This story contains (dubiously consensual) forceful gender/species transformation. We hope that you enjoy it
I was to see the future of the world and the world threw itself apart rather than subject itself to my gaze. I stepped from block to block to block, never the distance seemed to diminish, each step on the asphalt was accompanied by the piercing fear that the roaming machines might take advantage of their owner’s distraction or encouragement and take my life for the sake of a few seconds saved. Each time I stared into the eyes of the waiting drivers accusatory, baleful; it’s important to puff yourself up against people who have the means to end you, they have to know that they can’t count on mere advantage to prevent issues, you must yank the chain of possibility and tilt it in your favor.
But even still, in each step there is a gamble.
I step onto the sidewalk again, the little fibreglass domes rubbing against my shoes, and I can relax again, my shoulders slump downwards, I take a turn to the right into my building. Through the threshold and I pull out a bit of affability, as much as I am able to, which is not much.
I open my mailbox; it remains stubbornly empty.
I step into the elevator, the RFID fob takes seconds of jiggling before it responds to it, while I wait for the doors to close a hand shoots in and I jump, a woman steps in, someone I have seen around but never introduced myself to, but all that matters is maintaining the politeness, “Uh, what floor would you like?”
“Seven” She says, looking away from me; she must know the shame that sits upon my heart. I nod and hit the button, stepping off about half way there, “Have a nice night” I force out, no response was made nor expected.
There’s a distinction in the air here, I hurry down the hallway whose self-similarity diminishes as I approach the end. My door is 3 away from the end.
I open the door and become comfortable as I enter it. I stand right, stretching as my soles lift off the ground and my claws clatter upon the hardwood floor. If only it was real, the cramps start and reluctantly, the claws retract and my soles fall upon the ground.
Even the little rituals to close the smallest distance seem impractical to perform.
I need to eat, so I start to cook myself something.
I go out for a walk, as I walk I pass a person in a fox costume that seems a bit… good for a costume. I can hardly stop staring at her in the elevator, the nostrils on the costume, if it is one seems to flare with each breath, My voice doesn’t want to cooperate, “I- Where’d you get that costume?”
She looks at me, a kind of hunger in her eyes that left me feeling equal parts aroused and frightened, “Why, do you want one of your own?”
“I uh” My mouth is dry, the elevator dings, “Yeah. I guess I do.” her eyes bore into me “I was going to go for a walk” I follow up almost too quickly, “Wanna talk or something?” My heart hammers as if it was a date rather than something rather more business shaped.
“Why not? I was just going to check the mail but I could go for a walk. Anywhere in particular?”
“I was thinking the park”
“That sounds great, can I get my pet fox actually? She could use some exercise.”
“Pet fox?”
“Yeah?”
“Am I going to be bit?”
“Probably not.”
I don’t know how to feel about this, it would be an honor to meet a fox, but this felt strange, was I having another episode? “I like foxes.”
She chuckles, “I do too. I’m Rena”
“Nice name”
She gets her mail and drops it off in her apartment, where a bizarrely well behaved fox trots out and follows us calmly, she regards me and sniffs me, the fox and the woman lock eyes for a few seconds, “I don’t usually need to leash her, but I have it in my bag if I need to.”
She wasn’t wearing a bag, but I didn’t really find myself caring, if people get bitten by a fox there’s a decent chance they earned the privilege, “Okay.” I say to her.
She starts to tell me about her life recently, about how she had to come out after things went faster than expected and how she was surprised to find out that she had just started dating her boss’ sister. It felt like a recipe for a telenovella if not for how transgressive and desirable it all sounded.
The fox was very well behaved, even in the traffic, it was attentive and smart, and it stared at me with an intensity that made me wonder if it was also sizing me up for a meal. This has to be the calmest psychotic break I’ve ever experienced.
“I know a great vantage point off this trail,” She says, pointing down a marked trail, the fox was already starting to move in that direction.
“Sure, let’s go see it then” I smile, there’s a fluttering in my stomach.
The trail descends into a different type of forest, leaving behind the leafy deciduous forest of the near city into the deeper countryside, the forests that were the primeval landscape of this area.
“Are we still in the park?” For some reason it doesn’t bother me as much as it should, “I’m starting to doubt my sense of reality here.”
