Days of His Lives

by Jennifer Loraine

Contact the author at jennifer@phuze.com

Other Stories by Jennifer Loraine

 

Chapter Zero

 

Monday's child is fair of face,

Tuesday's child is full of grace,

Wednesday's child is full of woe,

Thursday's child has far to go,

Friday's child is loving and giving,

Saturday's child has to work for a living,

But a child that's been born on the Sabbath day

Is fair and wise and good and gay.

"Monday's Child is Fair of Face", Nursery Rhyme

 

In the Beginning.....

The infinite sea of probability states popped another virtual particle out of non-existence into one of the possible universes. It swam in the space until it's life was expended and it was called back into non-reality. After a span of time, another particle took its place. In another possible universe, it had survived for a shorter duration before being called back into the Tao. This is/was/will be Maya, the illusion of existence that replicates itself infinitely and then disappears. It is life and non-life, death and non-death. It is all and nothing simultaneously. Creatures were born within it, grew old and died. Each creature's life was reflected multiply across the manifold of possible existences. Every choice that was made opened a new sheaf of probability paths for the creature to follow. Some paths lead to greatness and some to sorrow. All paths come to the same end in the Tao; what emerges from the sea must return to the sea. In some universes time runs sidewise, in others it runs backwards. In others, time doesn't exist. Only the eternal now exists in those universes. Past and future cannot even be dreamt of in those universes.

In an infinite sheaf of universes, all things are possible. This is the story of a man who's life ran backwards in seven different universes. It was not what he wanted or what he had been looking for, but he found the way back to an earlier time in his life nonetheless. His story needs no explanation, for the Tao cannot be explained, it must be experienced like poetry..........

 

Chapter One

 

Wednesday's Child

by Jennifer Loraine

 

All those who try to go it sole alone,

Too proud to be beholden for relief,

Are absolutely sure to come to grief.

Robert Frost, Haec Fabula Docet

 

As a scientist, I knew that this was possible. My associate in the lab had spent the last ten years perfecting a device that altered reality. At first the device took the probability function for a defined space and altered it randomly. As he modified the device and increased it's complexity, it caused the objects placed within it's field to change by varying the twenty-four dimensional settings on the machine. He discovered that the device's behavior was governed by a set of arcane tensor equations that took him most of the ten years to interpret.

With the advent of high speed microprocessors, he was able to gang them together to form a massively parallel processing array to predict which changes the device would incur on the objects within the field's area. The effects of the device became reproducible and we began to seriously experiment with the device. We started out small placing pens or pencils within the field and changing them into sticks of wood, quill pens, and other objects whose purpose we could never fathom. When we placed living creatures, such as lab mice, within the field we were surprised by the results. Although we could cause massive changes in the creature's appearance such as hair and eye color, weight, size and age, the form of the creatures remained relatively constant. Each time we could change the creature and we would test it extensively for biochemical changes before changing them back. We experimented with rats, then pigs and finally monkeys before we decided we needed a human subject.

I looked in the full length mirror in Paul's bedroom and wasn't entirely displeased with what I saw. It wasn't that I minded being like this temporarily, I've had fantasies since early adolescence of having this happen to me. It was just the idea of being like this permanently that frightened me. I wasn't sure I wanted to live the rest of my life in the body whose image was being reflected back at me. I gazed into the mirror at the figure of the same toddler I saw the day before; a clumsy, tottering, two year old in white underpants and a T-shirt. The underpants were padded...training pants.

For the past three days I've been trapped in the body of a baby. The world around me is a huge place that is strangely familiar, but terribly frightening. I was sorry I volunteered to be the guinea pig. We'd had such success with the lab animals that my confidence level was high, and neither of us had anticipated any problems. The first changes he had made were subtle. The color of my hair, the shape of my nose; always changing my features back as quickly as he altered them. Gradually, we started making dramatic changes; manipulating the probability field to give me a younger body. Last week, I was a teenager, then he changed me back again without any difficulty. I should have expected something to go wrong. Everything had been too perfect. The machine's calibration was dead on the first time we powered it up. Not a single component had failed in testing. We were ahead of schedule because the delays we had allowed for had not materialized.

The latest change went off exactly as planned. When we tried to change me back, nothing happened. Paul was frantic, he sweated profusely as he reprogrammed the computer trying to restore me to my body. For some reason I couldn't return to my former probability state. My associate Paul wrapped me the lab's emergency fire blanket and took me home Wednesday night. He asked his wife Gina to take care of me until he could find a way to change me back. Gina agreed readily, saying she had always wanted a baby and her inability to have one had been the greatest disappointment of her adult life. She went out shopping for clothes for me immediately, while Paul stayed with me at the house. When she returned, she dressed me in the only clothes she had been able to find that would fit me; a toddler's t-shirt and training pants!

Gina put me in their spare bedroom after putting a waterproof sheet on the bed. I tried to tell her I didn't need it, but she was adamant, little boys had accidents she said and she didn't want me ruining the mattress.

The next morning I discovered that I had wet my training pants in my sleep. I tried to hide them in the bathroom, but Gina caught me trying to stuff them under the bathroom sink. She asked me what I had been doing and I was forced to explain what had happened. It was the most humiliating experience of my adult life. She laughed and told me it was alright, that's why she had bought training pants for me. Then she filled the tub with lukewarm water and insisted on bathing me like I was a little boy. When she finished washing me, she helped me out of the tub and dried me off. She insisted on dressing me in a clean pair of training pants before she would let me go to breakfast.

She led me by the hand to her kitchen where she helped me up on a kitchen chair. When I saw what she had prepared for my breakfast, I was horrified. Unsweetened oatmeal and milk for breakfast? Where was my coffee? Where were the bacon and eggs? Paul didn't strike me as some kind of health nut. I had seen him eating hamburgers plenty of times at the lab. I was grateful to Gina for taking me in, but was this the kind of meal you served a guest? I asked her courteously for a cup of coffee and some butter and sugar for the oatmeal and she positively blanched. You'd have thought I was asking for a ham steak in a Kosher kitchen! I asked her what was the matter and she said, "Honeybunch, I can't give you coffee, you're too young! Why don't you drink the milk instead?"

I shook my head in disgust and said, "How about some butter and sugar for the oatmeal then?"

She looked sadly at me and replied, "Butter and sugar aren't good for little boys, Honey. It'll taste fine once you get used to it. If you absolutely have to sweeten it, I have some applesauce in the refrigerator I can put in the oatmeal. Would you like that? No? Okay then, dig in! Come on, Honey! Eat some oatmeal for Aunt Gina! If you make a happy bowl, Aunt Gina will give you a banana for desert!"

I hung my head low and began to eat the mush slowly. "I thought childhood was supposed to be happy, carefree time. I don't remember it being anything like this!", I muttered to myself around the spoon.

When I finished, she wiped my face with a damp washcloth and led me into the living room. I sat in front of the tv and she turned it on. Instead of the morning news, she tuned it to Nickelodeon. A cartoon called the Rugrats was on. Apparently she thought cartoons were the appropriate fare for someone my age. Rather than argue with her, I sat and watched the show quietly. At least it took my mind off of my grumbling stomach.

The morning passed slowly as I watched cartoon after cartoon on the tv. I almost welcomed it when she told me it was time for my nap. She tucked me into my bed and kissed me on the forehead before she drew the curtains and closed the door. Within minutes I was fast asleep. Two hours later I awoke to find Gina beside me. Gina had come in the room, pulled the covers down from my head and sat down beside me. She smiled as I opened my eyes and asked me how I was feeling. I moaned and said I didn't feel like getting up. Gina put her hand on my forehead and told me I didn't have a fever. She patted me on the head and said, "Come on, sleepyhead. Aunt Gina's made a wonderful lunch for you. Aren't you hungry?"

She pulled the covers down to my waist and put her hand beneath the front of my pants before I could object. She smiled and said, "Honeybunch, I think I should get you into some dry pants. Come on, get up, Honey and Aunt Gina will help you to the bathroom."

I blushed and reluctantly let her lead me into the bathroom and undress me. When she pulled off my pants her smile became a broad grin as she saw their condition. She helped me up on the toilet and left me to do my business. When she passed by the doorway, I saw her carrying a plastic bag into the guest room. She returned shortly with a box of babywipes in her hand. She stood me up and wiped my behind before leading me back into the bedroom. The coldness of the wipe surprised me, I guess I had expected them to be room temperature, but the evaporation of the alcohol made them much colder than the surrounding air. I told her that in the future, I'd rather she used toilet paper to wipe me, but she only smiled and said she'd see what she could do about the cold.

Gina boosted me up onto the bed and laid me on my back. I started to ask her what she was doing, but she silenced me by putting a finger on my lips. She started tickling me and I began laughing uncontrollably. Suddenly, she lifted my legs in the air and put a pad underneath my bottom. She sprinkled baby powder over my crotch and rubbed it carefully into every fold and crevice of my skin. I writhed in embarrassment and arousal. She had no right to do this to me! She was a married woman! She pulled my legs apart and I licked my lips in anticipation. She tickled me again and in the mirth I never even noticed that she had pulled the pad up between my legs and was taping one side together.

She was diapering me! I screamed in anger as she fastened the other side and sat me up on the bed. I demanded to know why she had diapered me and she took the wet training pants down from the top of the dresser where she had laid them. She told me to look inside and I complied angrily. I was shocked when I saw the back of the pants. I had shat in my pants while I was sleeping!! I was mortified! The shame and humiliation were too much for me; I started crying. She picked me up, sat me on her lap and began cuddling me. I leaned against her and wept like a baby.

When I quieted, she carried me to the kitchen and settled me in a chair. I never even looked at the room around me until she sat me down. I just kept my head buried in her bosom and hid my face in shame. When I finally opened my eyes, I saw that I was actually higher than the kitchen table. My chair had a tray in front that went around me and the arms and back were heavily padded with plastic. She had put me in a high chair!

She stepped around behind me and put something in front of my neck. I looked down and saw she was tying a bib around my neck. I kicked my legs in frustration as she sat down in front of me and began spooning food into my mouth. I tried to tell her I was perfectly capable of feeding myself, but could not talk with all the food in my mouth. She was treating me like a twelve month old baby! She finished spooning the jar's contents into my mouth and wiped my face with the bib.

Then she got up and made herself a bowl of soup and a sandwich. I looked at her meal enviously and wished she was in the high chair instead of me. My tears had made my nose run and I coughed. She looked at me in surprise as if she had forgotten something important.

The next thing I knew she had stuck the nipple of a baby bottle in my mouth. I wanted to spit it out, but my thirst betrayed me. I had to have something to drink! I sucked on the bottle until it was half finished and then slowed. I felt like I wanted to throw up! I wasn't nauseated, but it felt like I had eaten too much. Gina saw the expression in my eyes and immediately got up and stood behind me. She started patting me gently on the back and I belched loudly. I sighed in relief and sat back in the high chair.

It slowly dawned on me what I had just done! I had drunk nearly three-quarters of a bottle of infant formula without making a fuss! Would Gina notice? Had they somehow discovered my secret? I looked at Gina for some sign that she was pleased with my reaction to her treatment of me. Nothing. A coincidence, nothing more. I sighed again in repletion. Oh well, if she was bound and determined to treat me like a baby, I was going to sit back and enjoy it. Paul would find the solution quickly enough and I'd never get a better chance to actually live out my secret fantasies. I waited patiently while Gina finished her lunch and nursed occasionally on my bottle.

When Paul came home that night, he was surprised to see me crawling around the floor in diapers. After Gina explained to him the mess I had made in my pants, he nodded and agreed it was the only thing she could have done. Besides, he told her, it didn't look like it had made me unhappy. By eight o'clock my eyelids were drooping and I was falling asleep in Gina's lap. She carried me to bed and tucked me in with a kiss. What a wonderful mother she's going to make some child, I thought as I drifted off to sleep.

The days became weeks and still Paul was no closer to reaching a solution than when he started. Everything had become routine under Gina's care; first my diaper change in the morning followed by my bottle of water and back to sleep. Then Gina would wake me and take me to the kitchen for my breakfast, followed by cartoons until it was time for my nap. After my nap, Gina would change my diaper again and then it was time for lunch. A few more hours of play and then time for my afternoon nap. Then a diaper change, dinner, play and my evening bottle and back to sleep for the night. I was in heaven. Gina mothered me and coddled me unceasingly. Paul went to check on my apartment on a Saturday and was surprised by the number of bills that had accumulated in my mailbox. He came home and talked with Gina in private before coming to me. Paul told me that I had to appoint someone to take care of my affairs while I was in this condition and suggested they ask my attorney. I told him that I didn't trust my attorney that far and asked if Paul couldn't do it for me. Paul said that he'd be happy to do it, but he'd need a power-of-attorney to be able to handle my affairs. I agreed and we contacted my attorney to arrange a meeting.

Three days later, my attorney was sitting on the couch and having coffee with Paul and Gina while I sat on the floor with my bottle. My lawyer kept looking at me and shaking his head as if he couldn't believe what had happened to me. He arranged for someone to come over and take my fingerprints to use in the event that the judge required proof of my identity. He told us that he couldn't have sworn in court that the person sitting on the floor at his feet was his client and with the exception of Paul, he didn't think anyone else could either. He recommended that I grant Paul a full power of attorney and I agreed. I signed some papers granting him limited power of attorney to handle my affairs until we had a final ruling from the court.

Two weeks later, Paul had been empowered with my full power of attorney by the court. (My attorney had pulled some strings and had gotten it moved up on the docket.) Paul went to my apartment to box my things and put them in storage. Paul came home looking stunned and said he had to talk to Gina in private. When they came out they were looking at me strangely. I asked them what was the matter and Paul said that he didn't know how to tell me, perhaps it would be best if he showed me. He went to his car and returned with a large cardboard shipping carton and set it on the floor.

I crawled over to the carton and sat down in front, curious about what he had to show me. Paul reached in a pulled out a large cloth diaper. An adult diaper! He looked at me as if he expected me to say something and then reached in and pulled out a pair of adult-sized, blue-pastel plastic pants. I blushed in embarrassment as I recognized my property. He had discovered my secret! He reached in again an pulled out my favorite pair of "onesies". I was mortified! How could I explain my secret desires to them? I wanted to run away and hide. Gina looked at me with an odd smile on her face as if she was secretly enjoying my discomfiture.

I tried to explain and found myself breaking into sobs. Gina knelt beside me and put her arms around my shoulders and told me it was alright. She didn't mind if I wanted to be a baby. I tried to tell her that I wasn't a pedophile, I just like to dress up and pretend that someone loved me and cared for me. I told her about how different I had felt growing up and how lonely I'd been. I told her about how all I had wanted in life was a place I could feel warm and secure and where everyone loved me. My sobs became loud cries and she gathered me up in her arms and held me to her breasts to comfort me. She patted my back and made mothering noises to calm me in front of her astonished husband. Paul shook his head silently and took the box out to his car. I never saw it again.

A month later, Paul called home and said he had some great news for us. He rushed home and told Gina to get me dressed, he had discovered the solution. Gina looked oddly sad at the news and took her time getting me ready. When I was dressed, Paul drove the two of us to the lab and asked Gina to strip me and put me within the machine's field. He made some final adjustments to the control panel and turned it on.

The whine of the charging capacitors filled my ears as the machine began it's startup sequence. I heard the main relay kick in and the hum of the coils as the current passing through them caused them to oscillate. Then the automatic timer kicked off and I asked how I looked....Or thought I asked how I looked!? "What's the matter?", I demanded.

Paul and Gina stood frozen with surprised looks on their faces. Something was wrong! I looked down at my hands and saw that the fingers were still short and pudgy like a small child's. I tried to ask Paul what had gone wrong and all that came out was a baby's babbling! I drummed my feet against the floor in frustration crying to know what had gone wrong. Paul recovered slightly, then rushed to his desktop computer, shouting, "His psyche! My God, I forgot to include his psychic field in the equations!" He worked furiously, forgetting all about the presence of his wife and infant associate.

Gina knelt at my side and picked me up in her arms. She turned to Paul and said softly, "Paul can you explain what's happened to him? I thought you said you could cure him! He's even younger than he was before! Instead of a two year old toddler, he's been turned into an eleven or twelve-month-old baby! What happened?" Paul turned to her and said, "Gina, it's him! His need to be a baby again is what happened! His psyche interacts with the probability field! The machine works by altering the order within this manifold of Hilbert space. His psyche is also an ordering function. It's interacting with the machine's changes and introduced chaos into the equation. His intense desires have formed a mathematical strange attractor and are causing the field to produce uncontrollable changes! Don't you understand? He subconsciously wants to stay a baby! There's nothing I can do about it! I'm scared to put him back under the field's influence, I don't know how young he'll become!"

He turned off his computer in disgust and went over to the control panel to shut down the machine as well. He turned to Gina and said, "Let's go home Gina. It been a long day."

That was the day I returned to full babyhood. I can still think, but my body and reflexes are those of an eleven-month-old baby. Paul used his power-of-attorney to have me declared mentally incompetent and was made my guardian. It wasn't difficult; once they proved my identity to the judge, my diapers and pacifier made all their arguments for them. The judge said it was a clear case of "res ipsa locutor", or "the thing speaks for itself". I only wished I could have spoken for myself as well.

They took some of my money and bought a complete set of baby clothes and outfitted a nursery for me. Gina "adopted" me as her baby and I've come to love her as my mommy. I've accepted my new role as her baby and spend my days playing happily in my playpen or crawling on the rug. I'm living in an infantilist's paradise. My previous life as a scientist is fading into a dim memory as time passes. It's hard to believe that only a few months ago, I was a respected scientist running a laboratory. Paul dismantled the machine and has gone on to fame and fortune in his researches. Everyone seems to be happy with the final outcome of our experiments, but I find myself wondering, what would have happened if I wasn't an infantilist? Was Paul's theory too pat? What if everyone had a secret desire buried deeply in their subconscious to become a baby again? Would they be affected the same way I was? I'll never know. But then, it's not a baby's place to know anything. A baby's purpose is to love his mommy and to have his mommy love and care for him. And she does!

 

Chapter Two

 

Thursday's Child

by Jennifer Loraine

 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening st. 4

 

As a working scientist, I should have known that the risks of employing the unknown effect of a temporal field on a human subject were high. My wife is a researcher who had spent the last ten years perfecting a device that altered local entropic states. It changed the direction of the arrow of time within the field's area. Objects placed under the field's influence became younger with respect to the rest of the universe. When we conducted tests with living animals, however, the results were not what we expected them to be. The animals regressed as we expected, but their consciousness seemed to be unaffected. We subjected them to every psychological test we could think of, but there was no degradation of mental function. As nearly as we could tell, consciousness was independent of the material state of matter. It was this curious result that led to my volunteering as a test subject. My wife was hesitant at first, but the animal trials had gone so well that I was able to persuade her to make the attempt. I was convinced that with a little more research we could crack the secret of consciousness.

