letters far more clearly than those shapes time he'd traced on my scales just an hour or two ago; with nothing vague or ghost-like about the sensation this time. I said, “You must have been pushing harder than when you did this before.”

“No, much lighter. I was hardly pressing down at all. see?” he said, and slid the same finger down my hairless arm, as lightly as dragging a feather across my skin.

Which was baffling to both of us. And when he decided he wanted to give me the equivalent of a foot massage by kneading and stroking my tail's rubbery semi-translucent caudal fin I agreed, figuring 'Whatever floats my kinky sweetheart's boat!'

But I'd felt that too, as if the synthetic material it was cast from had a million nerve endings in it leading straight to my brain!

This was simply impossible, since this fin had no vitaform in it and was a good fifteen centimeters beyond where the toes of my angled feet should have been inside there; But suddenly I was feeling hands on what felt as much like a part of my body as anything up on my human half, and it was so ticklish I started giggling uncontrollably. My whole tail was thrashing and bucking like a fish out of water, and Greg had to stop before I peed the bed!

So something was definitely happening. Neither of us dared to say it in so many words, it was such a crazy notion; but it was as if this artificial tail I'd been gloo'd into was actually turning into part of my body! And if it was all just a product of my imagination---of a mentally disturbed individual's pitiful delusions---then I say: BRING ON THE MADNESS!!!

Greg said, “I don't suppose I need to keep asking you if you still want to go through with this.”

"I can't imagine anything that could make me change my mind at this point, but keep it up. It's your duty to make sure I've thought this through. And for me, being questioned about this over and over is like getting ID'd at a bar. It might be a little annoying at the time; but you sort of miss it after they stop.”

“They've stopped carding you? That's hard to believe. I wouldn't be able to tell if you're 24 or 19...”

“If I went out as Bill Winstead again they probably would,” I said, my tongue stumbling over that dead and unlamented name I hadn't uttered in months, “But when we go out now it's five or six of us girls from work, descending on Tequila Junction at Fashion Island Mall en mass, and they hardly ever do.”

“A gaggle of 20-something hotties is always good for business in a place like that. The guys go where the girls are.”

“Hotties? Well Kelli is totally gorgeous, Mary and Sara are real pretty, and Rae... she's what you'd have to call an exotic beauty. So I guess collectively and on the average we'd qualify as hot; some of us making up for what others lack,” I said, frowning at the Skinny Minnie in the mirror, then smiling at how much better she looked as a mermaid. I affectionately rubbed my hand across the hair on Greg's chest, surreptitiously feeling his pulse. “So how you doing? You recovered yet?”

He sat up on the side of the bed, “Enough to do this, but not enough to... you know.”

“We can you know some more later,” I said, licking the goo (not GLOO!) off my sticky palms and fingers. “But right now let's check out this fancy wheelchair...”

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

With the help of Rae's blueprints we investigated my chair's various features. Its canted wheels had a clever pair of disc brakes worked by a Campagnolo brake lever, I guess so you could come to a stop if you were zipping down a mountain highway at 100 mph. And what we thought might be an ejection seat was actually a scissor jack device---worked by a lever that you yanked back and forth---that could raise you up on a stack of metal X's so you were as tall as a six foot person, allowing you to reach the highest shelves in a grocery store, and when you held a button set in the lever down it eased you back down however far you wanted with a pneumatic hissing noise. But a scribbled notation on the blueprints warned: 'DO NOT ELEVATE > 20 CM WHEN IN MOTION!'; probably because this would raise your center of gravity and make the chair prone to tipping over.

The chair had a cup holder with an adjustable aperture for holding anything from a shot glass to a Big Gulp cup, that could be folded down out of the way when not in use. It had quite a few other bells and whistles, including a bell and a whistle.

“I can see why you like this girl,” said Greg, making the chair's cheap little bicycle bell go: Brrrring-g-g! Brrrring-g-g! “She's got your sense of humor.”

“Or I've got hers,” I said, “But that thing must weigh a ton, with all that extra stuff she's got on there. I might have been better off with the one I was gonna buy. Or bought, I should say. Do you think the medical supply place will give me my money back for that?”

“They should, since it never even left the store,” he said, then lifted Rae's chair off the floor by its armrests. Set it back down. “Surprisingly, this chair's not a whole lot heavier than that one. Whatever isn't titanium on here is made of graphite. Even if she built it all herself this thing must've cost a bundle just for materials...”

“I'm sure she managed to bill the company for it.”

“Jeez! I just had to fire somebody for doing that; Bought himself an RV with his expense account and wrote it down as something else. I hope she doesn't get in trouble!”

“Rae lives for trouble. Not that she'd get in trouble for this. She's singlehandedly made the Big Y millions- No exaggeration,” I said, and pointed at the chair's back and seat, “What is that? Leather? I've never seen leather like that.”

He ran his hand over the seat. “It's eel skin!”

“Of course,” I laughed, “It ties in with the aquatic theme!”

“And so does this,” said Greg, spinning the chair around so I could see the back of it. The seat's eelskin back was slung between two upright posts, like the canvas back of a director's chair. There was a real dried starfish Gloo'd to it, that had been gold-plated somehow. He smiled, “I guess she knew you like starfish.”

“That, and she's telling me I'm a star,” I said, suddenly getting a little teary-eyed. How did you repay a kindness this thoughtful? This definitely called for some sort of thank you gift, something bigger and more special than just the plush toy fox I'd got her for Christmas... But what?!

Greg wheeled the chair up to me, “Give it a try. I'll hold it steady for you.”

“No. Just put the brakes on and get out of the way,” I said, and when he did I grabbed onto the armrests and hefted myself up by them...

...and now I was backwards for sitting in my chair. My tail was no good for standing with but it was plenty good at being in the way. Greg reached out a hand to help me, “Here!”

“No, I gotta learn to do this,” I said, and managed none-too-gracefully to get myself turned around and seated in it. Then I undid the brakes and started wheeling it forward as fast as I could...

“Where you off to in such a hurry?”

“Bathroom- I really gotta pee!”

“Do you need any-”

“NO!!”

I used the handrails Greg had bolted to the sides of the little alcove the toilet sat in to clamber onto it, figuring out that the best way to do this was to start by grabbing the handrail one side with both hands, hefting myself onto seat by it and then using the other rail to get myself turned myself the rest of the way. This method also worked for transferring my ass back into the chair when I was done.

It was my first big lesson in being able to get around on land without legs, and as I rolled back into the bedroom I was sure there would be more.

42 Hours, 15 minutes...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Lunch was leftovers from last night's Thai dinner. The last of the red curry and almost the whole styrofoam tray-box of pineapple rice. Keeping with his diet, Greg kept picking the cashews out of his pineapple rice as he found them and dropping them on mine, his hand going back and forth like a crane.

The takeout tasted as good as it had last night, and the curry sat in my stomach glowing warmly. I said, “That's a pretty good restaurant, but why do they call it 'Thai Me Up, Thai Me Down'? Does Riverside have like a big S&M subculture that a name like that would appeal to?”

“Well I do know one couple like that who live around here, but no; It's a pun on the name of a film Pedro Almodovar made back in the nineties.”

“That's pretty obscure. A 90's Mexican movie!”

“Almodovar's Spanish. I think you'd like him.”

“Wait a minute... Didn't he do that one where Antonio Banaderas is this crazy plastic surgeon who kidnaps some young guy, gives him face surgery and breast implants and turns him into a copy of his dead wife? That was a seriously fucked up movie! I was in high school, and one night when my parents were gone---because you know how they were!---I watched it on HBO. I didn't realize it was a horror film, and thought it might help me figure out this transgender stuff, and who I was. But it was just sick! I hated it!”

“That one was awfully dark for Almodovar. But there's a comedy by him I can almost guarantee you'll love. We can watch it tonight if you want.”

“All right,” I said skeptically; reminding myself that I'd been skeptical about King of Hearts last night, and I really enjoyed it. So hopefully this nameless flick would be as good. And if I didn't like it I could always bale on it and start the paperback I'd bought for a buck...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Back in the bedroom I realized that I hadn't unpacked yet, so I did that. Since I only had two small bags didn't take long at all.

I rolled myself around the room, appreciating how easily this chair glided. I put my laptop on one of room's two little identical computer desks with a printer on a small table between them. I set my phone and charger on the end table on my side of the bed, hunching down to plug them in. Then I hung my sweater and the empty laptop bag up in the closet using my chair's scissor lift.

The larger bag I just dumped out onto my side of the bed, but gently, because of one particular item. Out tumbled Sharpies, scrunchies, Colgate and dental floss, my library book sale paperback (it had a pair of blonde mermaids on the cover who appeared to be twins...), a yo-yo I didn't remember ever owning, my cheap little Nerf-ball breast forms, an amber plastic bottle full of estradiol pills; a dozen or so et ceteras, and what was probably my most valuable possession now that I'd sold my car: A sculpture of a mermaid who was bent into a shape like a letter C- as if she was swimming in a loop-de-loop for the pure joy of it! She was holding her arms down alongside of her but could have easily reached out and grabbed onto her dolphin-like fluke to form a complete circle if she wasn't made of heavy crystal. Everything about her was clear and sparkling and smooth and flowing like she was water herself...

The scupture was over ten inches in diameter and quite heavy, with an anatomically incorrect flat spot that was obviously its base. I set it lovingly on the dresser, my contribution of our home's mermaid art.

Greg was lying on the bed engrossed in a college basketball game, but this caught his attention.

“She's beautiful!” he said in a reverent whisper, “Where did you get that?”

“At the going away party they threw me at work on Thursday, my last day. I think they were preparing it since I gave them my two weeks notice- it was this big luau! The guys were all wearing flip flops and Hawaiian shirts and the girls all wore grass skirts—well, cellophane---and everybody kept joking about 'giving me a lei', hanging them on me until I looked like a Rose Parade float! The few who still had issues with me being Lori now didn't want to lei me, but even they had a good time. Maybe they were glad I'd soon be 3000 miles across the ocean where I couldn't give them any transgender-cooties.”

“So it sounds like they bought your story about moving to Oahu as the reason why you're disappearing off the face of the Earth.”

“Everybody did. My neighbors, my landlady, the guy I sold my car to. It's not like I'm ashamed of what we're doing. I mean it's not illegal---at least I don't think it is---I just don't want to end up on NEWS OF THE WEIRD with all the other Gloo stories- Professor Dicknose, the Octoboob Lady and the Bunnylove Twins!”

“No, I agree. When all it takes for a person to wind up a national news item these days is getting caught on someone's cell phone throwing a tantrum and shouting something sexist or racist or otherwise really uncool, someone as out of the ordinary as a Human Mermaid could wind up a celebrity whether she wanted to or not; So discretion is definitely for the best here. So did you give your parents the moving to Hawaii story-” he started to ask, but then he saw my face. “You didn't tell them anything, did you?”

“It's kind of hard to when they never gave me their new phone number. As far as they're concerned I already fell off the face of the Earth, and they couldn't be happier.”

He sighed. “I'm so sorry they're being like that!”

I sighed. “It is what it is...”

My relationship with John and Marsha Winstead had never been good, but when I came out as trans it plummeted straight down- from bad to worse to non-existent; which is what they finally declared me. I can wish things had gone differently with them. I can wish they were different people. I can garner your sympathy by telling you stories that would make you hate them. OR...

I can recognize that their final act of contempt was the best thing they'd ever given me: An opportunity to start over with a new name, a new sex, a new species, and a new (if smaller) family where I am valued and loved and respected.

'And new friends!,' I remembered as I glanced over and saw the mermaid figurine. Friends who I knew I could break the morose spell that'd fallen over the bedroom just by talking about. They had that power. I said: “But I did tell six people from work what I was really doing.”

“Kelli and Rae and those other girls you were talking about?”

“Yeah, my gaggle,” I grinned (I could easily see our little group embracing this term!) “And where a lot of people got me tacky Hawaiian joke gifts or some last minute thing they grabbed at random, their gifts were all special!”

He nodded toward the crystal mermaid, the wheelchair I was sitting in. “If they're anything like these two I'm sure they're amazing! Rae's letter said she made that chair from two failed prototypes; but I don't see anything 'failed' about it!”

“She probably wanted it to fly,” I shrugged, “Three of them chipped in to get me that mermaid; And Marnie and Sara each gave me a gift card that could be used at the pharmacy at STAY RITE, to help pay for my hormones. They came in a baby shower card that said, 'It's a Girl!!'”

“That's sweet,” said Greg, “So they accept you as a girl and a mermaid?”

I resumed picking up odds and ends from off the bed and putting them away. “Well Kelli warned me that I might be making a terrible mistake; and said I should try living in the tail for a year without the GLOO!; like a Real Life Test for fishgirls. And that would make far more sense to a practical person like Kelli. But like I told her, if I could take it off any time I wanted I wouldn't feel like I was a mermaid, but was just dressing up; So I had to do it this way. After that she just said 'Then I hope having a tail is everything you hope it will be and it makes you happy...' But Rae Droidlander is the one who totally understands my need to be a mermaid, and has been telling me 'Go for it!' from the minute I told her. But then Rae's kind of like I am...”

“Yeah, you kind of let slip that she was trans.”

“She is, but she's like me in other ways too.”

“She's a mermaid?!”

“No. Rae is a fox,” I said, deciding he was going to find out about her anyway when she came to visit.

“You like her, huh? There's that bisexual streak of yours...”

“Well she is really cute. But when I say fox I mean literally. She has the ears and and a big fluffy tail like a red fox. She's thinking of getting little fox whiskers implanted next...”

“She's a 'furry'?”

“I don't think she'd object to the term, but it isn't just a costume she puts on. It's an identity, like me being a mermaid. And like me, she's made being a fox permanent.”

“With GLOO?”

“She's the one who convinced me that if I was serious about becoming mermaid GLOO! was the only way to go. And this was back before the Bunnylove Twins became YouTube stars; before the 'GLOO! Challenge' and the big media outcry about it started. So she's been her Furry self for a while now, and she says she's never regretted it for a minute."

"Well that's good. She'd be pretty well fucked if she did regret it," he said, "And all I can say is your former employer must really love her if they let her come to work like that. I don't see how a person could work wearing one of those big cartoon animal heads. You can't hardly see out of those things, not to mention how damn hot it gets in them!"

"You say that like you've worn one. Did you used to work at Disneyland or something?"

"My dorm mate at UC Irvine was our school's team mascot. He let me try his costume on."

I started giggling. While other colleges had fearsome predators for their mascots---bears or cougars or sharks---the students at University of California Irvine had chosen a more whimsical creature, "Peter the Anteater? Oh my God, you must've been adorable! You should of tried out for that gig."

"Hell no! I couldn't imagine jumping around in an animal costume like that for length of a whole football game, let alone doing what your friend did and GLOO-ing myself into it permanently. Just wearing the head for 20 minutes gave me a sore neck."

"Furlifers like Rae are a little different that your standard furries. Their suits are made for practicality and long-term comfort; and they don't wear those big fake-looking heads. You couldn't even drive a car with one of those stuck on your head. They modify their own head, their own face to look like the animal they're going for, like the Cowardly Lion or those costumes in Cats; And if they GLOO! on a prosthetic animal maw to make their face less flat and human they'll make sure it's one they can breathe and eat and talk with."

Greg shook his head. "That seems like such weird thing to do to yourself; but I guess it's no crazier than what we're doing."

"No it isn't. But here's where it gets weird. Rae can move those new fox ears sitting higher up on her head exactly like a dog or a fox does, and her sense of hearing is incredible. Plus she can wag her prosthetic tail around just like any canine, or whatever foxes are.”

“It must be some sort of trick. Little motors or something.”

“She swears it isn't; and says it's the GLOO! she put it on with that made it possible."

"Oh bullshit."

"Maybe, but she's a beyond-MENSA level genius so maybe she really does know what she's talking about, even if her theories about it sound pretty out there.”

“What kind of theories?”

“Well to start with: Nanites. She's run tests on it and says GLOO! is full of active nanites.”

“BULLSHIT!” repeated Greg, “There's no such thing as nanites.”

“Sure there are! They've had nanomachines for a couple of decades now.”

“Exactly! And that's all they have. Nanomachines are machines of the simplest sort- like a pulley or a lever. They're built to do one thing and they do that. They're not tiny robots you can program remotely to do different tasks like in the sci-fi stories. And they definitely don't have a hive intelligence!”

“You mean they won't be unearthed by an underwater archaeologist and spread through the world's water cycle, raining down on all the cities and turning everybody into mermaids and mermen?” I pouted, referring to a popular ongoing serial at Mer-Mania by the author Diving Belle.

“Not unless the ancient Atlanteans were a lot smarter than anyone who's working with nanotechnology today,” he said, “I think your genius mad scientist friend is pulling your leg- er, tail!”

“She has been know to do that. And then she goes 'Psyche!' when you fall for it. So maybe she's just playing on my gullibility...”

'Or maybe not,' I thought.

Rae had said the first symptom of her synthetic ears and tail becoming so impossibly motile was a strange sensitivity she'd noticed in the first few days after she attached them; something I was now experiencing with this tail. I supposed time would tell if I was just deluding myself about this.

Greg had condensed all his stuff from the bedroom's dresser into the four wide drawers on its right side, making its whole left side mine. All my worldly possessions hadn't even managed to fill the shallowest top drawer. It felt kind of good starting out clean, and wondering what I would eventually fill the rest of it with. Certainly not socks and panties.

I slid it shut, then took the took my toothpaste, toothbrush and girl-pills into our bathroom and raised the chair to put them in the medicine cabinet. Announcing: “Well I'm done unpacking!”

41 Hours...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

“Don't just stand there, you idiot! Shoot!!!” Greg shouted.

A buzzer sounded, and whatever had happened at the end of the quarter made him shut the TV off in disgust. I'd been reading and hadn't caught whatever it was. “Bad game?”

“I've seen better. And anyway it's too nice a day to just sit around. I think I'll take my walk. Care to join me?” he asked. He walked a couple of miles every day. Doctor's orders...

Joining him would mean putting on the long dress I had that could cover my lower half, and using this chair that I was still getting used to. And getting sweaty would mean taking a sponge bath that wouldn't be satisfying unless I got so wet that I risked getting water down inside my tail. I told him, “I'll start Monday.”

He left, and I went back to my paperback, which I'd bought at my local branch library because I was leaving for the next county and couldn't easily return one I'd checked out.

The book got my attention right on the first page when it turned out that the narrator was a fifteen year old transgender girl named Suzie. She was still presenting as male but had just come out as trans to her parents, and was on vacation in Florida with them when she wound up getting grabbed off a lonely stretch of beach by pirates who had come from the past somehow. There was some back-story about how she'd dreamed of being a mermaid when she was a little kid, and there was quite a bit of foreshadowing that she was going to wind up one pretty soon.

This was goddamn bizarre, is what it was. That of the hundreds of titles in the little “for sale” section at the front of the library, I'd found this particular book; and was now reading it while in the process of turning a mermaid myself, something the author---who had to be trans---might well approve of...

It made me wonder what the hell this connection was between MtF transgender people and mermaids. Little Jazz Jenning was really into swimming in her mermaid tail a few years back, and in England there's an organization for trans youth called MERMAIDS. Maybe I'm just an extreme case of something that exists latent in all trans people, because we all have mermaid genes.

No, that's silly. But it might make a good story at Mer-Mania...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Sometimes when I'm reading a book or watching a Netflix series on my computer I'll get curious about something I saw or read and skip over to Wikipedia for a few minutes to read up on it. This happened with my fantasy paperback when it talked about the mermaids being able to breathe either air or water. I know fantasy writers aren't obliged to explain how the stuff they make up works, but as the chapter progressed I kept hoping for some description of these miraculous lungs Princess Anemone and her twin had, since being fully amphibious always seemed like the Holy Grail of turning into a mermaid.
.
I scooted off the bed into my chair, wheeled over to my computer desk. I was curious to know if there could be any scientific justification for their being able to do this, and was soon on the internet searching for information about how lungs work, how gills work, and whether so-called amphibious fish like mudskippers could actually breathe air or just held their breath until they got back in the water. I read five Wikipedia pages in their entirety, then moved on to other sources; so caught up in my sudden interest in this topic that that I didn't notice Greg standing behind me until he asked, “What are you reading?”
.
“This Scientific American article on the evolution of the Australian lungfish. It says they're one of the last few species left from a whole class of fish that had both gills and a lung and used to live all over the world. Only there wasn't an 'all over the world' when they first evolved, because back then the Earth just had that one big continent. You'd think it would be super-adaptive to be able to breathe both, but apparently these amphibious species mostly died out after air breathing and water breathing vertebrates went their separate ways.”

