Chapter 2

My name is Alice Mary McConnell and I’m a teenage girl, wondering what my future holds for me. I don’t wish for things any longer. After a week of getting used to seeing the new me in mirrors, and learning to move around in a nightie, I was almost ready to face the world.

Monday morning. The soreness is there when I wake - interior, a tenderness that locates itself when I move. I lie there for a moment taking stock of it, and then I get up.

Downstairs Emily is at the sink, her back to me. She turns when she hears me and her face has something in it - a careful stillness, the effort of someone holding their expression steady over something else. The coffee is already made. She pours me a cup without speaking and then turns back to the sink and grips the edge of it with both hands and breathes slowly through her nose.

One

Sandy awoke to the racket of a lawnmower beneath his window, followed by the ear-shredding shriek of a leaf blower. Mhairi had said the gardeners came once a week, and as he pulled his pillow over his head, he would tell Overstrand that he could earn another fortune by inventing silent garden machinery.

 One

Samantha’s knock on the door didn’t rouse Sandy from his sleep at first. It wasn’t until she had entered the room and drawn back the curtains, letting bright sunlight stream through the windows, that he opened his eyes, startled to see her there. He had kicked off the duvet during the night, and only as he sat up did he remember what he was wearing, desperately pulling the duvet up to cover himself. 

“What are you doing, Sam?” he squealed.

Chapter 1

My name is Alec Martin McConnell, and I don’t call myself religious, although I’ve been asking anybody who may be listening to grant my wish. Not every night, but often enough. I knew, in my mind, that it was futile, but my brain wasn’t wired to listen to reason.

Day Two

One

Sandy sat up in bed and groped for the phone, but missed, knocking it onto the floor instead. He cursed and got out of bed to find it. It had stopped vibrating, but it started again as he picked it up off the floor. Sandy sat on the bed and, without thinking, pressed accept, and nearly fainted when Overstrand’s face appeared on a FaceTime call. 

The walk happens the way weekend walks happen - without planning, Emily suggesting it over coffee, the two of us ending up on the path along the reservoir without having formally decided to go there.

It's a good morning for it. The spring air still cool enough to need a light layer, the trees along the path in the green of early May that doesn't last, the reservoir flat and grey-blue in the morning light. Emily walks beside me with her coffee in a travel mug and I walk beside her and we don't talk much, which is the right amount.

“Yeah, practically an all-new me...”

Pete's Vagina
86. Conversion
by Erin Halfelven

Chapter 5

Going back to school felt more intimidating than facing the training chamber.

NOTE: This story was originally posted in single large chunk. But some readers have indicated that it was hard to navigate, so I've split it into two parts.

Cover art by Erin Halfelven
©2026, SammyC

SYNOPSIS: In 1566 Constantinople, a Janissary is bitten by an ancient vampiress and awakens transformed; first into something between genders, then, through blood and hunger, into a woman. Across five centuries she moves through mercenary camps, European brothels, the court of Versailles, Victorian England, two World Wars, and the New World; feeding discreetly, loving unwisely, and burying everyone she touches. Her body is clay, shaped by desire and will. And the woman who made her has been watching all along,

I wake before Emily. Grey light, the room quiet. I lie there for a moment and take stock - the lower back ache that's been there for five days is gone. Not reduced, gone. The heaviness behind the sternum still faintly there but lighter, beginning to clear. Something has shifted overnight.

I get up and go to the bathroom.

Chapter 58: Distractions

The laptop screen casts a blue pall over Caden's hands as he scrolls through endless grids of sports bras — women in mid-stride, frozen in athletic poses, all of them grinning with their hands on their hips like this is some kind of victory. His fingers hesitate over the trackpad. None of these are designed for someone who still lifts weights but needs to strap down what shouldn't be there in the first place.

Leo was an ordinary guy until he discovers a strange program… the Master PC program. It allows him to edit the people around him and alter reality (including himself). What will a young man bored with life use it for? Well, depravity of course.

I wake at five-seventeen and lie very still.

Wednesday I woke to the first of it — the small buds, the wider hips, the absence below the waistband. This is Thursday. Whatever the process is, it has not stopped.

I move my hands.

“There’s no room,” I announced. “We’ll have to take it all back.”