I gazed in the mirror while waiting for my wife to get dressed and saw the toddler I had become in only a few minutes under her projector; a fat-legged two year old in white underpants and a T-shirt. The underpants were padded...training pants.

I've been trapped in the body of a baby since early this morning. I considered the sequence of events that had led to my predicament. It started with me volunteering to be the test subject. My lust for knowledge had caused us to make a terrible mistake. There seemed to be some sort of limit to the reversibility of the effect we hadn't encountered with the lab animals. My wife thought it had to do with the magnitude of the change that was induced. The lifespans of lab animals being so short, we were only able to regress them a few years. It simply never occurred to us that a time change of over twenty years might be dangerous. She'd had such success with animals that my confidence level had been high, and neither one of us had anticipated any problems.

The first changes she made were subtle. The early graying of my hair was changed into the chestnut brown of my youth. The crowsfeet at the corners of my eyes I had gotten by spending too much time squinting through the optics of instruments vanished in a minute under the projector. She always changed my features back at the end of each session. Gradually, we started making dramatic changes; reversing my entropic state for longer and longer periods to give me an increasingly younger body. Last week, I was an adolescent, then I was back in my old body again without a problem. A series of small mishaps caused us to delay the final tests until Thursday. The project seemed to be cursed by gremlins; every time we turned around something else had failed. First it we had a galloping glitch in the digital to analog converter boards for the power driver unit. Then the calibration on the coils started drifting for no apparent reason. After that a filter capacitor in the fifteen volt power supply started to go and put a three volt ripple on the fifteen volt line. Finally we tore down the entire unit and checked everything before continuing the test series. If I had had any idea of what was going to happen to me I would have smashed the circuit boards and hauled the broken shards to the dumpster myself.

When we tried to change me back we discovered that this metamorphosis was different. For some reason I couldn't return to my former state. I became more and more frantic as my wife tried various combinations of settings to restore me. The banks of computer equipment and field generators that surrounded me seemed simultaneously familiar and ominous as we toiled to return me to my original body.

When my wife turned off the machine and walked over to the test stage to sit down and talk with me, I knew we were beaten. She told me that she had tried everything she could think of, but nothing had worked. I put my face in my hands and wept bitterly in anguished frustration over the news. Pauline patted my back and told me it would be okay, she would take care of everything. She wrapped me in a blanket and carried me out to our car in her arms. I cried like a small child on the ride home, fearing the consequences of our experiments with nature. What if she couldn't change me back? Would I be forced to grow up all over again? The thought sent shivers down my spine. Surly she'd find the means to restore me to my proper entropic state. I just couldn't bear the thought of being a toddler again.

When we got home, my wife put me to bed while she went shopping. I awoke later in the afternoon and discovered I had wet the bed. I was in a panic. What was Pauline going to say when she saw what I had done? I stripped the bed as quickly as my diminished body would allow and dragged the dripping mess into the laundry room. I had set up the stepstool in front of the washer and was stuffing the sheets into the top when I felt something was amiss. I turned around to see my wife standing there watching me."And just what do you think YOU'RE doing?", she inquired imperiously.

I sputtered in embarrassment as she walked up to the washer to examine the load. She looked at the sheet, pulling the folds over to reveal the wet spot I had made. "And just what is this?"

Pauline fixed me with an icy stare as she said, "Did you wet the bed?"

I nodded silently, too embarrassed to talk. "I see," she said. "...I guess we'll have to do something about that, won't we?"

She finished loading the washer in a jiffy and took me by the hand into the living room. Pauline picked me up and sat me down on the couch before sitting down herself. She turned to me and said, "Honey, I know you didn't mean to wet the bed, but I want you to understand that I can't have you ruining the mattress by peeing on it. We're going to have to take some steps to protect it and the bed linens too. Do you understand? I stopped by Wal-mart on the way home and bought you some new clothes to wear until I can change you back. I was afraid that you'd be angry with what I found for you to wear, but now I understand that I did the right thing. You understand that it's very difficult to find clothes for someone your size, about all they had was toddler's clothes. "

She pulled a shopping bag close to her feet and continued, "These are the only clothes that I could find that came even close to what you normally wear."

She pulled a set of bulky toddler's overalls from the bag and held them up to me to check the fit. "I think these are about the right size. If the cuffs are too long I can take them up, but it shouldn't matter that much. I don't think you'll be wearing them for too long anyway. I found a shirt too, let me check the size. She took a pullover knit shirt from the bag and said, "Put these on, Honey. I can take them back if they don't fit. I can't take them up like I can the overalls."

I put out my arms and she helped me put on the shirt. She looked at it a few minutes and said, "Okay, you can take them off now. I just wanted to see if they'd fit."

I struggled with the shirt for a few moments and found myself being undressed by my wife like a small child. She reached in the bag again and took out a plastic wrapped package of underclothes. Pauline tore off the wrapper and shook one out for me to see. It was a white t-shirt in a toddler size and style. She gathered the shirt up in her hands and worked my head through the neck before pulling down the bottom of the shirt and smoothing it against my body. "There you go, a perfect fit," she said, putting her hand back into the bag and taking out another package.

She said, "Why don't you wear these tonight, Honey? I've got some briefs to match so you won't have to run around the house half-naked. Here, let me help you put them on."

I looked at her hands and saw them holding a pair of briefs down low for me to step into them. I steadied myself on her arm as I put one foot then the other into the brief and she pulled them up my legs and over my bottom. She looked at me and smiled while saying, "They're exactly the right size! I was so afraid they'd be too small for you. I guess I keep thinking of you as bigger than you really are."

I grimaced at the implied thought and thought to myself, "They do feel like they fit well, even if they are toddler's underwear."

I looked down to see how they fit in front and I was horrified to see they didn't have a fly! What I had originally mistaken for a fly was only a layer of padding in front. "Padding! These are training pants!", I groaned. No wonder she had helped me on with them. If I had known what they were, I'd have never put them on. I put my hands to the top of the pants to push them off and I found my arms imprisoned in her hands. She shook her head 'no' and said, "Honey, you have to wear something! This is all I could find. I know it's embarrassing to have to wear training pants, but no one will see them except me. Besides, remember what happened in the bed this morning? These will keep the bed dry if you have another 'accident'. You won't have to wear them for very long, I promise. These are only temporary until I find something else for you to wear. Come on, be a good boy and wear them for me, please?""Boy?", I thought to myself with affronted dignity, "...just who the hell is she calling boy? I may have the body of a child, but that doesn't mean she can treat me like one. She's my wife, not my mother!"

I started to push down the pants despite my wife's entreaties and she said, "Honey, I'm afraid I must insist! I'm the one who has to wash the sheets if you wet the bed. If you don't let go of those pants this instant, I'm going to get angry."

She pulled my hands away from the pants and looked me in the eye. "Be good and leave the pants alone or I'm going to spank!", she said playfully.

I began to push down the pants immediately in a demonstration of my independence. She pulled my hands away again and lightly swatted me in fun on my bottom.

I exploded in anger. I reached up with my hand and struck her across the face as hard as I could. She looked at me with a frozen expression of shock upon her face before that realization of what I had just done sunk in. I had never hit her in my life! An angry snarl escaped her lips as she grabbed me by the arms and hauled me to the easy chair and over her lap. She was livid! She pulled my pants down to my knees and began hitting me over and over on my bottom. What had started out as a game had turned into a full fledged spanking!

I yelled and screamed my rage, but she was unfazed by my protestations. She was determined to teach me a lesson! The skin on my bottom became red and inflamed with the repeated blows on my behind. I struggled in an effort to break free, but she held me too tightly for me to get away. As the sensory nerves in my skin were stimulated into continuous firing, the pain became more intense. I wailed in torment at the hideous pain. My sensorium overloaded and all I could see, hear and feel was the pain raining down on me. The world turned blood red before my eyes. My wails became pleas for mercy. I begged her to set me free. She beat on, heedless of my blubbered apologies. The blood roared in my ears and I could feel my bottom throb with every heartbeat. I whimpered in an agony of shame and humiliation.

As suddenly as she had started she stopped and demanded, "Are you going to be a good boy? Are you going to wear those pants like I told you to?"

I sobbed in defeat and she repeated, "Did you hear me? Are you going to wear those pants?"

I nodded my head vigorously. She picked me up by the armpits and set me down on my feet, then pulled the training pants up over my scarlet bottom. She took me by the hand and said, "Come on, Honey. Mommy's going to put a cold washcloth on your face and do something about those puffy eyes of yours. Then we're going to get dinner."

I looked up at the dominant giant who had been my wife and said, "Mommy?! Pauline you're my wife, not my Mommy!"

As she dragged me to the bathroom, she replied grimly between her teeth, "Not anymore! I'm not about to play wife to a bed-wetting, tantrum-throwing, little boy. If you're going to act like a child, then fine, I'll treat you like a child. From now on, I'm your mommy. Do you understand me?"

I remained silent, hoping that no answer was sufficient to make my point. She stopped and knelt in front of me and demanded, "I SAID, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME, BABY?!" I nodded meekly in the presence of the towering female claiming to be my mommy. She said, "Good! Then you won't mind if I carry you to the bathroom, you're too small to keep up with me!"

She picked me up in her arms and carried me to the bathroom on her hip. I winced as she scrubbed my face clean of tears with the washcloth and roughly dried it with a towel. When she finished I asked, "What are we having for dinner?"

She gave my face a last brush with the towel and said mildly, "I think you meant to say, 'What are we having for dinner, Mommy?', didn't you?"

I hung my head and said in a barely audible voice, "mommy".

She looked at me with fire in her eyes and said, "What did you say, baby? I didn't hear you."

I stared down at the floor and said at a slightly higher volume, "What are we having for dinner, Mommy?"

She smiled in triumph and said, "Hamburgers. You like hamburgers. Don't you, Baby? Well? Don't you?"

I nodded my agreement. "Good," she said, "You can sit on the bed while Mommy gets dressed.""Get dressed?", I said in panic, "I can't go out like this! Look at me! Everyone will think I'm a baby!"

Pauline grinned evilly and said, "But that IS the point. You are a baby! And you'll do exactly as Mommy says or you're going to get another spanking. Is that clear?"

I hung my head to my chest and said, "Yes, Mommy."

She got dressed, took me out to our car and drove into town. I was mortified. I made myself as small as possible so the people in the cars beside us wouldn't see me sitting in the passenger seat dressed in a t-shirt and training pants. I couldn't see outside the window, but I didn't care. Presently she stopped the car and said, "Okay, Baby. We're here. Just stay where you are. I'm coming to the other side of the car to open the door."

She came over to my side of the car and opened the door, then unbuckled my seat belt for me. She picked me up and settled me on her hip to carry me into the restaurant. I looked up and saw the golden arches and whimpered, "Please Mommy. Not here, don't make me go in there."

She looked at me with determination and said, "Hush, baby. Of course we're going in there. We're having dinner, don't you remember? Mommy will buy you a nice happy meal just like all the other two year olds in there. Now put your thumb in your mouth and suck it."

I put my thumb in my mouth and she grinned broadly, saying, "See, Baby? That wasn't so hard, was it?" She laughed as she bent down to pick me up saying, "Just suck on your thumb, Honey, and nobody will think you're anything but another baby. If you stick your fingers out while your thumb is in your mouth, nobody will be able to see your face." I did as I was told, panicked at the thought that someone would recognize me.

Pauline put her hands under my armpits and hauled me out of the car seat before settling me on her hip to carry me into the restaurant. She went to the counter and ordered a quarter-pounder combo for herself and a happy meal for me while I sat on her hip in embarrassed silence sucking my thumb. All around us were mothers with small children and infants. Pauline paid for the burgers and carried me to a booth and sat me down. The table reached halfway up my chest! She told me to sit still and that she'd be back in a few minutes. She returned pushing a high chair mounted on wheels. Surely she didn't expect me to eat in a high chair!

She bent over me and I found myself whisked into the high chair. I was seated in the high chair in full view of everyone! I looked around anxiously and discovered that no one was paying me the slightest attention. Everyone DID think I was a baby! She put the happy meal on the tray in front of me and I began to eat. When I finished I belched extravagantly, earning me a dirty look from Pauline. I looked around the table for my drink and discovered that she hadn't ordered me one. In a quiet voice I asked Pauline if she would let me have a drink of her soda. She grinned and said that I was too small to be drinking sodas. She told me to be patient and she would get me something to drink. Pauline reached into her purse and took out a baby bottle full of formula. She said, "Here's your ba-ba, Honey. Drink up!"

I put the nipple of the formula between my lips and began to suck on the bottle. Pauline nodded and went back to eating her dinner. I looked around the restaurant at the patrons, there was the usual assortment of workmen and teenagers, but the rest of the room was filled with mothers with their squalling brats. I looked at some of the small children and saw that Pauline had been right, they were eating happy meals! The front door opened and in walked Gina, my mistress!! I almost dropped the baby bottle in surprise. She breezed past us and went to the counter to order. I hid behind my bottle and hoped she would get her order and leave immediately. What evil fate had made her decide to have dinner here? She picked up her order and walked into the main dining area to find a table.

She saw Pauline and came over to the table. I panicked! She knew it was me! What was I going to say to her? She stood at the side of our table and said, "Pauline, what a pleasant surprise! Would you mind terribly if I sat at your table? All the others seemed to be filled."

Pauline put down her burger and said, "Why of course! Have a seat. There's plenty of room."

Gina sat down opposite Pauline and laid down her food. She looked at me, cocked her head and smiled sweetly. "She knows who I am! Oh sweet Lord, help me!", I thought in an utter panic.

I peed my pants in a rush. I held the bottle in front of my face and sipped on the nipple slowly, hoping that it would disguise my appearance enough to keep Gina from recognizing me.

Gina said to Pauline in a conversational tone," He has the prettiest blue eyes. Is he yours? I didn't know you had a baby."

Pauline swallowed her bite and replied, "Oh he's not mine, he's my sister's. I just taking care of him until she gets out of the hospital. She should be home in the next week or two."

Gina looked politely concerned and said, "I hope it's nothing serious. It's a shame that such a cute baby can't be with his mother."

Pauline agreed and they went on with their meal.

I was desperate. After eating the meal, I suddenly discovered I had an intense need to use the toilet. My gut ached as the contractions rolled across my abdomen. I knew my bowels would move soon, whether I wanted them to or not. I wanted to ask Pauline to take me to the bathroom, but Gina's presence effectively precluded that option. The minute Pauline lifted me from the high chair, my wet training pants would be obvious to everyone. I groaned inwardly in an agony of fear and physical discomfort. The last thing I wanted was to attract attention. If Gina discovered who I was she'd make a scene and Pauline would discover our illicit love affair. I couldn't afford to have that happen to me while I was still in a toddler's body. I had planned to leave Pauline in three weeks, but this incident had upset my timetable. I still hadn't converted the stocks and bonds although I had managed to buy the tickets for the plane to Buenas Aires. If she found out, my finances would be tied up for years in court.

Pauline and Gina were chatting amicably when the inevitable happened. I started to mess in my pants! I tried to look innocent, but the smell betrayed me. I stuck the nipple deep into my mouth and sucked industriously, trying to look like the toddler I had become. Gina and Pauline swiveled their heads toward me simultaneously and smiled in that curiously condescending way women have with babies.

Gina said, "I think your nephew smells a little poopy, Pauline."

Pauline smiled back at her and said, "He's just going to have to sit in dirty training pants until we get home. I don't have any pants with me to change him into."

Gina nodded and commiserated, "Isn't it always the way! I think babies must sense when you're down to your last diaper and make a 'special' effort. From the way they act, sometimes I think they enjoy sitting in poop! Oh dear, look at the time! I've got to run. Tell your husband, "what's-his-name", hi for me. Maybe you should stop at the grocery store and pick up some diapers on the way home. You can potty-train him when he's at home and put him in diapers when the two of you go shopping. Surly your sister won't object to that. Bye!"

Pauline watched Gina leave and leaned over to me and whispered, "Sooooo, you couldn't hold it until we got back to the house! Why didn't you ask to be taken to the bathroom? I think I'll do what Gina suggests and get you some diapers."

Pauline finished her meal and threw out the trash, then found a newspaper vending machine and bought a newspaper. She took him out of the high chair and took him to the car. Before she sat me down on the car seat however, she spread the newspaper down for me to sit on. "There you go, Honey," she said as she buckled his seatbelt, "I didn't want you making the upholstery wet. The newspaper will take care of any 'leaks' you have."

She got into the car and began driving to a nearby grocery store. On the way there, she was stopped by a cop who gave her a ticket for not having a baby seat in the car. Pauline didn't argue with the police officer, she knew it was hopeless to explain that I was her husband, not her baby. She told me she knew of a second hand children's store nearby and stopped there before going to the grocery store. Pauline said she had no intention of getting another ticket.

Pauline took him into the children's store and inquired whether they had any baby seats. The saleswoman showed her several and Pauline picked out a seat in reasonably good condition. She saw some diaper bags and purchased one of those too. The more she thought about it the more sensible Gina's idea sounded she told me when we got to the car. If I was going to behave like a baby, then "By God", she said, she'd treat me like a baby!

She installed the baby seat into the rear of our car and strapped me in. Pauline stopped at the grocery store as promised and took me inside with her. The thought of being arrested for 'parental negligence' for leaving me in the car left a bad taste in her mouth. She said she could picture herself handcuffed in the back of a police car as her husband was whisked off to a foster home. She'd never be able to explain to the court what had happened to him. Pauline said that she suspected that the longer she waited the less likely she was to able to return me to my former state. A day or two didn't matter, but a month would be disastrous!

When we got to the grocery store I saw what she meant by treating me like a baby! She sat me in the cart facing her and proceeded immediately to the baby aisle. I watched in horror as she filled the cart with diapers, baby food and baby care items. She really meant it! I hung my head in shame as several mothers looked at me and grinned, the stain forming on the front of my training pants must be obvious to everyone!