“And now they're only in Australia? That figures," he chuckled, "They've got some freaky animals down there. I didn't realize you were so passionate about biology.”

“I wouldn't say passionate. I guess I'm just trying to make the time go by quicker while I wait for Zero Hour to get here. Distracting myself,” I said, “So what's up?”

“I was wondering if you'd want to help me make dinner?”

“Is it 6:00 already?! Sure; I'd be glad to."

I rolled into the kitchen after him where he put me to work at the butcherboard table, chopping carrots, onions and tomatoes for a salad he was constructing. He opened the fridge, looking for something to make what he called our “rabbit food” dinner a bit more interesting...

“How about we crumble a little of this smoked salmon into it? It'd go good with just Italian dressing.”

“None for me thanks, I'm done with eating fish.'

“Why?! You love fish!”

“Not anymore. Now that I'm half fish myself it would be cannibalism!”

“You're a nut! You know that?” he laughed when he realized I was joking; then saw something in there that excited him, “Ooooh! These olives would work with it too!”

“Not too many!” I heard myself automatically order him. Then I said, “Sorry...”

“Don't be, that's good advice. A salad's not a salad if you load it up with fat.”

“Yeah, but you're doing so well on your own. A year ago you wouldn't have considered a salad any kind of dinner for a man...”

“Yeah; well a year ago I was heading blindly for the precipice. But after what happened on Christmas... Let's just say fear of death is a good motivator. And if the fear wears off and I start to forget I have you around to keep me in line.”

“You'd better believe I will!” I glowered.
.

Last Christmas Eve we'd been snuggling in front of the living room's big fireplace and the tree we'd decorated earlier when Greg started to feel dizzy. At first he shrugged it off, saying he'd had a long day, and that it had happened before and would pass. But instead it got worse, until he was on his back, saying it felt just like the whole room was flipping forward, end over end like some carnival ride in Hell; and we knew we had to get him to the hospital.

I'd long since shrugged out of my mermaid tail and put on some pants, and I made the call that a one way trip in his Dodge Caravan would be better than having to wait while an ambulance made a round trip. Even with me helping Greg fell down a several times on the way to the garage, and while I was hurriedly trying to put the back of the SUV into truck-bed mode so he could lay down, he puked up everything in his stomach. And then---barefoot, because my shoes hadn't turned up quick enough---I drove like the devil to the ER at Hemet Valley Medical Center.

Thankfully he hadn't needed a coronary bypass or some other big gruesome surgery, but they did wheel Greg right in for a procedure where a tiny a balloon was shoved up an artery into his heart to open up where it was badly blocked by plaque. Just a little more would have killed him.

It was Christmas morning when they came out and told me he was going to be okay, and I was so relieved I started bawling like a baby. The worst Christmas of my life had returned to being the best Christmas of my life! (Also, they let me keep the shower slippers they'd given me to wear.). They kept him there until the morning of the 26th; when they sent him home with pills and a strict new diet and exercise regimen.

When I saw how seriously my Honey was taking his diet, and wasn't treating the cholesterol reducing drug he'd been prescribed as a license to pound down the double/doubles from In n' Out, I was once again almost tearfully relieved. I wanted my Old Man (who compared to me was literally an old man) to be around for a long time!

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

'How did a girl like I wind up madly in love with a man over twice her age,' you ask?

It sure wasn't anything I ever expected. I didn't consider a relationship like ours to be morally wrong in some way, or even necessarily unworkable; if that's your thing. I just never thought it was my thing...

It wasn't as if I thought men approaching 60 were repulsive or anything; but one had never yet interested me romantically, and as a subgroup of humans they didn't seem terribly sexy to me. If I was at the store and caught a glimpse of someone from the corner of my eye who made me turn my head to get a second look, that person generally turned out to be between the age I was then and about thirty, or occasionally forty (I did fall madly in love with a thirty-four year old a few years back, but that turned out to be an unmitigated disaster). And beyond forty they didn't even register on my libido's radar screen.

I might consider an older guy cool, charming, smart, or good company to hang out and watch TV with, but that was as far as it went. I might briefly reflect that some ruggedly handsome older film star was kind of sexy---(“Wow... Han Solo makes a great-looking President!”)---but only “kind of”; and always with that automatic qualifier “for his age”...

And whatever vague stirrings of interest some old geezer might produce in me would cause me to think something more like “I hope I can have a guy like him around when I'm a saggy old granny-lady myself” rather than to make me want to climb on and ride him like one of those coin-operated fucking machines they have out in front of the adult book stores in Copenhagen...

If you had told me three years ago I would fall in love with and get engaged to and spend a big chunk of this morning blissfully balling my brains out with a 58 year old man, my response would probably have been: “Why would I do that?!!”

But if three years ago you'd said that I would be falling in love and getting engaged as a mermaid, with a kind loving man who happened to be somewhat older than myself, but when he looked at me never saw the human boy I was transitioning from, but only the Daughter of the Deep I was in my heart...

And if you said that I would never feel more alive and like a sexy beautiful fishgirl than when I was squirming around impaled on his man-hook, my response would likely have been: “You mean I have to wait THREE WHOLE YEARS for that?!!!”

Because for a couple of Grade A weirdos like us the mermaid stuff was so entwined with who we were---with our minds and our identities---that it was only natural that it would be a HUGE factor in our relationship. And like I said yesterday, this all started at a place called Mer-Mania...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

At first I just loved the stories at Mer-Mania, putting myself in the place of the women and girls and occasional boys who through magic or science were transformed into beautiful mermaids and began a whole new life Under The Sea.

Then I started to get a little more selective about what I read, as I realized that some of the authors just threw words up onto the screen any old way to get their story told, while others just took my breath away with their talent and their craftsmanship!

There was one author in particular---Ophelia Goglubglub---who when a new story by her appeared I YAAAAAY!!'d and dove right into it; knowing I would love it. They weren't particularly happy stories, at least not until right at the end, but they were moving in their darkness. Usually about some shy outsider girl, escaping from school bullies or abusive parents or a total scumbag of a wife-beating husband. She would usually be right about at the end of her rope when something came along and transformed her, allowing her to find her real home underwater, the other mermaids welcoming their new sister with open arms. Or if not them, the new mermaid would meet some lonely land-guy. A lobster fisherman, a shipwrecked castaway, a badly deformed lighthouse keeper who shuns the company, the whispers and taunts of other humans. And she and he would build themselves a perfect little world-for-two, far from everyone (Kind of like Greg and me, I suppose, but we don't intend on being anywhere near as isolated as the damaged souls Ophelia wrote about...)

I registered at Mer-Mania mostly so I could tell her how much I loved her stories. Some of my comments turned out quite lengthy, and they were 90% fervent praise. Ophelia never responded to comments, but one day I got a private message from someone named Admiral Whirlpool, telling me how much my comments meant to his friend Ophelia. Ophelia was a depressive sort already, he'd said, and recently Real Life was totally dumping on her; Everything from health problems to the threat of eviction. He said that when they talked on the phone from several states apart, it often sounded like my positive comments were the highlight of her day. And then---being a writer---he ended his PM with: 'And by the way, try one of my stories and tell me what you think...'

I replied to Admiral Whirlpool's message, a brief 'sorry to hear about this wonderful author's problems' and assuring him I would check out his stories. And that was how I met the guy I would later know as Greg. Neither of us could have dreamed what it would turn into.

His stories were mostly love stories too, but where Ophelia's all started with strife and heartache, his were fun, and funny. Greg was sometimes a bit reserved in real life when I first met him---coming off of a bad divorce like he was---but his humorous side really cames alive in his writing. I read them chronologically, starting with The Astronaut, the Genie & the Mermaid- a retelling of the first episode of I Dream of Jeannie where a 1960's astronaut in a space capsule lands on a tiny desert island and a servile dimwitted genie and a clever mermaid compete for his affections (the mermaid wins); followed by The Ensign & the Mermaid, The Pirate & the Mermaid, The Cowboy & the Mermaid, Jacques Cousteau & the Mermaid and a dozen more. His stories were more diverse in plots and more clever than the titles might indicate, and I told him so in my critiques.

Mer-mania also had a chat room, where I made quite a few friends and often stumbled into work tired the next day after we'd stayed up yacking in type until it was very late and it was only LORI and AW chatting...

Somewhere in here I posted my blog where I told about how intense my intense desire to be a mermaid was, and that it actually pained me that I wasn't one. It was the most honest I'd ever been about this in my life, and I still wasn't exactly honest, since I didn't mention anything about being trans. I just loved being accepted as the genetic girl everyone assumed I was, and didn't want to wreck this.

Most people were kind in their responses, and Admiral Whirlpool (“call me Greg”) was just wonderful in his understanding. And then in Private Messages and also now e-mails he spoke of his own deep obsession with mermaids and how much he wished he could meet and fall in love with one. He half kiddingly suggested: “If you're crazy enough to believe you're a mermaid I'm crazy enough to believe you are too. Since we're both crazy maybe we can be a pretend mermaid/human couple... Will you be my internet mermaid girlfriend?”

“You might not want me to,” I replied, because I sensed the seriousness behind his joking question and I knew it was time to come clean with this wonderful man who was so caring and supportive and understanding. I told him I'd been born male and his just barely started toward transitioning, and I would understand if this was just too weird for him.

It was the longest fifteen minutes of my life---in which I realized how devastated I would be if he rejected me---before he responded with: “Nobody's perfect. (951) 978-6418.”

I called, and after I got over my fear that my voice might sound too masculine it was just like talking with him in the chatroom, only better. We talked, we laughed, we shared more secrets, hopes and dreams; and when we weren't calling each other we were looking forward to the next time we would.

Somewhere in there we started saying “I love you”; and it felt so GOOD! I'd never thought about having a 56 year old boyfriend, and he'd never though he could love a transgender girl, but there we were.

Our online mermaid community was scattered all over the world, and if Greg had lived in Sydney or Dublin our relationship might have remained an intangible one. But it was just a little over 50 miles from Tustin to San Jacinto Valley, and we discussed where to meet. And when he said the magic word “pool” I agreed to drive to his house.

My friend had said he was “well off”, so I figured he didn't work at Home Depot or drive an ice cream truck; But as my car's GPS directed me into his Jacinto Spring neighborhood I realized he was a lot richer than I'd ever imagined. I don't think he'd been hiding his wealth so much as he just hadn't wanted to brag (Plus, when you're mostly talking about mermaids certain things just don't come up...).

He invited me in. I was wearing flats, a skirt and a blouse, and like a dork about the first thing I did was gesture at my tits, which were a pair of cheap little foam b-cup breast forms sitting loose in my bra and tell him: “These aren't real.”

And then I fell all over myself, babbling: “Oh my God, I'm such a dope! Just blurting out I mean why did I SAY that?!?”

In person his smile was even nicer than in the phone-pictures he'd sent me. He said, “Because you're nervous. I'm nervous too!”

“You are? Why?!” I asked, as if anybody who lived in a house like this would have to be all smooth and confident like the rich people are in movies.

“Because I really want you to like me. And I'm not exactly the guys from my stories...”

Which puzzled me, because the Greg I'd been talking to on the phone for months and who was now standing beside me totally was the guys from his stories. Smart, decent, kind, thoughtful, masculine but not macho; exactly the kind of human male a mermaid could fall in love with. But then it dawned on me that his story's narrators were all were all at least twenty younger than him, and he was insecure about being past his prime.

At this point Greg felt more conflicted about our age difference than he did my XY chromosomes and genitalia. That issue he'd gotten over, figuring that if I was a mermaid because that's who I was in my heart, then logically I was also female. But he was worried that he might be trying to act out the ludicrous and somewhat icky cliche of a wealthy middle aged male parading around his 22 year old girlfreind as a symbol of status and prowess in the guy half of the world: “Look what I got, because I CAN!”

But I knew Greg's interest in me wasn't due to some midlife crises, because he had admitted that early on in our online friendship he'd pictured me as a 44-year-old housewife with cellulite thighs and a huge butt, and he liked me a lot then anyway. But he'd also thought I was probably married and maybe had a few kids, so our online role playing would have to stay on the level of innocent flirtations and him telling me what a beautiful mermaid I was, something we could both fantasize about.

I looked up into his eyes---he was taller than I'd thought---and said, “Maybe you're not an action hero, but you're still those great guys from your stories. When you talk you sound like them; You have their character, their humanity, their decency. You're just a little older.”

“You're far too kind,” he demured, “And I'm more than a little older than-”

“No, I meant it!” I said, and did the first thing I could think of to convince him I meant every word of my praise. I kissed him. It wasn't a fiercely passionate kiss but it wasn't a chaste little peck either. It was a good solid smacker that sincerely conveyed my sentiments about him; that he was a man worth kissing.

And the way he started kissing me back told me he felt the same way about me... until we sort of mutually agreed that this wasn't quite the time to take this any further, and we separated. But it had been an effective ice breaker.

Greg smiled, “That was nice!”

“It was. And you know, if this turns into something, you wouldn't be the first older man I fell for, so don't worry about that,” I said, not mentioning that the guy was 34 and looked like a rock star.

“Who was this lucky fellow?”

“My psychology professor at Fullerton, when I was 19,” I said.

He grinned wryly. "Should I be jealous?”

“God no! He was an asshole!” I spat. (Unfortunately, in spite of---or maybe because of---his rock star good looks, Professor Wood had all the arrogance, entitlement, deviousness and philandering ways of some prima donna lead singer for an 80's hair band.)

Greg started showing me his house, each room bigger and more beautiful than the one before. If he would have to work at it to get over his reservations about our age difference; what would make me start feeling awkward as we got deeper into our relationship was the economic imparity of between us. When an anonymous benefactor paid off all my student loans I told him never to do anything like that again. Not without talking to me first, and working out terms for how I'd repay him.

Since freeing myself from my parents' tender loving care on the very first day I was legally able to do so, I had always prided myself in my economic self-sufficiency. And his wanting to pay for everything we did and trying to give me expensive presents freaked me out! If Greg didn't want to be the walking cliché of a male midlife crisis, I didn't want to be a shallow amoral gold-digging bimbo, prostituting myself to some Sugar Daddy for an easy ride through life...

But eventually I realized I wasn't and could never be that stereotype. Like he had with me, I had been falling in love with Greg since long before I knew about his low eight-figures net worth. And there is nothing calculating or mercenary about your being with someone if you loved him so much you'd take a bullet for him without a second's hesitation, like I would for my Gregory.

He pointed at the gym bag I was carrying. “What's that?”

“Take a wild guess.”

He broke into a grin. “Is it the one from those pictures you sent me?”

“It's the only one I own; so yes,” I said, “I know it's silly, but I wanted to wear it today.”

“It's not silly, it's who you are! And I'd like it very much if you wore it.”

It was a good, friendly, comfortable first meeting. I didn't wear my tail for the whole visit, but we both enjoyed it when I did; and it was a total blast be swimming together as a man and a mermaid in the much smaller pool this house had at the time. I took it off when we went to lunch, trying a new chain Italian restaurant that turned out to be so bad it was amusing, things we could have made a stink about and sent back, but we were enjoying each other's company so much we just made a game out of trying to guess what would be wrong with the next course, and decided we wouldn't be going back to Fibonacci's Ristorantore...

Back at the house I slipped back into my tail and we watched a movie on cable about the heist of a famous painting from the Louvre; but lost track of the plot because we were talking and paying more attention to each other, and we wound up kissing again. I could sense that a large part of his excitement this time was due to the fact that he was kissing a mermaid, which dovetailed perfectly with my own excitement over being kissed as a mermaid!

We didn't fuck and I didn't stay the night, both feeling we should take things slow enough that at least we weren't being reckless about this; But I think we both knew that this moratorium on sex wouldn't last more than another date or two...

Anyway that was our first little play date. It wasn't lavish or wild but it was the best day either of us had had in a while, and left us both with a sense of promise- that this might actually be love.

It was a promise that was delivered on beyond our wildest dreams.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

A month or so ago Greg signed up with a film streaming service called Filmstruck, which was like Netflix but showed the kind of obscure stuff he liked: Old John Ford westerns, movies by Nepal's Greatest Living Director, or one that had won the Palme d'Or at Cannes back before the Franco Prussian War...

And after dinner he selected the movie that he'd promised would changed my mind about this Pedro Almodovar guy. Which it did. Women on The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was totally wacky and utterly fucking hilarious! I was laughing so hard I missed a lot of the subtitles.

Between this film and last night's French one Greg almost made up for the one we watched two weeks ago, which he called "The greatest science fiction film of all time!"

The longest science fiction film might have been more accurate, because that's what it felt like. I really tried to get into it, watching in silence, refraining from smart-ass remarks, but I don't think I was ever so bored in my life.

“So what did you think?” he asked after the giant fetus floated away into space.

I tried to think of something positive to say. “Well... it had some nice miniatures.”

“So I take it you didn't like it.”

“And the wormhole or whatever he went through was pretty cool; but it didn't have much of a story.”

“Kubrick wanted the story to be deliberately cryptic and ambiguous, so everyone could interpret it for themselves...”

“But it wasn't cryptic. It was all pretty straightforward. It began with the aliens causing a huge leap in human consciousness, and it ended with them doing it again. It just took forever to get there! I mean it took the whole long version of the Blue Danube Waltz just for them to dock that space plane with the space station. I could've parked it faster than that! I know it's a classic, and I guess I'm glad I can say I finally saw 2001, but they managed to take what could've been a good concept and make it as exciting as watching paint dry... beige paint! So what can I say? I'm just another philistine from the attention-deficit generation.”

“A philistine one thing you're not. You understood it, you just didn't like it. It would be boring if we always agreed on everything. And that was a good critique. Very specific, with the color of paint and all,” he chuckled.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

'That's one of the things I love about Greg,' I thought as we called it a night and sacked out right after the Almodovar film ended. 'He's never look down on me, assuming that if I don't like something it's because I'm young and lack the wisdom and maturity that allows him to appreciate it; like so many from his generation seem to think...'

And while he sometimes had a certain movie he wants me to see, this was only because he was such a cinema nut, and hoped it would be something we could enjoy together. Other than this he wasn't on any mission to educate me, to bring me “up to his level” so we could be peers. We already were peers. So he didn't use me as a captive audience for long-winded lectures about Important Culture or The Meaning of Life; like some sleazebag professor would do with the latest coed he's boffing:

“Here, read this. It's Nietzsche. It will help you understand the futility of existence. That way when I dump you at the end of the semester you'll already be so miserable and full of angst you'll hardly notice...”

“Gee thanks, Professor Woody! Tee hee hee... you're so smart!!”

Guys like this use intellect the way less articulate abusers use their fists. As a means of control. They lecture, they condescend, they toss a bit of praise your way when you parrot their opinions back at them. But what they never do is really listen.

Greg really listened to me. In this and every other way he was the total opposite of my old Cal State Fullerton psychology teacher, who promised me his undying devotion and some wonderful future together (that included Paris, of course...) while treating me as an exotic variation on his usual game of seeing how many of his girl students he could bone; and who was the main reason I dropped out in my second year.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I considered killing myself as I stumbled through the rest of that day, in shock over having been so cruelly and mockingly dumped. Instead I took the less drastic course of removing myself from the place that was a constant reminder of him and of what a fool I'd been. And I realized I should have believed what several girls had warned me about him; But he'd said he loved me, and he made me feel like a real girl, even though for the most part I wasn't dressing like one then...

