Personalias

Heaven sucked. There was no doubt about it. Anika couldn’t stand it. Everyone wanted to go to Heaven, sure, but did they really? In her present circumstance, Anika was having post salvation regrets. “Remember my lovelies,” the angel said. “Make sure to color in the lines.” “Yes Miss Lucille…” The chorus came from a dozen adults of varying ages, though looking at the surroundings, it would have been more appropriate to guess that this was a preschool for people with that Benjamin Button disease. The girls all wore big floppy bows in their hair and socks that were longer than the hems of their skirts. The boys all wore shorts that came up above their knees and button up shirts with slip on bowties. Marcus, another relatively new arrival, had started making jokes about an old rock band where the guitarist wore something similar but it just didn’t land. It didn’t stop him from trying. “The lines are like tiny little commandments and guides so that we can make our prettiest picture. Just like how the Bible gives us all guides on how we live our best lives.” “Yes Miss Lucille…” Everyday. This. Again and again and again. Random parables. Bible study. Videos. Lessons. Before she was old enough to stay home, her parents took her to church every Sunday where she languished in first the nursery and then the “Little Learners” Room. The nursery hadn’t been so bad. That had been just like daycare but with a few extra Jesus decorations. There were far worse ways to whittle away an hour or so while Mom and Dad sang hymns to the sky man. Heaven, this level anyways, was like the Little Learners room. Lots of forced stories and songs and talks about how great God was and how this day was the day that the Lord had made. Everyday was Sunday in Heaven. At present they were sitting at circular tables…because God’s children were all equal or something something something Anika had zoned out half way through the Angel Teacher Lady’s explanation. Anika would never say this outloud, but she was beginning to wish she’d been a little worse in life. “Can you pass me the blue?” Anika asked her seatmate. The kid…girl…woman dressed like a toddler… looked up from her coloring sheet. “Yeah. Are you coloring Jonah and the Whale?’ Anika made the mistake of telling the truth. “Nope.” She brushed her light brown bangs out of the way. “Doing Noah’s Ark…I think.” The other girl squinted her eyes and moved her lips at the squiggles on top of the coloring sheet. “I think so, too.” Nothing here was written in English, or any Earthly language. The angels had promised they’d learn to read Celestial Script in time, but at present they only got lap read to. Anika took the blue crayon from her neighbor and started coloring the pair of birds on the tippy top of the boat. Coloring was in five dimensions here so it was particularly difficult to capture the range of color that a bird would get throughout its entire life and through every space and angle of light, but that’s what the lines were supposed to be for. If only she could see in five dimensions… “I need a drink,” Anika muttered. She reached forward and grabbed a juice box from the center of the table. There was a cluster of juice boxes in the middle of every table, straw unwrapped and ready to be sipped from and it never went out. One benefit of Heaven: unlimited apple juice. The angel teachers promised that they’d get wine too when they’d ascended enough. “Miss Lucille! Miss Lucille!” Anika’s neighbor shot her hand up in the air. One of the angels, all named Lucille, glided up. “Yes, Hannah?” The other girl leveled an accusing finger right at Anika’s temple. “Anika’s doing it wrong! She said she was coloring Noah’s arc but everybody knows that the birds holding the branch are supposed to be doves!” The hair on the back of Anika’s neck stood up. So annoying! The first level of Heaven might have been Sunday School but every level of Hell was definitely other people, she decided. The angel peered over her. “You’re right, Hannah. Good job for noticing!” Anika felt her skin start to prickle as Hannah got patted on the head. The brat could have just stopped her and told her she was about to make a mistake. “Sorry,” Anika apologized but didn’t mean it. “I thought they’d look pretty as bluebirds.” The angel teacher suppressed a light chuckle. “It’s pronounced ‘birds’, honey. ‘Bluebirds’. Not ‘boobirbs’.” Anika felt taken aback. “That’s what I said…bluebirds.” The angel enunciated the words back. “Blue. Birds.” Her treacherous neighbors on either side of her started giggling behind their hands. Whispers of ‘baby’ made their way to Anika’s ears. “Blue. Birds.” “I know what you mean, honey.” The angel ruffled Anika’s hair. “Well even if they are boobirbs in your picture, I think they’re very pretty.” That made her spirits rise a bit. “Though you accidentally scribbled over here where it hatches and colored it like an adult in the sunlight, when this particular one was born at dusk and hatchlings tend to be closer to gray.” Right back down again. “See your mistake?” A sigh. “Yeah,” Anika lied. To her stupid, human, babyish three dimensional eyes it looked to her like the angel was just jamming her finger up and down on the same spot of paper again and again, but she was too embarrassed to admit it. It had been weeks and everyone else seemed to be getting the hang of this. She thought that if she just looked at it from the right angle she might see something. No such luck. “Don’t worry. You’ll get it. Just use the lines.” “Yes Miss Lucille…” “Miss Lucille! Miss Lucille!” That brat Hannah said. “Are there any coloring pages with ephalants! I love ephalants!” “It’s elephants, dear. But I think I can get some for you. Maybe something from Garden of Eden” “I said ephalants,” Hannah said, seeming offended. The blonde bimbo was getting a taste of her own medicine. But wait…if she couldn’t hear the difference between ‘elephant’ and ‘ephalant’, what did that mean for Anika’s ‘boobirbs’. The angel started to walk away to another table but she doubled back seeming to remember something. “Hannah. Anika. Do either of you need to go potty?” “No…” the girls said in unison. Anika didn’t need a mirror to see how much she was blushing. She had Hannah for that. “Are you sure?” Both girls faltered. “Stand up. Let’s check.” Both of them stood up, fidgeting while the Angel lifted up the hems of the skirt and inspected their disposable training pants. That was another part of Heaven that Anika hadn’t rightly anticipated: Everyone in her class was in giant adult versions of Pull-Ups. Every boy had a bit of blue poking out above their waistbands and every girl had a bit of pink just barely noticeable beneath their skirts. Eventually, they’d been promised, they’d learn to not have to use the toilet at all but until they’d mastered themselves to that point, everyone had to wear Pull-Ups ‘just in case’. It was hard to object to an angel’s demands. Even harder was the fact that she’d woken up in Heaven covered in her own excrement. People peed and pooped when they died. That evidently carried over with souls into the hereafter. Training pants had seemed reasonable at the time. “Oh dear,” Miss Lucille said. “You lost your rainbow, Hannah.” Anika smirked, feeling smugged. Her fade when wet designs were gone. Appropriate considering she’d tattled about Noah’s Ark. Hannah didn’t seem too keen on it… Good. “And Anika…all dry.” The angel said. Anika beamed triumphantly. “Good girl. Now go try going potty for me.” Anika balked. “I don’t…” she stuttered. “How am I going to learn to… you know…if I keep going?” They were about the same height, but the air of authority and wisdom that the celestial being carried about her made Anika feel much much smaller. “Please, Anika? Try? For me?” With a huff, Anika whirled around towards the class bathroom, a single toilet and sink with no door for privacy, again, ‘just in case’. “Fine…” She might have been embarrassed how her skirt flared out when she twirled, or how everyone would hear her tinkling and see her Mary Janes through the archway. These days, the only thing that was at risk of being more dead than her was her modesty. “Come on, Hannah. Let’s get you cleaned up.” “Noooooo….” Hannah whined. Being a big girl on the verge of true Sainthood, Anika got to use the potty. Being a little girl who had an accident, Hannah was being guided over to the cubbies to get a fresh Pull-Up. The only difference between her and a full on baby was that Hannah was allowed to get changed standing up. Anika did her business, pondering the absurdity of the afterlife. She didn’t actually feel much bigger or that she was closer to enlightenment or whatever. She just felt like she was being potty trained again. Everyone binged on apple juice so that they’d have full bladders and try to hold it in for eternity, but all that seemed to accomplish was having to go to the bathroom more often or having an accident. “Okay,” she called. “I’m done.” Another, nearly identical angel teacher came up. She looked down into the training pants around Anika’s ankles and smiled condescendingly “Good girl! You’ll be ready in no time!” An errant thought made its way out of Anika’s mouth. “For what?” More cheerful chuckling. “Okay, let’s wipe and wash our hands.” Anika stood still and held up the hem of her skirt so that literally immaculate hands could wipe between her legs. She really wasn’t that different from Hannah in this way. Hannah didn’t have to wash her hands while an Angel puppeted her wrists in and out of the stream singing: “And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos…” The girl tried to mumble along but found herself missing the words and melody every step of the way. She’d lost count of how many times this song had been sung to her and she still couldn’t get past the first or second ‘begat’. “All done,” the angel said, which is good because Anika had absolutely no clue otherwise. Whatever happened to the ABG’s? She walked back to the table, hoping to see an embarrassed Hannah being humiliated having to step into a fresh Pull-Up and be encouraged about her lack of improvement like a baby. She got more than she could have hoped for. The Pull-Up and leaked all over the girl’s skirt. It was now balled up next to the used training pant by her feet and she was doing her best to keep her loud bawl a quiet one. “Don’t worry,” the angel said. “We just have to wash it. Nobody’s mad at you. You’re doing your best.” Heaven had infinite juice boxes and infinite Pull-Ups that could fit over full grown adults, but had to wash their preschool uniforms? Anika didn’t care to question that since it was working out in her favor. She might not be able to color in five dimensions but she could still make it to the toilet. The Lucille pulled Hannah into her arms and then boosted the girl up like a toddler. Angels like the Lucilles had impossible strength and stamina. Hannah might as well be an actual child. She certainly looked like one. Now, everyone would know that stupid Hannah had messed up so badly that she’d lost her bottoms. That brat was crying like a two year old. And getting her back rubbed. And having a pretty lady tell her it was okay. And getting hugged. And carried. And getting offered toys to make her feel better. Why was Anika feeling so envious of this? And how could she get that kind of attention for herself? She reached out and grabbed another juicebox… *************************************************************************** Yup. Jessica had it figured out. Hell definitely was the place of cruel and unusual punishments. She’d expected fire and little guys with hot pokers. This was somehow worse… “Awwww!” Another inmate mocked her. “Wood at duh baby! Such a widdle cutie walkin’ awound in huh Pampuhs.” Dude was no better off, truth be told. He was in training pants, same as hers. He just had shorts on over them. Jessica had peed herself so many times that the guards just took away her skirt. “Yeah yeah,” Jessica rolled her eyes. “Tell me another one I haven’t heard before.” The new fish were the quickest pots to call the kettle black. They’d learn the hard way. “Wussa mattuh. Did I huwt yuh feewings?” This guy was beyond oblivious. Jessica turned and squared up to the idiot. “Do you even hear yourself?” “Heah wut?” “Are you talking like that on purpose or…? “Tawking wike how?” That answered that. One of the guards appeared right behind the idiot. “Jeffrey,” the demon said. “Are you making fun of Jessica?” New fish’s eyes went wide with terror. “No ma’am.” “Don’t fib.” She looked over to Jessica. Weird that a demon could be so oddly attractive. Jessica might have guessed the demoness was a succubus or something but ‘visually pleasing’ and ‘sexually arousing’ didn’t overlap in this instance. “Jessica?” Jessica decided to play dumb. “Jeffey wasn’t bein’ mean at all, ma’am.” The slight babyish lisp wasn’t as pronounced as her would-be tormentor’s, but it was coming more naturally every day. “He was just tellin’ me I was wearin’ a diapee…I mean diaper.” Jeffrey’s face fell just in time for it to contort in pain when the demon yanked him over by the ear and gave him a loud pop in the rear. “We. Don’t. Make. Fun. Of. Our. Friends.” Jeffrey went limp after the first swat. They all did. Something about the spankings here made a body go all ragdoll. It didn’t stop the pain or the embarrassment. Jessica released her bladder again into the already soaking Pull-Up. Just watching the man-child get spanked was giving her immense satisfaction. Squeezing her legs together and feeling a bit of residue linger on her thighs did, too. More work for the faux caretakers of this place was a good thing. Passive resistance for the win. She’d grown up a preacher’s daughter. In part that’s why she ended up dying an athiest. No book describing the afterlife, religious or otherwise mentioned this. Who’d have thought that Hell was a daycare? A near identical demon tapped Jessica on the shoulder. “Come on, Jessica,” she sighed. “Let’s get you changed. I can see you sagging from here you soggy thing.” Bow legged, Jessica took the monster’s hand and was led over to the cubbies to be wiped and given a fresh pair of training pants that she had absolutely no intention of keeping dry. “Yes, Miss Judy.” ***************************************************************************************************** “Here you go, sweetie,” the angel said to Anika, handing her a block, “Why don’t you play with these?” From out of the bottomless plastic bin, blocks made of solid light tumbled out. They were the stackable kind, but were still too big to swallow. “They’re only in three dimensions. I hope that’s okay.” It was very okay. “Thank you Miss Lucille.” “You’re welcome, Anika.” the Angel said. “Do you need to go potty?” “No,” the woman lied. “Not even a little?” “Not even a lil bit.” Anika’s bladder was close to bursting, but she’d wait until after she had some privacy to wet herself. It wouldn’t be long after that. Average response time for the grand celestial educators to notice that Anika’s rainbow had gone away was six minutes. A few times she’d stopped and counted…though maybe the fact that she was stopping and counting was doing it. She was in just a t-shirt and a Pull-Up now. Much more comfortable and only slightly more embarrassing. Far less embarrassing than it should have been, in truth. The dimensions of Heaven had shifted. Or perhaps a more apt explanation would be that her senses had expanded to notice more than the art tables and the playgrounds. She was off in a corner with the other pantsless peeps; other people that were going backwards in their potty training instead of forwards. She got to play with blocks and finger paint while everyone else was doing more organized activity. And every time she had an accident, she got changed and fawned over and reassured that it would be okay. No Hannah either. Hannah had started asking for potty reminders, little goodie two shoes that she was, and was now sitting on a bowl every thirty minutes. Anika had made the better choice. “Can I have some juice?” “Of course you can have a cup-cup.” The angel said. She handed a sippy cup filled with apple juice. “Anything else?” “No Miss Lucille.” “Okay, you be good.” Depending on your standards, Anika was good. She felt it was rather polite of her to relax things downstairs right as she glugged down her apple juice. Efficient too. Coldness inside and warmth directly outside, Anika shifted to her knees and went for the first block. “Have you tried it?” A new voice asked. Anika looked over her shoulder. “Tried what?” The woman-child who’d spoken crawled up right next to her. She had olive skin and mediterranean features.. “Eating the blocks.” The girl wasn’t wearing a t-shirt and Pull-Ups. She wasn’t wearing a prissy school uniform eithers. Her legs were just as bare as Anika’s, but her t-shirt wrapped all the way around her torso. Something white and puffy shown out through the too small leg holes. Anika didn’t need three guesses to know what it was. A baby woman? Not a toddler or preschooler? Anika took this all in and tried not to stare. “I can’t eat them. They’re plastic,” “They’re light.” “I can’t eat them.” “You can eat anything.” The new girl paused. She looked like her mind was in two places “What’s gonna…happen…? Do you think you’re gonna get…sick? From eating…light? In…” she let out a long, relieved sighed. “Heaven?” Anika’s nose wrinkled. She’d gotten used to certain smells, but she still didn’t do that in her training pants. “Are you okay?” The newcomer shifted from all fours and sat down on the flour. “Yeah. Why?” Anika wanted to gag and barf just thinking about it. She tried to distract herself instead. “Where did you come from?” The diapered woman motioned behind her. “From over there, with the other babies.” Babies? Sure enough, in yet another area of the massive preschool was a completely different area, one with bright colors and toys, and every person there was crawling and giggling chaotically. Nowhere was the orderly diligence of the preschool art tables or even the quiet preoccupation of her toddler section. Just grown people acting like drooling idiots and loving every minute of it. A disturbing thought: How long had Anika been dead? Had she once been in a big beautiful nursery like that with all of her needs cared for and loved unconditionally with no expectations…and forgotten about it? “Are you new here…or something?” She asked the other woman. The new girl wagged her head. “Nuh-uh. I’ve been here for a long time. Ever since Mr. Levi was running this place and we worshiped Zeus. “Who’s Mr. Levi?” “Andromeda!” One of the Lucille angels called out. “There you are. What are you doing here you little stinker?” She looked slightly different than the other angelic teachers, mostly in her outfit. The others wore conservative but functional dresses and pants. They looked like archetypical teachers; elementary school to be specific. This one, besides the bleached blonde hair, had scrubs decorated with rattles and bottles and safety pins. There was no doubt what relative age group she worked with. “You let this big girl play with her blocks in peace.” Up into the Angel’s arms the crawler went. “Yes, Mama Lucy.” “Now let’s get you back over to all your little friends.” The angel sniffed audibly. “Let’s you get changed first.” “Yes Mama Lucy.” Tunnel vision overtook Anika. The entire baby section of Heaven zoomed into focus. Everything else blurred and muted out by comparison. They were all having fun over there. Together. Even here in just her Pull-Ups with the other kids who weren’t quite getting the swing of potty training (some of them might even be faking it like Anika) everyone was alone. Competition on one end. Isolation on the other. And friendship and camaraderie right in front of her. And Mama…the angels over there were called ‘Mama’. A well timed cramp snapped Anika back out of her head. She stood up, feeling the Pull-Up sag from the gravity and its weight. She’d just raise her hand and find a teacher angel. Tell them she had to go potty. Then she’d be sat on the toilet and changed out of her wet Pull-Up and…and…and… “Excuse me…” Anika said to the angel in the nursery scrubs. She hadn’t even consciously realized that she’d toddled over to the nursery area. It really was like the church nursery back home. Just…bigger. The angel turned around. Andromeda was already laying peacefully down on a changing table, her hands shooting up to mobile above her head, her unbuttoned onesie revealed a diaper that was badly in need of sorting out. The line in the middle had turned completely blue and there was the smell of something stronger wafting up too. “Yes ba-?” The angel stopped and adjusted her gaze to eye level. “Oh hello Anika! Do you want to be a big girl and help me change Andromeda’s diaper?” Andromeda made no move or blush at the mention of a stranger seeing her in this state. “Um…can I play?” Anika asked. “With the babies?” “Sorry,” the angel said sweetly. “But big girls like you can’t play with the babies. You might accidentally hurt one of them. Go play with your blocks by yourself.” She spared a glance at Anika’s sodden training pant. “I’ll get one of the others to change you into a dry Pull-Up.” Sulking, Anika turned away, and froze when she felt the waistband of her disposable panties get pulled back. “Huh?” “Just checking. Yup. Still a big girl. Go play.” Anika’s feet did not move. But her knees bent. Her thumb drifted in between her lips. She closed her eyes and did her best not to think about what she was doing. “Could you…check me… again?” She asked. She was checked. Mama Lucy told her to sit down on the floor while she finished changing Andromeda. She did. She went back first onto the changing table. The garment that was slipped underneath her after she was cleaned up was not a Pull-Up. Mama Lucy didn’t make her go back to the bigger kids. It felt like a win. ************************************************************************************************** Jessica was the hustle queen of Hell. They were trying to break her and failing more and more every day. Pull-ups to diapers? Pfft. Kiddie toys? As if. Story time? She literally knew every story by heart and could correct the Judy demons where they got it wrong. She could do any and all of this standing on her head. It was easy. All around her, the screams of the anguish filled her ears. “No, I’m not a baby! Waaaaah! Stop it! Staaaaahp!” People who got too many rain clouds on their potty training charts ended up plopped back into nappies. The charts went away after that, and for Jessica, away went the shame. They weren’t keeping track of it so why should she? None of this phased her. She was harder than all of that. And through her efforts, she was working on adding the demons’ screams to the damned. “No no, baby. Careful baby!” Hell was a daycare. Hell was a prison. Prisons had rules. Rules could be exploited. As long as she pretended to not know what she was doing, she wouldn’t get spanked. Jessica leaned back in the giant highchair and craned her neck away from the goop in the spoon. “Spinach yucky!” “Here comes the airplane!” The demon sang with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Spincahe! Yucky!” She swatted the spoon out of the Judy’s grasp and it splatted all over Jeffrey’s face in the next highchair. Jeffrey had followed her back into diapers soon after her own ‘failure’. Depending on one’s outlook, he was either adapting very well or not at all. Jeffrey looked bewildered for a second and then burst out into tears, blubbering till the snot on his upper lip dripped down to the baby food on his chin. “Sowwy, Jeffy.” Jessica didn’t mean it. It was an affectation, just like all the baby talk she was doing. She couldn't remember when the last time she’d said a full sentence like an adult (probably the last time she did number two’s outside of her clothes) but all of her thoughts were suitably mature. Good enough. “Sorry, Judy,” One of the demon’s said to the other. “I think Jessica is a little fussy today.” “When isn’t she a fussy baby?” the other one rolled her eyes. “Seriously.” Jeffy was taken out of the highchair by his chief tormentor and cooed and fussed over like an idiot. “I’m gonna go get him cleaned up. Try and cheer him up with a pop up book or something.” The demons talked to each other more than to their prisoners, like they couldn’t understand or something. It was more of the gaslighting that was such a common one in this circle of hell. “I’ll catch up in a second.” Jessica’s Judy said to the first. “I gotta get something in this cutie’s tum-tum.” There was a time when being called a ‘cutie’ would have flattered Jessica. The demon tapped her chin and regarded her most difficult victim. “What am I gonna feed you?” Jessica didn’t know but she was sure it was going to end up on the demon’s clothes. Too bad all of their clothes were literally stain proof. It was the thought that counted. The demon daycare worker picked Jessica up out of the highchair and carried her out of the kitchen. “Maybe you’re not ready for solid foods yet,” she moved them out of the afterlife daycare’s kitchen. “Spoons can be scary if you’re too little.” Jessica found herself in a rocking chair sitting in the monster’s lap. “Hungeeeeee…” she moaned. “Baby hungeee…” She groped at the uncanny valley caretaker’s breasts, hoping to get a rise out of her. She got a much different response than she suspected. “Oh? You’re hungry for this?” She lifted her shirt to reveal a nursing bra, quickly opened to show off a dripping, milky teat. “Does baby wanna breastfeed?” She did. Jessica really did. The thought of breast milk mixed with blood after she bit down was so spiteful as to be arousing. Innocently, baby Jessica nodded her head. “Uh-huh! Uh-huh!” “Okie dokie. Let’s get baby some milk!” Jessica’s head was guided towards the woman-thing’s breast. She never did bite down… She was too caught up in the sheer ecstasy of it. The world started to make less and less sense. Only the heartbeat of the Mommy and the taste of the milk mattered to her. Faintly, she heard Mommy talking to one of the other grown-ups. “You know I heard Madison crying in her crib the other day. She was so upset, bawling that she was in Hell and being punished.” Mommy laughed. “Punishment? They think this is a punishment? Silly babies.” “Yeah. Who said this was Hell?” ********************************************************************************************** “Okay Anika,” Mama Lucy said. “Give me burpies.” The angel started patting, thundering on Jessica’s back. Contentedly, Anika let out a series of massive belches, the pressure in her tum tum lowering, as her eyes drooped. Mama Lucy’s milk always tasted like strawberries or pomegranates for some reason. It didn’t make sense, but it didn’t have to. It was Heaven. She’d figured out Heaven’s secret. The classroom and the promises of ascension? The work? The potty training? That was a test. And only by failing and accepting what a silly little infant she was and abandoning all that pride could she truly be happy. Anika was happy. Happier than she could remember. She didn’t have to worry about a thing. She didn’t even have to burp herself. And Mama Lucy cared for her and all the other babies that had figured it out. The others were coming around too. Even Hannah had realized that it was better to be a baby in Heaven and that anything less was Hell. They were good friends now. Them and Andromeda. After her nap; milkies always made her sleepy; maybe she’d go crawl over and play with them. Or maybe she’d just stare at herself in the mirror and let herself forget that the cute reflection wasn’t another baby. That could be fun too. A quick trip to the changing table was the only way that Anika knew she was wet or messy. It wasn’t her problem anymore. Nothing was. Babies like her didn’t have problems. Problems were for big people and angels. Instead of a crib, Anika was laid down on a playmat, with beautiful dangling shineys that she could bat at and kick with her hands and feet. The toes of her footed sleeper tasted like cotton candy… “You can lay here,” Mama Lucy said. “And play until you fall fast asleep.” Oh wow. What a wonderful way to drift off! She smiled and giggled, stifling a yawn just as Mama Lucy gave her a gentle kiss on the forehead. “Night night, baby.” “This is the life, isn’t it?” Andromeda asked. The two baby friends were laid down side by side on their own playmats. “No worries. No cares. No thoughts. It’s better than what I imagined the Elysian Fields to be.” “Yeah.” Anika said. “Yup yup yup.” She closed her eyes, knowing full well that she wouldn’t open them until after nap time. “Andromeda.” “Yeah?” “Fanks for tewwing me the secwet.” “What secret?” “Of Heaven.” Andromeda giggled. “Who said this was Heaven?” **************************************************************************************************** From the Journal of Professor Bumble: Heaven and Hell, though locked in a perpetual cold war until some form of Armageddon or another, are not innovators. That’s what humans are for. Their short life and unique experience causes them to innovate where cosmic beings would be content to stagnate. Lucifer might be a master of betrayal, lying and murder, but Adam and his spawn invented the sport to be certain. Innocence is also highly valued on both sides. Cleanliness may be next to Godliness but innocence- a word here meaning non-malicious ignorance- might be close to cosmic uranium. There are dozens of spells from on High and Below that value innocence either as a pure form of the human spirit, the very thing which Heaven might be constructed of, or its reaction with the environment of Hell in pure contradiction as a powersource. Side Note: I remember coming across a coven in the 1800’s that believed that Original Sin was Heaven purposefully tainting the well to prevent Hell from utilizing fallen souls that had done nothing wrong yet not achieved salvation. Shame it never caught on. Likewise, the longstanding rules of Limbo were seen as a form of non-aggression and pseudo neutrality. Even if fostered by Heaven, Limbo was staying well out of things and all of those cleansed minds and souls were not being put to use beyond giving a few angels very specific and matronly jobs. In more recent events, sources tell me that since what has been dubbed “The Dante Incident”, the neutrality of Limbo is being reconsidered at best. More to the point, both sides are experimenting ways to manufacture innocence, the result being that a fraction (still a rather large number) of the arriving population is put into a Limbo substitute, gaslit, and mentally regressed until something akin to innocence is achieved. It’s not nearly as potent as the real stuff, and it’s unpredictable, but each is taking the philosophy of quantity over quality. The sad but tragic part is that as far as my sources indicate, neither side knows what the other is doing and they have no clue just how similar they’ve become. Surprising perhaps, but not shocking.

