---

Every now and then, I wonder. I wonder if the gods I work for and with are really gods or something else. I wonder why they created Ovid. I wonder why they transform some people into other people and follow their new lives very closely while others they seem to forget before their victims ever stagger out of the courtroom. I wonder what they know of the future that we mortals can only guess at. But most of all, I wonder: why me? Why was I chosen to be the assistant to The Judge, better known to those outside Ovid as the god Jupiter?

The problem with wondering about all of that is that most of the time, I’m too busy doing the job I’m paid for or looking after my family, so I don’t have time to wonder often. I don’t really regret that, though. Being a woman has turned out to be more rewarding than I would have ever dreamed if I hadn’t been transformed into one.

“You look deep in thought.”

I looked up from my desk at the smiling face of Susan Jager, my best friend in Ovid. “Sorry,” I said. “I was just wondering.”

“About Ovid?”

“Of course.” It was a frequent discussion between the two of us. We probably knew more about Ovid and its gods than any other mortals, and yet we knew very little. Most of it didn’t bother us much since, as I said, we had the more mundane tasks of job and family to contend with. Still, we often discussed it, primarily because there was one facet of the gods that concerned us–namely, their preoccupation with our children.

Both Susan and I had noticed how the gods treated her new son and my new daughter as if they were very important. We doubted if it was just because of our relationship with the gods. Even The Judge–a being who seemed to have little patience with children–seemed enraptured by our children. Both Susan and I were beginning to suspect that the fact that they were both born within hours of each other was deeper than just a coincidence.

“Hello ladies!”

The voice and appearance changed often, but we always knew Diana from her cheerful greetings. Today, she had a very Mediterranean appearance, with olive skin, aquiline nose, and coal black hair. Given the origin of legends of the gods, I suspected this lovely but somewhat earthy version of Diana was close to her original appearance–assuming of course that the gods really had a human appearance at all.

She was dressed in her usual sexy attire, albeit professional. Like Susan and me, she wore a business suit, but unlike our conservative gray suits, hers was a bright lemon yellow, and unlike the ‘sensible’ two-inch heels we wore, she sported matching yellow pumps with a full four-inch heel.

“Got time to update me on the Pearsons?” she asked. I wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t often we got celebrities in Ovid, although I was young enough that I didn’t really consider them such. They were just another washed-up band relegated to the ‘Golden Oldies’ on rock stations around the country. I suppose when you’ve lived as long as the gods have, the band was as new as this morning.

“Sure,” I replied. “How about you Susan?”

“Well, I was there for quite a bit of it, but sure, why not?”

“No time like the present,” I shrugged as I fell into my trance...

Nobody had to tell me what Hell was all about–I was already there. Hell was cruising down a two-lane Oklahoma highway on the hottest Indian Summer day in fifty years (or so the locals were sure to tell us) driving a rundown Plymouth van with an air conditioner that didn’t work worth shit. Oh, and just to make it even more hellish, let’s add a radio that keeps shorting out, a cloud of cigarette smoke, and the company of my three best friends who I had come to hate with all my might.

“Turn that up!” Gordy called from the back seat. “That’s ‘What a Face’.”

“I know it’s ‘What a Face’,” Boop growled in her husky voice. “You think I don’t recognize my own voice?”

I suppose I could have pointed out that her voice had changed quite a bit since we had made that recording. Of course, it was so old it had been originally on vinyl. God, Boop had a voice in those days. No wonder we were able to pack them in on the What a Face Tour. Now though, she made Stevie Nicks sound like a soprano. No wonder we were stuck with gigs in places like East Bumfuck, Oklahoma.

“So turn it up!” Gordy insisted, hitting the back of her seat. Shit. I wished he wouldn’t do that. The fucking van was held together with superglue as it was. Besides, if Gordy hurt his hand on the back of the seat, we’d be short a bass guitarist for our evening performance. Things were tight enough for us as it was without losing this gig. I mean, it was a shitty gig, but it was the only gig we had.

Boop snorted but she turned up the radio. Actually, I was glad she did. The riff just coming up was one of the best ones I ever did. Jeez, I could play guitar in those days, I thought to myself. I could still outplay a lot of the new kids coming up, but not like I played in ’78.

“I figure we’re about an hour out of Muskogee,” I announced from behind the wheel as the song faded away. “You’d better wake up Jess.”

“You figure?” Gordy asked, making no move to wake Jess. Boop snorted again and lit another one of her fucking lung wasters. “You mean you don’t know?”

“This road should get us there,” I said, faking confidence.

“Jeez, Grant, you’re a typical male,” Boop observed. “Wouldn’t check a fucking map or ask for directions if your life depended on it.”

“If you remember, Jess threw the map out an hour ago,” I snapped. Yeah, Jess was high on something. I didn’t have any idea what it was. He had more pills than a fucking Walgreen’s. I don’t think even Jess knew what he had taken–assuming he was even the slightest bit lucent. Jess had a bad habit of copping pills from fans without knowing what they were. It was no small miracle that he hadn’t managed to fry his brain. Maybe he had. Nothing Jess had said or done for the last few years had made any sense.

But God, could he play the drums! I had seen him so cooked he could barely sit up in his chair, but when the stage lights came on, it was as if someone had tripped a switch on him as well. He didn’t just play the drums; he became the drums, beating out a rhythm that would have made a deaf man start tapping his feet. Of course, everything he played he had been playing for twenty years. We didn’t play anything new.

“Fuckin’ A,” Jess mumbled at the sound of his name. It was his favorite expression and he mumbled it a lot.

“Will he be okay for tonight’s gig?” I asked Gordy.

Gordy was about the most normal member of the band. Tall, lanky, his thinning blonde hair still as long as it was twenty years earlier, he always took care of Jess, sort of like a big brother. Sure, he smoked, drank and partied like the rest of us, but with Gordy, it seemed sometimes as if he did it just to be part of the group. I suppose we were his family in a way. An only child, he had lost his parents while we were all in college together, so in a way, we were the only family he had–and so Jess ended up being treated like his little brother in spite of the fact that he was really two years older than Gordy.

“He’ll be okay,” Gordy said confidently, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke in my direction as he spoke.

That was all I needed to hear. Gordy would walk Jess around, throw water in his face, slap him silly or do whatever else was needed to get Jess ready to play. Gordy was a good older brother–or I thought he was. I had never had any siblings so I couldn’t tell. I had been raised by an alcoholic mother who had been deserted by an alcoholic father right after I was born. She was gone now and I didn’t miss her. Come to think of it, I didn’t miss anybody.

I opened my window to let in the warm Oklahoma air.

“What the fuck did you do that for?” Boop asked crossly.

“Because when you and Gordy both have a cigarette going, the air conditioner can’t clear the air quickly enough,” I explained more calmly than I felt. “My eyes were stinging.”

“Nothing worse than an ex-smoker,” Boop mumbled as she scooted down in her seat. At least she didn’t say anything. I gave a quick sidelong glance at Boop. Jeez, she was nice looking in spite of approaching forty-five. Oh, her skin had that sallow look a lot of smokers get, but her breasts were still high and firm inside her black halter top. And her waist was slim and trim, encased in designer jeans.

She fussed with her short dark hair, and as I looked at it, I could see that she needed to touch it up. Gray was peeking through here and there, and nobody expects to see a sexy-at-middle-age rock singer with gray hair. She had kept it short all of her adult life, and that had become a trademark and partially accounted for her unfortunate nickname. Her real name was Elizabeth McCarthy and her parents called her Betty. Then right after our first gig in college, Jess had looked her over in her short flapper-style dress and short hair and announced that she looked like a Betty all right–Betty Boop. By the time we were well known, the trades picked up on the nickname and she had been stuck with it ever since.

Looking at Boop always made me a little sad. I’d always start thinking about what might have been. Back when the band got started–before anyone had ever heard of Interossiter–she and I had been close–real close. But while she really did it for me, apparently I didn’t do it for her. She found other interests and I didn’t fit in. Now we just had two things in common–the band and the fact that we both liked girls.

“We’re gonna miss the gig,” Boop mumbled.

“We won’t miss it,” I assured her. “There’s a town up ahead. I’ll stop and you can ask for directions.”

“Why me?” Boop asked.

I gave her the patented Grant Douglas grin–the grin that had led a steady procession of girls to my bed and the grin that always annoyed Boop. “Because men don’t ask for directions, remember?”

Gordy snickered–which pissed Boop off even more.

Usually, we weren’t quite so tough on each other, but our experience just a few hours before had jangled us enough that the unspoken truce we had observed for the past couple of days had broken down. I suppose anyone nearly encountering a tornado on the Oklahoma plains would have been pretty jangled even if they weren’t in our band. We all thought we’d bought the farm. The huge funnel was so close to us that the roar of the storm caused our van to vibrate. We had pulled over to the side of the road to avoid damage from the hail that accompanied the storm. The funnel caught us completely by surprise. Fortunately, at the last minute it pulled back up into the sky and veered away from us, but it had left us all pretty shaken.

Who would have thought, I mused as we came closer to the unknown town, that we would end up like this? Back at Arizona State, we had been close–real close. All of us were in the same dorm together as freshmen. At first, we were just casual acquaintances, eating and sharing stories about our classmates and our professors. But as we got to know each other better, we found that we had one big thing in common–music.

Gordy and I had both been in bands in our respective high schools. Boop–and she was just Betty back then–was a small town girl with a voice that had gotten her the lead in all the high school musicals. Jess was already a pro, sitting in as a drummer in three or four recording sessions back home in San Diego. One thing led to another, and by the second semester of our freshman year, Interossiter had formed.

The band name had been Gordy’s idea. Even back in the late seventies, naming a band was a little like naming a racehorse. You needed to find a name no one else had used (at least popularly) and one that would be remembered by your fans. Gordy came up with the name. He was a big science fiction fan, and the name cropped up in the movie This Island Earth. An Interossiter was a device used by an alien race to communicate. It had a screen like an inverted triangle, so that became our logo.

We stayed around campus the summer after our freshman year, sweating through the ungodly Arizona summer but honing our act. We were good–very good. We got plenty of gigs but nothing really big. Mostly, we played small, loud clubs where we did our versions of songs made popular by the Beatles, the Stones, and the Doors. You might say we were early retro.

Then as our sophomore year began, two things happened. First, I met a girl I really liked. She started showing up at all of our gigs. She was cute and blonde, and her eyes danced to the rhythm of our music. Whenever I looked down at her, she seemed to inspire me to play better. Her name was Eunice. It’s funny, but I couldn’t think of her last name, and the more I thought about it, I wasn’t sure if I ever did know it. Maybe it was because she had such an unusual, old-fashioned first name. In any case, we saw a lot of each other that semester.

The other thing that happened is that my music caught fire. No, I don’t just mean the way I played. Like all musicians, I tried my best to compose as well as play, but I had limited talents when it came to writing original music. Everything I wrote seemed trite. Even when the other members of the band heard my works, they’d tell me it was good and then tell me what other song it sounded like.

Then came What a Face. I know; it’s a stupid name for a song. One music critic later said “Grant Douglas should get a pie in the face for making us listen to What a Face.” But he was in a very small minority. To make a long story short, we got noticed–big time. One day we’re playing little clubs in Tempe and the next day we’re on the front page of Billboard. MCA signed us, and Interossiter was big stuff.

To be honest, all the songs on our first album, titled simply Interossiter, were inspired by Eunice. When I was with her, my creative juices just tended to flow. Tunes rolled through my head, echoing within my mind, demanding to be written down. And the words... they weren’t just lyrics; they were poetry. Even people who hated rock music clamored to get copies of the lyrics. They appeared in poetry collections and slick paper magazines along with the works of prize-winning poets.

We dropped out of school right after our first album came out. There was really no other choice. After all, MCA wanted us on the tour. The 1979 What a Face Tour drew as many people as ELO’s Out of the Blue Tour. No college degree was going to make us rich like the tour would. The only thing I regretted was that Eunice and I broke up, but riches called.

And we were rich–for a little while. More money was coming in than any of us–or all of us for that matter–had ever seen in our lives. There was plenty of money for palatial houses, magnificent cars, women, and every electronic toy known to mankind. Fans bought our first album in droves; the store couldn’t keep the album in stock. We were on the cover of magazines. Product endorsements rolled in. Life was good.

Someone once said that all good things must come to an end. I suppose we all knew that deep in our hearts, but none of us realized how quickly it could come to an end. In the recording business, it’s called sophomore slump. It refers to a second album that doesn’t measure up to the first. Ours wasn’t just a slump; it was an out-of-control nosedive.

This is how it happened. Eunice and I had broken up the minute the big checks started coming in. After all, what did I need with one cute little blonde when thousands were pleading with me by mail, phone and in person to have my baby? And as I realized all too late, Eunice was my inspiration. All I had to do was hold her hand and the music began to play. Now, my hand was empty and there was only silence.

But that didn’t stop me. Our fans were waiting for our next album. It came out in 1981 and to be kind, it was trash. I think we all knew it when we made it, but we thought Interossiter on the album cover would be enough to carry the day. But it wasn’t.

What followed were years of trying to climb back on that pinnacle we had once achieved. But it wasn’t to be. The second tour was cancelled after dismal results in three cities. Plans for a third album were scrapped. The phone stopped ringing.

No matter though, we thought we’d take our winnings and retire. So after five mediocre years of trying to create another What a Face, the band broke up. Well, most of it broke up. Boop (and she was now and forever known as Boop) and I had become an item. But even that didn’t last long. As I said before, we found that we really only had two things in common–our music and the fact that we both liked girls.

I looked over at Boop and tried to remember the good times we had together before she decided to take men off her diet. We had been hell in bed together, but that wasn’t enough for either of us in the long run. To be honest, I started cheating on her, seeing other girls. Imagine my surprise when I came back to the place we shared and found out she was seeing other girls, too.

Then five long years ago, fate threw us back together. No, I take that back. It wasn’t fate; it was poverty. Here’s what happened. First of all, none of us knew squat about investing our money. Here we were, rich by most people’s standards, and it looked for a while as if Interossiter was going to earn more money every year than some third world nations. Of course, that was before our second album bombed. Anyhow, like a lot of bands, we found ourselves a business manager to invest our earnings for us. Unfortunately, also like a lot of bands, our business manager turned out to be a crook. By the time we all realized what had happened, there were no bills left on the money tree and Interossiter was washed up.

Still, we all had some assets left. After all, houses and cars and other fancy toys can be liquidated for cash. So each of us went our separate ways–usually after loudly telling each of the others to screw themselves. We cashed out and tried to get on with our lives. Unfortunately, none of us had ever gotten around to getting a college degree or learning a trade, and it seemed there wasn’t much call for washed-up rock stars in the corporate world any more than there was a call for them in the entertainment world.

I swallowed my pride first. I went back to singing and accompanying myself in small, smoky clubs. One by one, I got back in touch with the others and found out that their lives outside of music sucked as badly as mine did. Boop was waiting tables, Gordy was working as a disk jockey doing dance parties and the like, and Jess... Well, let’s just say that Jess had burned out so much of his brain that he wasn’t much good for anything except day labor. He was one of those guys who hang around the loading dock looking for enough manual work to get money for food and drugs.

Fortunately, there were enough aging Baby Boomers out there who remembered Interossiter that we could get gigs. And as shitty as our collective lifestyle was, we were all better off than we had been on our own. That was why we stayed together in spite of the fact that we didn’t really like each other anymore. We needed each other. There it was–in spite of the fact that we were all in hell, it was a more comfortable circle of the underworld than we would have been in on our own.

“Okay,” Boop said reading the roadside signs. “So where the hell is Ovid?”

“How should I know?” I growled. “Do I look like an Okie?”

She gave me a withering stare. “No, you look like an asshole.”

Gordy broke into his irritating laugh; I swear the guy sounded like a little girl giggling.

“Oklahoma...” Jess muttered. “We’re in Oklahoma.”

Well, there it was. Jess had made his one halfway lucid statement of the day.

“It doesn’t look very big,” Boop observed.

I really couldn’t reply to that. I was too busy driving to look around. All I could see was that the two-lane road ahead of me seemed to wind over a small hill then turn somewhat to the right where the usual collection of roadside businesses began. I had to admit that Boop was probably right. The town didn’t appear very big. But then again, many of the small farm towns in the Midwest didn’t appear very large. They were slowly dying as the farm economy they depended upon took less and less people. Besides, most of the younger residents could hardly wait to get out of the little burgs in the Farm Belt. They longed for the bright lights and good times of the cities, and I couldn’t say that I blamed them.

In our journeys from one gig to another, I had seen countless small towns. Mostly, we were just passing through. We hadn’t sunk so low as to take gigs playing at high school proms and summer park concerts, so the only reason we ever stopped in small towns was to get a bite to eat or ask for directions. Ovid would hopefully be large enough to provide us with both.

As we actually entered the town, I began to note something about Ovid that few other small towns enjoyed. There was an... orderliness to it. That’s the only way I can think of to put it. Ovid was clean and polished, like the back lot of a movie studio. Business buildings were neat and well-maintained. Trees and lawns looked neat and well-cared for. Even the streets looked as if they had been recently maintained, their blacktop and concrete surfaces striped and free of the usual cracks and potholes that seem to plague all towns regardless of size.

Boop was apparently thinking the same thing. “What is this, the governor’s home town? Since when do small towns look this prosperous?”

I grunted in agreement.

“I wonder if they have a Mickey D’s,” Gordy mused.

My stomach did a flip-flop just thinking about that. It was a running war between Gordy and me. He liked the fast food joints while I always tried to find a good little local place with a broader menu and a slice of homemade pie.

“Food,” Jess agreed, or at least I think he was agreeing.

“Directions first,” Boop demanded, pointing. “There’s a convenience store. Ask them for directions.”

“You ask,” I muttered, pulling in to the gas island in front of the store.

“Jeez, you’re serious about not wanting to ask for directions, aren’t you?”

“It’s not that,” I replied. “I need gas. I can be filling up while you ask.”

“Fine!” she snapped, opening the door the instant I stopped. I smiled as she stormed away. The fact of the matter is that I really didn’t like to ask for directions–she was right. Actually, I still had better than half a tank, plenty of gas to get us to Muskogee. Or at least I thought it was.

“I can use some more cigarettes anyway,” she called back, knowing how much her smoking bothered me.

The heat of a warm but fairly dry afternoon hit me as I got out to fill up the car. I normally hated the Midwest for the summer heat and humidity, but the temperature in Ovid didn’t seem too bad. Of course, it really wasn’t officially summer any more. But I knew from personal experience that just because it wasn’t officially summer didn’t mean much in this part of the country. That tornado we had spotted that very morning was proof of that.

Boop strode back to the car, an angry look on her face. Before I could ask her why, she told me, her arms folded over her breasts. “Can you believe it? They didn’t have any cigarettes.”

“All out?” I asked, surprised. The place wasn’t a name brand convenience store like Seven Eleven, but I couldn’t imagine that anyone would run the store so inefficiently that they would be out of one of their highest profit items.

“They don’t carry them,” she said to my surprise. “It turns out smoking is against some city ordinance.”

“Well, probably just in restaurants,” I offered, but she shook her head.

“No, the whole damned town doesn’t allow smoking.”

If she had said that booze was outlawed, I would have understood. This was, after all, the Bible Belt and there were still a lot of dry towns and counties. But cigarettes? Jeez, if the Californians ever heard of this place, they’d make it an honorary California town, I thought.

“Well, they’re not going to stop me,” she muttered, pulling a mostly-empty pack of smokes out of the car.

“Shit!” I screamed at her. “Don’t light that! Can’t you smell the gas fumes?”

She graced me with a particularly nasty frown, but she didn’t try to light up.

Changing the subject, I asked her, “So did you get directions?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

She motioned with her head at the young clerk behind the counter. “The fucking brain dead monkey in there was sort of vague. He acted like he’d never been out of the county–whatever county this is. He said something about taking the road out of town and keep on it until we reached the main highway.”

“Which direction?” I prompted. “And which highway?”

“He wasn’t sure.”

“That was a lot of help then.”

Now her hands were on her hips. “Well, genius, why don’t you ask him while you pay. Maybe one brain dead idiot can understand another.”

“Fuck you.”

“You wish.”

But as I paid for the gas, I began to understand Boop’s frustration. The kid behind the counter looked like he had escaped from junior high. But that wasn’t what bothered me the most. I swear the kid looked almost... transparent. No, that’s not right. I couldn’t exactly see through him. But it was almost as if he didn’t quite register on the eyes like he should have. But when he handed me back my credit card, his hand felt solid enough. I chalked it up to too many hours driving.

When I got back to the car, Boop was sitting in her seat with the door open to keep the car from getting too hot. She still looked angry, but there was something else about her as well–a look of confusion to put it bluntly.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her as I started the car and an anaemic stream of cool air flowed out of the air vents.

“Nothing.”

“No, tell me,” I said gently. Something was really upsetting her and it wasn’t just the cigarettes. I cursed myself for not noticing it sooner.

“Did you notice anything funny about that kid back there at the counter?”

My heart caught in my throat. “Like what?” I asked carefully.

“Like he was... not really... like...”

I decided to let her off the hook. “Like you could almost see through him?”

She looked at me strangely. “You saw it, too?”

“I figured it was just tired eyes or something like that,” I told her.

“Are you guys trying to fuck with my mind?” Gordy asked, practically forgotten in the back seat. “What the hell are you talking about anyway?”

“Never mind, Gordy,” I told him. “It must have just been a trick of the light or something.”

“Well, if you’re worried about your eyes being tired, let’s stop and eat,” Gordy suggested.

“Food,” Jess added.

I hadn’t forgotten Gordy’s earlier request to find a Mickey D’s, but fortunately, the town of Ovid seemed to have no representatives of any of the major franchises, which suited me just fine. “Maybe I’ll head down to the main drag and find someplace,” I suggested.

“You can eat fast food for once in your life,” Boop chided me. “There’s a place up ahead that looks okay.”

Rusty’s Burger Barn, the sign said. Another sign advertised ‘Rusty’s Best Burgers’ under a neon bull. The place was twenty years out of date and wouldn’t have attracted flies next to a new McDonald’s, but it looked clean and the cooking odors I was starting to pick up through the air conditioner smelled as if the grease wasn’t ten days old like it was in most old burger joints. My stomach turned at the thought of a burger. Well, maybe they had decent malts. So I pulled into a parking space right next to the front door.

“Food,” Jess said again, but this time it was part of a contented sigh.

Most of the lunch crowd must have already cleared out. Well, it was close to two, I realized, and in most small towns late lunches were frowned upon. There were only a couple of customers in the place–both about college age and both were studying as they drank their drinks. Two waitresses chatted behind the counter. Both of the girls looked to be about the same age as their patrons. Given the look of the place, I had half expected them to be dressed in those dopey old pink waitress dresses and tennis shoes. Okay, they were wearing sneakers I could see through the break in the counter, but short denim skirts and tank tops seemed to be the uniforms of the day. One was blonde and quite pretty, while the other was a cute but not exactly pretty redhead. But there was something else about the redhead...

Boop grabbed my arm. “Grant, do you see what I see?”

“I think so,” I replied. The redhead was like the kid at the convenience store. It was almost as if I could see through her.

“What’s the problem?” Gordy asked as we all were grouped just inside the door.

“Look at the redhead,” I told him.

He glanced at her. “Yeah, kind of cute, but not your type, Grant.”

Boop and I just looked at him. He shrugged. “Look, are we going to eat or what? I thought you guys were in a hurry to get to Muskogee.” He hurried ahead of us and picked out a booth, Jess right behind him.

“Should we ask Jess?” Boop whispered to me.

“Why?” I replied. “Jess is so out of it, I don’t think he knows what’s going on. He probably sees semitransparent people every day.”

Reluctantly, we joined them in the booth. I was a little relieved as the blonde came over to wait on us. “Hi guys, what...?” Her voice trailed off as she looked at us, her blue eyes growing wide. “Oh my God, you’re Grant Douglas!” she gasped.

I gave her a closer look. The girl–Gwen according to her nametag–looked to be no more than nineteen. I didn’t think anyone under the age of thirty even knew who I was.

