“You totally are.” Tammy snickered at me, prompting me to cry harder.
“You gotta help me! I’m gonna die!”
“Jesus Christ. You are so pathetic.”
“You’re mean,” I snapped back. I was Tammy’s daddy; she was supposed to be nice to me. Instead she was being such a poopyhead. If she wouldn’t help me, then I would have to go ask Denise. She would be nice. She was my mommy—no, my wife. She was my wife and I was her husband.
I sniffled and then pulled up my pants. “See you later, kid,” Tammy called out as I ran away. I could hear her laughing as the door closed behind me.
As I ran, I was leaving a trail behind me, droplets of blood staining the floor. Tammy could have helped me. She could have told me what was happening or she could have at least fetched a grown up to explain it. Instead she called me names and laughed at me. I hated her.
But Denise would still help me. She was a nice lady. And a teacher. She would have to help me.
I threw open the door. As soon as I slipped through the doorway, everything shimmered for a moment. The world seemed to swell around me as if I had entered a world of giants. Something else was bigger too: my tummy. It stuck out so much that I looked like a tiny pregnant lady. My big stomach pressed against a cute sailor dress with a white top and dark blue skirt.
I heard other kids start to laugh at me. Denise turned from the chalkboard to look down at me. Before I had come up to almost her boobies, but now my eyes were level with her waist. She squatted down to look me in the eye. “Can I help you, young lady?”
I wanted to tell her what was happening, but I couldn’t. I was frozen with terror. She was so big. Everything was so big. I desperately wanted my mommy. Mommy would make me feel better.
“Hello? Sweetheart? Are you lost?”
I said nothing. Then I felt my underpants starting to turn wet. I hoped no one would notice, but a girl in the front row pointed to the floor. “She’s peeing!”
Everyone laughed harder at me. Even Denise. She quickly put a hand to her mouth to cover it, but I saw it. She was a meanie like all the others. She was supposed to be nice to me, but she wasn’t.
I started to sob. The mean lady ran a hand through my hair. “It’s all right, sweetheart. Why don’t you tell me your name?”
I was crying too hard to tell her anything. I was saved when I heard a woman call out, “Lynn! There you are!”
Mommy stood in the doorway. I turned to race over to her. She wrapped her arms around me. If she noticed the smell of pee-pee she didn’t mention it. She just hefted me off the floor and then pressed me to her chest.
“I’m sorry, Ms.—”
“Cauffield.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Cauffield. We had to give something to Lynn’s big sister. I turned my back just a second and she got away from me.” It was only then she must have noticed the puddle on the floor. “Did you have an accident, Lynn?”
I was still sobbing too hard, so I only nodded. “I’m so sorry, Ms. Cauffield—”
“It’s all right. Accidents happen. I’ll ask the janitor to clean it up.”
“Thank you so much.” Mommy bent my head into the crook of her neck. “It’s all right, sweetie. Let’s go home and get you changed.”
“OK,” I said with a sniffle.
The other kids were still laughing at me as Mommy carried me out. Even Ms. Cauffield was chuckling behind her hand again. They all thought I was a stupid baby now. But I wasn’t. I was a big girl. I was—
I barely noticed the world shimmer again. I’m three—and a half, I told myself. I’m a big girl! And someday I would go to a school just like this and all the kids would like me and think I was pretty and nice.
When Mommy carried me into the bathroom, I saw my reflection. I had become a rotund Asian toddler. My round face had pinchable red cheeks, a darling button nose, and a pair of dimples when Mommy tickled me. There were glasses on my nose, magnifying my slanted brown eyes. My hair had turned black and unraveled from its braids to fall loose.
None of that seemed strange to me. I actually smiled into the mirror and waved at the pretty girl. I giggled as the other girl waved back to me. Then Mommy took me into a stall to wipe up between my legs.
“I’m sowwy, Mommy,” I mumbled.
“It’s OK. You were just scared. You shouldn’t run off like that.”
“I won’t.”