Chapter 80: War Paint It was Tuesday. I was sitting across from Skinner in the Speech Therapy Room, alone and without my posse as Skinner tried once again to get me to talk like a friggin’ toddler. Things were not going well for her. Though I had to give her credit: Nearly twenty minutes of my nonsense and she still hadn’t lost her composure. ‘A’ for effort. “Okay. What does the…” she paused and looked at the picture on her flash card. “What does a crow say?” No more ‘birdies’. I stood up and started to pump my fist, pretending to stab something.. “DIE! DIE! EEE! EEE! EEE! EEE!” I took my fingers and pointed them outward, cocking my thumbs. “I’m gonna give you to the count of ten. One…two…TEN! Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew!” I struck a pose worthy of the worst community theater in existence. “Muahahaha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in-” Skinner cut me off. “Clark? No! Crows don’t say that. They go caw-caw, you silly goose!” I sat back down and smiled at her, unnervingly staring and not blinking. “Then why is a group of them called a murder?” The speech therapist looked at me like she was trying to decide whether I was a genius or an idiot.. Finally she laughed. “Oh Clark, you’re such a silly Little boy!” Time to get really silly. “Oh Clarrr-k, You-er such a sillay Lil’ boy!” I even did her laugh. Skinner looked confused again, which to be fair to her, was sometimes her default state. I was beginning to rank her only slightly higher than Forrest in terms of quick wittedness. “Can I ask you a question?” I said. I didn’t wait for her to respond. “You’re a speech teacher, yeah? Teach Amazon kids how to talk and pronounce words? Get rid of lisps? Then why don’t any of the kids you work with have your accent?” Skinner puckered her lips a moment. “I don’t have an accent.” “Ah don’t have an ack-sent!” In truth, she didn’t. At least no more of an accent than any of the other locals had. But what was a bit of gaslighting between ex-coworkers? I had to pass the time somehow. “Can you not hear it anymore?” “Hear what?” “Hear wuuuuut?” “Clark, stop it.” “Clarrr-k, stahp it.” “That’s very immature!” “Thaaat’s very imma-shure!” It was a shorter reply than saying, “No shit it’s immature, you think I have a made up disease that turns me into a toddler!” What incentive did I have to act in good faith? Skinner closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “You are gonna be the death of me.” I let out a gasp. “Ya’ll are gonna be the death of me? Did you say y’all?! You said y’all!” “What? No!” She jolted in her seat. I saw her eyes looking off and her mouthing words to herself, afraid she’d slipped. “I did not say ‘y’all’.” “You just did.” I got only stony silence in reply. “What? Lion wouldn’t shut up about it until I promised to tell you about your accent.” “Lion’s not here, right now.” “I took a message.” Wisely, Skinner ignored me and moved on. “Okay. Okay. Here’s a new one.” She showed a poorly drawn picture of a woman holding a swaddled baby. Or it could have been a Little, I supposed. Proportions were hard to tell when swaddled and the Amazons in my life barely made the distinction themselves. “This is a Mommy. Mommy’s say ‘I love you’. What do Mommies say?” I leaned back and started miming rubbing my nipples. “Ooooh. Ooooh,” I moaned. “Oh yes! Oh yeah! Oh yeah! Oh yeah!” I feigned closing my eyes just enough so that I could see the look of shock and discomfort on her face. “Clark. That’s not what Mommies say.” I bunched my fists up and put one right on top of the other like I was holding something long and then started shaking them like a jackhammer right over my crotch. “BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!” “Clark. Stop.” “Oh Mark! Oh Mark! Oh Mark! OOOOOOOOOH!”” “Clark!” In a surprising move Skinner rose to her feet and did something close to a legitimately intimidating glare at me. I froze. “Sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t understand you at first because of your accent. You might want to work on that.” Her glare intensified. Wow. I was actually kind of impressed and sat up straight instead of continuing to pantomime masturbation. “Mommies do not sound like that, Little boy!” “Mine does…” I was lying, of course. As far as I had witnessed, Janet had zero libido or emotions that didn’t in some way relate into forcibly mothering me. Skinner didn’t need to know that. She walked around the table and took my hand. “I think we’ve done enough work today. Let’s get going.” I had no choice but to follow alongside her. We were walking along back to Beouf’s room. A pair of Tweeners, a teacher aide and a custodian stopped chatting while the Amazon and I passed. “I can still work,” I said. “Don’t you want to know what Daddies say?” “I know what Daddies say,” Skinner said in clipped, stressed out tones. “You do? Who’s your Daddy, Skinner?” Grunting, stilted laughter muffled behind hands reached my ears, even as the Tweeners turned away. Skinner didn’t take the time to glare or dress them down, choosing to ignore them. I had a feeling that Skinner was on the verge of a good old fashioned stress cry. A guy could hope, anyhow. “Having trouble walking, bubba?” Skinner asked, purposefully increasing her strides so that I’d struggle to keep up and be pulled along more. “Looks like you might need a change when you get back. Your drawers are drooping.” Petty bitch. “Will you change me?” I bluffed. I don’t think I’d ever seen her change a diaper. At least once she’d brought somebody back because of a ‘code brown’, citing her sensitive nose. “If you want,” Skinner replied, “but I might not be as good at it as Mrs. B. or Mrs. Zoge.” Was that supposed to be a threat or something? It kind of felt like it. “No thanks. I’m good.” She muttered something under her breath. I suspect it was a disagreement about my status as ‘good’. She flung open the door and dragged me back into Beouf’s room. “Okay. Clark’s done for a little bit. Can I please have Tommy, Annie, and Jesse?” “Annie is in O.T. with Chaz and Shauna.” Beouf said. “Okay. Then how about Mandy?” “Sure.” Mandy got up from her seat at Zoge’s table and stuck her hands out. They were rainbow colored and not quite dripping with paint. Zoge practically engulfed them with baby wipes trying to quickly get all the paint off of her. There were a few blotches of fresh paint on the homemade smock. Quietly, I considered making Mandy my next target. For her own good, of course… “Great,” Skinner said. “Let’s go kids! Also, you might want to ease up on how much Clark drinks at snack time if you get my drift.” “Sure thing,” Beouf said. “And on it.” I was picked up in Beouf’s arms by the end of that sentence. She gave the back of my pants a gentle squeeze. I did not crinkle very much. Admittedly, it was squishing near the bottom. The front had already been saturated and it just worked its way back. “Oh yeah,” she said to Skinner. “Good call.” She looked at me. “You’re close to leaking!” I bit my tongue. No shit I was close to leaking, not that anyone taller than me would take my word for it. On our way to the bathroom, I caught a beautiful sight of Tommy flicking the air right by Sandra Lynn’s ear on his way out. She flinched and looked around confused. Tommy was already growing up. Too bad all three were bringing their stupid stuffed animals with them. I’d yet to break anyone of that habit, and the loss tasted almost as bad as the overcooked vegetables from the cafeteria. Jesse tucked his hobo clown under his arm like it was a football, and Mandy’s Teddy Bear was resting on her hip with a cloth napkin diaper pinned on. At least Tommy was dragging his alligator disdainfully by the tail. He still corrected it when prompted. Over on the changing table, Beouf pulled my shorts all the way off my legs and examined them. “No leaking.” She gave my backside a gentle poke and added. “But close. You wouldn’t have made it to lunch like this.” My arms went rigid and my jaw clenched. “Don’t worry, I’m giving them back. I promise. It’s just easier to change you with them off so they’re not sliding up and down your ankles.” She laid them on my chest over the safety strap. “Here, you can hold them.” I grabbed them like they were a life raft in the middle of the ocean. “Can you ask my mommy to bring in some spare pants in case I leak?” I asked. The idea of being so exposed still made my brain burn and sizzle on constant high alert. I was willing to play the game to avoid that, pride be damned. In reply, Beouf put a pacifier between my lips. “Hold on, baby. I need to concentrate. I don’t want to miss a spot and have you get all rashy. Your mommy wouldn’t like that.” Reluctantly, I started sucking. I wanted this over with. I thought she was reaching for a fresh diaper, but a familiar plush face tumbled into my arms. “You forgot this.” ‘Forgot’ had nothing to do about it, and I think she knew it. While Beouf changed me, I sucked on my pacifier and stared at my reflection on the ceiling. I no longer saw a parody of a child. The initial shock of this treatment had long worn off. I didn’t look like a baby at all; just someone who had been silenced and restrained. Switch out the pacifier for a gag and Lion for a set of handcuffs and my expression or body position wouldn’t have been any different “There we go,” Beouf said, taping me up. “All done.” As an exclamation point she dropped the old diaper in the pale with an audible thunk. Yeah. I knew she was done. We’d done this before. A lot. I held out the neon lime green shorts from underneath Lion. “Not yet.” She took the baggie shorts and slid them back over my legs. “Point taken.” I was allowed to stand up before she snapped them back over my temporary underwear. “Let’s go finger paint,” she squeaked and chirped at me. “I think you’ll like it.” Very quickly I was over at Zoge’s table with Ivy, Billy, and Sandra Lynn, an old button up shirt fastened backwards as my smock. The table was covered in old newspapers and weighed down by heavy bottles of paint, paper plates, glue and glitter. It was big enough to accommodate all four of us, but I’d gotten used to working in pairs so it felt crowded by comparison. Things always got mixed up on days when the so-called therapists showed up to take people away in groups of two and three. Beouf was taking one end of the kidney table, Zoge on my end. They were centralizing the art activity primarily because they didn’t have enough different colored paint to go around. “What do you want to finger paint?” Zoge asked. “A butterfly? Or a bird? Or..?” “A violent and bloody massacre,” I said, letting the pacifier drop from my mouth and dangle. “With as many different shades of red as possible.” I saw Zoge look over my head, towards Beouf. She frowned lightly. “I don’t think that’s appropriate for something at school. What else?” In front of me was a plain white sheet of paper. “A white rabbit in a snowstorm.” “No.” Zoge said simply. “We don’t have enough white paint.” I looked down at the stuffie now nestled between my feet. “What about Lion? Can I paint Lion?” “You may create a picture of Lion,” Beouf said. “But you may not get any paint on Lion.” They weren’t going to fall for the same semantic trick again. Not surprising, but I felt it was worth trying. I inhaled and exhaled, steadying my temper. “That’s fine.” Maybe I could get a few good shots in by destroying the fucking stuffed parasite in effigy. It was a thought, anyway. I asked for yellow and got a glob of yellow squirted onto a paper plate next to me. I went to work, dipping my thumb in and dabbing it around the paper in a series of circles and ovals. A nice round circle for his head, a big round oval for the body, and four longer, narrower ovals for the limbs. The tail was closer to a skinny streak made by my pinky. “Wipe please,” I thrust my hand forward, my pinky and thumb jutting out. Zoge immediately engulfed my fingers, scrubbing off the yellow. “Are you done?” Zoge asked. I audibly scoffed. “Of course not. I need to do his mane and tail and face.” “Oh,” Zoge said in that musical tone of hers. “I’m very sorry, sir. Please forgive me.” Again her sightline went over my head and across the table. She was clearly very amused. “Look!” Sandra Lynn called out. “I made a portal to another world!” Not a trace of white remained on the twit’s paper. Just red and blue and yellow smeared every which way on top of each other and blending together in puddles of purple and green and orange. Billy looked over. “That’s just a mess.” Thank you Billy for not letting me have to be the one to say it. “It’s a portal,” Sandra Lynn repeated herself. “They’re all sorts of colors! Like red and…orange…and yellow…” she was literally staring at her own technicolor mess and pointing out the different colors like she hadn’t put them there. Sandra Lynn was like Amy but without the wit. Or Ivy without the practiced care and faux daintiness. Speaking of which, Beouf was trusting her with glue and glitter. Bold choice, but Ivy wasn’t going to do anything on purpose. “Your picture is a rectangle. Portals are round,” Billy said. “Everybody knows that.” “How many portals have you seen?” Sandra Lynn asked in that way that people used when they didn’t expect a real answer. “All the portals in cartoons are round.” “Well the real ones are rectangles.” The matter seemed to be settled. Briefly, I wondered what kind of woman Sandra Lynn was three years ago before Beouf had gotten her tendrils into the girl’s brain. “Can I get some brown, please?” I took my left pinky and dabbed it gingerly in the goop. Sandra Lynn wasn’t done smearing yet. The moment Beouf or Zoge picked her paper up, there’d be a rectangular outline on the newsprint. If Beouff chose to hang it up for decoration, she’d have to make sure there was something beneath it to catch the dripping excess. Heh. Sandra Lynn was such a mindfucked babydoll that even her art needed a diaper. My pinky started dabbing and stroking around Lion’s head, creating the mane. I did a few at the end of his tail. I gently blew on the paper to make sure the yellow paint was dry enough to not mix with the brown around the chin. This was going to be such an awesome effigy to destroy! If only Beouf had a lighter or something to snatch. “Wipe, please.” Zoge obliged and I took a moment to rub my right shoulder. It was aching. I hadn’t consciously noticed but I’d been tensing it, controting it and moving it away from Sandra Lynn, like I was afraid I’d catch something. I sniffed. I knew that smell wasn’t coming from me. Her smock concealed more than a babified Little dress ever did, but it was a safe bet that the only thing keeping her onesie shut was the Amazonian strength poppers. Billy took a moment from his messterpiece to look over and admire my picture. “Hey, that’s pretty good, Gibson.” “Billy, Clark’s name isn’t ‘Gibson’.” It used to be. Just thinking that made the phantom hair on the back of my neck stand up. “But he likes being called it!” I did. “Don’t you, Gibson?” “Billy…” Beouf warned. “Make good choices.” My personal bully boy sighed and threw me an apologetic look. “That’s a really good picture…Graaaaa…” No no no no! “Clark. That’s a really good picture, Clark.” I allowed myself a non-humiliated, non-flustered blush.”Thanks, dude. I like yours too.” I was lying, but it was a lie based on returned courtesy. “Welcome.” I sat back and took a moment to admire my budding masterpiece. It was just some dumb finger painting that I was going to destroy for shock value, but the compliment felt good. It was nice to feel like I was half-way competent at something, even if it was just a stupid baby activity. Since adult activities were denied to me, the narrow field of options available had gained increased value to me. Maybe that’s why that pair at Little Voices were always complaining about blocks and gossiping about their daycare like it was office banter. They no longer had a job and something had come to fill the void… Pushing those thoughts out of my head, I plotted my next steps. “Black, please.” The problem with using my pinky fingers so soon was that I had nothing smaller for the finer details like the beady eyes or the stitched on smile and claws. Maybe if I used the barest tip of my pinky I could pull it off; even if it wouldn’t be quite to scale. Shit, how was I going to do his nose and whiskers? Maybe I could draw away from the weaknesses by adding in backgrounds. A blue sky and green grass beneath Lion. Use negative space to make the clouds. Did Lions live in grassy areas, or was it more like flat desert? I’d have to file that away and ask Amy about it later in the week. The sun could be snuck in the upper right hand corner, I supposed, but how to make that distinct from Lion’s fur? Lion, the real Lion, was only yellow-ish. Closer to tan, but I didn’t have the paint mixing skills to get the correct hue so I had settled on yellow. Maybe I should have gone with orange fur inste… Droplets of goopy gloppy paint rained down over my paper, splashing on Lion’s portrait in sickly greys and browns and blacks. “Wipe peeeeeease!” Sandra Lynn held both hands out towards Zoge. Her paper was a smeared palette of psychedelic colors, but her hands were murky and disgusting looking from all the mixing and sloshing. Zoge rattled off something panicked in Yamatoan and pushed the Little girl’s hands out and away from my paper. I’d never heard Zoge talk that fast. “Baby girl!” she said. “You have to be careful! You don’t want to drip on…” But it was too late. Her whipping Sandra Lynn’s disgusting dirty palms had just made things worse, in fact. There was now a grayish bluish blotch right over Lion’s not yet illustrated face and reddish graying blackish flecks dotting his body and where the ground would have gone if I’d been afforded the time.. “Oh no. Clark. I’m so sorry, baby!” However bad she might have felt, it didn’t stop her from wiping Sandra Lynn’s hands. My lips retreated inward over my teeth. I was mad that I kind of wanted to pop my pacifier back in and take a shot at biting the rubber nipple off. No. That wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t do at all. Beouf was already getting up and walking over to a cabinet to get a fresh sheet of paper. “It’s okay, Clark. I can get you a fresh piece of paper. You can have till lunch to finish. Lion was suddenly in my lap. I didn’t even remember picking him up. “No. That’s fine Mrs. B.” I said. “I’m fine.” “Are you sure? I don’t mind…” I couldn’t see Beouf but I could hear the worry and hesitation in her voice. Just like she could hear the brewing storm in mine. “Yeah. I don’t mind,” I said. Robotically, I turned my head and looked at Sandra Lynn. “Thank you Sandra Lynn.” “You’re…welcome…?” She backed up, slightly intimidated. “Lion just gave me an idea,” I said. “A way to make it so the picture looks more like him.” I didn’t wait for anyone to ask me ‘what?’. I lashed my arm out and grabbed Sandra Lynn’s stupid fucking modern art portal bullshit smearing and wiped it all over Lion’s front. “Now he looks just like his picture!” Lion’s fur and head became instantly smeared in wet paint, his head matted and dripping down over his eyeballs in shades of green and blue and yellow. Red and yellow and orange covered his lower face and chest. His lower half was blue and purplish. A few quick extra rubs added in the muddled gray of where two many paints mixed together. My stuffie was crying, barfing, and bleeding a rainbow! Wonderful! Neither Grown-Up moved or said anything for a moment, too stunned by what had happened. Funnily enough, it was Zoge who said something first. “Clark! Look what you’ve done!” My initial reply was drowned out by Sandra Lynn’s screaming and bawling. Frankly, I thought I’d improved her work. I was even kind enough to put it back after I was done with it. Not that she saw it. She was too busy staining Beouf’s light sweater with her tears and snot. “Clark Grange!” Beouf barked at me. “Say you’re sorry! Immediately!” “What?” I shrugged. “The stuffed animal told me to do it. Lion thought it was a good idea.” “You should apologize,” Zoge said softly to me. “I am very disappointed.” “Mommy,” Ivy said. “No,” I said. “I’m not going to apologize. Lion’s mine and I should get to paint on him if I want!” Sandra Lynn kept on crying and Beouf started walking her toward the nap room, rubbing her back and whispering gentle nothings in her ear. Zoge stared directly into me. Neither of us blinked. “That was Sandra Lynn’s picture. You had no right to ruin it.” “She ruined my picture first! Fair is fair!” Ivy appeared in my peripheral vision tugging at Zoge’s sleeve. “Mommy!” “It was an accident.” “Yeah and when you’re a Little, all it takes is one ‘accident’!” “Mommy! The aide’s lips formed a thin line. “I am disappointed,” she repeated. “But not surprised.” Ivy was literally jumping and stomping her feet with every landing. “Mama! Mama! Mama!” Zoge finally broke eye contact. “What?” I won. “Look!” During all the yelling and crying and arguing, all the eyes that mattered had been off of Billy. Now Zoge was treated to the sight of a stuffed tyrannosaurus rex on top of the table, drenched in paint, glue, and glitter. “What?” Billy said. “Rex told me to do it. He’s my dinosaur.” He’d managed to get a good portion of it in his hair, too. It was already starting to crust over from the looks of it. Zoge asked Ivy something in Yamatoan. The sound of it was shocked and confused. Ivy accidentally forgot to answer back in their secret shared language. “You told me to keep my hands, feet, and mouth to myself. Personal space…?” Billy went to the corner. I went to the naughty stool. Lunch time we both got the green beans put in a blender and spoonfed. Mittens were shoved over our hands. Neither of us were being trusted to handle anything ourselves that day. My timeout extended through naptime. At Beouf’s request, Tracy ran over a nap mat from the preschool room and I laid on the middle of the floor. Afterwards, I had to sit on the bench between Beouf and Zoge. That had been a fatal mistake. Everyone had seen enough of what had happened and Tommy had planted the idea in enough ears that burying the stuffies alive, covering them in moss and dirt and leaves and roly poly bugs and mulch and bits of grass, would be a fun game. The stuffies would have gotten even dirtier than they did if some people had minded their own business. Of course, the stuffies involved all ‘wanted’ to be buried alive. They’d told the members of the A.L.L. such. I just couldn’t stop beaming. The smile that blossomed on my lips stayed put the entire afternoon. All while Billy told a very disapproving and exasperated Beouf and Zoge this, I kept showing him my bright eyes and pearly whites. Well done, my good and faithful servant. After the bus left, Beouf handed Janet a Lion wrapped up in a plastic grocery bag. “Here. Hopefully a couple runs through the wash on gentle will fix him.” Beouf sounded tired. “Hopefully it’ll work on mine, too. I don’t want to throw them out.” “What did he do?” Janet was suspicious and irritated. My smile would not leave. Beouf told her the thirty second version, which was mostly true except for the part where she called what I’d done a temper tantrum. Then she finished with. “Honestly, this whole stuffie at school thing isn’t working out the way I hoped. They’re just blaming every naughty thing they do on the stuffies. We’re gonna have to start phasing out I think. I don’t think we’re going to be able to trust them with paints and glue anymore, either.” Janet added her tired sigh to the chorus. “Oh Clark…” “Yes Mommy?” My smile hadn’t faded. “Nothing. Just…just…nothing.” Damn straight.

So reading through this, I have a hypothesis about what might actually be going on. Ever seen that episode of Futurama where Bender is jealous of another robot and needs to get an upgrade? Then before he gets zapped in the upgrade machine he breaks free, goes to a remote desert island and decides to live a life rejecting technology and he "downgrades" himself in protest. But at the end, he has an epiphany about how good technology is and at the end we find that everything after he broke out of the upgrade factory was a simulation in his head? That. I think Elise was captured pre-story. We're watching her be hypno conditioned so that she feels like she is making a choice, just like Bender was. Every other route that isn't with Danny, Cat, and Tom, is someone cruelly trying to adopt her, betray her, and erase her mind. The odds that every other person she comes across wants to adopt her ON THE SAME DAY is astronomical. Her sense of reality is being altered so that she feels that getting adopted is a foregone conclusion, and she will only exit the loop when she chooses and submits to the "correct" option of joining her new family. We're watching a hypno version of a mouse running a maze and every time they go down the incorrect path they get shocked and have to start the maze over. By the time the mouse is done running the maze, she'll just be relieved that there are no more shocks and that she'll at least have a nice cozy cage with an exercise wheel and a water bottle. Going back to the fields and scavenging for seeds won't even be considered an option in her mind. Hypnotism disguised as free will.

Short version: You are correct.

Pretty much all of this.

That tracks, sadly.

Correct. Me too, I think. It might still be called "Teacher's Aide" in some areas. A lot of terms seem vary from region to region I've found, based on preferences.

@spark We got a troll, here. So much intellectual dishonesty and goalpost moving. I wouldn't bother replying, were I you and I've already hit the ignore button. To everyone else engaging in good faith: Speaking as a former educator myself who spent 8 out of 10 years in a position with a full time para, I get where you're coming from. I had a para for several years who was pretty much my best work friend and my right hand. I also had several caseloads where I had kids who needed diapers due to intellectual disabilities. One of my paras was near the end of her career and didn't want to change diapers so she got moved to another classroom because frankly changing diapers was part of the job description for working in my classroom; and yes this applied to me as well. Diapers need to be changed and children deserve access to the curriculum for free and no strings attached, potty trained or not, and it didn't make sense to have someone who's only job was changing diapers, so it just got tacked onto the job description. We had no school nurse, just a "clinic assistant" or some other title whose duties were calling parents when a kid threw up, letting a sick kid sleep in the and keeping a log of prescribed medication so that it was taken with fidelity and not stolen. Even if we had a school nurse, diaper changing visits wouldn't have been practical. It's not a Rocket Manatee pick where you have an otherwise capable student laying on a changing table looking at their phone while their pants get pulled down for them. If a kid can change themselves, they are given supplies and materials and go off to a restroom and clean themselves up. Kids who need their diapers changed are literally incapable of doing the job themselves. Most have an inability to recognize when they need changing and require some form of adult supervision when traveling from location to location either because of mobility or behavior issues. (Wheelchair or walker bound, or just a tendency to wander off or lay on the ground if unsupervised). So instead of taking a child (who may be as big as some adults depending on age and hormones) and walking them around campus to get their diaper changed or having a non-existent nurse leave the clinic unattended several times a day, it makes way more sense to have at least one adult within the classroom whose job it is to change diapers and make it an added responsibility. And I wholeheartedly agree; paras need and deserve more money for the services they provide. After I quit teaching, my old classroom couldn't fill the vacancy that had been created and my para was left with a substitute teacher for an ENTIRE year. She had to effectively do the job of a full time teacher using all the experience and tricks she had accumulated, including grading papers and entering them into the gradebook because there was no consistency with the substitute. But she wasn't given a teacher's salary for all the extra work she was doing. The school saved money because neither subs nor paras are paid as much money as a fully accredited and licensed teacher, and if not for a court order might have tried to keep it that way. Fucking shameful. But as to the original posting: Yeah, I don't get it. Barring a school that specializes in students with severe disabilities there can't be THAT many kids in a given school setting that require diaper changes to where diaper changing needs to be a contractual point. Like...seriously...it's gross because being on the giving end of a diaper change tends to be gross...but be an adult about it. I did and I have a master's degree. That might be the only part where we may disagree on. I think paras in those positions should expect to change diapers, but teachers should, too. I know I traded off on diaper duty with my para. It was as simple as "I got this one" or "I got the last one".

We don't call a trainee professional a paraprofessional because paraprofessionals aren't trainees. They're support staff. They're teacher assistants/aides. The teacher TEACHES the students, not the paraprofessionals. I'm not an expert on law, but I think it's roughly the same working relationship that a paralegal and a lawyer have. It's not a master and apprentice thing. You sound like you're thinking of college education majors doing a teaching internship. That's a totally different thing than paraprofessional. Everything Spark said is right on the money.

THIS! One of the best ways to become a better writer is to read! Read for enjoyment, then re-read and analyze what the author did to make you enjoy it so much. And I don't mean "the writer wrote about the thing I like". HOW you construct the words is just as important as the subject matter. Finding those specifics, reading and re-reading and asking yourself what the author is doing there to draw you in is just as helpful (if not more so) than taking isolated examples from fiction that you have no personal connection to. For that reason, I'd recommend reading non-kink stories, even if they're just kid's chapter books. Speaking personally, it's easier for me to analyze techniques and THEN add in the squirmy diaper stuff then it is to read squirmy diaper stuff and figure out why it made me squirmy. Porn is a genre like any other...but it's easier for me to analyze and make porn when the blood is all rushing to the top if you know what I mean. Goosebumps, Warriors, Animorphs, Magic Treehouse, all have solid foundations to study from; not to mention any number of classic literary examples. (Ex Elementary Teacher...so my curriculum got kind of specialized) On dialogue, something I noticed that a series from my childhood, Animorphs, did really well was giving characters very specific ways of speaking. Things that they would say that would let you know who was talking before you even read the end of a sentence sometimes. Not quite catchphrases. But they're excellent ways of expressing the characters through their words. Rachel, the pretty girl who discovered that she was a fearless bad ass: "Let's do it." All but her battle cry. Not a shout. Just a flat line. The thing said when the gang has laid out a strategy that is an absolute suicide mission but it's the only way to pull out a win. These "adventures" hardened her to the point where she realized she could probably never go back to a normal life...like a veteran who wouldn't be able to handle being a civilian again. Marco, the cynical, logical strategist who was never quite as gung-ho as everyone else: "Insane!" ie: "Are you insane?!" "This is insane!" "That's insane!" Always "insane". Not crazy. Not mad. Not bonkers. "insane". They were just kids, set with the fate of the human race on their shoulders and this should NOT be something to laugh and play about. This was NOT healthy or good, and it was VERY IMPORTANT to him that his friends knew that and not get caught up in the power fantasy of it. Axamilli-Escarouth-Isthill aka "Ax", the shapeshifting alien adapting to both Earth culture and his alternate human form. "Prince Jake" (All aliens of his race served a "Prince" as part of a military chain of command.) Jake lead the Animorphs, thus he was "Prince" as far as Ax was concerned. ie; "We only have thirty of your minutes before we have to de-morph Prince Jake." "Ax, they're everybody's minutes. Not just ours." "Yes, Prince Jake." "And stop calling me Prince!" "Yes, Prince Jake." That and Ax would constantly play with human words when he morphed human. "We have only thirty minutes. Minutezzzzzz. Miiiiiiin....min-uuuuuuutzzz. Zuh zuh zuh. Ssssss..." (Ax's race was telepathic so using a mouth to speak was amusing to him. Ax was a big comic relief character.) And I can never forget Visser-Three. Who started off all of his villanous monologues with "Ah, yes!" Such an awesome 90's cartoon villain in how he was presented. "Ah yes, the Andalite bandits. I might have expected your pathetic interference." And if you didn't read that last sentence in the voice of Beast Wars Megatron, you did it wrong.

Speaking as a Floridian, born, bred, and raised: - Florida Man exists because of the state's VERY BROAD public record's laws so that our jackasses get 0 privacy and are all but guaranteed to make the news cycle on a given slow day. -Florida Man ALSO exists because we have a very HIGH percentage of jackasses per capita among our citizenry.

One of my favorite characters in all of fiction is Roland Deschain from The Dark Tower. He is a total shit heel in the first book who willingly sacrifices a child so that he can get one step closer to his goal. Extremely unlikeable. It's over the course of the next 6 books that we learn of the causes of Roland's fall and watch him build himself back up to something that could be arguably called a hero. Agreed. As a writer, it's all about whether the criticism is something that is useable. "I think the story should have ended this other way instead of the way you wrote it!" Isn't helpful. I write either what I like or what someone pays me to write. The above comment isn't helpful because either I wrote to my preferences and vision or I wrote to someone else's. "I would have done X in this scenario instead of what the character did." I am very happy that the reader is invested enough to imagine themselves in whatever setting and scenario that they're reacting to, but that's not gonna affect anything because I'm not writing about the person who made that comment. As long as we have that understanding, feel free to tell me how you'd take down whatever monster has been cooked up. "I am invested in this story but X character is being VERY unlikeable." This IS helpful. It let's me know how I'm doing as far as getting an emotional reaction from the audience and whether I'm evoking the right emotions. Spoilers: My intention is for Clark to be an asshole here. He may or may not rise back up, but if you're getting the vibe that he's getting worse and worse as a person then I've succeeded in my endeavor. On the other hand sometimes comments help me know when I'm way off track. Over on patreon, I'd unintentionally worded things so that my readers thought Clark was contemplating suicide and that was NOWHERE NEAR MY INTENT. So I hastily replied to every comment and edited the chapter to make the language more precise and steer it away from that tone. Some people like Clark, some people hate him, some people relate, some people are disgusted; but I never wanted to convey the idea that he was having those kind of thoughts, and that feedback helped IMMENSELY. Just want to take a second and say I appreciate this particular piece of a comment, too. One of my goals was to make the Amazons...complicated.

Yup. This section is called "Problem Child" for a reason, and it has nothing to do with "Mental Regression" in the niche sense. Clark is not very likeable here. This is a period of time where Clark is his worst self. Thank you for noticing and vocalizing that. As close as I feel to the character, I'm really glad to know that you like the story but don't like the character at this point in his life. This is important for me to read, too. I am not going to try and justify Clark's actions in this story through any kind of objective moral lens. You'll get no "um...actually, Clark was justified in this because of this this and this" from me. Maybe (MAYBE) an argument about why CLARK thinks he's right to do something, but never from me. This whole scenario is meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Telling the reader about what happened, not saying that it should have happened. Beyond Clark's regrets and reflections there is no attempt "should have done this instead" from yours truly.

