On my 13th birthday, a gift from my grandmother contained simply a decorated card labeled “Ticket to The Clothes Hole for Dan Mitchell, unlimited use, training required.” There was a box to mark and for someone to sign that the training had been completed. And at the bottom, it had her address. I figured this was some kind of family secret I was going to be introduced to. When we were alone together for a moment I asked her about it, and she said only that it would become clear on my next visit.
The basement at my grandmother’s house had always been off limits, but when my parents took me over there a week later, we all quickly went down there.
Grandma explained, “I know this will sound confusing, but it’s been a bit confusing for all of us, more than 2 centuries of our family. My ancestor Abbie found this site and built the home around it.”
“What is it?” I asked. “And why are there so many racks of clothes? It looks like a clothing store!”
“Yes, and it’s all free for you to use now. But I need to explain. And it will help if we go over to the other side, past all the racks of clothes.”
She led the way. At the far side of the room was a pile of clothes on the floor, just piled there, not hanging or folded, and nearby, there was a circle painted on the floor under a similarly sized round curtain rod with a curtain that was open in front.
“Abbie discovered a pile of clothes just like this. Except they were clothes from the 1700s, naturally. But where this mark is on the wall is the Clothes Hole. Once in a while this opens up and an article of clothing pops out. We think they’re all lost clothes belonging to other people. The clothes are all in good condition, and there’s some other condition for them to come here that we don’t understand, since if all the good condition lost clothes in the world came here, we wouldn’t have enough space if we filled the yard with a warehouse. Our best theory is that it’s a wormhole, and the other end drifts around the world and when it encounters a suitable piece of lost clothing it pulls it through. One thing we know is that it only pulls in one article of clothing per person.”
“OK, so it’s like a free second-hand clothes store?”
“That part of it is, but now let me explain this circle. When you enter the circle, your body changes to that of the owner of an article of clothing you are wearing.”
“What!?” I exclaimed.
“That’s what happened to Abbie, who was originally Abraham Johnson. It was a cold winter day when Abraham came upon the clothes pile, and feeling the need to be warmer, grabbed a coat from the pile and put it on. It turned out to have belonged to a woman, and Abraham’s body changed into a copy of that woman’s when he stumbled through the then-unmarked circle.”
“Is the change permanent?”
“It’s permanent, except that you can visit the circle again in another person’s clothing and change to that person.”
“So why didn’t Abraham change back?”
“Oh, he did once he figured it out. But ultimately he changed back to Abbie again. Abraham was gay, and there was no tolerance for that in colonial America. By changing to Abbie, she could stay with her male lover without them being outcasts.”
“Do you know it’s really the owner of the clothes, and not just the kind of body the clothes might be designed for?”
“Yes. It’s not limited to clothes that have come through the hole. If you want to confirm it yourself, try on my hat. Well, before I offer it, I need to be sure you have some of your own clothes here and that you aren’t, for some reason, dressed in borrowed clothes, or ones bought from the thrift store in town.”
I thought for a moment, then affirmed, “Everything I am wearing belongs to me and me alone and was purchased new.”
“Great. Then take my hat and walk into the circle.”
I took the offered hat, put it on my head, and walked into the circle. Sure enough, I turned into a copy of Grandma. I was still wearing my clothes, which were a bit ill-fitting, but they did not fall off. Still standing in the circle, I took the hat off and handed it to Grandma, and I turned back into myself.
“OK. Seeing is believing; being a part of it, doubly so. Do you know how it works?”
“Some sort of magic, it seems. I wouldn’t believe in magic if I didn’t see it. But there is no rational explanation otherwise. The copy is exact down to fingerprints, but we think it provides the body as it was at the time the owner last touched the clothing. Some of this clothing has been here for decades and it produces a body at the same age it did when it first came through the hole.”
“How does it decide which body to give you if you have clothes from different people?”
“Ah, yes, important info to know. It doesn’t consider clothing covered by other clothing, even partially. If your shirt is tucked into your pants, it won’t consider the shirt. If your shirt is untucked and covers the waistband of your pants, it won’t consider the pants. Hats, shoes, and jewelry all count, and those things sometimes come through the hole. Out of the possible items, the one which is highest on your body is the one considered. And it seems meticulous about ownership. If your borrow something, or if something was lost and not intentionally discarded, or it was stolen, then it still belongs to the person who owned it before. While we treat it as ‘finders keepers’ because we have no hope of locating the owners, the magic doesn’t. If the owner sells it, gives it away, or discards it, he no longer owns it; in the case of something discarded, whoever picks it up next owns it. If the item was owned by a business, or a person too close to death, it will ignore that item, but the hole doesn’t bring us items like that, nor does it bring items that were owned by somebody who wouldn’t be expected to wear it.”
“You’ve had a long time to figure this out, I guess.”
“Abbie documented it before the United States was a country. I still have the original records, but we work from modern copies.”
“So I can just go pick anything and change into somebody else? Other than the style and size of clothing, how would I know?”
“When something new comes through the hole, we don’t know. Once in a while, one of us comes down here and tries on all the new things. We put a small numeric tag on each item and we store the description of the person it produces in a computer database, and if you have no idea what you would want, you’re welcome to help with this effort and see some random bodies. If you want something specific, you can search for a person of a specific gender, height, weight, and basic sizes. But generally, we don’t let you take the items that came through the hole, save for the garment generating a specific body you want to try for a period of time. We keep the clothes here to make those bodies available, and if you want to leave here in another body you should bring a set of clothes to fit it.”
“I guess I could. If you’re guaranteeing I can leave in my own body, I wouldn’t mind getting to try on other bodies for a short while, and help with your effort.”
“I should caution you about the nudity. When we test the new items we generally have you strip naked behind the curtain and then put on just the one item that came through. This ensures that other clothing does not interfere, and if you turn into a body too big for your original clothes you don’t rip them. But it means you might be topless or bottomless while you are here being measured and weighed. The people here measuring and weighing you, which will be other family members, will see you partially naked, but it will be somebody else’s partially naked body, though you will be occupying it. Nobody will molest you or touch you more than is necessary to take the measurements, but you do need that accept you will be seen partially naked in these other bodies.”
“I guess I am OK with that, as long as other people take turns being the one to try on the clothes.”
“Sure, we can fully introduce you into the system. Usually we have three people, one trying on clothes, one measuring that person, and one entering the data into the computer. It looks like we have a washload of clothes that have come through the hole, so I can get those washed and dried and we can do the measuring after lunch.”
So we let her start the wash and all went back upstairs. Immediately after lunch was cleared away, Mom, Grandma, and I went back downstairs.
Grandma instructed, “OK, we’ll rotate roles, but Dan, you will be trying on clothes first because that doesn’t need any explanation. You can observe us while I measure you and your mother enters the information to see how that works.”
“OK,” I replied.
“I’ve put the clothes to be tested on this table, folded and stacked. When it’s your turn to try something on, you pick an item, and take it inside the curtain with you. There is a small gap between curtains at the back where you can access a clothes rack with hangers for you to hang up your current clothes as well as the item you are trying on. Strip completely naked like you were going to take a shower, then put on the new item. In weird cases, like it’s too small to wear properly, just put it on as best you can. Your body will change, and then you should be able to finish putting the thing on. And then open the curtain and we’ll measure you.”
“Sounds simple enough. And you said my turn to try on stuff first. I can choose anything from this table?”
“Yes, go ahead.”
I wanted to keep it simple, so I picked up a T-shirt. It was red with a car printed on the front. I went in, pulled the curtain closed, and hung the T-shirt on a hanger. I took my shoes and socks off and set them aside. I figured I could leave them off for the entire session. I took off my shirt and pants and hung them on hangers. There were also hangers with small hooks, one of which I used to hang up my briefs. There were still more hangers of these and other types, including one that had a small box hanging from it which latched shut, I suppose for jewelry.
I took the new T-shirt, determined which side was the front, and put it on over my head, then worked on getting my arms into the sleeves. And then I grabbed the bottom of the shirt and pulled it down over the boobs I suddenly had, since the shirt had apparently belonged to a woman. I looked down for a moment. Yep, I was female down below, too. I wasn’t old enough to have had sex, but I had had the lessons about sex, which came with drawings. So I knew the slit that greeted me between my legs was expected on a woman. I opened the curtain and stepped out.
“Oh, very nice,” Grandma said upon seeing me.
I posed for them, trying to ignore the fact that my now-female private parts were on full display. At least they had promised I’d see them similarly half-naked.
Mom spoke next. “OK, I’ve got the record for this one started. Gender female. Description: A red T-shirt with a picture of a car on the front. Do you have the size?”
Grandma stepped behind me and looked at the tag behind my neck, and called out, “Medium.”