“And you’re Boop McCarthy!” Boop flushed at her nickname. “And Gordy Maxwell. And Jess Conroy!” Gordy smiled at being recognized but Jess didn’t look up as he was too busy sprinkling salt on the back of his hand, observing it as if it were a critical scientific experiment. “Jeez... Interossiter!”

“I’m surprised you’ve heard of us,” I told her with one of those disarming grins.

“Are you kidding?” she gushed. “When I was in high school, you guys were my favorite band.”

“I’d guess you’d be more into something more current, like the Dave Mathews Band,” I told her. “After all, you’ve only been out of high school–what–a couple of years?”

She looked confused for a moment, then flushed herself. “Oh yeah... well, I mean, sure I like the current bands and all and... Hey, look, what can I get you guys?”

I looked at her puzzled as we ordered. She had an embarrassed, almost flustered air about her as if she had almost said something she shouldn’t have said. Once she had our order, she gave us another shy smile and bustled back to the kitchen.

“What was that all about?” Boop said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and offering one to Gordy. “She acts like she said something wrong.” Boop pulled her lighter out and flicked it. It didn’t even spark. “Shit!”

“Try mine,” Gordy said, pulling a Bic lighter out of his pocket. He flicked it and got the same result. “Crap!” he muttered. “That’s a brand-new lighter.”

“So was mine,” Boop told him. Then she yelled out at the girls behind the counter, “Hey anybody got a light?”

“Sorry!” they both said in unison.

“Shit!” Boop growled again.

I was actually happy about it. It would be the first meal I had shared with them in a long time where I didn’t have to gasp for clean air.

And maybe it was just the clean air, or maybe it was the quality of the food, or perhaps it was both, but in any case, I enjoyed that lunch more than any I had eaten in weeks. My stomach had been bothering me for a couple of months–an ulcer, I suspected. So I had tried to avoid fast food whenever I could. The meal at Rusty’s didn’t taste like fast food, though. The BLT I had ordered tasted crisp and flavorful, unlike the ones I had eaten in recent years. The bread was so tasty it made the toast taste almost sweet, and I had no doubt that the mayo had never come from a jar. As for the lettuce and tomato, it reminded me of the fresh-picked kind I had enjoyed years before on my grandparents’ farm. And the bacon was sugar-cured and cooked to perfection.

They say smells, sounds and taste can invoke the past more than sights, I mused as I washed a bite of sandwich down with a big gulp of the vanilla malt I had ordered. If so, then sitting there in Rusty’s was like a trip back to my childhood, accompanying my grandfather into town for a lunch at a variety store lunch counter–the kind that had disappeared from the cities where I had been raised long before I was out of diapers.

The rest of the group had mellowed out when the food had arrived as well. Boop was ravaging a chicken sandwich like starving raptor, and Gordy had made a Double Rusty Burger (with cheese) disappear and was seriously thinking about ordering another. Even Jess seemed happy, sucking down a plate of French fries. I mean that literally. Surely he had to be chewing them, but it didn’t look like it.

“Are you guys going to be playing around here?” Gwen asked with excitement as she brought us our bill.

“We’ll be playing in Muskogee,” I told her, grabbing the bill.

Her face fell. “Oh, darn!”

“It can’t be that far,” I told her. “What is it, an hour or so from here?” Notice my subtle way of asking for directions?

“About that,” she agreed. “But I’m not allowed to go there.”

That surprised me. Gwen looked to be about college age and there was no wedding ring on her finger. I would have thought an unattached girl her age wouldn’t need permission to drive an hour away. “So who’s stopping you? Your parents?”

“No,” she laughed. “I live on campus.”

“Then who’s stopping you?” I repeated.

Her smile disappeared. “That gets kind of... complicated.”

I frowned at that. It sounded as if Gwen had a possessive boyfriend or something. I remembered a guy my cousin dated who was like that–telling her what she could and couldn’t do. She must have figured out what I was thinking, because she added, “No it’s not like that. It’s...”

Suddenly, her expression changed, as if she had had a shocking thought. “Oh boy, I just... Look, you guys need to hurry up and get on the road. You need to get out of town.”

“Town...” Jess said.

I gave her a confused smile. “But I thought Muskogee was only an hour away. I doubt if the van with our equipment is even there yet.”

“It won’t be there at all if you don’t hurry,” she told me, only adding to my confusion. “Please... I really like your music. I’d hate to... I mean... Just go!”

I flipped a few bills out of my wallet, more than enough to handle the tab and a nice tip. Thrusting it into her hand, I said nothing. She seemed to be on the verge of crying.

“Come on, guys, we need to go.”

“Go...” Jess mumbled.

“What the fuck was all that about?” Boop asked once we were all back in the car. She pushed the lighter in and waited impatiently for it to heat up.

“Beats the shit out of me,” I replied, checking around for a sign that might tell me in which direction Muskogee lay. “Maybe she’s on the same shit Jess is taking.”

“Fucking lighter!” Boop had her fingers on the business end of the van’s lighter. Cold gray metal shone instead of the bright orange signature of a working lighter.

“Maybe now is a good time to give up smoking,” I suggested with no little sarcasm.

“You wish!”

“Ghost.”

“What?” we all said, looking at Jess who had just mumbled the word. Jess managed to nod his head. Following his nod, we watched as a couple who looked to be in their twenties got out of a nearby car parked just down from ours and headed into Rusty’s. Now I’ll admit that I might have been mistaken about the clerk in the convenience store or the redheaded waitress in Rusty’s, but this couple was walking in broad daylight... and they were almost transparent. Again, I couldn’t exactly see through them, but it was as if they were somehow less than solid. It was as if I could visualize what was behind them without really seeing it.

“Ghost,” Jess mumbled again.

“What the hell is he talking about?” Gordy asked.

“It’s that couple,” Boop told him. “Can’t you see anything wrong with them?”

Gordy shrugged. “What? She’s a little young for him? What exactly am I supposed to see?”

Neither of us answered. There wasn’t really much we could say, I suppose. I just got the sudden feeling that the waitress back inside Rusty’s had been doing us a big favor when she told us to get out of town. There was something very, very wrong about Ovid, Oklahoma, and I wasn’t in a mood to find out what that was.

I punched the accelerator and felt a little skid as we hit some gravel on the way out of the parking lot. The worn tires shuddered as they tried to catch hold of the pavement of the street.

“What’s the hurry?” Boop asked. I didn’t have to look at her face to hear the worry in her voice.

“We need to get out of here.”

“Grant, you’re scaring me!” Gordy called out nervously as the van shuddered as I got back into the traffic lane.

“Shut up, Gordy!” I didn’t want to discuss anything until all of Ovid was in my rear-view mirror. It was funny how quickly it all hit me. I guess the transparent couple was just the final straw. Already that day I had narrowly avoided being sucked up in a tornado, I had seen ghostly people all over the place, and I had been warned by a waitress (and a fan who seemed far too young to be one of our fans) that we needed to get out of town–fast. Put it all together, along with Boop’s bitching and everyone else in the van being high on nicotine or drugs and I had had just about all I could take.

And it wasn’t over yet.

My attempt to get out of Ovid had just met with disaster. The sudden whoop of a police siren, coupled with the sight of flashing red and blue lights, told me that if my day hadn’t already been fucked to the limit, it was about to be.

“Local fuzz,” Gordy told me, looking back over his shoulder. “Maybe you can just pay him and we can get out of here.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. But somehow, I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be all that simple. If I had known then how right that feeling was, I might have tried to make a run for it.

I had about five hundred in cash on me. That may seem like a lot for the de facto leader of a has-been band to be carrying around, but there it was. Slipping your setup guy a twenty here and there can make all the difference in getting things to go smoothly. Besides, merchants in the towns we usually played don’t like to take anything but cash from a forty-something guy with his hair too long wearing a Motley Crue t-shirt. So I had an image to maintain, so what?

Unfortunately, that image wasn’t going to be much of a help to me right at that moment. Small town cops figure most guys like me are trouble. I just hoped I could get by with slipping him a fifty and a promise to get out of town by the closest available route.

I must have been deep in thought assessing my options, for as I sat there in the van I had carefully pulled over to the curb, I hadn’t even heard the cop get out of his cruiser. The next thing I knew, he was standing right next to the window I had at least remembered to roll down. He was tall–well over six feet–and looked as if he should be on a recruiting poster for the State Police rather than wasting his time in Tank Town, USA. He was trim and looked as if he could run a marathon without breathing hard. His gray-blue uniform shirt was pressed military style with sharp creases down the front. The mirrored sunglasses he wore were almost polished, reflecting the afternoon sun into my eyes.

“Is there something wrong, Officer?” I asked with the age-old greeting all traffic offenders know so well.

“You left that parking lot at Rusty’s a little fast,” the officer said blandly. So that’s the way it was, I thought. Ovid was one of those towns where if they couldn’t catch you speeding, they’d stop you on some chicken shit charge just to soak a few bucks out of you.

“Sorry,” I said obsequiously. It never hurt to toady up to a cop–especially a crooked one. “We were on our way to Muskogee for a gig–you know, a band performance–and I may have been in a little bit of a hurry. Is there something I can do to make this right?” The something I was referring to, of course, was a greenish piece of paper bearing the picture of a dead president.

“Yes, there is something you can do,” he told me blandly. That was no surprise. What he said next was. “You can follow me over to City Hall to see The Judge.”

“Now wait a minute!” I interjected, losing my cool at the rebuff of my bribe. “We haven’t got time for that. We...”

“Yes, I know,” he broke in. “You have a gig.”

From most people, that would have been a sarcastic comment. The officer–Officer Mercer, according to the silver nametag on his shirt–seemed to be incapable of sarcasm, though. With a sigh, I realized that he was all business, and meeting our date with a small town magistrate was the only way we were ever going to get back on the road. “Okay,” I finally replied. “Lead on.”

“I’m calling Jens,” Boop announced, pulling a cell phone from the canvas bag she used as a purse cum carryall. Jens was our agent such as it was. If we wanted to blame anyone–besides ourselves–for getting gigs in the backwater of the Bible Belt, Jens was our man. From his rundown office in LA, he kept us busy but never exactly prosperous. He wasn’t going to be happy when he found out we’d blown the opening of the Muskogee gig. After all, he got fifteen per cent of our take, and fifteen percent of nothing was still nothing.

“Damn!” Boop growled, throwing the phone back into the bag. “No service.”

“Cell phones don’t work everywhere,” I reminded her as I followed the cruiser toward what passed for a business district in Ovid.

“Cell phones don’t work anywhere where we do,” she muttered. “It fucking serves Jens right. He books us out here in the middle of Cowpie, Texas...”

“Oklahoma,” I corrected.

“Okay, Cowpie, Oklahoma. Anyhow, if he’s gonna book us in these burgs he’s gonna have to know we can’t always reach him when there’s trouble.”

“Maybe we can call from the court after we see this judge,” I suggested, wheeling into the parking lot of this neat two-story granite building with columns out in front as if they were trying to make an office building look like a Greek temple or something. I suppose for a town like Ovid, it was a reasonably impressive building. They probably paid for it from fining motorists who were passing through, I thought darkly.

I was sure that Ovid was nothing more than a speed trap. After all, this Officer Mercer had done a few things wrong when he stopped me, and believe me, I’ve been stopped by experts. I never learned how to drive slowly, so I had collected more than a few speeding tickets in my life. First, he hadn’t asked to see my license or registration. I was certain the only thing in my wallet he wanted to see was the color of my money. And he hadn’t been curious about Jess. To be honest, I was sure he’d notice Jess out there in Never-Never Land and check the car for drugs. Boop and Gordy probably had a little pot on board, and Jess probably had enough pills to make a small city high. I had given all that crap up a few years ago, but I would have been brought up on charges, too. Yet the cop hadn’t even noticed.

One thing did surprise me, though. When we got out of the car, our Officer Mercer no longer had the laconic look of a cop on his own turf. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn there was real concern behind those mirrored glasses. Now, he noticed Jess. Of course, that was to be expected. Gordy had to pull Jess out of the car since our drummer was almost unconscious.

“You didn’t let him take something else, did you?” I whispered to Gordy as I helped him with Jess.

“No,” Gordy whispered back. “But he may have taken something when I wasn’t looking. I’ve never seen him this wasted before.”

Neither had I, but I didn’t say it. Boop was concerned, too, I noticed. Boop had been known to pop a pill or two but she was careful when she did. There was no doubt given the look on her face that she was worried about Jess.

“Quickly!” Officer Mercer ordered, bringing us back to our current legal situation.

“I think he needs a doctor,” I called out.

Officer Mercer shook his head. “It’s too late for that. He has to see The Judge.”

“Listen!” I lashed out. “I think he may be dying.”

“Given what he’s taken today, it’s a miracle that he isn’t already dead,” the officer replied.

“But how...?”

“Now, Mr. Douglas, before it’s too late.”

Before I could argue, an attractive black woman in a uniform similar to Officer Mercer’s rushed out of the building and grabbed one side of Jess’s body while Gordy wrestled with the other side.

“We have to forgo the paperwork, Wanda,” Officer Mercer told the woman.

“I know,” she said, struggling with Jess who was considerably larger than she was. “I just heard. We’ve only got five minutes.”

“Five minutes until what?” I demanded, confused.

“Five minutes until your friend is dead,” she called over her shoulder.

The courtroom was chaos. An attractive blonde woman hurried in with us, opening the large oak door that guarded the courtroom. In side at the defendant’s table, another attractive woman–this one a brunette–was spreading some papers on the table. Like the blonde, she was dressed casually–denim shorts and a yellow tee. She was a damned fine looking woman if I do say so.

Jess was propped up in one of the chairs at the table. I thought for a minute he was going to collapse but Gordy held him up. Boop and I sat down on their left, leaving me beside the attractive brunette.

“I’m your attorney,” she said quickly. “Susan Jager. Sorry to be dressed so casually, but I took the day off and just got called in to court a few minutes ago.” She didn’t bother to shake hands with any of us, and I notice Boop was having a wonderful time watching our attorney wiggle her attractive ass as she arranged her paperwork before sitting down next to me. “We’ll talk after the trial.”

“Look, our friend should be in a hospital,” I told her.

“Your friend would be dead before we could get him there,” Susan said, shaking her head.

I felt almost as if I was in the middle of a strange play called Alice in Wonderland Meets Perry Mason. All the trappings of the legal system were being spread out before us while our friend was–according to the locals–dying. It didn’t make any sense at all. What were we doing in a courtroom when we should be in a hospital? Boop, Gordy and I should have protested more, but I think we were so confused by the absurdity of the situation that we just sat there at the defendant’s table.

Suddenly, Officer Mercer called out, “All rise! Municipal Court of Ovid, Oklahoma, is now in session, the honorable Judge presiding.” He said it so quickly that all the words seemed to run together.

At that moment, I was aware of another player in the room as I rose to my feet with the rest of our table. The Judge looked the part. He was not terribly tall–at least a couple of inches under my six two, I estimated. Brown hair and a mostly-brown beard gave him more the look of a scholar than a magistrate. Like everyone else in the courtroom, he seemed to be in a terrible hurry, still buttoning his black robe as he sat on the bench.

“Stand aside!” he commanded in a voice used to being obeyed. The order was aimed at Gordy who had been trying to hold Jess up.

“He’s nearly gone!” Officer Mercer called out.

“Just what the fuck is going on here?” Boop yelled.

“I will not tolerate such language in my courtroom,” The Judge’s voice boomed, actually hurting my ears. Boop gasped and tried to speak but no sound passed her lips.

“Your Honor!” our attorney blurted out. “I think he’s dead!”

“Not yet he isn’t,” The Judge muttered, his eyes fixed on Jess. I looked at Jess in alarm. He was standing, but no one could stand in the manner he was posed. Although on his feet, he looked more like a scarecrow, as if there was a rod jammed up his back to keep him from slumping over like a pile of lifeless straw. The judge had been right–I could see that Jess was still breathing, but his breaths were ragged gasps, barely sufficient to keep his lungs working.

The Judge said something, almost in a chant, but I couldn’t catch what it was. It sounded like gibberish to me, but every now and then I heard a word that sounded familiar. Languages had never been my strong suit. The strange thing was the effect it seemed to have on Jess. A golden glow surrounded him, and within that glow, his gasps for breath seemed to have stopped. I couldn’t detect any sign of breathing from him, yet I could detect very slight movement, almost as if he was sleeping. Yet he hung there so relaxed that I couldn’t imagine what was holding him up.

I found I was standing–all of us were. It was as if we had all tried to move to prop up Jess only to find ourselves suspended in space. I found that with effort, I could move my arms and head, but my legs seemed to be locked in place as I stood next to Gordy and Boop.

“Your Honor,” Susan Jager began, trying to look like as much of a professional attorney as her tee and denim shorts would allow, “I move that the trial be postponed until tomorrow morning so that my client can have suitable medical care.”

“I can’t allow that,” The Judge told her bluntly. “Ms. Jager, your client has not been stabilized. I have merely captured him in a moment in time. That moment can only be slowed but not stopped. Unless we continue with the trial right now, Jess Conroy will die and no medical treatment can stop that.”

There were a hundred questions I wanted to ask, but none of them came to my lips. Maybe like Boop, I would have been silenced by the strange magistrate on the bench if I had tried. I could do nothing but stand there, held in place by some improbable force, while that strange play was acted out around me.

“Yes, Your Honor,” our attorney said, sinking into her chair.

“Officer Mercer, read the charges, and quickly. Maintaining this time indolence is tiring,” The Judge said. His voice had returned to normal, no longer booming through the courtroom, but I had no doubt that it would be any less obeyed.

“Charges are careless driving and possession of illegal drugs,” Officer Mercer said simply.

“Your Honor,” our attorney interjected, “only Mr. Conroy was in actual possession of drugs at the time of the arrest.”

“Yes, but all of the defendants had knowledge of the drugs,” The Judge pointed out. “The charge will stand.”

The Judge then looked sternly at our attorney. “Ms. Jager, I am tiring quickly. I will give you dispensation to speak with as many of your clients as you feel necessary this evening after a verdict has been reached and sentence passed. But please do not try to entertain me with your normally amusing antics in this courtroom today. I have neither the energy or the patience to appreciate them. Do I make myself clear?”

Susan Jager’s face seemed to lose its color. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“Then if there is nothing further to be said, I will pass...”

“Wait a minute!” I yelled, actually a little surprised that I was able to speak at all. “Can I say something?”

“If you must,” The Judge sighed.

“What kind of a put-up trial is this?” I began, feeling my temper rise. “You drag us in here and...”

“Enough!” The Judge boomed, and in that moment, anything I tried to say was lost. Air escaped from my mouth but there was no sound.

“Let me tell you what kind of a trial this is, Mr. Douglas,” he began to lecture, leaning forward from the bench. “This is the trial of four very talented individuals who wasted their talents until they had none left. It is the trial of four people who all feel that if it hadn’t been for the others, they would have been more successful. It is the trial of four individuals who should have learned long ago that their strength lay in their unity. And it is a trial which has reached its end!”

He started again in that strange language that he had uttered when he was focused on Jess. I don’t know why but I braced myself, as if I might have done facing a strong wind. I suppose in a way, I was as I felt a cool breeze blow across my skin and heard what almost sounded like whispers on the breeze. It made my skin tingle, and even as the breeze abated, the tingle was still there.

“Court is adjourned!” The Judge pronounced with a sharp rap of his gavel. I recovered just quickly enough to see him retreating from the courtroom with Officer Mercer right behind him. The blonde woman who had come in with us and settled in the gallery also made her exit as silently and as unobtrusively as possible. The four of us were left alone with our attorney. Jess, I noticed, had slumped back into a chair. He seemed to be sleeping, though, rather than trapped in a drug-induced stupor. His ragged breathing had become regular once more.

“That was a near thing,” our attorney breathed.

“Look, what the hell is going on here?” I asked, my voice cracking suddenly as if I were experiencing puberty again. I hoped suddenly that there was nothing wrong with me. After all, if this weird bunch was finished with us, we had a gig that night. It wouldn’t do if I couldn’t sing.

Susan Jager looked at each of us as if she was expecting something to happen. “This would be a lot easier if everything had gone normally,” she said, adding not one bit of clarification to our situation.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Boop asked. Then she suddenly cleared her throat. Her voice had become huskier through the years as she continued to smoke, but just for a moment, it sounded almost like a man’s voice. Maybe we were both coming down with something. Great, just great.

The pretty young attorney scribbled something on the top sheet of her legal pad and handed it to me. “Look, go here to the address I’ve written down for you. Give me a few hours. I have to talk to The Judge first and finish a couple of things at the office, but I’ll be there as soon as I can. Actually, let’s make it eight o’clock, all right?”

“What the hell is this all about?” I asked, taking the sheet of paper in spite of myself. “Is everybody in this town crazy? Do we have to pay a fine or what? Are we free to go?”

“Just be at that address.”

“We don’t have time for this,” I argued. “We’ve got a gig–you know, a performance. We can’t just...”

“Be there!” she ordered us as she gathered her belongings and rushed from the room.

As the large oak door closed behind her, the four of us were left alone. I looked at the others, noticing for the first time that something had changed. After all the years we had been together, I knew each of the members of the group better than I had known my own family. I knew every feature of their bodies, every gesture they made, and every sound they could utter. So why did they suddenly look different to me?

Jess was the first one I noticed. At first, I thought he was just slumped down in his seat, but all at once I noticed he seemed somehow smaller. It wasn’t as if he had shrunk to Lilliputian proportions; it was just that he looked shorter than he should be. And his dark, thinning hair seemed somehow lighter and fuller.

Boop noticed, too. “What the hell?” There was that deeper voice again.

“Let’s get him out to the van,” I suggested. “He still doesn’t look good.”

“I think I saw a sign for a hospital,” Gordy offered, slipping one of Jess’s arms around his shoulders while I got the other one. Damn! Jess may have looked smaller but I could have sworn he had put on fifty pounds. Either that or I was going to have to start working out again. It had to be additional weight, I thought, because Gordy was having trouble with him, too.

“She’s heavy,” Gordy grunted.

“What?” I asked. “What did you say?” I looked at Gordy. He and I were virtually the same height, but suddenly he appeared a good three or four inches shorter than me. So was Jess for that matter, I realized.

We must have looked odd as we rushed to our van on strangely uncoordinated limbs. Only Boop looked as if she was having no trouble. If anything, she seemed taller and more solid than any of the rest of us. And why was her hair suddenly so short and so brown? “Come on!” she ordered, shoving back the sliding door on the van to let Gordy and I shove Jess in.

“Get that out of the way!” I yelled to Boop, indicating a colorful object on the back car seat.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Damned if I know.”

“You shouldn’t curse,” Gordy said suddenly in a prim voice about half an octave higher than normal.

“Jeez... it’s a Barbie doll,” Boop said, holding the toy up as if it were somehow radioactive.

“A what?”

“Oh Christ...” Boop’s deeper voice trailed off.

“What?” I demanded, breathing hard from carting Jess to the car.

“Look at yourself in the mirror,” she told me.

The side mirrors of a van aren’t exactly the best way to view your own image, but... my own image? The face looking back on me wasn’t my face at all. My face had been described by Rolling Stone once as ‘ruggedly handsome.’ Well, the face I was looking at now was neither rugged nor handsome–or at east not handsome in the usual male sense of the word. The bones of my face seemed to be moving, rearranging themselves into something smoother and less linear. My skin was becoming lighter, the deep tan I had enjoyed since my surfing days in high school was being replaced by a creamy complexion accented by a significant dusting of tiny freckles. My eyes were no longer gray, shifting to a light blue instead. And my hair–well, it had been longish before but now it was a darker shade of brown–almost black–with what seemed like hundreds of tiny curls.

“Oh God!” I screamed, and that’s just what it was–a scream, high-pitched and obviously feminine.

I turned and looked at Boop. Boop? No, it couldn’t be Boop. The person beside me was bigger than Boop should be; hell, she (she?) was bigger than me. Boop’s face was shifting as mine was, but instead of softening, I noticed tiny dark dots–stubble–appearing on her cheeks. Her hair seemed to be retreating into her head, even receding in front just a little. Her earrings dropped from her ears as I watched, blurring like an approaching mirage and disappearing from where they had fallen on the pavement.