Chapter 79: Sabotage “I love you…” “I love you, too, baby boy.” Wake. Wide awake. Burning up with fever and shivering cold at the same time. Dehydrated but almost too tired to drink. And in the moment, none of that mattered. No. No, no, no! Fuck no! I did not just say that! She did not just hear that! I was delirious. I was still feverish. This was a fever dream. A fucking nightmare; the same that I always had when things were either too good to last or too awful to handle all at once. Any second now I’d sit up in my crib, covered in sweat, panting and blinking away the nightmare I’d just trapped myself into. It felt real, but so did all dreams while you were in them. I’d thought I was awake and about to nod off when I was talking to Cassie in our old bedroom but then I woke up back in FUUUUUUUUCK! “I’m sorry,” I said to Janet, my breath feeling hot in my throat. Shit! Why did I say I was sorry?! “I was having a dream! I wasn’t talking to you! I thought I was somewhere else!” Still cradling me, Janet took a seat in the kitchen and repositioned me so that I was seated sideways in her lap, reclining in the crook of her left arm. The bottle came up to my lips. “Okay,” she said. “Drink up. I just want you to feel better. That’s all.” To my horror and shame I’d taken the nipple and a few sips of red flavored juice as she was soothing me. I let the bottle from my lips.. Water mixed with sugary red powder dribbled out over my neck and chest for my trouble. “No!” I said. “No! That’s not what I-” “I understand what you’re saying, sweetie,” Janet interrupted. “But that’s not important right now. You’re sick. You need to stay hydrated. Drink up.” She was being patient with me. Too patient. Infuriatingly patient. “No! I didn’t! I didn’t say anything!” “Just a few more sips for me.” She managed to get the bottle back between my lips.. I took a few sips. My bladder suddenly felt full, as it had been feeling all day, and I started to feel amazingly anxious. “What’s in this stuff?!” “Water and flavor powder.” Janet set the bottle down and felt my forehead again. It was still cold but not icy. “What’s in the powder?” I demanded. I fidgeted and shivered. Hard to focus. Cold. Hot. Had to pee. Again. All day. Janet shrugged noncommittally. “Electrolytes. Sugar. That kind of stuff. I can read you the ingredients off the back of the can.” “No!” I squealed, my voice cracking. “I want water!” I wouldn’t have understood the ingredient list anyways. Who could? She sighed in annoyance. but there was a glint of worry in her eyes. “Sure. Let me get you a different bottle.” “No!” I barked. My throat felt raw and scratchy. “Dump it out, rinse it and refill it!” I didn’t want her slipping in anything else, maybe coating the new nipple in something tasteless and odorless that would have me pissing and shitting in my pants or chemically altering my brain so that I’d be in some kind of bizarre brain damaged haze. No! Not that! Never! “Okay, honey,” the worry was spreading to Janet’s voice. “I can do that for you.” “No! I want to do it! I’ll fill it up!” “Clark, you’re-! “I’m not a baby!” “I wasn’t going to say-” “Baby boy! You called me baby boy just a second ago!” I was angry. I was scared. I was embarrassed and humiliated. I was panicking. My bladder was full to bursting again and the only thing that distracted me from it was the adrenaline and guilty terror I was experiencing. “Don’t call me that!” “Okay,” Janet said.”That’s fine. I’m sorry. I just meant it as a term of affection.” Bullshit! “I h-!” I stopped. She wasn’t looking at me. I needed her to look me in the eyes when I said it. She carried me over to the sink. It wasn’t modified to accommodate Littles at all. I could sit in it and the water would make it up to my belly button. And as weak as I was feeling I probably couldn’t fill up the bottle myself unless I planned on glugging it down right on the kitchen counter. “I hhhhhh!” I just panted. She still wasn’t looking at me. I needed her to know in no uncertain terms how much I hated her. “I HHhhhh!” The bottle came back to my mouth. My throat felt dry. I was thirsty. So thirsty. I’d drink the water, make sure my throat was good and wet. Then I’d tell her. Look her in the eye and make her burst into tears with three simple words. “You’re doing great,” she said kindly to me. “You don’t have to drink so fast. Just take sips. That’s it. This isn’t a race.” “Hhhhhayhhhh.” No. Had to finish the bottle. I’d finish the bottle of tap water. Then I’d chew her out. We stayed in the kitchen the entire time. Outside of occasional hums and mumblings to herself that I couldn’t pick up and had absolutely no interest in knowing about, she didn’t talk. I reached up and grasped the bottle, even though she was holding onto it. Grabbing onto the vessel felt better than leaving my hands idle and my fists close up in potent rage. When the bottle was about three-fourths of the way drained she took it away from me. There was no chance at me being able to successfully resist. “I hayyyyyy!” “You can finish the rest with your broth,” she said and put me into the highchair. No straps or harnesses this time, just the tray and the drop to keep me there. Honestly it was closer to how I had lunch at school. My mouth opened to tell her off. “I…” Janet turned around. “Still want your broth in a mug and a straw?” “I…” She was looking right at me, waiting for an answer. “Yes please…” I slumped forward, my forehead casting a shadow on the feeding tray. Why couldn’t I tell her how I felt? The fuck was going on? I relaxed my bladder yet again and closed my eyes pretending that the dampness was just a warm compress on my junk instead of…you know. The microwave beeped and my soup came out of the oven. A bright green bendy straw was inserted in. “You don’t have to drink the whole thing,” she said. “But it’ll be good for you if you drink as much as you can.” I muttered out another thank you. Janet grabbed a tremendous banana from the top of the refrigerator and peeled it. Without saying a word she broke off a piece and offered it to me with a hopeful “Mmm?” I shook my head and quietly sipped my broth. I’d tell her how awful she was and how much I hated after I’d had enough to eat and drink. If I made her too mad she’d just put some mush in a bag and gag me with it or something until I had to swallow it or risk choking. That’s what Amazons did. Even her. Even Janet. Just thinking about that hurt what miniscule appetite I’d had. If my body wasn’t doing everything it could to try and retain water and fight dehydration I might have cried into the broth. Only babies who didn’t know how to use their tear ducts couldn’t cry. That didn’t make me feel any better. “I…” I stopped while she slowly chewed her banana. I should wait for her to swallow. Out of politeness… Oh fuck. Who was I kidding? I couldn’t even think of her as ‘Grange’. She was Janet. Always had been. The fuck was happening to me? Maybe this wasn’t a virus or me working myself into exhaustion. What if this was more programming? More mindfuckery? Get me to let down my guard again and then WHAM…I’d be Ivy or Amy but without the pink and frills (and many more teeth). “All done?” Janet held her hand on the mug readying to carry it off to the sink and toss it down the drain. “No.” I said. She took her hand off. “Yes.” She put it back on. “NO!” The mug that almost doubled for a soup bowl went away. “I said I wasn’t done!” I whined. “I think you’re more than a little punchy,” Janet told me. My eyes widened. “I’M NOT FUSSY!” My old friend drew back like a caged lion had just taken a swipe at her. “I didn’t say you were fussy. I said you were punchy. You need more sleep, Clark.” “DON’T CALL ME-!” I stopped. My name? I didn’t want her to call me by name? I’d been so sure she’d bust out a ‘honey’ or a ‘baby’ or a ‘bubba’ or some other toddlerish pet name. Janet removed the tray and started carrying me back to my room. “You definitely need sleep.” She said, quickly adding. “And that’s okay. Your body needs to rest and heal. Do you want me to change you before I put you down or do you think you’re not that wet?” Fuck. Back to no-win questions. “Change me, please.” Cry. I was going to cry. I’d barely moved all day and I still felt dizzy. I tried to start myself into raging, desperate tears, but the most I could get was not-even hyperventilating on the table. Bars sprung up around my periphery. “Do you want me to stay with you? I don’t mind sitting in the rocker and keeping you company while you go to sleep.” I was not going to sleep. “No.” She seemed to read my mind. “Okie dokie. You can rest here. I’ll give you some privacy. You don’t have to go to sleep.” Fuck her. I was totally going to go to sleep. She pointed to the baby monitor. “You can call if you need me.” Her actually listening to that heap of scrap; that’d be something. Out of all the ‘presents’ I’d gotten out of that awful shower it was the thing I’d seen the most, day in and day out, and gotten the least utility out of it. Depending on outlook, that was supposed to let her spy on me or allow me easier access to her. Beyond suspicious paranoia, all data indicated that it did neither. Skinner had said that it would be ‘educational’. The only thing it was teaching me was that Amazons were the absolute worst, and I didn’t need any help or remediation on that lesson. I tried one last time before Janet left. “I…hhhhhhhhhhhhh.” She walked out before I could tell her and closed the door. “I hate you.” The curse came out a full thirty seconds later as a growled whisper. The monitor certainly picked it up at least. I rolled over, sneered at the baby monitor, and tried to come up with a plan. *************************************************************************** One afternoon, a few days later, I sat in my stroller while Janet pushed me around in it. I was leaned back, but sitting up, and drinking from my ba-ba. Red! My favorite flavor! I was just wearing a nice sky blue t-shirt and a diaper, but Janet had given me a knit blankie to keep my legs warm. Maybe it wasn’t just a few days? Maybe it was weeks or months? Years? Time meant less to me, recently. (There was an ironic statement). I leaned back and looked at Lion. “Lion?” I asked. “Do you want some juice?” He didn’t respond. “More for me.” I kept sucking on it, enjoying the sweet red flavor of it. Delicious! The Grown-ups walked by. Some waved. Some didn’t. That was okay though. Grown-ups are always super busy. Always worried about all their responsibilities and bills and stuff that they had to do. I used to be just like them. Then Janet found me and became my Mommy. I knew she wasn’t really my mother. ‘Mommy’ was a job title; like teacher or artist or ax murderer. And as Janet liked to remind me, being my Mommy was a full time job with no pay but benefits she wouldn’t trade in for the world. I didn’t have a job title anymore. Didn’t need one. Littles with Maturosis were special. Deep down I knew I didn’t have Maturosis. I knew I was really an adult and not a baby that would never grow up? But why fight it? At least everybody was friendly towards me now. I didn’t have to worry about somebody snatching me up or putting me in diapers; because it had already happened. Speaking of which, I took a moment go pee-pee, sighing even while I continued to nurse my ba-ba. Drinking and going to the bathroom at the same time: There was something I wasn’t allowed to do before! Other strollers with Littles passed by. We waved casually at each other; smiling; content that we were both in on the secret. A few grumpy or sad Littles pouted. Screaming. Shouting about how they weren’t really babies. Just like I had. They’d come around eventually. We all did. The big people knew the true secret to happiness, and not able to have it for themselves, they shared it with us. “Hi Janet!” It was Amy’s Mommy. Amy waved from me over in her stroller. “Hi Clark!” Finally! Finally I saw her coming before she said it. “Did you know that platypusses are the only semi-aquatic egg laying mammals that start with the letter ‘p’? “Yeah!” I said. “I did! Did you know that the Muffets creator got his start by making coffee commercials?” That used to bother me considering how often coffee was used to mask stronger stuff. Not anymore! “No! I didn’t! Did you-?” “Say bye bye to Clark, Amy.” Bye Clark! See you at daycare!” Oh yeah. I never went back to Beouf’s room. I’d been so good and been making such progress that it was decided I should just go straight into daycare. How had I forgotten that? Probably because I didn’t need to remember it. Whether I remembered it or not, Janet was taking me there. So why fight? Why worry? “Hi Clark!” This time I had to look up. Mrs. Beouf was leaning over and waving at me. “Hi Mrs. B.” I suddenly felt very, very, shy. I always did when I saw her outside of school. It was like she was somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, but I wasn’t brave enough to point that out to her. She’d gone a whole long time without telling me where I belonged. It was only polite. I raised Lion up over my face, using him as a feline shield. Sorry bud. Mrs. Beouf took it in stride like she always did. “Awww, Hi Lion! Good to see you, too. How’s he doing?” That last question was directed towards Janet. I kept drinking my ba-ba, while the Grown-Ups talked. I didn’t think it was weird that there was so much red juice in it. It was a really big ba-ba. Big enough for me! Honestly, I kind of tuned them out, listening less to their words and more skimming the cadence that their voices made. Nothing was out of the ordinary. Two old friends catching up. Small talk. I looked around at my surroundings. Where were we? Were we inside or outside? It was hard to tell. Nothing was obstructing my view, but unless I really concentrated, I couldn’t tell. On one side of my stroller, it was grass and sunny, like a park. To the other side of me were tiled walkways and storefronts. Where in town had something like that? Had we moved and I’d forgotten? Directly in front of me, it was just the Grown-Ups talking. Janet had stepped in front somehow and was now talking with Mrs. Beouf, yet I still could only make out the cadence in their voices. Did Grown-Ups have a secret language that I was only now just aware of? Was that how they did it? “Thanks for catching up with us,” Janet said. “But I gotta get this baby boy home.” She poked my diaper through the blankie. “Hmmm…maybe a change, first. I don’t want you leaking in your car seat.” Oh wow! She was right! I really did need a change! What’s more, I had to pee again. “Say bye bye to Mrs. B.” I took my ba-ba out of my mouth. “Bye bye Mrs. B!” “Bye-bye Clark! I love you!” “I love you too.” Janet pulled a lever and my stroller reclined back. She grabbed the diaper bag and started fishing out the appropriate supplies. She didn’t have to go potty, so no need to go to the bathroom. She could change me out here in the open. In front of everybody. Okie dokie. Janet reached down to the tapes of my Monkeez. “Let’s get you nice and dry again. Then we’ll go home and you can take a nap.” ****************************************************************** “Yes, Mommy.” The sound of those two words rocketing out of my throat woke me up like a loud snore. I sat up in the crib, dripping wet from head to toe hyperventilating. “No!” The only thing that wasn’t wet was my diaper, ironically. The nursery was dark, but tiny motes of sunlight shone through the curtains. It was late afternoon more than likely. The computer of my brain updated itself and made sense of what I’d just seen and experienced. A dream. Just a dream. Random garbled nonsense from my brain. No wonder Amy had been the most coherent in it. My bladder was still screaming too. That’s why I couldn’t stop peeing in my dream. That’s why the bottle never got empty no matter how much I sucked stuff down. The door to the nursery opened. In walked Janet. “Clark? Are you okay? I heard you over the monitor.” Was I okay? No. I wasn’t okay. Not even a tiny bit. “You’ve been asleep for almost four hours. Let’s get you up so you’re not up all night. Get you a snack.” My stomach growled at hearing the word ‘snack’. I finally felt hungry and invisible hands were reaching out of me, desperate to bring food down into my belly. I responded by sitting up in a ball and huffing my way back to my normal breathing pattern. Janet walked up and pressed her hand against my forehead. “It looks like your fever has broken.” She sighed with relief, even as she wiped her hand on her pants. “Good. Now we have the whole weekend to get you better.” Better? Clearly, I was getting worse. I looked away as Janet checked my diaper. “Uh oh. Dry. Let’s get some more fluids in you.” A light on the baby monitor was blinking. Had it always been blinking? No. No fucking way. “I hhhh….” Only hot air came out of me. That and something else. “Ooops. Never mind! I felt that!” Janet chuckled. “How about I change you after snacks? Just in case?” “Hhhhh…Yeah.” I said. “Sure.” I couldn’t tell Janet that I hated her. I was having batshit dreams. I couldn’t even think of her as anything other than Janet and…and… and now the ‘educational’ baby monitor was blinking. I was being mindfucked. Totally and completely mindfucked. There was some kind of sensor in that monitor that scanned and recorded my vitals and waited until I was in REM sleep to start pumping out subliminal messages to turn me into a drooling stupid doll. Me staying up so late was protecting me. “Mommy,” I squeaked. Even my voice sounded better. “Can I please sleep with you tonight? In your bed?” “I don’t know how comfortable I am with co-sleeping, Clark. I don’t want to accidentally roll over and hurt you in the middle of the night.” Stoked by resentment and desperation, I wasn’t at my best yet, but I could still feel my mojo coming back to me. “Pweeeeease!” “I don’t have a cot in my room,” Janet said. Then she got a look in her eyes. That classic, typical Amazon baby crazy look. “Yet. I don’t have one yet. I wonder if Babhub delivers this late.” She dug around her pants pocket for her phone. “It’s just a cot.” A cot wasn’t ideal, but better than the monitor. “We’ll see.” I nuzzled into her. “Thank you…Mommy.” ******************************************************************************* I didn’t spend the night sleeping in a cot by Janet’s bed. Four o’clock on a Friday was just too late for whatever Amazon delivery company specialized in delivering baby furniture for spur of the moment Little abductions. I did, however, sleep in Janet’s room. She went to the trouble of moving a playpen into her room and then decking it out with every spare pillow she could find. I slept like the dead. Nice and dreamless, only waking up every one to three hours to make sure that some other bit of blasphemy hadn’t escaped from me or if I had to pee. Janet slept in the bed, wearing silk pajamas that I was positive she didn’t normally wear. She snored, too, but the rhythmic sawing actually helped me sleep. Since my poisoning and downfall this was the first night that I hadn’t slept alone. It was…nice. I wasn’t here to be nice, however. Saturday was one big nothing. Janet insisted that I take it easy and we just spend the day resting in doors. In truth, I needed it. Just because the source of the spasms had gone away didn’t mean my muscles weren’t still tired from all the shaking. At least she dressed me up in something besides my crinkling plastic padding. Sunday though… Sunday was my opportunity and I took it. “Whelp,” Janet clicked her tongue. “We’re here.” She didn’t have the same sing-song voice she did first thing in the morning. Not that I could blame her. No teacher wants to be at school on a Sunday morning. Papers still needed to be graded. “In and out,” she said. “We’ll grab the papers and then go right back home.” “Or,” I said. “I don’t mind if we do them here.” Janet nibbled on her lip and looked at me from the rear view mirror. “I didn’t bring your diaper bag.” “That’s okay. I’m dry.” I suppressed the blush that was coming. I was a grown-ass man. I shouldn’t have to be talking about the state of my so-called underwear. “It’ll be quicker if we do it here. Less for you to carry back and forth. Less chance you’ll forget something at home.” “I’ll need to enter them into the gradebook too,” Janet said, sounding unsure. “If I get too w…” I stopped and corrected myself. “Worst case scenario, I start to feel bad and we go home?” Honestly, it didn’t matter where we graded the papers. This was more on the principle of getting Janet to do what I wanted. Get the giantess to listen more. To obey me. “Come on, Janet.” I said. “Let me play teacher. It’s not like anybody is around to see.” The sparkle in her eyes died a little bit. I probably should have called her ‘Mommy’ but that would have been laying it on too thick. If I used the M-word it’d become the default and expectation. No. Janet wasn’t getting that unless she was good or I really wanted something. I might not be able to say it out loud, but fuck that bitch. I knew I’d won when Janet walked around, got me out of the car seat and took me by the hand instead of carrying me. No one was around and her classroom was empty. The air conditioning didn’t run on the weekends, so it was more than stuffy inside. Good. I’d use that discomfort to mask any of the residual guilt I was feeling. I stood in a chair, leaning over a student’s desk, two piles of papers presented in front of me. “It looks like the substitute still did the spelling quiz and the math test. Which do you want?” “Both.” My former friend didn’t flinch. “Okay,” she said. “You can start on one. I’ll grade the Science and Social Studies work and come back to help when they’re in the gradebook.” She caught herself. “If you still need help.” A weak smile managed to show itself on my face. “I don’t think so,” I said. “If it’s spelled wrong, I mark it wrong. Same with math. I don’t need to know history or states of matter or whatever.” That seemed to make her feel better, an admission of ignorance. Then, unholiest of unholy, she made the mistake of trusting me with a red sharpie. “Get to work,” she said. “Or play. Whichever.” I took it, cordially, and did a tiny bow. “Thank you very much Ms. Grange.” She reciprocated. “You’re very welcome Mr. Grange.” Then went over to her teacher’s desk so that she could grade and enter things into the school computer while I marked things down. Mr. Grange… If I wasn’t already about to do something awful before… My dirty deed took only slightly longer than an hour, all told. I breezed through the spelling tests, first. No calculations to do. No work to show. Used my best handwriting. I was random too. Fair. As far as I could be. Every third paper I marked, I left alone and graded fairly. If they got all the spelling words right, they were given a hundred. If they made a mistake, I took my bright red marker and scratched out their misspelled words and then in my neatest, smallest, most precise handwriting I’d write the correct spelling of the word. Nothing more. Nothing less. Technically, scratching out the wrong answer and writing the correct answer wasn’t the best method from a pedagogical standpoint. Yeah, the kids would see the correct spelling, but I was also robbing her massive third graders the opportunity to see what their mistakes were. That was intentional. By marking and correcting the real errors like that, it made it more plausible when I inked out a correctly written word and copied it next to its remains. The same happened with the Math tests, though only one out of five got ‘Gibsoned’ since I was intent on showing all my work and many of her students did their math in such chaotic margins that finding the answer- correct or otherwise- turned into a scavenger hunt. The grade point average on these tests and all tests in the foreseeable future were going to slowly but surely go straight down the toilet. The real errors helped me with the forgeries. If not-so-little Kelly made a mistake like forgetting a silent e or thinking that the shorthand for pi was three point five instead of three point one four, then not-so-little Connor would make the same sloppy mistake. It was easier for teachers to believe that groups of their students were all struggling with the same concepts than to believe in complete randomness. I shouldn’t be doing this, a tiny voice that almost sounded like me buzzed in my ear. These were just kids. Some of them had been my students. My babies all grown up. Even the ones that hadn’t been in my class were names I’d learned and belonged to faces that I’d seen around campus. They weren’t Janet. They weren’t Beouf or Brollish or Forrest or Madra or Skinner or Winters or Sosa or any of the other giant condescending authoritarian hypocrites in my life. They were just kids. Except they weren’t. They were Amazons. Living in an Amazon world with Amazon parents. Even the kids I’d helped and taught if they hadn’t directly turned on me had immediately accepted the ruination of my life as normal and natural. Three-hundred and sixty nonconsecutive days spread out over the course of two years wasn’t going to undo a lifetime of further indoctrination. I couldn’t change the world for the better. I couldn’t even change my tiny corner of it. I could only make the Amazons in closest proximity to me have a more difficult life before the programming and mindfucking and gaslighting finally broke me down. Fuck these kids. They’d get over it. Undeserved failure would only breed character in the long run. “Finished?” Janet said, coming over from the computer. “Already?” I grinned. “Yes, ma’am!” “You really are such a fantastic helper!” I was dead inside so I didn’t flinch when she kissed me. I sat down, pretending not to stare as Janet went over and entered the grades. “Russel?” she scoffed. “Really?” She shook her head and entered the grade the kid had ‘earned’. She turned over to another paper and kept typing. “Guess we gotta cover this again.” Everything was going to plan. Janet was going to have a ‘rough batch’ this year of kids who just didn’t quite get what she was teaching. Especially if I was allowed to grade. More time in remediation meant less time covering new topics, and unneeded remediation and lowering grades would lead to frustration for the students. Frustration led to angry parents and kids acting out. None of it would come back to me. I’d even stopped from putting my initials down at the bottom corner. No proof would link this to me. “Mommy,” I called out, distracting her. “Can I sleep in your room again?” Janet yawned and dabbed her forehead with her sleeve. The stillness of the air was finally starting to get to her. “I don’t think so, honey. We’ve both got school tomorrow and need our rest.” “Pleeeease!” There was no way I was going to sleep with that baby monitor again. Not if I could help it. “We’ve been up late the last two nights and I don’t want you super tired in the morning. I blinked. That’s right. Both Friday and Saturday night, Janet and I had gone to bed at the same time. She’d laid me down, then gone to the bathroom, changed into her pajamas and crawled underneath her comforter. I’d never considered that. “What if the cot is delivered by tonight?” “I still don’t want to wake you up when I come to bed.” Then she tacked on “Website says that the model I ordered is on backorder.” “Pweeeeease!” “Maybe we can sleepover together next weekend.” “Pweeeeeeeease!” “No.” She wasn’t angry, but it was final. ‘Final’ was for quitters. “Pw-” “Clark…” My blood froze with the stare she sent my way. Looks like I was out of luck. I opened my mouth to tell her what I really thought of her, and stopped. No. I’d let her listen over the baby monitor like always. Stay up as late as I could until I passed out. Disrupt my own sleep and dreams and keep towing the line towards exhaustion and sickness. Why stop a good thing that up until now had obviously been shielding me? If I played my cards right, I could trick her into getting actual sleep on Friday and Saturdays at the very least. I brooded on it, staring and glaring at her while she played into my trap. Twenty minutes later the work was done and she was standing up and stretching. “Grading done. Now all I gotta do is plan for this coming week. We can do that at home.” “We can stay here and do it.” I was just being obstinate. The warm stagnant air being heated by the sun wasn’t any more comfortable for me considering that I had a layer of plastic coating my nethers. Janet was in no mood to deal with my nonsense. She picked me up and carried me. Like a baby. The game was now over for her. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go home and eat some ice cream or something.” “Okay.” I ceded. “Do we have any more of that goat’s milk?” She smiled weakly. “No. I threw that carton out. I was afraid it was expired or something. We can get some more at the store if you like.” “No thanks,” I said. “Just curious.” “Come on,” she said. “It’s time to go.” As if I had any say in when or where we went. She was right about one thing: It was go time, alright. She just hadn’t figured it out yet.

Love how you took an evil domineering AI trope and kind of molded it into a sweet platonic love story. I'm not rooting for the A.I. just because of lifestyle kink preferences, but because you also tricked me into empathizing with her. Well done.