Mom continued, “Size medium. This body is young, I’d say around 18. White, with blonde hair and can you tell me the eyes?”
“Blue.”
Grandma directed me, “Now stand over there in front of the height chart, with the backs of your feet together and flush against the wall.”
She pointed where there was a tape stuck to the wall with measurements every inch, and I went there and stood as directed.
“Five foot five inches tall.”
Next, Grandma directed me to a scale.
“One hundred forty one pounds.”
Next, Grandma pulled out a measuring tape.
“I’m going to show you how to measure a woman. I’m going to take several measurements around your body and a couple vertical ones. The first is the bust. Hold your arms out slightly so I can run the tape under them.”
And she wrapped the tape around my body, directly over my boobs, bringing it together between them, and read off, “38 inches.”
“Next, we measure your band size. This is for bras, and I know you’re not wearing one, but it’s an important measurement of a woman’s size.”
She lowered the tape, this time directly below my boobs, pressing up against the bottoms of them where they met the flat part of my chest. “35 inches. That makes you a 36C bra size. The C means your bust is three inches larger than your band, and the 36 is because bras come in even-numbered sizes.”
“Next, your waist. Where I’m going to measure is higher than you might think of as your waist, because you’re used to thinking as a boy. For women, the smallest area above the hips is the waist.”
And she did just that.
“31 inches,” she called out.
Grandma continued with the next instruction, “Next is the hips. Stand with your legs straight and pressed together.”
She ran the tape around my butt - my naked butt - and just missed my private parts in front.
“This measurement goes around the widest part of your hips when you stand this way. 39 and a half inches.”
“Now hold this here.”
She put one end of the measuring tape at my neck on one side, and I held it in place with the hand from the opposite side as she ran the tape along my shoulder and all the way down my arm, holding it at my wrist where she read off “31 and a half inches.”
“The next measurement is a little delicate. Spread your legs somewhat, and I want you to hold one end of the tape against the top of your leg where it meets your crotch. No, directly in the middle so it would be trapped between your legs if you put them together. Yes, like that.”
I appreciated that she had avoided touching me there, since it was impossible to hold the tape there without touching my private parts slightly. I was touching a girl’s private parts for the first time, though I was the girl! She ran the tape directly down the inside of my leg and read off where the top of my foot began. “29 inches.”
Next, she had me sit in a chair and she got out one of those foot-measuring devices I’d seen in some shoe stores, and used it to measure one foot, then the other. “Size 8 and a half.”
Grandma stepped away for a moment, and came back with a camera which was mounted on a tripod.
“Hey, you didn’t say pictures were involved!”
“Sorry. But it’s only a picture of the owner’s body, and we’re only going to take a picture of the face.”
She had me stay seated in the shoe-sizing chair and took the picture, showing me afterward it was just of the face.
“OK, that’s it. Measuring a man, or a girl whose breasts have not started growing, is mostly the same, but with these differences: Instead of the bust and band measurements, there is a single chest measurement, which is around the widest part just like the bust measurement. The waist measurement is at the place where the top of typical pants would go, a couple inches below your navel, and between where a woman’s waist and hip measurements would be. There’s no hip measurement, and the shoe sizer has a separate men’s scale.”
Still with no pants on, I went over to where Mom was sitting at the computer, and she showed me how all the data they’d just collected was entered on a form that looked vaguely like a human body. There was also a space with today’s date, and a blank one labeled Tag Number. “I need the number,” she said.
Grandma took a round tag from a small box and called out, “Thirty-nine two seventy-one.”
Mom showed me how she entered that number. The camera was set up to automatically upload to a folder on this computer, apparently, and Mom showed me the folder and how she attached the picture to the record. Then she clicked Submit to save the record in their system.
Next, Mom showed me how to create a new record, something she must have already done when she started the last one. The first step was to select boy, girl, man, or woman. “This gender choice brings up different templates of measurements, and then you get to the screen we were on before, or one similar to it. We use ‘woman’ for anyone with measurable breast growth, and ‘men’ for roughly a year beyond puberty, when the genitals have started to expand. You go change and then come here to enter the next one.”
I went back behind the curtain, took off the shirt, and put my other clothes back on, restoring my usual body. Then I handed the woman’s shirt to Grandma, who attached the tag and laid it on the back side of the table with the other clothes.
“Put your shoes over beyond the scale so they are out of the way until we are done here,” Grandma suggested as she took her own shoes off in that area.
Grandma modeled next, while Mom took up the measuring role. She chose a button-up shirt which turned out to be a man’s shirt. The tail of the shirt hung down but didn’t quite cover her dick and balls during the measuring process. As weird as it was to think about seeing Grandma naked, it was weirder to see her as a man.
I entered the description of the shirt as a long-sleeve medium-blue button-up shirt with tails, the description of the man as about 30, Hispanic, dark brown hair and brown eyes. And I entered the measurements as Mom read them.
Once Grandma got changed back, it was her turn to enter the measurements, my turn to measure, and Mom’s turn to model. She picked a red mini-skirt from the pile. It was near the top, but I had been too embarrassed to pick that one the first time. Now that I’d been a girl already, I figured I’d be able to pick something that was obviously girl’s clothing, and I was thinking about my choices from what was left.
Mom came out with the most unbelievably huge boobs just hanging there, and even Grandma was laughing. And then I realized I had to measure her. She came out 5 foot 6, 187 pounds. Mom took a moment to explain something before we went on.
“Normally, when a woman’s bust is measured, she has on a bra or clothing that is going to hold the breasts in place. I don’t, so I am going to hold them up a little the way a bra would, and you run that tape measure right over the nipples and press them down as much as you reasonably can.”
Eventually I got the tape measure wrapped around her to her satisfaction and called out, “44 inches.”
The band size, with Mom holding up her breasts more fully so that the space directly under them was accessible, was 38 inches.
“Woo hoo! A 38F,” Grandma called out. “Going to be demand for this one even though the bras will be hard to find.”
Her waist was 36 inches, and her hips 46. Sleeve length was 34.
Next was the inseam. Mom held the top end of the tape measure in place, and while I trusted her to do it right, I looked up for a moment from my position kneeling by her feet, and her private parts were clearly visible under the short skirt. They looked very different from the ones on the girl body I had before; that one was closed up and just a slit, but these were open and I could see all the parts the health class diagrams had said were inside, all exposed. I quickly turned my head toward her feet where I got the measurement at 31 inches.
The shoe size was 9.5 in womens. And then it was my turn to take a picture.
“You’d better take a picture only of this face,” Mom said. “If you have my boobs in the picture I’ll delete it.”
I took the picture to her and Grandma’s satisfaction. And once she got changed back to her more normal sized woman body, it was my turn.
I took the rather see-through blue garment, I wasn’t sure what it was called, but it was like a woman’s one-piece bathing suit except clearly exposed too much for any beach that wasn’t a nude one.
“Woo hoo! Danny in lingerie!” Grandma shouted.
“Hush! We want to make this easy on him,” Mom scolded.
Then, to me, Mom said, “Let me take a look at that first.”
She examined the garment and then told me, “Some of these open up at the bottom. Those you can pull on like shirts and then fasten the two straps between your legs. This one doesn’t, so you will have to pull it on like pants. Then you pull up each shoulder strap with the opposite hand and put the arm through it, and adjust the cups comfortably over your boobs.”
She mimicked the motions while holding the garment in front of her, then handed it back to me. And I took it and headed into the booth. Mom’s instructions worked. As soon as I had my feet through the holes, I changed. I got the thing on, and when I adjusted it over my boobs (which fortunately were normal sized), I saw there were lace flowers that I assumed were supposed to go right over my nipples. When I adjusted it that way it seemed somewhat comfortable, so I assumed I had it on right. You could see right through the garment all around the edge of each breast. There was also a lace bit between my legs that covered my private parts. In back, the garment covered most of my butt, but without any lace - I was sure anybody would be able to see my whole butt practically like I was naked. But so equipped, I opened the curtain and stepped out.
“Marvelous,” Grandma called out. “You make a great girl.”
Mom said, “You’re a nice-looking girl, not a porn star like my last body.”
I blushed a little, thinking about where I’d put my hands on the body Mom just called a porn star.
They decided I looked 22, and did all the measuring and the picture.
We went on like this, at first doing all the main garments like shirts, pants, skirts, and dresses. Then the underwear and bras.
“Isn’t it creepy putting on someone else’s underwear?” I asked.
Mom replied, “By the time you get them on, they will be on the body they belong to. But yes, if it wasn’t for providing access to a body, we’d just throw them away.”