When we went out to the car, Pauline left me in the cart while she put the groceries behind the driver's seat. She bent over to take something from one of the bags and then lifted me out of the cart. To my surprise she didn't take me over to the baby seat, but instead laid me down on the back seat next to the grocery bags! What was she doing? She lifted my legs to raise my bottom from the seat and slid something underneath my bottom. She lowered me to the seat again and grinned before putting a pacifier in my mouth. A pacifier! I was mortified! She tugged on the pants and with a single movement, pulled the pants off me. I looked around in humiliation to see if there were any witnesses to my shame as she pushed my feet back until my knees were in my chest and my dirty bottom was fully exposed to her. Tears of embarrassment rolled off my cheeks as she wiped my bottom clean with a baby wipe and then released me. The next thing I knew she was pulling the diaper up between my legs and fastening the tapes. A minute later, I found myself sitting in a baby seat with a pacifier in my mouth and wearing diapers.

When we came home she left me strapped into the baby seat of the car while she unloaded the groceries. She came back out and carried me into the house on her hip as if I was a baby. I guess I am, but I still have an adult mind and deserve to be treated like an adult.

That afternoon was pure hell. She refused to let me use the toilet and forced me to pee in my diapers instead. I screamed and cried, but my tears had no effect of her whatsoever. She was determined to punish me for my infantile fit of rage. She made me eat baby food and drink formula from baby bottles until I thought my stomach was going to pop! Then she made me crawl around on the floor to work off the effects of the food. All the pureed vegetables and formula had a profound effect on my metabolism; before I went to sleep I found myself pooping helplessly in my diaper! I wept miserably as she changed me. Then she wrapped me in an old blanket and laid down with me to go to sleep. I had to convince her to make another attempt to change me back into an adult again, I thought as I fell asleep.

The next morning I woke to find her groping my crotch in my sleep. At least that's what I thought. When I opened my eyes I saw that she was checking the diaper to see if I had wet it during the night. I had. When she pulled down the diaper in front to change me, she got a funny smile on her face. Then it hit me, I had pooped in my sleep! She was never going to let me wear training pants after this! I started crying and she finished changing me and picked me up to comfort me. "No, no, no! This can't be happening to me!", I cried as she patted my back and told me how much she loved me.

Then I realized how I sounded. I was carrying on as if I really was a baby. My wails had made my speech unintelligible and I sounded like a real baby. I screamed again in frustration. After a while I calmed down and she took me to the kitchen to feed me breakfast. Within two hours I had pooped again in my diaper requiring another diaper change. I knew if she didn't change me back soon, I would become psychologically dependent on diapers and would be forced to wear diapers even if she did succeed in changing me back.

I finally managed to convince her to try the machine again this morning. It was a humiliating experience to have to kneel before her on my hands and knees and beg for her to try to change me back into an adult. She told me that she'd wanted to find some old clothes of mine for me to wear after the change. I told her to use any of my clothes, but she just gave me that funny look again and said since she would be the one who had to wash my pants if I pooped in them, it was her choice to make. She went into the bedroom and went through my clothes while I watched tv. There was nothing on but soaps and cartoons, so I selected the later. I had become quite addicted to cartoons in the last twenty-four hours, they seemed so bright and entertaining since my change.

Pauline came out of the bedroom with an angry expression on her face and said, "Okay baby, It's time for your treatment. I'm going to make a phone call first and then we'll go."

She packed the diaper bag and left me for a few minutes then returned. Something was wrong I decided, but I couldn't figure out just what it was. All of a sudden she seemed to be extremely distant and angry with me. It must be my imagination I thought. I'm just misinterpreting her reaction to the stress of subjecting me to another treatment. She sat me in my office chair while she prepared the machine for my treatment. She rolled the chair under the projector and said casually, "Okay, I'm ready to start the machine. Do you have any last words for me?"

I laughed and said, "You make it sound like my execution!""It is," she replied and threw the main breaker switch.

I blacked out and when I came to, I was sitting in another chair swaddled in a baby blanket. I tried to talk to her but all that came out were baby noises. What had happened to me? Suddenly Gina rushed in and said breathlessly, "You said there was an accident and something happened to your husband. Where is he? Is he okay?"

Pauline said I was okay but it might take a few minutes to explain what was going on. She told her to sit in my office chair and wait until she got finished securing the machine. Gina complied and waited patiently while Pauline busied herself with the machine settings. All at once I heard the main breaker contact on the machine. Pauline had turned it on with Gina under the projector! I tried to get down out of the chair and see what had happened, but discovered that I was tied into the chair. All I could see was Pauline's rear as she bent down over Gina's slumped form.

A few minutes later Pauline returned carrying an infant Gina. She placed her on the chair beside me and said, "Well, well, well. I see the both of you finally got together. I found the airline tickets to Buenos Aires in both your names. It really wasn't very smart to hide them under your old clothes, Honey. You were planning to leave me, weren't you? I hope you enjoy your trip together, it's going to be a long one. Instead of going to Buenos Aires, though, the two of you will be journeying back into babyhood. I hope the two of you will be very happy together. I'm going to make sure that the two of you are never separated. You'll bathe together, sleep together, eat together until you're sick of the sight of each other. Unfortunately for you, you won't be making whoopy any more together. You'll just have to be satisfied with each other's company. You see, I've turned Gina into a baby just like you, Honey! This way she can see you as you really are; a spoiled, immature, self-centered brat! And you Gina! He'll be able to see you parading around the house wearing nothing but a skimpy diaper! Of course you'll be crawling on the floor on your hands and knees when you do it! Won't that be fun?

I'm going to adopt the two of you as my babies. That way I'll be able to see the expressions on your faces when you realize how helpless you've become. I'm going to enjoy hearing the two of you cry for me to change your dirty dydees! And you'll have to cry too, I've made the two of you too young to talk! You'll spend the rest of your lives in diapers being treated like the infants you really are. If one of you is really, really good, I may turn you back into a diapered five year old so you can help me take care of your lover for an afternoon, but after I'm tired of looking at you, I'll change you into a baby again."

The two lovers turned to face each other to see what the other had become. A look of sick horror crossed their faces simultaneously as they realized that Pauline wasn't joking, she would keep them as babies for the rest of their lives. A howl of despair rose up from the two babies as they realized how hopeless their position was. Pauline reached into her pocket and chuckled saying, "Hush children. Mommy's going to take good care of you. She wants you to live a long, long time. I want you to enjoy every minute of your return to babyhood. I'm going to."

She popped a pacifier in each of their mouths and laughed as their infantile reflexes took over and they began to suck on the artificial nipples. She grinned and said, "Now I want the two of you to relax on the way home. I don't want you to get overtired and excited. When we get home I'm going to put you in your crib for a nap." They looked at her in horror as she continued, "I think I'm going to see my gynecologist about getting some medications to allow me to nurse. You're going to be mommy's little wet titty babies forever!"

She laughed again as she saw that they had wet their diapers in terror while sucking on their binkies. They were going to be adorable little babies once she had them trained, she thought to herself as she picked them up and settled them on her hips. She was sure they'd learn to like her titties once she got her milk flowing. Pauline laughed again as she strapped them into the car; her researches had allowed her to come so far and this pair of lovers had so far to go. Of course, since they were forced to crawl there on their hands and knees, they'd never make it! They'd spend the rest of their lives crawling aimlessly around their mommy's feet, just waiting for her forgiveness and their restoration to adulthood. It would never come.

 

Chapter Three

 

Friday's Child

by Jennifer Loraine

 

Whose purpose was it? His or Hers or Its?

Let's leave that to the scientific wits.

Grant me intention, purpose, and design-

That's near enough for me to the Divine.

Robert Frost, Accidentally On Purpose st. 17

 

As a scientist, I knew that this was possible, but my id did not want to accept it. My partner in the lab had spent the last ten years with me perfecting a device that scrambled cells; taking patterns from existing human beings and altering them with a computer, enabling the user to change the physical characteristics of individuals into whatever human form he chose. It worked by analyzing the energy state of the subject, calculating it's cellular structure and mapping the original state onto the desired pattern. That took one of the world's most complex number crunchers; a supercomputer built from 65, 536 individual 64bit processors ganged together in a parallel array. It had taken us years of work to amass the resources to build it and it's associated peripherals. We precalculated most of the computations to ease the load and sold time on the computer to the research departments of various overfunded Universities and deep-pocketed MegaCorps. It paid the salaries of the beast's keepers and took care of the utility bills. The utility bills were staggering in size, enough to break the treasuries of most third world countries. Fortunately, so were our fees. It takes a hellacious amount of energy to dismantle a human into subatomic parts and rebuild a body from elementary particles. It's official name was "Biocellular Analyzer, Binder and Integrator", we called it the "Mixmaster" Years of prototyping, testing and redesigning had led to where I stood now. We had finally completed our testing with lab animals and moved onto the final phase of development. A human subject was required to complete our work. Paul wrote our names on slips of paper and put them in a coffee cup. He held the cup high as I drew the name of the lucky subject. It was mine. Then the testing began. Weeks later I found myself gazing at my reflection in a mirror and shaking my head at the results. I still couldn't believe it.

I looked in the mirror as I waited for my wife for my wife to finish dressing and saw the same toddler I saw the day before; a plump, lovable, two year old in white underpants and a T-shirt. The underpants were padded...training pants.

I've been trapped in the body of a baby since Friday. The old familiar world of last week has become alien and terrifying. I dreaded the thought of accompanying my wife to do her shopping, but I had no choice. She insisted that she couldn't leave me alone to take care of myself in my present condition and she's right. I can't even get a glass of water from the faucet by myself.

I wondered how long I would have to remain like this before my partner could restore me to my normal body. It was humiliating to have to dress in toddler's clothes. What was worse, I fully looked the part; I had the rounded chubby features of a tot. My stomach protruded over the top of my training pants and my spine had the characteristic curvature of early childhood. Even the proportions of my body had been changed. My head was proportionally bigger than it had been and my limbs were shorter. Nothing about my looks suggested I had ever been anything but an infant. I was sorry I volunteered to be the guinea pig. He'd had such success with animals that my confidence level was high, and neither one of us anticip ated any problems.

The first changes he made were subtle. The color of my hair, the shape of my nose; always changing my features back as quickly as he altered them. Gradually, we started making dramatic changes; scrambling my cells to give me a younger body. Last week, I was a teenager, then a quick treatment in the machine and I was back in my old body again without a hitch.

Everything had been going so well that we were days ahead of schedule. We decided to take a break from testing for a couple of days and relax before we started the final test sequence. On Friday morning we turned on the main breaker and began warming the power supplies. We went through the entire pre-test inspection without any problems. I stepped on the testing stage and became what I am now. It was only when we tried to change me back that we realized that something had gone wrong. Paul hit the execute button on the main console and the machine cycled and appeared to operate, but when the Mixmaster field went down, I was still in a baby's body. For some reason, the Mixmaster has been unable to return me to my normal appearance.

My colleague called my wife after repeated attempts to change me back failed. She rushed over in her car to see me. Paul had locked the office door and wouldn't let her in until she had established her identify. I firmly believe in keeping my professional life and personal life separate and had never introduced them. It was an awkward meeting at best. Paul opened the door and pointed to where he had sat me in my office chair. The sight of me regressed into a tot must have stunned her, because she stood motionless with a funny half-smile on her face for a full five minutes before she said a word. Then she came over and picked me up and sat down on my office chair with me on her lap. She sat there for the better part of an hour, holding my sadly reduced body and rocking me. She kept calling me her darling, her honeybunch, her baby. It was not until later that I was to realize how prophetic her endearments would be.

Finally she got up and took me home after bundling me in the lab's emergency fire blanket. She stopped at a twenty-four hour grocery store and bought me some clothes to wear on the way home. Everyone stared at the woman with a toddler wrapped up in a blanket, but no one said anything. I guess they thought I was sick or something. She couldn't find anything for me to wear except infant underwear and diapers. I quailed and hid my face in the blanket when she leaned over the shopping cart and whispered that she was thinking of buying me diapers, so she bought me the only other thing that would fit; training pants!

Paul calls my wife every day to see how I am doing and tell me what progress he's making on my problem. I'm beginning to lose hope. My wife has suggested that she take me shopping for a new wardrobe before the end of the week. I've been able to put her off so far, but I don't think I'll be able to do it much longer. It's just that I don't want to be seen like this. Also, since the only clothes that really fit me are baby clothes, I'm sure she'll take me to a baby boutique. The thought of parading around a baby store in training pants with my wife holding my hand while she shops is too much to bear. What if I can't keep up with her? Would she pick me up and carry me? The idea of being toted on her hip like a small child sends shivers up my spine. I can picture the condescending smiles of the women in the store as they see me hide my head against her shoulder in shame. What if I had to go to the bathroom? Would she take me into the women's toilet to use the kiddie potty? I'd never live it down.

I've spent hours considering the problem of why the process won't reverse. I'll have to come up with something soon, though, my reflexes are going and I keep spilling my drinks on my undershirts. I can't seem to control my hands anymore and even if I hold a glass with both hands, I still spill it. I'm wearing the last clean undershirt she bought me.

Over the past two days I've noticed a change in my wife's attitude toward me. At first she was solicitous of my well-being, checking on me every few hours, but gradually she's become more dictatorial, telling me what I should do and when. She's started making me take naps in the afternoons and she won't let me even get close to the bar. She's begun serving vegetables at every meal (which I despise!) and insisting I finish everything on my plate. I've let her have her way so far, but I'm sure things are going to come to a head soon. Just because I have the body of a toddler doesn't mean I should be treated like one.

That evening my wife and I got into a row. She discovered me making a drink from the bar and took it away from me. I lost my temper and told her that I was a man and had a right to do as I please. She replied that I didn't look like a man and she was only concerned for my welfare, then she smiled and told me it was mommy's orders. I told her that I didn't take orders from anyone, much less my so-called mommy. I said that once a man is out of diapers he doesn't have to take orders from a woman and I wasn't about to start taking orders from her. She told me that I might be taking orders from her sooner that I thought and stopped speaking to me. She stalked off angrily and the two of us went to bed mad.

The next morning my wife seemed to have gotten over the fight and made me breakfast as usual. I had to be helped onto the kitchen chair and discovered to my horror that I could barely reach the table. My wife saw my difficulties and helped me off the chair, then stacked phone books on the chair before reseating me. She plopped a plate of oatmeal in front of me followed by a large glass of milk. I asked her to pass the honey and she refused! She told me that it was dangerous for me to have honey at my age. When I asked her why, she told me that children under the age of five shouldn't have honey. It might be contaminated with botulism and I could die. I pointed out to her that I was forty one years old and immune from the effects of the contamination. She replied that maybe I had been forty one years old at the beginning of the week, but not now and passed me the sugar bowl instead. When I asked her where my cup of coffee was, she told me that we had run out yesterday and she had been too busy to stop by the grocery store to buy any. I asked her why she had given me milk instead, she knows how much I hate milk. My father always said that milk was only fit for babies and cooking. Real men drink beer or if they're sick, soft drinks. She told me it was all we had in the refrigerator and if I wanted to have some water, there was plenty in the kitchen faucet. She knew I couldn't reach the sink at my present height! I grumbled under my breath as I drank the vile stuff.

My wife took me clothes shopping today after getting a ticket for not having me in a baby seat in the car. She tried to explain to the police officer that I was forty-one years old and the law didn't apply to me, but the cop just grinned as if he didn't believe her and told her to tell it to the judge. As expected, she took me to a baby boutique. It was a humiliating experience. At first she was considerate of my feelings and tried to get smaller sizes made for older toddlers. As she continued to shop, she became enthralled with the cute clothes designed for younger children. She seemed to forget I was her adult husband and began shopping for me like I was two years old. She towed me from one display to another, holding my hand tightly in her grip. I resisted and tried to dig my heels into the carpet, but she was too strong for my baby muscles. She hauled me protesting down the aisle with my feet dragging behind me. When I got mad at her and called her a bitch, she took me into the dressing room, pulled down my training pants and gave me a spanking! Then she pulled up my pants, put me in the baby seat of a shopping cart with the tears from my spanking still running down my face and went directly to the sales counter where she immediately bought a pacifier. She unwrapped it at the sales counter and laughed as she turned to me and put the pacifier into my mouth in front of everyone in the store. Everyone applauded her mastery of my tantrum and made approving comments on what an effective mother she was. She smiled warm ly down at my condition, basking in the approval of her peers. I blushed hotly as she patted my head and told me to be a good boy and suck on my binkie. I was completely under my wife's control and she knew it. Then she went on a shopping spree just to piss me off. My wife must have spent over five hundred dollars at the boutique. She bought everything from clothes to furniture there. What she couldn't carry in the car she arranged to have delivered.

I rode home in the back of my own car, strapped into a baby seat. On the way home I had an 'accident' in my pants. Not a big one, but humiliating nonetheless. She saw the growing yellow stain in the rear view mirror and stopped at a convenience store to buy me some diapers. I wept and whimpered as she took me out of the baby seat and diapered me on the back seat of my car, but my tears didn't faze her at all. I writhed on the seat trying to get away from her and in the scuffle the mess from the back of my training pants got all over my wife's clothes and on my shirt. My wife pulled it off of me in disgust and within minutes I was back in the baby seat wearing nothing but a disposable diaper.

That was the beginning of my return to babyhood. She drove back to the boutique and returned the children's style clothes she had bought me and replaced them with infant and younger toddlers clothes. She bought an entire nursery suite, effectively doubling her order of furniture. I hung my head in shame when I saw that she was buying baby bottles and nipples for me to use to drink. Her next stop was the grocery store, where she bought a cart full of disposable diapers, baby food and formula. I sat in the cart facing her with silent tears running down my face as she compared various brands of disposables and talked with the mothers shopping there.

When we arrived home my wife left me strapped into the baby seat in the car while she unloaded the groceries and the packages from the baby boutique. I grew bored and fell asleep waiting for her to come get me. When I awoke she was carrying me into the house on her hip like my mother used to do when I was little. She put me into the playpen which she had purchased at the boutique and had set up in the middle of the family room. I was thirsty and asked my wife for something to drink. She returned a few minutes later with a baby bottle full of formula. When I protested to her that I wasn't about to drink from a nipple, she told me that I was a baby now and that was all I was going to get to drink from. She told me she was going to call Paul and see if there wasn't something he could do about my age.

Paul came over to visit me an hour later and smiled when he saw me standing in the playpen. My wife went into the kitchen to get him a cup of coffee and left us to our conversation. He asked me how I felt and nodded sagely when I told him how my wife had reacted to my rejuvenation. I demanded he call the police to arrest my wife for assault and unlawful incarceration. He shook his head 'no' and said I should be patient, he would take care of everything. When my wife came in, she handed him the cup of coffee and kissed him on the lips. I was shocked! I had no idea the my wife even knew Paul, much less was having an affair with him. They sat down on the sofa in front of me and began kissing and groping each other in full view of me.