Slowly, deliberately, Serena took a sip of coffee, savoring the flavor: Two creams. Three sugars. Extra, extra caramel. Truly, it was perfect. It was a shame, almost, that she wouldn’t be swallowing this batch. She counted backwards in her head, three…two…one… and spit out the delicious beverage all over the office carpet. “Did you…?” She stopped and glared at the intern, some barely twenty-two year old Amazon whose mother and father were rich enough so that she could afford to go unpaid for six months in the name of experience. “Did you put something in my coffee?” The girl looked like she’d been sucker punched by a professional boxer. “What?” “Did you…” Serena spoke slowly and deliberately, “put something…in my coffee?” Serena craned her neck upward and put her hands on her hips. Visually, it might remind an onlooker of a chihuahua yapping at a Dire Dane with neither dog realizing the vast size difference. More accurately, to the giants’ brains, it was closer to a toddler scolding an adult and the grown-up being terrified. “Only what you asked me to put in Miss Hudson,” the intern insisted. “Mrs…” Serena flashed her fake wedding ring. Amazons had the tiniest bit more fear of married women, and Serena had learned to weaponize that. The intern corrected herself. “Mrs. Hudson.” “Then why do I taste mocha?” Serena lied. Dramatically she dumped the rest of the coffee on the floor. A more eagle eyed witness might have noticed that there was still a carpet stain from the last time this happened. “Mocha? I ordered caramel-!” “Training chocolate?” Serena scolded. “Really? Did you really think I wouldn’t notice the taste of laxative in my coffee? I’m not some poor dumb Little freshman your Sorority sister adopted just before graduation as a present to herself because she didn’t want to have it all without ruining their figure.” Based on the intern’s facial expression Serena had just sprouted a second head. “I…I…I didn’t…I swear. I’d never…I’d never think that. You’re very mature for your…” If Serena hadn’t already planned this next bit out in advance, the ‘m-word’ would have sealed the deal. “For the sake of time I hope you didn’t unpack or personalize your desk,” Serena spat. “You’re fired.” The girl ran off crying, hands buried in her face. The twenty-five year old Little walked off, the sound of her heels clicking sounded more like goat hooves to the latest crop of terrified interns. Breaking in the newbies at her family advertising firm was a favorite hobby of Serena’s. For every new batch of interns, she’d make sure to hire one more than was needed just so that she could dramatically fire them in front of everyone else; and it was always an Amazon. “Somebody clean that up.” It was a trick she’d learned from her mother. Tweeners were prepared to be fired at the drop of a hat. Littles, if they were mature enough to handle a job, were more worried about being plunked in a crib. Amazons were always shocked when things didn’t go their way; it’s why Serena did it. A Little with authority and she wielded it like a sledgehammer. It was a wonder Serena Hudson hadn’t been adopted yet by some high and mighty Amazon who thought the Little might need a diapered attitude adjustment. Except that she’d already been adopted. “Phone call on line one Mrs. Hudson,” Serena’s Tweener secretary notified her. Petite, even for a Little, Serena still didn’t come up to her secretary’s chest while wearing high heels. “I’ve got a video conference call in forty five minutes.” Serena didn’t so much as turn her head or slow her stride. “It’s your mother, ma’am.” Serena stopped. “Put it in my office.” She clicked into her office and climbed the footstool into her mother’s old office chair. She’d lost count of how many hours she’d sat in Mommy’s lap, learning the tricks and tools of successful management. Mommy was gone now; retired rather; though she still had a seat on the board of directors of various philanthropic endeavors. The custom made leather booster that perfectly matched the original upholstery had to suffice. “Mommy?” she asked, her voice unconsciously raising a half-octave. Little or not, everyone becomes who they were circa age twelve when they’re around their parents. The fact that Serena had already known her Amazon parent when she was twelve only exacerbated the habit. Like so many Littles, Serena had been adopted. Unlike her late twenties and early thirties peers, Serena had actually been adopted, not abducted. She’d been put back in diapers at age three and was allowed out of them by age five; not bad, all things considered. The idea that Littles had Maturosis had been almost a decade away from getting deep roots or firmly codified, and Littles were just adopted for being “immature”. Maturosis or not, Serena getting trapped so early had helped her. Conventional wisdom said that Littles past a certain age were beyond all hope of truly growing up. If they couldn’t hack the real world in their teens and twenties, why bother giving them a chance in their thirties and forties? “Re-raising” Littles just meant keeping them as babies. Being close to an actual baby at the time, Serena had been given the benefit of the doubt and had flourished under a system of private tutors, genuine parental affection, and learning from her Mommy’s and Daddy’s example. Who wouldn’t flourish? “Hello, Siri,” Mommy said on the phone, her voice sounding pleasant, but forced. “How are you?” “I’m well, Mommy.” Serena said. “Yourself?” “I’m fine, dear. How are you minding the shop?” Serena shrugged, unconsciously. “Oh, you know,” she said. “I just fired an intern.” “Good girl,” Mommy’s voice sounded with genuine pride. “Just like we taught you. Did the old botched coffee order?” “Yes, ma’am.” Serena leaned back in her leather booster chair, feeling proud of herself. “I still use that one from time to time at the hospital.” The hospital was one of the places where she sat on the aforementioned board. “Accused the girl of slipping in training chocolates, I’m guessing?” “I technically don’t need a justification to fire her,” Serena said. She shrugged again. “But yes.” “I’m not sure whether I should discourage you from leaning into such dreadful stereotypes or be proud of you for leveraging them to your advantage.” The Little smirked. “The latter, please.” Mommy gave no laugh or other comment. Small talk had officially ended, but Mommy wasn’t going to bring up the reason for her call. Serena had to make the first move. “I’ve got a meeting today that I need to prepare for.” She cushioned the statement by adding, ‘What can I do for you?” It was slightly rude, but power moves had to be made when talking to powerful people. Growing up as she had, Serena didn’t know if it was a rich person thing or an Amazon thing, and frankly it didn’t matter much either way. Hurrying things along was Serena’s way of saying ‘Spit it out, Mom. What do you want? Why did you call?’. “I just got the latest fertility results back.” She hadn’t realized it, but Serena had forgotten to breathe. For as long as she could remember, Serena’s parents had been trying to conceive and have a biological child; an Amazon child. At twenty-five, things had improved on the anxiety front; Serena had aged out of worrying about being replaced and having to share her parents’ love and was firmly in the ‘Will this affect my inheritance’ stage. Still, she genuinely cared about her Mommy and Daddy and wanted them to be happy. There was no good answer to the question she was about to ask. “Okay. What were they?” “Not good,” Mommy sighed audibly. Serena’s face fell. “I”m starting…my body is…” She stopped, not even wanting to say menopause. “I just feel…old, dear.” There was a pause. Growing up as she had, empathy was not one of Serena’s strengths. “I just wanted the chance to hold a baby in my arms again.” “You could always be a grandmother,” Serena offered, and instantly regretted it. Bringing up being a grandmother to a woman who’d just said she felt old was a bad idea. That, and Serena wasn’t exactly lighting the dating world on fire. The physical mechanics of intimacy with an Amazon were… complicated; the social even moreso. She scared off most Tweeners and Littles who might have been interested. They just weren’t on her level. Also, it was hard to get emotionally invested in anyone who could miss a second date because they screwed up and got sent to daycare. That gave her an idea. “Why not adopt again?” she broke the silence that had followed her misstep. “It worked with me. You could even get an immature Little if you wanted. Have a forever baby.” If Serena was supposed to feel guilty, about suggesting another Little get thrown under the stroller, she didn’t. The part she’d yelled to her intern about freshmen Littles getting adopted wasn’t exactly manufactured. Some Littles really couldn’t cut it in the big bad world of Amazons. They were lucky in a way that the only penalty for failure was a life without responsibility. It was compassionate after a fashion. More to Serena’s benefit, a sibling that didn’t grow-up would not inherit any stock portfolio down the line. Knowing Mommy and Daddy, they’d be given a trust to pay for caregivers, diapers, formula and the like, but that would be all. “I suppose, Siri,” Mommy said. “I suppose.” Predictably, she started brightening a tad at the idea. “It might be nice, actually. I wouldn’t have to redecorate her nursery, or worry about tutors. Never needed daycare when I was working with you. Wouldn’t need one now that I’m retired. Wouldn’t have to pay for private teachers…” The Little executive stared at the time on her computer calculating when the best time would be to end the conversation so she could get back to work “See? You’re still a mother, and you can be a mother again.” Mommy’s expression turned sour. ‘Oh, but there’s that law.” “Which one?” “That families can only adopt one Little.” Serena imagined her mother curling her lip in disgust as she did. “Stupid goddamn beauracrats.” “Mother!” “Sorry, Siri. Mommy lost her temper for a second.” As an already adopted Little, Serena was only vaguely aware of the relatively new law. The cold harsh reality was that Littles were a kind of commodity and the government had realized that if Littles were over-babied, there wouldn’t be actual baby Littles being made for future generations of giants to pamper and infantilize. So gone were the days where parents would walk around with Littles in double strollers, or have a gaggle of diapered thirty and forty year olds on toddler leashes. There was a time when the well to do would have an entire nursery all to themselves. But if an Amazon had so much love in their heart that they’d have to find an immature Little to baby and cosset forever, they’d have to give all of that parental affection to just one. There were already positive results, sociologically speaking, Serena had had to admit. Littles were less afraid to approach an Amazon with a bouncing ‘baby’ Little on their lap, provided they didn’t have a particularly cossetting best friend right next to them. Of course, with her peculiar background Serena had never had to worry about getting adopted. Amazons didn’t steal children away from other Amazons. Serena could be spanked, mouthsoaped, and put in a naughty corner, but never adopted by someone else. As soon as they found out she had a ‘proper’ Mommy and Daddy that option was off the table. As soon as they found out who her Mommy and Daddy were those other options were swept up in a flash, too. “We’ll think of something,” Serena promised. “Exceptions can always be made. It’s not what you know but who you know.” She could practically hear her mother nodding along. “True, true. True, true. Your father is already meeting with a lawyer. We’d like you to take part in the discussion, too. You might have some insight that could help us.” “Would love to. I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes, however. Tonight?” “Tomorrow would be better. Mommy said. “At the hospital.” “Tomorrow then.” The Little executive hung up the phone and prepped for her meeting. Filing away going to the hospital in the back of her brain. Mrs. Hudson, the real Mrs. Hudson, wanted a baby and what Mrs. Hudson wanted she generally got. It’s just what Hudsons in general did. What Serna had failed to entertain, even for a second, was that she might end up as the baby. ************************************************************************************************************ It was quite the motley crew that gathered the next day. One might have thought they were going to a funeral, considering how everyone was dressed in black. Perfect strangers, too. The light blonde hair Serena had been born with had turned dark brown enough to be almost black, while Daddy’s had aged to a snowy white. Mommy was still blonde, but that was thanks to her stylist, not nature. Still, among the Hudsons, there was the familial familiarity in how they addressed and looked at each other. It was strange. Normally one didn’t see that kind of closeness between Littles and Amazons unless the Littles needed a pacifier to keep quiet and had a steady cartoon diet to keep them compliant. Looking in the plain, but pristine business office, one might not have guessed that life saving medical decisions were being made in above, below, and around them, but even hospitals need such places: Someone had to keep the lights on, negotiate settlements for malpractice, and negotiate the budget for the coming year. In a way that’s what the Hudsons were doing: Negotiating. “What are our options?” Daddy started the meeting in earnest once initial introductions were made; (fat lot of good that did since Serena had already forgotten the lawyer’s name). They sat around a large rectangular meeting table with far more seats than attendees: just Serena, Mr. and Mrs. Hudson, and the lawyer. He was a Tweener, so his chair was something of a modified stool. Serena’s seat was once a highchair that now lacked the restraints and tray and was given the once over so that it had something besides pastel fabric and hard plastic. It wouldn’t do as well with stains, but the Littles who used it didn’t need to worry about diaper leaks or spilling strained peas…probably. “I’ve had some of my people look into it,” Serena volunteered. This earned her curious glances from her parents on either side. “What? My team is normally more into finance and tax loops, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know a thing or two about a thing or two.” Mommy and Daddy exchanged looks. “What are your ideas, Siri?” Mommy asked. “Based on the precedent of the law,” Serena said, “it’s under the premise that one full time Little baby needs so much attention that it would be unethical to have more than one in any given family.” That wasn’t the real reason the law had been passed, obviously. The art of politics was saying one thing and everyone in power knowing its a lie but going along with it anyways. “Couldn’t the argument be that because I’m not a dependent, that my parents have more than enough resources to foster another Little?” The bigger people’s heads were already shaking by the time she’d finished talking. “While that is the official opinion that lead to the policy,” the Tweener lawyer said, “that’s not how the law is worded. One adopted Little per family. Full stop.” “What if I adopted a Little from an orphanage and then signed away custody to you?” “Siri,” Daddy said, “orphanages are closing left and right. Too many empty cribs.” “From overseas then?” Serena offered. “Even if we were able to get away with something like that,” Mommy explained, “what would happen to you? A Little that tried to adopt and gave up? That’s not very mature, is it?” Damn. That was a good point. Even if she couldn’t be re-adopted, that perception of her could really hurt the business. “A Tweener?” “Legally speaking, we’re close enough to Littles that the law protects us as well.” Despite the confidence in his tone, there was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead. Unlike Serena he’d clearly not been adopted and there wasn’t anything protecting him. “What about just adopting a regular Amazon baby?” Mommy and Daddy stared at each other over Serena’s head, and then slowly shook theirs. “They would grow up,” Mommy said. “Once was enough.” Serena’s adoptive mother didn’t want a child, she wanted a baby. And babies eventually turned into children unless they were Littles. “And I don’t want to adopt again. Did that too.” Mommy gave her a glowing look. “And I have no regrets doing that. You’ve been a wonderful daughter, Siri. I just want to…I want to nurture and carry life inside me. I want to be pregnant.” “Invitro?” Serena suggested. More slow headshakes.A fine layer of mist was building up in Mommy’s eyes. “No offense, Mommy, but it seems you want to have your cake and eat it too. You can’t get pregnant and have a baby that won’t grow up.” In what could only have been stupefied shame, Mommy broke eye contact and looked away. Serena quietly hoped she didn’t get that crazy when her body started changing again. As if in reply the door cracked open. In slid an Amazon man about Serena’s parents’ age; early to mid fifties, possibly late forties, with wispy silver hair. “Am I too early?” the man asked with a quiet shyness. She was about to tell him that he was; this needed’t concern him, when the lawyer cut her off“No, Doctor,” the Tweener said. “You’re right on time.” Serena raised her brow in question. What was a doctor doing here? Was this the one that had delivered the bad news concerning her mother’s declining fertility? Her concerns lessened dramatically as the man leaned over and shook every member of the family’s hand before taking the chair next to the lawyer. “Dr. Maddox, good to see you,” Daddy said. “So…?” “As I told you and your wife over the phone,” the doctor said, “I think we have an option regarding your wife getting pregnant.” “Go on, Doctor.” “Are you familiar with the work of Dr. Matilda Devereux?” Maddox asked, his gaze wandering over to the LIttle. Of course she wasn’t, and of course her parents had been given at least the elevator pitch. This was for the younger Hudson’s benefit. Politely, Serena shook her head. “No, Doctor. What can you tell me?” “I’ll spare you the finer details, but she’s had some remarkable success in…let’s call it ‘unbirthing’.” “Oh no…” the gasp came up out of Serena’s throat almost involuntary. It didn’t take a..a…whatever degree this doctor had to figure out what that meant given the context. Her stomach started to turn. “Yes,” the doctor said, not at all perturbed by Serena’s reaction. “It was invented as a way to kick start a woman’s reproductive system, but there are other implications. There have already been over a dozen recorded successes so far overseas. It doesn’t help with menopause, but pregnancy is pregnancy as far as the body is concerned. The successful implantation of a Little into an Amazon womb is no longer a dream.” “And as far as we can find,” the Tweener lawyer chimed in, “there’s nothing illegal about it.” “Who would dream that?” Mere moments before, Serena was talking about abducting and adopting fully grown Littles, but this was crossing an ethical line that Serena hadn’t known she’d had. Her question went unanswered; at least directly. The doctor’s gaze moved to Mommy. “You’ll have to be on a strict regimen of specialized medication after the implantation procedure. Even as the operation slows the baby’s metabolism, you’ll still have to feed her.” “Of course,” Mommy said. “Shouldn’t be hard.” “Where are you even going to find a Little to do this on?” All eyes honed in on Serena. Her mouth became as dry and coarse as desert sand. “What? No. No, no, no.” She turned in her seat and looked at her mother. “Mommy. I love you, and you’ve been great to me, but I'm not getting shoved into your body so that you can be pretend pregnant.” Daddy’s heavy hand landed on her shoulder. “We don’t have a choice, Siri. We don’t have any other Littles and can’t adopt any more.” She tried to shrug her father’s hand off. She failed. “No! Don’t be ridiculous. I won’t be a part of it. I don’t consent.” She glared at the doctor and repeated herself. “I. Do. Not. Consent.” The lawyer who Serena still couldn’t remember, “Your consent, technically speaking, isn’t needed.” “I’m an adult!” Serena shouted. “No, Siri,” Mommy said, “You’re a Little.” Behind her sad, guilty smile, there was a hunger that Serena hadn’t seen before. It had been hidden by the looming tears. “Your adoption papers from when you were three,” the lawyer explained, “are no different than the papers of a Little who gets adopted at twenty-five. Your Mommy and Daddy are well within their rights to revoke your adulthood from you.” Serena’s brain barely registered when she was lifted out of the chair and pinned face first to the meeting table. “But Mommy! Daddy!” she shrieked and begged. “I proved that I’m an adult! I potty trained! I got straight A’s all through college! Stocks have risen since I took over the family business!” “I know,” she heard Mommy say. “And this isn’t a reflection on you, dear. It’s just…it’s not personal.” “Fuck you!” Serena shouted. “You’re going to be so happy when all of this is over,” Daddy promised. “Your mother and I always regretted that we never got to know the real you when you were a newborn. This is our chance.” This couldn’t be happening! It wasn’t! It just wasn’t! While Daddy pinned her face down against the mahogany meeting table, Mommy started pulling Serena’s pants down. Jarringly, her brain registered the rest of the stillness in the room. Her body thrashed for all its worth but after a certain point she was just helping Mommy get her panties down. Meanwhile the plain white wall of the meeting room was the only thing she could take in. One sense felt everything that was wrong and another saw absolutely nothing. “You can’t do this!” She heard the smug condescension in the Tweener’s voice. “Legally speaking, this is no different than if your parents had tried to potty train you and then go back to diapers. They just gave you a trial run of a couple of decades instead of a couple of weeks.” “What about the company?” “We’re retired,” Daddy said. “There are some things more important than business. Like family. Could have sworn we taught you that.” She’d done everything right! Her entire life she’d been an Amazon in miniature and she was about to be indistinguishable from any other Little she’d crossed paths with. They all struggled and cried and begged in the end. Even her. It must be inborn; reflexive. “Please!” she pleaded. “I don’t want to go back to diapers!” “Don’t worry,” the doctor said from behind her. He must have walked the other way around. “You won’t be. Not for at least seven months.” Serena felt a pinch on her left butt cheek as the syringe plunged into her. The world went away. *************************************************************************************************** “How are we doing, anesthetic?” “Mother is under, Little should be coming up.” Serena’s brain clicked on. Anesthesia was like that. It wasn’t sleep as much as it was flipping the person’s brain on and off. No dreams. Not even the vague awareness of the passage of time. If there was such a thing as a soul, it was probably the closest someone could get to death and still be on this side of the coffin. She opened her eyes, groaning into the bright lights of the operating room. Reflexively she tried to struggle but her limbs were tied down to the slab she was on.. She could just barely lift her head and look around. Amazon doctors were everywhere scurrying about like ants right after the mound had been kicked. Tubing and needles were inserted into her arms, seeming to criss-cross and snake everywhere. The slight tickle in the back of her throat and clogged sensation in her nose told her that she had a feeding tube shoved down her throat. The only dignity she was allowed was a petite operating gown covering her tiny fragile form. The catheter tubes broadcasted that she at least wasn’t wearing a diaper. “Welcome back,” an Amazon in surgical scrubs said, looming over her. It was hard to tell if it was the man who had stuck the needle in her ambush. In the big scheme of things it didn’t much matter. Serena didn’t need to know who it was to let out an absolutely blood curdling scream. The surgeon smiled with his eyes. “No need for that, little girl. “If you can understand me, blink twice.” “Phughoo!” Serena said. Her eyes shot open. Her teeth! What had happened to her teeth? Her entire mouth sang out in unbearable pain. She’d gotten her wisdom teeth removed and had needed to subside on a diet of over the counter pain pills and frozen yogurt just to get through the rest of the week. This was like that but a million times worse. She ran her tongue along her barren mouth and tasted nothing but bloody gums and the tickling ends of stitches. “If you can understand me,” the doctor repeated. “Blink twice.” She did. “Good. We need to get the anesthesia more or less out of your system before we implant you into your new home.” He chuckled dryly. “More of a timeshare, really. A rental?” The former executive let out mewling whine, asking for explanation, or pity. The doctor only gave one. “You may notice that your belly is slightly distended.” She hadn’t, but now that he’d pointed it out. “Don’t worry, you’re not gaining any weight, we just loaded you up via enema and feeding tube; kind of like a bear before hibernation. Took care of your hair too.” Serena was beyond tears as a gloved Amazon hand brushed against her freshly shaved scalp. “Don’t worry,” she heard, “This part will grow back, but not as thick. Babies as Little as you don’t need thick heads of hair anyways. It’ll grow in lighter too. You’ll look even more like your Mommy.” That was no comfort. “In just a few minutes” the surgeon told her, “we’re going to be draining your blood through your femoral artery while we transfer some of your Mommy’s blood into you. Because of the stuff we’ve already given her, you’ll get very drowsy, but it won’t feel like anesthetic. It’ll be just like slipping into a warm bath. As we insert you, we’ll unhook you from the machines and hook you up into your Mommy. Then it’ll be her job to take care of you.” Serena tried saying something else, but the combination of drugs still in her system, tubes in most every orifice, exhaustion from medical abuse, and lack of teeth made everything come out as just more babbling gibberish. The entire staff just ignored her as they wheeled her closer and closer to her mother’s prone, unconscious form. “Maaaaa! Maaaaaaa!” “She can’t hear you,” the doctor told her. “You’ll have to try again later, on your new birthday.” She started feeling light headed, watching as the blood drained out of her. Her skin started buzzing when more blood drained into her. Serena closed her eyes. They fluttered open when one of the needles was removed. “It’s okay baby. Go back to sleep.” It really was like slipping into a warm bath. ****************************************************************************************************** A blur of time. Less a surgery anesthetic and more of a coma. Serena was aware, but only in short bursts, like waking up from a dream in the middle of the night before plunging back to sleep. It was the reflexive kick and startle from a falling dream. It was rolling over when a limb started to tingle or a shoulder ached too much. It was screaming and startling from a night terror, only to be claimed by darkness. There were brief moments of lucidity where the Little woman knew how doomed she was, but those were few and far between. The rest of the time that passed, she’d be half-conscious just long enough to wonder what time it was, where the alarm clock was, and what she was going to do to scare the life out of that unlucky intern she’d inevitably fire, before rolling over and going back to sleep. It never quite occurred to her that the thick heavy bed sheets draped over her head were actually made of artificial amniotic fluid. Occasionally she’d be aware of the thump thumping in the air. It was a passing train, definitely not another heartbeat. Or she’d hear muffled voices. The walls in these overpriced apartments were too thin, and the neighbors must be throwing a party. Stupid college kids… Then… Light! Air! Serena came out gasping for breath and dripping. She’d just started trying to blink away the confusion when an Amazon sized hand turned her upside down and slapped her as hard as she could. “AAAAAAAAAAAAH!” Serena bellowed in shock and pain. She was still too weak and disoriented to do or say anything more coherent. Huge Amazon hands laid her down on a table and started toweling the viscous stuff out of her. “Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Hudson. It’s a girl!” She’d barely inhaled through her mouth when a nozzle practically shoved itself up her nose. A bit of suction and mucous and more viscous fluid jolted out of her clogged nostril. Without actively thinking about it she puffed air out of her right nostril trying to chase away discomforting sensation. The action was premature, she found, as the same tube alternated to the other nostril. Someone was literally picking her nose for her! Her protests and cries of stop simply came out as more incoherent mumbling. Serena was disoriented by everything that was happening to her but once the baby blue nozzle stopped sucking the fluid from her nose she realized that she had been laid onto something cold as an icy chill consumed her bare naked thighs, bottom and back. Whatever she was laying on had slowly lowered itself due to her weight. She tried to lift her arms and legs to get away the cold plastic, but she couldn't even lift her limbs! “Weight,: one-hundred pounds.” Her arms and legs felt like they were weighted down and made of clay. She willed them to move but nothing happened. Someone stretched her legs for her and straightened her spine. “Height, five foot two.” Serena's limbs weren’t asleep, either; with the Little being acutely aware of her legs being lifted up and something being inserted into her rear end. Her shrieks took on an even higher pitch with that action; the rod was smooth and cold and violating. She wanted to thrash and kick at the almost casual intrusion, but she lacked the strength to so much as roll over, let alone fend for herself. “Temperature: Ninety-eight point eight.” Something finally clicked. She was being weighed, measured and having her temperature taken. Just like a newborn. The giant manipulating her body lifted her unresponsive legs up and she felt something soft and cushioned slid under her bottom. She felt as much as heard the soft plastic crinkle over her own incoherent wailing. A diaper! She was being diapered! “WAAAAAAH!” Months old memories came flooding back. No kicking, only screaming for the Little girl. Her arms and legs from months of stillness had become all but useless. She couldn't even sit up or turn away as the fresh diaper was taped on. Serena felt an ankle bracelet snap around her left leg. “Last name: Hudson.” The nurse called out. “First name?” “Serena.” It was Daddy’s voice. “We’re not changing a thing about her name. She’s always been our bundle of joy.” More crying as it was easier than ever for her to be mummified in a clean blanket and swaddled like a newborn. She was trapped. She’d grown into a butterfly, spent over half a year trapped inside the cocoon of her adoptive mother’s womb and had come out a caterpillar. Less than a caterpillar! A maggot! “My baby!” Mommy cried out. “Give me my baby girl!” The room flew by and the open air felt frigid against Serena’s face while she was passed from giant to giant. “That’s right,” Mommy whispered. “Come to Mommy. Come on. You can do it.” She felt something stiff and fleshy brush against her cheek. With near exhausting effort Serena turned her head and felt Mommy’s erect nipple enter her mouth. “That’s right. Go on and latch. Go on.” Toothless, cold, and hungry, the girl sucked and sucked and sucked. The first few pulls reminded her of college dating, until the first bits of colostrum flooded her mouth. Something between forgotten instinct and desperation took the wheel from there. “Latch.” Mommy said. “That’s right.” Serena had no choice. She suckled and suckled while her now birth mother petted the thin wisps of light blonde hair that had grown over the last few months. Were she an adult, she might look like she was just going through chemo. She was a Little, though, and so just seemed all the more newborn. “Take your first meal.” It would be the first of many. There wouldn’t even be a highchair necessary to feed her. The meal didn’t last long. Her stomach was just as weak as her arms from disuse. The new newborn woman lasted no more than a few mouthfuls before she felt like she might vomit. Mommy didn’t force it. Too weak to talk. Too weak to open her eyes, Serena could only listen and breathe. “How long before she can crawl again?” “Unless you put her through extensive surgery and therapies,” a voice said. “Probably never.” “What about tummy time?” Mommy asked. “As long as she’s awake and supervised, you can start in a few days when you get home.” “Good,” Mommy said, sounding satisfied. “I don't want her laying in her bassinet all day. Solid foods?” “Keep her on a liquid diet. Your body will provide for her if you stay on the pill regimen and your milk will come with enough calories. However, there are high calorie baby formulas that can imitate breast milk if you stop taking the medication. Either way, she’ll probably gain a bit of a tummy. Twenty to thirty pounds. Some real baby fat.” Twenty to thirty pounds? A lifetime of diet and exercise being poured down the drain and squirted directly into her mouth! Serena felt her diaper warm slightly, pulling her away from her silently lamenting. Was that her imagination or had she just peed a little bit? Her bladder was so weak she couldn’t tell. It didn’t fill up as much as just constantly dripped out of her. “So she’ll be my little newborn,” Mommy said, sounding tired and happy. “Forever.” “She’s a Little. They stay at whatever age you put them in, but with her it would take a lot of work if you wanted to treat her even a few months older than a newborn.” “I talked with a lawyer,” Daddy’s voice made Serena’s ears twitch. “Because you’re now Siri’s birth mother, we can technically adopt again if we want to give her a bigger sibling. Maybe a Little boy this time. Or a girl if we want to still use all those frilly dresses we’ve got leftover from the first time.” “One thing at a time,” the doctor said. “In the meantime, I think both mother and baby need their rest. It’s been a big day.” Serena was ripped away from her mother’s arms and carried out just as she started silently hyperventilating. The quiet of the delivery room was replaced with the crying of newborns in the maternity ward. Other newborns. The Little opened her eyes just in time to see glass walls surround her. An aquarium of a crib-an incubator- rose up around her and Amazon nurses unwrapped her from her blankets, leaving her naked save for the not-quite-fresh diaper she’d just been put in and her identifying anklet. All around her newborn children screamed and bawled, scrunching up their faces, confronted by the shock of a confusing and frightening world. A newborn in all but mind, Serena related. What would other Littles think of her when they saw her. Probably what she thought of most before all this. “Good thing I’m not her.” She was in diapers and definitely needed them. But she couldn’t walk or crawl or eat solid foods. She’d spend the rest of her life being carried around and breastfed. She might get the quiet dignity of a footed onesie, but it was just as likely that being swaddled in a blanket and knit cap would suffice to cover her diaper and keep her warm, if anything at all. Painfully, aching and exhausted, Serena lifted her head up and did her best to look around. Huge familiar faces stared at her, both young and old. Children coming to see their new baby brothers and sisters. Grandparents meeting their first grandchild. It was supposed to be heartwarming but it was closer to how a zoo animal must feel. It might have been delirium, but Serena could have sworn she saw an Amazon woman sipping a cup of coffee and smiling smugly down at her. How many interns had she done that coffee trick to? Even hospitals needed someone to fetch the coffee and file the paperwork. They had to go somewhere. That’s when Serena messed herself. It wasn’t a big poop. Newborns’ first bowel movements never were. It still felt disgusting to Serena’s formerly adult sensibilities. With her bowels and bladder as broken as they were, it was very likely that she’d spend most of the rest of her life, such as it was, wet or messy. Wearing clean clothing around her bottom would be the exception and not the rule. “I did everything right,” Serena thought to herself. “I was the perfect daughter, I grew up getting straight A's, ran a business and I’m still here, lower than the lowest pants messer. I don’t even have pants anymore…” As the nurses walked away to check on other crying babies, she joined them and lent her impotent screams to theirs. The only difference was most of them would get to grow up.