At the end, there were a few garments that would not cover much: a sock, a glove, an earring, and a hat. I guess it wasn’t surprising we had all left these for last since it meant whoever wore them would for all practical purposes be completely naked in front of the others. When it came to my turn among these, I picked the glove, which turned out to be a man’s glove. Mom put on the sock, which turned out to belong to a girl of about 10 years. Grandma, who had pierced ears, put on the earring, which was for a somewhat attractive but obviously older woman, though younger than Grandma. And I was left with the hat, obviously a woman’s hat, and I ended up in one of those porn star bodies like Mom had had, though a bit smaller. When that last was done I put on my proper clothes again including my socks and shoes.
Grandma read out a summary, “37 garments, representing 21 women, 13 men, 2 girls, and 1 boy. A typical mix and the usual assortment of sizes. Three porn star bodies that we should only allow renting. Four that are too old and ugly and not worth keeping. The rest can go into the usual catalog.”
“What are you talking about, renting and catalog?”
Mom explained, “For most of the time members of our family have been here, we only used the bodies to refresh our own family. When each person got old, they’d pick a young body from here and live a new life. I’m really your mother and Grandma is really my mother, but we lived other lives before these. For a long time, there wasn’t tracking of a person from birth to death, and it was easy to just make up new identities. Even after Social Security numbers were created, nobody needed to apply for those until they started working, and we’d look for a body that was the appropriate age and simply apply for one when we were ready. And we mixed in across the area, returning here when we wanted a refresh. And there were way more clothes than we could keep, so we kept only the ones that gave roughly 15 to 25-year-old bodies, donating the others to thrift shops or selling the occasional really nice items. In those days, there were just two rows of racks down here, male and female.”
Grandma now added, “Those were sorted by when they arrived, and when either row was full, we would throw out the rack of oldest clothes as not wanted. When somebody took a body, they took the article of clothing with them, and could optionally come back and refresh the body as long as the garment was still wearable, even if it had holes and whatnot. It was rare that people did that, though. Usually they were ready for a change and took something new.”
Mom continued, “Although SSNs were not required for children, the way that children were listed as dependents on tax returns created a virtual tracking system for children. Family members started reporting fake children as dependents 18 to 22 years before they planned a refresh, and within the town we made complete fake records for these children. We stayed ahead of the system. When the supposed parent was ready to refresh, they’d find a body that was believably the right age and gender and swap into it. Often, they selected these bodies and held onto the clothes to generate them years in advance. We also saw the need to sometimes produce these children when people got audited, so we started keeping clothing for children of all ages, and added more racks. We could have a town employee become a child of any age, gender, and race when needed. Of course, some people had real children in addition to the fake ones, so we had real schools and teachers and whatnot, but each teacher had one or two real classes a day and other classes full of fake students who never actually attended school, but our records said they did.”
“I see where this is going,” I said.
“In 1986, the IRS started requiring SSNs for all dependents 5 years and up, and we simply generated SSNs for every fake child we were tracking. Again, we were ahead of the system. Now it’s just a town function; anybody really or fictionally born here can apply to be reborn at any time, and we’ll set up all the paperwork, and when they really want to be young again, they can. But eternal life isn’t for everybody, and though there have been a few thousand descendants since Abbie’s days, we only have about seven hundred people today regenerating themselves typically once every forty years.”
“So you need about 18 people’s clothes every year.”
“Yes. But you saw that more than 30 usable people’s clothes came through the hole this session. Nine of them were in the age range people might reincarnate themselves into. That was a week’s clothes. We get more than 20 times the suitable identities that we need. So, by word of mouth only, so it didn’t get to be too big a deal, we started letting other people pay to change bodies. Sometimes, if the change isn’t too great, they keep their identity. But we also have twelve other small towns now where we control the infrastructure, and though many of the residents of these towns know nothing about what we are doing, we are making the same complete fake child records there as we do for people here. We charge people ten thousand for a new body, another ten thousand for the new identity, and they have to pay for the travel to set things up.”
“Seems cheap,” I said. “Twenty grand to reincarnate as a high school graduate with all the documents needed to start a new life?”
“If we wanted to charge a market price, it would be in the millions and only the super-rich could afford it, and so much money coming through our small town would look suspicious. As it is, it can fly under the radar as tax revenue. We basically eliminated real estate taxes for family in the town; there are tax bills, but money coming from outsiders pays those taxes, not our family members. Some of the money also goes to the other towns, paying for the security systems we put in place that hide our activities, taxes on the homes of family members maintaining our positions there, and to bribe people outside the family to keep our secrets. And it continues to be free for family members.”
“So what you are saying is, maybe 25 years from now I can have you set up a fake identity of a newborn, and 18 years later I can change into an 18-year-old looking body, assume that identity, and fake my old identity’s death.”
“Yep. And you get to keep doing it as long as you care to live.”
“Just be careful not to die,” Grandma added. “While it might be possible for us to give someone else your body, and we’ll certainly recycle any fake child identity you started so that someone else can use it, we can’t bring you back.”
“You said something about renting some of the bodies?”
Mom said, “Some are too valuable to sell. There’d be a war over them. Mostly they are bodies so sexy that people want them for porn videos. We didn’t show you any porn when we had the talk, but we described it and you can probably figure it out.”
I nodded.
“So we let people use these bodies but we put a GPS tracker on them like prisoners under house arrest. If they try to leave the town, or if they go beyond their rental period, which is usually 24 hours, then it knocks them out and gives us a signal and we go pick them up.”
“You personally go pick them up? And put them back in their original clothes and bodies?”
“Well, local police pick them up to bring them back here, but the police are family members. Remember that the whole town is. And then we bill that client extra for violating the terms. Though hardly anybody ever does this; they want to stay on good terms with us.”
“All right. Guess that isn’t really something I have to worry about. But if I wanted to try one on for a day, could I do that?”
“Sure,” Mom said, “Family members are allowed to exchange whenever. But until you turn 18, only with my approval of the body you are taking, and not on a school day, unless you are just doing it for the evening.”
“Also,” Grandma commented, “You will need some other clothes to wear, unless the body happens to be close enough to your size to wear what you have now. But we can let you try on various bodies, and when you find one you like, print out the sizes. You can go down to the thrift store, which actually has a lot of good clothes, even though they are cheap, because it has the things that came out of here that belonged to bodies that were unsuitable, or they were not taken after too long a time. Just remember, though, that if you buy something from there with one of our tags on it, it still belongs to its original owner forever, even though you paid money for it. You won’t be able to use it to get back to your original body, nor the one you take from here.”
“Well, I think I’d like to explore more bodies next weekend. Not that I don’t like this one, but just to test out options. Actually, I’ve got one other thought.”
“What’s that?” Mom asked.
“If these are not your and Grandma’s original bodies, why did your clothes change you back to them instead of your original bodies?”
“Good question,” Grandma replied. “It has to do with the length of time you spend in the body. After you stick with a body for about a month, any new clothes you buy while wearing the body belong to that body rather than your original, and you will need clothes from before that time if you want to get back to your old body.”
“Interesting. So the body becomes yours after a while.”
“Yes.”
Grandma signed my card indicating training was complete and we left.
The next weekend I was back there, and there were a bunch more new garments to sort out, and we did those first. Mom, Grandma, and I were doing it again, though we reversed the sequence so I was measuring Grandma. And it was just like before, we got a variety of different ages, sizes, and looks. A few more women than men. The weird thing was I was finding I enjoyed the times I was a woman more than when I was a man.
So at the end of that, when I sat down at the computer to search for options, I left the gender blank. I put in age 16-20, figuring I wanted someone I could change into permanently once I was 18. Because I hadn’t chosen a gender, I couldn’t search on detailed sizes, only height and weight or the S-M-L sizes, and I put in S, M, L, excluding XS, XL, and the like. And I wanted a body that was attractive, but not so much so as to make that the sole reason to take the body, so I put in clothing that had been here for 1-3 years. And available for purchase; I knew the usual rental ones were off limits.
There were still hundreds of matches, and I found myself scrolling through pages of results. Ultimately, I picked seven of them to try on, 3 guys and 4 girls, spending ten minutes or so in each one. Some of them were kind of awkward due to the nudity. One guy came from a hat, but I managed to put my pants on, though I could not fasten them. Three of the girls had skirts, which at least meant their private parts weren’t exposed, but their breasts were. The last had a bra, and Mom showed me a tricky way of putting on a bra: fasten the hooks in front of me, then slide it around, and put my arms through the straps and my boobs in the cups when they were aligned. I changed into the girl as soon as the hooks were fastened, so the fact that it was way too tight on my boy body wasn’t an issue.
None of them seemed right to me, though, so I changed back and Mom and I went home. Mom had a talk with me afterward.
“I noticed you were including girls’ bodies in your search. Do you think you want to become a girl?”