Professor Alan “Woody” Wood broke my heart when he turned out to be full of shit; not to mention a creep, a cad and an inveterate liar! And a bastard and a shit and an asshole and a douchebag and a louse and a rat and a snake and a prick and a cunt and a motherfucker!! Not only that, he was not a nice person!

And when his karma finally caught up with him he turned out to be a dickhead...

Because apparently I wasn't the only one who harbored a grudge against him. Six weeks ago I heard on the news that he'd gone missing. His car was sitting at a stoplight with the door open and the motor running, and footage from CCTV cameras at some nearby business showed hooded figures with guns shoving him into a van. And when no ransom demands were made people began speculating and joking about what he would look like when showed back up.

And sure enough... 72 hours later he was released, with a large and veinous day-glo purple artificial penis for a nose. Which is when---as often happens when one person breaks the silence---his victims started coming forward by the dozens, students and ex-students both male and female---and Professor Dicknose was fired and went into hiding. He wasn't the first man this had been done to, and I doubted that he would be the last.

Glooing a dildo to someone's face allows even the worst rapists, abusers and pussy grabbers to play the victim card, and there are always those who will believe it when they say they were innocent victims of violent man-hating feminist hooligans. And so for that reason (and because assaulting someone like them physically is stooping to their level) I'm not a real big fan of the #MEGLOO! movement. But like they say, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!

But like that whole situation with my parents, his is not a story I'm going to waste any more time on in this journal. Not when I have a much happier tale to tell.

'And a tail!' I thought blissfully as I fell asleep in my lover's arms, completely contented and utterly at peace.
.

(34½ Hours..........)
.

.

============================================================>
============================================>
==============================>

In this story by Ray Drouillard you'll find out more about Lori's friend Rae:
https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/74866/glood-tails-01

And Chapter 02 of his story has stuff about Rae and Lori
and Lori's last days of working at Yoyodyne, unless that isn't
what Ray's calling their place of employment (it's a semivariable story universe):
https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/74946/glood-tails-02

.
And here's some chica loca singin' about GLOO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoQiSn-johM
????????????????????????????????????

My transformation into a mermaid was two thirds complete. In just 24 more hours the state-of-the-art synthetic mermaid tail I'd GLOO'd myself into would be a permanent part of me + there'd be no going back!

Not that I would ever want to. This had been my deepest desire ever since I was a little boy; and each time my mermaid-worshiping fiance asked if I was sure I wanted to go through with this insane scheme my answer was a resounding “YES!!”

While I realized even the fanciest fake tail wouldn't really turn me into the mythological creature I'd always dreamed of being, I knew I'd be very happy living as the closest thing that reality would allow...

But unbeknownst to me & Greg, impossible changes were occurring within my body that would merge reality with dreams + make our strange fantasies far more real than either of us had dared hope...

72 HOURS: Strange Love Meets Weird Science (meets GLOO!)
Laika Pupkino - 2018
Part 3 of Four

.

DAY THREE:

Yesterday I'd awoken to find our bed empty, while my fiance was off preparing me a breakfast in bed fit for a princess. This morning I was the first to wake up, nestled in Greg's arms as he snored gently a few inches from my face. Greg's snoring used to be much louder, but the 40 pounds he'd lost over the past five months has had the unexpected benefit of turning down the volume on his snoring to a catlike purr.

Or not quite catlike, more like a large asthmatic cheetah; but it was no longer making me startle awake in the dead of night thinking a 737 was about to plow into the house! Or those times when it didn't wake me all the way up but found its way into my dreams, like the one where I was lost in a howling snowstorm-

Wait... Had I had the howling-snowstorm dream again last night?!

No, I realized as caught a clearer image of that fleeting moment from my dream. Because it hadn't been snow that had been swirling around me but a galaxy of tiny black specks. And it had all taken place in an eerie unnatural silence.

At least until those weird buzzing voices started speaking to me, like ten thousand Stephen Hawkingses chanting in unison, telling me...

Telling me something. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't remember a word of what they'd said, only that whatever those voices that should've scared the crap out of me were saying had filled me with a wonderful, grateful feeling; the same feeling that the dream I'd awoken from yesterday had left me with. It might have even been the same dream, but since I could recall even less about that one I couldn't be sure...

The clock on the wall said eighteen after six.
25 Hours, 22 Minutes to go...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

And now the dream feeling was fading away, but it was still a beautiful morning with a lot to be grateful for: My beautiful new tail. Our beautiful house. That beautiful lagoon surround by lush tropical vegetation I could see through our bedroom's sliding glass door. This beautiful loving relationship I was in; the first I'd been in that wasn't harmful to me in some way.

But what definitely wasn't beautiful was this rank odor I was smelling, which I figured had to be me even before I sniffed the hairless concavity of my armpit; and it was...

I couldn't recall the last time I'd gone this long without a bath or a shower; it was disgusting! And even if I could stand myself for another whole day poor Gregory shouldn't have to put up with a stinky mermaid!

Because Greg and I were being extra careful about getting my tail wet before the GLOO! holding it to me had completely dried, we'd agreed that about the best bath I'd be able to give myself during these 72 hours would be to wipe myself down with a damp sponge. But looking down at where my human skin disappeared under the tail's scales I realized this was the only place where water could possibly get into it; which gave me an idea that would reduce the risk of this happening to almost zero...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

I quietly scooted over the side of the bed and climbed into my wheelchair- a maneuver I was already getting fairly good at. Mist was rising from the hot tub out on the patio right next to the pool. This was a good sign. Greg had turned it on in anticipation of us using it on Monday, and however much its water had heated up since last night it would certainly be warmer than what would come out of the garden hose this early in the day.

I rolled into the kitchen and with some difficulty managed to grab the white plastic cleaning bucket and a heavy black 50 gallon trash bag from the cabinet under the sink, then made my way back to our bedroom, where as quietly as I could I searched Greg's side of the bedroom's dresser, looking for that Ace bandage he used to wrap his messed up knee with back when I'd first met him. I really hoped he hadn't thrown it out.

When he'd consolidated all the dresser's contents into one side I was afraid Greg might be sacrificing space he needed for my benefit, but his four drawers weren't even close to being overcrowded. For a man of considerable means he really didn't own a lot of stuff.

And it wasn't that he was some ascetic or super-frugal by nature; when he needed a new suit or a better washing machine he'd spring for a really nice one. It was more a matter of the one thing Greg wanted in life seeming so impossible that all the toys that rich people usually covet seemed like shitty consolation prizes. Which led him to spend most of his free time living his impossible fantasies vicariously, by reading and writing stories in which mermaids were something real; Although not quite as frequently now that he'd found his fantasy girl.

Ah, here they are! Not just one Ace bandage but two of them, down in the big bottom drawer that seemed mostly full of charity swag; tee shirts and tote bags emblazoned with the logos of PBS, the Red Cross, Cancer Society, Humane Society, etc. (so apparently sending regular donating to these organizations was something else he did with his money...). I also found a couple of Swedish magazines with women in garish makeup and cheap looking mermaid tails on the cover; that I had to look through to confirm that yes, apparently there really is such a thing as mermaid porn. Their tails were about the crummiest ones I'd ever seen, but since these periodicals seemed to date from the 1980's the pornographers probably had to figure out how to construct one from scratch.

Flipping through them I almost laughed out loud; and I knew I would have to start teasing Greg about them in a Swedish-mermaid accent the next time we made love...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

I dropped the two rolled-up bandages in my bucket, went into the bathroom and grabbed my shampoo, soap and conditioner; then remembered it was time to take my pills.

I rolled over to the sink and began working the lever that elevated my chair. I had to marvel at my friend Rae's mechanical ingenuity: The one-way socket-wrench-type lever spinning the axle that disappeared under the seat, which spun a gear with a bicycle chain around it that turned a smaller gear below it, which rotated a worm screw that pushed the base of the bottommost "X" of the scissor lift assembly inward, forcing it and the two X's on top of it upright and raising my seat...

One day at work Rae had asked me how I planned to get around on land once my tail was a permanent part of me. I told her I guessed I'd have to use a wheelchair, like the mermaid Lori Lemaris did in the Superman comic books; And she suggested a certain brand of electric one that could go 100 miles between rechargings.

Rae seemed surprised that I didn't want a powered chair. I said that to me motorized ones are for people who are so disabled they can't use their arms to move their chair around. She disagreed, saying they were for anyone smart enough to not want to make unnecessary work for herself, so I asked her why she'd want to walk around Yoyodyne's twelve acre campus instead of just riding her segway.

“Sometimes I do ride it,” she said.

“But would you want to if the only way you could was to have it permanently attached to you, like a damned cyborg?!”

“No, I guess not. But I did always want to grow up to be Inspector Gadget when I was a kid.”

So then she started asking me questions about what kind of manual chair I would want: What type of tires, how wide a wheelbase, sidepull or clincher brakes... Which probably should have tipped me off that she was planning to build this one for me. She kept trying to load our hypothetical wheelchair up with an onboard navigation computer and all sorts of other devices; and now I was glad that I'd said no to anything that was electric, since I was planning on going outside and dumping water all over myself-

Suddenly the hand lever wouldn't ratchet anymore, and I realized my chair was as high as it would go. I was way higher than I needed to be to get my pills, and instead of my face what I mostly saw in the mirror on the medicine cabinet's door was-

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!”

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

My breasts looked like they might be just a smidge bigger than they were 24 hours ago, or maybe not. But what there was not the slightest doubt about was how large my nipples were! Or not so much the nipples themselves---although they were a bit plumper---but the disks of flesh they poked up from.

Unless his hormones are seriously out of whack the areolas of a man's nipples tend to be much smaller than a woman's; and yesterday---despite taking female hormones for the past four months---mine had been depressing male looking; not much bigger around than the nipples they surrounded. I'd been looking forward to them getting larger as my “girl pills” kicked in. But I sure hadn't expected this to occur overnight; growing from the diameter of a dime to the size of a Kennedy half-dollar in just eight hours!

While this was a welcome development it was kind of worrisome because it didn't seem possible, and if they kept growing at this rate it wouldn't be long before they were so huge they were freaky looking! 'Should I schedule a doctor's appointment about this,' I wondered, 'Try to look up instances of this happening to someone on line? Or just wait to see what they were like tomorrow?

I lowered my chair enough to grab my pills and washed one down with a half a glass of water. It couldn't have been these 2 mg Estradiols that had done this to me. Even if I took a handful of them hormone pills don't work this quickly outside of bad transgender fiction.

Could the fact that they'd gotten irritated on Friday have caused this? That didn't seem likely either...

The one thing I was sure about was that I still stunk and still needed a bath. I plopped my soap, shampoo and conditioner into the bucket on my lap, returned to the bedroom and slid the outside door open, and was halfway through it when I heard Greg yawn.

“Morning! What are you doing?”

“I was gonna try to take a bath.”

“Outside?!”

“I didn't want to get the bathroom floor all wet. I'm using water from the hot tub.”

“That's smart. What were you screaming about in there?”

“Nothing bad, it's just my... Come outside where the light's good and I'll show you.”

“Let me go poop first,” he said, and as I went outside he lumbered off toward the bathroom.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Our hot tub was a big redwood barrel that could seat six people, half of it jutting out over the lagoon on pilings like a little pier. I park next to it, hunched forward in my chair, unfurled the bandages and tied them into a single long one, then I folded the big polyethylene bag into a six inch wide belt that I wrapped around the top of my tail and the inch or so of skin just above it.

I was wrapping the extra-long elastic band tightly around myself when I heard Greg's voice, “You could've just GLOO'd that bag in place. We still have plenty of GLOO! and solvent.”

“I didn't want to open a whole new tube for just a ten-minute job,” I said, “This should be good enough for taking a bucket bath, I'm getting this bag cinched to me pretty tight.”

“Don't give yourself bruises making it too tight. It's been two days, I think we're well past the main danger period here.”

I tied the ends of the bandage into a bow and looked up. I was surprised to see that he wasn't wearing the pajama bottoms he'd been lounging around in since Friday, but actual clothes: Khaki shorts and a shirt with a pattern of kelp fronds and mermaids in hues that were rather understated for a Hawaiian shirt. He had on desert boots and was even wearing his watch.

“Going someplace?”

“Just into town to pick up a Sunday Times. But do you need a hand with that first?” he asked as he loped across the patio toward me.

“Maybe, but what I do need is your opinion on something. Notice anything different about me?”

He looked me slowly up and down, frowning until his eyes fell on my nipples. “Wow! Where'd you get those? Are those the self-adhering kind?”

“In a sense. So what do you think?”

“Very nice! It's incredible how real they look,” he marveled as he leaned in to inspect them. He ran his thumb over the areola around my left nipple, palpating the spongy flesh until the nipple itself stood up at attention. “Wait a minute! These are you?!”

“I think so...”

“But how?!”

“'How' any of the changes I've gone through in the last 48 hours?! My improved skills as a fellatrix... my tail getting so sensitive, and right down to the end of it where I shouldn't be able to feel anything... I'm starting to think everything Rae told me about GLOO! is true.”

He rolled his eyes. “Your little 'nanite' buddies.”

“Have you got a better theory?” I asked as I scooped up a bucketful of tub water.

“No, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Here, I'll do this,” he said, grabbing the bucket from me and dumping it over my head. “How's this water? Warm enough?”

“It's fine, give me another.”

As he did he said, “I can't deny you seem to be changing physically. But there's a big flaw in this whole nanomachine theory. Let's suppose there is such a thing as nanites. They're in some tube of GLOO sitting in the store, that anyone can buy for anything they want to glue; even normal stuff like fixing a lamp. But let's say it's you, putting on this tail. Or your fox friend with her fox ears and such. Or someone who wants to turn himself into a Martian..."

“There probably is a Martian somewhere,” I said as he doused me again.

“So then how do the nanites know what to do? Nobody's programmed them, and they're not going to know what a mermaid or a fox or a Martian is. How do they know to do one thing, and not something else?”

“That's a very good question. And I have no idea. But they sure seem to know what I want.”

“They do at that,” he said, and poured another bucketful on me, “Just tell me when to stop here...”

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

“Stop!” I said after the fifth bucket of warmish water splashed down over me.

I squeezed some of my shampoo into my hair, lathered it up, and had Greg rinse it with another five buckets. I worked a little conditioner into it and while my skin was still wet I soaped up my human half. My tail might need to be washed at some point (the instruction book recommended dish soap and a cellulose sponge) but this morning it was still brand new and perfectly clean. Greg doused me with another seven or eight buckets to rinse me clean. “Hows that? We done here?”

“Almost,” I said, “But I'm kind of a fanatic about getting every last bit of shampoo and conditioner out of my hair. And I think the best way to do that would be to just hang off the patio and dunk my whole head underwater.”

“Aren't you afraid you'll fall in?”

“I won't if you hold me.”

The patio ended at a row of big river rocks along the lagoon's meandering edge. Two stones that were taller and skinnier than the others had a person-sized gap between them, where ladder rungs were bolted to the lagoon's side (eight meters away was a bathtub sized sloping bay-thing that I could wriggle up out of; but I needed this more vertical pool exit for what I was doing...). I slipped out of my chair and crawled like a commando to the gap, inching forward until I was mostly out over the water. While holding myself up by the ladder's top rung I had Greg straddle me then sit down on my butt.

I let go of the ladder and was able to submerge myself to just past my ribcage. I worked my fingers all through my hair for a minute or two, then grabbed the rung and raised myself up.

Greg shifted his weight on me. “Let's get you out of there-”

“Hang on! I need to go back under for a bit.”

“Again? I think your hair's about as rinsed as it can get.”

“I know, but I need to try something. An experiment. Remember when I was going down on you yesterday, and you were amazed at how long I could go without breathing?”

He chuckled lewdly. “I won't be forgetting that anytime soon!”

“Well I want to see if how that ability might translate into being able to hold my breath for... for the mermaid thing. That watch you're wearing has a second hand, right?”

“Just a sec,” he said, and made his watch go beep a few times. “There, now it's a stopwatch. So how long you gonna try to stay under for?”

“I really have no idea. Just sit there and time me, and if you start to worry tap me on the back. If do this-” I held my arm out beside me and made a waggling a thumbs-up gesture, “-leave me under. If I don't, then pull me out immediately.”

“Maybe it would be safer if you just tried holding your breath up here.”

“Except a person can actually do it longer when their head is submerged. I think they call it the 'dive reflex'- where the body sort of goes into energy-saver mode. Are you ready?”

“I can't say that I'm crazy about this, but say when.”

“Okay, NOW!” I cried, and let go of the ladder.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

I hung there suspended between two worlds. The lagoon's concrete floor was adobe colored, and textured to try and make it look more like the bed of a lagoon than the smooth bottom of a swimming pool. It was embossed with images of starfish, cowries, sanddabs, and for some reason a trilobite.

I was glad our lagoon's water didn't have to be chlorinated but came right out of the earth as pure as any bottled water, and was constantly being replenished; while also being kept circulating by our big waterfall and its three strategically spaced intake valves. The warm mass of Greg's butt pinning me to the patio was an oddly pleasant sensation, but I almost wished he'd get up off me so I would drop all the way in and could go mermaid-ing around through the cool clear medium I'd always felt so at home in...

I wondered how long I'd been underwater. It couldn't have been too long; If Greg had growing anxious up there I think I would've been able to tell.

My mind drifted back to the day when the concept of “being a mermaid” made the dizzying jump from mere stories at a fiction site or our lovely weekends of role play to potentially becoming a reality that I'd never have to relinquish. It was late afternoon, and we were here in the backyard, lounging on a pair of chaise lounges next to the smaller rectangular pool this house had then. I couldn't recall what we'd been talking about, but I sure remembered Greg dropping that mind-blowing proposition on me...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

“Move in with you? You mean here?! Seriously?!?”

“Well certainly not frivolously. You know how I am. I've been weighing the pros and cons of this for a week; and I couldn't really find any cons. Not from my end of it. And I can't see much sense in you having to shell out $800 a month for that tiny place when there's just me here, and so much room. This is way too much house for one person. You come here every chance you get as it is, and we both love it when you do...”

“I know, and both hate it when I have to leave. But it would be one hell of a commute from here to Irvine and back every day.”

“Then quit.”

“I don't think I could find anything local that I'd like nearly as much as this job at Yoyodyne. That dry cleaner's on State Street always seems to have the 'Help Wanted' sign up, but there's probably a good reason for that.”

“You working there would be a serious waste of your talent!”

“Talent? Would that be my mad typing skillz, or that I can always get the copy machine unstuck when the paper gets jammed up? Or is it being such a whiz at putting people on hold,” I said with a theatrical button-pushing gesture.

“Your talent! You're a damned good writer.”

Someone went tap! tap! tap! on the small of my back. It was the other Greg; The one in the real world who was making sure I didn't drown. I gave him a thumbs up and returned to my reminiscing...

“My writing's sure not going to pay the rent,” I told Memory Greg, “Mermaid fiction isn't exactly a top seller on Amazon Kindle.”

“You wouldn't have any rent to pay here. Didn't you tell me you wished you could just write all the time? Or get back into painting?”

“Those are just dumb dreams...”

“Dreams aren't dumb!” he said adamantly, and then realized: “Or no, I guess some are. I'm not gonna quarterback for the Cowboys at my age. But yours aren't. And what about your other dream? Your big one?!”

“That one's even less realistic. People don't turn themselves into mermaids!”

“Nobody turned themselves into the opposite sex---that wasn't 'realistic'---until fifty or sixty years ago when that gal went over to Denmark and had it done. And now transgender people are doing it every day. But I sure don't have to tell you that...”

“You want me to be the Christine Jorgensen of mermaids?”

“It's not what I want. Or I mean it is, but not unless you'd want to. Which I'm pretty sure you do, when you say things like: 'It's so damned depressing having to take this tail off and go back to being a human on Monday...' And it's like you're this- Well I won't say a whole different person; you're still the same 'you'... But you really come alive as a mermaid, in a way you don't when trying to live that so-called real life. You're just so much more, uh-” He gestured vaguely, as if trying to pluck the word he was looking for out of the air; finally just saying, “Well you must've noticed it too.”