Dear @Ohmo, If you were arguing that I should give credit to the images I used in the same manner that I remembered to credit small niche community artists, ie; "X Character is owned by X Mega Corporation", I'd say, "Okay. Fair point. Let me add one or two more slides. Thank you for pointing out that oversight of mine." I was pretty sure that most people knew which mega corporations owned the rights to characters they didn't create and wouldn't benefit from the exposure and accreditation in the same way as the small time ABDL writers and artists I featured in those slides, but "fair is fair" as some say. But you're making arguments that me doing a powerpoint presentation with pop-culture references is somehow immoral and/or illegal. There's so much wrong with that that I can barely unpack it all, but I'll try to loosen up the mountain of faulty suppositions, logical fallacies and non-real world experience you've crammed in there. I'm speaking as a writer and a public school teacher with at least a decade experience in each field. You're calling an uncountable number of public educators grade K-12 (not to mention college level) who put funny pics, memes, and references in their lecture slides to grab student attention and help them relate to and memorize the material of being thieves. That's just not the case. That's not how that works. That's not how any of that works. You don't know what you're talking about. Not legally. Not morally. I don't even think the most deontological purist would take your side in good faith. I once had a Psychology and Sociology professor who played a different pop song every lecture and posted the lyrics at the beginning of class to relate to what she was talking about. For example, she played Blue's Traveler's "Hook" as a way to explain emotional persuasion techniques. "It doesn't matter what I say So long as I speak with inflection. That makes you feel I'll convey Some inner truth or vast reflection. But I've said nothing so far. And I can keep it up as long as it takes. And it don't matter who you are 'Cause if I'm doing my job, it's your resolve that breaks." (Yes, there's a reason I chose that song for this particular discourse in reference to you...) By your logic she's a thief who should have been fired and Blues Traveler should be coming after her for a large sum of money because she played their song in a classroom without permission and gave us the lyrics on a powerpoint while she verbally explained the connection she was trying to get us to draw. My high school math teacher taught us the difference between combinations and permutations using a 2-3 minute clip from Spongebob Squarepants trying to build a hamburger and obsessing on the exact order of the toppings. No ethics committee within the school system has taken up the case against him and to my knowledge Nickelodeon hasn't chosen to take legal action. Not even a cease and desist letter. A former colleague who is an English teacher taught passive voice with a slide from AMC's The Walking Dead. (If you can tag on "by Zombies" at the end of a sentence and it's still a correct sentence, it's passive voice.) Similarly, I included pictures of famous pop-culture characters owned by Disney et. al. to act as persuasive arguments and mnemonic devices about writing, world building, planning, point of view, stylistic choices, etc.; with a specific focus on writing ABDL fiction and treating it as as much of an artform as anything else. I didn't include every correlation on every slide, because I didn't want my presentation to be nothing but me reading off the slides. Are we all thieves? I certainly don't think so. Your argument doesn't hold water in the hypothetical thought experiment realm, and it DEFINITELY doesn't work in the real world. Furthermore, you sent me a PM that told me you weren't looking for a reply, you weren't accusing me of wrong doing, and that you'd be leaving the site permanently, and yet here you are again saying very blatantly that I'm a thief. By your own simplistic logic you're a liar, sir. Why should I take the word of a liar? Everything you've said is now suspect you immoral so-and-so; you Sneaky Pete, you! I'd take the time to politely explain how each image was used in context of the greater presentation and how and why it fits into an educational and/or satirical fair use policy, but based on your behavior I have no reason to believe you'll engage with me with any kind of intellectual honesty or good faith. You've already told me and shown me that you have no interest in listening to anyone but yourself and getting the last word in. Copyright, Trademark, IP, and artists' rights are all tricky and nuanced subjects for in depth discussion both from a ethical and legal point of view. I can and have had my mind changed in the past by such emotionally and intellectually honest discussions. However, I have no reason to think that you're capable of having such a conversation. As near as I can tell the only conviction you have is wanting to be "right" and wanting to get the last word in. If you REALLY have a problem with the above content I have submitted at no charge, report it to a moderator here on DailyDiapers and hope they take your side. If they don't, leave like you said you would the first time. If this place is not for you, I don't want you having to go through the struggle of navigating a community that clearly goes against your core beliefs. You can also contact the organization that allowed me to give this presentation: CAPCon. Get them to ban me or shake their finger at me or whatever so I don't do it again. https://www.capcon.club/ If they don't do that, then there's one less event that you have to worry about going to because of your deeply held personal beliefs and you can warn others who share your deeply held beliefs to stay away too. Full support! Integrity first! Are you really so out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong. (That's also a pop culture reference, btw.) OR... Take a moral philosophy class. Learn about logical fallacies and how to spot them. If you're religious, talk to your spiritual leader and see what they have to say about it. Yes, including the diaper porn part. Integrity! Stop pretending you're standing up for artists like you're protecting the little guy when you're just standing up for corporations that have wealth greater than most small countries. You can overcome Dunning Kruger Syndrome if you choose to; I just don't believe you'll choose to. Sincerely, Personalias

Chapter 78: Fever Teachers don’t get sick that often. It’s not something we do. Part of it is just building up natural stamina and resistance. As a general rule, kids are germ factories, walking petri dishes of viruses and bacteria all spreading it around with one another. Not counting hospitals, schools are probably the biggest hotbed for any number of diseases. So teachers, as a side effect, often develop very robust immune systems. If only that were the only reason why teachers were hardly ever sick. That’s barely a third of the reason why. The rest of it is more of a cultural thing. ‘Sick’ for a teacher, and ‘sick’ for someone else in almost any other profession are two different metrics. Somebody else might get a case of the sniffles or a mild fever or toss their cookies first thing in the morning, and decide to call out of work. It sucks, of course, and their boss will totally give them grief about it if it happens too often, but it’s not like the entire accounting division is going to be thrown into chaos for the day because Steve woke up with an ear infection. As a teacher, though? No such luck. Me being sick meant that I had to call into school as well as put in the appropriate digital paperwork advertising that I needed a substitute teacher for the day. Then I’d have to have plans that amounted to a script so thorough and detailed that a complete novice who didn’t know my classroom norms and procedures and likely didn’t have a teaching degree could run my daily routines as if I wasn’t really gone. This includes being able to tell them in perfect detail where everything is from worksheets to learning toys to art supplies and pencils. Yes, I could have ‘Emergency Sub Plans’ filled with busy work but busy work in of itself is a misnomer. Even with three and four year olds, what was appropriate and challenging at the beginning of the year was nothing by the middle, and six hours worth of material come August might not last half an hour come April. Every time a teacher feels under the weather, they’re faced with a choice: Stay home, rest, and heal, or pop a pill, suck it up, run on fumes and drone through the day like a zombie. When it takes at least a day worth of preparation to be absent for an entire day, most teachers will take their chances and hope that their students are either empathetic enough or oblivious enough not to take advantage of the situation. For me it was doubly so. All it would take was one slip up and… And… Well, you know… Another fun fact, when teachers do get sick, it’s more likely to be on vacation. Three day weekends and other prolonged scheduled breaks are the most likely time for a teacher to finally stay in bed so that they can barf up a lung or something. I’m not sure how accurate that is statistically, but that’s how it always felt to me. Perhaps it was more psychological than physiological, but if I was going to get sick it tended to be on the days when I knew I’d have the time to recover. Like my body would ignore symptoms or my brain would block out pain and exhaustion just long enough until my mind knew that I could afford to be sick and then suddenly everything would hit me all at once. That was another thing about me in particular. I’m a total wimp when I get sick. All confidence and self-reliance goes out of me and I become a whimpering quivering mess who by turns wants to either be left alone in a dark room or to be held and cuddled and told that it was all going to be alright. ****************************************************************************************** There I was that morning, laying out in the middle of the living room on my ‘sick bed’. I was wrapped up in a thick wool blanket with a smooth comforter on top and I was still making the couch cushions vibrate with how much I was shivering. I never stayed in our giant king bed in our bedroom when I was sick: Cassie needed the computer to do her work still, and the guest bathroom with the Little sized toilet was closer to the couch. My joints ached too harshly and my bladder ached too frequently to want to climb the old Amazon sized toilet in the master bathroom. My eyes focused on the T.V. The DVD that had been playing had gone on so long it had looped back to the menu screen. Damn. I’d missed it too. “Cassie!” I whimpered, not realizing just how quiet I was being. “Cas?!” I called out, feeling like I was shouting at the top of my lungs, but it was probably just a more pitiful moan. Quiet, almost gliding footsteps came. “Hey hon,” Cassie said. Even at a whisper her voice sounded booming to me. “What’s up?” She stopped and felt my forehead, her palm feeling icy cold on my face. She looked down at the small wooden table she’d set up. “Do you want more juice?” The plastic sports bottle, something that only got broken out when I was sick, suddenly existed again in my mind. My lips were chapped and my throat was dry, but it wasn’t why I had called out for her. Meekly I shook my head. “Uh-uh.” “I’m gonna get you some anyways.” “But…” My wife picked it up and quickly walked over to the fridge. “Apple or orange?” “Apple, I guess.” “What?” I spoke louder. “Orange!” “Okay. Sit up so you can drink it.” Reluctantly, I did and regretted it. Sitting up brought me that much closer to the waking world and I realized that I had to pee. When I’m sick the combination of dulled senses combined with constant hydration makes it so that my bladder either feels completely empty or is to the point of bursting with no warning or in between. Most of my coworkers would likely snicker something asking how that was different from when a Little was healthy. Typical. Feeling like the dead rising from his grave, I struggled out of my cocoon and shambled to the guest bathroom, my clothing nothing more than a baggy t-shirt and a pair of equally baggy shorts. Peeing felt like it took forever and any stamina I’d saved up felt nearly spent by the time I’d flushed and gone back to the couch. Waiting for me on the table she’d arranged by the couch was a thermometer, a filled up bottle with watered down orange juice and a couple of pills. “Come on,” my wonderful wife said. “Let’s get you back and wrapped up.” “C-c-c-cold.” I felt like my lips were turning blue. I collapsed back into the couch. Something about Cassie’s touch made me shiver even more while she started tucking my legs under the blankets. She started rubbing my legs up and down, trying to build friction heat. “Does that help.” I shivered again. “Not really. But thanks for trying.” She stopped rubbing my legs and put the thermometer in my mouth. The metallic taste and the slight weight from it dangling from my lps made me want to spit it out like it was poison. My eyes looked down at the tiny electronic readout. Ninety-nine point nine. One hundred. One-hundred point five. Cassie’s slender hand twisted the thermometer so that the screen was pointed down. “Don’t look,” she said. “It only makes you more stressed out.” I grumbled but knew she was right. After what felt like much too long the thermometer beeped and she read it. “Hundred and one point nine,” she said. “Take your medicine.” She slid the pills over to me and I reluctantly picked them up and took a swig from my bottle. The orange juice tasted like battery acid to me but it covered up the taste of the pills. I put the bottle down and wiped my mouth. “Why do I even have to take my temperature?” I asked. “I know I feel sick.” With extreme patience, Cassie finished tucking me in, practically swaddling me. “Because if the fever gets too high, that’s bad.” “It’s not like we’re gonna go to the hospital.” That was a sure way to get plopped in a cot. Cassie dodged my whining. “Would you rather I stick the thermometer somewhere else?” She grinned with her eyes, but kept the rest of her face calm and patient. I felt too weak to so much as say, “Pass.” Instead I just feebly shook my head right before another cold flash ripped through my body. She leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I moaned in relief at the very touch of her. I hadn’t even realized that I’d closed my eyes again. “Thank you,” I whispered. “Welcome, hon,” she said. I didn’t even realize she’d walked away. I might not have realized I’d almost gone back to sleep save for that I startled myself awake snoring. “Cassie?” I heard only silence and some light clacking. “Cassie?!” Her footsteps were heavier coming back. “What’s wrong?” I couldn’t tell if she was annoyed, worried, a little bit of both. “It’s only been five minutes.” Her focus honed in on the bottle. “Just sip, hon. Don’t tank up too quickly or it’s bad for your stomach.” She reached over and picked up the bottle; frowning when she felt the weight of it. I hadn’t had a drop. “Oh. WHat’s wrong?” What was wrong? I wasn’t sure. I wanted to ask her not to leave. I wanted her to be in the room with me, even if we weren’t directly interacting with each other. I wanted to ask her to help me climb into our bed so that I could at least be bundled up and unconscious within thirty feet of her. I just wanted her there. A sliver of memory pierced through the mind fog I was feeling. “Can you start my DVD again?” Cassie looked at the screen. “Yeah. Sure.” She went over and pressed play. “Sure, hon.” “It helps me sleep.” “I know.” My eyes closed again and the rest of the day passed me by, interrupted only by the desperate need to not pee on the couch. ******************************************************************************* I opened my eyes, needing to pee yet again. I actually held my breath releasing my bladder, irrationally afraid that the diaper would leak. When the leak subtle seeps out the leakguard and soaks your clothes it almost feels like a betrayal. It had one job and it couldn’t even do that. When the diaper leaks right as you're peeing, hot fresh urine actively dripping down your thighs and legs; it somehow feels worse. It feels even more pathetic than usual. Like I was having my first accident all over again. That was unlikely to happen again. After the first leak that morning, Janet changed me back into a nighttime diaper. I wasn’t feeling in any shape to walk anyways. Janet had whisked me home immediately, changed me, and put me to bed. It was the first time in a while that I hadn’t stayed up trying to curse her name, but sleep had not come for me. I spent the whole night closing my eyes, waiting for sleep, but never feeling rested. Instead, the cold feeling just got worse, and anything that wasn’t cold was somehow on fire. Night had bled into morning and Janet had seemed disappointed but not surprised that I’d yet to make a full recovery. “Don’t worry,” she told me. “I already sent emails saying I’d be out today. Stayed up all night making sub-plans.” Several quiet, hazy hours had passed since then, with only a leaky diaper and Janet opting to lightly swaddle me to mark the time. “Hey,” Janet whispered to me, once she knew I was awake. “How are you feeling?” Everything aching I flopped my head to the side. We were still on Janet’s couch. She was reclining in it, holding me gently against her with her outside arm while working a cell phone with the other. The T.V. was onto some empty talk show where middle aged B-list lady celebrities talked in a circle to the hoots and hollers of their equally middle aged mostly lady audience. “What time?” “Not quite lunch,” she said softly. “I already called Dr. Milton and told him your symptoms. He thinks it’s just a bug but if you don’t get better by Sunday we’ll be going to see him on Monday.” “Mark’s last name isn’t Milton, is it?” “No.” She brushed some hair off my forehead. She didn’t laugh or roll her eyes. Just spoke to me softly like my paranoia was the most normal thing in the world. I suddenly felt silly. I’d forgotten that I already had a pediatrician. Mark probably wasn’t even a doctor. I chuckled at my own stupidity, but the laughter came out as a weak panting. Suddenly my body shook and spasmed, and she just gripped me so I didn’t fall. For either ten seconds or a year, every part of my body that was touching her felt like it was being nuked and the tiniest of slivers of skin that peaked out from the blanket was being flash frozen. I squirmed and wriggled to be closer to the giant source of warmth that only wanted to cuddle me. I was actually glad to have her there. “You can go back to sleep if you want to,” Janet whispered gently to me. “I don’t mind.” My eyes closed, but they felt itchy and burning instead of nice and heavy. I tried to count sheep in my head, hoping that I’d lose count and drift off but only one of those things happened. “No.” I said. “Can’t.” Janet switched arms and picked up a bottle. She sat up a little straighter so that I was resting in her lap instead of curled up against her torso. “Here.” she said holding up the bottle with red liquid. “Take a drink.” I opened my mouth and accepted the nipple, taking more gentle sips of some kind of watered down artificial drink with a flavor that matched the color. It wasn’t cherry, or strawberry, or watermelon. Just red. Anxiety trickled down my brainstem, hissing to me about what the contents of that bottle were. There could have been poison or an addictive drug that caused me to become completely incontinent or killed my brain cells until I’d forgotten my shapes and colors. At that point in time I was so completely and utterly wiped out that I would have welcomed the death of self. Also, the stuff tasted pretty good. Once my cracked throat had some wash down it, it wanted more. “Careful now,” Janet said. “Don’t drink too fast. You might upset your stomach.” She took the bottle away from me, letting me have sips every once in a while over the course of several minutes.I didn’t mind. I was just glad to not be alone. *********************************************************************************************** “How do you think you got it?” Cassie asked. I was sitting up, spooning broth into my mouth. “I don’t know. Probably just the summer campus crud.” Cassie nodded. She’d heard this song and dance from me a billion times. “Somebody coughed on you last month or didn’t wash their hands or whatever and your body has just been putting getting sick on hold.” I shrugged. “Yup.” I couldn’t tell if she’d heard me so I repeated myself. “You are such a wimp when you get sick.” Cassie smiled at me. I felt like crap, but seeing the smile on her face made me feel a tiny bit better. My stomach wasn’t hurting, but anything more substantial than chicken soup wasn’t the least bit appetizing. The soup wasn’t exactly mouth watering, but I could picture myself eating it without feeling my throat tighten in rejection. The way she was eating the spaghetti signaled that she was having no such problems. “I’ll take care of you if you get sick,” I offered. “I’m not a wimp when I get sick,” Cassie said. I took a drag from my sports bottle. The orange juice tasted like I’d just brushed my teeth despite all evidence to the contrary. It might be just because my taste buds were shot. “I’d still take care of you. Get you things.” She favored me with a weak grin and slurped more noodles. “That’s fair.” She finished off her plate in a few more mouthfuls. “Though you know you don’t have to wait for me to be sick and dying to give me stuff.” I coughed a bit and silently hoped that wasn’t a new symptom. “That’s fair.” “I should stop picking on you,” her voice was both taunting and enervating. She was both flirting with me and making fun of me at the same time. If only I had the energy to do more than just whimper and imagine myself nuzzling against her in bed. “Okay. Back to work,” she groaned. I kept sipping broth and listening to dishes clink and clank in the sink. “Need anything?” She called out. I swung my feet over the side of the couch and dropped the blankets to the floor. I tromped after her, doing my best not to shake. “How many clean towels do we have?” The love of my life slowed and let me catch up with her. “At least two.” “Can I get one wet?” She looked at me quizzically. Her eyes glanced down to my shorts before zipping back up to my shoulders. “Sauna treatment?” “Sauna treatment.” *************************************************************************************************** I rubbed my eyes, knowing sleep would not claim me now that I was awake; not when I wanted it. Sleep never came when I wanted to when I was sick. Deep down, I knew exactly how I’d gotten to feeling so absolutely dreadful. For weeks on end I’d pushed and deprived myself so that others could know my pain. Even when I shouldn’t have. Especially when I shouldn’t have. On some level I’d been constantly on guard, constantly coiled, ready to strike. That sweet taste of victory on the playground with Tommy had lulled my mind into enough security that my body finally let down its defenses and whatever gunk inside me had finally kicked into high gear. I’d stepped into the ring, swung against anything and everything within arms reach, and only heard the bell when Tommy hit the floor. Back in my corner, I was out of breath and the adrenaline was taking me so far and I was now officially feeling every hit that life had dealt me. I had this coming. I really had this coming; strategically if not karmically. “I’m sorry,” Janet said. “I’m really really sorry.” Laying in her arms, gazing past Janet and up at the bathroom ceiling, I croaked out. “Why?” “I shouldn’t have taken you to the meeting last night,” she said. “I should have seen that you weren’t feeling like yourself with how sleepy you were and kept you home.” She reached up to a medicine cabinet. For the first time that morning, her voice lilted slightly into her cooing Mommy talk. “Poor guy. You burned yourself out playing when you should have been sleeping. I moaned in half-agreement. “I’m pretty sure I’d still be sick.” “But maybe not as sick,” Janet replied. “Let’s check your temperature.” Every muscle that I could muster tensed up involuntarily. “Please don’t stick it up my butt!” I opened my mouth like a snake ready for a mouse. The Amazon clearly wanted to laugh at me, but everything south of her eyes stayed calm and professional. “It’s a forehead scanner, Clark.” She dragged the top over my forehead and stared at the readout. “Hundred and two.” Her lips retreated inward. “Not the worst, but not great.” The world tilted and the blankets drooped off me as Janet sat me on the bathroom counter by the sink. Blizzard air hit me right in the chest and I had to yank the blankets back across myself. Panting,I shifted and felt the wet squelch beneath me. Had I peed that much already? Janet was busy pouring a viscous liquid into a cup that was tiny even for me. Every joint in my body ached, and despite the chill, the cool bathroom tile was starting to feel very good beneath my naked thighs. She turned back around and held it out to me. “Here you go,” she said just above a whisper. “It’s children’s strength.” She quickly corrected herself. “Amazon children…so…Little sized.” “Will that put me to sleep?” “Uh-uh.” she said. “It’s just acetaminophen. You can go to sleep if you want, but it’s just to help keep you comfortable.” Her eyelids flickered and she glanced back down at the cup. “Not enough for a bottle. Do you want me to put it in a syringe so you can suck it up?” My mouth hung slightly agape. It sounded like a genuine question instead of a veiled ultimatum. I held out my hands and took the plastic cup gingerly from her. “Thanks.” “You’re welcome. Both hands.” I threw it back like it was a shot. The stuff was overly sugared, even for me, and went down like a milkshake. I set it down next to the sink and smacked my lips. “Can I have more to drink?” “Sure. Let’s go get your bottle.” She stepped forward to envelop me again. “Wait.” I held my hands out. “Stop!” Janet froze. My eyes gazed out past her to the bathtub. I was cold. I was trembling. I was wet. “Can I have…” I stopped and swallowed, tasting the last bits of the medicine again. “A shower?” “A shower?” She looked over her shoulder to the tub’s showerhead as if it were a mysterious alien artifact. “You want to take a shower?” Over a month and it had been all baths with the only variables being with or without bubbles. “Yeah…” “Yeah, hon. Sure. You can have a shower.” She transported me over to the tub and stood me up. It felt like a ball ‘n chain was coming off of me when she undid the tapes and my diaper fell down between my legs. I sat down with my knees pulled up to my chest as soon as she balled it up and cleared it away. The coolness of the tub’s basin was exaggerated by my addled senses. I was alone for the first time that day and uncannily awake. I dared not move. Janet came back with a fluffy white towel and left it on the sink where I’d been sitting. “Close the door?” I asked. She closed the door and turned on the water. “Let’s give this a try,” she said. The water came out of the tub faucet and lapped up to my toes, chilly at first. Janet ran her hand under the water until it was warm enough. She stood up to her full height and took the shower head attachment off from his perch and snaked it all the way to the floor. She aimed it down. “Ready?” “Ready.” She pulled a knob on the faucet and it sputtered, stopping for a half a second as water was rerouted through different pipes and tubes. The showerhead surged to light spraying water down by my toes. I flinched when tiny droplets bounced off the floor and onto the tops of my feet. Janet held it steady and I gingerly- very gingerly- slid my feet into the stream. Relief. Sweet relief as my feet felt the warmest they had in forever. I was in a hot spring in the middle of a blizzard tundra. My body untensed and my legs slowly withdrew away from my chest, hungry for more warmth. The water came out hot and fast, stinging like thousands of bees; pulsing like a tattoo gun. My upper body still shook. Janet wisely took that as a cue. The wonderful torrential downpour maneuvered around me and started spraying on my back. My arms fell slack against the side. “Feel good?” Janet asked. “Yeah,” I said. Looking up at Janet. “How could you tell?” My friend smiled lightly, not showing her teeth. “I’ve never heard you make that sound before.” “I made a sound?” In reply, she gave me only pleasant silence, with nothing but the sound of running water hitting my back and the basein to do it. My shoulders wouldn’t quite release the tension, flinching and jerking every few seconds. I heard a click above me and the water pressure changed. Still as hot, but not nearly as intense. That did the trick and my body must have telegraphed it. “Better?” Janet asked. “Yeah.” I threw back my head into the stream and rubbed my hands through my hair, quietly exhilarating in the wet curls flopping down my head and becoming malleable again. Steam quickly filled the bathroom, fogging the mirror and clouding my vision. I inhaled through my nose and relished in the ability to do so. A stuffy nose wasn’t the worst symptom I’d had. I hadn’t consciously noticed it. But damn did it feel good. The medicine must have been kicking in. I spent the next five minutes asking Janet to adjust the positioning of the portable showerhead. First my upper body was too cold, then my legs. Then back to my back. Anything that wasn’t being doused with near scalding water felt unusually cold. It wasn’t as bad as before, but it was closer to an itch that wouldn’t quite go away. I kept my eyes pointed downward, stuck in my own world. “Do you wanna hold it?” Janet said. I looked up at her through the steam. I’d almost forgotten she was there. I sat up leaning back on my hands for balance and my legs spread open wide, not even attempting to conceal myself. Janet had seen me naked so many times that I’d lost count. She knelt over me, holding the wand-like apparatus. She was dressed in light blue sweatpants and a pink t-shirt; and the steam was starting to do things to her hair. My head was finally clear enough to look at her and notice her shifting her body weight and wiggling her shoulder. No way could that position be comfortable for long. “Do you want to hold the showerhead?” she repeated. I reached up and out. “Sure.” She passed it off to me and rolled her shoulder. “Thanks,” she said. Even with aching joints and limbs that wanted to fall off me; even though the portable nozzle was like a hairbrush in Janet’s hands and a club in mine, I wanted it. A big dumb smile plastered itself on my mug right as I aimed the water right on my face. Funny: It took me being sick for Janet to let me do things myself. Using both hands I moved the shower head to my spine. Janet stood back up and was lightly stretching, but she hadn’t taken her eyes off me. Through the artificial mist I couldn’t tell if her eyes contained that trademark Amazon Mommy madness or if she was showing shades of one friend worried and caring about another. Maybe both? “Can I have that towel?” I asked. Janet looked confused. “You want to get out?” “Nuh-uh”. Whether because I was feeling a tad better or because the acoustics in the bathroom carried my voice more efficiently, but it came out loud and clear. “I want to get it wet. Heat blanket. Opposite of a cold wash cloth?” Understanding came to her. “Got it.” She took the fluffy white towel and draped it over my head. “Here. Let me help.” I didn’t put up any kind of fight when she took the shower wand back from me. “I’ll give it back. Promise.” I got hosed down with the towel cloaked over me. My eyes started rolling because of how good it felt. The weight of the sopping towel pressed down on my shoulders, absorbing and transferring the heat of the water all around me while making it last longer. “Oh yeah,” I groaned. “That’s the stuff.” Janet’s laughter joined my voice. It was light, almost humming. Satisfied. She placed the showerhead down by my feet and I just let it spray on me. “Better?” “Much. Thank you.” I looked at Janet and saw her turning away, rubbing her eyes. I’d made a mistake and was too tired to care. Hefting the showerhead one more time I gave the towel a fresh blast of heat. ************************************************************************************ “Clark?” Cassie’s voice bounced off our master bathroom. “You okay in there?” I roused myself up from the tile. My hot water towel had cooled around me and I’d nodded off, the steam and my own exhaustion compensating. I let out a shiver and stood back up, feeling life return to me with more hot water. In truth, we were about out of hot water. It was more tepid than anything, just like with swimming my skin had gotten overly used to it, and my skin swore the air was made of sleet. “Yeah. I’m fine.” “It’s been close to an hour,” Cassie said. There was a pause. “Did you fall asleep?” She didn’t need to say ‘again’. She technically didn’t need to ask. She knew. “I’m getting out,” I called back. “Okay,” she chirped. “I laid out some fresh clothes for you when you get out.” My sick heart melted a bit. “Awww. Thanks, Cass!” “Sure thing, babe!” ************************************************************************************* The toilet roared and I jolted out of my half-memory half-daydream. I almost gave myself whiplash. Janet was in the midst of pulling her pants back up over her hips. “What?” Janet said. Her eyes widened. “Oh no! Did the water get too hot with the flush? I’m sorry!” Without realizing it I’d let go of the shower head. The darn thing was snaking by the drain, spraying impotently by nothing. “No. It’s not that, it’s just…” I started to mumble. Something close to a blush started to spread. Janet allowed herself a smirk. “Big people need to go pee too, you know.” “Yeah,” I said. “It’s just…you’ve never…around me.” Her eyebrows knitted, trying to recollect while she washed her hands. “I haven’t? “ she said. “Huh. That’s weird. I’m sorry.” “For what?” She dried her hands on a bathroom towel. “Nothing. But if I made you uncomfortable I promise it wasn’t on purpose.” I stopped myself from saying it was alright. As refreshed as I was starting to feel I was still exhausted. Only the sound of the shower filled the brief silence. “Thanks,” I mumbled. The self-appointed nurse inched closer to the tub. “You’re all coiled up again. Feeling tense? Achey?” I barely nodded, but that was enough. Reaching over she picked up the showerhead and gently sprayed me down again, coating me with more warmth. I hadn’t even realized how close my shoulders were to my ears until they’d already lowered back down. “Let me try something,” she said. She hoisted the showerhead back to its holster so far above me that I likely couldn’t reach it without being at full strength and being allowed to jump from the rim of the bath. She took a few moments to angle it, playing it. “Do you want it coming down on your head or by your feet?” “Feet, please.” She angled it so that the stream came just south of my lap, then removed the towel from off my back and then held it close to the head until it was dripping. Gently, she placed the heated piece of cloth back over my shoulders and my upper body melted. Janet didn’t stop there. She started pressing and squeezing at my back, shoulders, and neck. Kneading and massaging my aching muscles. I’d never been to a professional masseuse and I highly doubted Janet was anywhere near that skill level, but the level of care she applied more than made up for it. I could feel her strength with every squeeze, but knew she was being careful. She probed and poked and prodded, but only until my body gave some sort of unconscious signal to move on or continue. I’d been touched and carried and picked up and toted and wiped and scrubbed and manhandled so far, but not like this. “How’s this?” she asked. “Uh-huh.” I let out a yawn. “Yeah.” Clearly I wasn’t at my most coherent. “Can I wash your hair? It might feel good.” Another yawn. “Yeah. Okay.” I shivered a bit as flower scented goop was poured onto my hair. Even the shampoo felt cold to my short circuiting senses. The rest felt decadent, however. Every movement of her fingers gently digging into my scalp, massaging my hair was pure paradise. And there was no singing. No cooing. No remarks on how cute she thought I looked. Just some tuneless humming as she took turns massaging my scalp and the rest of my body. For just a few minutes I let myself forget that there was a fresh diaper with my name on it after this. As if she were reading my mind she took down the shower head and gently rinsed the suds from my hair and body. “I think it’s time for you to get out. You’re yawning an awful lot.” “No I’m not,” I said right as the yawn bellowed out of me. “Okay. No you’re not.” She turned off the water. “Stay right there and try not to fall asleep. I’m going to get a fresh towel.” “Okay,” I said. There in the quiet, with only light drips, I sighed to myself and ripped the massive wet towel off my back. It was losing heat quickly now. Good things never lasted it seemed. Janet came in and scooped me up with the old towel’s dryer fluffier twin. She wrapped me up and swaddled me, paying attention. A few strides and we were across the hallway and I was back on my back with an especially thick Monkeez making its way under me. Two giant fingers dipped themselves in a tub of cream. “You’re peeing a lot today.” She hastily added, “Which is normal. I’m going to put some of this on you just so you don’t get a rash.” I let out a tired breathy sigh which she must have taken for resignation if not consent. She started smearing the stuff down below, carefully rubbing it into all the folds and crevices of my skin. Her nose wrinkled. Mine too. The stuff had a funny chemical smell to it. Memories of zit cream and off-brand sunscreen bubbled up into my brain. It was the kind of stuff that you could feel on you for a moment after it was applied. “How about some powder for the smell?” I didn’t complain. She made it snow on my crotch before closing it off and taping the diaper up. She sat me up. The padding of the Monkeez still stuck to me like I’d had a training chocolate level diarrhea. Unconsciously, my eyes started to drift over to the crib. For once it looked extremely comfortable. “I know you’re sleepy,” Janet said in a soft quiet voice; even so it thundered slightly between my ears. “But first, I want to get some more liquid in you. Let’s go finish that bottle you started. Maybe we can try and get something to eat. Then you can go back for a nap like you normally do.” It was true. I was becoming accustomed to afternoon naps. “Something simple. Oatmeal, maybe.” “Do we have any chicken soup?” I heard myself ask. “Broth?” She tapped her chin, thinking. “Yeah. I think I’ve got some. How about I put it in a coffee mug and you can sip it with a straw? All by yourself?” The idea of being able to use a straw sounded heavenly. “Okay. Sure.” She cradled me back up in her arms and carried me to the kitchen. *************************************************************************** I was still wet when I toweled off, but wasn’t dripping. My skin was back to vibrating the moment my feet were out of the shower. I threw on the loose shirt and shorts as fast as I could, praying that they’d somehow magically make me feel warm in a way that three layers of blankets and four stacks of pillows had so far failed. My strength almost spent I hoisted myself into bed and re-wrapped myself in Cassie was at the computer, click-clacking away. The glow of the screen felt like an unreadable beacon to my tired eyes, and all I could see was the back of her head, and only if I sat up to watch her work. “Feel better?” “Yeah,” I said. Then I corrected myself. “Better. But not good.” She kept typing, but I caught the faint outline of her turning around and smiling at me. “Thanks for taking care of me.” “Of course,” she said. “It’s what we do.” She turned back around. I nestled back and closed my eyes yet again. My yawn came out like a contented cat’s. “I love you, Cassie,” I said. She didn’t react. I must have been whispering when I thought I was talking normally again. “I love you,” I repeated myself. Nothing. My eyes popped back open. She was ten feet away but it might as well have been a mile as far as sound went. “I love you.” **************************************************** Something was wrong. My eyes opened, for real this time and not in the fever induced half delirious dream. I was no longer in the past and still being cradled in Janet’s arms. She beamed down at me, softly smiling like I’d somehow granted her deepest wish. Oh no! The giantess had the refilled bottle of juice in her hands and placed it between my lips, waiting for me to suckle down the sugary sweet stuff before telling me, “I love you, too, baby boy.”