“Mom, what’s happening?” a high, worried voice called. I looked over at Gordy, but Gordy wasn’t there anymore. Instead, there stood a child who could have been either male or female, his juvenile face confused and frightened. He was still wearing Gordy’s clothing, but as I watched, the clothing seemed to shift and fold in upon itself.

I looked in the car to see what was happening to Jess. All I could see was a small body–even smaller than Gordy’s–asleep on the seat, completely oblivious to the shifts of skin and material going on around him.

I don’t know how long all of this took. It might have been an hour or it might have been just a few seconds. However long it took, there seemed to be nothing we could do to stop it. I felt weak in the knees, as if I wanted to fall to the ground and pass out, but I couldn’t. Something seemed to be holding me in place as parts of my body shifted inward while others shifted outward and my clothing modified itself to fit my new form.

“Mom?”

There was that child’s voice again, and it seemed to be directed at me. I looked around... No, I looked down at a cute little moppet of no more than ten (and probably less). She was dressed in shorts and sandals, her brown hair tied back in a ponytail. She wore a t-shirt with no sign of breasts in it. She had the freckles and knobby little knees so many children her age had, but there was promise of a future woman in her features. There was no doubt in my mind that this little wisp of a girl had until minutes before been Gordy.

“Mom?” she said again, worry in her voice. She was looking into my eyes.

It was a surreal moment, and I knew instinctively that this little girl saw in me the mother she sought. I became strangely aware in that moment that I had now changed as completely as Gordy. I was, indeed, the woman she thought I was. I took only a moment to glance down at my own body, noting respectable but not overly large breasts poking out from a pink tee. I could feel the denim shorts against my thighs but felt a strange absence between my legs. I could see my own smooth legs ending in small feet encased in sandals not unlike those the little girl wore.

“Holy shit!” a man’s voice muttered. I didn’t have to look over at him to realize it was Boop.

“Are we going home now, Mom?” the little girl asked. She obviously had no idea she had once been Gordy. As far as she was concerned, everything was normal.

“Look, Gor...” For some reason, I couldn’t say his name. Maybe it was because he no longer existed, I thought to myself. But more likely was the fact that the sweet little girl who was staring at me just didn’t look like a Gordy. “We’ll go in just a minute,” I managed to say calmly. “I... forgot something inside.”

The man Boop had become nodded to me as I turned to go back into the courtroom. The look on her... or rather his face was one of alarm. I raced back into the building. I had to find The Judge and talk him into changing us back into ourselves. I may have had other thoughts as well, but that was the only one I could concentrate on. The whole situation was just too preposterous to think about. Here we were, a rock band minding our own business when suddenly we’re dragged before a small town justice and transformed, presumably by magic, into members of the opposite sex. It wasn’t the sort of activity that promoted steady thinking.

As I got to the courtroom, the blonde woman who had been sitting in the gallery during our trial was just closing the door. “I have to see The Judge!” I cried out, amazed at how sweet and feminine my voice had become.

“He’s already left,” she told me with a knowing little smile as she looked at my new body.

“Left? Left where? I have to see him,” I demanded. “Even if I have to go to his home, I have to see him.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” she told me. “He... well, no one knows exactly where he lives.”

“But look what he did to me!” I cried out, motioning to my new body.

“He was pretty lenient with all of you considering,” the blonde told me. Then she held out a hand. “I’m Cindy Patton, by the way.”

Numbly, I took her hand. Her handshake was firm for a woman, and I couldn’t help but notice our hands were about the same size. “What did you mean about him being lenient?” I managed to ask.

She smiled a little wider, relieved that I seemed to be calming down just a little. I didn’t feel calmer, but what else could I do?

“The Judge hates drugs,” she explained.

“But I don’t take drugs,” I pointed out. “None of us do–did. Except Jess, that is.”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. For years you’ve let Jess turn his mind into jelly with every hallucinogenic drug imaginable. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill himself a long time ago. And if he had, it would have been your fault–all of you.”

“Now wait a minute, Jess is a big boy...”

“Not anymore.”

Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen Jess since his transformation was complete. However, given that I had seen him shrinking, I had no doubt that he was now a child like Gordy. It seemed as if we had been changed into a typical American family, with Gordy and Jess as the kids, Boop as the father, and me... Well, I didn’t want to think about that at the moment.

“He has to change us back,” I insisted.

“He won’t,” she replied. “In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never seen him change anyone back–ever. If you’re smart, you won’t even ask him if you do see him. He’s never changed anyone back, but he has made some of the changes worse.”

Worse? What the hell could be worse than finding myself in the body of a small town mother of two? That was my first reaction. My second was a bit more somber, realizing in that moment that there were probably a lot worse things. I just didn’t want to think of what some of those things might be.

But that, of course, didn’t mean I had to like my transformation. Obviously, I didn’t, I had never had any desire to be a woman or parade around in women’s clothing. And as for sex, some rock stars might be into the bi scene but not me. I was still one-hundred percent all-American heterosexual male–at least in my mind.

“Look,” Cindy said, taking my hand gently in hers, “I know Susan will be over to talk to you this evening. Save your questions until then. The Judge has given her dispensation to fill you in. You should feel honored. He seldom does that, but given the emergency nature of your trial, he decided to give all of you a break. Now, do any of the others remember who they were before?”

“Uh... yes,” I managed. “Boop and I know. I don’t think Gordy does and I’m not sure about Jess. He was still pretty well stoned.”

“Actually, he’s probably sleeping by now. Be careful when he wakes up. If he doesn’t remember who he was, he might be a little alarmed if you act strange.”

“Like Gordy,” I thought out loud, remembering the look of confusion on the little girl’s face when I nearly called her Gordy.

“Exactly,” Cindy said, ushering me out. “Now I know this is going to be hard for you, but just remember, all of us have gone through the same thing. Just get your bearings and try to make the best of it.”

“I’ll try,” I muttered. “But this isn’t over yet.”

“Probably not,” she agreed, leaving me as confused as I had been when I came in.

“So what did The Judge say?” Boop asked as I stumbled back out to the car. And I do mean stumbled. I had been wrong when I assumed my sandals were like Gordy’s. The ones he, or rather she, now wore were flat whereas mine had a small but pronounced heel, causing me to walk as if balanced on my toes. It was strange that I hadn’t noticed them as I had marched in to see The Judge. Maybe if I didn’t think about them, my body would act as if wearing them was natural.

“He wasn’t there,” I told Boop, glancing over to see if Gordy was listening. She wasn’t; she appeared occupied with the Barbie doll as she sat there in the van with the door open. Beside her was a small sleeping form, and although I couldn’t tell for sure, Jess’s tiny pink shirt indicated to me that Jess was now as female as I.

“Then let’s find him!” Boop demanded, causing me to cringe a little. Boop had been forceful enough as a woman, but in the impressive male body she now wore, she was downright intimidating.

“We can’t,” I told... him. I went on to explain what Cindy had told me.

“I don’t know if we can trust her or not,” Boop mused.

“Trust has nothing to do with it,” I told him. “Don’t you see? We don’t have a choice. This Judge has magical–almost godlike–powers. The best we can do is play along tonight and hope we can get to him tomorrow.”

“But what about our gig?”

I sighed. “You know, Boop, I’ve got a strange feeling that’s the least of our problems. I wouldn’t even be surprised to find out that the people in Muskogee who hired us don’t even remember doing so.”

He frowned. “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know,” I said with an unintentional feminine shrug. “Woman’s intuition I guess.”

We didn’t have any trouble finding the address Susan had given us. She had even sketched out a simple map for us, and besides, Ovid wasn’t such a large town that we could get lost.

On the way to the address, I had an opportunity to look around at the town. Normally I would have been driving, but for some reason, Boop slipped behind the wheel and I hadn’t objected. We drove right through the business district, and it was easy to see Ovid was a prosperous little town. There were no closed storefronts, no signs of obvious disrepair, and most of the cars parked along the main drag were reasonably new. That was on the plus side. On the other side of the coin, the citizens of Ovid who bustled into their cars for what must have passed for rush hour in the town were to a large degree transparent–or a reasonably close facsimile. Maybe that’s what they really were, I thought–a facsimile. Maybe they weren’t real at all.

But no, I realized, that couldn’t be right. I had touched one of them in the convenience store when I had bought gas and he felt as real as I was.

As real as I was?

I had to stifle an hysterical giggle. I was hardly real, was I? I mean, the real me had simply disappeared like water down the drain, leaving me in this... this... body. I looked down at myself reluctantly trying to reconcile reality with the two substantial breasts beneath my tee shirt.

“So where the hell in Linden Street?” Boop muttered in that deep, masculine voice she–he–had acquired.

“How should I know?” I growled. “You have the map.”

“It should have been back a street or two.”

“There’s a gas station,” I pointed out, nodding at a little neighborhood station ahead. “You can stop and ask there.”

“No need. I’ll find it,” he said gruffly.

“Daddy, you missed our street!” the little girl who had been Gordy screeched.

Boop brought the van to a halt in the middle of the street. “Where?”

“Back there, silly,” she pointed with a grin at a sign partially obscured by a tree. “You know where we live.”

Gordy was starting to really freak me out. And what was going to happen when Jess woke up? I turned and looked at what was left of Jess–a tiny shape in a smaller version of what Gordy and I were wearing, asleep on the seat. She–and Jess was most certainly now a ‘she’–was twisted inside the seat belt at an odd angle, sleeping soundly. It was a peaceful sleep, unlike the unsettled drug-induced near comas Jess usually fell into. I actually hoped for his sake that when he woke up, he was like Gordy. It was bad enough to wake up as the wrong sex, but to wake up in the body of a little child would be too much for me.

Boop suddenly announced, “Let’s play a game.”

“Okay!” Gordy said cheerfully.

“Let’s pretend Daddy... and Mommy don’t remember anything about where we live or even who you are, okay?”

“Sure!” Gordy agreed.

Turning the van to head up Linden Street, I had to grin in spite of myself. Apparently Gordy thought she had always been our daughter. She saw nothing wrong, but if we seemed too disoriented, she might worry. So why not use her under the ruse of a game to learn more about our transformed selves?

“So where do we live?” Gordy asked as we cruised down the street.

“You’re getting warmer,” Gordy chuckled in her girlish little voice. “Warmer... warmer... oh you’re burning up!”

With a smug smile, Boop pulled into the driveway of a modest but adequate two-story house with beige clapboard siding and a brick façade in front. I tried to ignore his smugness, fishing away inside the purse that I had found at my feet in the car for what might pass for a front door key. Still smug, Boop pushed the button on the garage door opener which was attached to the visor. “Five will get you ten the door to the house is unlocked,” he whispered to me. I had no intention of taking that bet.

Sure enough, the door was unlocked. As I held the door open, Boop marched in, holding the little girl who was all that was left of Jess while Gordy walked confidently past us, presumably to her room since she ran up the stairs before us.

I stayed downstairs in the kitchen trying to make some sense of things while Boop took Jess, still asleep, upstairs. I could feel my heart thumping madly and the blood rushing through my head as I rummaged through the purse looking for anything that might tell me who I–we–had become. I extracted a large women’s wallet and began pulling every scrap of information from it I could find. The kitchen table was covered with small slips of paper when Boop came in the room.

“Jess is still asleep and Gordy is... well, I guess she’s playing in her room,” he announced.

“Well, I’ve figured out who we are,” I told him as he walked over to my side to see what I had been studying. Holding up a driver’s license with the usual bad picture on it, I told him, “I’m Donna Lou Pearson, age twenty eight, and according to the check book, you’re Marty Pearson, Jr. By the way, there’s four hundred and twelve dollars in that account.”

“Yeah, I know,” Boop sighed. “I looked in my wallet after I dropped Jess off. How the hell do men get used to carrying a bulge on their butts like that wallet? By the way, I’m the same age you are.”

“Well, at least we’re younger,” I pointed out, looking at the small stack of credit cards in my name.

“And the wrong sex,” he pointed out. “By the way, Gordy is Alicia and Jess is Kimberly. Their names are on their doors in pink letters.”

“How cute,” I said sarcastically.

“Something else, too,” Boop told me. “While I was upstairs, I called the hotel we supposed to be playing at tonight. I told them I was you.”

“What did they say?”

He shrugged. “They’ve never heard of you–or the band.”

“What?” It was one thing to find myself in the body of a young mother in some tank town in the middle of nowhere, but to find out that I–or at least my former self–was an unknown was almost too much to take. Then I remembered my ‘women’s intuition’ remark. Still, I had to be sure. “Maybe you got the wrong hotel.”

“No, it was the right hotel. I remembered the name. They’ve never heard of us.”

“Mom!” It was... Alicia yelling from the top of the stairs. I looked at... Marty and he pointed at me.

“What?” I managed at last.

“When’s dinner?”

Dinner?

“You’re the happy homemaker now,” Marty teased. “You know, you’re supposed to have dinner on the table for your family.”

“Bull. Do I look like...?” I stopped. Yes, come to think of it, I did. “What do I tell her?”

“What did your mother always tell you?”

Right. “In a little while... dear.”

“Okay!” I heard a door close. Apparently, she had gone back to her play.

“Look, I’ll help you,” Marty said. “As I recall, you can’t even boil water.”

“I can make soup!” I told him defensively. “And toasted cheese sandwiches.”

After a moment’s thought, he allowed, “I suppose that will do. Let’s get to it.”

“Wait just a minute,” I told him, grabbing his arm and realizing for the first time just how much bigger than me he had become. “Aren’t you giving in to this just a little too easily? This isn’t who we are. Why give them the satisfaction of acting the way they want us to act?”

“So what are you going to do, Donna?” He emphasized my new name. “Alicia doesn’t remember being Gordy. Are you going to tell her there’s no dinner tonight because none of us are really who we appear to be? Are you going to go street by street looking for that damned Judge and demand that he change us back?”

“Well...”

“Beside, that lawyer–Susan Something-or-other–is coming by in a little while to explain things to us. Why not just play the game until she gets here?”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I spat. “You get to be the big guy.”

“You think I like being a man?”

“Don’t you? You’re into girls. Now you can really be into girls.” As I made my pun, I tried not to think about who the girl he was most likely to try to get ‘into’ was.

“I’m not arguing with you,” he muttered. “I’m fixing dinner. You can help or you can sulk or you can go screaming out into the street for all I care.” As if to emphasize a point, he opened a cabinet and pulled out a soup pan.

“How did you know where that was?” I asked, suddenly alarmed at how he had not even had to search for the pan.

“Huh? I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking about it. It was just a reaction.”

I thought for a moment. There was more going on here than I had first realized. It was one thing to be physically changed into other people, but the changes might be even deeper than I anticipated. “All right,” I agreed at last. “We’ll make dinner together and wait until we’ve talked to Susan before we decide the next move. I’ll try to play the good little wife and mommy for the moment.”

“Good plan.”

Dinner was pretty simple stuff with both of us working on it. A couple of cans of tomato soup looked to be enough for us and I really could make a decent toasted cheese sandwich. Alicia marched into the kitchen, laid out utensils and napkins and poured four milks as if she had been doing it all her life. “I’ll wake up Kimberly,” she announced when she was finished.

Marty and I looked at each other and I know we were both thinking the same thing: did Kimberly remember being Jess? If she did, it would be best if Alicia didn’t wake her.

“Wait... dear,” I choked out trying to sound as motherly as I could. She stopped and looked at me, puzzled. “Je... Kimberly isn’t feeling well. Let’s let her nap and she can eat later.”

Alicia gave a chillingly childish shrug. “Okay.” Dutifully, she sat down at the table.

Marty and I shared a relieved glance and sat down as well.

“Hey!” Alicia laughed. “Why are you guys sitting down in the wrong chairs?”

“Oh, just to be different,” Marty said casually saving me from trying to think up an answer.

It’s difficult to explain how such a domestic moment as the three of us sitting there eating a mundane meal could be so unbelievably weird. I had never bothered to marry–none of us had–and the family meal we were ‘enjoying’ was probably the first one any of us had had since we had left our respective homes. As normal as it would have seemed to most people, it was anything but normal to us.

To make matters worse, everything I ate seemed to have a slightly odd taste. It was the lipstick, I realized, adding a subtle and unpleasant taste to the food. How did women ever get used to it? Was there some trick of avoiding the taste that I as a former man didn’t understand? Or was it just that women got used to the taste? Maybe that was why most chefs were men.

I wasn’t going to like being a woman, I told myself. Oh maybe it wouldn’t have been a total loss to be someone like Fiona Apple or some other female rock star. But I was stuck as a housewife/mother in a town on the other side of nowhere. Apparently, I was expected to clean house, cook meals, take my daughters to ballet practice and please my husband in the sack just like mothers had done since marriage was invented. Sorry, but I didn’t want to play that game.

But what were my options? I wondered as I thoughtfully chewed on my sandwich. I was the victim of some power I couldn’t hope to understand. Unless I could find The Judge and convince him that this life was not for me, I’d be stuck with it–or worse. At least Boop had her–his–memory intact. What a horror it would have been if Gordy remembered his previous life and Boop didn’t. Then I’d be stuck with somebody who really thought he was my husband, and I’d be expected to play hide the hot dog with him, no questions asked and no quarter given. I could imagine myself back in The Judge’s courtroom trying to explain why I had chopped off my ‘husband’s’ willie rather than spread my legs for him. Knowing The Judge, he’d probably just provide him with a new one, bigger and better than the last one.

Marty and I kept glancing at the kitchen clock, and I know he was thinking the same thing I was. We were both counting the minutes until our attorney showed up with some answers. And the question we both wanted answered was the same: how do we get out of this place?

Both of us nearly jumped out of our chairs when the phone rang. It was our attorney, I told myself. She couldn’t make it. We were on our own. Welcome to Wonderland, Alice. “H... hello?” I asked timidly.

“Is Allie there?”

Allie. Who the hell was Allie? Oh... Alicia. “Uh... Allie, it’s for you.”

A small hand grabbed the receiver. “Thanks, Mom.”

What was going on? How did anyone know Allie? But obviously someone did. As I stood there statue stiff listening to my ‘daughter’s’ side of the conversation, I realized she was an accepted member of the community.

“Hi, Michelle!

“No...

“Oh yuck!

“Right now?”

She put a tiny hand over the receiver. “Mom, can I go over to Michelle’s until bedtime?”

“I...”

“Oh please, Mom. It’s still light and her mother said she’d walk me home. It’s only a block.”

“Uh... all right.” Actually, I was happy to see her go. Then Marty and I could talk openly without alarming her. I didn’t exactly have to tell her twice. Calling a quick “bye” to us, she was out the door in a heartbeat–a small feminine blur.

“Oh God, Boop, what the hell is going on?”

“It’s Marty–remember?” He was up from the table and put his big strong hands on my shoulders. Something inside me told me Marty was a handsome man–not that I had ever been in the habit of looking at men in that way. I sighed as he lightly massaged my shoulders. It was a comfortable sensation, and I almost unconsciously let myself fall back against him until I realized what I had been about to do.

I turned toward him, jumping away from his hands. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He looked a little surprised, and not at my outburst. He was looking down at his hands as if they were two alien objects. “I... I don’t know.”

“Well keep your hands to yourself!”

Before he could answer, we were both startled by a piercing scream from upstairs. Apparently Jess was awake. We rushed into... her room. She was just sitting there on the side of her bed hyperventilating as she looked at her spindly little body. As we rushed into the nearly dark bedroom where she had been left. She looked up at us, her eyes shining in terror from the hall light. “Who... who are you? What’s happened to me? Where am I?”

The questions spilled out in a rush, and I realized the fear on her face must have been similar to the expression on my face not long before. I had never been close to children, having none of my own and no younger siblings, but I found a strange bond of sympathy with the little waif Jess had become. I reached out instinctively as if to put a comforting arm around her, pushing a dark blonde strand of hair out of her face.

“Don’t touch me!” she screamed, pushing herself back helplessly on the bed as she tried to put some force into the comically childish voice she now had. In that moment, I realized there were indeed far worse things to be changed into than what I had become. I might be female, but I was an adult. Jess had become a weak, defenseless little girl, and while he had no idea how it had happened, his mind was now clear enough to know that he was completely powerless.

“Jess, it’s me–Grant,” I said as calmly as I could.

“Oh sure,” she mumbled. “And I suppose the guy next to you is Boop.”

“As a matter of fact...” he began, and I could almost hear the ironic smile in his voice.

“Jess, listen,” I said more sternly. “Think about it. If someone could change you into a little girl, why is it so outlandish to think he couldn’t do something similar to us?”

Her fearful defiance began to fade, replaced by a look of shock. “Grant, is that really you? And Boop?”

“Come downstairs,” I told her. “We’ll explain everything.”

We told her as much as we knew as she sat there on the living room couch next to us. Of course she had questions, but most of them would have to wait until Susan arrived with answers. She agreed to eat a little, though, and as we watched, she ate a toasted cheese sandwich and quaffed down two full glasses of milk. It was the most I had seen Jess eat in weeks.

“You have quite an appetite,” I observed.

“I feel like I haven’t eaten in weeks,” she sighed. Then, looking at me, she asked, “Either of you guys got a smoke?”

I couldn’t help it; I broke out laughing. And I wasn’t the only one–Marty was laughing even louder than I was.

“What’s so funny?” she asked, rather indignantly. Her demeanor was enough to start us laughing again.

“Look, Jess,” Marty explained as he managed to catch his breath, “you’re a little girl. I’d guess you’re about six or so. What would you do if you saw a little girl ask for a smoke like that?”

She flushed. “But I’m not a little girl–not really.”

“Oh, I’m afraid you are a little girl,” I pointed out. “Your name is Kimberly Pearson and it looks as if you’re our daughter.”

“Yeah, right!”

There was a knock at the door which interrupted my next comment. Marty opened it and Susan Jager stepped in, still dressed casually as she had been in court that day. “Sorry to be so late,” she apologized. “The Judge wanted to make sure I understood what I could tell you tonight.”

“Why didn’t he just come himself?” I asked as Susan seated herself in a chair facing the couch where my ‘family’ had settled.

“The Judge limits his contacts with mortals,” she replied, as if that made sense. I suppose it did. Whatever The Judge was, he was not you run-of-the mill mortal–I was sure of that. But that would mean he was immortal–like... “A god?” I blurted out.

“Look,” Susan began, “you don’t know how lucky you are...”

Funny, I didn’t feel particularly lucky.

“What he’s authorized me to tell you usually takes people days or even weeks to figure out. But since your whole transformation got screwed up, he’s agreed to let me help you.”

“You mean we weren’t supposed to get changed into the Cleaver family?” Marty asked.

“More like the Simpsons,” I muttered, winning an angry glance from Homer–I mean Marty.

Susan shook her head. “No. Other transformations were in store for each of you tomorrow–transformations where you wouldn’t have to interact so much. But those roles won’t be available until tomorrow. The people you were due to be are all still out of town and...”

She looked back and forth at all three of us and sighed. “I’m sorry. I must be going too fast for you. Let me start at the beginning by explaining what’s going on here in Ovid.”

My mind was spinning as she told us the tale of a town created and run by gods straight out of classical mythology. If we had each been in our real bodies, I think we would have laughed her right out of the house, but we sensed the truth each time we looked at ourselves. Whatever had changed us into the Pearson family was as close to a god as anything I had ever seen. She didn’t name them individually, but I knew The Judge was Jupiter and the cop had to be Mercury given the similarity of names.

“So you’re saying these... gods created Ovid and changed us into this?” Marty asked.

“Exactly.”

“But why?” Marty and I asked together.

“That’s something I can’t tell you,” she said with a shake of her head. “Now wait! Before you start badgering me, understand that what I mean is I don’t know the answer myself. Like you, I used to be someone else. The Judge and his associates don’t let me in on their plans as a rule.”

“So why are you telling us all of this?” Kimberly asked. All of us looked at her in surprise. We weren’t used to having a small child participate in such a conversation, and I think it took all of us just a moment to remember that the cute little waif seated between Marty and me was really as old as we were.

“Why?” she asked again. I felt a strange sense of pride in my transformed friend. Of all of us, his change was the most radical in both age and sex, yet as Kimberly, she showed a poise and maturity that outstripped her conduct as Jess. Once she had overcome the initial panic generated by her transformation, she seemed almost to accept what had been done to her.