“I have,” I sighed, “It's like part of me is missing. Like I'm not quite real somehow as plain old human Lori.”

“Then why not let yourself be real? Why should who you are have to keep on being just a dream; When nothing would make me happier than to help make it come true? You know I love you being a mermaid as much as you love being one.”

“And do what? Just let you support me?!”

“Hey, what else am I gonna spend my money on? I've never wanted a $300,000 car or a $3000 watch; and I got wanting to see Tahiti and Rome, the Pyramids and Uluru out of my system when I was in my thirties; When I finally realized I'm really just a homebody. Being able to spend time with you makes me happier than anything I can think of.”

“But I'd feel like a sponge, a parasite!”

“That's absurd! A parasite takes and doesn't give anything back. What you give me can't be weighed or measured, and nobody has ever been able to put a price tag on it; but it's the most valuable, most perfect thing there is. Unless you can honestly tell me you don't love me...”

I looked into his eyes. Saw my love, admiration and respect for him magnified and reflected back at me; unconditional and total. And I loved how when he looked at me he didn't see a deluded boy in a silly fake tail who thought he was a mermaid; He saw a beautiful mermaid who just happened to have been born a boy. I told him, “I could never say that. But I don't want to get your hopes up and then back out later when I come to my senses. So for now I'll just say-”

The other Greg tapped on my back again. I waved him away irritably.

Memory Greg nodded. “I wouldn't expect you to say yes right now. Think about it, and tell me when you can. Next week, next month, next year... I swear I won't rush you. Or I'll try not to.”

“All right, I'm definitely thinking about it. And I must be certifiably crazy, wanting to turn myself into something that doesn't even exist! But you know what a hold this mermaid thing has on me. Although to be one this far from the ocean seems sort of strange. I mean they do call this part of the state the 'Inland Empire'.”

“Well we do have a pretty big sea.”

“Salton is two feet deep and it's drying up, with San Diego getting all the water that used to go into it.”

“Then I'll build you an ocean.”

“I don't think you have that much money.”

“Or at least a pretty good size lagoon. This is a big yard here.”

I knew Greg liked old movies, and from his smile I could tell he knew which one I was paraphrasing when I said, “Tell you what: If you build it, I will come.”

At the time I figured we were just spinning a beautiful fantasy, that our finding-a-genie-bottle magnitude wishes might somehow become reality. Little did I realize he was already surveying the yard around us and imagining how it could be turned into our own private theme park.

I said, “Okay for the sake of argument, let's suppose-”

Suddenly some great unseen thing grabbed me, and for a terrible disoriented second I didn't know if it was a giant octopus or Slender Man or WHAT, as real-world Greg dragged me none-too-gently out of the water.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Realizing where I was and what I'd been attempting I cried: “What'd you do that for?!”

Looking like he was almost in tears, Greg held his watch up accusingly, “You were under there for thirteen minutes and twenty seconds!”

“Really?! That's some kind of record, isn't it?”

“That's IMPOSSIBLE!” he roared.

[Which it actually wasn't, I discovered when I consulted Wikipedia later. A diver had set a record of 22 minutes in 2012; but he'd saturated his body with oxygen by breathing pure O2 for a half hour beforehand. My 13 minutes was a record for non-oxygenated diving, by well over a minute...]

I grinned. “I think I can go a lot longer. I'm not even breathing hard!”

“But wait until tomorrow, please!” he gasped, “And don't hurt yourself just trying to prove something... “Oh God! I need to catch my breath now!”

“This isn't about setting records or trying to get famous for some freaky thing I can do- I'm not the damn Bunnylove Twins! It's about me finding out, for me: What all these changes mean, what I can do, and if it's not nanites then what the hell is it? And I'm not gonna try to stay under any longer than I'm comfortable with. Or not much, ” I promised.

He breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay. I trust your judgment.”

“Now let's get this damn elastic off me. My girdle is killing me!”

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

My skin had a fabric pattern impressed into it where the tightly wound bandages had extended past the rolled up polyethylene bag, but they'd done their job. There was no moisture at all around the top edge of my tail, and its scales didn't look any worse for having been squished in like that. And it felt so good to be clean!

I dropped the soppy wad of bandages into the bucket. Rattled the dripping bag at Greg. “This is still usable.”

“It can dry off on Mr. Tiki Guy here,” he said, and slipped it over the glowering 4-foot tall grey granite Easter Island head rising from the edge of the nearest patch of landscaping. “So what do you want to do now? How about we get one of those breakfast specials at the Indian casino?”

“I know what I want to do,” I said, gazing at the waterfall pouring into our lagoon, “That little dip I took was just a tease.”

“If you want to go in that bad, do it. You should be okay by now. That whole waiting-72-hours was just us being extra cautious.”

“No, I'm gonna be strong and stick to the plan. What time is it anyway?”

“A little after nine,” he said. (23 HOURS to go...)

“I can wait,” I shrugged, “For now I'll just look at it. Take a roll around the lake.”

“I'll join you. Which way we going?” he asked, indicating the two ends of the paving stone walkway that started where the patio stopped and made a circuit of the whole backyard.

“Counterclockwise,” I said, pointing toward the trailhead on the right. The walkway followed the edge of the lagoon for a while then veered off between two tiny hills that sported ferns and jade plants and various other types of jungle foliage. The scenery to our right ended at our new 10-foot redwood fence, which totally blocked our view of the property next door, and vica versa.

Whoever lived in that big Tudor-style house at the center of their two acre lot would be able to see the top of our fake mountain and our palm trees sticking up, and if I was them I'd be curious as hell about what other crazy shit we might have back here; but they were never home. Probably because they owned several houses elsewhere. Quite a few of the residents of Jacinto Springs had fortunes that made Greg's few million dollars seem like chump change.

The walkway passed through a miniature bamboo grove---where a stone Buddha as big as a person sat meditating beside a koi pond---then emerged into sunlight. On the path's left side what was probably the world's smallest white sand beach sloped down into the water, and to our right stood a grassy a grassy hillock that had our three palm trees rising from it, with enough room left over for two picnic tables and a charcoal grill on a post for cooking burgers or whatever. Hidden behind the little hill was a plain dirt area that Greg hadn't decided what to do with yet, and then the back fence with the mountainous national forest rising up behind it.

Across the rear half of the lagoon we could see one end of our house poking out from around that barn sized fake rock rising up out of the water. Its backside didn't have a waterfall but did have a water slide cast into its slanted surface, with u-turn inside a tunnel and then a little flip at the bottom that would send you flying out over the water. I couldn't wait to try it!

“My God,” I laughed, “The gaggle from work are gonna freak when they see our place!”

“That's right, we were going to invite those girls from your old job over. All the ones you told the real truth about you 'going to live in Hawaii'... When did you want to do that?”

“I'm thinking this Saturday. I'll call Rae and she can tell the others,” I said.

“Saturday sounds good. I really need to meet these girlfriends of yours! They sound a whole lot nicer than that bunch from your old transgender-support group, who had a damned peculiar notion of what the word support means,” he said bitterly, “The way they treated you!”

I shook my head. “But it's like Sara, Mary, Kellie and all them can afford to be more accepting of some crazy mermaid chick. They're not stigmatized and marginalized- Well no, I guess there's a couple who are. When we go out and they're being affectionate we might hear some jerk saying shit about 'those dykes over there', or 'You bitches just need a real man. Come here and I'll straighen ya out with my big straight 12-inch rule-her!'”

“Did someone really say that? What an ignorant asshole!”

“Well it does give Tequila Junction's bouncers exercise. So I know my gay girlfriends catch shit from homophobes---and the rest have plain old everyday sexism to deal with---But no one's telling any of them that their whole identity is a delusion and they can never be who they feel they are inside, the way they do to trans people. Those girls from my support group, they just want to be accepted. To be believed! And if they were being jerks, it's because they felt threatened by by how people might lump them in with me, and say that me being this loony-toon who thinks she's a mermaid just proves that we're all just males suffering from mental illness. I understand their fears, but I'm sure not going to sacrifice being who I have to be, just so they can maybe be accepted by cis people if they act 'normal' enough...”

“Maybe you should invite them over on Saturday too.”

“My trans group? Here?!”

“It's just an idea... But I'm thinking that if they reject you because they're afraid people will use you to judge them by; then maybe, if they could see you living as who you are, in your natural element, so to speak,” he grinned, indicating the lagoon with a sweep of his arm, “In an otherwise fairly normal relationship and with a bunch of non-transgender friends who aren't all aghast about you being a mermaid, then they might see that there's at least one place in the world where you being who you are is no threat to them being accepted for who they are; and that it's possible. And it's something to shoot for instead of just playing by the bigots' rules. Or hell, I don't know... Maybe it's a bad idea.”

“If it is you do a pretty good job of selling it. Sure, let's do it! I'm still a member of their Yahoo Group, I can post the invite there. I doubt they would've gone through the trouble of removing my name. There's three of those girls who I really regret losing contact with, and Audrey, Jayne and Savannah are the ones most likely to show up. The others, well at least I offered them an olive branch, and if they don't want it that's on them.”

“Maybe the ones who do come will have such a good time they'll convince a few more to come to our next party.”

“Maybe...”

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

The walkway veered off through another little patch of jungle as it looped back toward the patio. The sprinker system had just shut off here, and water was dripping off of everything. I ran a hand over the mammoth leaf of an elephant ear plant that had sort of spilled out onto the trail. “It got a bit chilly again last night. Are all these plants gonna survive the winters here?”

“They should. Eldorado Nursery asks you where you live when you're ordering something, and if this house was any farther up the hill I'm sure they would've recommended against a lot of these species.”

“If we were any farther the hill we'd be in Cleveland National Forest, and you can't have a house there. Except for whatever they have for the forest rangers or whoever.”

He shook his head no. “There's more than a few houses up there. A little town called Idyllwild, smack in the middle of the federal land; that I guess was there before it was designated a national park. But it snows pretty good up there in winter; so you won't find any yards like this up there. But it's just beautiful, I mean if you like pine forests.”

“I do. It sounds nice.”

The walkway returned to the lagoon's shoreline. We passed the little pier bridge that led to an opening in the side of the artificial island that was the land entrance to our grotto, an area above the pool in there that had a pair of couches and a big TV; and a table with a lantern on it for romantic subterranean dining. Closer to the cave's entrance was a beautiful little antique cage elevator that went up to our fake hill's summit and the top of the water slide, for anyone who like me would have a rough time climbing that spiral staircase wedged in a vertical slot in the cliffside...

The last time I'd been inside the grotto it had been a waterless, with halogen work lights blazing and plaster dust all over everything. But just as I was about to suggest we go in for a look Greg asked, “So how committed are you to hanging around here while waiting for that GLOO in your tail to dry?”

“Hell yes I want it to dry! I am totally one hundred percent committed to being a mermaid. In fact-”

“Okay, that's good to hear; But what I meant was: Do we have to wait for the stuff to dry here? Or would you want to take a little drive into the mountains?”

I had envisioned this 72 hour wait as a sort of ritualistic staycation, during which my attention would be focused on the process of my transformation, a time when even any boredom I suffered would be part of the experience, somehow good for the soul, like an Orthodox Jew observing the Sabbath. But by now I'd been-there/done-that; And my soul was ready for a change of scenery.

“Sure!” I said, “And would this be to Idyllwild?”

“It would. I was really wanting to go somewhere today. A when you said you'd never been there; Well now I know where. It's your typical little tourist town with mostly just a bunch of souvenir shops and places selling chocolate covered pine cones or whatever, but it's nice; and there's an excellent restaurant where we can have lunch or dinner, depending on how long we're there.”

“Sounds like fun!”

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

It took me twelve minutes to get ready, most of which was spent gawking at my newly enlarged nipples in the mirrors on the closet's doors and deliberating whether or not the breasts they sat on were bigger as well. It would be nice if they'd start growing too, but maybe not at the same pace or they'd be riddled with stretch marks...

With such a limited wardrobe it wasn't too difficult to choose what to wear today. I put on the B-cup bra that I only wore with my sponge rubber breast forms, and after sticking them into it I wriggled into my blue and white cotton peasant dress, which seemed to have been made for one of those tall skinny humanoids from Avatar. But its length was what I needed for going out in public. I folded its bottom hem under my tail fin and lowered it onto the my chair's foot rest; and after checking myself out in the big mirror I decided I was indistinguishable from just a regular disabled person in a wheelchair.

Disabled person in a wheelchair...

Suddenly I felt really weird about going out in public like this; enough so that when Greg returned from folding down the seats in the back of the Caravan he could see the hesitation in my face.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

I gazed at our reflections in the door. “I just don't know about this...”

“About Idyllwild? We can go somewhere else.”

“It's not about where. It's about being there in this... disguise.”

“How did you think you'd be going out?”

“I knew how, obviously; But there's all these... ramifications to doing this; about mermaids and wheelchairs and public perception-”

“What are you talking about?!”

“It was this thing I read yesterday.”

“What thing?”

“A blog. About handicapped people and- Y'know what?! Never mind! I'm gonna have to do this eventually; And a whole different town is probably the best place for me to be out in public for the first time. Just let me do my face and we can go.”

I put on a some eye shadow, a little mascara and my pink lipstick. When I finished Greg was sitting on the bed reading a map. I said, “That's good! We don't wanna make a wrong toin in Alba-koikee!”

He chuckled indulgently. “No, this is a trail map for Cleveland Forest. I almost forgot I had this. It says there's a hiking trail just before Idyllwild you'd be able to take that chair on. Every national and state park has at least one like that, I think it's the law. It's a two mile loop, not too many hills; if you're up for it.”

“Well I did promise I'd join you on your next walk.”

I stuck my phone and paperback into my purse, and out in the garage managed to hoist myself and it up into the Caravan. Greg loaded my chair into the back, then a whole plastic wrapped case of Costco brand bottled water. He hopped in, hit the garage door opener and we were off!

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Rolling down our driveway we saw the plump middle aged woman who lived in the imposing Spanish colonial mansion next door pulling weeds in her front yard. She waved. Greg waved. I waved...

“She's always out there,” I said uneasily as we turned onto the street. “It won't be long before her and her husband realize they have a mermaid living next door.”

Greg grinned, “Oh hell, they probably figured you out a long time ago.”

“You think so?”

“For one thing, you're here every weekend. They saw the lagoon being built, and they already knew about my mermaid fixation.”

“You told them?”

“I admitted it, after Marcia went over there running her big mouth about what a disgusting pervert I am,” he said, and laughed, “That sure didn't go over the way she expected! They told her to get the hell off their property; and after that were even more on my side, and 'always there if I need to talk'. Bob and Eve Phillips are the last people you'd need to worry about judging you. They were totally fascinated by me having this fetish they'd never heard of. But what they don't appreciate is folks who go around gossiping about what somebody else is into, or what he or she does in their own bedroom, being somewhat sexually unorthodox themselves.”

“Really?! But they look so normal!”

“That's what they said about me: 'And here we always thought you were just straight up vanilla.'”

I knew what subculture liked to dismiss less sexually adventurous people as 'vanilla'. Fifty Shades of Snobbery. “You mean they're into...”

“Yep. With a spooky dungeon playroom in their basement and everything.”

“That's cool, if it's consensual,” I said, “But yee-ouch!! I really never understood that one.”

“Do you understand your own one? Can you explain why you wanted to be a mermaid?”

“Well of course! It's because…..................... Okay I see your point.”

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Traffic on the two-lane Highway 74 wasn't too terrible but there were lots of campers and trailers full of quads and jet skis, and far more vehicles were heading into the National Forest than out of it. As we swung into a gap in the stream of traffic Greg dropped two granola bars onto my lap. “I'm afraid this is breakfast, unless you want to wait 'til we can get something in Idyllwild. I never tried this brand, but they're supposed to be chock full of good stuff.”

“FROM NATURE WITH L♥VE? Looks delish!” I said as I ripped one open. I took a big bite. It had the texture and probably the taste of one of those bird treat sticks you put in your parakeet's cage for him to peck at. I swallowed and croaked: “I'm gonna need coffee!”

Greg tried his. “UGHHH! Chock full of chalk! It's eight miles to Mountain Center, they'll have coffee at the Gas n' Go.”

“Gas station coffee,” I said dubiously. “You've got me totally spoiled with your bean-grinding machine and that serious gourmet shit from Mozambique or wherever it is.”

“Sumatra, by way of Trader Joes. And I guess I should've filled us a thermos for the road,” said Greg. He pointed at the stream of cars ahead of us, “But with this many people on the road at least they won't be selling us the sludge that's been sitting in the pot since last night.”

I fished my brush out of my purse. My hair was now longer now than I'd ever had it, and needed a good brushing after my bath. When I finished I swept it all back and clamped the wide Alice band I'd brought down over it. Glancing over, Greg broke into a grin, “I like it like that. Simple, classic.”

“Is it? I'm just trying to keep it all out of my face if the wind kicks up.”

“It goes good with that blue dress. Like a grown-up Alice in Wonderland.”

Huh?!? I grabbed the overhead rear view mirror and swiveled it to look at myself. This wasn't the same style of dress, but with the white satin headband it did look like some half-assed attempt at a cosplay costume...

“Okay, kind of. But I wasn't even thinking about that when I was getting dressed, I was mostly concerned with hiding this,” I said, patting my tail through the fabric, “I didn't have a lot options for what to wear today.”

“You sure didn't. When a woman complains about having nothing to wear it usually means she's tired of what she does have, but you really don't have anything. We've got to get you some more duds! You won't to be in the pool or lounging around teasing me with your succulent new nipples all the time! If you need longer items, pick an evening and we'll hit the tall racks at Mr & Mrs. Large in the Winchester Outlet Mall.”

“That sounds good for skirts. But I'm really only 'tall' from the waist down, so I can pick up tops and tees anywhere. Target has some cute stuff, and it's more in my price range.”

“If you want. But let me buy you at least one really nice dress for if we ever want to eat at some real fancy place, or if somebody wants to give me another award," he said, and laughed, "I don't know why they keep doing that! I don't design my buildings and I don't physically swing a hammer and knock them together; I just get the bids and wangle the money end of it. But if I have to go to one of those things I want you to be there to help me get through it. And if you are I'd like you to have something elegant for it; something by Armani or Dolce & Gabbana...”

“Jesus Christ! Do you have any idea how much a dress like that would cost?!?”

“Believe me, I'm painfully aware of how much they cost. I payed for a whole closet full of them!” he said, “So stopping after one or two is going to seem like a real bargain. But I do want to see you in something befitting your natural beauty. Do you think you could let me do this for you?”

I had suffered through wearing a suit now and then as Bill, but I'd never had an occasion to get dressed to the nines as Lori. Neither my work nor any of my recreational activities in the past year had called for it, and when dining out with Greg we'd never gone to any place ritzy, which I'm noy sure there even is around our neighborhood. But I had to admit a dress like that had always appealed to me. Something black and backless in some delicious fabric, its classic lines transforming me from a tall skinny dork to a slender and statuesque runway model. Albeit with a tail...

“All right. But when we get married I don't want a fancy wedding dress. In fact I don't want any dress! We'll have a mermaid wedding, right in our own backyard,” I said, figuring this would more than offset the cost of a few overpriced gowns. I made a breast-cupping gesture, “Just get me a couple of shells to wear; And my bridesmaids can wear those grass skirts left over from my moving-to-Hawaii party at work...”

“What a wonderful idea! And I'll wear a tuxedo jacket and swim trunks!”

Which was exactly what we did...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

MOUNTAIN CENTER 3 MILES, said the road sign.

The two-lane highway had been steadily climbing higher into the mountains. For a while we'd been getting an occasional view of the towns back there in San Jacinto Valley but now it was all dry hills and canyons adorned with rocks and scrub brush, its population of rabbits, rattlers and coyotes well hidden, except for the ones that hadn't quite made it across the road.

A thought occurred to me: “Speaking of getting dressed up. How fancy is this 'excellent restaurant' you're taking me to?”

