© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

It took me a moment to adjust to the mid-morning sunlight. We’d emerged in front of an abandoned factory building on an abandoned factory site. It was actually a pretty good place to have kept me. Difficult to isolate the building I was in from the others. Easy to spot when the authorities turned up. Maybe even with an escape route somewhere, though knowing Peter, that’s where he’d likely have stopped thinking.

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

No dreams, just the sleep of the emotionally drained. It lasted all the way through to six o’clock.

“Three little maids from school are we,” blared from my phone’s small but powerful speaker, “Pert as a school-girl well can be, Filled to the brim with girlish gleeeeee. Three little maids.... from school!”

“Oh God!” I groaned.

“One little maid is a bride, Yum-Yum,” sang Alice.

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

No erotic dreams this time. Maybe down to the delay in taking my evening pills, maybe down to my body adapting to the changes, maybe down to the worries I was carrying. What I did dream about was juggling Fabergé Eggs while keeping balance on a unicycle on a tight wire over such a deep drop that all I could seems below me was cloud. On the plus side, I didn’t drop anything. On the minus, I woke up in a sweat without the benefit of the night’s rest.

Janet was a tea person and had a pot on the go when I emerged.

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

The shampoo and conditioner did their job again, leaving my hair feeling luxuriantly thick. I’d also noticed it was longer than it had been. I mean sure, hair grows so you’d expect it, but half an inch in a day? It looked untidy and ready for a cut when I put it into my habitual side parting, so I experimented, ending up with something that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Jamie Lee Curtis. Needless to say, it did look a little odd on me, but with a nightie on, decidedly less so.

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

I was still in my nightdress when the doorbell rang the next morning. Fortunately, I’ve never quite lost the paranoia accompanying the possibility of being found out, so I always have a dressing gown nearby. This one was long enough to cover the depths of white lace currently cascading off my shoulders, so all I needed to do was pull it on and cinch the tie tight.

“One thing I’ve definitely learned – the heart goes where the heart goes.”

Alex had a terminal Cancer diagnosis and thought she would die before she got to be the girl she always was inside. That all changes when she's in the wrong place at the right time and gets transported to another world and into the body of a girl. So what if she's not human, she's alive and a girl. Now if only she had her sister with her to navigate this new world and her new responsibilities. Wait, she's here too? The passage of their souls between worlds may have doomed the Earth to apocalypse, but Alex and Michelle won't be there to see it and they have enough problems on their hands.
 

“Of course I wanted it all – a fun career and friends and a husband and a family and no trade-offs ever. . . . When I discovered I was pregnant, though, I found out life isn’t like that. That I had to make choices, and a lot of them were hard. One of them, though . . . . One of them was easy. I chose you.”

Queen's Gambit - Chapter 6

© Copyright 2025 Maeryn Lamonte

Polly traded her anxious look for one of relief when I rounded the corner.

“I thought you might have forgotten,” she said.

“No, just got caught up talking to my parents.” I led her into the cafeteria and over to where Marie, Elaine and Abby were sitting.

“Why on earth did you bring Polident?” Marie asked as we sat.

Queen's Gambit - Chapter 3

© Copyright 2025 Maeryn Lamonte

Dinner consisted of – on my plate at least – a veritable mountain of bangers and mash with rivers of gravy flowing down the slopes like lava. Of course there were veg in there as well, I mean we are omnivores after all.

Queen's Gambit - Chapter 1

© Copyright 2025 Maeryn Lamonte

All my stories are available on my personal story site at metamorph.org.uk. The novels and novellas are available as a single posting here.

What is a story?

Journey Into
the
Forbidden West
A Horizon: Forbidden West Fan Fiction
by

E. E. Nalley
Part Five

September 28th, 3040

“Who are those guys?” demanded Buck. Travis stopped the recording and backed it up until the figures were before him once more.