Forced Possession

It was late spring and the afternoon heat sat heavy on the grass, all dandelion fluff and barbecue smoke, my parents already loose with laughter, their voices tumbling over the patio’s cracked cement as they played host to a handful of our family friends, a ritual so ingrained it barely registered anymore. All the grownups were inside this adult world, drinking in their familiar rut: clots of conversation, carafes of cheap sangria.

My sister, Shelby, was sprawled on a deck chair, already showing early signs of the summer’s tan, and if she spared a glance for me it was only to sigh audibly. Somewhere nearby, the 13-year-old daughter of our parents’ friends—Ellie, light brown hair always in two precise braids—was trying to fit in with Shelby, but it was clear to anyone who cared to notice that she was a few years behind in every possible way, all nervous energy and oversized glasses, boyish and slight. I watched her eyeing the burgers, the way she circled near the grill, emboldened by hunger or maybe just the need to be noticed, and I saw in her a sliver of myself—an outcast, a watcher, someone waiting for an opening.

I lingered on the porch, letting the screen door clang shut behind me, and for a moment just watched the scene play out: Ellie feigning interest in Shelby’s phone, Shelby volleying back with thinly disguised contempt, the parents’ laughter rolling from the kitchen window like a soundtrack. It was in the lull between these scenes that I finally broached the subject with Shelby, lowering my voice to a conspiratorial hush.

“We wouldn’t even be bored, you know,” I said, careful to keep my posture casual, my hands tucked deep in my hoodie, “It’d be fun. For both of us.”

Shelby didn’t even look up from her phone, “Alan, you’re way too big for her. You’ve only ever… you know, done it with people who were the same size or bigger than you. She’d snap. You’d break her, like, literally. Remember what happened with Jeff?”

I rolled my eyes, but she wasn’t wrong. I’d tried to explain it before: there was this sensation, like a wall between my consciousness and the body I tried to inhabit, and sometimes the wall was thick and solid, sometimes thin and brittle. With Jeff, it was brittle—and it had almost snapped me back out.

“I know what I’m doing, Shelby,” I said. “It’s not like I’m going to hurt anybody. I’ll just… try it out.”

She snorted, but there was a touch of curiosity to her voice, “Whatever. If you get busted, I’m not covering for you.”

“Noted,” I said, and tried to hide the tremor of excitement in my limbs.

Twenty minutes later, I was kneeling outside the bathroom door, listening to the giggles echoing through the tiled hallway as Shelby and Ellie changed into their swimsuits, the sounds so bright and close they seemed to vibrate in my chest. My palms itched with anticipation. For a moment I hesitated, reassessing the plan, but then the desire overwhelmed the doubt—I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and let that familiar sensation take hold. My own body flickered out of existence, the world going blue and blurred at the edges, and then I felt the strange drag of passage, the silent swim through air, the invisible glide through drywall and memory.

The inside of Ellie was a chaos of sensation. I could feel her heart, a panicky bird trapped in a child-sized ribcage, the dull hum of neurons firing and muscles tensing as her body registered something deeply alien. I skipped protocol—there was no need for subtlety—and drove both arms forward, the way you’d wriggle into an unfamiliar coat. I watched through borrowed eyes as her limbs spasmed, her mouth forming a startled O, and I felt the resistance of her native self, a tightness around my invading presence. It was different from Jeff or the others, far more congested—her brain was a crowded attic, every thought packed in close with the next, every synapse bursting with adolescent static.

“My back reeaally hurts for some reason!” she said, voice high and straining, and Shelby’s laugh was cruel and delighted. “You’re just being dramatic,” Shelby said, but there was something else in her voice: a note of expectation, an awareness that something real and extraordinary was happening right before her.

I fought my way into the rest of her, each inch an effort, until I could feel her hands scrabbling at the carpet, knees buckling beneath us. I thought for a second I might lose the thread, that I’d be spat out like an oyster’s grit, but then the last resistance gave way and I was in. Entirely in. For a second the world blinked out, then snapped into focus in a way I’d never experienced—everything sharper, colors sickly bright, every sound a hammerblow to the ears.

I tried to speak but the jaw was foreign, the tongue too small, and all that came out was a gargle. I watched Shelby’s face twist in a mix of fear and awe.

“Shit! Alan?” she whispered, her voice shrunk to a pinhole.