“It's not. As nice as it is it's totally casual, since they depend mostly on the tourist business. The whole town's really laid back; in that peasant dress you'll fit right in with all those old hippies and crystal wearing Wicca ladies up there. So don't worry about how you're dressed.”

“Who said I was worried?”

“You did! Whatever it is you were starting to tell me about back at the house. Something about what people were going to think when they saw you, and the implications or the ramifications of... of something that you decided you didn't want to talk about.”

“Because it's stupid,” I shrugged.

“But it's obviously bothering you. If this is about your tail, no one's going to suspect you've got anything but a pair of legs under that dress.”

“It's not the tail, or not exactly. It's this wheelchair. I keep thinking about how everyone's going to be looking at me and wondering what's wrong with me. And about what they might say if they knew. They'd think I was one of these pretenders going around in a wheelchair to get attention; Or for some reason even more messed up! Some weird, kinky, fetishy I wanna-be-a-cripple kind of-”

“But you're NOT! The only reason you're in that chair is because you're a mermaid on land, and you need it to get around. You're not pretending to be anything else. And whatever conclusions 'they' might come to about it---which is so hypothetical it's silly!---that would be their problem, not yours. I mean wouldn't it?”

“But the pretending is implicit in using one. If I was wearing a Marine Corps uniform with sharpshooter badges and Purple Hearts and Medals of Valor all over it, it would be pretty fucking disingenuous to go: 'Hey, I never said I was a combat veteran, that was your assumption!'”

“Okay, I guess it is something of a disguise. But I don't think your fake war hero analogy holds up. This isn't meant to make people think one thing or another about you, it's trying to make them think less about you, to draw the least possible attention. They might glance twice at a person in a wheelchair but they're not gonna whip out their phones and start snapping pictures, like they would if you were a mermaid riding in a wheelbarrow. And isn't this what mermaids in stories and films have always done when they go 'undercover' among the land dwellers? You never saw your namesake agonizing over the ethics of hiding her true nature, or worrying about what everyone was thinking.”

“Lori Lemaris doesn't have to wonder what people are thinking. She knows!”

“Oh that's right. She's one of those telepathic mermaids.”

[Neither Greg or I were huge comics fans; but somehow we'd both stumbled across the reissued anthologies of stories about Superman's mermaid friend, and we had each fallen in love with the character Lori Lemaris. Me as the girl I wished I could be, and Greg as his first adolescent crush on a mermaid. She'd first appeared in Superman #126 in 1959, as a coed attending the same university a young Clark Kent went to, where she posed as a crippled girl in a wheelchair by hiding her tail under a tartan blanket. She came out to Clark when she telepathically discovered he harbored a secret as big as hers, and the Siren from Atlantis became Superman's all-time second greatest love after Lois Lane...]

I said, “But the thing is, she's a fictional character; and when she was created she could only worry or think about what the writers wanted her to. And things were different then. A lot of the ways disabled people were portrayed back then and that were acceptable at the time are considered just plain wrong today.”

“But you're not disabled. You're a mermaid.”

“Except wheelchairs are automatically associated with the disabled, and with our increased awareness about respecting them, for anyone else to ride around in one is seen as a mocking them somehow.”

“I would think mermaids would get a pass. It's not like you can walk.”

“You'd think so, wouldn't you? But yesterday I found this blog at Mer-Mania about the history of mermaids and wheelchairs; and I went 'Wow, that's what I'm about to do!', so I read it. And it's what got me started me worrying about this.”

“A blog?! People blog about all kinds of stupid crap!”

“This one was well researched, and it was by Call Me Wanda.”

“Really?” he asked. Wanda was an author we both admired. “What did she say?”

“Back in the 1970's a singer named Bette Midler used to have herself pushed out onto stage at the start of her act sitting in a wheelchair in a mermaid costume, and everybody would laugh and cheer.”

“She had a concert movie where she did that too,” said Greg, “Or no, wait- It was Madonna.”

“Yeah, that was Madonna. She did the wheelchair thing too, on tour and in that movie back in the 90's. And maybe at the time a few people grumbled, but there wasn't any huge outcry. But when Lady Gaga tried this same bit in 2011 she was pelted with eggs for making fun of the disabled. She issued an apology, saying this was never her intention and some of her best friends are cripples, yadda yadda yadda... but it didn't matter. She was this evil person for being so insensitive that she could even do such a cruel, disgusting thing. And surprisingly---for a woman who doesn't usually let controversy stop her from doing something artistic---she ditched the wheelchair from that part of her act.”

“So how's a mermaid supposed to get around, crawl on the floor?!”

“I guess, or magically grow legs. Because DC comics got rid of Lori Lemaris's wheelchair too. The last couple of times she showed up in them they'd made her one of those mermaid who becomes human when she's out of the water, like Madison in Splash or the mermaids on that kid's show H2O. So it wasn't just a one time deal, or doesn't only pertain to stage acts; it's pretty much across the board a thing you just don't do. Like singing Mammy in blackface.”

“You could grow legs when you want to go out. It's not too late. We can go home, supersolvent this tail off of you, and you could just wear it at home. Give that chair back to your friend...”

I didn't even have to think about it. “Hell No, I'm not doing that! I'm not going back to just wearing my mermaid half, now that I'm so close to being a mermaid! Whatever people would think or I'd think they might think is just something I have to deal with. And if they actually start to get in my face about it I'll have Rae build me a nice wheeled dolphin.”

“What's that?”

“It's a dolphin on wheels. Mine would have to be motorized, but it's what Lady Gaga started riding out onto the stage for her mermaid number instead of a wheelchair. I guess no one had a problem with that.”

“I'm surprised PETA didn't protest. Ah, we're here!” he exclaimed, and at a clever three sided interchange sort of like a roundabout he pulled into the Gas n' Go and went in to get our coffee.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Greg came back with two giant 32 ounce coffees and four little white plastic tubs of half and half for me. I pried the coffee's lid up and poured two in. He watched me take a sip. “Any good?”

S-l-u-u-u-urp, “Very!”

We found our way around the articulated roundabout to Highway 243, and continued on up the mountain. Traffic was less than half of what it had been, since most of the folks in RV's or with trailers carrying boats or motorbikes had continued on down 74 to Lake Hemet or Cochella Valley. Soon the landscape's orange dirt, crumbly granite and squat, combustible shrubs were joined by the occasional pine tree; and up above the next looping switchback we could see a whole wall of them where the forest started in earnest.

“So are you ready to hit the town in your un-politically correct wheelchair?” asked Greg.

“Not completely. But I really only have two choices. I mean not just today, but with my life. And since detransitioning from a mermaid is unthinkable to me I have to be willing to face whatever negatives come with moving forward; real or imagined...”

He shot me an 'I'm proud of you!' grin and asked, “And should I stop asking you if you're still sure you want to be a mermaid, and reminding you that come tomorrow there will be no going back?”

“No, keep it up. At least for-” I checked the clock in the dashboard, “-the next 21¼ hours. I don't know why but it's comforting. Like you're doing your job. Hey, can we put the windows down?”

“Good idea,” he said, then shut the AC off and hit the buttons for both front windows. Inhaled the pine scented air.

I slid my partially eaten granola bar out into my palm and inspected it. Suddenly my hand jerked sideways- “OOPS!”

“You littering slob! That's it, the wedding's off!”

“But I didn't toss the wrapper. See?” I held it up. “Something will come along and eat it. And they are called From Nature With Love, so I'm just sending it back there. Minus the love...”

A minute later I heard an “OOPS!” and then: “I guess we can feed the rest of these to the squirrels.”

“We could stash them in the freezer in the garage until Halloween and give 'em out to the Trick or Treaters.”

“And three guesses who'd be scrubbing the front of the house after we got egged...”

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

A mile before Idyllwild we pulled onto a dirt road that lead through the trees to a little clearing with just one other car parked there. I dumped the rest of the Nature bars into my purse for the birds or whoever might eat them. Greg pulled my chair down out of the back and opened my door.

I eased myself down into it, grabbed my purse and rearranged the hem of my dress to completely hide my tail, then slipped my hands into the fingerless bicycle gloves Rae had left in one of the chair's saddlebags. I'd never thought about how someone's hands might blister from shoving a wheelchair's wheels forward again and again until I found them, but the second I did their purpose was obvious.

“How many bottles of water do you think you'll need?” asked Greg.

“For two miles? Two. But I'll take four. My chair has these side bags, I can carry yours too,” I said, “So where's this trail?”

“Over there by the bathrooms,” he said, pointing at a sign that read: Strawberry Creek Loop Trail.

Which sounded lovely, but I never saw it. The ground beneath me was firm dirt all the way to the bathrooms building, nearly as easy to roll across as asphalt. But from there onward, the trail that made its way up a gentle hill ahead of us until it veered off behind some trees had the consistency of sand. Not terribly deep but loose enough that my headway through it was inch by inch. I stopped after about four meters. What I could see of the rest of the trail didn't look any better.

“Goddamn it!” Greg huffed. “My map said this was an 'improved dual-access trail'. Somebody sure screwed up!”

Two guys and a girl about my age on mountain bikes appeared from around the bend in the trail, headed this way. They were up off their seats, pumping hard to make headway through the loose soil. I said, “I think that's your 'dual access'. Both bikes and hikers are allowed. Nothing about wheelchairs.”

“So I guess I'm the one who screwed up. Goddamn it! Let's get out of here.”

“Not yet,” I said, and as the first cyclists passed us I asked, “Excuse me. Is the whole trail like this?”

He knew what I meant. “The back two thirds of the loop is pretty solid, but you'll never get that far in that thing. You'll want the wheelchair-access trail by the ranger station in Pine Cove. Or better tires.”

“Thanks,” I shouted after them.

As they hefted their bikes onto their car's rooftop rack Greg said, “Then let's just go to Idyllwild. We can get our two miles in on the paved streets there; look at all the cabins and whatever...”

“But we're already here. You go ahead. I got my book, and the bathroom right here,” I said, and fished my phone out of my purse and checked it, “And I've even got bars on my phone. I've been meaning to to call Rae all weekend, so I'll have plenty to do to keep me busy. It'll take you what, an hour?”

“At the most. Are you sure now?” he asked, and after a few more assurances that I'd be fine he stuck his cheap no-name sunglasses onto his face, stuffed a water bottle into each of the big pockets on his shorts and quickly hoofed it up the trail and out of sight.

I pulled my unneeded gloves off of my hands. The mechanical odometer in my chair's armrest read: .02 km. Not much of a hike...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Ours was the only car in the parking area. I was completely alone here. For a while I just sat listening to the breeze rustling the nearby pine trees, the blue jays squawking and various other birds chirping and twittering. Pleasant sounds.

The sun beating down on me through a gap in the trees felt nice too, but I didn't want to get all sweaty before we even got to town so I twisted around and raised the telescoping pole jutting up from behind my seat to its full height, swung the device at the top like an oversize folding fan into its horizontal position and opened it, its triangular sections clicking and locking one by one until they formed a complete circle. This thing would not only keep the sun or rain off me it was also a solar energy collector, which originally was intended to charge the chair's battery and run all the devices Rae had wanted to install before she learned I wanted to go manual with everything. But she'd left a little jack in the post in case I ever needed to recharge my phone or run a small popcorn maker or something.

I deployed my armrest's cup holder and adjusted its size to fit my coffee cup, and then it occurred to me that since this chair had saddlebags the big purse I had sitting in my lap was sort of redundant. I spent the next few minutes transferring its contents into them, finding a perfect little pocket or slot for nearly every item.

After making sure I was the only soul around I pulled my dress up so I could look at my new tail again, admiring how it sparkled, and the way the sunlight shining through my semi-translucent caudal fin created a pretty patch of emerald green stained-glass light on the ground beneath it. I was something of a fish out of water sitting up here on this mountain, but at least I was a fish. Which reminded me...

I cracked open my paperback novel and dove back into the fantasy tale about a 15-year-old transgender kid named Suzie who had been magically turned into a mermaid named Enomena. Unlike me---who could never even pretend---the book's young narrator had at the age of 12 resolved to get over her infantile obsession with mermaids; figuring it was time to put away childish fantasies and focus on the actually attainable dream of becoming a female human.

But now that she was a mermaid she was realizing that she'd only abandoned her childhood dream on the assumption that mermaids weren't real. Having discovered they were, she embraced her new form, her new family and friends; forming an especially close bond with the teenage mermaid princess she'd become twins with. Enomena and Anemone lived with their mother the Queen in a castle next to a quaint village populated by 2000 or so mermaids and mermen (which weirdly enough was called Shellcastle- the last name I'd made up for myself!). She was slowly adjusting to her new undersea life, and learning to live without the internet and other comforts of the more technically advanced human world...

Her big problem was that she'd already had a life back on land, with a mom and dad who had just begun to accept that their “son” was a girl in heart and mind. She knew her vanishing without a trace was causing them unimaginable grief, and her sadness and frustration about this cast a dark pall over even her most wonderful adventures. Every chapter had at least one flashbacks to her former life.

While you might think I would be envious of the stunningly beautiful princess she'd become, who could breathe underwater and would someday be able to lay eggs and hatch babies like a real genetic girl; the parts that made me jealous were these passages about her old life on land. Suzie's childhood memories seemed utterly alien to me, being so Spielbergianly suburban and normal. For all the pain the loss of her original family caused her, I couldn't help thinking: 'At least her parents miss her!'

Not like when I ran away at about her age and returned home hungry a week later to find my parents still sitting on the couch like they'd never moved from there. They took a perverse delight in my shock when I found out they hadn't so much as picked up the phone to try and discover my whereabouts; but only leveled their bleary lidded eyes at me and asked: “So are you done with your theatrics?”

After some of the horror stories I've been told by friends who suffered serious physical abuse at their parents' hands I considered myself fortunate that mine were just weirdly cold and contemptuous, treating me like something that was in the way.

I only remember being struck by them once, when I was about nine. My mom was at the front door paying the paper boy and told me to go grab her purse. I was carrying it past my dad who was sitting in his recliner watching TV, when from out of nowhere I was backhanded across the face and sent reeling.

I blurted out: “What the hell did you do that for?!”

“You know!” he spat disgustedly, but I didn't have a clue. It was only years later that I figured out that it had to do with the purse I'd been holding, and his growing suspicions about me.

To this day both he and my mom are convinced that my being transgender is something I'm doing to spite them. I felt surprisingly vindicated when in the course of the half dozen sessions we'd spent discussing them my gender shrink told me, “Stop minimizing what they did to you! It wasn't 'sort of' abuse, it was ABUSE!”

But I was also glad that Doctor Randi didn't keep dwelling on my childhood, past asking me if I'd heard from them since our last session and if there was anything new I want to share about them. She wasn't trying to cure me of all my neuroses, our work together focused mostly on how I was getting along in my transition. She must have thought it was going well, because unless I was having some huge emotional emergency---(I'd had a few, but compared to that meltdown that had made me drop out of college none of them seemed big enough to bother her with)---I was only seeing her once a month now.

I was dreading my next visit with her, knowing I'd either have to lie my ass off and say my legs had been paralyzed in a car crash (“No, you can't see them!”) or come clean about my mermaidism and about this wonderful fiancee she was so happy I'd found being a mermaid weirdo too...

But that potential catastrophe was three whole weeks away. It was a beautiful day, and this part of the book I was reading was really cute, until it culminated in Eenie have a scary fight with an enormous
hammerhead shark. I finished the chapter just as my coffee ran out, and suddenly realized I had to pee.

I slogged back through the trail's sand to the bathroom, chucked my coffee cup into the trash can and went into the women's side. I hoped the handicapped toilet wouldn't be all gross and filthy, because I couldn't piss standing up now even if I wanted to...

But the whole room was wet like it had been blasted clean with a hose recently and smelled strongly of disinfectant; so all I had to do was wipe the seat of the institutional steel toilet dry with some TP and clamber on; an act I thought I'd really gotten the hang of, but this time I found it awkward as hell. Instead of being able to heft my tail up by the human knees inside it, my whole fish-half hung useless and unresponsive, and I realized I could barely feel anything from about my thighs down.

After I did my business I found it just as hard to transfer back into my chair, and I started to worry that the vitaform GLOO'd snugly to me might be interfering with my circulation somehow; but by the time I'd rolled back out into the sunshine my tail felt fine and moved totally normally, so I figured it must have just fallen asleep somehow; which I guess can happen when you've got a tail...

Knowing I had more coffee working its way through my system I parked myself right next to the restrooms. I had dug my phone out of my side bag and was starting to call Rae to thank her for my chair and ask if her if it would possible to get off-road tires for it, when I noticed someone bouncing down the hiking trail's incline toward me.

It obviously wasn't Greg; not unless he had shucked off his shoes and pants, shrunk down to about 5'6”, turned female and grown luxurious snow white fur all over while sprouting an adorable pair of long fluffy ears from the top of his cute little white furry head...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

The bunnygirl had fur on every part of her except for her more or less human face, and the slender little hands that she held curled in front of the swell of her furry breasts, which except for a modest bit of cleavage were hidden by the rainbow colored checkerboard-pattern vest that was her only clothing (besides her fursuit, I assumed...). As she came hopping down the trail toward me I could hear her singing happily to herself: “Hippity hoppity, bunny bunny! Hippity hoppity, bunny bunny! Hippity hoppity, bunny bunny-”

She was a good hopper. The ease with which she bounded along---more like a kangaroo than an actual rabbit down on all fours---made me wonder if there were springs in the bottoms of her bunny costume's big clodhopper feet, which were nearly twice as wide at their fronts as they were at the heel.

The white bunny seemed so preoccupied by her hopping and singing that she didn't notice me sitting here until she was almost to me. When she did she stopped hopping and singing and started walking normally. Or trying to, but it seemed a bit difficult for her. She was lurching along in the stiff, upright manner of a dignified drunk trying and almost managing to walk normally. I could tell she was embarrassed and was wishing that I would stop staring, so I did.

I pretended to get back into my book, opening it at random to some page from a part I hadn't read yet, in which the story's mermaid heroine was on a flying saucer with a bunch of wacky space aliens who liked to slap each other with dead chickens. I hoped this passage would make more sense when I read it in the context of whatever had come before; but no matter- Miss Bunny was almost to me.

As she passed by I glanced up as if I was just noticing her for the first time. “Oh... Hello there!”

“Hi,” she said shyly. She seemed to be a few years younger than me, but Rae once had told me that people generally tend to guess low when estimating the age of an anthro furry.

I stuck my hand out. “I'm Lori.”

“I'm Bonnie,” she said, and as we shook hands I noticed her oval nails were each a different bright cheerful color, like little Easter eggs. Her hand extended from her white fur as if from the sleeves of some insanely fluffy angora sweater. Besides her hands, the oval of her face was the only original part of her that I could see, the fur on her head conforming tightly to it, sort of like a fleece ski hood with the drawstring pulled tight.

It was a cute face, and mostly human except for her little twitching heart-shaped pink bunny nose. With fur as white as hers I had sort of expected her to have the red eyes and pure white skin of an albino, but her eyes were a pretty violet color and while her complexion tended towards fair there was a little spray of freckles on either side of her nose. She had a cute overbite that she'd probably been born with, and a pair of large Bugs Bunny teeth that for her sake I hoped she hadn't been. It would be hell going through school with teeth like that.

She pointed at my blue dress and white headband and lisped, “You look like Alith in Wonderland!”

“So I've been told,” I grinned, and pointed at her tall fluffy ears, “And you look like the White Rabbit!”

“Yeth I do. And I thuppoth you're wondering why I'm dreth'd in a bunny thoot...”

“Well actually I have several friends in the-”

Before I could say 'furry community' she launched into her story. It was a long convoluted saga that she rattled off with barely a pause to take a breath, so I'm not going to add to the confusion by trying spell every word with an S-sound in it the way she actually said it, especially since there were a few other words she mispronounced...

“Well basically I'm stuck wearing thith thing, permanently, thanks to a terrible set of circumstances and this sticky stuff called GLOO! Not glue, GLOO! But you must've heard of GLOO!”