“I don’t know, Mom. But I was a girl or woman lots of times during our try-on sessions, and in general I liked the feel of girl bodies. I am not sure I like it enough to want to change over after growing up as a boy, but I do want to consider it.”
“Well, there are some things you need to know about being a girl or woman. I should say woman, since it seemed like you were looking at ones that would pass for 18.”
And what followed was a lot like the sex talk, but there was simply... more to it. Guys worried about getting their girl pregnant. Girls had to maintain the equipment associated with pregnancy all the time while avoiding getting pregnant and there was surprisingly much to it. But she didn’t discourage me from being a girl; rather, she encouraged it. She told me not to be afraid to try that if that was what I really wanted.
“The next time we go there, I want you to pick a girl’s body to take home overnight. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s not right for the long term, as long as you think it’ll be tolerable for a day. We’ll go buy a set of clothes from the thrift shop, come back and get the body, and you can switch back to your body the next afternoon. I want you to experience being a girl for more than just the few minutes you do at the Clothes Hole. To be outside as a girl, at home, eating, sleeping, using the bathroom, showering, everything you do in a day. When it’s done, I promise you you’ll know, and you’ll either only want to look at girls for your next body, or only at boys.”
“OK, Mom. That sounds good.”
So a week later I was indeed only looking at girls for this overnight trial. After choosing a girl on the computer, I got to choose more detailed clothing sizes. I had been every cup size from A to F while testing the newly arrived clothes, and while D cup breasts and larger might be what guys looked for, I thought they were too much for me, and I narrowed the sizes down to B and C cup. I didn’t want to be too small, either. I eliminated the small size category, leaving it with medium and large, and a height range of 5-foot-4 to 5-foot-9. And with these more targeted choices I took off the limits on how long the clothes had been here. This came up with 70 choices, and I picked 10 out of those and tried each one on.
There were some dresses in this batch, so while wearing those I felt less exposed, and for the ones who only had a bra, a shoe, or the like, I slipped the largest of those dresses on over the body after leaving the circle, just so I wouldn’t feel so naked. I ended up choosing a 5-foot-7 C-cup whose garment was the bra half of a bikini. This was another one Mom showed me how to put on; though it covered the breasts like a bra, it didn’t go on anything like one.
I got back into my own clothes, and Mom and I walked to the thrift store two blocks away with a printout of this girl’s sizes. Ultimately I decided on a blue dress, and we found a suitable bra. They didn’t sell second-hand panties; they were deemed unsanitary. But they understood a lot of the purchases were for trying out bodies, and I was able to buy a single pair of new panties in her size from what was meant to be a Hanes multipack. A pair of sandals meant I didn’t need socks, and the weather was warm enough I didn’t need anything else.
So we walked back with a bag of clothes, and I went home in that girl’s body.
Dad knew I was going there today planning to come home in a girl’s body, and he was impressed with my pick when we came home.
“Wow, Danny, I like your choice! On the tall side for a girl but not too tall, not fat but not too skinny either. And you know the guys go for the big boobs, but now that you’ve had a chance to wear them yourself, you must realize big boobs can be a pain. The ones you have are a nice size.”
“Yes, Dad, that is pretty much what I was going for.”
“If I had had a daughter, I would be proud to have had one that came out looking like you do now,” he said, but the way he said it suggested he wasn’t proud at all, but he felt duty-bound to support me in my choices.
“Thanks,” I said, ignoring the message I inferred from the tone in his voice.
Mom surprised me next. She came into the room with a small purse I had seen her use, and handed it to me.
“Put your wallet in here, go to the bathroom if you need to, and be ready to go out.”
No indication of where we were going out, but it wasn’t like I had anything else to wear. I took the offered purse and looked in it.
“What’s all this?”
“I don’t expect you to use the makeup, but it will look normal if you carry some. The tampon is just in case your period starts. Don’t worry; I can go to the restroom with you if you need to use it.”
I added my wallet to the already half-full purse as directed, and went to the bathroom.
“Now,” I thought to myself, “How’s this going to work in a dress?”
I ultimately decided to lift the dress up to sit the way I would avoid sitting on my shirt tail as a boy, and of course pull the panties down. I only peed a little, but who knew when I was next going to get the opportunity. I didn’t even know where we were going!
I wiped and reassembled my clothing, and it turned out Mom took us to the mall in the big city. Dad went too, and we all walked together as a family. We didn’t buy anything, but Mom enjoyed taking me into the women’s clothing stores and suggesting things she thought would look good on me. And I didn’t really argue with her. While a couple of her choices were more revealing than I was thinking of, if I did become a girl full-time I’d have to buy a whole new wardrobe, and that would mean a trip like this where we were buying the things Mom suggested. So I had to seriously consider them, even though it was years before I’d need the clothes for real.
We ate dinner and then went to see a movie together. And I felt completely comfortable through the night, as if I’d been a girl all along. I had stopped to go to the bathroom again, just to pee, before the movie started.
We came straight home after the movie and I went to pee again as soon as we got there. And this time was different. This time, I saw red in the bowl and I knew what that meant. “Mom!” I shouted.
A moment later she was at the bathroom door. “Danny, are you alright?”
“Mom, it’s my period.”
She came inside with me now. “Oh, honey, I warned you about this, but I know the warning cannot match the reality.”
I stood and showed her the bowl.
“Yes, that’s definitely your period. Are your panties stained?”
They had fallen to the floor completely and I picked them up and examined them. “Looks like just one small drop.”
She washed the panties out in the sink until the red mark was almost invisible, and hung them up on the shower rod using those small hooks on a hanger that I never usually used for anything.
“You can put these back on in the morning. Just use tampons until we turn the body back in.”
She left for a moment, and came back with some tampons, undoubtedly from the supply in the master bathroom. She showed me where she put most of them in the closet, holding on to one. This was the main bathroom for the house, but since Mom and Dad almost always used the master bath attached to their bedroom, effectively it was my bathroom. They made me clean it, and most of the things here were mine, so there weren’t normally feminine products stored here. Guess that’s changing!
“I know I explained it before, but this is another thing where the explanation can’t compare with the actual use. I want you to do it so you can get the experience, but I will guide you. Sit back down on the toilet like you were going to pee, but slide forward a little and lean back.”
I did so.
“If you bend your head and neck forward and look down, you should be able to see your parts clearly.”
“OK, I see them.”
“Use your fingers to pull your slit open, and you can see the parts inside better.”
I’d gotten some girl anatomy lessons already, but this one was clearly going to be more intimate. I followed the instructions.
“Now you want to look at the hole at the very bottom. That’s your vagina. That’s where the tampon needs to go.”
I arranged my hands differently, one hand below the entire slit holding the bottom part open, and the other with a finger pointing at and almost touching my vagina.
“Yes, there. Now take this.”
She handed me the tampon.
“There’s a flap on one side you can grab and rip the package open.”
I did so and removed the tampon, and tossed the wrapper in the wastebasket.
“Now you can see the plunger end, which has a little bit of string hanging out, and the business end that goes inside you. Before you start, make sure it’s ready. The string should hang out the end of the plunger, and this one does, but if it didn’t, you’d shake it to get it out, or pull at it if there was only a tiny bit. And the tampon should be firmly against the other end, but not so far that it protrudes.”
“Is this not right, then?”
“No, it isn’t right. Push the plunger in a little until the tampon just reaches the slits at the other end.”
I did that.
“Yes, that’s good. Now, holding onto the outer tube and not the plunger, put that end into your vagina, and slide it in gently. If it doesn’t go in easily, you don’t have it at the right angle.”
I adjusted it until I felt it going inside me.
“Keep going until there’s just a finger’s width of the outer tube outside your body. Yes, like that. Now hold the outer tube between your index and middle fingers. Put your thumb on the end of the plunger, and while holding tight on the other part, push the plunger in. You should feel the tampon going up inside you.”
It was a strange feeling. I am not sure what I expected it to feel like, but it didn’t seem sexual at all, despite the fact that this involved the most sexual part of my anatomy.
“Good. Now pull the tubes out. The string will go through them but remain hanging out of your body.”
And just like that, I had a tampon inside me. Inside a body part I didn’t wake up with this morning.
“The applicator goes in the trash.”
I tossed it in on top of the wrapper.
“Now wear that to bed, and in the morning, when you come in here to pee and shower, take the tampon out first by pulling on the string. If it hurts, you’re pulling too hard. Adjust the angle you’re pulling at and maybe the position of your body. You’ll find a position that works. It’s possible it will feel dry and scratchy since you are just starting your period. Put the used tampon in the trash, never in the toilet. If it’s messy, you can wrap it in toilet paper or in the wrapper from the next tampon. Once you are done with everything on your morning visit to the bathroom, put in a fresh tampon. If the one you took out was not sopping wet, then you can probably wear the new one until we turn in the body after lunch.”