“Good. Now, when we get home, you’re going to take a nap. You’re not going to give me any fussing about it, are you?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“That’s my girl.”
“I wuv you, Mommy.”
“I wuv you too.” She hugged me. I felt so safe and warm. That was all I needed at that moment. Nothing else mattered anymore.
***
For the next fifteen years I was Lynn Fong. I grew up all over again, this time as Karen’s baby stepsister. We had our share of fights over toys and so forth, but she never made me feel like we weren’t real sisters just because she was white and I was Asian. I had to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic all over again without any benefit from having known them before.
Like any childhood there were ups and downs. The primary down involved my weight; the chubbiness from when I first became a toddler continued right on until I was in junior high. By then I had ballooned to nearly two hundred pounds and the doctor threatened I might soon develop diabetes. My parents enrolled me in a fat camp that over the course of a summer made me lose fifty pounds.
My second first period, I freaked out nearly as much as the first time around. I embarrassed myself slightly less, if only because it happened at home and not at school. Mom sat me down to have “the talk” and then introduced me to maxi pads.
Even after I lost the weight, I didn’t go out on a date until my senior year of high school. Thanks to being fat, Asian, and bespectacled I didn’t have lots of friends and gradually sought refuge in books. While it didn’t surprise many that the Chinese-American girl would make valedictorian, it required a lot of work on my part, a lot of evenings studying in my room when others—like Karen—were out with boys.
All that studying landed me a scholarship to Stanford that sent me across the country from Karen at Penn State. Not remembering my other life, I couldn’t appreciate the fact Karen was still alive as an adult. All I could feel was an intense dread to be so far away from my loved ones.
The first semester I put on the freshman fifteen—plus thirty more. I was starting to look like a larger version of how I had as a toddler with the Buddha belly and moon face. And then my roommate moved out and I met my soul mate: Denise.
When she first trudged into the dorm I felt déjà vu prickling over my whole body, as if I had picked up a live wire. There was something familiar about that narrow, intense face with the more intense blue eyes and businesslike short brown hair. When I looked at myself I still saw a little girl, but when I looked at Denise, I saw a grown up woman.
Her voice had just a hint of a Southern accent as she said, “Hi there. I’m Denise Fontaine.”
“Lynn Fong,” I squeaked. I immediately felt shame about the purple sweatshirt and sweatpants I was wearing, the belly underneath that sweatshirt, and the generally untidy condition of the room. She probably thought I was such a slob and I desperately wanted to impress her.
Denise dropped her bags on her bed and then motioned to my tablet screen. “What’s that you’re working on?”
My cheeks flushed as I said, “It’s supposed to be a poem for Composition 102. It, well, it sucks, quite frankly. I’m premed, you know?”
“You mind if I see what you got? I might be able to help you spruce it up.”
It was then I learned Denise looked like a trial lawyer on the outside, but inside she had the soul of a poet. In fifteen minutes she “spruced up” the poem I had been attempting to write for the last five hours. Her words were so beautiful that they took my breath away.
I didn’t know it yet, but I was in love. I think Denise k
new it long before I did. She made it her business to help me lose the weight I had regained by taking me out jogging every morning and converting me to a vegan. By the end of the semester I had not only lost the weight I had gained; I was skinnier than before. Skinnier and with more tone. At Denise’s urging I actually started to run in only a sports bra—or a cutoff hoodie when it was colder—to show off my firm tummy.
I was so shy and inexperienced that I didn’t understand what was happening until spring break. We didn’t go far, just into San Francisco for a few days. We had just dropped the bags off in our hotel room when she kissed me. She kissed me and to my embarrassment I fainted.
It was as I lay on the floor of the hotel room that I remembered. I remembered my life as Dr. William Cauffield. I remembered my life with Denise. I remembered our children. And I remembered that fifteen years ago there had been no Zargon Empire subtly running everything.
I knew better than to mention anything about it to Denise. Instead, I basked in being together again, even if I was a girl and we had no children. We had been apart for fifteen years, but now we were back and we were in love with each other.