Susan immediately accepted her question as she would have from a physical adult. I imagined she had seen other transformations of a similar or even worse nature. “Because until The Judge can sort all of this out, you’ll have to be the Pearson family and frankly, he’s not sure you’re up to the task. If it hadn’t been for your imminent death, Kimberly, four employees of the State Department of Agriculture slated to die in a car crash tomorrow would have become the Pearson family. Now The Judge has found other roles for them since the people you were supposed to be won’t be back in Ovid in time to make the switch. They’re on a field trip to Tulsa.”

“Sort of like airliners,” I mused. When I saw everyone looking at me with puzzled expressions, I explained, “If an airliner is late, its next destination sometimes needs to be changed while an earlier plane flies its route. Then that plane has to be given a new route and so on. One late plane can screw up flight operations all over the country.”

Susan nodded. “That’s pretty much what’s happened here. The problem is that the Pearsons are an important part of the development of Ovid, according to The Judge. We can’t have anything happen to them and the next few days may be critical for them. As a result, The Judge decided that you should be told as much as possible so you could adapt more quickly to these roles, even if they’re only temporary.”

“Temporary?” we all asked at once.

“Here’s the deal,” Susan explained. “For the next week, you all do the best you can to be the Pearson family. To help you, I’ve told you who really runs Ovid, and The Judge has even allowed the three of you to talk freely among yourselves. Normally, only two can discuss the changes at any given time. When a third person joins in, only your new lives in Ovid can be discussed.”

“You said three,” Marty pointed out. “What about Gordy–Allie?”

“When people are transformed, not everyone remembers who he or she was before,” Susan told us. “No one knows why. I’m not even sure The Judge knows why. Some of us think it’s just too much for some people to take. Their minds snap and the unconscious abilities you inherit with the transformation to cope with your new lives become the active parts of your memory and personality, submerging or even erasing the personality that was there before.”

“In other words,” I suggested, “Gordy might still be in there but unable to overcome the Allie identity he’s been given?”

“That’s possible,” Susan agreed. “Or it could be that Gordy’s mind was changed as completely as his body. Now only Allie remains. She’s just a normal, happy eight year old girl. The three of you are actually in the minority. Most people have no memory of their previous lives.”

“That’s horrible!” I said with a shudder, clenching my bare arms with my hands. “It’s like murder.”

“I agree,” she replied, surprising us. After all, she was an insider. We would have expected her to support what The Judge had done.

“I agree it’s horrible,” she clarified, “but remember, The Judge only recruits new citizens from those who would otherwise die. Most of them go on to lead vibrant, productive lives here in Ovid with or without their previous memories. Think of it as a second chance. Most of them wouldn’t go back to their old lives even if they had the chance.”

“I find that hard to believe,” I snorted. “Maybe it’s okay for someone like Boop who likes girls anyhow and...”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Marty broke in. “You think I like having all this junk between my legs? I feel like I’m as big as the Goodyear blimp. And as for...”

“Enough!” Susan yelled, stopping us at once with the commanding presence of her voice. When we were quiet, she went on. “I don’t think the two of you understand what’s at stake here. The Judge needs this family to work together until he can sort things out. Allie’s no problem. She’ll just act as she should; she doesn’t know anything has changed. Kimberly, I don’t think you can cause too much trouble. Just act like the little girl you are and things will be fine. As for the two of you...”

A serious frown crossed her face as she looked at Marty and me. “As I’ve been given to understand, you two are important to The Judge’s plans–or at least the Pearsons are important to his plans. The Judge has authorized me to tell you that if you cooperate on this matter for the next week or so, he’ll find replacements for you and find other roles for you.”

“Other roles?” I said warily. I had been changed from a man into a young woman–a wife and mother. All it took was a look at Kimberly or Allie to know it could have been even worse. But any being–or god if you will–who could do all of this to us could do much worse if it amused him. And I seemed to remember from reading Greek myths as a child that the gods thoroughly enjoyed playing with the lives of mortals.

“The three of you will be teens again,” she explained, “and be given your original sexes. You’ll be classmates–reasonably good looking and with your natural intelligence. You’ll be free to become wherever your talents take you.” She managed a thin smile. “Who knows? You may even decide to start a band.”

“What about Gordy?” Marty asked.

“Sorry, but Gordy’s gone. According to The Judge, there is no way to bring him back. Besides, she’s happy as Allie. The Pearsons are good people and she’ll have a good life. She just won’t remember Gordy or anything about him.”

I felt badly about leaving Gordy behind, but I supposed there was nothing to be done about it. Maybe he was the lucky one. Maybe whatever was Gordy was still there–unaware that she had ever been a man. I suppose Gordy was actually the most ‘normal’ of all of us, and the gypsy lifestyle of a down-on-its-luck rock band had probably deprived him of a normal life. I sometimes thought Gordy stayed with the band just for us. He was that kind of a person. I think if any of the rest of us had been asked to name the one member of the group we liked and trusted, it would have been Gordy–and probably only Gordy.

“I guess we don’t have much of a choice,” Marty muttered.

Susan shook her head. “No, you don’t. Or at least you don’t have any other good choices. Because let me warn you, if you screw this up, all bets are off. Have you ever heard the expression ‘Wrath of the Gods’?”

I gulped as the three of us nodded nervously.

Susan nodded, too, as if an agreement as binding as any she had ever committed to paper had just been made. “All right then. I’ll tell The Judge you’ve agreed to his proposal.” She got up as if to leave.

“Wait!” I called, jumping up as well. “What are we supposed to do? How can we tell when we’re doing this right?”

She waited until she was at the front door before turning to answer. “That is something I can’t tell you because The Judge wouldn’t tell me. He said he didn’t want to make things too easy for you. You’ll just have to figure it out for yourselves.” And before we could respond, she was out the door.

The three of us just stared at each other for a few moments. It was Marty who broke the ice at last. “Look, I say we find this Judge and try to reason with him.”

“Just where do you figure we should look for him?” I retorted.

“Well, the courthouse might be a place to start.”

I put my hands on my hips, then brought them down to my side when I realized how feminine the gesture looked. “If you were a god, would you hang around a small town courthouse at night?”

“And you’ve got a better idea?”

“Yeah, we do what our lawyer says,” I told him.

“You expect us to act like... like...” Kimberly started.

“Like a family,” I finished for her.

“Sure, that’s easy for you,” she muttered. “You get to be the mommy. And Boop gets to be the daddy. Look at what I get to be!”

Marty and I actually traded thin smiles. In a way, Jess was responsible for the screw-up. If he hadn’t been on the verge of dying from a drug overdose, we wouldn’t be in quite this fix. It served him right to have the worst role in all this. Maybe a week as a cute little girl would do him some good. I couldn’t resist getting back at him.

“You get to be Mommy’s little sweetheart,” I cooed, grabbing her and planting a sloppy but motherly kiss on her smooth cheek. She was too flabbergasted to try to stop me. For that matter, she was too small to stop me even if she hadn’t been flabbergasted.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she sputtered as I released her. A small hand went up to brush the kiss away, but she succeeded only in smearing the faint blemish of lipstick I had left on her.

Marty laughed and got into the spirit of the game. “What’s the matter, Princess? Don’t you love Mommy and Daddy?”

Her childish blue eyes narrowed in an uncharacteristically adult expression. “Oh I get it. You guys think you’re cute, huh? Well if you think it’s so much fun playing your parts, wait until you have to come to school to get me out of detention for causing trouble in class. Won’t that be fun?”

“Okay,” I laughed, although it sounded suspiciously like a giggle. “Don’t worry. We won’t lord it over you. But think about it, guys. If we play along, we’ll only be stuck this way for a week or so. But if we mess things up, we may be stuck like this for the rest of our lives. If I can handle being Susie Homemaker for that long, you guys can do your part. Then after The Judge sorts all of this out, we’ll be out of here. If we do a good job, maybe he’ll cut us some slack. He might even let us leave Ovid.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Marty snorted. “We’re stuck here. As far as the world knows, we’re dead–or maybe we never even existed.”

“Maybe,” I had to agree. “And you’re right. I don’t think he’d let us leave Ovid. But do you guys want to spend the rest of our lives together like this?”

Everyone was silent. It confirmed the unsaid problem we’d had for a long time. We were all absolutely sick of each other. I didn’t want to be a woman, but I particularly didn’t want to be Boop’s wife and Jess’s mother. Anything had to be better than that.

“Okay,” Kimberly sighed at last. “So what time do I go to school tomorrow? I’m in–what–the first grade?”

We all looked at each other with the sudden realization that we still didn’t know that much about ourselves. Where did we work? Or was I a stay-at-home mom? Where did the girls go to school? Who were our friends? It only took a few moments for us to all burst into action, scouring the house for clues.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long. Employee ID’s, correspondence, phone lists, and an assortment of other documents gave us enough to get started. Marty was an insurance agent–a revelation which made him groan. Boop’s father had been an insurance agent, so Marty knew what the job entailed–not that he liked the idea very much. I was apparently a secretary in the English Department at some place called Capta College. Great. I had always been lousy at paperwork and as for typing, forget it. Kimberly, as she had suspected, was a first grader.

“Oh fine,” she muttered. “I get to learn to read again.”

“Be sure and let me know how Dick and Jane turns out,” Marty quipped, earning a very ugly look from a very young girl.

“Look, if our attorney is right, this is all temporary,” I reminded them. “Let’s try to do what The Judge wants us to do and maybe things will get better.”

“Well they certainly couldn’t get much worse,” Kimberly muttered.

Before I could answer that, there was a knock at the door. I hurried over to the door thinking that Susan must have something else for us, so I was a little surprised when I saw Allie and a cute little blonde girl about her size standing there. Behind them was the blonde woman I had seen in the courtroom during our trial. “Hi,” she said with a pleasant smile. “How are you, Donna?”

“Come on up to my room!” Allie chirped.

“Okay!” the other girl replied, and before she knew what was happening, they had each grabbed one of Kimberly’s arms and were leading her upstairs as she looked back at me with alarm.

“Let’s talk for a minute,” the woman said, motioning that I should step outside and close the door. Marty looked curious but didn’t follow.

“You were there in the courtroom today when we were transformed,” I said when we were alone.

“Yes,” she agreed. “And I know how hard this must be for all of you. I’m Cindy Patton, by the way. We live just down the street–it’s the two story down there with the dark truck in the driveway. We’re supposed to be friends since our daughters play together and are in Brownies together.”

“How suburban,” I drawled in the soft Oklahoma accent we all seemed to have.

Cindy looked at me carefully. “Look, Donna,” she cautioned, “whether you know it or not, you’re still on trial. If you guys screw this up, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“Our attorney has made that clear,” I told her. “Don’t worry, we’ll be good. I suppose you know what this whole Ovid thing is all about.”

“Actually I don’t know as much as you think,” she replied. “I can make an educated guess, though. The Judge and his... associates seem to have knowledge of the future. Something bad is coming down–something so bad we can’t even imagine it. I think The Judge has a plan to stop it. That’s why he’s probably not going to cut you any slack. If he thinks you and your friends are important to the outcome of his plan, you can expect him to demand results.

“Now since we’re supposed to be friends, come down or call me any time. I’ll try to help you any way I can.”

“Start by telling me just what this Judge of yours is up to,” I suggested. “What exactly is his plan?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. None of us do.”

“But just what is my part?” I demanded. “What the hell are we supposed to do?”

She gave me an enigmatic smile. “The best you can.”

Before I could press her further, she opened the door and called, “Michelle! Time to go home.”

“Do I hafta?” a sweet little voice called sadly from upstairs.

“You have school tomorrow. Come on!”

Michelle and Ally reluctantly looked over the banister, and with them, I saw something that almost made me choke with laughter. They had piled Kimberly’s hair up high on her head in an attempt at creating an elegant hairdo. Kimberly didn’t look very happy about it, but one of the other girls would have been more than a match for her. It was probably a good thing we hadn’t talked long. If they had had more time, I think the other girls would have done far more than just her hair.

Cindy gave me a mischievous smile. “Girls will be girls,” she said.

“And apparently so will boys,” I returned, causing her to smile even wider.

“Damn girls!” Kimberly muttered moments later as I managed to pull out the seemingly endless clips and pins the girls had managed to put in her hair in just a few minutes. We were in her room–a veritable cliché of a young girl’s room, complete with white painted furniture trimmed in painted pink flowers, a girl-sized four-poster bed, and even a little dressing table, complete with a frilly little lace skirt around the edge of the table. Of course, there was an assortment of dolls and stuffed toys everywhere I looked as well. It was going to be bad enough being a woman, but I found myself very thankful that I had been changed into one instead of a little girl as Jess had been.

“Just be good and play your part,” I reminded her. “Maybe we’ll get out of this.”

“Yeah,” she growled–or as close to as a six-year-old girl can come to growling. “But we’ll just get changed into someone else.”

“We don’t need to worry about that right now,” I told her and was surprised to see her look at me quizzically. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s what you just said,” she explained as she took off her shoes. “You sounded just like my mother.”

I flushed in embarrassment. “Well, I’m not.”

“But you said we had to play our parts,” she reminded my slyly.

“Yes, but...”

She jumped up and grabbed me around the waist. “Oh Mommy! Get me some jammies. I want to get ready for bed now.” Her voice was high and sweet, and I knew she was teasing me. But I wasn’t going to let her get me. If she wanted to act the part as a joke, I could play along.

“All right, sweetheart,” I cooed as I gave her a motherly hug. “Let’s find something soft and snuggly for you.”

I reached into the second drawer of her dresser and pulled out some white pajamas with little red hearts all over them and a strip of red lace around the collar. “You’re giving me that look again. What’s wrong now?”

She pointed at the pajamas in my hand. “How... how did you know where those were? You reached in the drawer as if you knew exactly where they were.”

I was shocked. Actually, I had no idea how I had know. I hadn’t really thought about it; I had just acted. Still, I managed to shrug and say, “Beginner’s luck, I guess.” I didn’t tell her about Marty’s similar experience in the kitchen.

But later as I joined Marty in the den, I had had a chance to think about what had happened. I had even experimented a little in my own room, finding my own clothing in the drawers without a thought. It seemed as if not just our bodies had been transformed. We had been gifted with something almost akin to instinctive behavior. I wondered if all newcomers to Ovid received similar gifts or if this was another example of our unconventional treatment. I suspected all newcomers were given the unconscious abilities or life in Ovid would have been chaotic.

“The girls in bed?” Marty asked, half-asleep on the couch as the TV droned softly in the background.

“The girls?” I asked sitting down beside him.

Before I could think about it, he put his arm around me and snuggled up against me. “Marty! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” As I yelled at him, I jumped up off the couch, terrified.

“Huh? What?” he mumbled as if coming out of a trance.

“You had your hand on my boo... I mean, uh, my...”

He laughed in spite of his confusion. “Are you trying to say breast?”

I reddened in embarrassment. Like most single men, I had developed the bad habit of using boobs, tits, rack–you name it–to describe a woman’s breasts. However, now that I had a pair of my very own, it seemed somehow wrong to verbally debase my own anatomy with those terms, any more than I could call what was now between my legs all the sordid names I had learned through my years as a male.

“Yes!” I managed at last. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I really didn’t think about it,” he admitted, as if realizing it himself for the first time. “I was just sitting here, zoning out in front of the television, and when you sat down next to me, it was as if it was some sort of autonomic reaction.”

I thought about how I had found Kimberly’s pajamas without thinking about them. “Oh Marty, I’m worried. I think maybe The Judge did something besides change our bodies.”

“Like how?”

“I’d rather show you,” I told him.

“And how are you going to do that?”

“Just sit there and watch TV,” I told him. “Try not to think about anything.”

I sat next to him, a little nervously. I wanted to see for myself if I was right, and this was the best way I could think of to explain to Marty and satisfy my own curiosity at the same time. I just hoped I could gain some semblance of control during the experiment, but the... whatever it was had only lasted a few moments in Kimberly’s room.

I watched the images on the TV screen, not really paying any attention to them. It was a local news program out of Tulsa, and I did hear the newsreader say something about the tornado we had encountered earlier, but apparently there were no casualties. Ha! That showed what they knew.

The words seemed to drift into indistinct mumbles, and the images on the screen were no more than dancing patterns of light as I drifted off a little snuggling against Marty’s warm body, enjoying the feel of his hand kneading my breast as I methodically unzipped his pants and felt his growing manhood with my small hand and...

Oh... no!

I sat bolt upright, practically bruising my breast as I jumped away from Marty’s hand. Marty was looking at me with shock and something resembling pain. No wonder. The boner in his pants was absolutely enormous, and my lips had been inches away from it.

“Jesus!” he gasped.

“See what I mean?” I asked him, suddenly aware that my voice had a smoking, yearning quality to it. I realized also that my nipples were tingling, and something felt warm and wet between my legs.

“You mean if we don’t think about it, we have... I mean we do... I mean we want sex?”

“Not exactly.” I explained to him what had happened in Kimberly’s room and told him what I had concluded.

“My God!” he exclaimed. “Do you mean we might become just like Allie?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied slowly. “I doubt if it gets any worse, but it’s like having a minor case of what she has. Maybe in Allie’s case, the shock of being transformed was so great that she got lost in this... what did you call it? Oh yes, in this autonomic reaction. We seem to be able to recover from it.”

“So far,” he grumbled, looking down at where his pants were still unzipped. “So what do I do about...?”

“Little Marty?” I finished for him, even managing to grin.

“Funny.”

I shrugged. “Give it a little while. It’ll go down so long as you don’t stimulate it anymore.”

“It’s damned painful this way,” he said, shifting uncomfortably on the couch as he tried without success to stuff the woody back into his pants. “Isn’t there another way?”

“Well you could always take a Playboy into the bathroom and whack off.”

“No thank you!” he huffed. But he did leave the room and headed for the bedroom.

Of course, there was another way to solve his problem, but I didn’t want to think about that. Technically, we were husband and wife. If we had taken our actions to their normal conclusion, we’d be in bed together by now. But I didn’t want to think about that. It was too weird to think about being a woman involved in a sexual act with a man. In spite of the messages my body was sending out, I was still mentally male and the idea of having sex with a man just didn’t seem right.

But what if having sex with Marty was part of what was required to get us out of this mess? Susan hadn’t given me any clue about that. She and Cindy had both told me to play my part. But just what was my part? If I cooperated, I had The Judge’s promise through Susan that I’d be changed into a teenager–a male teenager–and have a new life. But did that mean spreading my legs for Marty? Could I do that–even to earn a change back into a male body? I just hoped it didn’t come to that.

When Marty came back into the den, he was wearing blue and white striped pajamas and holding a pillow and blanket. “I assume you want me to sleep down here.”

I couldn’t help it; I laughed. Well, I suppose it was more of a giggle actually.

“What’s so damned funny?” he demanded.

“You look like something out of a fifties sitcom,” I told him, barely able to talk.

He looked down at himself with a frown, and then to my surprise began to laugh himself. It was the first time since our transformation that either of us had found anything to laugh about. It felt good to laugh, and in a strange way, it felt good to hear Marty’s deep laugh.

“Okay, Lucy,” he said in a very poor Cuban accent, “so what do we do now?”

“Well,” I told him, finally able to contain myself, “it’s a king-size bed. I think it’s probably big enough for both of us. Besides, if we don’t share the bed, Allie might wonder what’s wrong.”

“You’re not afraid that I’ll jump you in the middle of the night?”

“I think you’ll be able to restrain yourself,” I replied in a very demure fashion.

“Do you need my help getting ready for bed?”

“What?”

He shrugged. “I just mean getting ready for bed as a woman.”

“What’s so different about that?” I asked, my suspicion returning.

“Oh, removing your makeup, getting your hair fixed so you don’t wake up looking like Raggedy Ann in the morning–that sort of stuff.”

I thought for a moment. I suppose for a woman being changed into a man, little things like getting ready for bed would be easy. Just brush teeth, drain the snake, strip down to shorts or throw on some pajamas, and hit the sack. For a woman, though, it was a more involved process, as was getting ready in the morning. I suspected I could let myself go on automatic and get ready for bed, but what if while on automatic, I decided to slip into something short and sexy and turn my new hubby on? A little help might be a better decision.

“Okay,” I agreed, “but no funny stuff.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it!” he replied with mock indignation as he held his hands up.

I have to admit, his help was beneficial. He showed me how to clean off the makeup, helped me remove my earrings, and even brushed and braided my hair for me, explaining everything as he went. He had even found a pair of women’s pajamas for me to wear. They were soft and silky, in a sort of baby blue color. As I sat there letting him brush my hair, I felt a lot of the day’s tension slip away. Maybe I could make it through this after all.

A good night kiss would have been too much for us, but we did squeeze each other’s hand and manage a small, almost shy smile for each other. We slipped between the covers, each settling for a position on our side so we wouldn’t have to face each other. I could almost imagine that I was sleeping by myself.

Lying there in the dark, though, I did start to wonder once more exactly what was expected of us. Normal married couples were intimate in bed. Marty and Donna Lou Pearson had probably conceived both girls in this very bed–or so they would have if they were real people. What would it be like...?

No! That was a dangerous thought. I was a man, and if everything went right, I would be again. Okay, I’d be a teenager–little more than a boy–but I’d be male again if our attorney had told us the truth. All I had to do was get through the next few days and I’d be male again. We’d all be male–except for Marty, of course. I imagined she wanted to be female again just as much as we wanted to be male. Just a few more days, I thought as I drifted off, just a few more days...

It took a few moments the next morning to remember what had happened. The radio alarm had gone off, and I was jarred awake by an old Led Zeppelin song on an oldies station in Tulsa. Lying there as the memories of transformation sifted into my tired brain, I remembered back when we had been on the same stage with Robert Plant’s group. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Hell, it was a lifetime ago, I realized.

Marty was just getting out of the shower as I sat up in bed. He just had a towel wrapped around his body, and he’d done it all wrong.

“You know you don’t have to hide your nipples anymore,” I pointed out.

Embarrassed, he let the towel slip a little bit. “Old habits die hard,” he muttered.

“Why not just go on automatic?” I asked him. “That’s what I’m going to do.”

“Uh... I was afraid I might...” he began. “I mean, I woke up with... uh...”

I laughed, “You woke up with a woody, didn’t you?”

He turned as red as Rudolph’s nose. “I wasn’t sure what to do.”

That’s what Marty got for preferring women when he was Boop. She had never awakened to find her boyfriend’s member at full attention before. But it seemed to be gone now, so he must have gotten it figured out. I was still chuckling as I grabbed a bra and panties and headed in for my own shower.

I wasn’t laughing a few minutes later. I hadn’t relaxed to let the autonomic reactions take over as I started my shower. That was probably a mistake. I found myself unsettled by the feel of water on my smooth, feminine body. I hadn’t expected my nipples to rise so spectacularly in the warm water, and the feeling of water running between my legs was a source of mild but obvious stimulation. It was then that I remembered that a man’s sexuality is concentrated between his legs, but with a woman, the sensual feelings are more general and non-specific. My body felt good... incredibly good. I was beginning to wonder if women managed to have orgasms just taking showers. No wonder many women liked bubble baths. The feeling on their skin–our skin–must be incredible, I thought.

I did go on automatic once out of the shower. It wasn’t that hard to do, as relaxed as I was from the shower. Before I knew it, my hair was dry and combed out and my makeup was on, tastefully done to give me that Young Professional Woman look. My choice of attire–again automatically determined–was of some concern though. The tan skirt looked a little tight and short and the blouse I wore seemed just a little filmy and was cut just a little low, but no worse than what I had seen on any number of secretaries.

Marty had gotten the girls up. It was funny how quickly I had come to think of them as ‘the girls.’ I suppose since they looked nothing like Gordy and Jess, it was a little hard to think of them in any other way. The converse was probably true, too. Allie, of course, thought of me as her mother because she knew no better. As for Kimberly, it was hard to say. She was playing her part as best she could, even acceding to Allie’s advice and help as she got ready to face the rigors of first grade. I guess she thought of me as her mother because it was easier to think that way than to think about who we had been. Strangely though, she seemed a little different–more juvenile–but I suppose that was because she was going on automatic part of the time, too.