Mom gave me a few other pointers, including not wearing my bra to bed.
“Wait. I’m nor supposed to wear the dress to avoid rumpling it, not supposed to wear the bra to avoid leaving marks on my body, and my only panties are drying. So I sleep in the nude?”
“Hang on.”
She left, and came back a bit later with one of her nightgowns.
“Wear this tonight and return it to me after you get your clothes back on in the morning.
Although it was hard to ignore it in the first couple minutes, I soon forgot the tampon was there, and my main worry about going to bed was what position was best. Lying on my stomach with my boobs pressed out flat wasn’t very comfortable, but I managed a position on my side and I was soon asleep.
I had to pee when I woke up, and then I remembered the tampon was inside me. I couldn’t feel it, but the string was there. I pulled and felt it sliding. It seemed to slide longer than it should. The applicator was only about 2 inches long and half an inch of that was outside my body, so it should only be an inch and a half inside me. It felt like I was tugging on it for about 6 inches, but finally the main part of the tampon came out. At no point did the removal hurt, and getting it out actually felt good. Was that a sexual feeling, or just relief at having the thing out of me?
The tampon was damp and stained red all over, but not dripping. I put it in the trash, peed and wiped, removed the nightgown, and grabbed a towel. The panties hanging on the shower rod were dry, and I set them aside and took my shower.
Showering a woman’s body was an experience. I am pretty sure some of the feelings I felt were sexual. They were much more intense than what I felt when I got the tampon out, but I felt them all over my genital region, on my boobs, and in some other random places. Did guys get feelings like that when they were fully grown? Since my guy body was only 13, I wasn’t sure all the sexual sensations had fully developed. Guess I’d watch for them.
I dried off, again noting my skin was more sensitive than in my boy body. I also realized I needed to dry my hair with the hair dryer I rarely used, due to the length of the hair. Next I grabbed one of the other tampons and repeated the procedure from last night. The relieved feeling I realized now I had felt ever since getting the other one out went away, so I know that was relief at having it out. She told me there were pads I could wear that didn’t go inside my body, but I think she was making me use tampons on purpose just to experience this part of being a woman. There are definitely some pluses and minuses.
I put my only set of girl clothes back on, and went down and joined my family for breakfast.
“This looks like my usual breakfast,” I commented, “But some of the food tastes different. Stronger flavors. Did you do something different?”
“No, it’s the same breakfast you usually get. It’s probably your body. Women in general have stronger senses of taste and smell, and that’s probably causing what you are sensing. More sensitive sense of touch, too. Did you notice that in the shower?”
“Yes, I did, actually. Good to know I wasn’t imagining things.”
Interestingly, I noted privately, I could no longer feel the tampon inside me. Once I got it in, it seemed like I stopped feeling it, though the entire time it was out, I felt a sort of relieved sensation that it was not there.
After breakfast, Mom suggested a walk, just me and her. I figured that she wanted to talk about girl stuff, but that was only partly right.
“Dad is an outsider. He didn’t grow up here. He didn’t get introduced to the concept of changing bodies through the Clothes Hole until after we met. He understands it’s a big part of our culture here, but as far as he’s concerned, it’s useful for immortality and nothing else. So if his praise of your body choice seemed a little disingenuous, that’s why.”
“Oh, yeah, I noticed that his ‘If I had had a daughter’ sounded like he wasn’t willing to accept that. But at least for today and possibly forever after I turn 18, he will have one.”
“He’s not going to stand in the way of your wishes, but at the same time, he wishes you wouldn’t go girl.”
“So why did you marry an outsider?”
“Because these days, the majority of family members prefer to be female. Most of them have had chances to go both ways, and a century ago most of them went male because of discrimination against women, and we married outside women into the family. Now it’s the other way around, women have rights, and just comparing the bodies, people prefer female ones. So there simply aren’t enough men within the family. Maybe in the next generation, a lesbian relationship would be fine, and we have family members who do that now, but it causes too many difficulties for me.”
“You know, I haven’t even really thought about that. If I go girl, does that mean I will marry a guy? I don’t think I’ve quite got a clear picture of who I am interested in sexually.”
“And that’s fine. You will figure it out, perhaps soon. Even if you find a female body you would really like to have, you can change your mind later. If you decide to stay a guy, you might even convince a person you like who’s determined to go female to take the female body you liked, so you can still appreciate that body from the outside. One thing you can do is masturbate. Try it as a girl and as a guy. Figure out what you like better. It’s not the same as sex, but in terms of figuring out what you like, it works. I know we told you don’t rush into sex, but when you are taking the long view, asking yourself who you want to marry, sex is definitely a part of it.”
“So you mean that after this walk I should masturbate today while I am still in this body?”
“Yes. And you can use your fingers, especially on your clitoris, but because the insertion is an important part of sex as a woman, you may want a dildo or vibrator to help you.”
She explained those, though I had a fair idea already, and then I found that she had walked us to the sex shop, which at my young age had always been off limits to me. But I realized the body I was in today did not look 13, and Mom and I walked in without being questioned.
“The dildo will better simulate actual sex, but the vibration of the vibrator can provide better sexual pleasure. And the kind I got you can be inserted in the vagina or used externally on the clitoris, the vaginal lips, or wherever it gives you pleasure. But you absolutely cannot let Dad see that you have these. If you keep them in the bathroom, store them away in the closet behind something so he won’t see them by accident if he uses it. In your bedroom, just make sure they aren’t visible.”
The vibrator needed batteries, but Mom bought those too. So after that, we walked back the way we came, me carrying the plain brown bag with my new toys. When we got home, Mom quickly ushered Dad off to their bedroom. To have sex? Dunno, but if she wanted to give me time to masturbate as a girl, there was no better way. I went into the bathroom, set the lock on the door, stripped and hung up my clothes, and sat on the toilet and explored my new sexuality. I removed the tampon so I could insert my toys.
It was quite good. One obvious difference is there was no definite stopping point, unlike as a boy when I came and then I needed to build up a bit before I could do it again. It just kept building up to higher and higher levels of intensity, and eventually I was panting with the pleasure and decided that was probably a good place to stop. I’d sweated enough that I needed to wash that off, a sponge bath to add to my earlier shower. And put in a new tampon.
I went back to my room at that point and thought about the whole experience. Did I like the idea of a man putting his dick into me, and squirting his come up inside me? Well, most of the time he won’t get the come inside me. We’d be using condoms. Would he keep going long enough for me to experience a stronger sensation as a woman than I got as a man?
I couldn’t decide. But one thing I decided was that I was comparing apples to oranges. I needed to try masturbation not as my usual body but as an 18-year-old man to properly compare with what I had just done as a woman. Maybe I could be a man next weekend, and then alternate. Dad would like it better that I was at least considering staying male, but I wasn’t going to let that sway me.
Pretty soon I heard Mom and Dad coming out of their room. We all got together for lunch, and then Mom and I went back over to the Clothes Hole to get me changed back.
“OK, Dan, one last thing before you change back,” Mom told me.
“What’s that?”
“Go to the bathroom here and take out your tampon. If you don’t, it’ll just get pushed out onto the floor.”
It was a little easier that time, but it still seemed like it had gone farther up inside me than it should have. But I changed back to my usual body with no difficulty after that. And that was all we did there. No more trying on other things, no more side-trips to stores, just there and back.
Over the following week, I tried to masturbate every evening and think about how this felt and how doing it as a girl had. Was this going to get better as I got older? Mom told me that when I was fully grown my erection would be as big as the dildo was. It was nowhere near that big now. It still felt good, but would it feel better as it got bigger? That is what I’m going to find out next weekend.
Pretty soon, Saturday was here, and it was time to try on random clothes that came through the hole before I got try my choices.
When we got down to the small items, at one point I picked up a pair of pantyhose. Grandma, who was sizing me, asked if I had ever put on pantyhose before.
“No.”
“Well, if you are going to be a girl, at least some of the time, it’s good that you learn.”
“Is there a trick?”
“Not really, it’s just difficult. Bunch up most of the legs and put both feet in like putting on socks, and at that point you should be in the female body. Then you pull them up and you have to keep pulling, and you have to take turns between pulling from the top and stretching out the part already on your legs. They’re very tight; if it feels like they are a size too small, they’re probably just right, but be careful not to rip them. Always pull at the loosest part. Eventually, the part at the top should be snugly against your crotch, like panties.”
“All right. I’ll give it a try.”