Our second relationship was very different from the first go. Despite that I could remember my old life, on the outside I was still Lynn Fong. I was still the bookish girl who needed a firm hand to guide her in the ways of the world. Denise was all too happy to instruct me.
For a year our love blossomed. Our first attempt at sex was awkward thanks to my reluctance, but Denise was patient enough to wait until I came around. I got to be quite good at eating her pussy while my nimble fingers could find her clitoris without any guidance. Denise was even better, so much more assertive than when I was a man, probably because for all practical purposes she was the man in our new relationship.
And then I fucked it up. We were cuddling on my bed, me tucked against her since I was the smaller of us. As she massaged my breasts, I sighed and then mumbled, “I hope Mike or Tammy don’t walk in on us right now.”
“Who are Mike and Tammy?”
“Huh? Oh, um, just a couple of kids in my biology class. I told them to drop by to study, but I kind of forgot about it.”
“Uh-huh.” Denise kissed me on the neck, but I couldn’t be sure she believed me. We fell asleep in each other’s arms, though sometime in the night I felt a shiver run through my body.
The next morning I woke up alone. I tried to get off my bed to find Denise, but doing so required a monumental effort. I had swollen to over four hundred pounds. I grunted and groaned as I levered myself out of bed. By the time I got to my feet, I had sweat pouring down my face and I could hardly breathe.
“God, I wish I didn’t have to see you first thing in the morning,” a voice growled.
A light came on. In Denise’s bed was a gorgeous blonde who looked like a younger version of how I had as a bimbo secretary. She ran a hand through her delicately tousled platinum hair and then glared at me. “You want something, Tubby?”
“N-n-no,” I stammered.
“Then stay on your side of the room. And make sure you don’t inject your insulin until I’m gone. Seeing you jam a needle into your flab makes me want to barf.”
“OK.” So I had become a diabetic this time. I had probably not gone to fat camp and so continued to blow up like a balloon. I waddled over to a mirror to see my bloated moon face with thick glasses on my nose and black hair cut as short as Denise’s had been.
My body looked almost like a snowman’s now, except I still had two legs. Otherwise I was one sphere balanced on another sphere. My hands could barely reach the apex of my gut. That gut rumbled that it wanted fed. I rifled around the discarded potato chip bags and candy wrappers until I unearthed a pizza box. There were still a couple of slices left.
As I bit into a piece, Denise made a gagging sound. “You’re so disgusting,” she lamented. She was quick to stomp out of the room. I watched her go and then, with tears in my eyes, took another bite to drown my sorrows.
***
Not much has changed since then. Denise is still a gorgeous bimbo—the head of the cheerleader squad no less. I don’t see much of her as she’s either at her sorority house or with one of her boyfriends. She might still end up with two kids, but they won’t be mine.
I’m just a morbidly obese computer science geek now. I take a lot of my classes online because it’s easier than trying to waddle across campus. When I do have to show up in person for a class, I need special accommodations to handle my girth. Yet without Denise’s love, I can’t bring myself to stop eating junk food the way a whale gulps down plankton.
Two weeks ago I was studying at my desk when I saw that familiar shimmer around me. I noticed my gut swell even more while my sweatshirt and sweatpants were replaced with a muumuu. My chair groaned and then snapped beneath me. I landed with a thud that probably put a crack in the ceiling of the room below me.
As I lay on the floor, too exhausted and embarrassed to move, I knew they had gone from studying me or even punishing me to using me for comic relief. And there was nothing I could do about it, because no one even knew what the aliens had done.
That gave me the idea to write down my story. Once I’ve finished, I’ll hide it away for someone to find. Maybe Denise will find it, or maybe someone who occupies this room after us. Whoever you are, you must remember. You must remember what they did to us—all of us. You must remember and you must find a way to let others know. If enough people remember, then maybe we can do something. Maybe we can make things like they used to be, before our planet was taken over.
As for me, I’m going to upload everything to the Web, to as many places as I can. Even if they manage to erase it, someone might see it and remember. It’s all I can think to do. Wish me luck. And good luck to you too. If you ever meet Denise or my children, tell them I never forgot them, not in my heart.