Humans today, as a general rule, are an intelligent, complicated, wonderfully messy and diverse species with a sociological defect of thinking things should be simple. This can lead to them pushing themselves and the world around them into unhealthy extremes: Fire or Flood. Weal or Woe. Starvation or Gluttony. Chaste or Slutty. Is or Isn’t. Column A or Column B. The list goes on. This also results in massive amounts of low key unhappiness. People who live otherwise pleasant lives often feel unfulfilled and unhappy and they have trouble articulating why. While not simple, the reason for this discontent can be put down to a feeling of something being “off” or “missing the mark”. Things are never simple in real life, but to put it simply, the discontent in so many people’s experience comes from a place of expectation not lining up with experience. It’s the feeling of wanting barbecue sauce on your burger but only having ketchup or mustard. It’s the sensation of wanting to paint in vibrant colors but your palette seems limited to black and white. There’s nothing wrong with said condiments or colors, but when your palette isn’t completely satisfied, there’s a feeling of fullness but not satiety. In other words, sometimes life feels like settling. A bit of settling every now and then is just good old fashioned compromise. But when you feel like your entire life is settling, it’s not really settling; just losing. And when you keep getting spares and the person to your right rolls a strike, it’s easy to get down in the dumps; even if the person to your left is getting gutter balls. Speaking of settling, Sydney found herself on the boardwalk just after lunch that weekend. No particular reason that she could explain; she just didn’t have anything better to do and she preferred to be alone outside amongst strangers than alone at home. There was nothing inherently bad about the boardwalk, but if “settling” was the sensation of not quite getting what you wanted without getting completely punched in the face, the boardwalk was “settling” incarnate. Where else could one get the experience of going to a traveling carnival that never left but still wasn’t as good as real theme parks? Where but the boardwalk could you go shopping and people watching but with non-brand name stores? Where else could you feel like you were doing something patently nostalgic and interacting with history while being so obviously stuck in the bleakest parts of the present? The boardwalk gave all of that and threw in the smell of low tide and seagull crap for free! The boardwalk was great as long as you were under five or a tourist. Sydney was neither, but being out with the crisp and ever blowing ocean wind gave her an excuse to dress comfortably in clothes that would otherwise be called “dumpy” by folks like her parents. That reminded her; she’d probably have to put on that stupid dress when visiting her family, the one she only wore when visiting. She could already hear her father’s voice. “Is that the only dress you own or something?” It was, but she’d respond with “It’s my favorite”. ‘Only’ and ‘favorite’ meant the same thing. Then there’d be some comment- probably from her mother- about people mistaking her for a boy and how she didn’t want that, did she? And then the subject would get changed and Uncle Pete would ask somebody to pass the mashed potatoes. Sydney didn’t want to be a boy, that was true, but she wasn’t exactly hung up about being ‘girly’ either. It was one of the things she really liked about her name. While there were many more girls these days with the name, there were many men throughout history with the name, too. In her mind at least, it prevented people from making too many snap judgements. It wasn’t quite a girl’s name, and it wasn’t quite a boy’s name, just a name. Sydney would then get to fill in the details and values herself. The cotton candy vendor gave Sydney her change and pink sugar on a stick. “You go little lady.” Beneath her grey hoodie and jeans Sydney rolled her eyes and walked away, taking a bite and letting the cotton candy dissolve on her tongue. She found an empty bench right across from the (falsely advertised) Penny Arcade. She suspected it had just had a makeover when she first went as a kid. All of the video games and pinball machines had been cutting edge at the time; the best entertainment technology the year 1992 had to offer. Besides the Dance Dance Revolution game and swapping out one generic racing title for another, not much had changed. Somehow, the place had stayed in business- Sydney suspected it was a front for something- and things were picking up due to nostalgia. Everything old was new again. She nommed down on the cloud on a cone, listening to the sounds of skee balls rolling and Homer Simpson fighting nameless goons mingling with the waves crashing and seagulls squawking behind her. About halfway through, something conked her in the head. “Ow!” Her candy went to the ground and she rubbed at her temple. It didn’t hurt, really, it was more of the unexpected jolt of it all. Rattling a few feet away from her, the bright orange frisby that had ricocheted off jiggled on the planks before finally settling. A kid, about eight, trotted up sheepishly. “Sorry, Mister!” they said. “I wasn’t trying to hit you. I was trying to pass it but the wind took it away and…and..and…” “Yeah,” Sydney huffed. “That's fine. Accidents happen.” The kid gasped when he heard Sydney’s voice. “Oh! You’re a girl! I’m sorry ma’am! I didn’t mean to call you wrong or anything. It’s just with the baggy clothes and your hoodie pulled up I didn’t…” It was an honest mistake, Sydney knew. No one would have called her ‘Mister’ if her hair and hoodie had been let down, or if her jeans hadn’t been so baggie. Being seen as conventionally feminine came second to comfort with the biting winds coming off the ocean. More vexingly, Sydney felt herself annoyed, not because she’d been misgendered, but because she’d been gendered at all. Why did anything that wasn’t froo-froo and girly or show off her cleavage and curves automatically become masculine? Why did she have to be ‘sir’, or ‘ma’am’ when she just wanted to be Sydney? “I don’t care,” Sydney sighed. “I really don’t. Just go.” She added, “And if you’re gonna throw things, do it on the beach. Less chance you’ll hit somebody.” “Yes sir! Ma’am! Uh…bye!” Sydney bent over and picked up her ruined junk food. “Just as well,” she supposed. If she ate too much her one dress might not fit, and then what would she do? She looked at the retreating form of the kid, their boney legs stretching and carrying them farther into the distance, their encounter already forgotten. She couldn’t quite articulate why- like so many things in life, something just wasn’t quite hitting the mark- but for some reason Sydney felt a twinge of jealousy at the child. Oh to be that carefree and awkward and just have to worry about being yourself. The garbage can next to the bench was overfull to the point that any bit of trash thrown in might cause an avalanche, so Sydney forced herself to cross over and toss her ruined cotton candy into the garbage next to the Arcade. With a sigh she lobbed it in. That was good money wasted and plenty of time left to spend. ‘Now what?” “Fortunes told! Wishes granted!” Sydney heard the recording coming from the outside of the Arcade’s corner. “Step right up and know your future! Have your wildest dreams come true! Madam Xanatos knows allllll! Only one dollaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” Parked outside the arcade, next to the change dispenser, a big metal box with a glass case was positioned, calling out like an old timey carnival barker. The cabinet had been painted to look like old wood, and a mannequin’s form slouched over like a puppet with its strings cut. “Bend the cosmos to your will. Get your fortune told and your fate sealed!” Sydney stepped closer, arching her eyebrow. “This is new.” Actually, it wasn’t. The hokey machine was anything but new, but Sydney had never seen it here before; another not quite accurate statement that her brain had tricked itself into making. It was in good enough condition; but fortune telling machines were out of style back when Mario was 8-bit and more of a scam than claw machines. There was still the slightest chance that Sydney might get the coveted stuffed animal out of a claw machine. The fortune teller dummy hovered over the crystal ball was equally problematic these days; a nasty caricature of a Roma lady with a scarf on her head and too much makeup to “hide” a hooked nose while poised over a crystal ball. It was a small and terrible wonder that these depictions hadn’t gone out of style with minstrel shows. On closer inspection, the fortune teller dummy wasn’t that bad. She’d been made up with long silvery hair and a purple cowl instead of puffy sleeves and beads. A rather petite nose, too. It might have been a store display model before some engineer retrofitted it. It was still hokey and dimestore fake, but ‘generic magic woman’ was a better look than ‘gypsy’. “Make all your dreams come truuuuuue!” Wherever this thing had come from, the speakers sounded a few hours away from total breakdown. Sydney had heard less garbled speech coming from the drive-thru window. “Fulfill your deepest desires and fantazzzzzzz!” Who knows exactly what was going through Sydney’s head? Time, boredom and a general malaise can make people do pointless silly things; like throwing pennies into a fountain. The boardwalk didn’t have a fountain, however, and she still had a dollar left over from buying the candy. Digging into her pocket, she shrugged to herself. “Might as well.” She flattened out the remaining dollar and fed it into the machine. Haunting faux organ music played as the dummy lurched to life. The dummy held its hands over the crystal ball, now lighting up with all the power of five watts could manage. “Choose,” A lady’s voice, faded with time and neglect played on the speaker. “Fortune? Or wish?” Two buttons lit up on the cabinet’s panel. Sydney chose the one she figured would be the least waste of her time. “What do you wish for?” Above the fortune teller a countdown clock started ticking down from ten. What was she supposed to do? 10…9… Say it out loud? Press another button? 8…7…. What should she wish for? She wasn’t getting it either way, but if she wished too big she’d ruin the fantasy of it, but if she wished too small what would the point be? 6…5…4…. The clock was really adding to the anxiety. What if she was vague? Too vague? Too specific? 3…2… Her voice was a whisper, so that even passerby couldn’t hear her over the muzak coming out of the machine. From her lips came something oddly revealing and perhaps profound. “I wish I could just be myself.” It was stupid too, but it was the perfect wish; one that she might someday be able to control. Better than wishing for gold bullion or world peace. That might happen someday, even if it wasn’t through magical intervention. The placebo effect was better than nothing. 1… There was a pause and the music stopped. Then… “Granted!” The doll powered down. The ball stopped glowing, and a tiny card flitted out the side. Not unlike that old Tom Hanks Movie, Sydney expected to flip it over and read something about how her wish had been granted.That would have made her even more annoyed; a dollar for a cheap piece of thin cardboard. “Huh,” she mused reading it over. “One free ride at Comey Island.” Comey Island (not to be confused with the much more famous amusement park) was the local carnival ride section of the boardwalk. Merry Go Rounds. Ferris Wheels. A roller coaster that only went in a circle. Real kids’ stuff; at least half of the rides catered to kids too young to worry about bathroom breaks, but a free ride was still something of a prize. She gave a passing look to the fortune telling machine. “So it’s a coupon dispenser,” she said out loud. Odds are it was randomized, too. Some cards might be duds, others might be good for a free soda at one of the stands; the boardwalk equivalent of the McDonald’s Monopoly game. “Neat.” Coupon in hand, Sydney wasted little time in stolling over to the kids’ section. “Might as well not make it a total waste,” she said to herself. “It’s not like I’ve got anything better going on.” Walking up to the ticket booth, Sydney flashed the card that Madam Xanatos had just dropped out. “Excuse me, is this legit? I got this from a machine next to the arcade” She slid it under the glass. The old wrinkled woman on the other side adjusted her spectacles and squinted? “Yup. Sure looks that way. Didn’t know we were doing this promotion yet, but it checks out.” She slid the card back. “Do you want any more tickets, honey?” Sydney fought back a blush. “No thank you. I’m just going to try the one,” then out of politeness she threw in the little white lie of, “I’ll come back to get more later.” “Sure sure, go ahead.” Sydney walked past the booth, past the kiddie rides where infants rode in their parents laps as train cars decorated to honor Barney and Clifford and the Berenstain Bears gently chugged along oval tracks. She felt that same buzzing jealousy as she had with the kid who’d hit her with a frisbee, but like a swarm of bees Sydney couldn't single out any one reason why she felt that way. Further down, the rides got a little more complicated. Kids screamed and squealed in what were effectively giant car seats being jerkily picked up and dropped again and again. It was hardly extreme. Chances are any of the watching parents could have gone right up and still grabbed onto a child’s dangling ankle even at the ride’s apex, but it worked on the same principle as bigger thrill rides. Some of the rides looked fun and/or relaxing, but she passed on them on the basis that they were mostly for little kids and she wasn’t anybody’s parent. The last thing she needed was a bunch of parents staring at her like she’d grown a second head just because she’d gotten on a rinky-dink carousel. Sydney finally stopped when the sweet music of rubber slamming into rubber at moderate speeds alerted her senses. “Bumper cars!” She jogged over to the rink. One was never too old to simulate a demolition derby! “Last call!” the man at the ride’s entrance barked. “Going once! Going twice!” Sydney’s walk broke out into a jog. Bumper cars were one of those things where it was better with more people and she didn’t want to wait for another group to build up. “Ticket please.” The man said. He looked at Sydney suspiciously when she offered up the card. He twisted his mouth a little, but pocketed it anyway. “Okay. Good enough for me. Go on in.” Sydney trotted out into the rink amongst a sea of impatient elementary schoolers and climbed into a mint green model. As comically low to the ground as the cars were, her head still poked up higher than most. “Hey!” A recently familiar voice called out. “It’s that girl I hit with my frisbee!” Sydney finished buckling herself in (which was really more of a formality than a safety measure) and followed the voice. Not twenty feet away there was a yellow pod with a certain eight year old in it. “Sorry about that, miss!” A mischievous smile overtook Sydney’s face. “Don’t worry about it. I’m about to get you back kid!” The kid returned Sydney’s smirk. “Who are you calling kid, kid? I’m way better at this than you.” “You don’t even have a driver’s license!” Sydney called back. “Don’t need one here! I’m still better than you!” “Oh yeah?” “Yeah!” A buzzing clapped out and the power was switched on sending the bumper cars to life. Sydney floored it, twisting and turning the unwieldy wheel. The kid in the other cab reciprocated. BONK! The two collided hard enough to bounce back a foot. Their second collision ground them to a halt with each car pushing equally against the other. “Hahahaha!” They both laughed, throwing their heads back. It came to the point that the struggle became tiresome. “You go this way,” Sydney called out and jerked her head to the left. “I’ll go that way!” “Sure! See ya!” They split and Sydney started puttering around looking for the next victim. BONK! The kid had other ideas, it seemed, and circled back so that they could rear end the mint green car. Much to Sydney’s disappointment, bumper cars didn’t have a reverse gear. “Oh you little!” “Haaaaaa! Gotcha!” The play continued for what felt like a long time, and demolition derby mutated into a kind of demolition tag. The shrieks of delight and laughter didn’t stop the whole time. Come to think of it, the time might have been longer. It wasn’t like it was particularly busy and the cars probably didn’t run on a timer. Still, it wasn’t long enough for Sydney’s tastes. She easily could have spent a whole half hour playing stupid kid games. But the man threw the switch and there was a collective whining “Awwwww!” as the cars powered down. Sydney’s newfound rival came up and offered their hand. “Good game, kid. That was fun.” Kid? Funnily, Sydney liked the moniker despite the fact that she was at least three times older than her competitor. “Same,” she said. “Same.” “Morgan!” A woman called. “Time to go!” “Oh,” the kid said. “That’s my mom. Nice meeting you!” That was all the pretense needed for them to run back off. Morgan. Oddly enough, Sydney really liked that name too. Morgan seemed like a good kid. “Hey kiddo,” the man running the bumper cars tapped Sydney on the shoulder. “Here’s your pass back. He handed Sydney the bit of cardboard “Don’t forget it, or get your Mom or Dad to hold it for you.” Something rang off to Sydney and it didn’t have anything to do with being called ‘kiddo’ or talks of her Mom and Dad. “I thought that was only good for one ride…?” Her voice trailed off in a question. “At a time, kid, at a time.” He showed her the card with one hand and took a drag off of a cigarette with another. “See?” Sydney stared in disbelief. She was certain it hadn’t had that clause before. “It’s so you can’t get all of your little friends from Kindy-garten in or whatever; they have to pay for tickets. Sydney scoffed. “I’m not a Kindergarten-” “First grade, whatever.” He shoved the card back into the palm of her hand. “You hit the jackpot, kid. Live with it.” He turned his back and waved in some more kids straggling in (some of them had literally just circled back from their last ride), and considered the matter settled. Sydney glared at the card as if a fast one had been pulled; even if it didn’t make any sense. Head bent over, a new wrinkle entered Sydney’s day. “Huh?” She pulled the front of her hoodie straight down to get a better look at it. She was wearing a completely different shirt than the one she remembered putting on that morning. It had gone from a dull grey to a bright white. More than a trick of the light, Sydney knew something was off. Her shirt was supposed to be plain gray. Besides being cotton ball cloud white, this one had Dragon Talescharacters on it. Maybe that’s why people had been calling her a kid. Who else but a kindergartener, a first grader at best, would be wearing a sweatshirt with flying cartoon lizards emblazoned on it? For just a second, Sydney snapped her head up. She had the distinct feeling that someone was watching her. No one amongst the scattered amusement seekers moved or reacted in any suspicious way, but Sydney could have sworn she’d seen a familiar flash of silvery hair. Against all the better judgment in the world, Sydney looked down at her hoodie and allowed herself a shrug. At least it wasn’t overly girly. Nothing light pink or flowery. It had Ord and Cassie on it, too, so no one would be calling her ‘Mister’. By Sydney’s possibly impaired logic it was something of a win-win: She had a cute shirt that could oddly mesh with her preferred aesthetic, and a card allowing her access to the eighth best amusement rides in the state. It was a good way to kill time so might as well murder some minutes. A series of squeals brought her attention back to the lift and drop ride she’d seen before. “Why not?” she said to herself. “Might as well get the bad rides out of the way before the good rides.” The lines for dark ride through the year long haunted house and the two story roller looked a little long anyways. It was awkward standing in line, though, even if it was ironically. The only people whose height didn’t stop at Sydney’s belly button were the ones who were holding their hands. Sydney’s hands twitched feeling nervous, and wanting someone to hold onto, but all they had was the stupid free ride card. While the load before Sydney’s jerked up and down, Sydney jutted slightly from side to side, feeling antsy all of a sudden, but they couldn’t articulate why. Sydney stopped and looked down at their velcro fastened shoes. Something was off. Bunched up. Experimentally, Sydney hopped from the left food to the right. Their underwear -Sydney hated calling them ‘panties’- felt thicker; bunched up even. “Excuse me,” a woman’s voice brought Sydney out of their head. “Do you need to go potty?” Sydney wasn’t a big fan of the color pink, but you would have been hard pressed to guess that based on the flushing of their cheeks. The lady, holding a toddler’s hand, smiled kindly at Sydney. “Maybe you should go find your Mommy or Daddy and ask them to take you before you hop on just in case.” She slightly turned her head and looked to Sydney’s left. “Where are your parents?” Completely irrational nearly drunken panic overtook Sydney in a flash. This lady thought Sydney was a child? Oh gods, why? It was the hoodie, it had to be the hoodie! In normal circumstances, Sydney might have come up with two options: Explain that they were an adult who was just slumming it for poops and giggles and that the lady should mind her own business, or quietly back out of the line in shame. Sydney found a third way. Among the casual boardwalkers, some walking and others just loafing around was a woman in a dark purple coat, her hair an almost eerie silver color that contrasted with an otherwise grown-up but not elderly appearance. “That’s her over there,” Sydney pointed. “That’s my mommy. She’s letting me be a big kid and seeing if I can stand in line all by myself.” The stranger in front of Sydney hemmed and hawed for half a second before finally backing off. “Okay,” she said. “I was just worried, sweetie.” She pivoted and waved towards Sydney’s ‘Mom’. Luckily enough, the random stranger smiled awkwardly and waved back. Sydney just hoped that the lady stuck around long until the next ride loaded up. “Mommy! I want to be a big kid!” The child in front of Sydney said. “Awww,” the nosey mother said, patting her child on the head. “You are a big girl, but Mommy likes holding hands with you.” Sydney saw her nose twitch right before she revealed herself to be a hypocrite. Big kids didn’t get the waistband of their sweatpants pulled back in public. “Just checking.” She pulled the pants back up over the girl’s pink Pull-Up. Blue for boys and pink for girls. Color coding started young, right down to the underwear. Even younger. Diapers were unisex, but anything older than six months was all but guaranteed to be frilly and lacy or blue and rough depending on what equipment was hidden under the Huggies. The ride stopped and unloaded quickly, with the parents who opted not to ride being allowed to walk up and help the kids out of the giant safety harnesses. Sydney showed the attendant at the platform their wish card, waddled up and took the farthest seat so that all the other little kids could sit with their parents if needed. They reached up and tried to yank down the lap bar and the safety harness, but the damnable thing wouldn’t move. “Here you go, little one,” an attendant working the ride helped secure everything. Sydney flashed a sheepish smile; slightly embarrassed. “Dumb old ride,” they said to themself. “Stupid things getting stuck.” They put the thought out of their head and leaned back in the seat while the ride cranked up. Up, up, up, up to the top; a not so dizzying seven or eight feet in the air; but seven or eight feet seems like a long way when you’re sitting down. Sydney’s breath paused, waiting for the inevitable. DOOOOOOOOOOOWN! The entire ride squeaked and shrieked with the first drop, even though it was only a few feet. Sydney joined the little kids letting out a delightful squeal with that first drop, and then shut their mouth while opening their eyes in surprise. More than a shriek of delight had come out of their body. It had been a long time since Sydney had an accident in their pants, but some things were instantly recognizable: The warm wetness spreading down there, and the sudden feeling of bladder muscles relaxing and releasing. They really had been doing a potty dance and had just been distracted by that busybody’s prodding. The sensation was oddly localized. Sydney had expected to feel the damp puddle spread to underneath their thighs but the puddle stayed confined to the very middle of their underwear, pooling for a second and then…vanishing? What was up with that? Unable to enjoy the rest of the ride due to sheer humiliation, Sydney did their best to examine themself as the kiddie ride continued to jerk up and down, half expecting bits of urine to be dripping off their sneakers. Something was dripping, but it wasn’t pee-pee. The bright happy whiteness from the hoodie was spreading like an oil slick across the rest of their clothes. Sydney felt another jet of pee spurt into their pants just by watching the canvas of their clothes change from a muted denim to the same bright white material as the Dragon Tales hoodie. If anyone noticed the shocking transformation, nobody gave any indication; no one pointed or gasped along. If Sydney screamed they wrote it off as the happy excited shouts of a child on a ride. They practically leaped out of the seat when the ride came to a stop and frantically looked around; first to the ride, then to themself. Nothing remained on the seat. No puddle. No paint. Nothing but the standard hard and smooth reinforced plastic of a carnival ride built by the lowest bidder. Sydney’s clothes were another matter. Feeling themself up and down it quickly became evident that they were no longer wearing pants. The seam between pants and hoodie had miraculously melded together making it a kind of brisk weather romper. Beneath the romper, was a noticeable lump around Sydney’s waist and between their legs. Sight unseen but very much feeling felt, their underwear had transformed to contain the weight of their little accident and sagged ever so slightly. Strictly speaking, their underwear wasn’t exactly underwear. “A diaper?” they whispered to themself. A hand gently grabbed Sydney’s wrist and pulled them away from the ride platform. “You were such a brave baby,” the woman with the silver hair and purple coat said. “Mommy’s so proud of you.” “Mommy?” Sydney echoed. “You’re not my…” But Sydney remembered what they’d said in the line. One part of Sydney didn’t want to be a fibber. Another part wanted the fib to be true. Taller than Sydney, mysterious, and pretty to boot, the little one felt drawn in and safe. “Thank you.” “Now that you proved how big you can be, do you want to go on the train ride with Mommy?” Sydney turned their head and saw the hokey kiddie ride, so simple and unexciting. No dips or twists of even one of the kiddie coasters; just a toy train that went around in an oval. Yet the cars looked pretty and Sydney recognized most of the cartoon characters. “Can I ride in the Daniel Tiger car?” The Mommy with the pretty silver hair playfully pinched Sydney’s cheeks. “If baby wants to ride in the Daniel train I’ll be happy to grant that wish.” Hand in hand, they walked to the baby ride. Sydney’s walk was less refined, rather like a penguin’s but it got the job done. The Daniel Tiger painted train- red with hints of yellow and an artist’s rendering of the cartoon feline- was only third from the front, but it remained unclaimed until the silver haired stranger flashed Sydney’s ride card and together they took their seats. The train cars weren’t meant for two adults. Thankfully Mommy pulled Sydney into her lap without hesitation. Sydney fell onto the mysterious lady’s knee, and felt the pulpy padding under their pants squish in reply. Oh no! They hadn’t forgotten the accident, but had disregarded it completely when something else more interesting had come up. It felt completely babyish, oddly comfortable, and totally right somehow. Just like the comfortable, neutral, non-revealing outfit. Just like the wet diaper itself. Just like going with this compelling and somehow familiar stranger. “Do you want your pacifier?” Mommy asked. She offered a yellow binky up to Sydney’s mouth. They opened up and accepted it. “Awww, baby needs to self-soothe.” Sydney suckled on the pacifier thoughtfully as the train went into motion. They leaned into Mommy’s shoulder as Mommy stroked their hoodies head. What was so gosh darn familiar about this woman, Sydney wondered. They didn’t know, but there was something comforting about it all. It was only then that Sydney realized they’d stopped thinking of themself as ‘her’. As if looking into the crystal ball of their mind, Mommy said. “That’s right. You’re just a baby. A cute, cuddly baby sitting in their Mommy’s lap, just like all the other babies. Wish granted and fortune favored.” That’s when a light clicked on through the fog of Sydney’s regressing mind. Fortune? Wish? Silver hair? Purple? This was the lady mannequin from the fortune telling machine. The coupon dispenser that Sydney had idly wished to. Only she wasn’t a mannequin anymore, and the magic was more than just a card that said they could ride dinky carnival rides for free. The rational part of Sydney’s mind urged them to scream out, to call for help. A quick but gentle hug from their silver haired Mommy corrected that: It wasn’t their rational mind urging them to get loose, but their ‘conventional’ mind. The mind that cared what everyone else thought; the mind that never felt quite right with the world and Sydney’s place in it. The mind that carried around the nagging voice and expectations of Mother and Father. “Shhhhh,” Mommy said in Sydney’s ear. “Let the magic happen, baby. Let it all go. Let the wish come true.” For three arduous loops, Sydney looked around the boardwalk, their pulse pounding in their chest. For three laps, Sydney felt like a deer in a clearing, just waiting for a wolf to pounce out or a hunter’s gun to report. Then on the fourth lap, they felt safe, and they sank down a little bit in this magical Mommy’s arms. “That’s right. Enjoy it. Let it happen.” She gave the baby a kiss, and Sydney began to have something of a sinking sensation. By the end of the loop, Sydney only came up to the mannequin lady’s chest. Lap five made Sydney suck on their pacifier even harder as their tied up hair started to itch and recede into soft, fine, baby locks. “Just say stop,” Mommy whispered sweetly. “If you’re having second thoughts, we can pretend this whole thing never happened and you can go back to riding by yourself.” The sixth go about, and Sydney could feel their breasts melting back into their chest and their hips reshaping. Their romper became less and less baggy as a layer of baby fat filled itself in over the course of a few seconds. It wasn’t painful. “Last chance, little one,” Mommy cooed. Sydney couldn’t say stop; or rather wouldn’t. They had all of the ability, but none of the desire. The taste and the texture of the rubber bulb in the baby’s lips became all the richer and more vibrant as teeth painlessly slid into gums on the seventh and final lap. “Gah-gah-gah!” Sydney squealed and babbled in delight. “That doesn’t sound like a ‘stop’ to me” Sydney’s new Mommy chuckled. “I’m glad.” When the train came to a stop, Mommy stood up, a chubby, and perfectly happy baby in her lap. Indistinguishable from all the other six-month olds only in that no trace of clothing or accessory gave away what gender had been assigned to the child; (and anyone who got hung up one what gender a stranger’s baby was likely had much much bigger problems going on upstairs). “Someone needs a change,” Mommy said, pushing her hair off to the side so that Sydney could lay their head. “Don’t think I didn’t feel that little squish. Mommy knows these things.” The baby just sighed, but not out of frustration, while Mommy did the walking for both of them. “You wished to just be yourself,” Mommy said on the way to the family bathroom. “But so few people are just themself. They all start as themself but along the way they become what the world around them molds them to become. Sometimes that works out. Other times it’s….” the magic woman paused. “Maw?” Sydney ventured. Mommy opened the bathroom door and laid the tiny tot on the changing table. The boardwalk had a full - though unstocked- changing table instead of a wall mounted unit. Quaint. “Yes,” Mommy said. “Quite off. More off than a simple snap of the fingers can undo.” Her giant hands popped open the snaps along the romper’s inseams and tore open the wet Pampers beneath. “This was the closest I could manage. This is the oldest you were yourself before something else started to mold and shape you into someone other than you were. I suspect it had something to do with a pair of tights and a festive baby dress as the cold creeped in.” Sydney smiled and babbled. They didn’t ask where Mommy got the wipes or the fresh diaper being slid under them. Far more miraculous things had already happened than a lack of a proper diaper bag. “In lieu of an undo,” Mommy said, taping the diaper up and refastening the snaps, “I’m giving you a redo. How does that sound?” “Goo!” “Than it’s settled then. I’ll be Mommy, you’ll be baby, and we won’t need any more labels than that.” “Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-daaaah!” “Deal.” The cold air smacked in the face, but it no longer carried the bitter ocean wind, but sweet sweet relief and the promise of a kind of freedom Sydney had long craved but never felt. Diapers and baby clothes were an easy price to pay. “Excuse me,” a pimply pizza faced boy said on their way out of the boardwalk. “Do you know what happened to this thing?” He pointed to a metal cabinet painted to look like it was wood positioned just outside the Penny Arcade. “I could have sworn there was a mannequin in here earlier.” “Someone must have just made a wish that was too good not to grant,” Mommy told him. “Huh?” “I said it was out of order.” The boy noticed the baby in the woman’s arms. “Awwww,” he said. “What a cute baby! What’s their name?” Their. Not ‘her’, or ‘his’, but ‘their’. How oddly fulfilling! Talk about something Sydney never knew they needed to hear until they did. “Sydney,” Mommy answered truthfully. “My baby’s name is Sydney.” The boy frowned, puzzled. “Um…is that a boy’s name or a girl’s name?” The stranger winced at his own impoliteness. So many people got hung up on that sort of thing. “It’s a baby’s name,” Mommy said simply enough. “Baby girl? Baby boy? What’s the difference at this age? They’re just a baby. My baby. That’s all that matters.” “Huh,” Pizza Face rubbed his chin. “Good point. My bad.” “Quite alright.” And that was how Sydney got their wish. (The End).