I stripped off my clothes and hung them up like normal, bunched up one leg of the pantyhose and put my foot into it, and set that foot down and prepared to do the other one. Suddenly, I felt heavy and unsteady, and in a lot of pain. I fell over forward and ended up kneeling in front of the curtain.
Grandma was yelling, “No! No! No!” and she ran to me and pulled me back into the curtain. I missed exactly what she did, but a moment later I found myself in my normal body with my shirt around my neck.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The woman whose pantyhose those were was in the process of giving birth.”
“Oh. That’s what that was!”
“The only way I could see to stop it was get you out of that body. If it had gone much further, it would have been too late. Remember the rule about the tampon?”
“Yeah.”
“If you had pushed the head out, it would have been too much. When you changed back, the whole baby, cord, and placenta would have all been pushed out of you.”
“I’m guessing that would have hurt like He- ... Heck.”
“Pretty much. We get clothes from pregnant women sometimes - it’s always possible that an article of clothing belongs to someone who is already pregnant but not showing, and it’s one of the few moneyback guarantees we offer to the paying customers. If your body turns out to be pregnant and you don’t want the baby, you can come back and we’ll change you into your original body for a full refund, or any other body we have for free. Of course, some people keep the babies. And some of the clothes belong to obviously pregnant women, and we get couples who can’t have children for some reason who ask for such a body.”
“But those are not giving birth at the time they change, right?”
“Right. We only ever had one other woman in labor that the clothes changed somebody to, and we were renting that out - have your baby and return to your original body that day. One woman had second thoughts about the pain of the birth, and wanted us to change her back. She was running down here, grabbed any garment off a rack and put it over her head even though we yelled at her not to do that, but by the time she got into the circle the head had come out. She had chosen a man’s shirt, and with no corresponding orifice in the man, the change rejected the baby as foreign matter, the same way it would for the tampon. We eventually got her changed into her original body, but she told us she felt excruciating pain as the baby was practically launched from her body.”
“So she survived. Good.”
“The baby did too, actually.”
“What would have happened if the garment she had picked up had belonged to a woman?”
“We never tested that scenario, because we did not want to run risky tests involving birth and changes, but we had women who changed with a tampon in into another woman, and they still had the tampon in the other body, so I assume she would still have given birth to the baby, but at a normal speed.”
“Do you still have the other woman-in-labor garment?”
“No. After 35 copies of that same baby were born we retired it to avoid putting too many of those into the gene pool. Wouldn’t want their children to unknowingly marry and effectively have kids with their half-brother or half-sister.”
“Did you confirm that different people changing into the same body have the same genes?”
“This was only a guess for a while, but with the widely available testing now available we confirmed it. Two unrelated people changed into the same body had 100% matching DNA. But I will save those pantyhose. There will be people who want a child now, who would pay good money to rent that body, and I will warn them that this body is really giving birth immediately.”
Mom and Grandma figured out how to enter that one into their system. It turned out they had a surveillance camera aimed right at the circle - which made a lot of sense; if somebody broke in here and stole a body, they’d need the photo to know what body to look for! In this case they used it to get a rough description of the woman giving birth to put in the file, and cropped a face from a frame of the video to use in place of the usually more detailed face photo.
Then we set up for the next rotation.
Grandma commented, “Don’t worry about that happening again. It could, but it has only happened two times in hundreds of thousands of garments.”
“I thought the numbers were only in the thirty thousands.”
“That’s only since we started the tracking system. We get roughly 30 garments a week, so about 1500 a year, and it was about 25 years ago that we got serious and started tracking everything using the computer database. Before that, the only sort of tracking that was done was to separate garments into young adult bodies we thought were desirable and everything else that we discarded, and we split them into male and female, white and other races. In older days there were fewer garments, but I still think the total is around 250,000.”
“And how many of those 1500 a year get used?”
“About 10% are undesirable for some reason, and about 1% are kept for rental, usually for about 5-10 years after which point if it was useful to have for rent the clothes may be worn out, and if it hasn’t been rented, say, 20 times in 5 years, we open it up to purchase. Another 10% of them get used by a family member, and maybe 5%, around 80 a year, get purchased. The reason our sessions have not been all at the same time is because I am scheduling you around other appointments. And yes, this means that almost 3/4 of the garments don’t get rejected right off but never get used. In the old days, they were throwing out that many right from the start. Garments that belonged to kids younger than about 15 or people older than about 25 were considered something nobody would ever choose, and got tossed right off the bat to keep the volume of stored clothes down. And other exceptions among the 10% we toss today were also discarded.”
We went through the rest of the clothes without incident, except that one garment was a baby’s onesie. Mom got that on her turn, and she “wore” it by putting it over one hand with two fingers extended down into the legs. I had to carry the baby to measure height and weight, and then rescue her from that situation by tossing her dress over the naked baby. We didn’t measure the baby in more detail than that, but I saw that they did keep it.
“We don’t expect somebody wants to turn into a baby, but with the documentation required from a young age, it may sometimes be necessary to produce the person one of the fake identities represents before the person is ready to adopt that identity. If that happens, we’ll have somebody use some of this saved clothing to produce a person of a given age. Since the person is actually an adult in a baby body, they can play along to whatever is necessary to satisfy the auditor or whoever is requiring this.”
Next I got my turn, and Grandma was surprised to see me looking at male bodies today.
“You give up on going female? I hope that birth thing didn’t scare you off. Birth is an intense experience but when you know it’s coming it is not as bad as what you experienced today. And you generally use birth control and only actually give birth to children when you plan it, when you really want a child, and so you feel it’s worth that pain.”
“No, but Mom said something that made me have some second thoughts. Specifically, I want to compare certain aspects of being a woman with being a man in ways that being a 13-year-old boy may not provide a valid comparison for.”
Grandma smirked in a way that told me she understood this was about sex without me having said the word. I guess it was an easy guess.
After another trip to the thrift store, I went home in a man who had probably the kind of body Dad hoped I was going to take when he first knew I was going to look at other bodies.
Using the bathroom that was almost exclusively mine, I masturbated to orgasm three times in this body, once shortly after I got home, once that evening, and once the next morning. I was disappointed. Although my erection was twice as big around and 50% longer than the one my 13-year-old body possessed, the sexual feeling was only slightly better. I definitely felt it better as a woman.
Now I realized this wasn’t the end of the story. Mom had explained that sexual feeling varies among individuals and I will want to try other bodies to confirm my comparison. But what I had experienced suggested women got it better, and Mom had essentially said as much.
I got changed back to my young body without incident.
Over the next week, I started thinking about things. Who was I interested in? Was it boys, girls, or both? Did it even matter, since the whole town was family and they were likely all also being offered the chance to change bodies? Some of them wouldn’t, but they probably all had the choice.
But I wasn’t sure at all. I wasn’t really feeling that kind of feeling. Wasn’t sure at all who I might want to ask to date. I told Mom about it.
“Nothing to worry about. Not all aspects of sex develop at the same time. What you should think about is, when you are masturbating, who do you think about? Is it a man, a woman, any of your classmates? It might not be the same when you are in a male body versus a female one, nor in your usual body versus one of the adult ones. But that will help you answer these questions. And not immediately. What happens over time? Which thoughts help you enjoy sex the most? That’s the real answer.”
Not a simple answer, but I think the gist of it was she was telling me that if I don’t know, it will come in time.
I was looking at women again to change into next Saturday, and I ended up with a shorter and slenderer one the next time, who was still a C cup. But the same size breasts on a smaller body made them seem bigger. Still not too big, but at the upper limit of what I would be comfortable with. The masturbation was just as good with this one as with the first woman I had, but there was no period happening, which simplified some things.
I kept doing this the rest of the school year. Instead of going to the thrift store, I would bring with me a suitcase with all the clothes I’d bought previously for that gender. Sometimes I could reuse them and save a trip to the store. I alternated men and women, with different sizes within the range I thought was acceptable. They didn’t have it recorded in their database, but I was also looking at penis size. I wasn’t sure how much this mattered, but I intentionally chose some that, at least at the limp size I saw when trying out the bodies, seemed smaller and some that seemed larger. There was some variation in the sexual pleasure I felt between the men, though it didn’t correspond to penis size, and some variation between the women, but every one of the women was better than the best of the men.
So that was settled. The question was, then, what was I looking for in a partner? I had not really fantasized about my classmates, who were still underdeveloped sexually compared to the bodies I had been using part of almost every weekend for months. Instead, I usually fantasized about the bodies from trying on clothes at Grandma’s place, often but not exclusively the ones I’d spent a day in. I didn’t focus on male or female ones, but rather thought about both. When I was male, I almost exclusively thought about women, but when I was a woman I could think about either. And since I had decided that I wanted to be a woman, that let me consider anybody as a partner, as well.