—Dr. William S. Cauffield, PhD
***
Lynn slips the papers into a folder. She heaves herself off her chair and then waddles over to the air duct on her side of the room. The folder should protect the pages inside from any damage, at least for a while. It’s the best place she can think of that’s accessible for her. Maybe later she can find somewhere better.
She returns to her chair, biting her lip as it creaks dangerously. She smoothes the muumuu over the belly that’s so big it actually rests on the bottom of the chair. She hates being this way; being rotund makes everything—even surfing the Web—an unbearable chore.
As she opens the first page she plans to post on, everything shimmers. The room starts to grow larger around her. To her dismay, she is getting smaller, but not really skinnier. Her saggy breasts shrivel up as she again regresses into a little girl—little in age, not girth. She continues to get younger, but she fights through the pain to try to post her message. They’ll probably delete it, but at least she can get it out there for a few seconds—
The room around her changes. The desk turns into a plastic table with tiny plastic chairs. The computer that was on the desk evaporates just as she is about to hit the button to post. In the computer’s place is a Leap Frog tablet featuring Disney characters trying to teach her the alphabet.
“No fair!” Lynn wails. She was so close, but now it’s over. She’s a helpless little girl, a toddler in a pretty sailor suit and training underpants.
The door to the room bursts open. The cops who originally fetched her from her office stand in the doorway. She lets out a shriek and then scrambles to her feet. She frantically looks around for a place to hide—
One of the meanies needs only two steps to reach the table. He scoops Lynn up by the back of her dress. She dangles in the air, kicking and swatting furiously. The nasty man grins at her and then pinches her cheek hard enough that she squeals with pain.
“It’s over for you, munchkin,” he says.
“Wemme go!” she wails. “Wemme go!”
“Fraid not. You’re going to headquarters. But first I’m going to show you
what happens to bad little girls.” He sits down on Lynn’s bed. When he drapes her over his knees, she knows what’s going to happen.
She screams before he swats her fanny the first time. Her parents had spanked her before when she was bad, but they had never hit her that hard—and they never enjoyed it. The nasty man hits her again and again, until her throat is raw and face soaked with tears.
Only then does he lift her up. “You keep that in mind for your next life.”
She can’t say anything, too choked with sobs to form any coherent words. She can only continue sobbing and sniffling as they carry her down to the car. There’s a carseat for them to strap her into. The other one presses a stuffed ducky into her hands. He tousles her hair. “You mess with the bull, you get the horns, kid.”
They laugh at this and then take their seats. As the car gets underway, Lynn looks back at school. If she’s a good girl, it’ll be another fifteen years until she can get back here. She doesn’t know what will happen to Denise or anyone else by then. She only hopes they fare better than her.
***
Denise can’t sleep. In a way she misses that pig of a roommate of hers; Lynn’s snoring was better than any white noise generator. It will take a few days to get used to not having that.
To make things worse, she keeps hearing a rustling in the air vent. With a huff she rolls out of bed. It’s probably a wrapper in the air vent from all the food that tub of lard chowed down. With a start, she wonders if maybe it could be a mouse—or a rat. Gross. Maybe she should call Derek and ask him to investigate. No, it’s too late for that. She could ask the floor supervisor or something.
There’s no sense going to that much trouble if it’s just a potato chip bag. Still, Denise grabs a brush to use for a weapon as she flips the light switch. She waves the brush in front of her a few times just in case. Nothing.
The rustling continues. She squats down to get a better look. Then she giggles with relief. It’s not a mouse or rat or even a potato chip bag; it’s a folder of papers. She shakes her head. Tubby probably dropped it in there when she was moving out.
Denise would leave it in there forever if not for that obnoxious rustling sound. The only problem is the grate for the vent is screwed tight. She doesn’t have any tools. Then she remembers something she saw in a movie. She goes over to her purse to dig around.
Gender Swapped By Aliens! Page 6