When they finished, Paul told me that what had happened to me hadn't been an 'accident' at all, that he and my wife had planned the whole thing from the beginning. He said he had switched his name for another copy of mine before he put them in the coffee cup. Paul laughed as he described how he had 'forced' me to be the test subject to further their plans. He explained that he had met my wife at a singles bar and it had been a month before they knew who each other was in relation to me. When Gina rushed to the lab after my change, Paul had pretended that he didn't know her. Paul told me that my wife had concocted a plan to regress me to a six-month-old baby so I wouldn't be in the way, but he had talked her into turning me into a two-year-old. He told me that he now believed it had been a mistake to turn me into a toddler and he intended to fix the problem immediately. I heaved a sigh of relief as they put me into the car and drove directly to the lab.

****************

I'm still a baby. Paul put me in the machine last night and gave me another treatment, but nothing seems to have changed. I blacked out and when I woke up I was back in my crib. I feel horribly thirsty, so thirsty in fact, that I'd happily drink formula from the bottle if my wife brought me one. I try to call her name but nothing comes out but foolish baby noises. What's happened to me? At least yesterday I could talk! I stand at the side of my crib and scream for her to come. The door opens and there stands my wife and Paul together in the doorway, naked! Paul's arms are full of what looks like a stereo system. I see that my wife has a baby bottle in hand as she walks up to the crib. I grab the bottle from her hands and put the nipple in my mouth eagerly. I begin to desperately suck the precious fluid from the bottle as I watch Paul set up the stereo on top of the dresser and turn it on. The sound of flute music gently fills the room as he walks over to my crib.

Paul stands at the side of the crib and shakes his head with a knowing smile, then he begins to explain what's going on. He's turned me into a eleven month old baby! He had no intention of reinstating me to my former size and age, he decided to regress me until I'm too young to talk! He told me that he moved into our house last night and he's going to be my daddy! He says that by tomorrow I'll be a baby again in both body and mind! The stereo system has an endless tape cartridge with subliminal/hypnotic messages buried in the flute music. He's put a hypnotic drug in my formula to speed up the process and by tomorrow I'll have forgotten that I had ever been a man. Tears begin to course down my face as he explains that he's never going to let me grow up. I'm going to be a baby forever! Suddenly I feel a strange urge from my behind. I'm pooping in my diaper! The sound of a big wet fart escapes my bottom and the two lovers turn to each other smile and kiss in triumph. I feel the front of my diaper growing warm and wet as my bladder cuts loose and I begin to pee. I sink to my knees in defeat as they close the door behind them and leave me alone in my nursery.

mommy and daddy came into my nursery this morning to wake me. i giggled when mommy changed my dirty dydee and daddy laughed too. he kissed mommy on the neck and told her how much he loved her. mommy told him she loved him too and I began to squall. mommy finished diapering me and picked me up to hug and tell me she loved her baby boy too. I cooed happily back at her and then mommy and daddy took me into the kitchen to feed me breakfast. mommy fed me oatmeal with applesauce and i made a mess all over my face and high chair. daddy wiped my face with a wet washcloth and told me what a good baby i was. i chortled and put my thumb in my mouth to suck it. mommy gave me my ba-ba and i nursed my formula while mommy and daddy had breakfast. when they were finished they took me into the family room and put me in my playpen. mommy and daddy sat on the sofa and kissed for a long, long time. then daddy started taking mommy's clothes off and took off his own too. daddy lay down on top of mommy and made funny noises. mommy started making funny noises too and i got worried. i started crying and mommy looked over at me and smiled and told me it was alright, mommy was okay. daddy smiled at me and told me to be a good baby and be quiet. they went back to making funny noises and after a while they got quiet. mommy told daddy she loved him and he said he loved mommy. daddy got off mommy and they sat up on the sofa. mommy came over and took me out of my playpen and sat on the sofa with me on her lap. she told me what a good baby i had been and that she loved me very much. mommy told me i was going to be her adorable baby boy forever. i chuckled happily and daddy smiled at me and tousled my hair. daddy told me that he'd use his machine thing to keep us all the same age forever. he'd always be there to take care of mommy and mommy would always be there to take care of me. i love my mommy and daddy!

 

Chapter Four

 

Saturday's Child

by Jennifer Loraine

 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken st. 4

 

My training as a scientist hadn't prepared me for this. On a Saturday I was in my lab recalibrating the device I had been working on for the last ten years and two weeks later I was sitting in a playpen, idly playing with my toes. I gazed at the room around me stupidly as I tried to understand how my device had malfunctioned. I had been trying to understand what had gone wrong since the accident. The device itself was simple in concept and incredibly complex in design. In a nutshell, the concept entailed the creation of a temporary "pocket universe" whose temporal coordinate system was disconnected from the originating universe. What I had been trying to produce was a static temporal field for long term storage of objects. What I had produced was something alto gether different. All I had been able to deduce was that the field's arrow of time was oriented oppositely from the direction it took in this universe. Instead of being static, the field reversed the aging process for the objects enclosed within its boundaries. The rate of change was astonishing. I had only been under its influence for a few moments before the coils had overheated and melted down. When I emerged from the field's influence, my body had rejuvenated into that of a toddler. Strangely, my mind seemed to be unaffected by the transformation that had befallen the rest of my body. I was stunned at first, but after I regained consciousness my memories seemed to be unaffected. I was as if my memories were encoded in a way that was disconnected with the overall state of my body.

I conjectured after the accident that memory was encoded in the tissues of the brain in some type of holographic format where the information for each event was stored at every location in the brain. From the way that my total sum of memories had deteriorated over the last week, I was sure that my original thesis had been wrong. They acted more like a three dimensional wave where every element was being constantly reconstructed by the brain. My youthened brain apparently did not have the ability to fully recreate the original wave of my consciousness. As a consequence, every minute that passed left me a little less than I had been a moment before. In the parlance of my undergraduate students, I was losing it! The intricate mathematics I had devoured so easily years before was gone now, as was my understanding of temporal field structures. Since advanced theories of Physics are little more than a specialized application of mathematics of tensors and groups, I was not particularly surprised when the loss of one was tied to the loss of the other. Unfortunately, their loss meant that I didn't have the mental tools to find the solution to my problem before my consciousness returned to whatever ground state from which it had sprung. My only hope was that there would be some sort of intrinsic limit on the deterioration that was occurring. I reasoned that the opinions of the mothers I had heard in the past when discussing their child's development were right and that infants had well developed personalities. If that was true, then my brain could support my consciousness, albeit at a reduced level of functioning. My only escape from my fate seemed to be the possibility that my body would start growing again so that it could fully support the wave phenomena that had been my former self. Otherwise, I was doomed to spend the rest of my life in this playpen. I thought back to the instant of transformation and wondered if I had missed something that I could communicate to the team of researchers that working on the problem now. It had all seemed so mundane, just another ephemeral moment in the stream of events that had formed my existence as a Physicist.

The first test of the field had passed and we were ecstatic. It looked like I was going to be able to present my head of department with the fiat accompli that he had desired before the annual review of research projects. The extra effort we had expended by coming in on the last Saturday before the review was going to pay of royally. I had managed to keep the field stable for four milliseconds before it collapsed. I had been recharging the capacitors for another shot when I noticed that one of the coils seemed to be out of alignment. I left the generator on so the capacitors could continue charging while I made the minute adjustment that was required. The timer section would act as a switch to keep the field from being turned on while I was in the target area. At least that's what I thought as I stepped up on the target stage. My graduate student Paul had just finished calibrating the miniature atomic clock that we would enclose within the field when we resumed testing. He stood beside the control panel and watched as I tightened the non-magnetic stainless steel screws that held the coils to their heavy wooden frame. I grinned at him in success and tossed the screwdriver to him as I prepared to step down from the target stage. I watched in horror as the screwdriver bounced out of his hands and landed on top of the control panel. Then my universe went black as the handle on the screwdriver hit the firing button and the field went up.

I was alone. The universe I had created was empty, without stars or light. The sole object in the tiny pocket universe was my body. I gazed into the blackness for a moment before the enormity of what I had done overcame me. I was blind, surrounded by the nothingness of the universe my invention had created. My consciousness faded and I knew no more......

When I awoke, I was lying on the floor of my lab. The reek of burning insulation and fried electronics surrounded me. I looked over at my experiment and saw it was a blackened ruin. A heavy pall of smoke hung in the air from the coils that had self destructed. I looked up and saw Paul talking on the telephone. Apparently he was calling for help. Good! I wasn't sure what the field had done to me, but it was better to be safe than sorry. I looked down at my chest and discovered that my clothes had vanished. I glanced around to see if Paul had undressed me and had left them lying close by. I had the idea that my clothes had caught on fire and Paul had undressed me to quench the flames. I realized later how silly that sounded, but in my dazed condition it seemed to make sense. Then a wave of dizziness overcame me and I passed out again.

The next time I awoke I was in an ambulance. I was laying in a gurney while Paul and a EMT sat next to me. I looked down at the blanket that covered me and saw that a strap had been fastened over the top to keep me from falling out while I was being transported to the University Clinic. I kicked my feet to see if I could still move my legs and was surprised to see the blanket pop up about midway down the gurney. Somehow I had gotten shorter! I looked up into Paul's face, hoping that he could provide an explanation of what had happened to me. He glanced over at the EMT tech questioningly and then smiled down at me as if to comfort me. Then I passed out again.

When I awoke again I was on an examination table at the University Clinic lying flat on my back. The sharp odor of a hospital filled my nostrils. Emergency room doctors and nurses surrounded me, bustling about as they tried to discover what had happened to my poor body. A technician came in the room and wheeled a massive portable x-ray machine over to the examination table. He took a film cartridge out of a storage box mounted on the back of the machine and put it under me. The doctors and nurses left the room temporarily while he prepared to x-ray me. Then he spun up the anode and fired the unit to take a picture. Then he put another cartridge under me and took a second shot. I remember him joking with the ER doctor saying that I was so small that it only took three x-rays to get pictures of my whole body. He said he was done and began wheeling the unit out of the room as the doctors and nurses rushed back in to take his place. One of the doctors told a nurse to get me gowned before they moved me to my room and she told him they were out of pediatric gowns. "Pediatric gowns?", I thought in amazement, "Just how small have I gotten?" She told the doctor that she had called up to Pediatrics and they were sending a runner down with a gown for me. Then I swooned again and blackness closed in on me.

I awoke in a crib smelling the strong scent of baby powder. I was startled by the change and started screaming wordlessly in panic. A young nurse ran into the room and dropped the metal side of the steel barred crib I was laying in to take me out. She bent over me with a concerned look on her face and took me in her arms to lift me up. I felt myself being hugged to her chest as she patted my back comfortingly and made mothering noises at me to quiet my screams. After a moment, I regained my composure and realized where I must be. I looked over the nurse's shoulder and saw that the tiny room had large picture windows on three of its four sides. As she paced back and forth holding me to her chest, I saw that the room itself was virtually empty. All it contained was a crib, a chair, a large yellow plastic garbage can with a biohazard label and a bedside table with a stack of white disposable diapers."Diapers!", I thought to myself when I saw them, "Surely those can't be for me!"

Then I heard a soft rustling come from my behind as the nurse patted my bottom. The plastic crinkling noise she was making could only mean one thing. I was already in diapers!

I began talking rapidly, trying to explain to the nurse that I wasn't an infant. The nurse did a double take and said in shock, "You can talk!""Of course I can talk, nurse!", I said reasonably, "I'm forty-one years old. Did you think I was a baby? Could you do me a favor and get something else for me to wear? I'm a little old to be wearing diapers!"

She looked stunned and said, "Well.....I don't know. It's the policy in Pediatrics that all patients four years old and younger must wear diapers at all times. I don't know if I'm allowed to change policy on my own. I've only just started working here...."

I interrupted her, saying, "I just told you I'm over forty years old! Now get me out of these diapers!"

She looked nonplused and said, "I'll see what I can do" and lifted up the front of my gown. Then her lips pursed and she said, "You're right about one thing. These diapers are going to have to come off you right now! They're sopping wet!""WET! Oh God, no!", I moaned as she laid me back down on the bed. She pulled my gown up to my chest and began to unfasten the tapes that held the diaper around my waist. I was mortified. Then she lifted my legs with one hand while she deftly slid the soggy diaper out from under my raised bottom and replaced it with another. I wanted to cry. There I was in the Pediatric unit of the University Clinic being diapered as if I was a little baby. Words cannot express the depth of despair I felt at that moment. I had reached the nadir of my existence. My invention had turned me into a baby. Tears of humiliation and frustration began dripping out of the corners of my eyes. I watched her as she efficiently taped the new diaper up and said, "I'll call your doctor and you can talk to him about the diapers. He left orders that he wanted to see you the minute you woke up. Why don't you just lie here and relax while I see about getting him up here, okay?"

Then she tossed the drenched diaper in the yellow pail in the corner of the room and turned away to leave. She took about two steps and realized that she had forgotten something in the confusion of my awakening. She came back and smiled at me in an embarrassed way as she lifted the side of the crib to lock it in place. A moment later she was gone.

About half an hour later the lab-coated doctor arrived and came into the room accompanied by an older nurse with an air of authority. It was obvious that she was either the charge nurse for that shift or the head nurse for the Pediatric Unit. She put the metal clipboard she was carrying on the chair and began to drop the side of the crib so the doctor could examine me. The doctor lifted my gown and began listening to my chest with his stethoscope, saying, "How are you feeling, Professor Hawkins?""I'm not very happy about being treated like an infant," I replied tartly, "Can't we do something about these diapers?""We'll see," he said judiciously as he lowered my gown, "You know you wet the last pair of diapers you were wearing pretty thoroughly. Why don't we see how you do with these before we make any decision, okay?"

He helped me sit up on the mattress and said conversationally, "Now, how do you feel? Any aches or pains? Do you have a headache? Is there any nausea? Are you having any trouble seeing?"

I shook my head no to his questions and he put one finger in the air in front of my face and said, "Follow my finger with your eyes." He began moving his finger back and forth in front of me while I tracked its position with my eyes. "Good, good," he said, taking a small white plastic penlight out of the breast pocket of his lab coat, "Now look up into the corner of the room and try not to blink."

He shined the light in each of my pupils and then said to the nurse, "May I have his chart, please?"

He took the proffered clipboard from her and began to flip though the pages. I was amazed at how thick my chart had become in only a few hours, it looked like it was almost a half an inch thick. "Hmmm," he said as he paged through the nurse's notes and lab reports, "Everything looks okay. Can you tell me what happened to you?""It was an experiment," I said simply. I wasn't sure I could explain how the field worked to a non-physicist. I wasn't even sure I could explain what had happened to a physicist for that matter."What kind of experiment?", he probed."I was creating a localized field in the lab," I hedged.

He raised his eyebrows and said, "And?""I had an accident," I replied."So I see," he said with an air that told me he knew I was being evasive, "Would you care to expand upon that?""Not really," I said honestly, "I had just finished working on one of the coils when there was an accident and the field was turned on. I was caught in the field and when I awoke I was like this. Frankly, doctor, I don't know what happened. The field was not supposed to do anything like this. It was designed to be a temporal stasis field.""I see," he said nodding wisely as if he understood completely. I knew he was as baffled as I was, only his personae as a doctor wouldn't permit him to appear ignorant. He was bluffing."Would you like to try walking for me?", he asked, "I'd like to check your locomotor coordination."

I nodded and he told the nurse, "Would you give Professor Hawkins a hand getting out of bed? Put his feet down on the floor next to the bed so I can see how he walks."

She lifted me out of the crib and stood me next to the lowered bars on the side of the crib. I took a tentative step forward and lurched to the side as my knees threatened to buckle under me. I grabbed the bars of the crib, holding myself upright while he looked on with a concerned expression. He backed off a few steps and said, "Professor, let go of the bars and try to walk towards me without holding on to anything."

I released the bar I was holding and started to totter towards him. I felt like an infant learning how to walk. The thick disposable diaper between my had bunched up at the bottom and were forcing my legs apart. I had to waddle to swing my legs around the padding at my crotch. As a grew nearer to him, he backed off a step, forcing me to continue. I swayed once or twice as I uncertainly wobbled my way to the doctor. I looked up into his eyes and saw him towering over my reduced body. He looked so tall standing there. I kept getting the strongest feeling that I had done it all before. Then I realized who the doctor reminded me of, he looked like my father had when I was young! I took two more steps and then I fell backwards to land on my diaper-covered bottom. It was a painless fall, but no less humiliating for the lack of physical injury. Only my pride was wounded. I could not even walk across the room without falling on my bottom. I dropped my chin to my chest and closed my eyes in shame. I felt helpless. He had given me a chance to prove that I was an adult and I had fallen on my rump like a baby. I had flubbed my chance. I felt myself being lifted by hands from the rear and put back in the crib. The doctor made some notes on the chart and handed it back to the nurse, then said, "Professor Hawkins, we'd like to keep you here for a few days of observation. In general, you health appears to be unaffected by your transformation. You apparently have some difficulty with locomotor coordination, but that may be the result of unfamiliarity with your new body. Your incontinence disturbs me somewhat but that may be a transitory effect of the changes your body has undergone.""Can I get transferred to another room? There must be another room open somewhere else in the hospital. The care in this department hasn't been bad, it's just that being in Pediatrics is so......unseemly!", I said."I'm sorry, Professor Hawkins," the doctor said with a look of real regret on his face, "Your privacy is a prime concern here. I'm sure that you appreciate that the University wants to minimize publicity about your accident. In Pediatrics your appearance doesn't raise any eyebrows the way it would in another department. That's the reason we've put you in the Pediatric Intensive Care room. You won't have to share the room with anyone else during your stay here. There are other considerations too. Your size makes it difficult to treat you somewhere else in the hospital. At least in Pediatrics they have gowns and furniture that fits your body size. There are other.....items here in Pediatrics that are appropriate to your size.""Such as baby diapers?", I said ironically."Exactly," the doctor said, looking relieved that I had named the subject he had been skirting around."If you're so concerned about my privacy, then why are the curtains by the windows open? I'd have thought that you'd have closed them if you were worried about people seeing me," I said. I hadn't thought about my privacy until he had brought the issue up, but once he had, I realized how potentially embarrassing it could be to have someone I knew observe the nurse changing my diaper.

The doctor looked at the nurse and said curtly, "Nurse, close those curtains immediately!"

The doctor looked at me apologetically and said in an obvious attempt to save face, "You've been slipping in and out of consciousness since you were brought in the hospital. This is the first time we've been able to talk to you and determine how lucid you were. We were concerned that you might have an episode which might require immediate intervention by one of the nurses. Now that I've talked to you and had a chance to examine you while you're awake, I doubt that close observation will be necessary. You don't have any history of epilepsy or other convulsive disorders, do you?"