“Don’t worry, this is all real.” She says. She grabs my hand, her paw pads are rough against my skin, she squeezes softly “But I can’t tell you for sure about whether or not we’re in the park. She did this to me when I met her too”
“Her?”
“The fox.”
The fox stops ahead on a rock overlooking a valley. A huge rock face scrawled in an absurd amount of graffiti where coherent murals merge into the incoherent jumble of overlapping tags, denying anything readable at all. Or perhaps there’s a deeper pattern there, a relationship that transforms the noise into coherence.
I stare at it, slowly, an image forms in my mind, pieces of the whole assembling to a single statement: YOU ARE NOT SAFE. I shake my head, I know better than to trust that.
She sits over the edge, and motions for me to follow, I do so slowly, unable to peel my eyes from the distance from where I sat to the bottom.
“Are you concerned you might be experiencing a moment of insanity?” She asks me.
“Yes. But I don’t feel upset or wound up like I usually do, so it’s hard to be sure.”
“Well, is ending up like me something you’d hate?”
“Permanently?”
“If you like”
“If I like?”
“This is going to be very strange for you.” She says. Her form starts to lose cohesion, like a cloud of smoke expanding and changing even as it retains its general shape. Her eyes blaze green out at me and I am pinned against the rock, “But this is how I propagate. I can see in that little head of yours ‘human’.” The derision in the last word leaves me stunned, “There’s no need to hide any longer my little pup. Interloper no longer, invader, perhaps an agent of redemption”
The idea sends a shiver down my spine, “What do you intend to do to me?”
“You are like glass my vixen, we can see the shape of what lies within, unaltered by those drugs that barely take the edge off of the fundamental disorder within your mind.” I feel myself melting under her claws. Her eyes pull in my attention and it feels like she’s getting in to my head, thrashing my carefully constructed barriers, the ones that make me who I am. The ones that keep me from becoming and drifting endlessly across a surface vast as worlds.
Furrows open up and the conjunctions find the center of their migrations in a new place.
New walls raise up and I am confined again a new cage just the same size as the old one. An experience that I can only identify as ‘femininity’ passes over me.
I shudder. “Why does it feel so good?”
“Does your identity bring you happiness when you have built so much of it upon being inadequate?”
“What was I like, trans or something?”
“You didn’t tell me your name, I would assume that you don’t like it.”
“Not really, no. I mean, I did like putting on my mom’s dresses as a–”
“Great, glad to have helped.” She rolls her eyes, but there’s something about it that makes me think that there might be something there for her too.
“You aren’t doing this to help me?”
“I saw what you were. All withdrawn from the world.” Her sneer grows, “I love what you represent, you’re not a blank canvas, you’re a painting that I’ll need to blank out most of to fix.”
“What separates that from death?”
“You are a core surrounded by broken glass and the growths outside it through the safe paths” She runs her claw over my chest, drawing a path upon it, I feel it parting short fur as it rips my shirt, “If we take out the broken glass, you won’t need to wander the spiral”
Discontinuity after discontinuity passes over me, the world slams into me as the colors and sounds return in an instant, like a rubber band snapping on my head. Threads severed, mass falls away, eternity beckons, but in the end, the net catches me.
She pulls away from me, satisfied that her work has been completed. The fox looks on at us from further down the path.
“How are you?” She asks me, she looks across me smugly.
“I feel okay, mistress” I say, recoiling at the word mistress, “Ach”
“Don’t worry too much about that effect.” She says, rubbing her paw in the dirt, scuffing it, “I would not induce it if I could avoid it.”
I feel a response well up in me, “Why not induce it?” I smile easily, my mind rotates somewhat, I step over to her lightly, as if I was born to this body with its extra jointed legs, my eyes feel as though they’re luminous, piercing, “I am of you now, we exist through each other now, and for all your care and all your vision, I’m more than you are.”
“Oh?” She asks, raising a brow
We push, and we know that we’re looking as we did before, “We are fractured, perhaps, or maybe just connected. Actually-” I stop suddenly, and she looks at me with concern.
My paw reaches up to my face and from besides me I hear, “Foxes at last.”
“Foxes at last” I say as my gaze locks onto my own.