The whole morning scene just seemed so disturbingly domestic. Juice, cereal, coffee, fruit and milk got passed around as each of us wandered into the kitchen, grabbed something to eat, then cleaned up and left. As Interossiter, we had actually done the same thing more than once, staying in a suite where we shared breakfast in a similar fashion. Those had been the good days for the band–days in which we were on top and subsequently got along.

“Well, I’m off,” Marty announced, folding the morning copy of the Tulsa World on the kitchen table. “I have insurance to sell.” He didn’t sound very pleased at the prospect.

“Have a wonderful day, dear,” I sang, giving him a sweet smile. It was worth it just to watch the scowl on his face. I had to say, it was nice to know the former Boop was every bit as disturbed as I was. If I’d thought for a moment that Marty was happy with his lot, I would have fumed at my desk all day.

I guess I just wasn’t too enthusiastic about spending a boring day as a secretary, typing at a terminal and fetching coffee all day. I had really never had a mundane job–if you didn’t count the grunt jobs I had worked at while the band got established. And even though things hadn’t exactly been cherry for the band in recent years, we’d managed to get by without soiling our hands.

“We’d better hurry, Kimberly,” Allie said primly as she wiped her little mouth. “The school bus will be here shortly.”

Kimberly gave me a ‘what else can I do?’ roll of her eyes as she dutifully followed her new sister to get ready for school.

Maybe I had the best of it when you got right down to it, I thought as I finished my coffee. Selling insurance didn’t sound like any fun at all, and going back to elementary school as a helpless little girl wasn’t much to look forward to either. At least it was temporary, I reminded myself. All we had to do was keep our noses clean and we’d be changed into something more palatable.

“Bye Mom!” Allie said brightly, surprising me as she rushed up to plant a warm kiss on my cheek.

“Yeah, bye Mom!” Kimberly echoed as she kissed me too with a devilish look on her little face.

In spite of myself I laughed as they hurried out the door.

Capta College was like something out of Goodbye Mr. Chips. Mismatched stone and brick buildings covered in ivy and shaded by large oak and maple trees were spread across an expanse of grass punctuated by shrubs of all sizes and descriptions. I had to admit the campus looked much more like the traditional college campus than Arizona State where all of us had gone to school. The Tempe campus with its modern buildings and heat-seared vegetation was much larger than Capta College but not nearly as pleasing to the eye.

I had no trouble finding my office. After all, the strange automatic pilot that all of us had been given allowed us to function as if we’d been born to these lives. I was becoming less worried that it would somehow cause us to lose all memories of our previous lives but still tried to use it only for short periods of time, like finding where to park and what building to go to.

The English Department was on the second floor of Attica Hall. All the buildings seemed to be named after parts of ancient Greece. In addition to Attica Hall, I noticed Sparta Gymnasium, Corinth Hall, Delphi Science, and Thebes Manor, which seemed to be the main administration building. Oh, there was also the Homer Memorial Library, but I thought it was probably named for some wealthy alumnus named Homer who had paid for the place.

Attica Hall was well kept, in spite of its age. Tile floors designed to look like marble were polished to a high gloss, in spite of the morning traffic of Capta’s student body on its way to class. The oak wainscoting smelled of polish, but somehow it seemed to bring out the odor of the original wood as well.

I had never worked in an office before–well, at least not for any length of time. But I had certainly been in my share of offices. When I walked into the small suite of offices that would be my new workplace, I was pleasantly surprised to find them warm and inviting. My office was really a reception area, with a row of small offices surrounding me on three sides. I was apparently the first person in the office that morning, so it gave me an opportunity to look around and see what I could find out about the inhabitants of the offices.

It was obvious to me that I would be the low person on the totem pole. All the offices were inhabited by professors and instructors. Nameplates were in evidence, which would help me learn their names. The Department Chairman–judging by the fact that he had the largest office–was Professor Thurmond. His office was neat and orderly, but it was casual as well with personal mementos and pictures gracing the shelves. From the person in the pictures I was certain was Professor Thurmond, I could see a man who enjoyed life. The shots were taken deep-sea fishing, skiing, and even mountain climbing. A different girl was with him in each of the pictures. The only thing each of the girls had in common was that Professor Thurmond’s arm was around their narrow waists. He was an attractive man, I began to realize, with dark hair just starting to gray and the weathered complexion of a man who spent a lot of time outdoors.

Of the others with offices, one caught my attention: Dr. Steve Jager. It was an unusual last name and also the name of our attorney. Were they related? Given how unusual their last name was, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out they were married. Did that mean that Dr. Jager would be closely observing me and reporting back to his wife who would in turn be reporting to The Judge regarding my conduct?

None of the other names meant anything to me so I settled down at my desk so try to figure out what my job was all about. There was an ‘in’ basket, so that seemed to be the logical place to start. But before I could even start on the first item, she walked in.

She... Eunice... the girl from college all those years ago. And she hadn’t changed. Oh, she was a little older, but not as old as I would have expected. Her hair was still a perfect shade of blonde, and even the tight knot she had tied it into couldn’t disguise the glimmering richness of it. Her skin was soft and flawless, and her eyes still the perfect blue, even hidden behind small feminine glasses. As for her figure, the conservative tan skirt and white silk blouse clung softly to her curves, accentuating rather than hiding her beauty.

Looking up from the papers she was carrying, she smiled. “Good morning, Donna.”

“Eunice...” the word just spilled out of my mouth without a thought as I rose to my feet.

“Eunice?” she asked, puzzled. Then a look of understanding crossed her face. “Oh yes, she does use that name sometimes. You’re talking about one of my sisters.”

“Sisters?” I knew I was sounding dull-witted, but what could I do? This wasn’t Eunice? And what did she mean when she said Eunice was a name her sister used sometimes?

“Yes,” she confirmed. “Oh, that’s right. You’re new here.”

“No!” I said hurriedly, afraid my masquerade had been discovered. What would that mean to our assignment? “I... I work here. I’m...”

“Yes, Donna Lou Pearson,” she broke in with a wave of her hand as she laughed. “You’re our departmental assistant.” She pointed at a door to one of the other offices. “I’m Dr. Musetti–Polly Musetti. I teach creative writing and a few other English courses.” She looked at me. Her face was serious but her eyes continued to laugh. “But you knew that, didn’t you, Donna? After all, you’ve worked here for more than five years.”

She knew! She knew I was not really Donna Lou Pearson, and yet she seemed willing to play along. It meant she knew of The Judge’s work. Now I had at least two professors to worry about in the department–or perhaps more. Did everyone in the department know?

“Good morning, Donna.”

I wanted to ask Polly Musetti some questions, but I was interrupted by a cheerful male voice. Turning, I saw the man whose pictures I had observed in his office–my boss, Professor Thurmond. He was handsome and poised, just like in his pictures. Also, he looked as solid as I was, not like the transparent majority I had experienced as I had walked to the office that morning. “Oh! Good morning...” What did Donna call him? “... sir.”

He raised an eyebrow slightly–just enough to let me know I had just screwed up. Apparently things were pretty informal in the department. What was his first name? John? Jack? No, Jerry. I’d have to remember to call him Jerry.

“Are those reports for the dean ready yet?” he asked.

Of course, I had no idea what reports he was talking about. “Almost,” I lied. It seemed to be a good enough answer. He nodded and disappeared into his office, closing the door behind him.

“Don’t worry, he didn’t really notice your mistake,” Polly told me as she picked up a folder from her desk and started back toward the door.

“Wait, please!” I blurted out. “I have some questions for you.”

“Later, perhaps,” she replied. “Right now, I’m late for a class.”

And she was gone. I was beginning to feel more and more like Alice in Wonderland. Every time I seemed to find someone who could help me, he or she disappeared like the Cheshire Cat, leaving me with more questions than answers.

As Polly had left, another person entered, briefcase in hand. He was tall–or at least he seemed tall to me given my diminished stature–with brown hair and brown eyes. My newly feminized body seemed to react with a little tingle that probably meant it found him attractive, and I suppose he was. “Good morning, Donna,” he said cheerfully.

I didn’t know how to respond to him, but he helped me out. “Call me Steve,” he said softly as he brushed past me.

“Uh... good morning, Steve.” As I stood there stupidly, he unlocked the office of Professor Jager and stepped in. “Later,” he whispered back to me. So with that I knew he was related to our attorney and knew exactly who I was. Did everyone know? God, I hoped not!

“Donna, I need you!” Professor Thurmond–Jerry–called out. At least he had made no indication that he knew that I was really a man. Yeah, a man. There I stood in my tan skirt and heels thinking of myself as a man. I don’t think so.

“Yes... Jerry?” I managed as I stepped into his office, but to my surprise, he wasn’t at his desk. With a start, I heard the door close behind me. I turned and saw my new boss standing there with a hungry look in his eyes. Before I could react, he grabbed me and pulled me into his embrace. I knew what was coming next, but I had no way of preventing it without ‘blowing my cover.’ I let myself be kissed by a man for the first time in my new life.

Strangely, I didn’t find it unpleasant. His breath was fresh and there was not even a tiny trace of stubble on his face. I’d have to find out what sort of razor he used if I ever managed to become male again. His kiss was demanding but not brutal, and I actually found myself returning it. Worse yet, I also found my nipples rising uncomfortably inside my bra and a distinct dampness between my legs. No, this wasn’t right...

He broke the kiss, a puzzled look on his face. “What’s wrong?”

“Uh...” Think fast, man. “Uh... Steve... Professor Jager is in his office. He’ll hear us.”

“Damn! I didn’t hear him come in.” Jerry broke the embrace and quickly opened his door. “He has a class in forty-five minutes,” he said. “We can... continue then.”

I nodded as I left, but I knew I had to find something to get me out of the office in forty-five minutes or else.

I was shaken as I returned to my desk. The way Jerry had acted, this wasn’t the first time Donna had been in a compromising position with him. Were they having an affair? Probably. Susan had told us that if we ever wanted to be changed back into something more familiar, we’d have to act like the Pearson family was supposed to act. But what did that mean? Did it mean we had to be the all-American family, loving and sweet, or did it mean we had to act the way the Pearson family had normally been acting–including the affair with my boss.

To make matters worse, I was just a little bit stimulated. It was embarrassing, but I kept telling myself it was something I had little or no control over. After all, as a man, if a pretty girl had walked up to me and rubbed her body against mine, her lips on my lips, I would have gotten hard as a rock. Could I expect anything less than the female equivalent of that when an obviously attractive and virile man like Jerry Thurmond made similar moves on my new body?

But did that mean I was turning gay? Oh, of course it didn’t. I was a woman now, wasn’t I? It wasn’t ‘gay’ to be attracted to a man. I suppose instead it would have been gay if I wasn’t attracted to men. If I had to, I supposed I could actually go a lot further with Jerry. It might even be pleasant. But I wouldn’t be doing it to be pleasant. I’d just be doing it to get a male body again, wouldn’t I? I just hoped he didn’t expect a blowjob. The thought of giving a blowjob to a man was just too much for me to contemplate.

I had to know more about my relationship with Jerry, but how could I find out? Then out of the confused fog I found myself in, I heard Steve on the phone, talking to his wife–and he called her Susan! So I had been right. I waited impatiently until he got off the phone and decided to see what Steve knew about my relationship with Jerry. After all, even as careful as Jerry was trying to be, I was certain that an office romance would have been noticed by the other professors.

I tapped on Steve’s door. He was hard at work grading what appeared to be essays. “Got a minute?”

He looked up and grinned. “For a newbie? Sure.”

I closed his door behind me. “You’re Susan’s husband, right?”

“Got it in one.”

I sat down, remembering only at the last minute to keep my skirt from hiking up. “Sorry,” I mumbled, flushing. “I’m not used to... to...”

“Skirts?” he asked with a playful leer. “Don’t worry. They’ll become second nature to you. Susan had trouble with them at first, too.”

“Susan was a man?” I blurted out. How could someone as poised and as... well, as feminine as Susan have ever have been a man?

Steve nodded. “Right again. And for the record, I was a woman.”

“What is it with these sex changes?” I wondered out loud, but Steve had an answer for me.

“No one knows for sure. I’ve got a theory, though. I think a lot of people would repeat their mistakes if given a body of their birth sex. A new sex gives you a different perspective. You tend to strike out in new directions and not make the same errors. It almost makes me wonder if a large number of us are born the wrong sex to begin with and just never realize it. I know I’m far happier now than I ever was before I came here.”

“Sure,” I replied, “but you got changed into a man.”

His eyes twinkled in amusement. “So you think men have it easier?”

“I don’t seem to remember wearing lipstick and perfume and taking twenty minutes just to fix my hair when I was a man.”

“Strangely, those are things I miss sometimes,” he admitted. “I suppose I could try cross dressing, but it just doesn’t seem like a good idea. Besides, Susan’s not exactly my size. I will admit, though, that what I don’t miss are the periods.”

I shuddered at that. That was one thing I tried to keep out of my mind. Besides, if everything went well, I’d be out of this body before that became an issue–or at least I hoped I would.

“Don’t worry, though,” he continued when he noted my discomfort. “One of the blessings of Ovid is you’re given a couple of months to get used to all this before you have a period. I think it’s done that way to make you more comfortable with your new body before the nasty stuff starts. And also a lot of new women aren’t used to protecting themselves from pregnancy, so the lull in periods keeps that from being an issue.”

“That’s sort of why I came in here,” I began slowly. “No, nothing like that!” I added when I saw the alarm in his eyes. I think he was afraid I wanted to try out my new body with him. What a thought! “I just want to know–are Professor Thurmond and Donna... are they...?”

“Having an affair?” he finished for me as he leaned back in his chair. “In a word, yes.”

I dropped my eyes, silently cursing. That was all I needed. “I was afraid of that.”

“But you don’t have to continue it,” he pointed out.

“But I may have to,” I countered. “Did Susan tell you the deal The Judge offered?”

“Susan told me a little of it,” he said cautiously. I had a sneaky hunch she had told him more than just a little of it.

“Then you see my dilemma,” I continued. “I’m supposed to act as Donna acts, but does that mean I act as she has in the past or as The Judge wants her–me–to.”

Steve folded his hands and leaned back in his chair pensively. “I see your problem,” he said slowly. “I can tell you that Ovid is sort of a small town off an old Saturday Evening Post cover in many ways. That would indicate that family values apply.”

“But...”

“What?” he asked.

“There was an unsaid ‘but’ at the end of your statement,” I pointed out grimly.

He nodded. “You’re right; there was. It may be hard to say with the prohibitions on discussing certain subjects. I guess I could say that The Judge had something of a reputation of being a philanderer at one time.”

I nodded as well. I wasn’t exactly an expert on mythological characters, but I remembered enough from my readings to recall that Jupiter had a number of affairs. Maybe a couple of thousand years had changed all of that. After all, the older many people got, the more straight-laced they became. But did that apply to gods as well?

“Still, I’d probably go with the conservative approach,” Steve mused.

“Are you giving me a hint from something you know or just advice?” I asked pointedly.

“Just advice, I’m afraid,” he sighed. “I came here just like you did. I don’t have any special knowledge.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. “Even given who your wife is?”

“She got here just like the rest of us,” he explained. “She has a job just like you and I do. If you think she tells me whatever great secrets Ovid holds during pillow talk, think again. She probably has more insights than most of us do, but The Judge doesn’t trust his secrets with anyone who isn’t a... who isn’t like him.”

“Donna, are you in there?”

I jumped as Professor Thurmond’s voice blared through the intercom. “Uh... yes.”

“I just got called over to the Dean’s office. I won’t be back until about two.”

I gave a silent sigh of relief. That meant he wouldn’t be there for whatever he had planned for me after Steve left for class. Now I knew how a condemned prisoner felt when the call from the governor came through.

My reprieve was just that, though, and not a pardon. Professor Thurmond made it back to the office at a quarter after two. I had gotten so involved trying to learn my job and remember the names of the various instructors and students who flitted in and out of the office all day that I lost track of the time. Now, there I was at my desk, alone in the office except for Professor Thurmond. It was put up or shut up time. Or maybe I should say it was put out and shut up time instead.

“Donna, would you step in my office for a moment please?”

I wondered if the Romans had been so polite when they asked the Christians to face the lions in the Coliseum. Probably not.

I tried to tell myself that he wouldn’t try much in his office. After all, students might still stray in and out, and even though all of the staff seemed to have a class at that hour, several of them would be back when the class ended. Besides, the phone might ring. Come to think of it, how the hell had Donna and Professor Thurmond carried on an affair in the fishbowl that was the English Department office?

But as I stepped into his office, I felt just a twinge of something I had experienced only once before. That morning in his office, I had felt a strange dampness between my legs and a tingle in my nipples. I had chalked it up to nervousness but now I knew it was something else: anticipation.

Yes, I know I had been a woman for only a day, and my mind was still as male as it ever had been–mostly. The problem was that my body was not male in any way, and it anticipated a loving embrace just as my missing male member might become fully erect anticipating a tryst with a lovely woman. In other words, I had no control over what it was doing. I tried to think about unsexy things, but it was a little difficult with Professor Thurmond–Jerry–standing there by the door undressing me with his large brown eyes.

He closed the door, and I’m sure it was only my imagination that made it sound as if it had closed with a metallic clang. He wasted no time, crushing my body to his and attacking my lips. So for the second time that day, I found myself being kissed by my boss. This time, though, I knew what to expect. When I felt his tongue in my mouth, I didn’t recoil as I might have earlier. The strange dampness and tingling were becoming more insistent, and I found my crazed mind wondering what it might be like...

He broke the kiss. “God, I missed you today,” he breathed.

“I... missed you, too,” I replied, trying to play along. I still hadn’t decided how to accomplish my portrayal of Donna, so until I did, I felt I had to play her as she must have been playing herself. Strangely, it wasn’t that difficult.

“I can’t wait for Saturday morning,” he told me, causing me to wonder what was happening Saturday morning that I didn’t know about. It was already Friday, so that meant whatever was happening was happening tomorrow.

“Me, too,” I lied.

“I can only stay here for a few minutes,” he explained, holding me tighter again. “The damned Dean wants every department head at a cocktail party at the President’s house this afternoon. I wish I could take you with me...”

I didn’t say anything, but I wished I could thank the Dean and the President personally. I might have been just changed into a woman, but I was rapidly becoming a prisoner of desires that seemed to be built into my new body. I only hoped The Judge got a replacement for me quickly or I’d be a psychological mess by the time I got a male body again. It was indeed humbling to find out how much sexual desire is determined by the body instead of the mind.

Oh God! He suddenly put his hand under my skirt. Rubbing the palm of his hand over the front of my panties, I felt a sudden warm sensation run through my body. Had I just had a minor orgasm? If so, what was this new body capable of? A full-blown orgasm might be enough to give me a stroke.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he promised, his hand slipping away. I was both relieved and disappointed in exactly the same instant. “Got to go.”

So I had that to think about for the rest of the afternoon. A look at my calendar informed me that I had agreed to come in on a Saturday morning to help Professor Thurmond with budgeting for the next year. It all looked very proper. After all, there it was on my calendar. But there was no doubt in my mind that the Saturday budget planning session would never happen. Instead, I’d be expected to put out for my boss.

Did this mean there was a serious relationship between me and Professor Thurmond or was this just an extreme case of sexual harassment? I suspected it was the former. Surely the latter would never have turned me on the way his touch had managed to excite me. That is unless my new body was easily turned on. Either way, I had a problem. I had no intention of showing up Saturday morning. If I did, I’d probably find myself with my legs spread as I lay on top of a hard desk while he... he... It was just too horrible to think about.

But if it was horrible, what the hell was going on with my body? His sudden thrust with his hand between my legs had triggered an unconscious and definitely unwanted response from my body. The new slit between my legs tingled with something that could only be described as anticipation. I suppose it was just the reverse of a response I had experienced many times as a man as my dick grew hard as I came in contact with an attractive woman. If our sexes had been reversed and a female Professor Thurmond had slipped her hand in my pants and encircled my penis with her fingers, wouldn’t I have become as hard as a rock? So there, I told myself. The response of my body meant nothing.

Or did it? I was still debating that as I got home. Marty was already there and had picked up the kids from after school day care. I realized with a start that I hadn’t even thought about picking them up. It was a good thing Marty remembered. The strange thing was that I continued to think of two of my oldest associates as ‘the kids.’ I was becoming more and more certain that there was more to the magic of Ovid than just physical transformations.

Did that mean I would become Donna Pearson in mind as well as body? I had gotten the impression from Susan that all of us except Allie would always have our old memories. Maybe that was true, but it would become easier to act as Donna Pearson than it would be to act as Grant Douglas as time went by–unless we got changed to more compatible bodies.

“Hi, Mom!” Allie yelled, jumping up from her perch in front of the TV to give me a big hug. Strangely, the hug felt good. Kimberly was right behind her, a bit more subdued, but playing her role as best she could. She actually looked happy. If I hadn’t known who she really was, I would have seen nothing out of the ordinary with her responses. She was acting like a six-year-old girl.

“So how was your day?” Marty called from the kitchen. Something smelled surprisingly good in there and I realized he had started dinner. If things got any more domestic I’d think I had just stumbled into Pleasantville.

I joined him there as the kids went back to the TV. “Interesting,” I replied vaguely. I obviously didn’t want to tell him about my boss. “How was yours?”

“About the same,” he said, turning back to his cooking. I could have sworn he blushed though. And why wouldn’t he look me in the eye?

Allie and Kimberly kept the dinner conversation going, apparently oblivious to the silence from their new parents. I suppose I would have expected Allie to glibly carry on a conversation since she saw nothing unusual. The surprise was Kimberly though, who told of her exploits in first grade with something akin to pride. I would have expected her to be nearly as she had been the night before when she first realized she had been transformed–upset to the point of being nearly frantic. I resolved to ask her about it later.

The opportunity didn’t come until bedtime, though. She had managed to get herself all ready for bed, including a pair of pink pajamas complete with a Peter Pan collar. It was almost comical to see our former drummer pad over to her bed and climb up into it, settling down on the pillow with a contented sigh.

“Uh... Kimberly, are you feeling okay?” I ventured as I did the motherly bit, tucking her in.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” The reply carried an inflection which wasn’t quite as childish as the tone of her tiny voice, but it wouldn’t have been entirely out of place from a normal six-year-old.

“I thought maybe being... you know, a little girl might have been tough on you today, but you didn’t say anything.”

“What is there to say?” she asked. “As I understand it, we have to act like the people we are if we’re going to get changed into something more... normal. If I’m going to be a boy again, I guess I have to act like a girl now.”

I nodded. That made sense. At least it would be easier for her. She didn’t have a lecherous boss to contend with. “So things went okay today?”

She nodded, even managing a shy smile. “Yeah, to be honest, it was a lot easier than I thought. I guess Kimberly is a very bright girl, so I could be a bit precocious without being out of place. It was kind of fun really. I never was much of a student as a boy.”

“What was class like?” I asked her, genuinely curious about her experiences.

She gave me a cute little shrug. “Oh, it was pretty normal, I guess. About a third of the kids are like us–transformees, I mean. The rest, including the teacher, are all those shades. I only talked to a couple of kids who remembered their previous lives. Both were girls and both of them used to be guys.” She frowned for a second. “The funny thing is they both seemed to like being little girls more than they liked being males. That’s weird, isn’t it?”

I nodded in agreement. “I’d certainly think so.” But it did add to my concern that the changes might be more than just physical.

“In fact one of them wants to come over and play tomorrow.”

“I have to work in the morning,” I told her, realizing I had to come up with some excuse to get out of that session or I’d be screwed–literally. There was that damned tingling sensation again.

“That’s okay. She won’t be able to come over until afternoon. Can she?”

There was an eerie, childish pleading in the tone of her voice, causing me to smile and agree to her play date. Then, just like a real mother, I kissed her on the forehead and tucked her in, leaving the room to the sound of a muffled, “G’nite, Mommy.” This time it wasn’t a tease as it had been that morning.

Only Allie wasn’t acting strangely, I thought as I left Kimberly’s room. Well, I mean only Allie wasn’t acting differently from the way we all acted when we were transformed. Kimberly was acting with something resembling an inner peace rather than the hysterical panic she had exhibited right after being transformed. She was acting as if she was actually enjoying the experience of being a little girl. Maybe she was in a way. I knew Jess had never had a particularly happy life. I think that’s why he deluged himself with drugs.