I assured the doctor that I didn't and he continued, "Any history of heart problems? No? Do you sleep walk or have a problem falling out of bed? No? Well, then I think we can get rid of the crib and put a regular hospital bed in this room."

The nurse looked surprised by the doctor's decision and whispered in the doctor's ear urgently. The doctor looked embarrassed and said to the nurse, "Is this true? I can't? Why isn't this room bigger?"

The nurse looked at the doctor unhappily and said, "This was a storeroom that we converted last year when we remodeled. It was never designed as regular hospital room. After all, this IS a Pedi unit! We needed a room that could be easily seen from the nurse's station and had room enough for a crib and chair. We knew it was tight at the time, but there was no other choice."

The doctor gave the nurse a disgusted look and said, "I'll take this up at the next board meeting. For now, we'll have to make do with what we've got. Are there any more rooms open in this unit?"

The nurse shook her head sadly at the doctor and said, "We're full. He took the last bed we had. This is a very small unit, doctor. We don't need that many pediatric beds because we're a University Clinic. We have plenty of open beds in the other units. If he could be transferred to another unit I'm sure he could be accommodated."

The doctor ignored her attempt to get her "problem child" transferred to another unit in the hospital. He had been embarrassed once when she had contradicted his decision about the hospital bed, he had no intention of letting himself be embarrassed again by having me transferred after he had just given me reasons why they couldn't put me in another unit. He turned to me and said, "The nurse tells me that a regular hospital bed won't fit in this room. I'm afraid that you'll have to sleep in a crib for the balance of the time you are here. With luck, that will only be a few days.""Can I have the sides down on the crib then?", I asked, "Sleeping in a baby crib is bad enough, but having the sides raised so I can't get out of bed to go to the bathroom makes me feel so.......immature!"

The doctor looked uncomfortable and said, "I'm sorry, but hospital regulations don't permit patients to sleep in beds without the sides of the beds being raised to keep them from falling out of bed. It's for your own protection. The drop to the floor from the mattress is your full body height. I'm not sure that you could get out of the bed unassisted without hurting yourself. I know its inconvenient, but you would have to call the nurse to lower the sides in any case. I'll have the nurse put a call button in your bed so that you can call for help when you need it. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's no bathroom in this room. It looks like there might be enough room in here to put a potty chair."

He turned to the nurse and said pointedly, "What do you think?"

The nurse looked decidedly unhappy at having to shoot down another one of the doctor's plans and said hesitantly, "Well......It would be a squeeze, but I think we could do it. But, doctor.....Have you considered his body size? He's really too small to put on an adult potty. The opening on the seat is too big for his bottom, he'd fall in. He wouldn't be able to hold onto the handrails because they'd be too high for him. If he sat on the chair the safety rails would be at shoulder height."

The doctor looked irritated and said, "Then put a children's potty in here! Do I have to think of everything?"

The nurse dropped her head and said in a quiet voice, "We don't have one, doctor. That's why there's the rule about diapers for children under the age of four. Once they're bigger than that, we can use a regular potty chair.""I see," said the doctor, "You and I can discuss this later. I think we're going to need some changes in policy around here.""It's a matter of the budget, doctor. The board has said repeatedly that we don't need a Pediatric Unit and has kept our budget as small as they can. We simply don't have the money to buy anything but the most necessary equipment. You remember how they acted when I asked for a pediatric cardiac monitor. They told us to use the pediatric defibrillator we bought last year. It will work, but if I have more than one patient with cardiac problems.......""I know, I know!," the doctor said tiredly, "I'll take it up at the next meeting of the board, I promise."

The doctor turned back to me and said, "It's too early to discuss potty chairs anyway. We need to have you wear diapers until your continence is established."

He turned to the head nurse and said, "Do you think there'll be any problem with him using a bedpan?""None whatsoever, doctor," the head nurse said primly, "I'll call Central Supply and have one sent down immediately. He can use the nurse call to ask his nurse to bring him the bedpan whenever he needs it.""Excellent!", the doctor said with a smile as he put his stamp of approval on the idea, "I'll write it into my orders." The doctor was tired of having his orders contradicted by a nurse. Even if she was right, it was unseemly to have his authority over the patient's care questioned. The entire case was proving more difficult than he liked and he was in a hurry to get to his other patients. Then he could get back to the safety of his office where his rule was law.

The doctor turned to me and said as took the chart from the nurse's hands and made the entry about the bedpan, "I'll be back to see you later today. If you need anything, just call your nurse. We'll try to have you out of here in a few days."

The head nurse took my chart from the doctor and put it on the chair so she could raise the side of the crib. He decamped the room while her back was turned and retreated to look in on his other patients. I didn't see him until two days later. When I asked my nurse later about when he was coming to see me, she told me that he had come in while I had been sleeping and I would see him when he made his rounds. I suspected he was deliberately coming in when he was sure I was asleep. I think he had been embarrassed and was avoiding me.

The nurse left the room and the young nurse that had change my diaper returned with a remote control switch and plugged it into an intercom unit mounted into the wall. She fed the cable over the head of the crib and clipped it to the sheet on the outside of the mattress. After demonstrating the use of the call button, she canceled the call by depressing the cancel button on the intercom panel and said, "Your lunch will be here in about two hours. Why don't you try and take a nap until then?"

I looked at the bare mattress I had been sleeping on the night before and said, "Could I have a blanket and pillow to sleep with? I'm not used to sleeping on a bare sheet without a comforter. I doubt that I'll be able to get any sleep without one.""Certainly," the nurse said, "I'll get them, right now. Just wait here and I'll be back in a jiffy!"

She left the room to go get a blanket and pillow, leaving me wondering how she expected me to get out of the crib with the side rails up. It was just a figure of speech, but the idea of getting out of bed without her help made me smile. If she came back and found me out of the crib, she'd probably panic. The thought of her running to the nurse's station, yelling that she had lost her patient gave me a perverse sense of satisfaction. Maybe I'd try it later, I thought with a grin. Right then I was sleepy and a nap sounded like a good idea.

She returned a few minutes later with a small pillow and blanket. It was obvious that the Pediatric Unit had purchased them solely for use in a crib. The blanket was a gender neutral aqua-green and the pillow was too small to be used by anyone but an occupant of a baby crib. She put the pillow on the mattress at the head of the crib and had me lie down so she could cover me with the blanket. I was amused by her ministrations; she tucked the blanket around my body as if I was a small child who could not handle a blanket by himself. The maternal look she gave me as she hovered over me to tuck me in reminded me of how my mother looked when I was a child. In a few minutes I was snug under the blanket and began to fall asleep, secure in the knowledge that she wouldn't let me miss lunch. I smiled drowsily when the thought hit me that she would probably want to fed me like I was a toddler. They were having difficulties with having a baby-sized adult patient in the hospital. I had no intention of making their lives any easier by being agreeable. I'd do everything in my power to thwart their policies and make sure they treated me like an adult. It was too much fun to be a pain and I was bored. I looked forward to making everyone's lives miserable by demanding my rights. I closed my eyes and drifted off to the sound of a small child crying in distress somewhere in Pediatrics. They hadn't heard the last from me! I awoke about an hour later needing to go to the bathroom. I hit the nurse call button buttons several times to no avail. It was apparent that my nurse was busy with another patient. If I didn't do something about getting myself to a toilet quick, I was going to wet my diapers again. I stood up in the crib and looked through the bars at the floor. It wasn't that far, true, it the distance was greater than my body height, but if I was careful I ought to be able to get down without too much trouble. I took my pillow and stuffed it in the corner of the crib between the side rail and the headboard, then I scrambled on top of the pillow and tried to climb over the railing. The pillow was too short to let allow me to swing my leg over the railing, so I jumped down and quickly folded the blanket they had given me into a thick packet and placed it on top of the pillow. I mounted my makeshift stepstool again and was able to get my leg over the rail. Then I let myself down the side by holding on to the bars with my hands and letting myself slide down. A minute later I was at the door to my room looking for a public bathroom. I didn't see anyone at the nurse's station so I emerged from my room to see if one of the patient's rooms was empty. I wasn't too worried about getting back into the crib before they discovered me. All I had to do was push the chair up to the side of the crib and climb on top the seat. From the outside it should be an easy matter to trigger the release and let the side down on the crib. Then all I had to do was climb from the crib to the mattress. It was foolproof. I peeked quietly through an open door into a patient's room and saw that the TV was turned off. I knew I had a likely candidate in that room, it was unlikely that a child wouldn't be watching TV in the middle of the day if he or she was awake. If the patient was asleep, the door would have been closed. I tiptoed further into the room and peeked around the corner to look at the bed and confirm my suspicions. The room was empty. Then I turned around and went back to the bathroom. I was a bit surprised to find that the door to the bathroom had a knob instead of a lever. Apparently the University Clinic had not made the mandated changes to the rooms to allow full access to the handicapped. Considering the conversation I had overheard between the doctor and nurse I shouldn't have been, but I was. The doorknob turned out to be tough. I had to reach over my head and turn it between my hands. I quickly found out that I wasn't able to turn it enough to open the door. I decided that if I could get a little higher, I would be able to get a better purchase on the handle. So I went back into the room and got the chair sitting underneath the TV mounted on the wall. I pushed it in front of me, making horrible scraping noises until I got to the bathroom door. Then I clambered on top of the seat and gripped the knob between both hands. I almost had the bolt draw back into the door when I heard a voice behind me say, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE? Get down from there this instant!"

I turned to see the head nurse standing behind me with an ugly glower on her face. I lost my balance on the chair and fell face down to the floor, striking my nose. I was stunned for a moment and lay there while the head nurse dropped to one knee and picked me up in her arms. She sat down on the chair with me in her lap and examined me closely. I looked down at my chest and saw that I was dripping blood all over my gown. After a quick check she decided I wasn't badly injured and carried me to the examination room next to the nurse's station. One of the doctor's who was making late rounds came in the examination room and looked at my nose. Apparently the bone wasn't broken, I had just bloodied it. After a few minutes it stopped bleeding and the head nurse asked me, "And just what were you doing in there?""I had to go to the bathroom," I replied sheepishly."Why didn't you call your nurse?", she asked."I did, but nobody answered. I had to go immediately so I got out of bed," I told her."By yourself? You could have been badly hurt!", she told me."I see," she said, "Let's get you back to bed.""But the bathroom! I still need to go!", I exclaimed."Do you? From the looks of it, I wouldn't think so," she said grimly, "Let's get you back to bed so we can change your wet diaper!""Huh?", I said stupidly, then looked down at the infantile garment I was wearing. She had stripped off my gown when we had gotten to the examination room and bundled the bloody garment into the trash. The diaper hung low on my hips and drooped dangerously. I must have wet it when I fell and not even known it. My nurse came in the room and said, "How is he? I just got back from the pharmacy and the unit clerk told me he was hurt in a fall. Is he okay?""Take him back to his room and change his diaper. Then I'd like to talk to you in my office," I need to call maintenance.

My nurse took me back to my room and changed my diaper for the second time that day. I was miserable; my nose hurt and my ego had been badly bruised when they discovered that I had peed in my diaper like a baby. Worse, my nurse hadn't taken the time to replace my gown and left me sitting on the crib mattress garbed in nothing but my diaper. It was humiliating. She saw the blanket and pillow in the corner of the crib and quickly deduced how I escaped my confinement. She took them out of the crib and made me lie on my back while she went to talk to the head nurse. A few minutes later she returned followed by two of the hospital maintenance men carrying what looked like part of a crib. My nurse lowered the side of the crib and took me out, standing me on the chair to put a new gown on me while the maint enance men raised the object they were carrying and set it in place on top of the crib. When she picked me up in her arms to put me back in the crib, I saw what they had done to the crib. They had put a steel top on the crib to turn it into a cage!

My nurse shook her head as she put me back in the crib and said, "That wasn't very bright! The head nurse is very upset with you. I'd have thought that you had better sense than to climb out the crib on your own. I'm lucky she had sent me down to the pharmacy to pick up some medications or she would have blamed me for what you did. Falling from the chair clenched it for her, she told me you're as irresponsible as an infant and had to be treated that way. Do you know how it looks when a patient gets injured at the hospital? Your doctor is going to be very upset with everyone. She added special orders to your chart that you're to be kept in a crib with a top until you're released from the hospital. She's calling your doctor r ight now to tell him what happened and what she's ordered to prevent you from hurting yourself again."

The nurse slammed the side shut and said, "She told me to take the nurse call out of your crib so you don't get into any mischief with it. She told me to tell you that we're not going to worry about you using a bedpan while you're here. She said that you've had no problems using a diaper so far and she sees no reason why you shouldn't continue to use one. I'd be careful if I were you. If you cause her any more problems she's going to get nasty."

I apologized humbly for my behavior and sat in my crib while I waited for lunch to come. About thirty minutes later I saw a food service worker push a steel-sided cart to the nurse's station and hand the unit clerk a clipboard to sign. Minutes later my nurse arrived with my lunch tray. I have to give her credit, she did try to serve me a meal like an adult. She borrowed an overbed table from one of the other nursing departments and dropped the side of the crib to allow it to be rolled in over the mattress. After spilling the glass of low fat milk they had given me for lunch, my nurse had to change the sheets of the crib. Then I had problems cutting the minuscule serving of meat the dietitian had permitted me and knocked the food all over the clean sheet she had just put on the crib.

My nurse was fed up, she picked me up out of the crib and sat me in the chair while she went to get clean bedding and reorder lunch for me. When she returned, she was carrying a high chair along with the bedding. She set the high chair up next to the crib and put me in the chair while she changed the linens. About the same time she finished, an employee from food service arrived with another tray. The nurse took the tray from the dietary aide and set the tray in front of me, then began cutting up my meat so I wouldn't have any more accidents. I forked up some of the meat and put it into my mouth before I realized something was wrong. All is took was one chew to realize everything was not as it should be.

I had no teeth. Actually, I wasn't exactly toothless, but the full set of teeth I had had before the accident had huge gaps. I felt around my mouth with my tongue to see how many teeth were missing. I had a few molars, but my incisors were gone. The meat fit neatly around the few teeth I did have and I found it impossible to chew it up. I spit the meat out on the tray and looked up at my nurse helplessly. She looked at me as if she was about to scream and said testily, "Well? What is it this time?""My teeth," I muttered, swallowing whole the remaining meat in my mouth."Your what?", she asked not understanding my muffled mumble."My teeth!", I shouted, pulling back my lip to reveal the naked gums, "They're gone! See?""Oh God! Why me?", the nurse exclaimed, rollin g her eyes heavenward, "Hang on! I'll be right back with a meal you can eat!"

She took the tray from in front of me and left the room to return a few minutes later with several small jars in her hand. With her free hand, the nurse pulled the chair around in front of the high chair and sat herself down. She arranged the jars on the tray of the high chair with the labels facing her. She twisted the lid from one of them, took a small rubber-coated spoon from her pocket and ladled out a spoonful to feed me. I was appalled. There was no other word for it. My nurse intended to spoon feed me from a jar like an infant. I opened my mouth to object and she popped the laden spoon in before I could utter a word. When I closed my mouth I discovered it was filled with the most ghastly substance it has ever been my misfortune to endure. As an epicure, I pride myself on my ability to name the ingredients in a dish and be able to approximate the recipe with a single taste. This was some form of overcooked vegetable-chicken puree made from third rate meat approved for institutional use. It had a grainy texture that coated my tongue in the most disgusting way, leaving me with the intense desire to wash my mouth out with soap and swear off vegetables forever. I swallowed the vile concoction and found my mouth filled again. The muscles of my abdomen contracted violently as the muck hit my stomach and caused it to rebel against such maltreatment. It was horrible! I tried to tell her to stop but all I accomplished was to force a mouthful of the revolting stuff to dribble down my chin and fall into my lap. She merely smiled in a sickly sweet way and shoveled another spoonful of the sludge into me. I pointed at the mess she was making on the front of my gown and she said as she heaped more abuse upon my tastebuds, "Don't worry about the gown, it's disposable. We don't use feeding bibs here, when the patient finishes eating, we change his gown. It's much easier that way."

When I put my arms up to indicate I had had enough, my nurse said calmly, "I'd put my arms down if I were you. The head nurse is the one who told me to spoon feed you. She saw me getting the baby food out of the cupboard in the nurse's station and asked me who I was getting it for and I had to tell her what happened. She agreed to your change in diet and told me to feed you as if you were an infant. She told me that if you gave me any trouble, I was to tie your wrists to the arms of the high chair with gause strips. The head nurse gave me some other orders for your lunch which you'll see after you finish these jars. If you refuse to eat, we'll sedate you with a tranquilizer and feed you anyway. It's your choice, you can do it the easy way or you can make it hard on yourself. One way or the other, this is what you'll be eating. Now are you going to cooperate, or do I call the head nurse and have her get the tranquilizer ready?"

I opened my mouth in surrender and closed my eyes, gripping the arms of the high chair in anticipation of the wretched puree. I could not see the expression on my nurse's face, but I heard the coo in her voice as she said, "That's a GOOD baby! Open wide!"

When I had finished all the food, she wiped my face with a wash cloth and got a chance to see what she had been feeding me. The labels of the jars had gotten turned around and I saw that the foul textured mixture was baby food! No wonder it had tasted so revolting! The very thought of eating that infantile mess made me feel nauseous! She removed the filthy gown from me and reached into the large pocket on the front of her apron to show me what was next on the agenda. It didn't matter to me by that time what it was. All I wanted was something to drink and rid my mouth of the horrid taste of baby food.

At first the object in her hand looked like another jar, but when she removed the covering, I saw to my horror what they had planned for me to drink with my meal; baby formula!"No! Please no! Anything but that!", I whispered.

The nurse smiled encouragingly and said, "Oh, come on. It's not as bad as all that! Here, let me get you out of the high chair and I'll show you."

She recapped the short baby bottle and put it back in her pocket before throwing the empty jars in the trash. Then she removed the tray from the high chair and lifted me out of the humiliating feeding station to put me on her lap. I looked up at her with an expression of pleading in my eyes as she withdrew the baby bottle from her pocket and removed the cover. Then she laid me back against her arm and proceeded to put the nipple into my mouth. I struggled briefly against my fate and then surrendered without a word being said. A few minutes later, I lay in her lap nursing at the bottle as if I had been an infant all my life and had never learned to drink from a glass.

I suppose it wasn't all that bad, but I couldn't tell. The taste of the baby food I had eaten earlier had destroyed my sense of taste and all I could feel was the cool wetness as I sucked minuscule sips of formula from the artificial teat and swallowed. After a minute or two, I found the correct rhythm to maximize the flow and I lay there on her lap with my eyes closed, determined to get enough of the milky fluid to wash the taste of the baby food out of my mouth.