I didn't see the "like". Apologies.

Where is it say it's Babylon Bee? Also Babylon Bee is basically a conservative "The Onion". Almost all their jokes are "______ identifies as _________", so this lines up with them. But I don't see where this is specifically them?

Are you looking for questions? Or feedback? Or just using this as a way to illustrate and analyze your thought process? I don't want to interfere. I just don't know if this is a dialogue on your process or a monologue. Both are valid.

Thank you. I like slow burns. But there's nothing wrong with a quick concept piece.

Somewhere on the “UsBox Now”, a stream went live. Simultaneous updates on both public and supposedly private social media sites alerted subscribers to the feed. Anyone tuning in would have seen a pastel blue blur filling up the camera for an awkward few seconds before the figure in front of it slowly and carefully backed away, a plastic crinkling sound punctuating each step. To Amazon eyes, it was an adorable baby girl, barely a toddler despite her curly strawberry blonde ringlets. Surely, she wasn’t big or mature enough for potty training. Her blue pinafore dress had undersea decorations patterned on it, and no diaper was immediately visible, but the pacifier clipped onto her collar was a hint. Toddlers and preschoolers ready for potty training didn’t tend to get the suckles. Common wisdom dictated that the matching ‘panties’ in view were poofed out for a reason. Someone must have gotten a hold of their Mommy or Daddy’s phone and was trying to play silly baby games like Veggie Samurai. Precious! Tweeners would see what they often saw: A Little who hadn’t managed to keep up with the Amazons. The smallest folk often stumbled and bigger arms were always there to catch them and lower them even further into a crib. Based on the tall wooden bars in the background, this analysis was more than mere metaphor. It was a fifty-fifty split on whether this was a call for help or they were putting on a show for their new parents to delight in. It was so hard to tell or predict with Littles. They often took so well to their second go-round at childhood that it was easy to forget that chronologically they were adults. Those who had Amazon relatives or friends might quietly agree that even if it wasn’t something Littles wanted, and that Maturosis was a lie, such accommodations might just be what was best for them. To Littles, this was a preview of a nightmare. Full stop. No further notes. Watching Littles act like babies online was tantamount to watching a snuff film. And to a select cross-section of the internet, it was Grade-A thrilling entertainment. “Hey,” the Little girl said, waving to the camera. “Hope this is going live.” Her neck craned forward. “Yeah. I think so. Light is on. Signal is going strong. Good. So..uh…” she cleared her throat. “Hi. Alexi here, and in case you haven’t guessed, my Alexicons-yeah I gotta get a better name for my fans- but in case you haven’t guessed, I’ve been adopted. No, no, no, this isn’t me signing off, do not hit that unsubscribe button! I’m doing the Amazon Escape Challenge.” Awkwardly, she flashed two thumbs up to the camera. Anyone who had viewed Alexi Live and any of her numerous Little-centric film, television, and book reviews, not to mention her Let’s Plays before would recognize that the Little was clearly off her game and uncomfortable. First timers who just stumbled onto the channel thanks to the algorithm might think she was a rookie at this sort of thing. The next thirty seconds, however, showed a bit of professionalism on her part. “So um...for those of you who haven’t been watching for the last three weeks, watching me prep, or who haven’t heard of it before, I’m doing the Amazon Escape Challenge. You get caught. You get adopted. Aaaaand you escape and tell everybody out there what it was like on the other side of the playpen. I didn’t start this challenge. That credit goes to Mini-Mimi and Tweener Tom, but just because I’m not the first doesn’t mean I can’t be the best.” Her monologue done, Alexi’s hands flopped to her side and she started gesturing and looking around in the crib. “So yeah. I let myself get caught at a local park. I was sucking my thumb and clutching onto a teddy bear, and that apparently was enough for somebody to want to adopt me. Antiope Argyros plucked me up, adopted me, and within the day had this whole nursery set up. Here, let me show you.” The camera’s view radically shifted as Alexi grabbed it and panned around the room. Through the wooden slats of the crib, viewers were treated to what could be called either a horror show or something so mundane as to be somewhat boring depending on the height of the viewer. “There’s the rocking chair where I sit in her lap and she reads stories while I drink from a bottle. Those shelves with the bins have toys; I haven’t played with them very much so they’re still quite organized. And of course, over there in the corner is the changing table.” The camera stayed in and zoomed in on the changing table, with stacks and stacks of diapers folded underneath with wipes, cream, and baby powder within easy reach up top. “Speaking personally,” Alexi narrated, “My family never had a changing table. Littles tend to potty train and grow up quick, so for my brothers and sisters and me my parents were like ‘Why buy something that they’re gonna grow out of in like two years?’. But I guess for Amazons it makes more sense, cuz...you know...they want babies who are never going to grow up.” The phone whipped around to show Alexi’s face. “Also I know it’s kind of hard to see from where we’re at, but there’s lots of different diapers stacked under there. Miss Argyros bought something like a variety pack of diapers, so there’s lots of different brands and designs and styles.” A hint of a blush rose in the girl’s cheeks. “She’s having me try a lot of different ones to figure out which ones work best for me...or her...or...oh you know.” Audio picked up another exhalation while she gave a final slow pan around the nursery. “The creepiest part is this room was an empty guest room until about five hours after I got caught. A bunch of men came in, Tweeners mostly with an Amazon boss, and they set it all up after just one phone call. How weird is that? Like, I don’t know which would have been weirder: For her to have a nursery all set up, or to just have an empty room and a service on speed dial to turn it into a nursery in less than a day. They even added in those sheep stencils and painted everything pink.” Back to her face, viewers saw Alexi’s eyes narrowed as she read comments trickling in. “How did I get my phone in? Oh yeah.” The camera whirled around to show a large pink fluffy teddy bear, head slouched and button black eyes dead to the world. “So this teddy had a zipper back and had enough stuffing in it, so I was able to hide my phone and charger in it ahead of time.” The camera showed Alexi’s hand pressing the bear’s stomach. “You’re my beeeeeest friend.” A deep goofy pre-recorded voice mumbled out. “I just had to stick my phone right next to the bear’s voice box and nobody noticed. Right now, I’m kind of using him as a camera stand. Which reminds me.” Viewers were treated to more shaking and rustling as Alexi readjusted the camera on top of the bear.. “So yeah. It’s been about two days since I got caught. I’m filming this now because I’ve learned that Miss Argyros likes to take a shower during what she thinks is my naptime. The walls here are pretty thick, but you can still hear the shower turning on and water moving through the pipes. So I’m pretty safe.” The streamer’s eyes darted on the screen, reading more questions and comments. “Okay. Sure.” The bloomer-like baby panties slowly went down to her knees and the blue of her baby dress contrasted more with the increasing scarlet of her flesh. “As you can see, I’m currently diapered. These are Monkeez, which is really weird, since that’s what I used to wear as a kid, just not as big.” The camera caught a decent shot of her trying unsuccessfully to peel the tapes away. “Also as you can see, the tapes are Amazon strength; so there’s no way I’m getting out of this without a box cutter or something sharp to cut through.” Her blush lessened as she yanked the faux panties back up over her hips, the very tip of the waistband still on display until she yanked the hem of her dress back down. “Not that it’s any of your business, but yes, I have wet. Yeah. It’s super gross. Fortunately, as uh...Amazon-y as the lady who took me is, she’s at least very good about changing me when I say I need it.” Her blush doubled down as her eyes unfocused. “Not that I wanted to be changed and have another adult see me naked and wipe my butt for me, but she’s much better than the people at the daycare. You’d think that they were the ones paying for the diapers or something. They won’t change you if you’re not ‘wet enough’ or some junk.” A new light showed in the streamer’s eyes as the candle of thought and memory lit for her. “Oh yeah. I’ve already been put in daycare. I’m not gonna risk trying to smuggle my phone in that place. Too many eyes, and not just the people who work there.” She took a deep breath. “Lemme tell you guys, if you think it’s weird walking down the street and seeing a Little in a stroller, it’s even weirder when there’s two dozen of them, they’re all in diapers, and they’re all clearly loving it. Some barely talk, and the ones that do have totally bought into the lie; insisting that they’re babies. It’s bizarre. I’m pretty sure that at least one of them is old enough to be my dad or something.” Dramatically she rubbed her temples. “It’s really weird and frustrating, and on one hand I can’t imagine the kind of trauma those people have endured, and on the other hand it’s really gross when people start pooping their pants right next to everyone and won’t say anything about it because they want to finish watching cartoons.” Alexi tilted her head. “Oh yeah. That’s another thing. The cartoons. First off, they’re not hypnotic, not the ones at this daycare anyway, and they’re pretty good. Still, I’m kind of mixed feelings on this. Like, there’s almost an entire hour of ‘cartoon time’ at the daycare, it’s on their schedule and everything. And like...on one hand I’m glad not to have a giant hand poking it’s finger in my pants or someone trying to blow raspberries into my tummy or whatever, but it’s like...if these Amazons actually believed that we were babies, just plopping us down in front of a screen and walking out of the room…? How messed up is that?” Like a kid with her hand about to be caught in the cookie jar, Alexi’s head jerked around. “The water just shut off. Okay. Looks like shower time’s over. That means I gotta go, turn this off, and smuggle this back into my teddy bear!” She blushed and squeezed her legs together slightly. “Also...I kinda gotta pee, so I’m gonna have to do that real quick and then get changed.” Waving to the camera, she signed off. “Okay. Bye for now, Alexicons! Hopefully when you see me next, I’ll be back home safe and sound and in my big girl panties!” The view was blocked by the palm of her hand before the screen went black and the feed cut. ************************************************************************* The next stream a few days later was even more adorable and/or horrifying than the first. For starters, it didn’t take an eagle eye for viewers to spot the bottom of the diaper peeking out from underneath Alexi’s purple polka dotted sundress. “Hey there, Alexicons!” the second stream began. “It’s your girl, Alexi!” She let out an almost weary sigh. “So I’ve been like this for about a week, and I’m still here. Mommy’s got the house pretty much Little proofed, so I gotta think that if I’m gonna win the challenge, it’s going to have to be by getting out of the daycare. I told her that I was feeling sleepy so she plopped me back here in my crib. I’m not too worried about her catching me, though. She can’t resist her shows first thing after getting home from daycare. Who knew there was an Adoption Court reality show every weekday at four-thirty?” Alexi visibly shuttered. Without preamble, Alexi sat down, splay legged so that her subscribers got a good look at the bottoms of her black patent leather shoes and her diaper. The girl made no move to cover it up or adjust the hem of her dress. “I wasn’t quite lying. Daycare is...well..it’s work. The Grown-Ups are super condescending, calling all Littles babies, and treating us like we’re children. This one volunteer who fed me lunch in a highchair today came over from the local highschool. Kept trying to get me to eat mush by telling me it would help me grow up big and strong.” Dramatically, the streamer rolled her eyes. “I’m done growing, girl. I’m as big and strong as I’m gonna get and telling me otherwise isn’t gonna make me want to eat that jar of strained beets.” She huffed. “Amazons. Amiright?” Leaning in, her eyes focused and narrowed, reading the comments. “Guys. Guys, I’m sorry. Something must be wrong with my phone. I think it’s glitching. Unless a bunch of people are just smashing their keyboard, it’s getting hard to read what you guys are typing. Something weird must be going on.” Her eyes lit up with recognition before clouding over with dread. “Oh. One word is still coming loud and clear. ‘Diapers’.” With a weary sigh, Alexi started to talk about her uncovered underpants. “Yes. I’m still wearing diapers.” She lifted up the hem of her dress all the way to her bellybutton. As you can see, today’s model from the jumbo variety pack is a Koddles. It has Helga Hogg decorations. That’s the flat looking piggy on the landing strip. Personally, I prefer Jasper and Jinx, it’s one of the ones they show at daycare, and I think there’s something artistic about wordless storytelling. I don’t think they have Jasper and Jinx diapers, though.” Alexi paused and shook her head like trying to get cobwebs out of her noggin. “Anyways a feature of Koddles is a lot of them have this pee line going down the middle,” she indicated the yellow strip running between her legs. “That means anyone can tell when I’ve gone pee-pee because the color changes from this light yellow to a bright blue. As you can see, I’m very, very dry.” There was a bit too much pride in that statement. She let go of the hem of her dress, but the bulk of her diaper kept the Koddles well in sight and the hem bunched up in front. “I’ve had to get used to it of course. Daycare has scheduled changing times, so depending on the time I’ve had to go pee-pee and just learn to play and watch cartoons in a wet diaper. And well..” she wiggled uncomfortably in her seat. “It’s not that bad. The other thing though…” her face paled. “I’ve done it twice and didn’t like either time. I’m gonna have to get out before it happens too many more times, I think.” Still wiggling, the girl leaned back and kept talking to the camera in her crib. “I think my best chance to escape, like I said, is gonna be at daycare. Probably on the playground. Pretty sure that I can figure out a way to climb the fence. It’s chainli-” “Oh! That reminds me!” Alexi interrupted herself. “Weirdest thing happened on the playground today. We got a new kid...I mean a new Little checked into the daycare today, and for a second I thought it was Linked Up Lily! If you’re not subscribed to her channel, you should be, she’s totally an inspiration of mine, and I think she said she was going to do the Amazon Escape Challenge too.” A moment of screen reading and struggling to decipher and Alexi replied, “Um...no. I don’t think this was actually Lily. The Grown-Ups at daycare called her Liliana, which is close, but no cigar. She had a different haircut, too. Like her hair was waaaaaay shorter than Lily’s, and plainer too; Lily is super famous for her long and wild colored hair.” A beat.. “And more importantly, this Lily was totally mindf...you know, I can’t use the preferred term because I don’t want to get demonetized, but the people who know know.” Nervously, Alexi began biting at her nails. “You should have seen this poor girl. They got her bad. She was having a hard time walking, and it wasn’t just cause of the diaper; super uncoordinated. Needed help getting up the slide and such. And then right in the middle of everything, she was like running to the swingset, and she stopped, just froze, and um…” For the first time that stream, Alexi blushed. “She messed herself. Said it loud enough while she was doing it too.” A shudder served as transition between Alexi telling her story and idly biting her nails to full on sucking her thumb. Her unconscious squirming stopped and a relieved smile spread across her lips while they suckled on her thumb. Anyone staring at Alexi’s crotch would notice the wetness indicator on her diaper turning bright blue, leaving nothing in doubt about what was going on in the girl’s baby pants. A second later, Alexi’s eyes brightened and she seemed to come back to herself. “Anyways, I don’t think that was Linked Up Lily. Pretty sure anyways. I’m finding a lot of the cartoons here pretty neat though! I’m gonna have to get a subscription or something to watch them after I finish the challenge! The toys aren’t bad either! I’ve got this four option pop up jack-in-the-box type toy, with different animals, and they say different things depending on the order that you pop them up in, so there’s like...a whole bunch of things you can do with them. Really cool! I kind of wish I had had something like that when I was a baby the first time. I mean...” Alexi froze. “Uh oh! I don’t know if you can hear that stream, but footsteps are coming.” The stream was treated to her teddy bear’s pink underside while Alexi hurriedly hid her only link to the outside world. “Hello, Lexi!” a much deeper, matronly voice could be heard. “Oh. Hi Mommy!” “I heard a certain someone talking instead of taking a nap. Are you not tired anymore? You weren’t fibbing were you?” Viewers could hear a note of panic in Alexi’s voice. “No Mommy! Not at all. I’m not a fibber! I was just telling Pinky all about my day at daycare and all the new friends I’m making.” “Awwww,” the Amazon could be heard cooing. “How about you and Pinky come and watch cartoons in the living room for a bit?” “Okay!” The joy was spontaneous and genuine. Alexi wasn’t that good of an actor. The pink plush curtain was removed and the stream kept going for another two hours, with just a view of the mobile dangling above the crib. Those still tuning in finally got some new developments to the sound of a door squeaking open, and the faint sound of crinkling and humming. Then a gasp. “Oh no!” came Alexi’s whispers. Her face came back into full view as crib bars slipped by. “Uhhh...sorry guys. My Mommy came in and me and Pinky and her watched cartoons for a while. I was so good at watching them that Mommy sent me ahead of her so I could pick out my next diaper.” Just how infantile and bizarre that must have seemed was evidently lost on the girl. “Good-bye for now!” ******************************************************************************************** Two days later a new video was uploaded to Alexi’s UsBox channel. “Hey guys!” she waved to the imagined audience. “Just giving you an update! It’s the weekend and Mommy is talking to a friend of hers, setting up a playdate with one of her friends and their kid!” The camera panned around the nursery, this time without wooden bars. “As you can see, Mommy trusts me enough now that she’s leaving me in my room and letting me play as much as I want, though she leaves the baby gate up just in case.” She giggled uncharacteristically and stuck out her tongue. “Pinky is still in my crib. He’s my bedtime buddy, so I’m having to hold my phone all by myself like a big girl! On the bright side I found a good spot to recharge my phone right behind the diaper pail.” “Oh oh oh! I almost forgot! Have you seen my new diapers?!” She didn’t need to hold the camera back as far as she did for future viewers to get a good hard look at the plastic backed nappy taped around her hips. The (mostly) white decorated diaper was the only thing she was wearing beneath her light yellow t-shirt. Just in case, the video included what some might consider a less-than-tasteful shot of what was going on between her legs. “These are called You-Ni-Corns,” Alex said. “Cuz they have these pretty unicorn horse thingies all over them and they’re super comfy and pretty and Mommy says they’re made just for Little babies like me!” Experienced caregivers would also note that the diaper, while not overly discolored, did swell and sag a bit with bits of the sap bunching up and clumping together where they’d done the most work. Wet. But not in dire need of a change...yet. “I think I’m going to ask Mommy to get more of these cause they're super comfy and none of the other girls at daycare wear anything like them. Whether you’re a baby or a big girl or a Grown-Up, sometimes you don’t want someone wearing the same thing as you.” A silly smile spread on her lips. “At least you don’t have to go all the way home to change.” Gayly, she laughed at her own joke. “I won’t be reacting to the comments on this video,” she said, more seriously. “Something’s going on with my phone where I can’t read any of the words. I gotta get it fixed.” She tilted her head in thought. “Actually, I think it’s more than just my phone. The words in the books that Mommy reads to me every night are looking funnier and funnier.” She shrugged. “No big deal though. It’s more funnerer to listen to her read. She does all these silly voices for all the different characters and stuff.” From the camera’s point of view the room started bouncing with the girl. “Like there’s this one voice she does that sounds juuuuust like Momma Kangaroo in this one cartoon I just found called pocket pals where all the critters are marsupi-...marsh...they all have pockets that their babies get to ride in!, I gotta get her to watch it with me but they say it’s a special one that only good girls and boys at daycare can watch!” The next several words that came out of her mouth were so speedy and incoherent that it was nearly indecipherable over the loud crinkling that came with her constant jumping. Fans of the show who were still able to talk might recognize that she was describing the entire first season in all but one breath (albeit very much out of order). “And then Mr. O. Possum was like…like…” Alexi stopped. With her free hand, she grabbed the pacifier clipped onto her shirt and stuck it in her mouth. “Goffa..” she said. “Goffa go…” Her eyes stared into the distance, unfocused, and her cheeks puffed out like a bullfrog. With a long, heavy exhale, she groaned, and let out a soft smile. “Poofff” The girl’s eyes came back into focus with a blink and the color drained away from her face as the spark of recognition lit a fire beneath her. “I gotta go! Bye!” Comments would speculate that this was a deep fake. Others would guess that poor Alexi remembered how to upload videos through muscle memory and icon recognition; a pre-reading skill, they’d insist. Unfortunately for the Little girl, she hadn’t quite re-figured out how to edit out the part where she openly and flagrantly messed herself before posting. ************************************************************** “Hi everybody out there in internet land! It’s me! Lexi!” Canny recent viewers would notice that the Little streamer had her hands free and wasn’t in her crib. Even cannier voyeurs would realize based on the nursery’s geography that her phone was likely propped up on a lower shelf of the changing table, possibly leaning against a stack of diapers. Speaking of diapers, it could be argued on whether or not a purple t-shirt with frilly sleeves and a stiff rainbow colored tutu counted as a dress; it was indisputable that they did nothing to conceal the babyish undergarment. The knee high socks and velcro sneakers didn’t contribute anything to the girl’s modesty; that was for certain. “I just got back from daycare and they taught us this really neat dance that I wanted to show you! It’s called the tipsy wipsy dance! I’ll show you!” “First you take your hips and you get a little tips...eeeeeeee! Then you take your bowl and you stir it and stir it...one-two-three! And you flap your arms just like you’re a flying bird...eeeeeee! And you kick your feet and you sing a little song...do-ray-me!” Alexi’s dance might have been cute to the digital onlookers...if it had been anything remotely resembling a dance. The Little sang the song acapella, and amelodically. If there were steps to this “dance” they didn’t match the lyrics. They mostly consisted of Alexi jumping up and down and spinning in circles and shaking her rump for the cameras. “One more time!” “First you take your hips and you get a little…” she froze. She bent her knees. She clenched her fists up tight and stared at a point on the wall off camera. Alexi never was quite certain how big or small her viewers were; how many Littles, how many Tweeners, how many Amazons. Whoever they were, they got a good view of what came next: Brief popping, tooting sounds made their way to the camera’s microphone. What came next was evident to all who could see. Alexi had planted her feet so that her profile was in perfect view, and whether they were cooing, gasping, or cringing, every one of Alexi’s viewing audience got a front row seat of the back of her unicorn diaper expanding and drooping while red faced. Alexi huffed and grunted until at last… “Poopy!” It sounded almost celebratory. Shamelessly, Alexi started singing and dancing again, such as it was, her diaper bobbing along with every movement and gyrating motion she made. “And you flap your amrs just like you’re a flying bird...eeeee!” A giant figure came into focus in the background. “Is that someone singing the tipsy wipsy song?” her Mommy said from the other side of the room’s baby gate. Alexi threw up her hands. “Yeah! Mommy! Wanna do it with me?” Mommy carefully stepped over the babygate, her black hair and olive skin a contrast to the Little’s fair complexion and fairer hair. “Oh I don’t think so, baby girl. That’s a dance that’s best done by Littles. I’ll watch, though!” She sniffed. “Uh oh.” “Uh oh?” Alexi looked genuinely worried. “I think I’ve got a Little Lady Lexi who filled her diaper right up!” Mommy said. “Let me check.” She knelt down to one knee, taking her massive palm and cupping it to the Little’s bulging backside. “Uh oh. Yup! I definitely feel some poopy in there!” Rather than blushing, the Little girl giggled into her palm. “I’ve got a stinky baby on my hands! Let’s get you changed!” The ‘baby’ girl only gave more delighted giggles in reply. Mommy glanced over at the camera. A dark cloud gathered. “Lexi? What’s that?” “It’s my phone, Mommy!” Lexi said, cheerily. “I’m showing all my friends on the internet the dance I learned at daycare!” And just like that the sun came out. “Oooooh!” Mommy said. “Is my Little baby girl a streamer?” Theatrically, Lexi threw her hands into the air “Yesh!” “Awwwww! Isn’t that cute! Your friend Liliana from daycare used to have her own UsBox channel, too.” “Really?” Lexi squealed in delight. “Really, really! That’s what her Daddy told me. Now the only streaming she does are the pee-pees in her pants.” “Oh wow! That’s so cool!” Mommy chuckled. “Let’s get that stinky bum cleaned up, and later you can show me all the cute videos and streams you’ve recorded.” Lexi’s legs went out of view as her Mommy stood up and moved her on top of the changing table. “Really?!” she squeaked. “Really, really,” the Amazon cooed. “Hold on just a second.” The view blurred as it was whipped around and held over Lexi’s prone form. Not blushing at all, the girl waved from her spot on the changing table. “Hiiiii!” “That’s right,” the Amazon lady said. “Wave bye-bye to all your friends!” “Byyyyyyye!” The last thing the broadcast recorded was the sound of diaper tapes being ripped off. ********************************************************************************* “Hey everyone, Antiope Argryros here,” the Amazon waved at the camera. “Or as this precious Little one calls me, ‘Mommy’.” The camera panned over to a Little girl, her hair in blond ringlets laying on a forest green park bench. Bashfully, the girl smiled past the rubber teat of her baby bottle, waving to the camera. “Now I don’t know if you can tell just by looking, fam, but I’ve got a young lady who definitely needs a diaper change. Oh my goodness, you are so soaked! Aren’t you?” Lexi giggled. “Uh-huh!” She punctuated her sentence with a loud burp and finished downing the bottle full of juice. “All gone, Mommy!” “Good job!” the Amazon told her. “Now can you be Mommy’s special helper and hold her phone and talk to the people watching at home while Mommy changes your diaper?” “Sure!” the girl peeped. “I’m super good at this!” “I know you are!” The camera moved wildly to a close up of Lexi’s face. “Hi everybody!” she said over the sounds of her diaper coming undone. “It’s Lexi again! Mommy said that I’m too Little to be doing my own channel so she’s gonna be taking it over so I can do more ‘portant stuff.” No trace of irony, agony, dread, or disgust could be detected. “That way I got lots of extra time to play and cuddle and watch cartoons and play and figure out what flavor crayons are and learn new dances and play and watch cartoons and- Mommy! Cold!” “Don’t be naughty,” Mommy’s voice could be heard off screen. “I’m not gonna let you get a rash. The sooner I get you cleaned up the sooner you can go play. Keep talking.” “Yes ma’am!” Lexi adjusted her view to the camera. “So Mommy is getting me a bunch of new play outfits, and that’s really neat, but she also wants to get a bunch of different diapers for me, so like if I’m wearing a monkey outfit, I can wear Monkeez, and there’s these pink Hippo diapers for if I’m wearing pink- I mean the girl diapers are pink, boys have blue that’s super important- or if I’m gonna be her Little Piggy she’ll get me the Koddles with Helga Hogg. I still wish they had the Jasper and Jinx diapers, those’d be neat. But anyway, I really like my You-Ni-Corns, and as I was tryin’ to tell her, unicorns go with everything but she wouldn’t listen. Mommy’s, amiright?” “All done,” Mommy said, taking the phone away. “You can go play.” “Yay!” Wearing nothing but a teal t-shirt that stopped at her belly button, velcro light up sneakers, and a freshly taped diaper, Lexi waddled off the park bench and started for the playground where four or five other babies at or around her age were already at playing. “”I told her she wouldn’t get to go play until she finished her ba-ba,” Antiope winked at the camera. “Parenting hack.” Before she’d properly stepped onto the playground, the Little stopped. “Lexi? Are you okay?” her Mommy called out. As if in reply the tiny form bent her knees and clenched her fists. “Uh-oh. I know what this means.” With huge Amazonian steps, the camera whirled around to see a blank faced Lexi starting to puff her cheeks out. “Yup. Thought so.” The cell phone camera, this one Amazon made and designed, picked up the quiet grunting and moaning leaking out of Lexi’s lips. “Lexi, honey,” Mommy asked, not quite taunting. “I thought you wanted to go play on the playground with all of your Little friends.” The first reply came not out of the Little girl’s mouth but from her bottom as several rude noises reported out from behind her. Tiny toots and farts rang out so fast and clear that no one would mistake what she was doing. It was almost cute. “Lexi? Lexi, baby? What’s my baby doing out here on the sidewalk in front of everybody and the whole internet?” Another grunt. Another groan. Another muffled toot made to smell sweeter thanks to a fresh layer of baby powder. And finally a word from the Little chatterbox. “...Poopin’.” Viewers got the ‘treat’ of seeing the whole thing live as Lexi’s Mommy stepped around and got the perfect shot of the fresh diaper ballooning out. The effect was even more pronounced because of how fresh the diaper was. The camera caught as each and every crease was pressed and smoothed from the inside out. “Never fails,” Mommy clucked. “Put them in a clean diaper and they go and mush in it.” “All done!” “What was that?” Mommy asked. She stepped back around. “Can you say that one more time for all the people watching on Mommy’s phone?” The girl grinned, seemingly proud of herself. “All done!” Antiope let out a good natured laugh. “Awww, okay sweetie. You can go play, now.” The camera was treated to the sight of the Little waddling onto the playground, the lump in her backseat obvious even as she climbed up to the tiny slide. “She’s so precious.” After Lexi slid down, not even flinching at the spreading muck in her pants, her Mommy stepped in front of the camera, so that both her and her new baby could be seen. “So before we begin, I’d officially like to thank the creators of the Amazon Escape Challenge. I think it’s a really good way for Littles in need to find their Mommies and Daddies without feeling too scared or overwhelmed about the whole thing. I would encourage all Littles who think they’re independent and mature to test it out as either way I think you’ll be satisfied with the results and maybe even learn something about yourself.” Little viewers, assuming there were any, likely recoiled at the idea paired with the image of Lexi jumping on a teeter totter to play with another diapered and adopted Little. “For those of you worried about the change in format, don’t worry. This channel might be under new management, but you’ll still get to see lots and lots of Lexi. I might be the host but she’ll definitely be the star. Being a Little, she just doesn’t have the attention span to update this channel enough to make it really successful.” As if proving her point for her, the Little was already off the teeter totter, leaving her playmate whining and crying without her. She fell backwards onto her butt, but otherwise seemed unbothered as she picked herself up and toddled to the merry go round. “I’m gonna have to work on that…” She addressed the audience. “But see? Lexi isn’t going away. If anything you’re going to be seeing a lot more of her, while we show you fun games and songs and tricks for bath time and nap time to make everybody else’s life a lot easier. You’ll just see her as her true self, and not the Grown-Up she was pretending to be before I met her.” “We’ll have something for everyone,” Antiope continued. “If you’re a Little that doesn’t have a Mommy or a Daddy, you’ll see what you're missing out on. Or if you do, you can watch this with them and get ideas for play time and snuggles! If you’re a Tweener, I’m sure this will help convince you on how you can best help your Little friends or land that babysitting job you were hoping to get from the parents across the street.” The narration continued as the giantess strode onto the playground. “In fact, the only thing I think my lovely Little Lexi won’t be able to help you viewers at home on is potty training.” To herself she added. “Oh, we can do product reviews too. She was pretty good at that…” The aside ended at the top of Lexi’s head came into frame. “Okay, Lexi. I need to change your diaper again!” Like a kettle on boiling, giggles shrieked out from the Little’s throat and she waddled away. “Noooooooooo!” Any Amazon parent would infer that the adorable child didn’t really mean it. She just wanted to be chased. “Thanks for watching!” Antiope said. “Now if you excuse me, I’ve got a Little in a full diaper trying to escape!”