But it was Marty that I was most concerned about. He seemed to be avoiding me for some reason. His answers to me were short and delivered without looking at me. I really needed to talk to him. I needed his help to figure out what I could do to ward off my boss the next day. Marty had spent almost all of his life as a woman. What had Boop done to ward off men? I couldn’t very well to claim as she could have that I was a lesbian, now could I?

“What’s bugging you?”

I caught him on his way into the bedroom we shared. There was a guilty look on his face when he saw me standing there across the room. He hadn’t realized I wasn’t still in Kimberly’s room.

“Uh... nothing,” he replied sheepishly.

Again he avoided my eyes, but this time, he looked down unconsciously. I followed his gaze and was actually amused to see his pants tenting outward.

“Is that a mouse in your pocket?” I began the old saying. I didn’t have to finish it to be rewarded with an even deeper blush.

He plopped down on the bed, sighing in defeat. “God, Donna, I never realized it was like this... having one of these,” he moaned, motioning to the uncomfortable lump in his pants.

“It’s because of me?” I ventured, sitting down on the bed beside him.

“Partially,” he admitted. “And partially Wendy.”

“Wendy?”

“My secretary–office manager–whatever you want to call her. Donna, she wanted to blow me!”

“Blow you?” Why was I repeating whatever he said?

“Yes!” he said with an anguished cry. “I didn’t let her, of course, but I wanted to. God, Donna, I wanted to let her... her...”

“But I thought you always liked women,” I pointed out, putting an arm gently around his broad shoulders, my own problems set aside for the moment. Strangely, it felt comforting to me to hold him like that, and against my own wishes, I began to feel that tingling in my breasts and crotch again.

“I do like women, but not like that! I always thought it was disgusting for women to submit to something like that. I mean, most straight women I know don’t really like oral sex–unless they get some in return. Do you have any idea how many men there are out there who think a blowjob is their due but wouldn’t dream of performing cunnilingus on their partners?”

Fortunately, he wasn’t looking at me just then, for I was turning as red as he had been, admitting to myself that I had been one of those men.

“Apparently Wendy and whatever Marty there was before me were having an affair. I didn’t know what to do. I know we’re supposed to act like Marty and Donna, but does that mean I cheat on you as well?”

“I suppose it wouldn’t really be cheating,” I allowed slowly, realizing that Marty and I were in the same pot of soup.

“But I feel like it would be,” he replied, facing me at last so that I could see the glistening tears in his eyes.

It was the tears that did it; I’m sure of that. I just felt so sorry for him and so empathetic all at once. His face was there right in front of mine and it began to move closer and closer to me. The tingling got stronger. It was even more insistent than the sensations I had experienced in the office that day. I didn’t move my face toward his, but I didn’t move away either. It was inevitable that he would find my lips eventually.

And he did. His face felt a little coarser than any face I had ever kissed before, and I was nearly revolted by it, but this was Boop, I reminded myself. At least inside it was Boop. This was what was left of the woman who I realized suddenly that I had loved for years. Maybe that was why we always fought so much. It was a love that with Boop’s sexual orientation would always be unrequited. Now she was a man. Her sexual orientation had not really changed.

But mine had, I realized suddenly.

By all rights, I should have now been a lesbian, but I had a sneaky hunch things didn’t work that way in Ovid. No matter what my brain told me, my body was telling me something else–something I couldn’t ignore as Marty put his strong arms around me.

I can’t really relate everything that happened after that. Too much of it was based on sensation and too little of it on conscious thought. I just know I was overcome by a need unlike any I had ever had before. It wasn’t like it had been when I was male–a strong swelling demanding to be satisfied. Instead, it was a soft yearning–a feeling of wanting to be held, to be stroked, to be filled, and the sensations were coming from all over my body.

There we were together, our clothing practically ripped from our bodies as we fumbled to free ourselves. We hadn’t spoken, as if words would dampen the desire, and that was something neither of us wanted.

Marty was a generous lover, and in retrospect, I have to admit he knew more about pleasing a woman than I had ever known as a man. His every touch set me on fire, the urge to surrender my body to him growing with each pass of his hand. I don’t even remember doing it, but suddenly my back was arched and my legs spread as I watched him slowly, ever so slowly, position himself over me.

How to describe my first penetration? It was nothing like I would have imagined. It had no male equivalent that I could really think of. It felt warm, inside me, and there was the strange sensation as if my male penis had been opened, inverted, and wrapped around Marty’s own member. The slow rhythm he had chosen felt powerful but safe, and the orgasm it produced built with unexpected fervor until I shuddered with pleasure.

My God, no wonder women gasped, cried or moaned when they had an orgasm. I think I did all three. There was none of the sudden explosion a man felt. Instead, it was like the feel of the softest silk run over smooth skin but magnified dozens of times over. “Oh God...” I breathed, but it was drowned out by Marty’s own orgasm filling me to the brim and beyond...

We lay there together, dozing in each other’s arms for at least an hour. When I suddenly came awake, I was aware of Marty snoring lightly next to me, hugging his pillow as if it were me as he enjoyed contented sleep. For me, it was different, though. I awoke to the feeling of something sticky between my legs. Oh God, what had I done?

There was something inside me now–something that didn’t belong there. Could I get pregnant? No, I was sure I couldn’t. Susan’s husband had told me that transformed women had a grace period until they could get pregnant. That was probably to make sure careless new women like me didn’t give into their new urges without a little forethought, I realized grimly.

Why had I done this? I asked myself as I carefully cleaned off the folds of my new sex. I could understand Marty wanting it. After all, as a woman he had always preferred women to men. But me? There wasn’t a gay impulse in my body...

Oh.

There it was. The Judge had probably let Boop’s attraction to women stand when he created Marty. He wouldn’t have to change Boop’s sexual orientation so much as adjust it slightly for her new male equipment. With me though, and probably with most of the transformed, it had been a matter of reversing the orientation, almost like the poles on a magnet. Since I was always attracted to women as a man, it stood to reason I would be equally attracted to men as a woman, probably in something resembling the same intensity.

How many women had I made love to as a man? Oh for God’s sake, I had been a rock star at one time, although ‘star’ hardly defined my later career. As Grant Douglas, I had been handsome and virile, and many girls gladly spread their legs for me–so many that I could honestly say I had lost count. What if that sexual energy were suddenly reversed? The results were self evident, I realized as I washed off the smooth skin of my inner thighs.

I found myself uttering a silent prayer that suitable replacements could be found for us quickly. Making love as a woman could easily become habit forming, particularly with a lover like Marty.

I slipped on a nightgown and silently slid back into bed. Marty grunted and woke up enough to reach over and put a large hand on one of my breasts. I sighed just a little, but it was enough to wake him up. “How are you doing?” he asked, concerned.

“I’m fine,” I told him softly. His face was next to mine. On impulse, I leaned over and kissed him. That was a mistake, because it started the whole thing all over again...

All four of us were up early in spite of it being Saturday, and all four of us acted our parts in a scene of domestic tranquillity none of us had enjoyed since our teenage days. Allie and Kimberly sat happily in front of the TV watching mindless kiddie cartoons. I could understand Allie enjoying them since she remembered no other life, but Kimberly seemed to be enraptured by them as well. I began to wonder if the damage Jess had done to his brain with drugs had carried through to his new identity.

Marty and I worked together in the kitchen, putting together one of those weekend breakfasts that have Americans rushing to the gyms to work them off. I had already called Professor Thurmond and told him I was ill and wouldn’t be able to come in. I’m not sure he believed me, but what could he say? Besides, maybe he thought I had cancelled because Marty suspected something. I’d have to answer for it on Monday, but that was two days away.

I wondered as we worked together if Donna had taken up with her boss because she wanted to or because she had been forced to. I rather thought it was the former, and I thought I knew why. My suspicions were that Marty had an affair going with his secretary and that Donna found out. She decided what was good for the goose was good for the gander and agreed to an affair with her boss. I realized it could just have easily been the other way around, but I was Donna now so as far as I was concerned, Marty had to be the one who started it.

The rest of the weekend was strange but somehow relaxing. As struggling musicians, none of us had much free time on the weekends. People might fall all over themselves to see Train or Smashing Pumpkins on a Tuesday night, but has-been bands have to settle for playing Friday and Saturday night at a Holiday Inn near you. So it was actually fun to have a quiet weekend together as a family. In a perverted sort of way, we had already been family when we were Interossiter, but we hadn’t been in the right roles then.

Were we now–in the right roles, I mean? Allie, of course, remembered no other life, but she seemed happy enough as a little girl. I remembered when she was Gordy. Gordy had told us about losing his family–his parents and his younger brother–in a terrible car crash when we were all in college. I hadn’t known his family, but I felt as if I did from the number of times he spoke of them. Then, once the band was formed, he sort of became a big brother to Jess. I guess things hadn’t changed that much since he was now the former Jess’s big sister.

Boop seemed content to be a man in spite of her early protests. Boop had always been good eye candy, but it was a part she had played to make the band successful. Interossiter wouldn’t have been the same without her bouncing around in short, tight skirts while every male member of the audience fantasized about laying her after every concert. Actually, she hated the role, and that hatred spilled over to the rest of us because we didn’t have to wear short, tight skirts up there with her. Now she could make love to a woman without all the baggage lesbians were saddled with in our society.

Of course, the woman she was making love to was me. So how did I feel about that? Strangely, it felt... satisfying. Don’t get me wrong. I had never had a thing for men, but I did have a thing for Boop. I suppose that was the major reason I was always giving her so much crap. I was attracted to Boop, but she wasn’t attracted to me, and that hurt. Now, Boop might have the exterior of a man named Marty Pearson Jr., but inside I could still sense the presence of Boop. I don’t know–maybe if as Grant Douglas I had found a magic lamp, I might have allowed the genie to change me into a girl just so I could win Boop’s love. Or maybe not. The only thing I knew for certain was that it felt good to be in Boop’s arms, even if she was now a man called Marty.

Then there was Kimberly. One minute, I’d see Jess in her, desperate to get a male body back. Then the next minute, I’d see her in her room with her friends, giggling and acting like a typical six-year-old-girl. I suppose part of it was an act, but she seemed to really be enjoying her role.

I had no doubt that if we remained in these bodies much longer, they would become normal to us. No wonder the real residents of Ovid acted as if nothing was wrong, even when they knew they were not in their original lives. I suspected we had been offered a rare opportunity–to get something resembling our old lives back.

I tried to imagine what it would be like–to be changed into the three teens that Susan had said The Judge was willing to do for us if we played ball with him. Would we still be friends? Would we form a new band? Or on the other side of the coin, would Boop be gay and thus unwilling to love me? Or would Jess have a drug problem again? And what would happen to Allie?

Oh that’s right; Allie wouldn’t be with us. There was nothing of Gordy left now. She would remain Allie while we went on to our new teenage identities. It saddened me to think of that. The four of us had been together for so long. We had been like family in spite of our differences, hadn’t we? But it had to be done. Otherwise, we’d all be stuck as the Pearson family for the rest of our natural lives.

There was one problem over the otherwise mundane weekend, though. Marty and I weren’t content to give up on our sexual experimenting. We were like two kids with a brand new toy to share. We told ourselves that when we got bodies again of the proper sex, we’d kick ourselves if we didn’t try things from the other perspective. So Saturday night, we could hardly wait for the girls to go to bed so we could play with our new bodies once again.

I suppose it was easier for Marty. Since she had a natural bent toward women, I was the same sort of dish on the menu. He just dug into it with a different fork. For me, it was a little tougher, but I just kept reminding myself that it was Boop inside that masculine shell, and Boop was the person I had always wanted.

I guess we were too loud, though. I wasn’t exactly a screamer, but as Marty lay on his back and I rode him, I suppose we both got a little exuberant. The mood was broken almost immediately after he let go with an explosive climax as the door to our room creaked open and a little girl’s voice uttered, “Holy shit!”

There is nothing to dampen an otherwise delightful female climax like the voice of a six-year-old girl in the darkness behind you. I managed to turn and saw Kimberly’s bright blue eyes in the pale moonlight, wider than I ever imagined they could be. Before I could say anything to her, she turned and fled down the hall, and I heard her door slam shut.

“You’d better talk to her,” Marty suggested.

“Me? Why me?”

He actually had the audacity to grin. “You’re her mother.”

“Eat me.”

“Next time.”

Okay, I told myself as I walked down the hall, pulling a motherly terrycloth robe around my otherwise naked body. It wasn’t as if this didn’t happen to real parents all the time. But Kimberly wasn’t a real six-year-old girl. I couldn’t just go in there and say, “Darling, when a man and a woman love each other very much like your father and I do...” or some such crap. Instead, I had to explain to an adult man trapped in a little girl’s body what his former male friend was doing riding on the stiff penis of his former female friend. My task was not to be envied.

Kimberly was back in bed, but she was staring out into space. In the moonlight, I could see tears in her eyes.

“Kimberly?”

“Go away!”

“Look, I know how this must seem...”

She sat up in bed, looking like a little girl on the edge of a tantrum. “No you don’t. You’re starting to like these lives, aren’t you?”

“Of course not!” I huffed as I sat on the bed next to her. “What makes you say that?”

“One of the girls in school told me what happens,” she replied, her voice breaking. “She came here with her–his–wife. They got changed into a mother-daughter. That was three years ago. At first, her wife treated her like an adult, but then it got harder to do, especially with her wife’s new husband around. She said the next thing she knew, her wife was talking to her as if she was a three-year-old, cooing at her and dressing her up in cute little girl dresses.”

“We haven’t done that to you,” I pointed out. “As I recall, you’ve worn jeans both days since you were changed.”

“Yeah, I know,” she agreed reluctantly. “But haven’t you noticed the way you’ve been treating me today?”

“I thought you wanted to be treated that way,” I said slowly. “I thought with your friends you were just trying to fit in as a six-year-old girl.”

“I was,” she admitted. “As I understand it, it’s the only way I’m going to get a male body back.”

“I have the same understanding.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to tell me that the only reason you two were... were... you know, tonight is to ‘fit in’?” Those last two words were an obvious innuendo.

“Of course,” I assured her. Or was I assuring myself?

“And you two want to get back to being the right sex again?”

“Sure.”

“Then prove it,” she demanded.

“Prove it? How?”

“Set up a meeting with The Judge,” she told me. “Get him to clarify when he’s going to take care of us.”

I’m sure my face turned pale. Kimberly had been a very wigged out Jess when we were brought before The Judge. There was no way for her to know how overwhelming The Judge could be. I had no desire to attempt to beard him in his own den. I had a hunch people who tried found themselves worse off more often than not.

“Kimberly, I...”

She folded her arms and peered at me. Under other circumstances, it would have been precocious. “Look, you think I want to remain a moppet? Will you do it or not?”

I told myself that we needed Kimberly’s cooperation if we were ever to get back to bodies more familiar than these. If she didn’t play her part, she might unwittingly cause the whole deal to fall apart. Oh, she would do it on purpose. After all, she wanted to get back to a male body more than I did. I mean, it was one thing to be an attractive woman, but I couldn’t imagine what she was going through as a six-year-old girl.

“All right,” I agreed after an uncomfortable silence. “I’ll call Cindy Patton tomorrow and try to set something up with The Judge.”

That satisfied her and we didn’t say another word about it. I had gone back to bed where Marty was still awake and eager, but I had to beg off. I was not happy with the deal I had been forced to make. Seeing The Judge was not high on my list of fun things to do.

I felt a little better the next day after I talked to Cindy. Rather than call her, I had walked Allie down the street so she could play with Cindy’s daughter. When the two of us were alone, I asked her about seeing her boss the next day.

Cindy looked up in surprise from her Diet Coke. We were seated at her kitchen table sharing a can of Diet when I had made my request. “Are you sure you want to do that?” she asked slowly. “You know, he doesn’t like for people to pester him with pleas to change back.”

“I just want to discuss the deal he made with us through Susan,” I countered. “Kimberly has some questions, and I thought that would be the best way to do it.”

“How’s she adapting?”

I shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

“And how about you and Marty?”

I must have blushed because she didn’t wait for my answer.

“So it can be fun to be a girl, can’t it?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. In my mind I knew the answer: yes, it could. I was more than a decade younger than I had been as Grant Douglas. All the somewhat dissipated years on the road had been stripped away from me, and I had a life with new energy and purpose. As for the sex, yes–it was great–far better than I could have ever imagined. But I was reluctant to mention it. In spite of the positives, I had the potential to regain my rightful sex and enjoy even a younger existence. I’d be able to find renewed purpose there as well. It was as if admitting that being a woman wasn’t all that bad might somehow keep me from re-attaining my manhood.

Cindy didn’t wait for my answer, though. I think she knew it. She just laughed and said, “Look, I know The Judge will be in tomorrow and we don’t have any trials, so why don’t you pull Kimberly out of school over the lunch hour and I’ll tell him you need to see him?”

I’m sure the relief showed on my face. “Thanks, Cindy.”

Monday was a tense day for me. I barely slept a wink, turning down Marty’s offer to “relax me.” I had been too tense Sunday night to even think about having sex with him again. I knew I would be facing my boss and The Judge all in the same morning–not an enviable situation for anyone.

Professor Thurmond was indeed angry with me the next morning. I had stood him up on Saturday and he had had the rest of the weekend to brood about it. He was already in his office when I arrived, and conspicuously failed to return my morning greeting.

Even Steve noticed the snub. As he left the office, leaving Professor Thurmond and me alone, he mumbled softly, “Be careful. He’s pissed.” Really, did everyone know our business?

I decided to make the first move. I didn’t plan to come on to him but he was my boss and it probably wouldn’t do for me to get fired. I suppose that put me in the category of really needing my job. I wondered how many women every day faced the same conundrum I faced, trying to be pleasant to their bosses on one hand but not so pleasant that they found themselves in compromising situations.

“I’m sorry about Saturday... Jerry.” I was standing just at his office door as he purposefully avoided looking up from his paperwork. When I got no answer, I tried again. “I’m sorry...”

This time he looked up. “I heard you the first time.” There was no warmth in his voice. “Were you really sick?”

I could see in his eyes that if I tried to maintain that ruse, he wouldn’t believe me. But there was another story he might believe...

“It’s what I told Marty,” I said after a moment. “Jerry, he suspects something is going on. He said he wanted to come with me on Saturday. He offered to help me. The only thing I could think of was to pretend to be sick and not go at all.”

His frown softened. He hadn’t expected that reply. It was just the sort of reply that would feed both his ego and his natural suspicion. “Yes, I think I can understand that,” he said slowly. “That could make things difficult.”

I could see just what he was thinking. An angry husband complaining to the college authorities might create serious problems for him. Sexual harassment was probably more damaging to the career of a college official than it would be to anyone else. Add to it the fact that I notice Capta College had a woman president and for Jerry, the shit could easily hit the fan.

“Maybe we should sort of cool it for a while,” I suggested.

My boss suddenly transformed–oh not physically as I had, but the expression on his face turned from a stern one to the ingratiating look of a used car salesman with a hot prospect. “Oh I don’t think we need to do that.” He rose slowly, a carnivore stalking his prey. “That wouldn’t be good for either of us.”

I thought about turning and running, but what good would that do? I mustn’t lose this job, I reminded myself. I mustn’t. Losing the job might count with The Judge as lousing up Donna’s life. Then there’d be no transformation back to a male existence.

He stealthily closed the door behind me and slipped a strong arm around my waist, pulling me toward him. Oh God, he was going to kiss me, I realized. I wondered if he had been someone else before and what he had done to get turned into such a sleaze. I braced myself for contact with his lips, hoping I could make the kiss sincere.

The sudden shrill ring of his phone caused both of us to jump. As casually as possible, he looked over at the display on the phone to see who was calling. I know he intended to ignore it unless it was an important call. I nearly sighed with relief when I saw it was the president’s personal line.

“Yes, Betty...”

Good. It definitely was Betty Vest, the president of the college.

“Right now?”

Oh yes, yes, yes!

The frown was back. “I’ll be right there.” He hung up and looked at me, but this time he was looking at his secretary. “Where are those files on that course in eighteenth century American literature?”

“I’ll get them,” I told him, turning quickly so he couldn’t see the big smile on my face.

As promised, I picked up Kimberly at school just before noon. I tried to put a happy face on things and make her feel that The Judge was going to be pleasant and cooperative, but in my heart I didn’t feel that way. My last and only run-in with The Judge had resulted in my transformation. I had thought him to be an arrogant, sanctimonious ass who had robbed me of my very existence. Maybe that should be the definition of a god. I expected little or no help from him, but if we were to get any cooperation from Kimberly, she had to be made to understand that our only chance to get back to lives more like our own would involve cooperating with him.

I suppose in a way, Kimberly had the hardest job of any of us. Marty had his secretary to corral and I had a boss with nothing but sex on his mind, but at least the roles we had to play were those of adults. Granted, our sexes had been changed, but at least we were adults with familiar responsibilities. But Kimberly... what must it be like for her to awaken and find that not only had her sex been changed but that she was a mere six-year-old, barely past the toddler stage.

From what I had observed of her already, she was doing a reasonably good job of it. None of her friends seemed to think of her as anything but what she appeared to be. And around other adults, she assumed the demure role of a bright young girl. In a bizarre way, I suspected she would never admit to anyone including herself she seemed to be enjoying her part. Perhaps there were some compensations–no responsibilities, lesser expectations, and that sort of thing.

Or perhaps she was just enjoying life. Jess had joined the band because he was an absolutely incredible drummer, but he came to the band complete with the drug problem that had led to his ‘death.’ In a more lucid moment, he had told me that he started on drugs back in high school with his first band. That meant that Jess had been stoned for the greater part of his adult life.

Now though, as Kimberly, she was young and alert with no chemicals to dull her brain. In the short time I had observed her as my daughter, she exhibited a mind I had never imagined when she had been Jess. Although she hadn’t told me, I overheard her friends asking her questions like “How come you’re so smart?” If she were to stay in her new life and apply herself, I suspected she would someday be the valedictorian of Ovid High School.

Cindy smiled at us as we entered The Judge’s office. That made me feel a little better. I realized that Cindy must be like all of us–transformed from another life into this one. I wondered who she had been in a previous life. Maybe an attorney, I thought, since she was working with The Judge now. Had she been a male attorney? I was finding that most Ovidians seldom spoke of their previous lives, so I might never know.

She ushered us into The Judge’s empty office with a last minute admonition: “Don’t do anything to make him mad.”

“What makes him mad?” I asked.

She looked puzzled for a second before replying, “Come to think of it, just about anything might.” And with that, she closed the door behind her.

“How can I be of service to you Mrs. Pearson?”

Kimberly and I both jumped. The Judge was standing before us from behind his desk, and yet neither of us had seen him as we entered. It was a not-so-subtle reminder to us both that we were not dealing with a small-town judge–as if we really needed reminding.

I took a deep breath and began, “When we were... before you the other day, Jess–I mean Kimberly–wasn’t in any condition to understand what was going on. I thought you could enlighten her.”

He motioned for us both to sit. I sat in the one chair before his desk while Kimberly took a chair to one side. The Judge smiled indulgently at Kimberly as if she were the six-year-old girl she appeared to be. “And what would you like to know, my dear?”

I nearly gasped as Kimberly took The Judge’s politeness as some sign of weakness. I could see her little brows furrow as she sat forward in her chair. “I’d like to know what gives you the right to do this to us? What makes you think...?”

Her voice trailed off into a gagging sound as The Judge waved his hand before her.

“...and my dolly’s name is Samantha. And I...” Her voice trailed off as a look of terror crossed her face.

There was one on mine as well as Kimberly prattled along like the average six-year-old would. It wasn’t like Allie’s situation; Kimberly was mentally aware of what she was doing, but it was as if the autopilot we had all experienced suddenly went out of control, governing our actions whether we wanted it to or not.

“... and I’d like a kitty to play with and...”

The Judge waved his hand once more, a stern and unforgiving look on his face as he stared into Kimberly’s eyes. “You are by my will Kimberly Pearson and when you are in my chambers, you will act accordingly. Is that clear to you, young lady?”