I heard the head nurse's voice say as she dropped by to see if my nurse was having any trouble feeding me, "How's it going in here? Any problems? I see he's taken to the bottle easily enough."

I opened my eyes wide and looked up into the face of the author of my torment. She was looking down at me with a broad grin plastered on her face; she had won. I realized that the meal had been a punishment for escaping the crib and getting hurt while I was technically under her care. I had behaved foolishly and she was determined to make me suffer for my mistake. I kicked my legs helplessly at the thought of what else she might have planned for me.

Kicking my legs was the wrong thing to do under the circumstances. With a baby bottle in my mouth and my loins lovingly wrapped in a diaper, kicking my legs only made me look more like an infant. She smiled down at my infantile appearance and said, "When he finishes his bottle, put him down for a nap. You can give him his blankee and pillow back to sleep with, I don't think he's going anywhere with the cover on his crib. Remember, if he gives you any trouble, call me and I'll come in and sedate him. Once the tranquilizer takes hold, we won't hear a peep out of him for the rest of the afternoon."

My nurse agreed and I lay there on her lap suckling like an infant until I had finished the formula. Then she put the empty bottle on the floor beside her and lifted me up to lay against her chest. With her left hand cradling my diapered bottom, she began patting my back gently with her right hand to wind me. I was about to tell her how ridiculous it was to burp an adult when a huge belch escaped me. I blushed in embarrassment as my nurse said, "Ooooo....What a BIG burp that was! Does baby have any more bubbles? Let's see if I can get any more air out of you!"

I was glad that my head was looking over her shoulder and my nurse couldn't see the color filling my cheeks as they burned in shame. She got three more small belches from me before she quit and put me in my crib. Then she fluffed my pillow and carefully tucked the blanket around my legs and torso before she pulled up the side of my crib and locked it in place. I was mortified. Nothing could have made me feel more dependent than the way I had been diapered, spoon fed and forced to nurse from a baby bottle before she had tucked me into the crib like a little baby. I closed my eyes to escape the sight of the bars above me and fell fast asleep in minutes.

When I awoke, my crotch felt cold and clammy. In my half-awake state I didn't remember where I was and what had happened to me. I put my hand down to see if I could feel why my crotch felt so strange. My fingertips touched the plastic covering on my diapers and it all came back to me in a rush. I was in a hospital and they had forced me to wear diapers!

Then the smell hit me and I knew why I felt so cold and clammy. I had shit in my diapers!

It was too much! I had been fed and nursed like a baby and then I had pooped in my diapers like an infant. I moved my legs experimentally and felt the cold soggy diaper squish wetly between legs. Tears began to flow from the corners of my eyes and I started to cry. A few minutes later the head nurse came in to see why I was sobbing. It only took one sniff of the fetid atmosphere for her to ascertain my problem. She turned and yelled out the door, "He's okay, he's only got a dirty diaper! You finish what you were doing and I'll take care of him!"

The next thing I knew she had dropped the side of the crib and was removing my dirty diaper. The fact that it was my nemesis who had discovered me with a soiled diaper didn't help me regain my composure. I sobbed disconsolately as she lifted my legs and wiped the filth from my behind. Then she put a clean diaper beneath me and pulled it up between my legs, taping it tightly in place around my waist. I screamed from the depths of my torment, bewailing the horrible fate which had made me so helpless.

The head nurse looked down at the screaming infant which had been a full grown man only two days before and came to a rapid decision about her charge. She dipped into her pocket with her hand and withdrew the object she kept for soothing a babies' jangled nerves. Her hand passed over my mouth like a stage magician's and with a twisting sleight of hand, the object popped into my mouth.

She had silenced my bawls instantly. The object muffled my cries completely, allowing only soft whimpers of anguish to escape. I closed my lips around the thing in my mouth and explored its surface with my tongue. When I realized what she had put in my mouth to quiet me; a pacifier!

I began sobbing again, quietly this time. My chest heaved with emotion as waves of despair rolled over me. The nurse picked me up out of the crib and held me close to her chest while patting my back and saying, "There, there little one. It'll be alright. Your dydee is clean now and you can go back to sleep. When you wake up again, there'll be a nice bottle of formula waiting for you."

I moaned inwardly and lay my head against her in defeat. I shouldn't have tried to been a smart-ass and ignore my doctor's orders. The head nurse had probably had years of experience dealing with recalcitrant children and had no intention of letting me buffalo her into having my way. All my childish behavior had gotten me was to be treated as I deserved. I was lucky she hadn't put me over her knee and given me a sound spanking. She kept petting me and making motherly cooing noises at me until I calmed down and was ready to go to sleep again. I felt completely enervated and demoralized as she lay me back down on the mattress and tucked me back under the fleecy blanket. I knew with certainty that when I woke, it would be with a wet diaper. She had found the truth of my being under the urbane exterior I had so carefully cultivated over the years. I was only a helpless infant who had to be cuddled and coddled to keep me from throwing tantrums to get my way.

The next time I awoke, it was with a wet diaper as I had known I would. I lay in my crib quietly, resolving to wait patiently for my nurse to check my diaper rather than sink further into infantile behavior. I realized that my howls of displeasure hadn't done me any good, they had only served to make me look immature and justify treating me like a baby. If I had behaved myself, I could have had the use of a bedpan and maintained a little dignity. But since I had shown them I was incapable of deporting myself in an adult fashion, they had diapered me for the duration of my stay and confined me to a baby crib.

By the end of the week, my toilet training was almost gone. They had continued to feed me baby food and formula throughout my stay. The doctor came in a talked to me for a little while on the day before I was released. He told me that I would have to have assistance until I learned how to take care of myself and suggested that I should either go to live with a relative who could take care of me, or I should hire a live-in caretaker. One way or the other, he pointed out, I was unfit to take care of myself. It wasn't just that I was incontinent and couldn't feed myself, the tests had shown that I was becoming progressively more forgetful and emotionally unable to cope with the rigors of adult existence. He told me that my reflexes and control over my muscles were n't improving as he had expected and there was every indication that it might become more difficult to walk in the near future. In short, I needed a full time caregiver to take care of me. He asked if I had any relatives that might be willing to take me in on a permanent basis and I told him about my sister Gina. I gave him Gina's phone number and he agreed to call her for me and explain the problem. He told me that I shouldn't have to worry about getting supporting myself and receiving disability, he said that barring paralysis, my impairment was about as total a disability as he'd ever seen. When he left I cried myself to sleep. I couldn't bear the thought of being cared for by my baby sister, Gina.

Later that night, Gina called the nurse's station and asked to speak to me. They told her I was asleep and she explained that she was my sister. She told them that my doctor had called her and asked if she could take care of me. She told the nurses that she had told my doctor that she'd be happy to take care of me. She called that evening to arrange to pick me up the next day. One of the nurses came to get me so I could take her call. Rather than take the time to help me totter to the nurse's station, she picked me up and carried me on her hip. When we got there, she held me against her side with one hand while she held the phone receiver to my ear with the other. I was forced to listen to my sister's sympathetic gushes while being held like a toddler. When her chatter died down, I agreed to let her take me home to live with her. The nurse hung up the phone and took me back to my crib to go back to sleep. Being treated like a baby while I was at the hospital was bad enough, I wasn't sure how I would react to the way my sister was going to treat me.

I lay in the crib sleeplessly, wondering about what my life was going to be like spending twenty four hours a day with my sister. Don't get me wrong, my sister isn't a bad woman. It's just that she's...different. Our parents had died when I was in graduate school and had left me to take care of her. I was twenty-six at the time and was working on my doctorate's dissertation. Money wasn't a problem, Dad had been a stockbroker and left an enormous estate in trust for us. I had her move up to my college so I could look after her while I worked on my Ph.D. It wasn't as big a dislocation for her as one might think, she was sixteen at the time and only had two years of school left to get her high school diploma. Dad and I knew that my sister would never go to college, it had been an uphill struggle just to get her through high school. Frankly, my sister's not very bright. Her intelligence is considered to be at the low end of the normal range. That's why Dad put the money from his estate in trust. He knew that I had my own life to lead and wanted his bank to help look after her when he was gone. Dad had structured the trust so that I had to go to work after I graduated. If I had an accident or became ill, the trust would see to my care. Otherwise, I had to support myself until I retired. My sister was bound by no such limitations, she was set for life. The bank would see that she was provided for without her lifting a finger. Dad had known that the possibility of Gina getting married to a wealthy man was almost nil. Aside from being dumb, my sister had the misfortune to be cursed with plainness. This wasn't the everyday, ordinary plainness one might see in a Supermarket, mind you. This was an industrial strength plainness that guaranteed that she would never have a date throughout her school years. Her plainness, coupled with her lack of intelligence, education and thoroughly insipid personality made her unsuitable for any marriage I could conceive.

Nonetheless, she was a good hearted soul. She spent her days crocheting blankets for various charities, working in her garden and listening to the soaps on TV. It wasn't a life that would appeal to a great many people, but it was fulfilling for her. She had an old pickup truck of her own and a license so she could do her grocery shopping and buy seeds and needlework supplies. Clothes didn't interest her, she dressed in the most practical thing she could find, i.e., overalls. If our mother hadn't died in an auto accident when she was five, things might have been different. Dad hadn't remarried, instead he relied on the nannies he hired to raise his only daughter. Once they discovered my sister's total lack of talent they worked hard to find things that she could do. The crocheting was one of the few projects that had come to fruition. Gardening was the other.

Lately my sister had taken up knitting with a home machine and was producing sweaters and socks for the poor by the truckload. If she had been smarter, I would have tried to induce the bankers to use some of the trust money to invest in a needlework specialty store and let her try to manage it. As it was, she was merely the best customer of one of the local shops. They had taken her under their wing and continued her training in needlework until she was quite good. I had a closet full of sweaters and mufflers as testament to her knitting talents. This was to be the environment in which I was to learn to overcome my disabilities. My sister had a spare room so there was no problem with putting me up for an extended period of time. It was the thought of eating my sister's cooking that made me so depressed. Cooking was not one of my sister's talents. She survived from day to day eating TV dinners and eating the produce from her garden when it was in season. I had gone to great lengths to dissuade her from canning the produce from her garden. It would take only the smallest mistake to contaminate the jars with botulism and turn her jar of healthful vegetables into a container of deadly poison. Instead of canning, she gave her excess produce to a church who distributed her nutritious largess to the poor. Until I could find an orthodontist who could fit my small teeth with a bridge, I would be forced to endure countless bowls of oatmeal and mashed vegetables. When the vegetables were in season the flavor would be barely tolerable to my Epicurean taste, but when the season was over, I would find myself trying to swallow mashed vegetables from cans. The thought of spending months, perhaps years of ingesting insipid meals made me want to cry.

The next morning my sister arrived to take me home. I had called the University and arranged to take a sabbatical of indefinite duration the day before. I had also called the bank which managed the trust for us and explained that I had been injured in an accident at the University. I had asked them to move my belongings and books into storage for me and sublet my apartment until the lease ran out. My car was to be sold on commission at a used car lot and my outstanding debts to the credit card companies were to be paid from my bank account. They assured me that they would see that the utilities were paid and phone disconnected before the end of the month. A bank officer was assigned to see that the paperwork for my disability was properly filed with social security. They told me they would come by my sister's house the next day with the requisite forms to grant them power of attorney to manage my affairs until I could resume control of my life. I felt like I was an observer at my own death. The only thing that was missing was the eulogy and burial. My former life as a University professor was over, my new life as a dependent child was only beginning.

My sister came into Pediatrics with a confused look on her face. I could see her clearly through the open door of my room from my crib. Apparently the doctor's explanation of what had happened to me hadn't made sense to her and hadn't sunk in. She thought that I was confined to a wheelchair because my legs and arms had been hurt. She told the nurses that she had brought a blanket she had crocheted to keep me warm in the car while we went home. The fact that it was late spring and the weather was warm hadn't made an impact on my sister's plans. She had seen people in wheelchairs on TV with travel blankets so she had brought one for me. That was my sister, all heart and not the slightest crumb of common sense.

They got a wheelchair to discharge me from the hospital, mostly to appease my sister I suspect, and came to my room to get me while they plied my sister with discharge forms. The nurse lifted me out of the crib and sat me in the center of the seat of the wheelchair. My legs were too short to reach the foot rests and dangled off the end of the seat. The nurse shook her head at the safety hazard my small size presented and decided to use another method to secure me to the chair. She had heard about my accident and how unhappy the head nurse was when she had to fill out the accident report forms. My nurse didn't want to be blamed if another accident befell me.

She pulled the belt that was fastened to the rear of the seat and brought it around me to lay on my lap. Then she buckled the safety strap around me and snugged it down tight before she wheeled me back to the nurse's station. The unit clerk had just finished going over the discharge instructions from the doctor regarding my care with my sister when we approached the station and the nurse who was pushing the wheelchair said, "Miss Hawkins?""Yes?", she answered."I have your brother here," the nurse told her."Where?", my sister inquired, looking thoroughly baffled."Here in the wheelchair," the nurse explained."Which wheelchair?", my sister asked stupidly.

The conversation was rapidly becoming reminiscent of an old Abbot and Costello routine. I shook my head and put it into my hands in exasperation. "This wheelchair!", the nurse said."Where?", my sister asked."Here!", the nurse answered."Where's my brother?", my sister queried, discounting my presence and looking around the room."In the wheelchair!", the nurse exclaimed in dismay."Which wheelchair?", my sister asked, starting another round of whose on first."This wheelchair!", the nurse replied to my sister's straight line.

I groaned, the conversation was getting worse by the minute. Loathe as I was to get involved with the two of them, I had no choice if I was to get out of the hospital sometime that day."Hi, Sis!", I said, introducing a new variable into the conversation."Hello, little boy!", my sister said pleasantly, "Have you seen my brother?""I am your brother, Sis!", I told her."You can't be my brother, you're only a little boy. My brother is a full grown man!", my sister told me."Nonetheless, I'm your brother, Sis!", I insisted.

My sister bent over me and said earnestly, "You shouldn't fib, little boy! It's very naughty!""I'm not fibbing, Sis!", I exclaimed.

The head nurse came out of her office after hearing the commotion and said, "He's telling the truth, Miss Hawkins."

My sister looked nonplused and said, "There must be some mistake. My brother isn't a little boy! He's forty years old!"

I couldn't help it, the line was too good a lead-in for the obvious reply. I said, "That's an odd coincidence, so am I!"

My sister caught on that I was playing with her and said, "This is some kind of joke!""Funny, that's what I said when you made me the mittens with six fingers," I replied.

My sister stopped talking and gave me a hard look, then said, "My brother was the only one who knew about that! How did you know?""Simple," I said, "I'm your brother!""What? You can't be!", she said in amazement."I am and I can, Gina!", I told her."How did you know my first name?", she asked me, "No one here has said it!""I heard it first when Mom and Dad brought you home from the hospital. I was eleven at the time," I explained."This can't be!", my sister exclaimed."It sure can, Cleana Gina!", I said using the nickname I had given her in childhood. She had been an awful tomboy, aways getting herself dirty and covered with mud. I used to kid her about it when she was six and seven and I was in high school. I'd haul her into the house to hand over to her nanny for a bath and tell the nanny, "We need Gina cleana'!""Bubba?", she asked, using her childhood name for me. She knew that I hated to be called Bubba, I decided that she had called me that to see who I really was."I really wish you wouldn't call me Bubba like I was some hick farmer!", I told her tiredly."It really is Bubba!", she exclaimed to the nurses. She looked down at my diminished body and said matter-of-factly, "You've changed!""I had an accident," I explained."Oh?", she said with a surprised look on her face and then she seemed to notice the diapers I was wearing for the first time. She smiled and said brightly, "That's okay, Bubba. Your dydees will soak it up! I used to have 'accidents' too, when I was your age!""You've never been my age, Gina. I'm ten years older than you, remember?", I said with irritation."Oh, yeah, I forgot," she said with a stupid look on her face, "But you look like you're two years old.""The accident caused that," I told her."Peeing in your dydees made you two years old again?", she said, looking perplexed."That's not the kind of accident I was talking about," I growled."Oh," she said, "What made you young again?""I told you! I had an accident in the laboratory," I explained patiently."I see," she said with a glimmer of understanding growing in her eyes, "You peed in the laboratory and you got young again."

I put my head in my hands and muttered, "No, Gina. I had an accident in the laboratory that made me young. It had nothing to do with peeing!""Then why are you wearing diapers?", my sister asked.

The head nurse and unit clerk looked at each other and grinned before saying simultaneously, "BECAUSE HE HAD AN 'ACCIDENT'AND PEED!"

The nursing staff broke up in uncontrollable giggles while I moaned in mental anguish. Explaining to my sister could take all day if they continued to "help" me. I turned to them and said sarcastically, "Thanks, guys!""Gina! Gina listen carefully to me. Something happened to me in my laboratory. I got young again. My graduate student Paul called an ambulance. They took me here. I was too small to sleep in a regular bed so they put me in Pediatrics. Is that clear so far?"

Gina nodded and said, "Uh huh."

She looked like she had understood the first part so I said, "I was too small to wear my underwear. The only thing they had for me to wear that was my size were baby diapers, okay?"

Gina's brows furrowed dangerously with the beginnings of confusion. I could tell she was starting to lose the thread of conversation. I had to finish quickly before I lost her entirely. I said slowly so she would understand, "So they dressed me in baby diapers. Is that clear?""Uh huh," Gina said."Good," I said, "I'm glad that's all settled. Let's go, Gina. I'm tired and I want to go home. Here, let me have that blanket."

I took the blanket from my sister's hands and threw it over my bare legs and diaper gratefully. It was bad enough that I should be wheeled through the hospital with a bare chest. Everyone didn't have to know I was wearing a diaper too! Sometimes my sister's stupidity proves useful. "The Lord looks after fools, babies and drunks," my Dad used to say to me after he would catch my sister doing something spectacularly stupid, "I'm sure he keeps an eye on your sister too!"