“Why yes, as a matter of fact I-”

“You see what happened was, I went to this costume party on the Friday before Easter, at the Epsilon Omicron Upsilon sorority house at UC Riverside.”

“They had a chapter at Fullerton. Are you a member?”

“No I'm a bunny!” she cried, sort of looking around in confusion as if my interruption had made her lose track of where she was in her story, before she remembered and jumped back into it: “But anyway, the theme of this party was 'The Rite of Spring'; So your costume had to be something about springtime. My friend Sally went as Aphrodite, she wore this white diaphragmacious gown and a wreath of flowers; But I figured the Easter Bunny would be good for spring because it was, you know, in two days. So what happened was: I get the costume at this thrift shop, and Sally says if I really want my bunnysuit to fit good and not look like I was wearing a big furry bag I should use this stuff called GLOO!, 'cuz it glues real good. Well I was pretty proud of those 20 pounds I'd just lost, and I didn't wanna look like a furry bag, even if I was a bunny; so I said: 'Is this GLOO-stuff dangerous? I don't want to get stuck like that!' And she said: 'No, it pulls right off if you use the solvent that comes with it...'; so I said okay...

“And the party was great, and everybody loved my costume, but I sent a selfie of myself to my sister in Santa Ana, and she texts back: 'Oh you look so CUTE! You just gotta be the Easter Bunny at my church picnic on Sunday!' And I said okay to that too, because it would be fun; And you know, for kids!”

Two things occurred to me while she was saying all that. First off, this story of hers seemed oddly rehearsed. And second, that it was highly unlikely that this costume she was wearing came from a thrift shop. The feet alone looked like they'd cost a couple of hundred dollars, the way they ended in four distinct and lifelike toes, each with a stubby clawlike nail protruding through the fur. Her whole costume seemed nearly as well-crafted as the tail I was wearing, and could only have been made by Furtech- the furry prosthetics company that my fox friend Rae swears by.

Bonnie the Bunny was so into her story that she didn't seem to notice as I surreptitiously picked my phone up off my lap and brought up the Furtech website's catalog, and typing Bunnysuit, White, Female into the search bar. After scrolling through a surprising variety of white female bunnysuits I came across one that was exactly what she was wearing (minus the vest), at a price of $1200!

“And so anywhoo,” she continued, “I knew you have to take anything you GLOO to yourself off within 8 hour or the solvent won't work, and you get stuck like that. So when I get home I go to take the costume off, figuring I knew how to do it now so would go quicker when I GLOO'd it back on again on Sunday morning. So what happened was, I get the solvent out, when allofasudden my boyfriend starts bangin' on the door. And he's like really drunk! When he sees me he goes: 'Ohmigod, you're a BUNNY! I gotta have some bunnysex RIGHT NOW!' I know how much Bruno likes bunnygirls so tell him: 'Okay but just a quickie, 'cuz I gotta take this suit off real soon or I'll get stuck like this!' And he says: 'No you won't. There's this stuff called GLOO! Super Adhesive Solvent that can take it off up to 72 hours after you GLOO it on. My friend has a whole bunch of it; and as long as you use it by Sunday after your Easter egg thing you'll be fine!' So I told him okay and we had bunnysex---and I'm screaming 'FUCK ME! FUCK ME! I'M A BUNNY!!'---and then bunnysex all day Saturday and Saturday night; except for when I made him go to his friend Larry's to get the supersolvent, because Larry is kind of a flake and if we wait 'til the last minute he might not be home or something. Because I'm not STOOPID! I mean, do you think I'm stoopid?!”

“No, but there is something silly about you.”

“There is?!” she gasped, her unusually large eyes widening in alarm.

“But in a good way,” I said, “Silly's good when it's the fun kind of silly!”

“Oh!” she said, her smile returning, “And you're silly too! So Sunday morning I get ready to go to Santa Ana for the thing and Bruno says: 'I wanna go to church with you!', and I said: 'But you hate church!' And he says: 'Hey, don't you want me to get saved?!', all sarcastic like; But it was funny, and he goes: 'I'll even drive!' so I said okay. So we took his car and did the Easter egg hunt, and the church cervix was nice, and the kids were great, and Bruno even behaved himself and didn't make fun of the Christians and their 'imaginary Sky Daddy', or tell them he worships the Flying Spaghooti Monster, which he doesn't really but that's his joke...

“But then we're driving back to my place to get me out of this suit and he goes: 'Hey, let's stop at this bar and have a drink!' And I said, 'I really don't think that's a good idea.' But he's all: 'It's only noon, we got lotsa time!', and 'Plus we have to celebrate it bein' April Fools Day!' Because Easter Sunday was also April first this year; and so I said okay...”

“It was, wasn't it?” I remembered. I didn't go visit Greg that weekend but we'd met up in the Mer-Mania chat room on Easter, where people were joking about the concurrence of these two holidays.

“So right, it was April Fools Day but it turned out the yoke was on me!” she frowned, “Because what happened was: we went in the bar and everybody was all: 'Hey it's the Easter Bunny! Let's buy the Easter Bunny a drink!' And they bought me a lot of drinks; so many that I couldn't drink 'em all and gave a bunch of mine to Bruno; until all of a sudden he goes: 'Whoah! Look at the time! We gotta split!' And I said, 'We're both kinda drunk, maybe we should call a cab...' But he goes: 'We're not drunk,' and I go: 'Yes we are!' But he says, 'Believe me, I drink a LOT; and I know when someone is drunk!'; and so I say okay. You know how they always tell you to 'drink responsibly'? Well that's kinda hard to do when you're drunk...

“And so we're driving back home to get me unGLOO'd, sipping those little airplane bottles of Jagermeister and singin' the Bunny Song we made up, that goes: 'HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY-'”

A dreamy, far away look had come into her eyes as she sang her song---and it seemed like her record had gotten stuck---so I interrupted: “And so what happened was: the cops pulled you over and you both went to jail; And you missed the 72 deadline for the Gloo Adhesive Super Solvent to work and now you're stuck as a fluffy white bunny forever.”

She gasped, “How did you know?!”

“I kind of saw where this story was headed.”

“Well that's exactly what happened! I told them and I told them County Sheriffs: 'I gotta get home and get this costume off or I'll be stuck like this!'; And they just laughed and said, 'Tell me another April Fool's story!'; Because all this stuff about GLOO! was only startin' to be in the news then, and I guess they didn't believe me. And when I finally got home the GLOO! Adhesive Super Solvent didn't do anything, it was like puttin' stinky water on it, and so now I'm a bunny and I'll be a bunny for the rest of my life,” she sighed.

“So did you sue them?”

“Huh?!”

“The Sheriff's Department. I mean they did ruin your life!”

“What good would it do? It's not gonna get this bunnysuit off of me. And at least I get to be something cute, and it feels so nice to be all fluffy like this, like I can be my own pillow! And you wouldn't believe how sensitive most of my bunny parts are!”

“Actually I would, because-”

“So all in all, I'm learnin' to make the best of this bein' stuck bein' a bunny thing!!!”

“Yes, I'll bet you are. But I just have one question.”

“What's that?”

I knew she wasn't going to like this, but I had to ask: “Did any of that really happen?”

He eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean what happened to you over Easter and how you got stuck this way. It all just sounds... how do I put this? Too convenient, too perfect. I mean don't get me wrong, it's a great ancecdote---the way one thing leads to another to keep you in that fur suit past the 72 hour mark---and if someone wanted to turn it into a screenplay the thing would practically write itself. But I'm calling bullshit on your whole story!”

Her little pink nose started wriggling furiously. “How DARE you! I tell you about the misfortunous weekend that changed my life and you... you... How would you like it if you told me how ya got all crippilated and I called you a liar?! HUH?!!? Why on Earth would you even say such a thing?! You don't even know me!!”

“I think I kind of do though...”

She crossed her fluffy arms. “All right, Miss Smartywheels! If you know me so good then how did I get like this?”

“Okay, how does this sound? All your life you wanted to be a pretty white rabbit. Or maybe not all your life, but when you found out Furtech made these amazingly realistic bunnysuits you knew what you had to do! You saved up, maybe worked two jobs for a while, and when you finally had the $1200 you ordered one... For the next few days you kept looking for that UPS truck coming up the block, and when the package finally arrived you ripped it open with trembling fingers and beheld the thing that would finally make you feel whole! And when you saw yourself in the mirror in it you knew you never wanted to take it off. But you already knew that, which is why you'd bought all that GLOO!”

Bonnie stood gaping at me like I was a magician who had just pulled an elephant out of my hat.

“You GLOO'd yourself inside your new bunny body, but then you had to wait 72 hours for the GLOO! to dry. It felt like the longest 3 days of your life, and the clock barely seemed to move... But finally that glorious hour arrived when the GLOO! had finally dried and you knew nothing could ever take off your bunny nose or your bunny teeth, your bunny fur or your bunny ears. Everything about you finally felt right; And since then---in spite of the judgment from folks who just don't understand, for whom you've concocted your whole 'Easter accident' story---you've never for one minute regretted turning yourself into a beautiful white bunny,” I said, then bent forward in my chair, taking a little bow. “How's that? Did I leave anything out?”

She said faintly, “It was a FedEx truck. And three jobs for a while, until I couldn't handle the not sleeping. But everything else, that was it! 'Zactly how it happened. Are you like... telepathic?!”

“No. But I am a mermaid,” I grinned as a reached down and yanked my dress clear up to my waist.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

She squealed and clapped her hands in delight! “Oh my paws and whiskers, what a boo-ful tail! I didn't know Furtech even did mermaids!”

“They don't. It's from a German company called Traumfabrik. 'Dream Factory'... But if I was gonna go furry I'd definitely go with Furtech, their stuff is great. And that's an amazing suit. You make such a cute bunny!”

“Really?!” she trilled, blushing adorably. My blunt and tactless accusations were forgiven, we were buddies now; and in some strange way sisters. Or at least cousins. She leaned in over my tail for a closer look, “This fits you really good. Did you use GLOO?”

I nodded. “A furry friend recommended it.”

“That's a good friend,” she said, “Can I touch it?”

“Go ahead.”

“Ooooooh it feels so smooth and slippity! Not as nice as fur, but nice!” she exclaimed as she slid her hand down my tail, “Can you feel that?”

“I can. You have warm hands,” I said, “But just before you showed up my whole tail was numb and like... paralyzed.”

“Oh that's good!” she said excitedly.

“It is?!”

“Yeah! That means it's started.”

“What has?”

“Well for me it was almost a week of these weird symptoms, like the numb thing, and other things; but when it was over it turned out I can hop really, really good,” she grinned, “That's like my power!”

“That's a good power,” I said.

“But I dunno what it would be for a mermaid, though it's probably not hopping. Or you might not get anything real special. My friend Tina the Mouse didn't, except a improved sense of smell.”

“I guess I'm gonna find out,” I said, and then I had a strange impulse. She was close enough that I could reach out scratch the soft fuzzy fur on her belly, which if her suit was as sensitive as my tail I knew she'd enjoy. So I did, squealing: “OOOOGIE GOOGIE GOOGIE GOOOOOOOOO!!”

She started squirming and giggling, her big left foot rapidly thumping the ground in a way that was clearly involuntary; until she hopped back to a spot just out of my reach, grinning. She said, "I can't get over what a nice tail that is! I mean those scales- like a thousand shiny emeralds! You could go to the Oscars or somethin' and wouldn't even have to dress up. Why would you wanna hide such a boo-ful tail?!”

I shrugged. “I guess we each have our own way of lying about who we are. Me by literally covering it up; and you with your made up story about how you got this way and that it wasn't intentional.”

“Well I just tell that to people I don't know,” she said, “And not all of it was a lie. Some of it's true...”

“Not the getting arrested part, I hope! They say Orange County Jail is the pits.”

“No. I did go to that Sorority party and then to the Easter service with my sister, but not in my bunnysuit, because it didn't come until the Friday after Easter, But when it did, boy did me and Bruno have a lotta crazy bunnysex! That's the true part.”

I was looking at her crotch, as smooth and featureless as the loins of a cartoon animal. I said, “I have a question. I might seem kind of personal...”

“What do you wanna know?”

“Well you wouldn't have to get real graphic, But in general terms, what exactly is bunnysex? I mean how do you-”

“It's sex when you're a bunny!”

“So would that be a lot of like oral, or what?”

“Oh yeah, that too! And I was kind of afraid it might be dangerous for Bruno, I mean with my new teeth; but Bruno said he kinda liked the danger. But mostly we did, you know, regular...”

“Regular?”

“Regular, normal, his-dick-in-my-pussy sex,” she said, and when she saw where I was staring she said, “Oh! You can't see it, can you? And that's what's so cool about what they did for me. Ya wanna see?”

“Is it weird that I do? Because it's not like I'm a lesbian, or trying to- Er, I guess there was that one time with Linda Holt when we were- Well okay, it was three times; But this is just wanting to know about your bunnysuit and how you can do that. Because Greg and I---that's my fiance---we can't really, I mean-”

“Relax! It's just us girls here,” she said with an impish grin; and after looking around to make sure we weren't being observed she reached down and pressed her hands on either side of what I'd assumed was a faint seam in the bunnysuit's crotch---(but now I remembered that Furtech products didn't have visible seams of any sort...)---and pushed her fur on either side of it out away from it, causing a slit to open.

When it had opened wide enough I heard a faint click, and when she took her hands away the gap stayed open, exposing the ruddy soft tender flesh of her vulva, which seemed human enough (I'd never seen a rabbit's...), except for a dense ridge a quarter inch thick all the way around its perimeter, that was obviously her fursuit since her short fuzzy fur started at its top edge; but from this distance it looked more like animal hide than the synthetic material I would have expected.

“And when I wanna close it I just do this,” she said, pushing a pair of spots on either side of the opening with her index fingers. And it was gone---instantly!---replaced by the chaste blank crotch of a child's plushie toy.

I said, “Well that explains bunnysex, but I didn't see that feature mentioned in the Furtech catalog.”

“You wouldn't. The suit didn't come like this. The nanites from the GLOO! did this for me; fusing the suit with my girly bits under it and making it all invisible so I don't gotta wear pants or nothin'. And it's a good thing they did; because I really, really, really had to pee by then!”

She'd GLOO'd herself into this thing without making provisions for how she was going to pee?!! I don't want to call her a dumb-bunny but that was one gigantic oversight!

I asked, “So these nanites just decided to modify your suit for you?”

“No. They did it 'cuz I asked them to.”

“What do you mean you asked them to?”

“You know, like a question. And they said okay. They're very helpful like that!”

“You can talk to your nanites?”

“Not most of the time, our hooman brains are usually too noisy to hear them. And it's not really like regular talking. And most of 'em are gone from me by now, so it's harder. Ya ever notice how bad nanites itch when they're leavin' your body?!” she asked, and started vigorously scratching the fur under her chin. What startled me was she was doing this with her foot, while only stooping over slightly, her whole leg bent impossibly up in front of her!

“So then how do you talk to them?” I asked after she lowered her leg.

“Well first I got to be in Bunnyspace. Which isn't a place but, you know, in my head.”

“Like meditation?”

“I don't know, is there a hopping meditation? 'Cause that's how I go into Bunnyspace. I start hopping, like this-” She began boinging up and down like Tigger; and after getting a rhythm going she said: “And then I start singing my bunny song, that goes: 'HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY! HIPPITY HOPPITY-'”

Her big violet eyes looked a million miles away. Realizing she wasn't about to stop any time soon, I screamed: “BONNIE!!!”

“Oh, sorry,” she giggled as she came to a stop. “God, that's addictive! It's so pretty in Bunnyspace, with all the flowers and bunnies and rainbows and everything! But okay, so what happened was when I went into B-Space I talked to my nanites, and they talked to your nanites. And your nanites told my nanites you're not even at the 72 hour mark yet. Is that true?”

“It's tomorrow morning at 8:00,” I said, wondering if there was any other way she could have figured this out about me.

She looked at me like a doting big sister might. “Omigod! So you're just a baby mermaid! And if you've started going numb already you must've used a whole lot of GLOO!!!"

I held up two fingers.

“For just your tail?! I only used one tube for my whole body!”

“Did I use too much?”

““I don't know if there is a too much; but you got like a gazillion nanites in you. And that means everything's gonna happen faster. Girl, you are gonna be sooooo amazed!” she gushed; but then she frowned, “Oh. But your nanites told my nanites to tell me to tell you that there's just no way they can make it so you can be amphibulous and breathe water; so they're doin' the next best thing and changing your lungs and things so you can stay underwater a lot longer. Like a dolphin.”

I nodded. “So I've noticed. Tell them I said thanks!”

“You should go into mermaid space and tell them yourself.”

“How would I do that? I can't just go to sleep on cue. And if I could, then between now and when I started dreaming I would forget what I wanted to tell them.”

“You want me to ask my nanites to ask your nanites how to go into mermaid space?”

And maybe I should have agreed to it. But Bonnie's Bunny-chanting looked like some infantile self-hypnosis, and my mind was balking at the idea that this could be the key to talking to a swarm of magical sentient microscopic supermachines. I didn't want her to tell me that I would have to raise and lower my chair while singing: “SPLISHY SPLASHY, FISHIE WISHIE!” because I knew I would try it, and it would alarm the hell out of Greg!

This was just too much like something I'd find in this goofy fantasy novel I was reading, a deliberately absurd hodgepodge of science fiction, fairy tales, old movie cliches and slapstick surrealism. It seemed like it might be dangerous to start taking this kind of down-the-rabbit-hole-type stuff for something that could be real...

So I changed the subject.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

“No, that's okay,” I told her, and I reached into my chair's saddlebag. “Would you like a granola bar?”

Bonnie took it from me. Opened it. Sniffed it cautiously. “This doesn't got any animals in it, does it?”

“I wouldn't imagine it does. You're a vegetarian?”

“Well duh! I'm a BUNNY! And not one of those fake bunnies, like those stoopid Bunnylove Twins!”

“They're more the Playboy kind of bunny.”

“That's not a bunny! They might have the ears, but they don't know the first thing about bein' a rabbit! And what's wrong with their mouths?! They been goin' around kissing bees?”

“It's called collagen...”

She harrumphed, and chomped down on the energy bar. Her eyes widened, “Wow! This is GREAT!”

“Then here, have the rest. I don't like them,” I said, and started digging out the rest of them.

“Thank you so much!" she said, setting them on the ground in front of her. "Hey, do you want a carrot?”

“Sure!” I said. I was hungry and a carrot would help tide me over until breakfast.

She had two pockets that rode low on either side of her vest, and from the way they bulged must have had quite a few carrots in them. But when she slid her hand down into one what she pulled out wasn't a carrot. It was a rabbit's foot.

Or not the foot of an actual rabbit but a white furry glove with pointy little fingernails poking out of the center of each finger. And in her other pocket all she found was the glove for her other hand. “Sorry... I guess I'm outta carrots.”

“That's okay. So those are the hands for your bunnysuit?”

“Paws, yeah,” she said sheepishly. “I love bein' a bunny, and I know if I'm s'post to be a bunny I shouldn't have human hands like I got... But I can't really do anything when I got 'em on; Or not a lot of human-type stuff; and I sure couldn't do my job with bunny paws. And I need this job. Because I tried foraging in the forest for nuts n' berries, and it SUCKS! So I leave my front paws off most of the time, which I know is kind of a cop out...”

“It's not a cop out. You and I, we both turned ourselves into the nearest thing possible to what we always felt like we should be, but sometimes you have to compromise. Technically a mermaid should live in the ocean, but I live in a house with a fake lagoon to swim in. And sometimes there's things that someone who was born as the thing we wanted to be can do, that we'll never be able to.”

“Like breathing underwater?”

“That's a good example,” I said, although I'd been thinking about was genetic women being able to have babies. I asked, “So where do you work, Bonnie?”

“Oh, it's so much fun! I work at Village Veterinary up in Idyllwild where I answer phones and take people's credit card info and give 'em receipts and tell them their fur baby's in good hands with Herb and June, who run the clinic. They're both vets and they're really nice! And sometimes I help out with the kitties and doggies, and that's the best part. I give them baths, because we do that too, and you don't need a veterinary degree to do that. And sometimes when they're scared I just hold 'em and pet them, and they really like me 'cause I'm furry like them! And so what do you do for work?”