I could see in her eyes that she wanted to fight him, but discretion truly is the better form of valor. She merely nodded nervously and mumbled, “Yes sir!”

The Judge relaxed. “Fine, my dear. Perhaps you should just listen as adults discuss this issue.” Without waiting for a response, he turned back to me.

“Your Honor,” I began carefully, determined not to incur the wrath of this powerful being, “since... Kimberly didn’t have the opportunity to hear the offer you made for us, I thought perhaps you could tell her what you were willing to do for us depending upon our level of cooperation.”

I must have phrased my request correctly, for The Judge looked more at ease than before and offered me a small smile. “Yes, I suppose that would be of interest to her.” He picked up a thin folder lying on his desk. “It’s all right here,” he announced. “If you cooperate with us, I will grant you new identities–complete with your original sex–just as soon as your replacements are available. Each of these new identities will be a healthy young teenager from a good home. It’s a most unusual offer.”

He tossed the file folder back on his desk and ignored it as it slid to a halt perched just at the edge of the desk. Kimberly reached out and grabbed it before it fell. While The Judge continued to devote his full attention to me, I noticed Kimberly had the opportunity to skim the file. Good, I thought. That way she could see that The Judge’s offer was legitimate.

“And how are you fitting in, my dear?” The Judge asked me solicitously.

“Oh, all right, I guess,” I replied, feeling my face flush just a little. I wondered if he suspected that Marty and I had used our reversed sexes as an opportunity to experiment. I thought that he probably did know. After all, it was only natural for a person to wonder what the opposite sex experienced when making love. It seemed to me that it would be natural to experiment.

“Good,” he replied in a soothing tone. “I’m pleased that your group has made such an effort to conform.” He looked over at Kimberly who had replaced the file on The Judge’s desk without him noticing. “I hope, young lady, that you can follow your parents’ example and act the part you’ve been given. Do you think you can do that?”

Kimberly looked frightened, but she managed to reply, “Yes, sir.”

The Judge rose. “Then if the two of you will excuse me...”

We took our cue and left without any further discussion. Kimberly obviously wanted to say something to me as we left, but I motioned for her to remain quiet until we got to the car. Once in the car, I asked her, “Do you feel better now, knowing that we have a chance at getting more appropriate lives if we cooperate?”

“Oh God, you don’t understand,” she wailed suddenly, tears forming in her eyes. “It’s a trap!”

She was practically hysterical after that, and I decided to take her back home rather than having lunch with her and returning her to school. I had never seen her act quite like she was acting just then–even after she had discovered her transformation. I managed to get her into the house and get her a glass of milk. By the time she had downed most of it, she seemed to have calmed down.

I was anxious to hear what she had to say. Our short stay in Ovid had been filled with one strange revelation after another. First, we had wondered about the strange town. Then we had found ourselves hauled into an odd court and transformed into different people. Then we had discovered that we each had a life we had never known before, and that we would have to react to decisions which were made in our new names but without our personal knowledge. We had been offered a way out of those new lives, but I had a sinking feeling that what Kimberly was about to tell me might mean that the prices to attain those lives might be more than we could pay.

“Now, will you tell me what’s wrong?” I prodded gently, aware that I must have sounded very much like the mother I appeared to be.

She sighed and began to tell her story as calmly as she could. “You know I was in a band back in high school?”

“Sure.” I nodded. “You told us about it. That’s why we wanted you as our drummer. You had the experience.”

“We were great,” she said dreamily. “No offense, but God’s Gizzard was a great band.”

“God’s Gizzard?” I repeated, giggling in spite of myself.

She shrugged. “Okay, it wasn’t much of a name, but we wailed, man. I mean we really had the sound. Our lead singer was a doll–great eye candy. She had a voice that makes Stevie Nicks sound bad. You know what I mean–that same smokiness Nicks has but smoother with a wider range. And no offense to you, but our lead guitarist and male vocalist would have put you to shame.”

“So what happened?” I asked, genuinely curious. By the time we had hooked up with Jess, he was already pretty strung out. He never talked about his old band. Until that day, I had never even known what they called themselves.

“Drugs happened,” she mumbled, her head down. “We got into them big time. It was fun at first. We even convinced ourselves that we needed them to play. We really sounded great, too. Until Adrian–that was our male lead–he got high one night after a performance and just... died.”

“Died?”

“OD’d big time. It wasn’t pretty. I don’t even know what he took. But right after the performance, he started choking and grabbing at his chest. He collapsed right into me, knocking me over when he fell.”

We were both silent for a minute. It seemed odd to watch a six-year-old girl who was seeing something so painful through her young eyes–something which happened so long ago that it should have been before she was even born.

At last, she giggled, but there was no mirth in the sound. “You know, it’s funny. Just before we played that night, Adrian told me I needed to watch what I took more carefully. He was afraid I’d be the one to die. Of course, he was the one with the weak heart, but we didn’t know that until after the autopsy. It was a freak accident–a little bit too much of this and too little of that and his heart just went crazy.

“Carla–she was our female vocalist–she really liked Adrian. I guess you could say she loved him. They never talked marriage or anything, but they were usually shacked up. She just couldn’t take it after that. The band split up after that. Adrian was the one who always held things together. Carla ended up frying her brain on something. The last I heard, she was in a mental institution out in California.”

I put my arm around her small shoulders. “I never realized,” I told her softly. I suppose I could have added that her story explained a lot about Jess. I could tell from the way Kimberly told the story that she was closer to Adrian and Carla than she had ever been to any other people in her life as Jess. It explained why Jess had been cooking himself for so many years–he needed the drugs to dull the pain. Maybe he even blamed himself just for surviving.

“But Kimberly,” I continued, bringing her back to the reality of who she had become, “what does all of this have to do with your assertion that The Judge is trying to trap us?”

She looked up at me, the pain still in her eyes. “Don’t you see? Don’t you understand?”

I stared at her stupidly, unsure of what to say.

“There were pictures in that file–pictures of who we will be if The Judge changes us. Those teens–they look like Adrian, Carla and me. The Judge is going to make us re-enact their lives. It’s going to happen all over again...” She burst into sudden tears. To my surprise, she leaped out of the kitchen chair and threw herself into my arms. As alarmed as I was, it felt somehow... gratifying to have her there, sniffling all over my blouse as I patted her long, silky hair.

“It’s all right,” I soothed, a little unsettled myself from what she had told me. Could that actually be The Judge’s plan for us? “It can’t be that bad. Why, I haven’t seen any drugs here in Ovid, so I don’t think we’d be able to repeat their mistakes.”

She looked up at me, and through the tears argued, “But there is alcohol here. Maybe we’ll all become alcoholics or something...”

She had a point there. I had seen several bars and restaurants in Ovid that served liquor. There seemed to be no prohibition on alcoholic beverages. Although I hadn’t seen anyone staggering around drunk, that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

“I don’t want to become like that,” she pressed. “Not ever again.”

“But Boop is... you know... a lesbian,” I pointed out. “If she becomes Carla and I become Adrian, their romance won’t repeat itself.” I found myself saddened by that, as if I had realized it for the first time.

“I don’t think The Judge likes same-sex relationships. Look at how Boop has changed since she became... Daddy.”

“It’s really not a change. She–he–still likes girls.” Yeah, he likes me. But when Marty becomes this Carla person, what happens then? I wondered. If Kimberly was right, she might be attracted to the new me. But what if she was wrong? What if the new Carla would be attracted to girls? I didn’t want to think about that.

“Look, why don’t you go upstairs and get some rest? We can talk more about this later.”

“Okay, Mommy.”

I was shocked when she said that. It was so natural. Oh, I don’t mean natural for Jess, but it was natural for a six-year-old girl named Kimberly. I realized suddenly that she had retreated back into the automatic mode. I carried her up to her room as she hugged me fiercely. If anyone had seen us like that, all they would have seen was a nurturing mother comforting her little girl. It would have appeared so natural. The strange thing was that it actually felt natural as well. I began to wonder if over time we became exactly what we appeared to be whether we wanted to or not. If so, we needed to be changed into the trio of teens as quickly as possible.

But what if Kimberly was right? I asked myself once I had placed her on her bed and wiped away her girlish tears. What if the three teens we were to become were destined for a tragic end? Part of me argued that nothing was foreordained. We could overcome any predestination, couldn’t we? But then again, these were gods we were dealing with. They may have invented predestination. And the gods I remembered from my youthful reading delighted in such antics. It was almost like a divine version of Let’s Make a Deal. What will it be? Will you keep the lives you’ve been given or would you like to see what’s hiding behind Door Number Three?

Kimberly wasn’t the only one in the family who was upset that evening. Marty got home late, and when he came in the house, he scarcely spoke to me or to Allie who had joined me in the kitchen to help make dinner. Allie tried her level best to draw her father and her sister out of their respective funks at dinner. Poor Allie, I thought. In so many ways, she was like Gordy. It had to be hard for her to cope with the quirks of the three of us while she had no memories of our previous lives together.

I waited until the girls were in bed before confronting Marty. Fool that I was, I confronted him in our bedroom, not mindful of what had happened between us the last time I had done that.

“Wendy again?” I asked partially out of amusement and partially out of concern.

“How did you know?” he gasped, his face hovering between fear and guilt.

“A woman can always tell,” I told him sarcastically.

He ignored the sarcasm, looking down at the floor like a guilty child. “I would have let her do it this time,” he confessed.

“Do what?”

“The blowjob. I was working on a proposal. It was a big policy for the Farmer’s and Merchant’s Bank.” Recognizing my blank stare, he explained, “They’re the biggest bank in town. Anyway, I was working away on it and didn’t notice when Wendy came in. Before I knew it, she had her hands on my shoulders and started rubbing them. God, it felt good. And then one thing led to another. She said she didn’t know why I was mad at her. I told her I wasn’t mad...”

“Damn it, Marty, cut to the chase!” I demanded angrily. “Did you screw her?”

He actually looked shocked. “Screw her? Oh, no! No, I...”

“Did she give you a blowjob?”

“Not exactly...”

I sighed dramatically. “Marty, will you tell me how a woman not exactly gives a man a blowjob?”

“She was down on her knees before I knew it,” he said in a rush. “She had my zipper open and I... I...”

“You were hard and ready,” I prompted. “I used to have one of those things, remember?”

“Yeah. Just then, some farmer came in looking for a quote on insurance for his truck. Wendy got up so fast I thought she was going to hit her head on the side of the desk.” He snickered a little at that. “I made sure I left when my client did, leaving Wendy to close up. But jeez, Donna, I could hardly walk. I’m getting hard again just thinking about it!”

I don’t know why, but I found myself relieved that Marty hadn’t gotten that blowjob. I know we weren’t really married, but somehow it felt as if that would be cheating on me. Besides, it brought back too many unpleasant memories of our days together in the band–back when I thought I had a chance at Boop. Back before I realized she would never have anything to do with any man.

“Donna, do you think...”

I was a little lost in thought, and Marty’s tentative request was entered so meekly that I didn’t have a clue where he was going. “Think what?”

“That you could... you know... give me a... a...”

“A blowjob?” My eyes widened as I realized I had said that loud enough to be heard a block away.

“It’s not that bad. I’ve given them to guys–back in high school at least.”

Well I hadn’t. Yeah, I know there are a fair number of guys in bands who are AC/DC, but I wasn’t one of them. I got my share of sex as a performer, but it was all one-hundred percent heterosexual sex. “I thought you told me that most straight women didn’t like oral sex,” I pointed out.

He thought about that for a moment. “I believe I added ‘unless they got it in return’.”

“So there you are!” I said triumphantly.

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I’ll do you first.”

Oh shit. This conversation hadn’t gone where I wanted it to go, I realized suddenly. I had backed myself into something of a corner. To be honest, I didn’t exactly mind Marty doing me orally. In my short time as a woman, I had come to think of sex as something I might as well experience, since once I had been changed back into a male, I’d never have another shot at it. Spreading my legs for Marty wasn’t such a big deal. It didn’t feel queer. After all, men didn’t have what I had between my legs, so how could it be queer?

But a blowjob was different. I could do those just as easily as a male as I could as a female. After all, a man doesn’t have a vagina, but he does have a mouth. No matter how much I enjoyed sex as a woman, I’d lose the ability to have sex that way when my vagina went away. But as for blowjobs... Of course I was sure I wouldn’t enjoy the experience, so I supposed I had nothing really to fear. Still reluctant, I managed an “Okay.”

He didn’t give me any time to reconsider. I suppose from his standpoint, urgency was the word of the day. I could see his pants tenting out already in anticipation of what I had carelessly agreed to do. But it was to be my turn first. He undressed me quickly but not unkindly. I had changed into jeans and a cotton top when I had gotten home from The Judge’s office, but he didn’t even bother with the top, instead sliding my jeans down my smooth legs and discarding them. My panties he slid down more slowly, using his hands to caress my inner thighs as he did so. I could feel a little electric tingle as he touched me there.

Then, to my surprise, he didn’t go directly between my legs. Instead, he now removed my top and my bra with equal aplomb, making certain that his large, smooth hands took a moment to caress my breasts. I felt myself gasp involuntarily.

I was already getting wet by the time he lowered his face into my crotch. Somewhere inside my mind, Grant Douglas was trying to tell me not to go through with this, but while I had the mind and memories of Grant Douglas, I had already discovered that the body I now possessed in fact possessed me. It was a normal heterosexual female body, and it knew without my telling it what was about to happen.

How can I describe what Marty did to me that night? I had no idea what the human tongue was capable of doing. Marty drove me to the brink not once, not twice, but three magnificent times before allowing me to fall over the edge in what had to be the most incredible orgasm imaginable. How could I have ever known oral sex could be so pleasurable? As a man, I had always considered a blowjob a second rate substitute for good old fashioned penetration. Now though, I was starting to understand why some women actually preferred oral sex to anything else.

I was lying there basking in the pleasure of the orgasmic wave when I heard Marty ask, “How was it?”

“Incredible!” I breathed. “How did you know how...? I mean...”

Marty laughed, “You know you’re not exactly the first girl I’ve done that to. That’s what girl-to-girl is all about, right?”

“I suppose.” I hugged myself. “I just never knew how wonderful it could feel.”

“So are you ready to do your end of the deal?”

That brought me out of my sexual stupor. “Huh?”

“The... uh... blowjob?”

“Oh yeah.” I was so far out I had actually let myself forget about my part of the bargain. But fair was fair. I certainly had no cause to back out now. Marty had sent me soaring. I had to bite the bullet and... I giggled just a little. It wasn’t exactly a bullet I was going to be biting, was it?

Marty saved me the time of undressing him. He dropped his pants and stood there in front of me, looking for all the world like a high school boy about to get his very first one from his girlfriend. I tried to focus on his comical face; it kept me from thinking about what I was about to do.

Silently, I dropped to my knees. I gently took him in my hands, feeling the hard, almost slick surface of his penis. I could see he was so ready that I wouldn’t have to play with it very long. If I did, he’d be done long before I put my lips around it. Throwing caution aside, I wrapped my lips around him and began what had to be done.

A strange thought crossed my mind as I worked on him as best I could. I remembered an old joke: Why does the bride always smile at her wedding? The answer? Because she knows she’s already given the last blowjob she’ll ever have to give. Would that it were so.

I went on automatic as much as I could, but even on automatic, I could see myself performing. The only thing I managed to do on automatic was to perform the act a little less awkwardly. Even on automatic, I wasn’t prepared for the explosion in my mouth. I gagged, involuntarily spilling the cum out of my mouth and all over my breasts. There were tears in my eyes from the shock, and my neck hurt from where Marty had tried to hold my head in place.

Marty was certainly satisfied. His groans of pleasure were loud and sincere. That was the only thing that made me feel a little better. At least he had enjoyed it. I certainly hadn’t.

I rushed to the bathroom and wiped myself off as quickly as I could while spitting the salty fluid into the sink. I planned to use a full bottle of mouthwash to get rid of the taste. At least, I told myself, I didn’t need to worry about wanting to do this when I was changed back into a man. I never wanted to give anyone a blowjob again as long as I lived.

“What’s wrong?”

It was Marty. I hadn’t heard him come into the bathroom behind me, so intent was I on getting the taste of his ejaculation out of my mouth. My voice was husky from all the gargling when I replied, “I don’t want to ever do that again.”

“All right.”

“All right?”

He came up behind me and put his large arms around my tiny waist. “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have forced you to do that.”

“You didn’t force me,” I said quietly.

I could feel him shrug. “Maybe not, but you didn’t want to do it. I don’t blame you. I never liked to do them either. I... I think that’s one of the reasons I turned away from men altogether. But since you didn’t seem to have any problem making love to me as a woman...”

I started to protest but stopped, knowing it was worthless. The fact was I had enjoyed making love to him as a woman, as strange as that would have sounded to me a few days earlier, but it was true.

“...so I just was... curious about how it felt to have a blowjob.”

“And how did it feel?” I asked dully as I felt his penis rising behind me.

“It felt good,” he admitted. “But not as good as making love to you the regular way.”

I felt suddenly warm and content in his embrace. There was an unexpected twitching between my legs. I found myself asking tentatively, “Well, do you want to try it ‘the regular way’?”

I saw a smile forming on his lips in the image in the mirror. He released me and took my hand, leading me back into the bedroom. For the first time all evening, I began to think things might be all right.

However, things weren’t all right at work–not for me and not for Marty. Wendy the Trollop continued to press him for the next couple of days. To his credit, Marty managed to find excuses to be out of the office for a good portion of that time, but whenever he was there, Wendy would put the moves on him, reminding him that she could very easily blab about their relationship all over town. As small a town as Ovid was, Marty’s reputation would be ruined. It would cost him much of his business, and as for the remainder of his business, Wendy actually did much of the grunt work while Marty sold. Even accessing the automatic functions of being Marty, he wouldn’t be able to keep track of much. We’d be ruined.

And it was unlikely we could fall back on what I was making. I found out when I saw my first paycheck how little department secretaries made at Capta College. Even down-on-their-luck rock bands made more, and that was saying something. Besides, the way things were going, I didn’t think I’d have the job much longer anyway. Professor Thurmond was obviously annoyed with my rebuffs. I had no doubt that considering the attention he was used to getting from Donna before my arrival, he considered himself to be jilted. I suppose he was right in a way.

While he had stopped putting the moves on me, he had started finding things wrong with my work. I suspected he was building a case to have me terminated. Sure, it was sexual harassment, but how could I prove it? Besides, I suspected that the previous Donna had welcomed the relationship, just as the previous Marty had enjoyed a pleasant relationship with Wendy. Not that it made what I was undergoing any less than sexual harassment, but it at least explained why he was being such a prick about it.

Alone in the office, I decided to call Susan to see if she had any suggestions for me. I suspected that the last requirement we must meet before being given new teenage lives would be to reconcile our relationships–both domestic and professionally–one way or another. Perhaps Susan knew the answer to that.

“I really can’t help you,” she explained over the phone after I had told her what was going on.

“Please, Susan...”

“Donna, I don’t mean I won’t help you. I mean I can’t help you. I don’t know exactly what you’re supposed to do.”

“But you work for The Judge,” I argued.

“No I don’t,” she corrected me. “I work with him, but there is a definite arm’s length relationship between a defense attorney and a judge–even in Ovid.”

I was at a dead end. Or was I? Perhaps Susan could help me after all. “Susan, you at least know The Judge. What do you think he wants us to do? Isn’t that at least within your power to tell us as our attorney? I mean, even if you don’t know for certain, can’t you at least advise us?”

Her voice brightened over the phone. “You’re right, Donna. I guess I’ve been working in Ovid so long I’ve forgotten what a real attorney is supposed to do. Okay. Here’s my advice. As if you hadn’t noticed, Ovid is a little straight-laced. There’s no smoking, no prostitution, not even a lot of drinking. The bars around here are fairly tame.”

“So you’re saying The Judge probably wants Marty and I to break off these other relationships. That would be the straight-laced thing to do.”

“I believe you’re right.”

“In spite of the fact that according to myths, our Judge had a rather rocky marital relationship?”

“And still does,” she laughed. “Apparently he and his wife haven’t said a civil word to each other in a few centuries. But I can tell you this. As far as I know, The Judge is pretty straight arrow these days. None of us know what he does in his free time, but I don’t think it’s sexual.”

“But he surrounds himself with beautiful women–you and Cindy for example,” I pointed out.

“Well, I’d hardly call myself beautiful,” she replied. I could practically hear her face turning red.

I was excited about figuring out what to do. It was obvious when I thought about it. I was relieved as well. What if The Judge had really wanted Marty and I to continue our extracurricular activities? It was one thing to make love to Marty. All I had to do was remind myself that somewhere inside my hunk of a husband was the woman I had secretly loved for many years. Professor Thurmond had no such tie to me, and I couldn’t imagine making love to him for even an instant.

Unfortunately, Susan had no solution for how we could fend off our supposed lovers without damaging ourselves in other ways. I’d have a hard time proving Professor Thurmond was actually sexually harassing me without going public with what we had already done–even though my side of the ‘we’ had been before I had even been Donna. As for Marty, Wendy could ruin him legally with a sexual harassment suit of her own. Marty had no case against her that would hold up in court, even though it was a lie.

I told Kimberly and Marty what I had learned while Allie was upstairs taking a bath.

“So we’re stuck,” Marty said glumly. “If we give into them, The Judge will probably keep us like this. And if we don’t, they’ll ruin us.”

“Not necessarily.”

Marty and I looked over at Kimberly who had just spoken. We had been ignoring her, treating her exactly like the six-year-old she appeared to be. One look at her knitting her brows as she carefully thought out a potential plan was enough to remind us that she might be physically only six but she was mentally our equal.

“What have you got in mind?” I asked her at last. I suddenly realized I was ready to listen to an idea from a person who used to be our drummer, Jess. In all the years the band had been together, I had never listened to Jess. None of us had. Of course, he was usually too strung out to make much sense. Now though, I realized with no little pride that Kimberly was worth listening to.

“Here’s what we can do...” she began.

Professor Thurmond practically threw the papers on my desk. “Donna, look at this. This isn’t what I asked you to do.” There was a peevishness to his voice that was well staged. He knew the papers he had thrown on my desk represented exactly what he had told me to do, and so did I. I fought down the urge to defend myself though. It would spoil the plan.

“Professor Thurmond,” I began in a soft, subservient tone, “could I have a moment with you in private?”

The scowl left his face. This wasn’t what he had been expecting. No, in fact I had been very carefully avoiding moments in private with him for the last few days, knowing very well where he expected those moments to go. I could see a look of triumph in his eyes. He had won! He was certain of it. In no time at all, I’d be giving him a tearful apology, followed by a trip down on my knees under his desk to show with my lips how sorry I really was.

No dice, Jack, I told myself. If I didn’t want to give Marty another blowjob, I certainly didn’t want to give one to this creep.

“Why don’t you come in, Donna?” he said smoothly, motioning to the door to his office. Ah yes, the Emperor could be munificent when it suited him. All could be forgiven just as soon as the dirt on the floor under his desk graced my nylon-covered knees.

When he shut the door behind me, I thought just that this might not be the best idea I had ever acted upon. I had to do this just right, I reminded myself. If I didn’t, I’d be either fired or raped–maybe both.

He stood before me, a smug look on his face. “Now what is it you wanted to tell me?”

“That I’m sorry,” I said a little breathlessly. “Oh Jerry, I’m sorry about the way I’ve been treating you the last few days.” I, of course, said nothing about how the bastard had been treating me. “I know you must think I’m terrible, but so much has happened...”

As I let my voice trail off, I could see his curiosity rising. “What... has happened?” he asked cautiously.

I reached out and took his hand. “Oh Jerry, I want to tell you everything, but not here... not now.”

“Why not here and now?”

“You have a meeting with the Provost,” I reminded him. Of course, I had picked a time when he did have a meeting just to make sure I had him hooked for the next request.

“Damn! I nearly forgot it.” Good. That meant I had him a little off balance. He wanted me and he wanted to know what was going on. There was a way he could have both or so I needed to make him believe.

“Why don’t we go to lunch after your meeting?” I suggested. “We can go over to The Greenhouse and get a quiet little table in back. I can tell you everything then.”

“Well...”

“And your one o’clock meeting has been moved back to three. We can come back here and...”