I nodded, legs trembling. The sense of enclosure was suffocating, as if I’d been crammed into a sleeping bag three sizes too small, and every nerve ending screamed its protest. Ellie’s body arched with pain, or maybe it was pleasure, some weird fusion of both, and she shrieked once—the kind of sound that would have sent any parent running in, if they hadn’t been so lost in their party.

“Help me,” I gasped, using her voice at last, and felt the alien shape of the words pass over her tongue.

Shelby stared, wide-eyed, but didn’t move.

Ellie’s hands clawed at the skin of her chest for a few seconds, then slowed, then finally stopped.

I felt the last of Ellie’s consciousness bleed away; I’d expected a fight, but all I got was a flicker of resignation, a brief, exhausted sigh. The body slackened. I flexed her fingers experimentally, then tried standing. My new knees knocked together, unsteady, but I managed to pull upright, gazing down at the small hands, the flat chest, the childish hips.

It was my possession now. I was her.

I grinned, staggered to the mirror over the sink, and stared into the face. It was unsettling—my own thoughts trapped behind the mask of this adolescent girl, the features not quite symmetrical, the eyes reddened and huge. I felt a weird surge of pride, the thrill of having pulled off something nobody else could ever do.

Shelby watched me with a mixture of horror and fascination. “You’re not gonna stay in there all day, right?”

I shrugged. “Just long enough to see what it’s like.”

I ran the small hands along the counter. Touched the skin—so soft, so new.

For the next hour, I did everything I could to test the limits of Ellie’s body. I ate half a banana and drank a glass of milk, feeling each swallow travel down the unfamiliar throat, the cold shock of liquid in the stomach. I ran up and down the stairs, giggling at the difference in stride and balance. I tried on every pair of shoes in the mudroom, marveling at how differently gravity worked in this frame. I even let Shelby brush and braid my borrowed hair, pretending to be her little doll, if only to see how far she’d go to normalize the abnormal.

But the fun didn’t last long. After an hour, I started to notice things changing—subtly at first, then with a speed that scared me. My vision blurred, cleared, then sharpened again. My limbs tingled, and the skin on my arms prickled as if electrified. I watched in the mirror as my face shifted, the contours morphing minute by minute. The chin grew sharper, the nose more defined. I shot up in height, my spine lengthening with a series of audible pops. Shelby gawked as I nearly doubled in size in less than twenty minutes, the borrowed body recalibrating itself to fit the presence of my original self.

And then there was the other thing.

My chest began to ache, deep and insistent, and I realized with a start that Ellie’s breasts were swelling, the flesh gathering beneath my hands like memory foam. I could feel the areolae stretch, the nipples harden. My hips widened, my waist cinched. With each passing second, Ellie’s body reformed itself into a new template: older, more mature, almost womanly. The changes came in hot waves, a reverse puberty, and soon there was no denying it. I looked down and saw a stranger, a fully grown woman staring back from the reflection.

Shelby swore, backing away as if I was radioactive. “What the hell, Alan? What did you do?”

I tried to answer, but the voice was different now, deeper, richer, lined with a kind of sultry confidence that didn’t belong to a kid. “I… I think I changed her. Or maybe she changed me. I don’t know.”

“You can’t let anyone see you like this,” Shelby hissed, voice trembling.

But I couldn’t stop looking. I stripped off the too-small swimsuit and ran my new hands over the body—a body that buzzed with a thousand unfamiliar currents. The breasts were heavy and sensitive. The waist moved with a dancer’s grace. The legs were impossibly long, and my face… my face was beautiful. I tilted my head, mesmerized by the symmetry, the grown-up features, the subtle touch of lipstick pink on my lips. I flexed my new muscles, felt the rumble of new hormones tumbling through capillaries.

I fumbled for Ellie’s mother’s robe behind the door, the slick nylon clinging to my arms in a way that felt obscene and magnificent.

“Okay, look,” she said, and I could see the gears working behind her panic.

“You need to—” She stopped, stared at me, “God. You have, like, cleavage. This is so fucked up.”

I shrugged, unbothered by her horror.

“It’s just a body,” I said, unable to resist the urge to cup the new breasts in both hands, weighing them, marveling at the alien gravity, the feedback.

In the mirror, I stuck out my tongue, watching its tip snake between perfect white teeth.