During the summer, Grandma hooked me up on blind dates. I had identified three female bodies I had spent a day in that I would not mind having dates in, and she would find another teen changer who would want to date one of my bodies, and arrange for us to spend an evening or afternoon together. We would arrive and change into our bodies and pre-arranged clothes separately, and use an assumed gender-appropriate name, so we didn’t know during the date who it was we were dating. Mom helped me buy some nice-looking dresses. Not “date dresses” as she had described them, which were for when I got older and started doing more sexual stuff, just nice-looking, in the sizes we already knew for each body.
Sometimes my date was in a male body and sometimes in a female one. We would do some things together - not sex! - and at the end of our arranged time together we would go back to the Clothes Hole and reveal who we really were. I never had any idea and rarely did my dates figure it out either. Twice my date was in a woman’s body but his natural body was male, just like me, which we both laughed about. But it was good to know so many others of my classmates who were changing. Most of us agreed we would date again, and a couple times Grandma set us up for a repeat date but in different bodies.
Since I had narrowed my choices down to these three bodies, there was one other important step. Each of these bodies had a day-long doctor’s appointment during which they tested for everything. It was too much to test every single body that came into the system this way, so this was only done once someone had picked a body or a small set of candidate bodies. Fortunately, they all came back free of disease and without any strong risk factors for future disease, and without any issues that would keep them from having children.
When I got back into school in 8th grade, I had half a dozen interested partners. I didn’t date every weekend, but at least twice a month I managed to arrange a date with one of them. Having learned their tastes, I’d choose a body, not necessarily one I had used before with that partner, and my partner would choose one as well, and whoever we ended up as, we’d do something together. My partners knew I was always going to go female for my dates, while I had some partners who always chose male, some always female, and one who did both. And since my date and I now knew who I’d be dating, instead of using assumed names, I named the bodies I used Dana, Dani, and Danielle, and most of my dates did similarly.
And none of my partners cared that I was dating other people. They were dating other people, too, often the same ones I was dating. While I had dated quite of few people my age who were changing bodies like I was, that group wasn’t actually too large, and when Grandma was setting me up, she had in fact set me up with everyone from that group who was interested in female partners at least once.
I ended up most often dating Kendra, the one among this group who used both male and female bodies when dating me, but I realized it was for the variety.
“Kendra, I like you, but part of that is that I like the variety you offer. But won’t you eventually choose one body to stay in all the time?”
“Yes and no. Yes, I’ll choose one to stick with, but when I rejuve again for the next generation I can switch genders. So in the long run you will get to enjoy both sides of me.”
“Wow, I guess I wasn’t really thinking about it in the long term like that. But I’ll eventually choose some other woman to be as well.”
“Of course. We can go there together when it comes time to change up.”
This made me rethink things. Because Mom had chosen a new husband at the start of her current life, I was likewise thinking that I was only looking for a partner for this life only. But what Kendra was talking about was... eternal. A partner to keep across the generations and different bodies.
When I brought up the subject with Mom, she explained, “Danny, we have chosen as a community not to accept cross-generational vows. When one of us permanently adopts a new identity in a body which is younger by a generation, we let that person start over and not be bound by the promises, misdeeds, and such of their previous life. There are certain limits, imposed by way of not letting those convicted of major crimes like murder or rape take new bodies. That said, we do have some couples who have stayed together across multiple generations.”
“What about you? Why did you and your husband from your last life not go on?”
“My wife of the last generation wanted to stay female, but I was changing from male to female and she didn’t want that. Well, that’s the main reason, though I’ve never really stuck with a partner across two generations. But this ties in with more of our story and it’s really better to ask your grandmother about this story.”
So next Saturday morning, after I went over there with Mom and we tested another 28 garments, at the end of it when I changed into Dana’s body for the rest of the weekend, we sat down and Grandma gave the story.
First off, I need to level with you, Dana. I am actually Abbie Johnson. I only told you the brief version of the story before, because I was focusing on how the magic worked, but now I can tell you the whole story.
The rest of the story is true how I described it; I was born as Abraham Johnson, and in my first life I was gay. I’d been seeing a partner, Frederick Ingalls, secretly, because that society did not approve of gay relationships. We were hoping to establish an out-of-the-way farmstead where we could be together but our relationship might go unnoticed, so I was outside of the town when I encountered this huge pile of clothing in a small depression between two large rocks. It was right in this spot, but it hadn’t been tended to, so there were thousands of garments scattered around, some not in good shape due to being exposed to the elements, but on top of the pile was a heavy coat that was in good shape.
The coat I was wearing was old and ragged, so I grabbed that coat and put it on. Because the clothes were spread over such an area, this happened to be in the changing circle, though we never let the clothes build up to such an extent today. And although I was completely covered, I felt the change in my body’s size and shape as I changed into Abbie for the first time. Of course, I didn’t know what I looked like yet, but the female shape was clear. Trying to understand what happened, and not wanting to undress fully in that weather, I took off the coat and felt myself change again. Some of the other garments there made other changes, which I was not prepared to fully explore, but I changed back into what I hoped to be my own body by wearing the clothes I arrived in, and I took with me the coat that made me female, and went to find Frederick.
I knew this was the miracle Frederick and I needed. If I could stay as Abbie, we could stay together as man and wife, not be outcasts from the society, and if we built our home right on the spot (since we confirmed the changes only happened right there) I could change back into Abraham privately when Frederick and I were home alone. I brought him to the site and Frederick also took a turn at being Abbie, but we left there this time as Frederick and Abbie. We got married and registered that site as our homestead within the week.
So we first worked on building the house. This spot was lower than most of the land around, so we dug it flat, level with the land after we moved the clothes aside. We brought in rocks for the sides that didn’t have natural rock walls, and mortared them in place to make a basement as a foundation for our home. It was during the building process that we realized clothes were continuing to come out of the rock and that it wasn’t just a pile of abandoned clothing.
That home was much smaller than the one that is here today, but it was what we could manage then. It was a shelter, and it gave us time, in the secrecy of the basement, to understand how the magic worked. Once the house was finished and I moved Abraham’s belongings in, I never showed myself in public as Abraham again. There was only Abbie, who set up a vendor stall to sell some of the clothes from the hole that were in good shape and use the money to buy more of a wardrobe for Abbie, and later for other things.
For a long while, I turned into Abraham when we were home alone, but eventually we decided to have children and I stayed as Abbie all the time. We had a son, Jeremiah, and a daughter, Rebecca. Jeremiah eventually became your mother, but he lived two lifetimes as male before first turning female.
After the long spans I spent as Abbie, we learned about how the bodies became permanent in the sense of newer clothes turning you back into that body rather than the original. Some of Abbie’s clothes turned me into Abbie, and some into Abraham. We also learned how the newer clothes turned me into post-pregnancy Abbie, while the original coat turned me into young Abbie. I realized I had unlimited free rejuves as young Abbie, but after a while it wouldn’t work because I wouldn’t be believable for my age.
Apart from the initial experimentation, Frederick never changed, and he grew old and died like other people did, but my repeated changes into young Abbie before my pregnancies had kept me roughly 10 years younger than him. By the time Frederick passed, Jeremiah and Rebecca had families of their own, and I posed myself as Clarice, the youngest daughter of Jeremiah, at first about 10 years old, using a piece of girl’s clothing that had come through, so that I didn’t still look like Abbie. I let Abbie and Abraham both be dead and never used their bodies again. Ever since then, your mother and I have swapped roles like this repeatedly, usually indoctrinating a new spouse into the family tradition each time, and usually having one real child in addition to the parent passed down as child.
“So where do you think it came from?” I asked.
Grandma replied, “That’s a real source of confusion. The fact that it was not inside a building or even a place where there were records of a building having been before makes us think it’s Native American in origin. That might mean there was a completely different sort of clothing coming through here when it was created. But there’s no doubt these two were placed together on purpose. It’s possible one pre-dates the other, but if so, the other was added to make it more useful. We’ve never found any other real working magics like this anywhere, so we have no way to compare it to anything else to guess who could have made it.”
Mom added, “My theory is there were aliens who visited Earth, maybe centuries before Abbie found it, who used it to assume human form. The reason we didn’t find them is they only needed to change once and then they blended into whatever sort of Native American society there was. And they left it because they arrived on multiple spaceships over time and the last one never knew they were last.”
Grandma and I laughed together at that.
“Are you going to become my sister soon, Grandma?” I asked.
“Yes, I plan to. My chosen new body appears to be 17, but my new identity as your mother’s daughter is only 15, so it will be two years from now.”
“What about Grandpa?”
“His new body is going to be ready for him in six months. He’s turning into a girl, so we are not sticking together in the next generation, and he’s going down through the other branch of our family and will be your cousin to some degree.”