Again I let my voice trail off and had the satisfaction of watching my boss use his imagination to determine how many times I could bring him to climax before his three o’clock meeting. I had a grim suspicion the Donna Pearson who existed before I came on the scene would have gladly accommodated him in every respect. Of course, it was his memories of that Donna Pearson that made him want to believe everything I was telling him. I had to marvel, though, at the seductive power women had over men. I was surprised that women didn’t rule the world. Or maybe they did and the men just weren’t smart enough to realize it.

“I suppose we could do that,” he agreed with a predatory smile to meet my coy one. It was a date. I had him!

Now all I had to do was wait for him to pick me up for lunch. So far, the plan was working. Well why shouldn’t it? This was exactly what Jerry Thurmond wanted. I wondered if Marty was having equal success. For the first time in my life, I was thankful Marty had been a lesbian when he was a woman. It would make it easier to do what he had to do.

Professor Thurmond was right on time to pick me up for lunch, but it didn’t take much imagination to figure out what he really wanted to be on the menu. I had purposefully worn a sexy outfit that day–short skirt, especially high heels, and smoky hose that were attached to garters that he couldn’t have missed seeing when I had crossed my legs in his office earlier. Yes, I was to be the main course no matter what he ordered at the restaurant–unless our plan worked, of course.

I had eaten at The Greenhouse with a couple of the other secretaries from the college, so I knew the layout of the place. I had intentionally reserved a table in the most secluded section with the excuse that we had business to discuss. As we were being shown to the table, I thought that it was a good thing Ovid was a relatively small place. In a large city, my boss would have already had his arm around me, but there was too much of a chance of running into someone you knew in a town like Ovid. Of course, that was the plan...

“Donna!”

It was Marty calling out to me from a booth just down from the one I had reserved. I breathed a silent sigh of relief. Marty had kept up his part of the plan.

“Oh God!” I said quietly in Jerry’s ear. “It’s my husband. What are we going to do?” Poor little helpless feminine me–I was trapped without a plan–or so he thought.

“Why don’t you join us?” Marty offered gallantly. The blonde sitting across from him scowled dangerously. Marty gave her a little, almost imperceptible shrug as if to say, “What else can I do?”

Jerry looked equally uncomfortable, and I could see he was trying to find some way to refuse. The look on his face was that of a primitive male prepared to fight for his female. How stupidly romantic. Or should that be romantically stupid? “Don’t worry,” I whispered in his ear. “We’ll just have lunch with them and linger afterward.”

I could see that delaying things wasn’t going to do much to alleviate the swelling in his pants, but that was too bad. “All right,” he agreed reluctantly. After all, he had an image to maintain. Duking it out with my husband in a restaurant would not have improved his stature in the community.

Just as we arranged it, Marty got out of the booth and let Jerry slide across. I figured the blonde–Wendy of course–would never get up herself. The most I could expect from her was that she would reluctantly slide over allowing me to sit opposite Marty. That was a bad tactical move on her part, but what could I expect of the little bitch?

Introductions were quick and perfunctory since apparently only Jerry and Wendy had never met before, and Marty and I quickly grabbed our menus and pretended to study them.

“Just what do you do, Ms. Adams?” Jerry asked. He was turning on the charm in spite of himself. It was just too ingrained in his personality. Wendy was an attractive girl in a trampy sort of way, and Jerry was the sort of man who had to draw the attention of an attractive woman in order to feel attractive himself.

“I’m a secretary in Marty’s insurance agency,” she replied, making it clear in the way she said it that she felt she was destined for greater things.

“Oh?”

And the conversation went on from there as lunch was ordered then delivered. It was fascinating to be a woman and hear a man try to impress another woman in my presence. Jerry pretended to listen to every word Wendy uttered, but I could see in his eyes that he was really thinking about a better use for her lips than talking. Wendy on the other hand was trying her best to impress the Great College Professor. At first it was just a tease to annoy Marty, but as Jerry hung on her every utterance, she began to try to impress him as someone who might be able to do something for her.

“Mrs. Pearson?”

I looked up over my lunch and saw the worried face of the manager. She seemed reluctant to tell me the bad news, completely unaware that I knew just about exactly what she was going to say. “Yes?” I asked innocently.

“Your office just called. They had a call from your daughter’s school. She just passed out...”

“Oh my God!” I hoped I wasn’t overplaying it. Marty gave me a concerned look and put a hand on mine. I jumped up. “Excuse me,” I muttered, half hysterically. “I have to go. It’s my baby!”

“You’re in no condition to drive,” Marty warned, rising as well. “I’d better take you.” He looked around helplessly. “Jerry...”

My boss gave him a dismissive wave. “Don’t worry about it, old man. I understand completely.” He then looked at Wendy. “And I’ll be happy to see your secretary back to work as well.” I couldn’t see the look on Wendy’s face, but the satisfied smile on Jerry’s face was enough for me.

Marty gave him a grateful nod and ushered me out of the restaurant.

“Oh God! Kimberly’s plan might work!” I exclaimed as I jumped into the car practically giddy.

“I hope so,” Marty agreed, starting the car up. “You have no idea how hard it was to get Wendy to go to lunch with me. She wanted to lock the door to the office and jump me right there.”

“We’re close,” I told Marty. “I’m sure this is what The Judge wanted us to do. We’ll have our new lives by sundown.”

Marty was strangely silent but I let it pass. I knew he had actually gotten a kick out of being a man for a while. And why not? It was probably easier for him to make love to women now that he was a man...

I looked over at him as he drove intently toward Kimberly’s school. Boop was actually enjoying being Marty. Until that moment, I had thought it was just the magical ability to adjust that had made Marty seem so natural as a man. Now I was starting to see he was natural as a man because he wanted to be a man. Maybe Boop was more than just a lesbian. Maybe Boop had always harbored a desire to be a man. I knew there were men who wanted to be women. I had even met one once–a female impersonator who was playing a hotel next to the one we had played in San Diego a few years back. That guy wanted to be a woman so badly he was even contemplating surgery to look like a real woman.

Was Boop like that? Did she really want to be a man? I had read somewhere that it was hard to do the female to male surgery as effectively as the male to female variety. I didn’t know for sure, but it made sense. Now here was the golden opportunity for her. She could be the man she always wanted to be and no one had to carve her up to do it.

No, I thought, that couldn’t be right. If she wanted to remain as Marty, all she had to do was absolutely nothing. The Judge would then declare that we had failed to do what he required to be changed and we’d all be stuck as the Pearson family.

Kimberly proved to be a marvellous little actress. Of course, it helped that she had the mind of an adult male which, when unencumbered by drugs, was proving to be quite adept. She was lying down on the small bed in the nurse’s office, a cold compress on her forehead and her eyes barely open.

She stirred with nearly comic overacting as she said softly, “Oh Mommy, is that you?”

“She passed out in class,” the nurse explained to Marty and me. Yes, and she passed out right on cue. Her tiny girl’s watch had been synchronized with mine that morning, so she must have timed her faint perfectly.

“Oh are you all right, darling?” I asked in my best worried-mother voice as I rushed to her side. Fortunately, the nurse couldn’t see me wink at the ‘stricken’ girl or the wink she gave me in return.

“I think so, Mommy.”

“This happens every now and then,” the nurse told us as she patted her short, dark hair in place. “They get too excited about something or haven’t eaten a good breakfast that morning and they get lightheaded. Of course she’d just eaten lunch. It might even be something she’s allergic to. You might check her out with your family doctor just to be safe.”

“Oh we will,” I assured her as I pretended to help Kimberly to her feet.

By the time we reached the parking lot, Kimberly was giggling. “Be quiet!” I warned her. “We don’t want anyone to know we’re faking it.”

She jumped in the back seat and fastened her seat belt. “They wouldn’t think that. I’m a little girl. I’m supposed to change my mood every hour or I’ll get bored.”

“She’s got that right,” Marty laughed. “That’s just about the way I was when I was a girl her age.” That sounded so strange coming from the very masculine man.

“So what do we do now?” Kimberly wanted to know.

“Well,” I told her, “first we see how well things went at the restaurant and then we go home.”

“Can we get something to eat first? I passed out before dessert.”

“A sweet tooth, eh?” I chided her.

“It’s better than drugs. Besides, I’m a growing girl.”

Yes, I thought, but not for much longer if we are successful.

We got back to the restaurant just in time to see Professor Thurmond’s silver Porsche pull out of its parking space. Although we had to maintain a discreet distance, I could see that he had a passenger–a female passenger judging from the long blonde hair.

“My office isn’t in that direction,” Marty pointed out as he drove.

“Neither is mine,” I added. “But I do believe Professor Thurmond’s apartment is right down that street.”

They never saw us as they got out of the car and headed into his apartment. It was no wonder. Even from our vantage point nearly a block away, we could see them holding onto each other as they walked to his door. I had a hunch he’d be calling me to tell me to cancel his afternoon appointments due to an unexpected illness. Marty would probably have a similar message on his own machine when he returned to the office.

“Let’s go celebrate!” Kimberly suggested happily.

But before either Marty or I could reply, our thoughts were interrupted as a police car pulled in right behind us.

“Now what?” Marty moaned as an officer stepped out of the car. Turning around, I saw it was that strange Officer Mercer. I knew Ovid was a small town and Mercury was supposed to be speedy as all get out, but couldn’t the gods afford more than one patrol officer?

Of course they could, I realized suddenly. “He’s going to take us to The Judge,” I announced.

“How do you know that?” Marty asked.

I grinned. “Woman’s intuition.”

“Good day, folks.” Marty had already rolled down the window to receive the officer. Officer Mercer seemed in a good mood.

“Officer Mercer,” Marty replied coolly.

“The Judge would like to see all of you right now. If you’ll just follow me.” He didn’t wait for an answer but instead sauntered back to his car and pulled out into the lane. Marty followed without a question. After all, what else could we do but follow?

Our ride to the courthouse was strangely quiet. I couldn’t speak for Marty or Kimberly, but I do know what was going through my own mind. I knew that this was truly the end of Interossiter. When we were transformed, we might all look different and in Gordy’s case not even remember who we been, but we were still together–just as we had been for most of the time since college. Now that was about to change.

Gordy, of course, was stuck as Allie. Allie hadn’t even been given the option to change again. I suppose even if any of Gordy still survived, he had been immersed so deeply into the psyche of a young girl that it would have been traumatic for her to change again and would have served no purpose. Gordy had become a bright, intelligent girl, and every now and then I saw just enough of Gordy’s old mannerisms in her to make me believe that at least something of Gordy survived even if not on a conscious level.

Marty was deep in thought behind the wheel. I was pretty sure Marty would ask The Judge to not change him. Boop had turned into a pretty good man, I thought. In fact, he made a better man than a woman. The bitterness Boop exhibited for much of the time I knew her was gone. Sometimes–no, most of the time–I had wondered what had ever attracted me to Boop. Now I knew. In Marty, I saw all the good qualities of Boop without the bitterness that had ruined her life.

The reason? Marty liked women every bit as much as Boop had, and now he had the full package to offer a woman. Marty was a thoughtful and capable lover; I knew that from firsthand experience. I think I would have gone crazy at the prospect of having sex as a woman, but with Marty’s experience in making love to women that he had gained as Boop, it hadn’t been so bad. In fact, it had been pretty good. All right, it had been some of the most enjoyable sex I had ever experienced–as long as I left the blowjob out.

As for Kimberly, I knew she had her misgivings about the new roles we were to be given, but I had no doubts that she would still jump at the chance to become male again. After all, who would want to be a six-year-old girl?

I had to admit, though, she had done well at it. I had seen a side of Jess I had never known existed. Instead of the helpless but talented musician who had screwed up his life beyond any hope of redemption, I had been introduced to an intelligent, clever person who had come up with the plan that had saved the day for us. She actually seemed to enjoy her time as a little girl, but I was sure she would not turn down the chance to be a nearly-adult male.

So it would be just Jess and I changing to our male identities once more. We’d be friends; of that I was sure. I looked forward to developing a friendship with Jess. As band members, we had never been close. It was hard to get close to a junkie. And after a time, he would realize that his fears about the roles we were to be given were groundless. After all, it was virtually impossible to be a junkie in Ovid.

So there it was I thought, as we pulled up in front of the courthouse. Interossiter would be split right down the middle. Half of it would become half of the Pearson family. Meanwhile, Kimberly and Donna Pearson would become two high school boys set to face the world. It wouldn’t be so bad, would it–to be a high school boy once more? No, it would be good.

So why didn’t it feel as if it would be good?

I had a choice to make, too, I realized as I accompanied my family and Officer Mercer into the courtroom. It wasn’t a simple matter of accepting my new male body and moving on with a new life. I had thought it would be. But the last few days had actually been rewarding in a perverse sort of way. I had loved Boop at one time, and I had been devastated when I found that she could never love me as a man. But by the time I had realized that, our fates had been irrevocably tied together by the band. I thought I had grown to hate her, but I realized now that it wasn’t hate–it was frustration. It was that I had found the person I felt I was meant to be with and couldn’t manage the relationship because of the way Boop was wired.

All that had changed over the last few days. Boop, as Marty, still loved women, or maybe he even loved them more since Boop had very few relationships with women in spite of her sexual inclinations. As for me... well, I had forged an unconscious partnership with Marty. The purpose of it was to get back something resembling our old lives–or so I thought. Maybe the real purpose was just to cope with the changes that had been made to our lives. And I had sealed that partnership with Marty by being the woman he wanted me to be.

But I wasn’t really a woman, was I? Sure, I looked like one and had acted like one all the time I had been in Ovid. While I could joke around Kimberly, I had even managed to be the dutiful mother around Allie. To be honest, it hadn’t even been that difficult. With the magical automatic help, I had been able to act and look the part to perfection, but underneath it all, I was still really Grant Douglas.

Wasn’t I?

The Judge was already seated when we entered the courtroom, flanked by Susan and Cindy, my two new friends. Each of the women gave me an encouraging smile. Would they–could they–still be my friends when I was a teenage boy and they were adult women? It didn’t seem likely.

“Well, it seems you have managed to do what needed to be done,” The Judge said somewhat blandly, almost as if he was a little disappointed that we had succeeded. Or perhaps he just didn’t care. Who knew what went on inside the mind of a god?

“There are suitable candidates available to take over the lives you three have occupied,” he continued. “They will take your roles tomorrow morning. Now, I suppose you’re anxious to get on with your new lives so...”

“Your Honor!”

It was Marty who interrupted him. I closed my eyes. I knew what he was going to say after all.

“Yes, Mr. Pearson?” The Judge’s voice was polite, but there was sharp steel in his tone. I nearly shuddered to think about what The Judge could do if angered, and Marty seemed to have set him off on that path.

“Your Honor, I would like to request that I be allowed to stay as Marty Pearson.”

“Mr. Pearson,” The Judge began, “I am well aware of your original sexual orientation. But as you may have gathered, I frown on such activities. I can assure you that once you are in your new female body, you will find yourself very naturally attracted to men, so there is no need for you to remain male.”

“It’s... it’s not just the sex.” Unconsciously, he looked at me as he said that, causing me to blush. “It’s much more than that.”

The Judge settled back in his chair. “Perhaps you’d better explain then.”

“I’m needed here.”

An insurance man... needed?

“You see I’ve never really had a place to call home. My parents moved around a lot and then with all the travelling the band has done, I’ve never really felt anyplace was home. Here though, I’ve got a business, people know me and seem to like me. Some of them have even suggested I run for City Council next year. Then there’s my family.” He looked back at Kimberly and me. “I know only Allie will be the same, but I like having a family. I like coming home to them, providing for them...”

As his voice trailed off, I found my eyes were misting just a little. I had loved Boop to no purpose, often wondering what I saw in her. Now, as she stood before me as Marty Pearson, I realized what it was.

“Very well, Mr. Pearson,” The Judge sighed. “If you are satisfied as you are, I see no reason to change you further. Consider this your life. Use it wisely.”

“I will, Your Honor.”

I was happy for him. Of course, it came as no surprise and I would miss him terribly, but I was nonetheless happy for him. So our group would be split in half... forever. It saddened me more than I could imagine.

“And Miss Kimberly Pearson,” The Judge intoned. “I would imagine from your outburst the other day that you would like to be changed into a man again. The young man I’ve selected for you should meet your requirements.”

“Uh... Your Honor?” Kimberly asked, sounding for all the world like the six-year-old girl she appeared to be.

“Yes, Ms. Pearson?”

“I... I think I’d like to stay as Kimberly–if it’s all right with you.”

My knees weakened and I nearly collapsed in surprise. I knew she had had her concerns that The Judge was trying to trap us, but the opportunity to get out of her tiny body should have been more than enough to sway her to take The Judge’s offer.

“Of course it’s all right with me,” The Judge said in a kindly tone. “But would you mind telling me why?”

She actually swayed back and forth a little as she spoke, just as a natural if precocious little girl might do. “Well, Your Honor, at first I thought you were trying to play a mean trick on us–changing us into people like I remembered from my teen years. I thought you were trying to get us to be druggies just like those people–and me.”

“Surely you don’t believe that,” the Judge responded. “You must have found out by now that there are no drugs in Ovid. They aren’t allowed.”

“I realize that now, Your Honor,” she agreed. “But then I realized that no matter what man I became, I’d still be Jess. I’ve had a chance to view who I used to be from the outside and with a clear mind. I don’t think I like Jess very much, and any boy you turn me into just might be Jess again–even without the drugs. Then I’ve had the chance to see what you made me into. I’m smart, cute, and I have a lot of friends. I think I’d like to see if I can’t do a better job as Kimberly than I did as Jess.”

“A very admirable plan,” The Judge replied with a nod. “But there’s more to it than that isn’t there, Kimberly?”

“Yeah, there is,” she admitted. “I can’t leave Gordy–Allie, that is. He–she–took care of me for a long time. Gordy might as well have been my brother. In fact, he took better care of me than any of my real family ever did. I don’t want to leave her all alone.”

“But she won’t be alone,” The Judge pointed out. “There’ll be a new Kimberly.”

“But she wouldn’t be me,” Kimberly countered softly.

“All right, Kimberly, but this is your last chance,” The Judge warned her. “I’m going to give you one more chance to be a young man. If you refuse, you’ll be Kimberly Pearson for the rest of your life.”

She smiled at The Judge. “I refuse then, Your Honor.”

The Judge smiled back. “Very well, Kimberly.” Then he turned his attention to me. “Well Donna, it looks as if you’ll be the only one changing today, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so,” I replied dully. Of course, I was thinking about what I had just witnessed. For the last few days we had been a family. Once I had overcome the initial shock of being changed into a woman, I had actually enjoyed the routines of family life which I hadn’t experienced since I was a boy. It had been almost like a vacation to get away from the rigors of running the band, and I had been able to see a side of my long-time associates that I had never imagined before.

The problem was that I really enjoyed being male. Throughout my life, I had enjoyed an active life. I had been handsome, entertaining, virile, and for a time successful. Now I was being given the opportunity to start over again as a young, good-looking man with his future before him. It should have been my dream. So why did it taste like ashes in my mouth?

The answer was right in front of me. Allie, Kimberly, and Marty hadn’t become my family; they had been my family for many years. It’s just that somewhere along the way, we had become tired and dysfunctional as some families do. We had needed a change in our various points of view to rekindle the fires of friendship and love that had bonded us together as Interossiter so many years before.

“Your Honor.”

“Yes, Donna?”

“I... I think I’d like to stay this way, too.”

Kimberly gave a whoop of joy and was quickly silenced by The Judge’s gavel. “Young lady, there will be no outbursts in this courtroom!”

“Yes, Your Honor,” she said meekly.

The Judge turned to me. “Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not,” I replied. “To be honest, I’m scared. I don’t know if I can really learn to enjoy being a woman, let alone a wife and a mother. But I do know I can’t leave my family.” There were tears in my eyes by now. “And if being a woman is what it takes to stay with them, I’ll just have to learn to deal with it.”

I felt Marty’s strong arm around my waist, pulling me to his side, and I felt a small hand take my hand as Kimberly came up to me with a smile.

“Then it would seem that this court has no further business,” The Judge announced. “Besides, I think I’d better let you go since Allie will be home from school soon.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” we all said together.

I was smiling as we exited the courtroom together. I wasn’t sure how this would all turn out–being a real family and all–but I was more than willing to try.

As the trance faded, I saw that someone else had joined us. Experience had taught me that while the stories I related covered several days, the images we saw were in fact compressed into a few minutes. The Judge had come out of his office while I was relating the story of the Pearsons.

It was Diana who spoke first. “I’d say Donna’s problems aren’t over yet. She’s still got a few problems at work with her boss. That can’t possibly work out right.”

“True,” Susan agreed. “But it’s already taken care of. Donna resigned a couple of days later. Wendy did the same thing, by the way. So Donna is going to help Marty run his business.”

Diana smiled. “And I’ll bet Wendy applied for a position under Professor Thurmond.” Her wording was quite intentional.

Susan groaned, “Steve says it’s impossible to get any work out of her. She spends a great deal of her time in ‘private meetings’ with Jerry Thurmond.”

“What do you think, my dear?” The Judge asked. There was no question that he was asking it of his daughter, Diana.

She smiled. “I think you’re just a sentimental fool.”

That coming from a mortal might have led to life on a lily pad catching flies. For his daughter, The Judge only smiled. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean,” she told him, “that you acted as if the lives of the Pearsons were part of the Plan. You know they don’t have anything to do with it. Not only that, but what about that nonsense about the people they were supposed to be being out of town? Those people are shades, Father. You and I both know shades can’t leave town. Susan, I’m surprised he caught you on that one. He had you convinced you were giving them vital information while he was really deflecting them.”

Susan looked just a little shocked.

“All right,” The Judge actually laughed. “I’ll admit that I did it to save them from themselves, and I’ll admit I’ve always been a big fan of theirs. According to the Oracle, Interossiter should have been one of the biggest bands of the century. That was why I sent Eunice to help them when they were getting started. But they were too flawed to gel into the band they could have been. I decided as their deaths approached to give them one more chance to develop the bonds the Fates intended for them, albeit in a somewhat different fashion.”

Susan and I remained silent, our presence forgotten. We listened carefully, though. Mention of the Plan had caught our attention. Susan, of course, had been told that the Pearsons were important to the Plan so she could relate it to them, but apparently they weren’t. I could see her quietly fuming as she realized The Judge had lied to her.

“Besides, they are important,” The Judge argued, almost as if he had read our thoughts. “All of our residents are in a manner of speaking.”

“Yes, but you could have given them the identities you promised them without turning them into the Pearsons first.”

“And the Pearsons would have been headed for a divorce,” The Judge pointed out.

“So?”

To my surprise, The Judge smiled. “All right, my dear. You’re right. I’ll admit it. I indulged myself this time. It had nothing to do with the Conflagration...” His voice trailed off, and for the first time in my memory, I would have to describe the look on his face as nonplussed. He had said something he had not meant to say and was not certain how to recover. At last he said, “My reasons had nothing to do with the conflagration between the Pearsons.”

It was a good recovery, but not good enough. Diana looked a little alarmed, but she too recovered quickly. “Well, it was a most enjoyable story, but I must be off to London. I have tickets to a play in the West End and curtain is in thirty minutes.” With that she vanished. There was no cloud of smoke or anything so dramatic. It was just that one second she was there and the next she wasn’t.

After a moment of silence, The Judge said, “Well, I don’t want to keep you from your work.” He turned abruptly and walked back into his office, closing the door behind him. Almost at once, I heard the sounds of Boop McCarthy and Interossiter emanating from what had to be the only remaining copy of ‘What a Face’ in the universe.

“Any clue as to what that was all about?” I asked Susan. Her many years as a top criminal attorney had given her plenty of insights into human behavior. Although The Judge and his daughter weren’t exactly human, they exhibited a great number of human traits.

“Not really,” Susan admitted. “But I can tell you this. ‘Conflagration’ is a pretty strong term to use to describe marital difficulties. I’d say His Honor just slipped up.”

After Susan left, I got a little curious about the meaning of the word, so I pulled out my dictionary and looked it up. I wasn’t comforted by what I found. The word referred to a large disastrous fire. But there was another meaning of the word as well. The most troubling meaning of the word conflagration is ‘war.’

The End