My nurse handed Gina the plastic bag with my personal belongings and clothes that I had been admitted to the hospital with. Apparently Paul must have brought it with him when he rode in the ambulance with me. The head nurse walked with us as we went to the patient entrance to the hospital. She stood with my nurse and made small talk until Gina brought her truck around. Gina stopped the truck and parked it, getting out of the truck to help me in and buckle my seat belt for me. The head nurse peered in the front of Gina's truck and said, "You can't transport him like that! It's illegal, you'll get a ticket!""I will?", Gina said in confusion, "Why?""There's a law that says that children under the age of four must sit in auto baby seats when they're being transported in a passenger vehicle," the head nurse explained."But I'm forty-one years old!", I interjected."The police won't know that when they stop your sister, Mr. Hawkins. They'll give her a ticket and let her explain to the judge," the head nurse said."But what am I to do?", my sister said in distress, "I don't have a baby seat for my truck! I don't want to get a ticket!""Wait here, Miss Hawkins. The hospital has loaner seats to lend parents that need one in an emergency. We keep them in a closet next to the information desk. I'll go and get one for you, okay? I'll just be a minute," the nurse said handing the plastic bag she was carrying to the nurse standing behind me."Okay!", agreed my sister.

A few minutes later the nurse returned carrying the baby auto seat. She helped Gina get the seat secured to the front seat with the seat belt and then stepped aside as Gina picked me up and put me in the baby seat. Gina pulled the strap up between my legs and fastened it to the buckle on the shoulder straps that would keep me from flying out of the seat in the event of an accident. The head nurse bent down and picked up the blanket that had been laying on my legs to hand to Gina. Gina took it from her and tucked it carefully around my legs under the safety bar as the head nurse took the plastic bag she had given to the other nurse back in her hand.

When Gina finished, she turned and the head nurse handed her a plastic bag she had carried down from Pediatrics. Gina looked at her and said, "What's this?"

The head nurse grinned broadly in an expression of final triumph and said, "Spare diapers. In case he has an 'accident' on the way home in the truck!"

I groaned as Gina went around to the driver's seat and the nurses slammed the door shut on my side. I learned a valuable lesson that day; Never, ever make a head nurse mad at you! They have ways of making you suffer that would make a hardened nazi flinch in sympathy.

Gina drove me home and I explained about my "temporary" incontinence on the way. She looked suspicious when I told her it was a transient condition as if she didn't believe me but I decided later it was probably because she didn't understand the word "transient". When we got to her house she suggested that I rest. I insisted that she go to the store and get me some proper clothes to wear. I told her specifically that I needed some underwear to fit me as well as jeans, shirts, socks and shoes. I got out my wallet from the bag of clothes and took out all my available cash to give it to her, telling her to spend whatever she needed to get me properly attired again. I sat on the floor in front of the TV and watched an old Humphery Bogart movie while she was gone. I had seen it before, but it was the only thing on other than children's programming and soaps. I wouldn't have watched it at all except I was tired of being bored.

I was surprised at how long it took her to get me a change of clothes. It was almost three hours before she returned. She came in with her arms full of large plastic bags and disappeared into the guest bedroom, then went back out and repeated the procedure. The third time she came in, she took a group of smaller plastic bags into the kitchen instead of the bedroom and then went out to the truck for more. Then she started coming into the house with huge cardboard boxes, bringing them into the house and distributing them into various rooms. I was appalled by the number of purchases she had made. She must have filled the entire bed of the pickup with boxes and bags! After a while she stopped and told me that she'd be with me as soon as she was finished getting things put away. I went back to watching old movies until she had time to help me change into my underwear. It was annoying, but I knew if I interrupted her from getting her purchases sorted and stored, it would only serve to confuse her and slow her down. From time to time I would see her dragging furniture such as a twin sized mattress (???) through the hall into the door to the garage. When she was done, she came and asked me how I was doing and I told her I'd like to change into my underwear as soon as possible. She took me by the hand and led me back to her guest bedroom. I was shocked by the changes in the room. She had redecorated it as a nursery!

I looked up at her and said tiredly, "Sis, why did you do this? I have no intention of living in a nursery. What could have possibly compelled you to do this?"

She looked down at me with a worried expression and said defensively, "But the instructions from the doctor told me to do this! I was only following doctor's orders!""You must have misunderstood. I'll take a look at them later and explain them to you. Right now, let's get me into something decent. I'm tired of wearing diapers," I said as patiently as I could manage.

She went to the dresser drawer and took out a pair of white underwear and said, "These are the only underwear I could find in your size, I hope you like them.""As long as they're underwear, I'm sure I will," I told her.

She said, "Let me put you up on this table so I can help you get dressed."

I looked at the table she indicated and saw that she intended to use a baby's diaper changing table to get me undressed. It was tiresome, but using the table would probably expedite the change into some decent underwear, so I nodded to indicate I agreed to its use. She put her hands underneath my armpits and hoisted me up to the level of the changing table, then sat me well back on the top so I wouldn't fall. When she saw the sagging diaper between my legs, she realized that I had thoroughly soaked my diaper in the three hours she had been gone. She giggled and said, "Ohhhhh, you're wet!""I'm not surprised," I grumbled. I whined accusingly, "You were gone for three hours!""Did you know you had peed in your dydee?", she asked innocently.

I could feel the trap closing in on me. If I said "no" she would tell me that I needed to wear diapers and if I said "yes", she would ask me why I hadn't asked to have my diaper changed the minute she came in. The truth was that I hadn't known that my diaper was wet, but I didn't want her to know that I had slipped so far into incontinence that I couldn't tell whether I had wet my diaper or not. I decided that the best defense was a good offense and told her in a loud voice, "DON'T CALL THEM DYDEES!"

I continued more quietly, "They're diapers. Please call them diapers, okay?""Okay," she agreed cheerfully and asked in a plaintive tone, "Why didn't you tell me?""Tell you what?", I mumbled as she pulled the soggy diaper down between my legs and lifted my feet to raise my bottom enough to pull the diaper out from beneath me."That you wet them," she said in a childish sing-song."Because!", I said, hoping that would be enough for her to stop the inquisition."Because why?", she asked like a five year old in her silly sing-song voice."BECAUSE I DIDN'T KNOW THEY WERE WET! THAT'S WHY!", I yelled."Oh," she said, "That explains it."

She wiped my pubic area quickly with a baby wipe and slipped my feet through the leg holes in the underwear she had bought me. Then she pulled them down my legs, working them over my knees and up to my bottom. She lifted my feet again with one hand and tugged on the back of the underwear until they had cleared my cheeks and then lowered my feet so she could use both hands to pull the front of the underwear up. Gina carefully folded the wet diaper into a neat package and opened the lid on the new yellow plastic diaper pail she had bought to throw it away. I found the presence of the diaper pail ominous. I'd have to be careful and watch my toilet urges or it would see more use. Gina said, "Stay there, Honey. I'm not finished yet," and went to the dresser to get s omething out.

She sat me up on the table and had me hold my arms in the air so she could slip them through the armholes of the T-shirt she had brought me. She pulled the hem of the T-shirt down to my waist to even it out and smooth it down. "There you go. All done," she told me.

Then she put her hands under my armpits again and lifted me up from the table to lower me to the floor. I looked down at the new underwear she had bought me and thought that there was something odd about them that I couldn't quite put my finger on. It was hard to see them upside-down so I went into Gina's bedroom to look at them in the full length mirror Gina had mounted on the door.

I gazed in my sister's dressing mirror and saw the image of what I had become looking back at me. I was no longer the dapper Physics professor whose Epicurean tastes were renowned on campus. Instead the I saw the reflection of an apparent two year old dressed in a white T-shirt and underpants. Then I realized what my subconscious had been niggling me about the underwear; there wasn't any fly to pee through! I put my hand down to feel the front of my underwear and felt a thick panel in the front that I hadn't noticed before. The underpants were padded...They were training pants!"Gina!", I yelled angrily, "What is the meaning of this? I sent you out to get regular underwear for me and you bought training pants!"

Gina came running into her bedroom at the sound of my bellow and said apologetically, "I'm so sorry! It was all they had that would fit you except diapers. Do you want to wear diapers instead?""No, I don't want to wear diapers!", I replied in disgust.

Gina looked worried and said hesitantly, "Are you sure? The doctor's orders said you should wear diapers until you get potty trained again. The care instructions specifically say that if you try to wear training pants before you get potty trained the pants will hold your poop next to your skin and give you a bad case of diaper rash. Are you sure you want to wear them?""I'm sure," I told her disgustedly."Promise me you'll wear diapers if you get diaper rash! Please?", she pleaded."NO!", I said with an air of finality."But I'll get in trouble with your doctor! Pretty please with sugar on it?""No!", I said."Pleaaaaase?", she pleaded."Alright, alright! If I get diaper rash, I'll wear diapers. Will that make you happy?", I asked in exasperation."I'm just trying to take care of you," she said with a hurt tone in her voice."I know and I'm sorry," I said contritely, "It's just that.....It's just that it's hard to get used to the fact that my body has changed, Gina. A week ago I was a full professor at the University and now look at me! I look like a toddler!""I think you look cute!", Gina said in a feeble attempt to make me feel better."I don't want to look cute! I want to look like my old self!", I complained loudly."I know you do. I wish I could do something to help you," she offered sincerely."Why don't you get us something to eat? I'm starved!", I told her."Oh! Whatever happened to the time? I'm sorry, I'll make dinner right away," she said distractedly.

She went into the kitchen while I sat in front of the TV to watch old movies until dinner was ready. It wasn't too hard to control my sister, but I often had to make compromises to keep her happy. The one I had just made was enough to make her forget about diapering me. With any luck, she would forget I made the promise and let me continue to wear the training pants until I regained my toilet training. As long as it was only a little pee in my pants, it shouldn't be any trouble to convince her to go along with me. I resolved to run to the bathroom the minute I felt the need.

A half hour later Gina called and said that dinner was ready. I stumbled into the kitchen to eat dinner and to see what she had prepared for me. When I looked at the kitchen table, I froze in place. Standing next to the kitchen table was a brand new high chair. Apparently she intended to make me eat my meals while sitting in an infant's high chair!"What is this?", I said, indicating the new high chair."It's your new chair. Do you like it?", Gina asked in apparent expectation that I would be pleased by the acquisition."I suppose. Whatever gave you the idea I needed a high chair?", I asked rhetorically.

Apparently Gina had had little experience with rhetorical questions, she looked confused and said, "But the instructions said.....""Never mind!", I interrupted. I decided I was going to have to get a look at the instructions after dinner. Actually, the high chair wasn't a bad idea. I could sit and eat with my head at the same relative height as Gina's. It would facilitate dinner conversation if I had anything to say. I was sure that Gina wouldn't have anything intelligent to offer up for discussion.

Gina picked me up and sat me in the high chair so I could finally get something to eat. After I had gotten settled, she stepped behind me and began snapping something around my neck. I looked down and saw she was putting a toddler's plastic feeding bib on me. "Gina," I said, looking up into her bovine eyes, "What is the meaning of this?""But the book said....", she started to explain."What book?", I interrupted."The book I bought you," she explained."You didn't give me any book!", I told her."Well....The book isn't really for you," she temporized.

I sighed heavily, I could see it was going to be like pulling teeth to extract this piece of information from her. I asked slowly and patiently, "Then who is the book for?""It's for me," she admitted."If the book is for you, then why are you getting advice for me out of it?", I asked carefully."Because the instructions said so," she explained.

I had a bad feeling about the way that the conversation was heading. I plowed in though, anxious to discover the author of her actions. I closed my eyes in anticipation of the ill news I was sure that was coming and said softly, "What instructions?""The ones I got at the hospital," she said with perfect naivete."Did the instructions tell you to buy the book?", I asked."Well....noooo," she said evasively."Then why did you buy the book?", I asked."Because the instructions said I should get it if I had any questions," she answered."And you had questions, right?", I asked rhetorically."Right!," she beamed back at me."And what would be the name of this tome of infinite wisdom?", I asked her sarcastically."What?", she asked in bafflement.

I closed my eyes again and said as succinctly as I could, "What is the name of the book, Gina?""Oh, that!", Gina said, finally understanding my request."Well?", I said."Well what?", she asked me back.

I wondered how long I could take talking to her before I was reduced to talking gibberish. Six months maybe? A month? I closed my eyes again and said, "The book, Gina! Tell me the name of the book!""Oh, It's Doctor Spock's book. You know, the one called 'Baby and Child Care'," she answered.

I looked incredulous and said, "Do you mean to tell me that the hospital instructions said to get a BABY book to give you instructions on how to take care of me?""Yes," she answered simply."I want to see those instructions, right now!", I demanded."Okay," Gina agreed cheerfully.

She left the kitchen for a few minutes and came back with several sheets in hand. She handed them to me and waited patiently until I read them. The top sheet was about me and said that I was incontinent and would need to be toilet trained again. There were other references to my lack of teeth and the need to give me soft, pureed foods. Another dietary recommendation was to be sure to give me plenty of liquids and make sure I either drank milk or had a calcium supplement to prevent bone loss. There was even a reference to my loss of locomotor skills and how I would need to have rails on the bed and be assisted when I walked. I didn't like what I read, but at least it was accurate. I wondered were she was getting the other advice.

When I turned to the next page I got my answer. The head nurse had fixed me, but good! They had included the standard page of advice for baby care from the Pediatric Unit! No wonder she had bought all the baby furniture! I looked at the bottom of the page and I saw a line saying, "If you have any additional questions, the following books are strongly recommended for further reading." Beneath that line the first book that was listed was Dr. Spock's book. I scroaned in pain.

I looked at her and said firmly, "We'll discuss this after dinner!""Okay!", she said with perfect aplomb.

The next thing I knew she had placed a tray of food on the table in front of me. I looked at the contents of the tray; pureed baby food!

Gina gave me a small rubber coated spoon similar to the one the nurse used to feed me at the hospital and looked at me expectantly. I hesitated and she said, "Would you like me to feed you?""NO!", I yelled, then seeing the wounded expression on her face, I said in a calmer tone, "No thank you, Gina. I'm quite capable of feeding myself."

My answer mollified her and she said, "Okay," and sat down to eat her own dinner.

About half way though dinner I said, "Gina, may I have something to drink?""But the book says you shouldn't have anything to drink until after you eat!", she exclaimed.

Rather than argue with her, I merely started shoveling in the baby food as fast as I was able to swallow. At least my stomach wasn't trying to throw it up anymore. I guess I was getting used to it. When I finished I asked her again, "Gina, I need something to wash it down!""Okay," she said and went to the stove. She took an object out of a pot and wiped it with a dishtowel before handing it to me. It was a baby bottle full of warm formula!

It figured. I had had enough of the baby nonsense and I was unwilling to put up with any more. Eating the baby food had been the last straw. I screamed, "That's enough! No more! Take this putrid, wretched, vile concoction away from me and pour it down the sink! I'm not a baby no matter what the instructions say! Do you understand me, you big boobed nincompoop? Get the idea through your thick skull! I'M NOT A BABY!"

Gina's face screwed up and she began to cry. In my pique, I had gone too far. Now she would run to her room and spend the rest of the evening crying. She put her face in her hands and her shoulders trembled as her chest heaved with sobs. I could see she was preparing to make her grand exit. Then it dawned on me what I had done. If she left, I would be stuck in the high chair until she came to get me out. If I didn't do something about her wounded ego immediately, I would spend the night in the high chair. I looked at the nipple of the baby bottle and knew that there was only thing that would solace her. I would have to drink the formula willingly. I put the nipple up to my face and yelled, "I'm sorry! I was wrong! Look Gina, I'm drinking it. See? I'm going to drink it all down!"

I put the nipple of the baby bottle in my mouth and began sucking for all I was worth. I hate to see a grown woman cry. Gina sat there sniffling and watching while I emptied the bottle. Within five minutes, I had drained the thing. Gina smiled through the tear streaks on her cheeks and stood up to walk behind me. I thought she was going to remove the bib she had put around my neck and flashed her a smile before I bent forward to facilitate the unfastening of the bib. I was wrong, instead of hearing the sound of the metal snap popping free, I felt a gentle pat on my back. She was burping me! I was about to say something to her to get her to stop, when the largest eructation of my life exploded from me. It was ghastly! I must have swallowed huge amounts of air in my endeavors to ingest the formula quickly. I turned my head around and caught a glance of her; she was smiling at her success as a mommy. "Ohhhhh, what a BIG burp that was!", she exclaimed as if she was talking to a toddler.

I remained silent in my humiliation. I had been burped at the hospital, but nothing that came out of me was close to the belch she had elicited. Gina took a washcloth and wiped my face for me, then sat back down to finish her own meal. I watched her eating wondering whether I had made a mistake by giving in so easily. When she was done, she picked up her dishes and my dinner tray and took them to the sink to rinse them. She returned and removed the bib from around my neck, then lifted me out of the high chair and carried me into the family room where the TV was. She sat me on the floor and turned on the TV before retiring to the couch to indulge in her evening activities. I turned around and saw her pick up her latest crocheting project, then turned back to the program she had tuned into. It was the local evening news. Normally, I don't watch the local news, finding the stories about someone's cat being rescued from a tree a little too plebeian for my tastes. The only reason I ever watch the local news is to get the weather report if there is bad weather coming. I sat silently and endured the kitch until the national news came on. Towards the end of the program, in the sports segment, something happened. A fetid stench started growing around me. There could only be one explanation; I had pooped in my pants! I guess I shouldn't have been surprised after what had happened at the hospital, but I had hoped that my continence would improve once I had gotten away from the influence of the diapers. I looked around to see Gina sniffing the air, it wouldn't take her dim brain long to deduce that I was the source of the reeking miasma that was filling the room. Just as the local news closed their show, Gina's face lit up in an expression of motherly concern and she got up to see if my pants were dirty. I hung my head and stared at the floor as she bent over and pulled the back of my pants away from my bottom to peer inside. "Ohhh, you made a poopy!", she exclaimed, then picked me up to take my back to the nursery for get my soiled training pants changed.

It was a humiliating experience. It had been bad enough when she had removed the wet diaper, but the process of cleaning my filthy bottom made it take that much longer. She put me back into training pants and carried me into the family room so we could finish watching the news. The rest of the night passed uneventfully until just before bedtime. I had started to doze on the floor in front of the TV when she decided it was time to show me the surprise she had made to celebrate my release from the hospital.

She woke me up and led me into the kitchen to put me back in the high chair. She got out some forks and small plates in preparation for her surprise and set them on the table. I watched as she went to the refrigerator and removed the chocolate cake she had made for me. Gina knew about my passion for all things chocolate and had baked a cake in my honor. I was deeply touched by her efforts. Despite the fact that the cake had fallen, making it lopsided, I thought it was beautiful. She had done her level best to decorate the cake and had tried to pipe shells of chocolate frosting around the perimeter to make it look like a professional job. She hadn't succeeded, the shells were so inexpertly made that they looked like long trails of frosting rather than an attempt to decorate. What was impressive about the cake though, was her attempt to fix the problem; she had taken a bar of chocolate and had used a vegetable peeler to cut long curls of chocolate from the bar. Then she had covered the cake with the chocolate curls. The effect almost obliterated her earlier failure. It was gorgeous! I watched in anticipation as she cut a piece for me and set it on the tray of the high chair. Then she cut herself a piece and sat down at the kitchen table. She looked at me and said, "Welcome Home!" before taking a bite. Tears had welled up in the corners of my eyes and drained into my sinuses, making me sniffle as I replied humbly, "Thank you, Gina. I appreciate the effort. Your cake is beautiful!"