“Wait, if Kendra and I get married and have two real or reincarnated kids, and we reincarnate as their children, we’ll be first cousins. Is that going to be a problem for us marrying in the next generation?”
“No. Cousins are allowed to marry here, though it’s sometimes frowned upon for the potential inbreeding. But inbreeding doesn’t happen within our family because we use bodies from all over. If you and Kendra both reincarnate, you’ll become two genetically unrelated people, even if you are legally cousins. We can also place one of you with another family which is less close legally.”
“OK, well I am strongly considering Kendra for the potential she offers. But what will we do in generations where we are both female?”
“You can just host reincarnated family members, or do the same as lesbian couples in the rest of the world and get some sperm from somebody else. You or Kendra can temporarily turn male with the clothes here if you like. But don’t feel like you have to make a decision now. You’re only 14 and you have at least four more years before you will get married.”
“Thanks. So you think I shouldn’t commit until I finish high school?”
“I didn’t say that. In fact, it’s common for changer couples to commit during their senior year in high school, also choosing which bodies they are going to switch into at that time. But if you don’t, there will be plenty more opportunities to find someone, including reincarnated people.”
I had to think about that last part for a bit. Would I, in my first life, want to date and eventually marry someone who’d already lived a life and was going on their second or more?
“That sounds weird, but at the same time, it’s really a lot like what I’m doing, choosing a new body from the Clothes Hole. The difference is that they will have done it all before.”
Mom responded, “Yes, but each of us who go out and find people who have never visited the Clothes Hole at all get someone like that. It’s a real choice, and even though we might not stick together for the next generation, nearly all of us stick together for the lifetime in which we marry.”
After talking it over with Kendra, I continued to date Kendra, but I also dated two others, one always-boy and one always-girl. I found myself most attracted to Kendra, though, and after a year and a half of this, we were exclusively dating each other. Kendra liked Danielle best among my bodies. I had trouble deciding among her bodies, and eventually I told her which girl body and which boy body I liked best and told her to pick whichever of those two she wanted. She could either be Keisha, a cute redhead, or Kenny, an athletic man with straight black hair.
But assuming those bodies permanently was still in the future when Grandma took her new body. For a short period while that body became hers for the purpose of the magic, Mom needed extra help sorting the incoming clothes, and Kendra came in with me to help. And about that new body, all I can say is that there are distinct advantages to being here and seeing thousands of bodies. She wasn’t, like they said of some of those bodies, a porn star; she was really nice looking, though. Once the time passed and she bought new clothes that belonged to the new body, my once-grandma, now-sister continued working at the Clothes Hole.
When we got to the start of senior year in high school, Kendra and I decided to commit. This was a step before engagement; we didn’t have a fancy ring, but our families helped arrange a special date for us. While I was committed to using Danielle, I still didn’t know which of Kendra’s two most favored bodies she was going to choose until she came out to meet me as Keisha.
All senior year, we dated regularly in those bodies, and we started calling each other by those names even when we weren’t in the bodies. It was just before graduation that they registered our name changes and my gender change so that we would have the new names on our diplomas. That was also the time we started using those bodies full time. They were both close enough to 18 that it worked to do the changes then.
Our parents together rented an apartment for Keisha and me to live together in all summer. The idea was for us to get practice living together and apart from our parents. We didn’t change bodies at all during this time to give time for these bodies to become treated as our own, so we could start buying new clothes that would belong to Danielle and Keisha rather than to Dan and Kendra. And Mom found another teen to help try on clothes coming out of the hole.
For me, it was also an opportunity to get more experience living as a girl. I’d done plenty of evenings and whole weekends, but now it was going to be forever. A lot of it was great, but there were also periods. I think periods were really the biggest negative to being a girl, but spending the summer as Danielle gave me the chance to get used to them.
I had the better grades, so I was going off to college, for which I had already applied as Danielle, my high school supporting me by providing records as needed in that name even before it became official. Keisha had no such plans, but we got an off-campus apartment so we could live together. That let Keisha handle the domestic stuff while I could focus on my studies.
It also meant even more time of sticking with the one body, not that that was a problem. I loved my new body and so did Keisha. One thing, though, was that I found myself getting hit on by guys I wasn’t interested in. I solved that problem by getting engaged with Keisha. Our parents understood and covered the cost for the rings (one for each of us), with strict limits, of course. We didn’t have to actually get married yet, but telling guys I was engaged and showing the ring was a great way to drive them off.
The engagement was still speculative; same-sex marriage wasn’t yet legal in our home state nor where we lived for college, but some states had already started legalizing it and it seemed there would eventually be a way. But the guys I was showing my ring to didn’t know I was engaged to a woman. Indeed, when I got job offers after college, living in a state that had legalized same-sex marriage was how I chose between otherwise very similar offers.
We started planning our wedding as soon as we moved there, and that mostly meant Keisha planned it since she wasn’t working. Not many members of our families were going to make the long trip, so she kept it small, and instead planned a separate wedding party at Christmas when we would be back home and all the members of the extended family who lived near could attend.
Keisha planned one big surprise for me, though. All the guests at our Christmas wedding party knew about the Clothes Hole, so she arranged for my close family members to change into different bodies so that I didn’t know who anybody was. Even Dad showed up as a 15-year-old boy. I was confused where they all were, but when I saw so many unfamiliar faces I figured it out.
After I did, they made me play a guessing game; they lined up and I had to guess who each person was. Keisha spanked me with a pretend paddle that was actually made of Nerf-like foam material each time I guessed someone wrong. I thanked Keisha for planning such a fun and unique event.
We were barely back from that Christmas trip when Keisha brought up the subject.
“Danielle, I was just thinking about children.”
“You mean our children, right?”
“Of course. And I think it makes sense for me to be the one who gets pregnant.”
I thought about that, but Keisha didn’t let me think long.
“It makes sense since I’m the one who stays home while you’re working.”
I nodded.
“And it makes sense since in some other lifetime when I’m male, then you can be the one to carry the children.”
“Impeccable logic, Keisha. I’m not promising to carry your children in another lifetime, but I’m not denying it, either; it is something that I think I should eventually experience. Did you have any ideas how to go about getting pregnant?”
“Actually, I did. I think it would be awesome if you wear the Kenny body during one of our trips back home and use him to impregnate me. My family is keeping the shirt that generates him sealed in one of those airtight bags to preserve it for me.”
“Um... That’s... Keisha, that’s a great idea. You could have just asked me to do it as Dan, but why not? We both love that body, and our kid may come out as more of a hunk.”
Keisha laughed. “It’s a deal then?”
“Yeah, deal. When we’re ready, I’ll do that for you.”
As the year progressed, we eventually decided to try and do that on our trip home the next Christmas. But when Keisha started monitoring her fertile periods, we realized she was going to be fertile in the middle of December. So we planned an early Christmas trip, flying there on the 12th and leaving on the 26th. It was a little awkward for me to be Kenny for several days, but it was easier doing that and finding times to be intimate each day through the 17th than to have to run over to the Clothes Hole each time we wanted to do so. I spent the second week as Danielle, and Keisha got a positive pregnancy test on Christmas day, so we left very happy. She called it her Christmas present from me.
We did one other important thing. We took a trip back there in September of the following year so Keisha could give birth in our home town. Having the birth record there made it easier if our child wanted to take advantage of the Clothes Hole later in life.
Lisa was a bright child, but she showed no transgender signs. She loved being a girl. Still, with Mom’s permission, when we gave her the birds and bees talk when she was 11, we also explained about the Clothes Hole, and how neither I nor Keisha was in the body we started life in. She was curious, but skeptical.
“I’ve got the bestest body already! What if it makes me ugly, or stupid?”
“Well that’s just it, honey, you get to choose a body that’s not ugly or stupid.”
She got the ticket as a gift from my mother on her 13th birthday, and we went there the following Christmas. We did get her to try it, but she came up with complaints about every body she ended up in, and after just half an hour, we put her back in her original body and ended the session. And we didn’t talk about it again. Nobody was required to change. We kept the ticket together with her birth certificate and other important documents, where we hoped she would find it some time in the future, if she changed her mind.
We still visited the family from time to time, and after Lisa went off to college, Keisha and I visited, without Lisa, to try on new bodies. Before long, we picked the bodies for our next lives, and found family members to be the fake parents of our next identities. Keisha indeed picked a male body the next time, so I agreed to bear a child for us in the upcoming generation.
Lisa did fine, and became a world-renowned doctor. I guess she did have the right body after all. We still talked, but never about the Clothes Hole.
Keisha and I moved back to our home town late in life, and made our changes to our new bodies and their pre-arranged identities, and this time around I did get pregnant.