To the layman, Dr. Ella Sinclair looked like she was wearing an astronaut costume. It wasn’t as bulky, and the material was a shiny silver instead of a muted white, but the general vibe of a baggy full body suit and helmet remained. Diedre, her assistant, had commented early on that the suit looked like a costume from a B-Movie about space travel. If only space travel is what Dr. Sinclair had been aiming for. Space travel was so much simpler. “Remember,” Diedre told her as the final checks were being made to the chrono-capsule. “If this works-” “When this works,” the doctor interrupted. “Confidence, Diedre. Confidence.” “Right,” the intern corrected herself. “When this works, and you go back in time, you’ll still see yourself as you are now, more or less. Your present mind will overlap its own residual self image over your past body, but everyone in the past will see you as you were back then.” “I know, Diedre,” Dr. Sinclair said. “I literally wrote the book on all of this.” “Yes Doctor, I know. You told me to tell you, though.” That was true, too. She had told Diedre to remind her. There was a statistical probability, that in sending her essence back along her own personal timeline, Dr. Sinclair might get caught up in the temporal wave and not so much forget things as much as forget that she was time travelling. It wouldn’t do to be the world’s first chrononaut, forget about it, and then end up reliving her whole life over. Having an outside voice remind her of such a possibility drastically reduced that likelihood; a verbal string around her brain’s index finger. Dr. Sinclair had all but proved her own pet variant of string theory. Theorizing that each person’s lifespan left a trail of chronotons indelibly in the fabric of existence, Ella realized that it might be possible to follow that string back and ride it like a soundwave traveling down a taut string, and thus witness and perhaps even change the past. Today, theory was about to be put into practice. She’d travel back, observe the past through her own eyes, and then come back to the present. The biggest risk, assuming all her calculations were right, was being overwhelmed in the temporal wave, and then losing herself in the process. In short, her mind and very essence was about to travel back to a younger version of herself. She was about to try and cram close to thirty years of time and experience into the mind and body of a much younger version of her. Whether those memories, skills, and personality traits would be shoved deep down into a coma-like state or just blend with her present self wasn’t immediately clear. The problem with being a trailblazer in any field was there was no such thing as hindsight. It wouldn’t do to go back in time to middle school and have to relive her crush on David Bowie, (rather to have it feel fresh...she’d never gotten over Jareth the Goblin King but who did?). It’s why she was going back even further than middle school. Much farther back. If she inhabited the body of herself at age one, it’d be both a radical leap back in time as well as a fairly safe state for her in terms of psychological health and minimum risk of damage to the timestream. Chrono-physically, going back to her time as an infant would give her minimal agency to disrupt her past, but more than enough opportunity to test her theory. Going so far back would also help rule out the possibility of her just having a particularly good memory. Chrono-psychologically, her baby-self made the most sense too for a maiden outing. A McDonald’s McFlurry had most of the same ingredients as a Betty Crocker cake, but less so. It just hadn’t been given heat or baking powder. If Dr. Sinclair’s adult essence mixed with her baby self’s essence, there was nothing she couldn’t likely handle. At worst, she’d have a child’s moodiness that she could more than temper with her adult mind and patience. She’d gone through being one year's old before. This would be just mixing a little extra “one-ness” in with all the other years she had. Conversely, if instead riding the wave and vibrating along her timeline resulted in her shoving her infant self deep down into a back room of her own mind palace, then it wouldn’t be so bad for either her or her past self. Who cared about missing time when they were a baby? If her baby self existed separate and simultaneously from her present self this would just be another nap for the kid. Middle-school her would be justifiably freaked out about missing out on half an hour of her life. Suddenly going under the mental temporal displacement equivalent of anesthesia might traumatize the poor girl and send unforeseen consequences into the present. Damn, it was weird thinking of her and her own past selves as distinct and separate individuals. It literally gave the phrase “I’m not that person anymore” a much more literal meaning. Dr. Sinclair placed the helmet over her head. It was a pain to tie her long light brown hair back enough so that it would fit inside, but she’d refused to cut it for this. 'I shaved my head for a failed attempt at time travel' was not a story she wanted to tell. “Because your body in the here and now will be in a set of stasis inside the chrono-capsule, but you’ll need to be conscious, we’re only going to try for a short ride,” Diedre said. “Half an hour at most.” “Right,” Sinclair said. “So only half as long as it takes Australians to lose a war against flightless birds.” Diedre cupped her hand to hear. “What?” Darn it! A perfectly good joke ruined by the muffled acoustics of a helmet. Sinclair would have to try and work in that line when she got back. It was no ‘One small step for man,’ but darn it, she wanted this! Nervously biting her lip, Dr. Sinclair climbed into the pod and ran a final systems check. Damn, she needed a cigarette. “Three...two...one…” Before the world turned upside down and she was blinded with the electric blue and neon green hues of time itself, Dr. Sinclair briefly wondered if she could stop herself from developing a smoking habit if she just abstained from sucking her thumb for the next thirty minutes or so. “Ha-ppy birth-day dear El-la! Ha-ppy birth-day toooooooo yoooooooou!” The flash dimmed and Ella rubbed her eyes while a place and time far removed from her plain sterile laboratory rushed into her missing senses. “D’awwwwww!” She heard a familiar, almost forgotten scratchy voice. “Looks like somebody’s all tuckered out already.” “What did you expect?” Ella’s grandmother said. “She just turned one. All this attention is a lot at this age.” “Her? I was talking about me,” Ella’s grandfather joked. Grammy?! Grampy?! Her mother’s parents- Grammy and Grampy- had been dead for years relative to Ella’s experience. First Grammy over a decade ago when Ella was still in high school. Grampy died a few years later, fallen to pieces and unable to take care of himself without his wife’s gentle reminders. She’d just been finishing her doctoral thesis when the news reached her. Here they were, literally right in front of her eyes, sitting on the loveseat and eating rainbow frosted chocolate cake. Across from them were her father’s parents, Nana and Pop-Pop. They weren’t dead yet, but they were younger than Ella could ever remember seeing them. Imagining Pop Pop with hair or Nana with dark locks had been more of a thought experiment growing up. This more than anything else, proved her right. It’d worked! It’d really worked! She’d gone back in time! Ella started bouncing up and down in her highchair, a giant beaming smile spreading on her face as her bottom crinkled beneath and bare feet kicked out in exhilaration. “Looks like you spoke too soon, Frank.” Pop Pop said between bites of cake. “Birthday girl just got her second wind.” Second wind didn’t begin to describe the amount of exhilaration flooding little Ella’s system. The baby girl was so excited she could…! She could…! She did. The big birthday girl barely noticed how her diaper went from dry to damp. It was just that absorbent, but clever girl that she was, she did know that it had something to do with how excited she was, and how her muscles between her legs relaxed. That’s how it had always been. She was such a clever girl! The light squishy feeling when she bounced made her giggle even more and she clapped her hands with glee. “Here’s cake for the birthday girl!” A younger, fitter version of her mother said, sliding an entire plate of rainbow frosted cake onto the tray. It wasn’t sliced, but instead it’s own miniaturized cake. Smash cake. No silverware provided. Ella was going to have to eat it with her bare hands. When she got back, Ella promised herself to shove her mother’s physique in her face. She had totally lost the baby weight by Ella’s first birthday, and now Ella had the memories to prove it! Bare feet swung back and forth, and the time traveling scientist wriggled in her highchair. With both hands she plunged wrist deep into the cake. The first mouthful was for sustenance and enjoyment. The second one was for sensory and for show. Her diaper got a little bit wetter. The cake was so delicious and moist that she was now delightfully squishing from her top to her bottom. Another delayed twitch beneath her added an exclamation point to the thought. “I wish I could get that excited by cake,” Daddy said, taking a bite of his own. “Cake’s not why she’s smiling,” Nana said, “She just peed.” Mommy reached under the tray, and slipped two fingers past the leg cuffs of Ella’s diaper. “Wow,” she laughed. “You’re right! Just a little wet, but yeah. How’d you know?” “Body language,” Nana said. “You change five sets of diapers, two of ‘em twins, you start to notice things.” Ella’s laughter sent crumbs sailing through the air. She looked down past her naked breasts towards what was left of the smash cake and went in even though she hadn’t finished swallowing the first two handfuls. Her…? Naked…? Breasts…? Dr. Ella Sinclair hesitated as she came back to herself. “Don’t tell me she’s pooping now,” her father groaned. “Nope,” Nana answered. “That ain’t it. She’s just thinkin’.” Slowly, she chewed and swallowed the cake and blocked out the conversations and comments going on about what she was doing in her pants. Mouth closed, Ella finished chewing and swallowing, using it as an opportunity to exhale and take stock of the situation. The sheer exhilaration of success; it had been overwhelming! The sensory input, so vivid! The complete lack of embarrassment or shame on any level whatsoever! She had felt infinitely herself, not at all babyish...but babies didn’t feel babyish either. They just were. Dr. Sinclair had been a cake, ingredients carefully measured and prepped and baked with the heat of the passage of time. Baby Ella had been ice cream with mostly the same ingredients, just prepped differently. Now, Dr. Ella Sinclair was experiencing both truths at the same time. She wasn’t experiencing cake ala mode, but instead was a kind of ice cream cake with all the bits and pieces smashed in and mixed together. A cake McFlurry Theory confirmed. Probably still a good thing that one-year-old her wouldn’t remember this. It had been the sight of her own breasts and the reminder from Diedre that had settled her back into place. Her present day mind, unable or unwilling to fully comprehend riding the temporal wave back along her own personal timeline, was modifying her perception of herself. The highchair in the middle of her old living room wasn’t actually oversized. Nor was the wet diaper she was sitting in big enough to fit around her hips. More accurately, her hips weren’t actually all that big. Nor did her one year old body actually have breasts. But her present day mind was pushing certain preconceptions through; like an injured athlete dreaming about playing and waking up sore. What did that mean for her hair? “Oh oh oh!” her mother darted with near super human speed. “Not in your hair, baby, not in your hair!” Ella sat in her highchair, stunned, while Mommy...er...her mother, started taking a baby wipe to her fingers. She’d barely been thinking about touching her head when her body started doing it on its own. Even with her adult mind, her one year old body didn’t have much in the way of a filter or impulse control. She waited until her hands were clean before feeling the Pebbles Flintstone top knot in her hair. “If cake’s the worst thing that ends up in our little girl’s hair, I think we’ve done a pretty okay job,” her father said. That got a dry perverted chuckle from Grampy. “See? Frank knows how boys can be.” “Phil!” Nana said. “This is a one-year old’s birthday party! Why would you even say that?” “What?” her father said. “Better now when she won’t remember it!” “Wow!” Ella said. “Rude!” Her assembled relatives from yesteryear all stopped and stared directly out of her. “Did she just say, ‘rude?” Grammy asked. Too late, Ella realized she might have made a mistake in speaking up. Dad just threw back his head and slapped his knee. “That’s my girl!” he laughed. “Smart as a whip!” “Well she didn’t get it from you, then.” Mom said. More wipes found their way to Ella’s face and chest. “You may want to be careful from now on, Phil.” Miraculously, she boosted up Ella onto her hip, needing only one hand to support her bottom. “This might mean she’s advanced for her age. No more swearing around the B-A-B-Y.” “Fine fine,” Dad crossed his arms. “From now on I’ll only spell the curse words, not say them out loud.” Both sets of grandparents were glaring disapprovingly at him. “Fine, no more swearing.” Then he added, “We should probably start saving for a college fund while we’re at it.” “I think for now,” Mom said. “The only thing we need to worry about is dry Pampers and a nap.” Ella let out a yawn. Whether or not she had the mind of an adult or not, she still had the limitations and needs of a baby’s body. A little bit of sugar and excitement went a long way towards a crash. “Damnit…” she whispered, her eyes beginning to droop even as she was toted around her old house. How was she going to convincingly prove she time traveled instead of just hallucinated all this? She’d have to do that next time, she supposed. She hadn't whispered as quietly as she'd thought. “That was NOT me!” Dad said. “We’ll talk later,” Mom said. She wasted no further time in taking the one-year-old back to her nursery. ******************************************************************************************* “Dr. Sinclair,” Diedre whispered. “Dr. Sinclair? Ella? Wake up, sweety. It’s time to come back to the present.” No longer in the chrono-capsule, Ella woke up on a gurney, staring up at bright lights. “Hmm?” “There she is,” Diedre chirped. “There’s my big smart science girl! You gave me quite a scare, there!” “Sorry,” Ella yawned. “I was having a nap in the past. My past body gave out on me.” She sat up, hearing the crinkle of her chrononaut suit. “I’m just glad you’re back, hunny bunny.” Diedre cooed. She offered her hand to the doctor. “Here. Let’s get you sorted out.” Ella took it and sat up. “Steady now. Steady. Easy does it. That’s a good girl!” Bowlegged, Ella stood with her feet more than shoulder width apart. “Oops. Somebody’s a wobble butt!” Diedre laughed. “Come on! This way!” Following her assistant out of the lab, Ella took in her surroundings. She had the strangest feeling of not-quite deja vu. She didn’t feel like she was waking up from a nap or any other kind of natural sleep. It was closer to the feeling of regaining consciousness after anesthesia. Except that didn’t quite fit the bill, either. Emotionally, and intellectually, the closest parallel Ella could draw was turning on a video game that she hadn’t played in a long time, loading up a save file, and refamiliarizing herself with the saved game’s objectives. It wasn’t shock and revelation. Nor was it a proper memory. More like one giant, ‘Oh yeah’. The walls just outside her lab were painted murals of grassy hills and rainbows instead of sterile white. Ella had always liked pleasant colors and happy pictures. Oh yeah. Diedre opened the door to Ella’s quarters. Like always, it was plastered with her findings, theories, and fifth dimensional calculations. In place of holograms, desktop monitors, or just white boards, every bit of data was on pristine white printer paper, and drawn on with crayons. It was disorganized in a way so that no one but Ella knew what was actually useful information and what was toddlerish gibberish scribbled down. Some people thought the doodles of snakes and kitty cats on the back of some might indicate special importance. That was true, Ella remembered, but the important part was that those particular papers looked better with crayon drawings on them, nothing related to time travel. Oh yeah. “Hold still,” her assistant said. “We’ll get you into something more comfortable in just a second.” She unzipped the suit and slid the chrono-suit off of Ella’s shoulders. Gravity did the rest, sending the shell around her body crumbling to the floor like jammies on Christmas morning. “Step out,” Diedre Instructed. With a little help (the material always clung to her ankles for some reason) Ella did and got praised for it. “Good girl! So big!” As she did with most genuine praise, Ella fairly melted inside and gave her assistant a big warm hug even though she was almost naked. Diedre took the closeness as an opportunity to check the doctor’s diaper. “My, my!” she said. “Someone’s wet!” Ella had never been potty trained. Never went to school. She hadn’t needed it. She’d been a genius, walking, talking, and writing complex theorems since she was at least one year old. Oh yeah. “Up we go.” Like always Ella allowed her assistant to boost her up onto the changing table in Ella’s nursery. Bartholomew Ignacius Capernicus Smith - her stuffed ocelot- joined her and she held her buddy in her arms while her big person assistant worked at changing her diaper. Diedre took care of Ella now. Had for years. They were about the same age, but Ella had never grown up. Never needed to. She’d gotten older, and with it had come certain physical changes, but in terms of her lifestyle, she never really got much older than one. Oh yeah. “Somebody’s thinkin’ real hard.” her assistant teased. She worked quickly. The swollen sagging diaper had already been balled up with the used wipes and replaced with fresh padding and sweet smelling baby powder. Ella had never really learned anything in her entire life; she just always knew stuff for some reason. The results were incredibly lopsided, but they’d worked in her favor. “Yeah,” Ella sighed, putting Bartholomew Ignacius Capernicus Smith aside. “Just thinkin’ about stuff.” Her new diaper fastened on, she sat up as Diedre got out a nice, comfy lavender onesie and pulled it over Ella’s head. “Ya know.” She gingerly and thoughtfully sucked her fingers while Diedre snapped the two halves of her onesie over. She used her other hand to give the stuffed ocelot a cuddle. “Like time travel?” Diedre asked. Ella slid off the changing table. “Hmmm? Not really. Well...yeah...kinda.” On some level she was always thinking about time travel, about riding the temporal waves, going back and changing not only history, but herself, even if she never did. The only thing that changed about Ella ended up in the bottom of a pail when she was done with them. Unconsciously, she wiggled her hips, enjoying the simple and fresh contrast between her new underwear and comfy clothes as compared to what she’d just been stripped out of. She sat down on the floor and crawled. Today was probably going to be a crawling day. Sometimes, waddling around and walking was just too much trouble for Ella’s big preoccupied brain. “When did you go this time?” Diedre asked. On top of things, as always, the tow headed girl brought a cold baby bottle of apple juice. “Do you want me to do your hair up?” Ella took the bottle and sucked it down with both hands, getting so into the experience that she laid back and stared at the glow in the dark star stickers on the ceiling while she suckled. She’d almost forgotten that anyone was there in her nursery with her. “No thank you,” she said, a few moments later. “I’ll keep my hair down today. Was her hair down? She could have sworn that her hair was up in a pig-tail, except that was in the past. Oh yeah. Her caregiver had asked her another question. “Hmmm?” Ella said to no one in particular. “I went back to the beginning.” She finished draining the bottle. No sooner had she finished, than Diedre had swapped her bottle out for another one. “Gotta keep hydrated,” Diedre said. She started to walk away. Rubber nipple still in her mouth, Ella started whining and mewling. “Oh oh oh! Sorry, baby! Sorry!” Diedre went back and hunkered down next to her. She started patting and rubbing Ella’s back, half massaging Ella’s tensed up muscles, half stirring up the contents of her stomach. Within thirty seconds, Ella had let out a healthy belch. “Good girl!” She sat all the way down, and let the time traveler’s head rest in her lap. Ella moaned as Diedre started gently stroking her hair. “Better?” “Mmmhmmm.” “You really like going back to your first birthday, don’t you?” Diedre asked in that way that the big dumb people always used to indicate that they didn’t really want or expect an answer. Ella loved that tone. It made her feel so safe and smart and taken care of. Nothing expected of her and she just had to be her magnificent self. If she hadn’t just woken up from a nap, she would have been content to drift back off in the woman’s lap. “Kind of where it all began?” “Hmmm?” Ella cocked an eyebrow and looked up at the wonderful woman who took care of her between trips through the fifth dimension. “That’s when you had the idea for time travel, right? At your first birthday party?” Oh yeah. It had been. “Yeah,” Ella said. “I never thought of it that way, but yeah.” “What’s time travel, like?” Diedre asked. Like a lazy tiger after a full meal, Ella rolled off her caregiver’s lap and crawled for some paper. “I thought I already explained it to you,” Ella said. “Or maybe I went back and changed that.” Still on all fours, she shrugged. Big people were so weird, sometimes. “Maybe you did,” Diedre conceded. “But maybe it went over my head. My job is to keep you happy and dry. Everything else is just coincidence and osmosis.” “Fair enough.” Ella reached for some crayons. “Where’s the teal ones?” “I took them all away,” Diedre reminded the doctor. “You tried to eat them all last week, remember?” Oh yeah. Ella was feeling particularly mischievous. Mischief and science went hand in hand she found. “Well, I’m gonna need teal if I’m going to explain this properly. And some marbles….” “Ella…” her caregiver warned. “No ma’am, little miss. You may be my boss, but I can still put you in the corner if you’re getting fussy or acting up.” The babied time traveler sighed “Fine.” She settled for green, though green wasn’t nearly as good. Tasted too much like vegetable wax. “So how does this work, again?” “Tickles.” Ella harumphed. “Fine, fine,” Diedre laughed. “I’ll give you plenty of tickles. But first show me your big girl science brain.” Ella started doodling on her paper. “So I travel back along my own personal timeline,” she explained for what might literally be the umpteenth bajillion time- being a super genius she might actually be one of the few people who could actually count that high. “And when I jump back, who I am now mixes with who I was then, while my conscious mind in the present kind of pilots and takes over my past body and lets me fix things or warn people.” The diagram was starting to look less and less like a linear graph and more and more like a green wiener dog. Green was a neat color for a wiener dog. “Then when time is up in the present, I ride the temporal wave back here, you change me out of my work clothes, and we get to play the rest of the day.” “Didn’t you say something about seeing yourself different in the past or something?” Aha! She had explained this to Diedre before! “Kinda. My residual self image imprints on my mind and I see myself as I do now instead of how I was then.” From the look on Diedre’s face, she wasn’t getting it. “So like, if you went back to yourself in Kindergarten, you’d see your big people body, but you’d be dressed like a Kindergartener.” “But you’ve always been in diapers and onesies and stuff,” Diedre said. “So how can you tell when you’re in the past?” Ella finished coloring in the doggy and started chewing on her hair. Maybe she did want it up, now… “I don’t know. I just do. It’s like I’m made of cake and my past self is made of ice cream, and I go and mix it in.” Positively charmed, Diedre covered her mouth as she laughed. Ella thought it kind of sounded like a guinea pig’s happy squeak. “So my boss, who has prevented at least three national disasters, is just walking-talking ice cream cake?” “Technically,” Ella said, “I corrected the disasters, but I can see how from your point of view it was prevention.” When you could travel through time and warn the right people, hindsight was a literal super power. “Good thing you’ve been able to do all this stuff since you were super little,” Diedre said. Playfully she laid on her stomach so she could maintain eye contact with Ella. “If you just started showing everyone how smart you were today, my little ice cream cake, people might not listen to you.” “Yup.” Ella said. “So speaking of ice cream cake,” Diedre asked, “what happens when you come back to the present?” “It’s happening right now,” Ella said. She felt both right and wrong in saying that in the most profound of ways. Maybe it was gas. Diedre frowned, but didn’t seem particularly mad about it. “I guess what I mean to say is, you mix your present self with your past self when you ride the temporal wave. What happens when you ride it back? Do you get all the cake out of the ice cream? Or does some get left behind? Do you only bring back cake, or does some of the ice cream of who you used to be come back with you?” Ella stopped blinking. She had never thought of that before. Had she caused a causality loop of some sort? She’d been a genius the likes of which had never been seen ever since she was a baby. She’d skipped all forms of formal schooling and had advanced the progress of mankind to unprecedented heights. She also never grew out of diapers. Or stopped watching children’s cartoons. Or snuggling. Or eating crayons. Or playing pretend games that made no sense to anyone but her and the caregivers who humored her. She’d used the ice cream cake metaphor all her life to describe it to people who were just not otherwise imaginative enough to understand what the experience was like, but it had never felt that way to her. If ice cream was ‘baby’ and cake was ‘adult’, then all of Ella’s personal timeline from age one to present day was one big Baskin Robbins special. It was just how she was made. Or had she made it herself? What if Dr. Ella Sinclair had once been a brilliant but relatively normal person, and when she’d traveled back in time to when she was an infant a piece of that experience had been left behind in the past, and a piece of the past filled in the gaps? What if she created a self fulfilling prophecy, and had somehow meddled with her own personal timeline so that she invented time travel, but also never got a chance at a normal adult life? Ella felt a deep rumbling inside her, one made of doubt and existential crisis. All these years of never growing up and being pulled between the two extremes of giving the middle finger while having these infantile habits and needs...had she accidentally done this to herself? Finally, she let out a final belch and felt better. Nope. Not an existential crisis brought on by a causation paradox. It was just gas. “Ella?” Diedre said. “Baby, are you okay?” Before Ella could respond her caregiver got up and patted Ella’s bottom. “You’re fine; there…” she said. “Just thinkin’ hard,” Ella said. “Thinking of new ideas and possibilities.” “Like how to use temporal waves to travel to your own personal future?” “More like how to fit as many marbles as possible into my mouth without swallowing.” Being a time traveler, Ella already had had several decades worth of being not surprised. Why would she want to double that on herself? She knew enough of the past to be more than happy here. “You are not getting marbles, baby girl!” Diedre corrected her. “What you are getting…” she paused dramatically, “is…” the fingers of her hand went stiff and crooked, resembling.a dragon’s claw or a spider’s legs. “TICKLES!” “NOOOOOOO!” Ella shrieked while the big person descended on her, tickling her mercilessly. Ella laughed and writhed on the ground, kicking uselessly in the air, enjoying herself but not wanting to hurt her sweet sitter. “No, no, no, no! NOOOO!” What Ella had really meant, though, was ‘yes!’. Oh yeah. (The End)