“I used to work at this big company in Irvine that makes everything from jet engines to computers, but I quit. I met someone, and he really likes mermaids, and we're getting married.”

“That's wonderful!” she said, “I hope it works out. I'm kind of between relationships.”

“What happened to Bruno?”

“I thought we were doing great, especially after I bunnied up. But out of nowhere he up and leaves me for some cougar we met at a furry bar in Hollywood!”

“Oh Honey, I'm so sorry," I said. "So how old was this woman?”

“No, not cougar. A cougar!” she said, making a cat-swiping gesture, “She was taking the whole predator thing way too far! Bein' hostile to everybody in there; and loud- 'Well ain't this place a fuckin' Zootopia?!' But she liked Bruno for some reason. She shows me her dog tags and says she's in 'the forces that the Special Forces run away from', which I know is baloney 'cuz they kick you out of the Army if they find out you're a furry. But she was big, and just a nasty mean drunk---sayin' she was gonna eat me and keep my little tail for a souvenir!---with claws that popped out like switchblades! And when I look over at Bruno I see a big old smile on hims face, like he couldn't wait to watch me and her goin' at it over which of us gets him. And I thought well screw him! And told her, 'Fine! You want him that bad you can keep him- 'Good luck!!' And that was that.”

“That sounds pretty smart to me,” I said, “So is today your day off?”

“Yeah, and I always take a long hop in in the woods when I can, because from the start of next month into August I'm gonna have to stay around town. It gets too dangerous for a bunny out here.”

“Too hot?” I asked, thinking maybe her suit wasn't climate controlled like mine was.

“No, RABBIT SEASON! On the first of the month there's gonna be a thousand people running around these woods with guns going 'Kill the waaaaaaabit! Kill the waaaaaaaaabit! Kill the waaaaaaaaaaaaaabit!' A bunny would have to have a death wish to come out here then!”

“But you're not-” I caught myself. I was pretty sure 'You're not a real bunny' would be the last thing a bunnygirl like Bonnie would want to hear. “But you walk upright, and you wear clothes!”

“And why do you think I wear this vest with all these colors? Because even now there's people who don't care if it's the right season or not. And sometimes they're drunk. The guy who shot my deer friend Jane Doe didn't notice that she was walking home carrying groceries. They didn't even charge him for assault, said it was a understandable accident. So I stay the hell out of here until they're gone. I hate hunters! I hate guns! I don't even wanna see them! I mean even if I was totally safe I wouldn't wanna watch them killing other animals and laughing about it! It's sickening! Why are hoomans so mean?!

“That's a question people have been asking for thousands of years,” I shrugged, “I'm not any kind of fan of my old psychology teacher, but the one thing Professor Wood told us that sort of made sense was-”

I stopped when I realized Bonnie wasn't listening. She was staring up the trail at something, looking like a rabbit caught in a car's headlights. I turned to see Greg strolling down the trail with something long and cyllindrical cradled in his arm like a shotgun. Whatever it was, I could tell it wasn't a gun, but maybe Bonnie was as nearsighted as a real rabbit.

“Don't worry, that's only Greg-”

“EEEEEEEEK! A HUNTER!” she shrieked as my voice snapped her out of her frozen state, and then something happened that made it seem like reality itself was popping its rivets!

In a blur she jumped straight up, soaring clear over the roof of the bathroom building! Wherever Bonnie landed I didn't see or hear it, so it was like she had vanished into thin air; and for an instant I even wondered if I hadn't hallucinated her and our entire conversation.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

But Greg had seen her too. Sort of...

“Who was that you were talking to?”

“Did you see that?”

“I saw you talking to somebody,” he said, looking around, “Did they go use the bathroom?”

“I think maybe she beamed up to her space ship,” I said, still stunned by what I'd seen. And why was Greg carrying a car muffler and a section of tailpipe? This was turning out to be a very weird day! “What are you doing with that dirty old thing?”

“It's not dirty, it was sitting in the waterfall,” he said, and dropped it into the trash can, “It was trash, so I hiked it out. But what's strange is, that highway down there is only road near here. I figured it came downstream from somewhere, but I can't imagine from where...”

I looked up in the sky, almost expecting to see Bonnie. “Maybe it fell off an airplane.”

“Maybe. So who was that,” he asked, “And why was she wearing a fur coat in this weather?”

So I guess people really do see what they expect to see. Not giant disappearing rabbits...

“That was Bonnie. She's a bunny,” I said, and as we went back to the Caravan and loaded it up I told him about her.

“Really?! She sounds delightful! I'm sorry I scared her off.”

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

We pulled out onto the mountain highway and continued up the hill. Greg asked, “You ready for breakfast?”

“Absolutely. What's did you have in mind?”

“There's a bakery on the main drag that's really good. Their boysenberry scones are incredible!”

“That does sound good...”

On our drive into town I kept thinking about Bonnie's vagina. Or rather about my vagina; the one I didn't have. When I used to think about turning into a mermaid a vagina was never part of the equation. Starting as a kid---a time when I never thought about sex except as that mysterious place that babies came from---the smooth look of a mermaid tail always appealed to me. This aesthetic preference kind of carried into adolescence and my first sexual stirrings, so that whenever I fantasized about sex it was always about the things a crotchless fishgirl would be able to do. Getting fucked between a pair of tits that would be big enough for this to be possible seemed wonderful; And a bit more realistically, in high school I would discover the joys of fellatio with my football player boyfriend...

If you could call him that. He threatened to beat me up if I told anyone about us. And while he was occasionally protective of me when his buds were harassing me (I could see the conflict in his eyes, and felt bad for him...) it was never more than he could do while pretending he didn't know me and didn't want to know me. Something like: “Let's split, guys... the little fag's not worth it.”

It doesn't say much for my teenage self that I would settle for such a relationship. There were things I put up with then that even by the time we graduated I had learned not to. The self-respect I've gained since eleventh grade has been hard earned, with a steep learning curve...

I'm pretty sure that during our furtive trysts Danny was imagining that who was on her knees in front of him was Sherri Stevens, who he had a serious crush on but never gave him the time of day. He'd even asked me for advice once on how to win her over: “You're kind of a girl... what do girls like?”

Meanwhile my own fantasies were more maritime in nature; and in them I always had a perfect mermaid body. A body that didn't have a vagina, because to me the image of normal human woman's pussy situated on the front of a mermaid's tail had always seemed disturbingly out of place...

But today Bonnie had showed me a vagina that wouldn't look weird at all on me, since it wouldn't be visible until needed. And now suddenly I really wanted my invisible mermaid pussy! Greg and I had never discussed such a thing, probably because it seemed so impossible, but I knew he'd enjoy having face to face intercourse with me as much as I would.

Bonnie said her nanites had manufactured that discrete opening in her bunny crotch on request, but with my male internal anatomy any nanomachines dwelling in my body would definitely have their work cut out for them giving me something like she had, even if I could go into “mermaid space” and talk to them...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

As traffic bunched up and we joined the slow procession of cars heading into town my tail went numb again.

'Goddamn it! Not now!' I thought. Because if I had any trouble getting out of the car and into my chair Greg was going to notice, and I didn't want him to start worrying.

Or that was my excuse for not telling him this was happening to me, but my motives were probably more selfish than that. I didn't want Greg to worry because I was afraid he'd say that this could be a symptom of something serious, and maybe we shouldn't go through with my transformation...

Which is exactly what he would say when something happened to me at dinnertime that I couldn't pretend wasn't happening. But by the time we parked the leaden paralysis had gone away, and I was able to slide nimbly down into my wheelchair like nothing was wrong. My tail would keep going floppy and numb like this off and on for the rest of the day; but I was mostly able to ignore it and just have a good time in the cute little mountain tourist-trap town.

I know it was stupid for me to blow off these episodes the basis of medical advice from a silly rabbit veterinary receptionist ('Oh your nose fell off? Don't worry, that's s'pose ta happen. You're gonna have a purty mermaid gill-slit nose now to go with your big sexy bass mouth and blank staring fish eyes. OOPS! There go your arms...'); but I was so damn close to finally being a mermaid that my obsession overrode my good judgment, and put a serious dent in the honesty I swore I would hold myself to in this relationship...

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

It didn't seem likely that we'd find a place to park anywhere close to downtown but suddenly---right there on Main Street---we were in just the right place as someone pulled out. We slipped into the spot, and there across the street was the Sunshine Bakery.

“A good omen,” said Greg.

We ate our pastries at one of the tables on the sidewalk in front of the bakery and I had a cappuccino. Already I could tell I was going to get more attention in this wheelchair than I would walking around in sneakers (Our waitress's “You need anything else, Hon?” carrying an unspoken 'you poor thing!') but none of it triggered any anxieties and weird thoughts. I was Lori Lemaris: Undercover Mermaid; and it was actually kind of cool!

We spent the day exploring every part of Idyllwild's small downtown area, poking around in even the shops we had no real interest in. We paid four bucks apiece to visit the California Wildfire Museum, a big barnlike structure with a bunch of antique firefighting equipment, some photo displays of tanker planes and smoke jumpers, and a dingy yellow fiberglass Smokey the Bear statue who gave a speech that sounded like an out-of-tune kazoo when we pushed the button. Then we wasted an hour or so playing Skee-ball, Pinball and a game of billiards at Ye Olde Funland Arcade. My chair was great for putting me at the right height for playing each game...

Greg had begged me to help him stay out of Granny's Fudge Shoppe---he had a real weakness for the stuff---but what was driving us both crazy was the aroma emanating from Cap'n Pappyjack's Rib Palace. You could smell it from clear down the block, it was just brutal; and by one o'clock we broke down and split a half rack of their dry rub pork ribs, which at least didn't have a lot of sugary sauce all over them.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

At some point we split up and started hitting shops separately. Village Veterinary was open, I went in and asked for Bonnie, even though I knew it was her day off. Maybe I was just being nosy and wanted to see if a person in a bunnysuit could actually get a regular job. Apparently so, if the employer was as nice as Herbert Gold, DVM here. He and his veterinarian wife both loved Bonnie to pieces, and were delighted that she'd found a friend. He pointed out her apartment across the street above General Mercantile and Sundries for me and suggested I go pay her a visit; before he realized I'd have to climb the stairs to get up there, and asked me, “Do you want me to call her? I'm sure she'd come down.”

“No that's okay. Just tell her Lori came by and said hi,” I said. I asked him, “So what do your canine patients react to being handled by a giant bunny?”

“I'm pretty sure they just think she's a very furry hooman,” he grinned, “Since she doesn't smell like a bunny. I guess those GLOO-nanites can't do everything.”

“So she told you about them? You're a doctor, what do you think about all that?”

He and said guardedly, “What would you do if I told you something extraordinary was going on with Bonnie, and probably a lot of other people who have modified themselves with GLOO!; something traditional science can't explain?”

“Are you asking what would I think if you said that, or what would I do?”

“Do.”

“Like would I go running to the tabloids about her, or post a YouTube saying I met a mutant superbunny who can jump over a small building? HELL NO!” I have my own secrets to protect!”

Doctor Gold smiled. “That's what I wanted to hear! Now I don't know how the HIPAA regulations would apply to this situation; They're not something veterinarians usually have to worry about, and we didn't do this as part of our practice but just out of concern for a friend when she started having a bit of trouble walking, and refused to go to a regular MD about it; but June and I have X-ray'd Bonnie, her legs mostly. And...”

He'd trailed off. “And?”

“I'll leave it to Bonnie to give you the details if you see her; But I will answer your question with: Do I believe there's such a thing as nanites that can produce extraordinary changes within the human body? Absolutely!”

I thought about these bouts of paralysis I'd started having. “And do you think these nanites could be dangerous?”

“I wish I knew the answer that myself. There's very little information about them, and even less that's credible. So far the FDA hasn't even admitted they're real, let alone published any findings them. So I can't tell you more than to say Bonnie seems perfectly healthy now since her physical alterations, although she could use more protein in her diet. And the two freinds of hers I met---a raccoon and a kittygirl---don't seem to have any complaints,” he said, then implored me, “But please, don't take that as an answer to whether nanites can be dangerous or not!”

“I understand. Her case could be like that uncle my father is always going on about, who smoked two packs a day and lived to be a hundred, 'So what do these phony scientists know?'; like that disproves all the statistics somehow. But anyway, thanks! You did help answer some of my questions. So just tell Bonnie Lori stopped by,” I said, and as I looked around to see if I had enough room to make a backwards Y-turn and leave I spotted a stack of colorful business cards in a little tray on the counter that said:

BONNIE THE BUNNY ~ Birthdays. Easter Events. All Occasions

They had her phone number and e-mail addy, so I took one. “She does this too?”

“It's what she was doing before she worked here, and still does it as a sideline. She does magic tricks, games, singalongs. She's great with kids,” he said, and as I was almost to the door he asked, “Now I have a question for you, if you don't mind. And I'm asking this for Bonnie's sake, because we know so little about what she's done to herself...”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“You're obviously in a wheelchair. Does this have anything to do with you using GLOO! to try to put something on you? Some unintended side-effect?”

“Not at all. I got exactly the effects I intended. And it's nothing you need to worry about Bonnie catching,” I grinned, and by rocking and sliding up the hem of my dress I revealed my tail to someone for the second time that day.

He goggled at the sight of it. “Oh my! No I guess Bonnie couldn't catch that. So you're like her, except you... I mean you're...”

“A mermaid,” I finished for him.

“There's mermaids now?!?!” he gulped, and I got the impression he felt as if his life had turned very strange since the day he and his wife decided to hire a furry girl.

“I know for sure there's at least one,” I said, patting my tail; and asked, “So what were you expecting to see when I pulled my dress up?”

“I... From what you said I figured you weren't showing me your injuries; or anything- you know, indecent; But other than that I was bracing myself for anything,” he said, He inspected my tail and said, “Actually that's quite pretty...”

“Thank you!” I said, “So as you can see I'm not technically disabled; I'm just out of my element here on land.”

“You live in the ocean?!”

“I'm not quite that hard core!” I laughed, “I live down in Jacinto Springs, but we have a big giant pool on our lot that's pretty nice.”

“I'd imagine so! That's a zip code I wouldn't mind calling home.”

“It beats that crappy El Toro apartment I used to live in,” I said, “But anyway, my husband's probably wondering where I've gotten off to. I'd better go find him.”

“All right. It was nice meeting you. And do give Bonnie a call.”

“I will. Bye!”

I was out on the sidewalk when I realized I'd called Greg my husband. But while not yet legally true, in the ways that actually matter it didn't seem at all premature or inaccurate that I'd said that. I smiled.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Continuing down the sidewalk, I decided to hit the last three shops on this block and make my wandering in and out of every business in town complete. Just as I was leaving a little t-shirt shop (Oh You Tees!) I spotted Greg coming out of the shop next door (PINE AWAY!), the only one I still hadn't been in. We each had a bag.

“What did you get?” he asked.

“It's for you,” I said as I pulled it out; a black t-shirt that had the lapels and such of a cheesy looking tuxedo printed on it (with a pink blob that I guess was meant to be a carnation). I held it up for him. “It's your tux, for our wedding. It'll go good with your leopard spot swim trunks and Ho Chi Mihn sandals.”

“That's a good idea; since they'll probably end up tossing both of us in the pool. I got you a gift too,” he grinned, pulling something out of his bag and presenting it to me.

It was deformed looking mermaid made of stuck-together pine cones in sizes ranging from small to tiny, with a pair of those cheap black-on-white googly eyes glued to what must've been its face. This just might have been the ugliest nicknack in the world. The little black disks in its eyes were rolling around spastically. I busted up laughing. “Sweet Jesus! It's hideous!”

He tried to grab it from me. “Well if you don't like it I'm gonna go get my $7.50 back!”

“Don't you dare! She's a special needs mermaid! If we don't give her a home where she'll be cherished and loved who will?! Ain't dat right, Piney?” I asked the thing as I turned its little eyes toward me. “Piney Gir, that's her name! She'll have me and you, and all her little mermaid knicknack sisters to take care of her!”

The faux-antique clock on the squat little tower poking up from the Bank of America building said 6:33. Dinner time, or close enough. I was amazed at how quickly this day had gone!
(13 HOURS and 27 MINUTES to go...)

We could see our car from there so we stopped off to toss our bags into it before heading to the restaurant. As he was about to shut the door I told Greg: “Crack the window a little...”

“What for?”

“For Piney, you dope!”

“You're a nut!” he laughed, but indulged me in pretending a mass of pine cones would need air. He asked, “How are your hands holding up?”

I pulled my gloves off, looked at my pink tender palms. “No blisters yet, but they're getting kind of sore even with the gloves.”

“Then I'll push you,” he offered.

I accepted, sitting back and enjoying the ride as he carted me down the sidewalk, and then across the street at Idyllwild's only stoplight to the restaurant.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

The Blue Skies was a large building made out of logs, with a steeply pitched green metal roof that had different sized gables facing this way and that. The interior's ceiling beams, stone fireplaces and rugged Northwestern décor reminded me of our living room, minus all the mermaid stuff.

We had to wait for a table on the outdoor terrace, but the view of the sunset was worth it. Our sixty-ish waitress was Stella and she was all smiles, remarking on how sweet it was to see a couple who were so obviously deeply in love. I thought this was her way of telling us she was accepting about our age difference, but there was more to it than this: “You remind me so much of me and my husband when we were dating.”

Among her tattoos from various decades I noticed a name inscribed on the underside of her left forearm in pirate-like cursive lettering. From the faded sheen of the ink it seemed to be one of her earliest ones. “Your husband... that would be Jack?”

“It would! The first time I met him was a job interview. I didn't have much hope that I'd get it when I applied for that secretary position as his law office but I needed something right away, and figured it was worth a shot. And when I saw him, I won't say 'love at first sight'---with the rent due my mind was anywhere but on romance---but there was something. He looked like Charlie Rich with that hair of his. He was so distinguished!”

I was about to make some crack like 'and here the similarities end...', but when I saw the face Greg was making at me I could tell he was expecting it. We both laughed. Stella grinned at this exchange.

“Yep, that too! The humor, the comfort. Somehow Jack decided to take a chance on me over all those more qualified girls he'd seen, even though he basically had to teach me my whole job. I know my looks might've had something to do with him hiring me---I had them then---but he was a gentleman about it; no funny stuff! It was six months before he asked me to dinner. But after that-” she smiled wistfully, “Life can sure take some crazy turns sometimes!”

I said, “Sometimes good ones.”

“Sometimes...”

“I'm sure he loves you very much,” said Greg.

“Yes he di- does,” Stella said, and I saw a flash of pain and loss from behind her big brown eyes. She hefted her order pad. “So have you decided what you're having?”

As she headed back toward the kitchen I asked Greg, “Who's Charlie Rich, and what's so special about his hair?”

“A country singer back in the seventies. And his hair... Well they called him 'The Silver Fox'.”

“Oh,” I nodded, “So Jack was...”

“Yeah, was,” intoned Greg ominously. So he'd caught her making that sudden shift from past to present tense too; not wanting to memento mori us with how their wonderful May-September romance had ended.

“She's nice,” I said. “Big tip?”

“Big tip,” he agreed.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Greg declared his lean chicken breast and braised green beans perfection, and my jalepeño-jack buffalo burger was cooked just right, but was smothered in so many jalepeño slices it was ridiculous. But after picking off a few dozen of them it was perfect too. And now I could tell there was a slight difference to the taste of buffalo meat from regular cow, but not enough that I'd ever have to order it again.

Greg killed off the last of his diet Coke and looked at his watch. “Seven forty-one. Won't be long now...”

“Nope. Twelve hours and change. And if you're wondering; Yes I still want to do this!”

“Actually I was going to suggest we celebrate.”

“Yeah! Let's do a whole bunch of shots of tequila and sing 'HIPPITY HOPPITY, BUNNY BUNNY!' and wind up in jail!”

“Uh... You can do that if you want. I'm just going to have a beer. A real beer,” he said, tapping the little cardboard stand-up on the table that said: WE HAVE ANCHOR STEAM ON TAP.

“You wild man!” I kidded, and when our waitress came back I asked Greg what the name of that tequila drink was that he'd made me on the second night after I'd had all my toenails removed, since piercing parlors can't prescribe painkillers (well I didn't say all that in front of her, I just said, “my toe surgery”). I ordered one of those, made with their Sauza house tequila plus a shot of Patrón silver.

Stella studied my face for a second. “I'm gonna have to ask you for your ID.”

I had already fished it out, always happy show someone my license now that it said LORI SHELLCASTLE and FEMALE. I told her, “We're celebrating!”

She decided it was legit and handed it back to me. “What's the occasion?”

“She made the swim team,” deadpanned Greg.

I started laughing wildly. “Boy, I'll say!”

Stella went off to the bar grinning and shaking her head.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Our drinks arrived. Greg slurped the top inch off his beer with a grunt of satisfaction. I held my glass up against the orange and red evening sky. They looked identical. “Are you sure this isn't a tequila sunset?”

And then my drink and the sunset and Greg's face all began to run together in an orangey-pinky blur as my eyes started watering and stinging really bad! I rubbed them clean with the little napkin from under my drink but everything was still blurry. My eyes seemed to be watering not just from the tear ducts but from all the way around them, like they were melting or something.

I tried not to sound to panicked as I felt when I said, “Uh, Greg... I can't see!”

“Oh Jeez!” he cried, “They're really watering! Did you touch your eyes after you were playing with those jalepeños?”

“I must have.”

“Go rinse them out. Can you make it the bathroom?”

“Not without running into something. I really can't see! If you could push me to the door of the lady's room I'm sure I can find the sink in there.”

Even though I was trying to act discrete about this I could sense curiosity and concern from the blurry room as he wheeled me across it. What's wrong with the crippled girl?!

“I'll be right outside the door,” said the tall blur with Greg's voice, and even half blinded I could see his posture was dutiful and serious, standing upright like a sentry.

“Relax, go finish your beer. I'll be right back,” I said, and pushed the door open to make my way bumpity-bump like a defective Roomba toward that moving blue blur that I knew was my reflection in the mirrors above the sinks. Finding the faucet and a wad of paper towels I rinsed my eyes out really good, and then did it again, and then managed to pull myself up onto the the counter and get my whole face under the faucet; making a mess of the bathroom and getting my dress drenched.

After a while my eyes started feeling better, but my reflection or my hand in front of my face were still indistinct blobs. I'd never had any trouble with my eyes before, and suddenly I was essentially blind. I had never felt so scared and helpless before in my life! All I could think to do was rinse out my eyes again. And again...

“Greg, is that you?” I asked the person who had entered the bathroom, but they were much shorter and wearing black pants and a sky blue shirt like the staff here all wore.

“No, Honey, it's me,” answered Stella. “How you doing?”

“Not good,” I admitted, “They stopped hurting but I still can't see anything. I don't know what's going on.”

“Your boyfriend was mentioning the jalapeños on your burger. Do you think it's maybe an allergic reaction?”

“I hope that's all it is, something that will clear up! But this is obviously the end of our day out. If you could hold the door open I'll go wave for Greg.”

“Let's fix your dress first. I'm Stella, by the way. I waited on you.”

“I know. I'm Lori. What's wrong with my dress?”

“Your tail came out.”

“Oh yeah, about that-” I said, wishing I had a story like the one Bonnie had told me to account for me having it.

“You don't have to explain. But I'm assuming you're trying to hide it, I mean with this long-ass dress. Can you lift it up?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said, and was relieved to find that it hadn't gone dyskinetic and disconnected on me again so I could at least do that.

She pulled the end of its hem down around my tail fin and held it underneath as I lowered it, “There. No one can see.”

“Thank you! We like to keep it a secret when we go out. We don't want everyone gawking.”

“I guess I would too. So you're a mermaid?”

“Pretty much.”

“And would you consider yourself part of this 'furry' movement, or something else? You don't really have fur...”

“I think I would have to. It's in the same spirit. And it sounds better than calling myself a 'scaley'.”

I saw her head nodding. “I guess it does. And is this a GLOO! thing? I mean this tail isn't coming off?”

“Nope. Making it a permanent part of me was something I had to do,” I said, “As fucked up as that probably sounds...”

“Every generation does something that sounds crazy to the one before. Flappers, zoot suiters, beatniks, mods, hippies, bikers, punkers, goths, and whatever's come along since then. I'll let you guess which one I was. But I have to say you GLOO-heads have really raised the bar on nonconforming and upsetting the generation before you!” she chuckled, “I know a pretty white bunny you'd probably want to meet.”

“I met her earlier. She's a trip!”

“Bonnie's a sweetheart. People give her shit, and I admit I didn't know what to think at first. But she's not hurting anybody; and I'm realizing she's more someone I'd want to know than any of the ones who make fun of her. So you ready?” she asked, getting behind my chair, and when I said 'sure' she wheeled me out into the dining area and to our table.

“Feeling better?” asked Greg, and I explained that I was but I was still blind as a bat. He handed Stella his card and as she started clearing the table I asked for my drinks. Dumped the good tequila into the fruity mixed drink and sucked it down with the straw. He waited until I'd finished to ask, “Are you sure that's wise?”

“No. But I already ordered it and I'm kind of freaking out here. I needed this!”

Stella must have been assigned to helping us because the seating hostess didn't squawk when she left with us, shepherding us across the street and down the block to the Caravan.

Greg opened the door on my side. “Or did you want to lay down in back?”

“That's not going to help with being blind. Just put the chair back there after I'm in,” I said. I waved off his help, raised myself to the level of the seat and clambered across.

“Cool chair!” said Stella.

“It is. I have this canid genius friend who made it for me.”

“Canid?! Is he like Wiley Coyote?”

“It's 'she', and sometimes she is. But her inventions work a lot better.”

Stella leaned into the SUV to give me a quick hug, and addressed the starless sky, “I hate this! Now I'm gonna be worrying about if that mermaid girl ever got her sight back.”

The car jounced a bit as Greg got in and started it up. I told Stella, “I have Bonnie the Bunny's g-mail address. I'll either write her or if I can't I'll have Greg do it, and tell her to keep you informed.”

“That'll work! You know, by tomorrow she'll have told the whole town about the mermaid she met, and most people will just go 'Yeah, sure!'; like about her fairies from the old oak tree. Okay, watch your fingers!” she said and snicked my door shut.

We pulled out and headed down Idyllwild's main street, which with all the little white year-round Christmas lights coming on was lit up like some extremely blurry fairyland.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

“Did you remember to tip Stella?” I asked as we passed a dark blotch that might have been the turnoff to the Strawberry Creek Trail.

“You're worried about that now?” he asked incredulously, “I put in two twenties. It's all I had, and she earned it. So how you holding up?”

I tried to think of a joke. Couldn't. “This is scary! And the pain is coming back.”

“I wish I could tell you there's nothing to worry about,” he said, “We'll know more when they checked you out at at HMVC.”

“Our favorite emergency room,” I said glumly.

And I supposed while we were there I should finally mention those episodes of numbness I'd been having in my tail today, though those still didn't worry me too much. Bonnie had mentioned a similar issue with her legs and had said they would pass. That they had something to do with becoming a better bunny, or a better mermaid. But what could this shit going on with my eyes have to do with any of my hoped-for transformations?! And what if those doctors at Hemet Valley Medical Center can't help me?!! I'll be BLIND!!!

Tall green blobs dopplered past in the beams from our headlights. I sighed, “I guess Hemet Valley Medical Center is gonna find out I'm a mermaid.”

I knew Greg was anxious when he said fuck: “Fuck 'em if they don't like it. And there's privacy standards they have to follow about anyone they treat. But they'll probably be as nice as Stella was, and afterwards I think we need to talk.”

“About what?”

“It can wait. Let's see what they have to say first. How's the pain? One to Ten...”

“About a three; but it's different than before. That was like sand or ground glass in my eyes. This is like pressure. Which is not as bad, but it's building. Like now it's almost a four.”

Greg indicated the guardrail on our right and the black space beyond it. “I can't really speed on this highway, but after the turnoff onto 74 I'll try to break the record you set when you took me to the ER!”

The pain was at about six as we approached the straighter highway---it felt like my eyeballs were preparing to pop right out of my head---but just before we made the turn the weirdest thing happened: There was this squisssssh sound like when your ears pop, but I could have sworn it came from my eyes. The pressure immediately stopped, and-

“Holy fuck! I can see!!”

He made the turn. “Are you sure?”

“Yes I'm sure! It's completely back to-” I looked around. The dark trees, the dark mountains. The sky that didn't seem to have any stars a minute ago now had billions of them. “It's better than normal. It's like I have night vision!”

“You mean like infrared?”

“No, it's not all black and green like that, or like thermal. It's more like when I would watch movies on my parent's ancient VHS player, and now I'm seeing one in high rez Blu-Ray. Everything just looks like... like more!”

“Really?”

“Absolutely! I think this has something to do with helping me see better underwater; I'll know for sure when I go in the lagoon tomorrow. And I think we can skip our trip to the ER.”

“I would feel better if we got you checked out.”

“And tell them what? The pain's completely gone, I don't have any symptoms. They'd be like: 'Get out of my ER you crazy mermaid!' If you really want we can go the walk-in tomorrow.”

He frowned. “Tomorrow might be too late.”

“For what? I'm fine!”

“Because, ever since we put your tail on you weird things have been happening to you.”

“But not bad things; they're all good!”

“We don't really know that. I'm thinking we should slow down until we figure out what's going on.”

There was only one way I could think of to slow this down. “You're kidding!”

“Just until we know more. We have the GLOO Super-solvent, so taking it off isn't going to damage your tail. I want this, Honeybunch; I really do! I want you to be happy, and you know I love you being a mermaid just as much as you! But it's not worth risking your health for.”

“But I'm fine! Better than fine. All these changes, it's like magic out of that fantasy book I'm reading.”

“Fantasy book," he said with emphasis. "But you know what they say about things that seem too good to be true! I'm afraid we might both be caught up in magical thinking, and walking right into something we can't even see. Do you remember the stories on the news about that girl in down San Ysidro; Maria, the virgin-birth girl?”

“No, when was this?”

“Last year. She believed, and she convinced her parents and I guess her whole parish she was pregnant without having sex. She had the belly, every sign of being pregnant, not to mention the name. Everyone was so happy! It was a blessing from God, maybe even the Second Coming. Right up until the tumor that it turned out to be killed her.”

“Oh my God that's a fucked up story!”

“So when you keep talking about nanites---nanites this and nanites that---I'm getting a weird echo of what happened with her. I mean nanites are great for stories at Mer-Mania, but let's have some empirical evidence before we put all our faith in something we've never even seen! You're just taking this Rae girl's word for it. Geniuses can be completely wrong too...”

“There's been a growing body of empirical evidence. I mean you saw how Bonnie could jump!”

“To be honest I'm not sure what I saw. These nanites, maybe all they do is go into a person's brain and make them hallucinate things. I had GLOO! all over my hands, so I've probably got them in me too- I mean if they exist. We need to slow down and think about this. And as we find out more we can decide if we want to try this again later.”

“But what's the point if the nanites are already in me. In my blood, everywhere. I don't think taking this tail off now would get rid of them.” I said. I thought about the episodes of numbness I'd been having all day, about how I'd seen Bonnie jump, and about those X-rays her DVM employer told me he'd taken of her legs. 'Extraordinary changes,' he'd said. I told Greg, “Plus I think it's already too late to try and take it off. I'm afraid of what we'd find under it if we did!”

“You really think you've changed that much?”

“I really do...”

We were approaching the road leading into Jacinto Springs, the little street sign perfectly legible to me a block away in the dark. This was where we would either turn or continue on to the Emergency Room. Greg said, “It's your call.”

“Home,” I said, and he hit the turn signal indicator.

“Sure hope this isn't a mistake,” he muttered as we made the turn. “I guess from here on in you're in the lap of the gods. Let's hope they're kindly disposed!”

“I think they are...”

Although a half hour ago I wouldn't have believed the gods were so benign. The pain was awful but the helplessness I'd felt as everything dissolved into a meaningless blur and the fear that I was now permanently sightless had been far worse.

I hadn't been that scared since that horrible Christmas last year when Greg almost died; and I'd forgotten just how exhausted this kind of pure primal terror can leave you. I was so wiped out that as Greg pushed me in through our front door I decided to skip washing my face, brushing my teeth, or doing anything but crawling under the covers and losing consciousness.

But now my tail was turning numb and leaden again---moreso than ever---so I perused nonexistent text messages on my phone until Greg went into the bathroom for his bedtime ablations, then attempted to hop from my chair onto the foot of the bed- a maneuver that left me and most of the bedding in a tangled heap on the floor while my wheelchair went scree-screeking backward in some kind of opposite but equal reaction.

Looking down the length of me I saw that the bottom of my tail was bent 90º sideways in a way that wouldn't be possible unless the tibia and fibula bones of both my legs were snapped clean in half.

But my tail didn't hurt, even as feeling suddenly returned to it, so I grabbed my caudal fin and pointed it straight again. It was an oddly rubbery sensation but I decided could deal with whatever this was in the morning. I bunched one of the blankets up into a pillow and stuck it under my head. and was almost asleep when Greg emerged from the bathroom.

“I guess I won't take a shower either. Your tail will be dry in the morning and we can try out our giant new bathtu- Good God! What happened here?!” he cried when he saw me on the floor.

“My horse threw me,” I said, nodding toward the wheelchair sitting halfway across the room.

“You've got to remember to set the brake.”

“I know, I spaced on it. I can't remember the last time I was so sleepy.”

"Are you okay?”

“Maybe... I think so... she said it gets better,” I muttered, and yawned.

“Who said what?”

I yawned again. “That Bunny Girl, at th' trail thing. She said I was gonna have symptoms but then they'd go away.”

“She knew you were going to go blind?!”

“No, not that. I don't know! Can't we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Sure. Let's get this bed made and call it a night.”

“I'm good right here,” I said, and hugged my makeshift pillow.

“But you've got all the blankets,” he said as he started yanking them away from me. He made the bed, scooped me up, dropped me onto it, killed the lights, climbed in and pulled the sheets up over us. Then turned on the TV, “Is this gonna be okay?”

“Oh shit yeah,” I slurred, “Go 'head turn it up. Play yer bagpipes; I won' hear it...”

As I faded away I heard a stopwatch ticking insistently.

o . 0 . O . 0 . o

Someone was nudging me.

“WHAT?!” I barked crossly.

“60 MINUTES,” he said, “It's about GLOO!”

“Oh for fuck's sake! Now?!” I whined, but knew I had to watch this. I slapped a pillow against the headboard and scooted up against it, elevating my head just enough to see the screen.

The segment was called GLOO! NATION. A female reporter stood outside a convention center in the Akron Ohio who's big animated scoreboard said FURCON 2018 and WELCOME FURRIES! She gave a bit of background about what a furry is, saying: “But there are furries, and then there are furries-”

-before moving inside and showing the throngs of animal costumed attendees. Many mugged and waved and made goofy faces at the camera, but they were only interested in interviewing the few who had used GLOO! to make their fursonas their day-to-day selves. First a fox---which jarred me fully awake before I realized it wasn't my friend Rae---and then a pair of self described GLOO! Girls, a lithe 19-year-old cheetah and her somewhat chunkier and more butch looking little Armadillo girlfriend, with bonelike armor covering most of her body and continuing up over her head and the bridge of her nose like Batman's cowl.

Both were adorable in their way but I wished the show had picked someone brighter to represent 'GLOO! Nation'. Which of course they wouldn't; since that wouldn't fit the increasingly anti-GLOO! slant of the piece...

The animal girls assured the obviously aghast correspondent that no, their costumes could never come off, and no they weren't going to regret their choice in ten or twenty years. Because sure it might be kinda hard to like find jobs and stuff at first, but this wasn't a problem since within five or ten years furries will have taken over the world. The interview concluded with both girls raising clenched fists and cheering: “GLOO POWER!”

Lesley Stahl paid a visit to the hot pink + zebra stripe Hollywood condo of those self-discribed superstars the Bunnylove Twins- a pair of 20-something blondes with permanent rabbit's ears who had modified themselves into identical huge-breasted Barbie dolls before they each sacrificed an arm part of a leg and GLOOd themselves together into the world's first artificial conjoined twins. Bunny and Lovie Bunnylove couldn't articulate why they had done this to themselves---they didn't seem to understand the question---but this became obvious as they raved on and on about how fabulously famous they were, and the number of subscribers they had on YouTube. But since they couldn't sing, dance or act I doubted if they would be remembered long once the shock value and novelty wore off. I hoped they got along well, they were gonna be stuck with each other for a long time...

By now if I didn't know several GLOO-heads who were sanely functioning members of society (let's give Bonnie the benefit of the doubt...) I would have exactly the opinion about the GLOO! Movement that this program wanted me to. And now they moved in for the kill: A story about a large man with antlers who looked more like Bullwinkle the Moose than I ever would've thought possible. His name was Hayden Walter and he deeply regretted his decision to moosify himself.

With no way of changing back, he only hoped that his story might serve as a warning about the false promises of trans-speciesism, and that the Church of the Universal Solvent he had founded might help prevent others from making the same mistakes he had. He rattled off some fake sounding statistics about 'transformation regret' and furries committing suicide by turning themselves into roadkill. But he seemed to be doing all right for himself, having become the darling of the right's alarmist fringe...

Finally there was an interview with none other than Dr. Paul Fucking McHugh; who was tying the GLOO! Menace in with his usual anti-transgender tirades: “This is exactly what I said would happen if we started letting people with mental illnesses decide they know what's best for themselves!”

I struggled to stay awake as he compared the GLOO! movement to a cult... a dangerous cult; with their bizarre quasi-mystical beliefs about the adhesive and its properties... these proponents of self-modification making unfounded claims---each more preposterous than the last---about GLOO! and its so called 'nanites'... reckless and unaccountable... charlatans pushing illusions of freedom.... Seduction of the innocent... countless lives ruined by irreversible modifications... mamas don't let your babies grow up to be moo-cows... 10,000 times more addictive than heroin... Escape From the Fluffy Zone... Hippity hoppity bunny bunny... down gyring dark maelstrom of post-rational cloudthink... No such thing as mermaids... breakthrough in the gray room... oh god the dip... show me all the blueprints... forty years of darkness... cats and dogs glooing together... mass hysteria...

.

Okay so I was falling asleep. Or I was hallucinating. Or renegade nanites had invaded the 60 MINUTES studio...

Because now the show's reporters were turning into animals in little outfits like from Wind in the Willows:

Scott Peley was a badger...

Charlie Rose was an otter...

Lara Logan was a darling fluffy bunny who was having trouble giving her report because of her teeth...

Steve Kroft was Mr. Toad...

And standing in a forest clearing in the misty dawn playing his reed pipes was Anderson Cooper, with the hind legs of a goat but human from the waist up.

Or no, much more than human... a beneficent but somehow terrifying primeval god!

“Hey, are you watching this?” asked Greg.

I replied slurrily, “Oh Mole, I am afraid! I dare not gaze upon His Magnificence!”

“You're a nut,” he said and kissed me on the forehead, “Good night, sweet mermaid...”

.

And then things turned really weird.

.

TO BE CONCLUDED...

.

============================================================>
============================================>
==============================>

Like I said last chapter you'll find out more about Lori's friend Rae HERE:
https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/74866/glood-tails-01
In this story by Ray Drouillard

And Chapter 02 of his story has stuff about Rae and Lori
and Lori's last days of working at Yoyodyne
https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/74946/glood-tails-02

And check out Chapter 03 for more GLOO-ey goodness:
https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/75232/glood-tails-03

(And the "paperback" that Lori's been reading? That's this story:
https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/60614/deep-end-1-arrr...
that I really need to get back to writing + posting!)