She smiled and blushed at the unaccustomed complement from me and dug into her cake while I did the same. We finished the cake and she gave me a small bottle of formula to drink to wash it down. I was so grateful to her that I said not a word as I put the nipple in my mouth and sucked about half of it down. That cake was so good that I asked her for another small piece. She agreed and cut herself another as well. I was so relaxed by that time, i wasn't watching what I was doing and I managed to impale my tongue with the fork. I jumped and screamed, "Ow!", making her spring out of her chair to see what had happened. My tongue was bleeding as if I had done major damage. Gina was in a dither, she didn't know what to do. Frankly, neither did I. In the end she told me to drink more of the formula to wash off my tongue. The idea worked, albeit slowly. My sucking keep pulling more blood out of the wound and it was five minutes before I stopped bleeding. She asked me how I felt and I told her that I just wanted to go to bed. She put the dishes in the sink and carried me into the nursery to put me to bed and show me the second surprise she had waiting for me. She didn't say anything as she lowered me onto the mattress. She only stood there with a smile on her face as she waited for me to discover what she had found for my comfort. I knew she was waiting for something by the expression on her face, but I couldn't figure out what it was. I decided that there must be something special about the crib. I looked at the bars and footboard and couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. I lay back and relaxed. The crib wasn't as uncomfortable as I had feared. It wasn't anything like the hospital mattress I had been sleeping on. Then I moved to the side and discovered her surprise. I hadn't known that they made water bed mattresses for cribs! It was heavenly! From the wave damping I knew the mattress even had baffles. Water beds were a passion with me and Gina knew it. I had tried to get her to sleep on one for years without success. She preferred regular mattresses. "Thank you, Sis," I said as she tucked the comforter she had bought around me."Do you like it?", she asked with a little trepidation in her voice as she lifted the side of the crib and locked it in place."It's wonderful!", I said as I snuggled down in it's gently heated embrace. "Good," she said, "I wanted you to be happy in your new home.""Thank you, Gina," I said as I drifted off to sleep.

When I awoke the next morning I knew the chocolate cake had been a mistake. The food in my gut had produced the expected response and I had pooped in my pants. When I moved my legs, I realized the depth of my error. I had slept all night in dirty, soggy training pants. Moving my legs or bottom was agony. I had diaper rash!

Gina came in the nursery to get me for breakfast and knew immediately that I needed to be changed. She looked down at me and said, "Do you need your pants changed, Honey?"

When I tried to tell her to be careful, all that came out was, "Car..fuuulll...Ginnnna....huuurkks!"

My tongue had swollen up during the night and I was unable to speak. Gina took me out of the crib and put me on the changing table to get the soiled pants off of my sore bottom. I moaned as she wiped my bottom, causing her to look closely at the condition of my skin. When she saw the raw tissues on my behind and the bright red rash surrounding my groin, she said, "Poor baby! You have dydee rash!"

In a thrice, she had cleaned me up and was applying a soothing cream to my sore bottom. I closed my eyes in appreciation as the pain began to disappear. The next thing I knew, she had slipped a diaper beneath my bottom and was pulling it up between my legs. I opened my eyes in surprise as she pulled the tabs tight on the Cushies she was dressing me in and set the velco tabs in place. I was being diapered!"Noooo.....Ginnnna!....no...diapraaaaa!", I pleaded."You promised!", she accused, "You said that if you had diaper rash, you would wear diapers!""Buuuc...Ginnna!", I pleaded thickly."No buts! You agreed and that's that!", she said with determination.

She looked at me curiously and said, "What's wrong with your tongue? It sounds like you can't talk this morning!""Thanks for noticing," I thought and said, "Forrrk....a...hurk...maseelk...wi...ma..forrrk!..remmemmberr?"

Gina looked puzzled for a moment, her face cleared as she figured out what I had been trying to say and she said, "Fork! Oh, now I remember! You stuck your tongue with your fork last night, didn't you?""Yeesss...Ginnnna!", I answered.

Gina gave me a sympathetic look and said, "Try not to use your tongue, okay? Maybe it will get better if you let it rest.""Uh-huh," I answered.

She took me into the kitchen and insisted on spoon feeding me my oatmeal. I couldn't stop her. My tongue was too swollen to argue with her and my bottom was so sore it was utter agony to move. I let her feed me my breakfast and wipe my mouth when she was done. I was too depressed to care. In one fell swoop, I had been reduced to talking gibberish and wearing diapers. Gina's chocolate cake had done its work well.

I spent the balance of the morning watching TV with Gina. She sat on the couch while I sat on the floor in my diapers. I had another bowel movement about thirty minutes after breakfast and peed as well. Gina changed my diaper and left me to watch TV while she did her chores. The banker came by with the papers for me to sign and I was forced to see him while I was wearing nothing but a diaper. He looked at me in askance when he saw my attire, but he said nothing. Then Gina lead him into the kitchen to sit at the table while she carried me on her hip and sat me in my high chair for the interview. It was humiliating. He asked me a few questions about my financial history at the bank to identify me and then he gave me the papers to sign. When he was finished, he told me that from all appearances he would have no problem getting me one hundred percent disability. He was looking in the direction of the high chair and diaper as he said it, so I was pretty sure what he was referring to when he told me he was confidant that Social Security would honor my claim. I noticed him looking out of the corner of his eye at one of the baby bottles in the kitchen sink. I could just hear what he would saw about me at the bank when he returned. My reputation as a sane, competent adult was finished. He left and Gina returned me to the family room to pass my time watching TV.

About midmorning she gave me a bottle of formula in case I was thirsty, then went to do the laundry. I finished about half the bottle and discovered a few minutes later that I was sitting in a wet diaper. I got up and began tottering out to the utility room connected to the kitchen. As I was walking in front of the refrigerator, one of my feet hit a wet spot from some spilled formula that Gina had missed and I started to fall. I grabbed the mop handle in an attempt to keep myself upright, but my weight pulled the handle over causing it to strike my head and knock me silly. I sat there stunned for a moment before the realization of what had happened hit me. Then I tried to get up and discovered that my knees were shaky and I was unable to stand. I tried to call for help, but with my swollen tongue all I could manage was a gurgle. Blood was streaming down the side of my head and I had a hard time focusing my eyes. My earlier depression became a pit of black despair. I began to beat my fists against the floor beside me while I wept silent tears at my predicament. My control soon broke down and I started to wail at the top of my lungs, making the very welkins ring with my anguished cries. Gina rushed into the kitchen from the utility room and found me in a bloody heap on the floor. She took me into the nursery and cleaned me up, changing my diaper and putting a bandaid on the cut of my head. When she tried to stand me up on the floor to lead me back to the family room, my knees buckled beneath me and I fell to the floor.

Gina was very solicitous of my accident, telling me that the house was too dangerous a place to wander around in my condition. Before I knew it, she had gotten out the playpen she had bought the day before and set it up in the family room. I spent the rest of the morning crawling around the padded floor of the playpen as if I had never learned to walk. As the day progressed, she would take me out of the playpen to feed me lunch or change my diaper, but then it would be back into the playpen when she was done.

I decided to use the unwanted free time to think about the problem of restoring me to my former self. I sat on the floor of the playpen and tried to reconstruct the equations that governed the field in my head without benefit of my notes. Try as I might, I couldn't remember the equations. It was as if I had never seen them. They had been completely wiped from my memory by the blow or at least that's what I thought at the time. I wept a little in frustration and Gina, who was walking by while cleaning house, happened to see me. She picked me up and said, "Poor baby! Are you crying? You must be all tired out! It's been a busy day for you, hasn't it? Why don't we put you down for a nap? You feel better after you've gotten some sleep!"

I let myself be carried back to the nursery for a nap before dinner and gratefully laid my head on the pillow as she tucked me in. She woke me later that evening and fed me the chicken and vegetable puree that I had detested so much when I ate it at the hospital. Somehow I must have gotten used to the taste, because when I ate it for dinner, it seemed to have an acceptable flavor. Not good, mind you, but acceptable. She finished her meal quickly and put away the dishes without giving me a bottle of formula to wash my meal down. I must confess I grew fussy because of my thirst and I kicked up a little to get her attention. Instead of giving me the bottle as I had wanted, she took me out of the high chair and gave me the bottle while she held me in her arms. I su cked on the nipple and nursed while she carried me into the family room to watch TV. When we got there, Gina surprised me by covering her lap with a small square of rubberize flannel and sitting me down on her lap while she watched TV rather than putting me on the floor or in the playpen. This was a new experience for me. I hadn't been on a woman's lap since I was a small child and I found I rather enjoyed the closeness of another human, even if it was only my sister. I laid back against her arm and put the nipple in my mouth so I could drink while I watched TV with her. Presently I noticed how sweet tasting the flavor was. I kicked my feet idly against her thighs and wondered why I had disliked the formula so when I tasted it initially. Soon I had finished the bottle and she burped me and let me continue to sit on her lap. After awhile I grew sleepy and fell asleep on her lap. I lay my head against her breasts and used them for an impromptu pillow while I took a short nap. I awoke to find myself being carried back to the nursery for another diaper change, then she carried me back into the family room and let me sit on her lap again as she continued to watch her TV shows. Somehow during one of the shows I must have fallen asleep again because when I woke again it was morning and I was in my crib.

My tongue was still swollen and I couldn't speak. My diaper was wet and I wanted it changed as soon as possible. I tried to stand up in the crib and discovered that I was still unable to stand unassisted. My emotions overtook me and I began to cry in frustration.

Gina came in the room and changed me as soon as she heard me crying. Then she gave me a bottle of water to quench my thirst until it was time for breakfast. I could see that we were starting to fall into a morning routine, but there was nothing I could do to alter or modify my sister's behavior. My inability to speak and my sister's slow-wittedness ensured that I would be treated like a baby until I found a way to communicate my mental competence. I spent the day pretty much as I had spent the day before, sitting in the playpen while my sister kept house and only being taken out when it was necessary to change or feed me. Somehow during the night, I had progressed or more properly, regressed further into my infancy. My abilities in mathematics seemed to have disappeared in the night until I could no longer perform first year calculus in my head. The difference between sine and cosine seemed hazy to me and I could no longer remember how to get the tangent of an angle. If the trend continued, I wouldn't be able to perform basic algebraic calculations the next day. I noticed that my vocabulary was beginning to slip as well. I kept finding myself mentally searching for words that I had known since high school. The concepts were there, it seemed like the words where on the tip of my tongue but I was not able to access them.

Gina filled my playpen with baby toys to keep me occupied and I sat amid the profusion of multicolored plastic toys trying to think of a way to communicate with my sister. It was hopeless. My deteriorating mental faculties were simply not up to the job. By mid-afternoon, ennui was driving me crazy and I began to idly play with the toys. I hoped that no one from the University would come to visit me. I didn't want them to see the depths to which I had descended in two short weeks. They would have a hard time believing that I was the brilliant professor of physics that had made the breakthrough in the creation of temporal fields. My body and demeanor gave me the appearance of a none too bright toddler. I had begun to drool constantly. The only bright spot was that the baby food Gina served me at every meal started to taste good. I surmised that my taste buds were changing along with the rest of my neural structure. Either that, or I was regressing mentally to match my apparent age. However, the only evidence to support the later conclusion was my disturbing tendency to cry every time I needed Gina's assistance so I discounted it. I decided that the crying episodes were caused by the subconscious frustration I felt because of my loss of physical aptitudes. Gina's speech indicated her maternal feelings toward me were developing rapidly. She cooed sweetly and spoke to me in a childish baby talk that only increased my depression.

I found myself wishing fervently that the field had killed me rather than reduce me to an infantile state. If I could have committed suicide, I would have. But the soft, safe trappings of infancy that surrounded me afforded no possibility of self injury. The resilient mesh walls of my playpen were as incapable of damaging me as the foam filled walls of a padded cell would have been. There were no ropes or strings within my reach to strangle myself and the toys were too large to induce choking by swallowing. Even the toy blocks that Gina had given me had no sharp edges to injure me; instead of being made of wood, they were constructed of foam covered by soft fabric. The weakness in my legs prevented me from escaping the playpen to find another means of ending my life. I would have to see this through to the bitter end.

By the end of the day, Gina was treating me like an incompetent infant. She took me to the bathroom and sat me in the bathtub and bathed me as if I was a toddler. When I saw the tub full of water, I was overjoyed. There, finally, was my opportunity to commit suicide by drowning myself. I was all smiles as she sat me in the lukewarm water. Surely she would leave me for the few minutes necessary to beat my head senseless against the porcelainized steel walls of the tub. Then I could slip into the water and drown without a word. But my hopes for self destruction were all for nought. She didn't leave me for a minute. I guess my accident in the kitchen had sunk into her thick-witted brain and made her more cautious. She cleansed my tiny body with a washcloth, then rinsed and dried me before taking me to the nursery and diapering me for bed.

My reverie ended as I finished reviewing the events of the past two weeks. There was nothing in what had happened that gave me a clue to the solution to my problem. The swelling on my tongue had gone down enough for me to talk, but something had happened in the interim that had damaged the speech centers in my brain. I could understand simple vocabulary well enough, but my ability to enunciate words was profoundly affected. My disability gave me a lisping vocabulary of about fifty words and my unbalanced emotional state made me cry whenever I was wet or hungry.

I discovered that the neural reordering had another surprising effect; my lips and mouth became extremely sensitive. It wasn't the painful sensitivity that one might expect after an accident or trauma, but a heightened awareness of the textures and tastes of anything they came in contact with. The sensations were so powerful that I found the urge to sense objects with my mouth was irresistible. At first I unconsciously put my thumb in my mouth when I was engaged in thought, then other objects found there way into my mouth. Without thinking, I would pickup one of the toys that littered the floor of my playpen and slip it into my mouth to explore its textures with my lips and tongue. I discovered that I could draw my foreshortened legs up to my chest comfortably when I lay on my back and it wasn't long before my toes were in my mouth. My sucking reflex returned with a vengeance; aside from the sensations that my mouth produced when I placed an object in my mouth, sucking seemed to have an added dimension of pleasure. If the object in my mouth was small enough, I would start sucking on it unconsciously. My cheeks would begin to move rhythmically and the sensation of suckling would lull me into a semi-hypnotic state where all thought stopped. I started spending most of my time in the playpen a state of quasi-rapture, sucking mindlessly while the hours passed. I gave up on the problem of how to change myself back into adult form, seeking solitary solace instead in suckling. The baby bottle became my addiction. I found myself longing for the sweet taste of the infant formula in my mouth. When Gina finally gave me my bottle, I would lay on my back with my legs in the air and suckle in an orgy of pleasant sensations. The feelings that nursing the bottle produced were incredible. I could taste the rich formula not only on my tongue but on the on the insides of my cheeks too. The aroma of milk permeated my nose as my tummy filled comfortably with the warm, satisfying liquid. My mind would disconnect as I was transported on waves of pleasure with every movement of my cheeks. Time stood still and I would lose myself in the eternal now, wordlessly enraptured by the infantile pleasure I had rediscovered. As my tummy bloated with milk, it would displace the urine in my bladder and the front of my diaper would grow warm as my pee began to flow. The warmth would spread down between my legs and crawl up the back of my diaper until my bottom was encased in a comfortable, moist glow. It was heavenly! Soon after I peed, my gastric reflex would cause my bowels to move and the poop would begin sliding out of my behind. The smell of my poop had stopped being offensive to me several days before. It had a pleasant homey smell to me now and I luxuriated in its warm aroma as I filled my diaper. Before my poop had cooled, Gina would sniff my diaper's reek and take me into my nursery to change me into another soft fluffy diaper so I could begin the process anew. When I finished my bottle, the minor discomfort of the bubbles I had swallowed along with the marvelous formula would be dispelled by Gina's gentle raps on my back. I would burp and the world would be right again. My rising blood sugar would cause me to become drowsy and before long, my eyes would close and I would drift off into a deep, contented slumber. This process repeated itself over and over every day. My adult concerns seemed to have taken flight. I was without anxieties, burdens, or misgivings. I was truly an infant.

Days passed without number as I learned that creeping is more fascinating than walking and playing more fruitful than thinking. I had forgotten the small things in life are the most joyful; watching a doodle bug crawling across the rug, snatching sunbeams in my hand, cuddling a furry teddy bear. The world was my oyster. Gina was my Mommy now, our previous relation as siblings was only an academic memory that had been forgotten along with my other useless knowledge. Each day I knew less than the day before and my contentment increased proportionally. I saw the strange similarity between growing very old and becoming very young. Either way, one's grip on life loosened and the words the had been so facile slipped away. I knew instinctively that soon I would be without words entirely. It didn't matter, I was happy to merely sit in my playpen and blow bubbles and raspberries. I drifted in a sweet sea of formula amid ship-shape stacks of fluffy fragrant diapers.....

the bell on door make noise. mommy go door to see who it is. i not know big person came in. he look like i see hims before but i don't 'member so good anymore. he say it im-por-tant to see pro-fes-or haw-kins. mommy say i not pro-fes-or haw-kins anymore. i baby. he say him name paul. he say i teached him. he take paper out of big box he carry and say to mommy only i know what mean. he say paper only copy in whole world. he say it secret to make me old again. i not want be old. i happy now. i not smart anymore. i not want work. i want play. mommy say can't you see he just baby? paul man not listen mommy. he show it to me anyway. i say, no, no, no! i only baby, i not know what funny swiggles mean. i yell leave me alone! he tell mommy he work for gov-ern-ment now. he tell her she bad mommy. he say he tell gov-ern-ment and they take me away from mommy. they make me talk to them. i grab paper and run to potty. i throw in potty and flush. flush, flush, flush! paul man rush in bat-room and see paper go bye-bye. he very mad. he slap me hard and i fall down. i hit head and get blood everywhere. mommy grab me and run to house next to ours. she use phone thing to call police. i luv my mommy. mommy so smart!

Gina frowned and finished her statement to the arresting officers, "....when he saw that the baby had flushed the papers down the toilet, he flew into a rage! He struck the baby on the side of the head and screamed obscenities at him. You can see what he did to his head! I pulled him off and grabbed the baby. Then I ran to the neighbors to call the police. I was terrified.""Don't worry about him, mam," the officer said grimly, "He won't be getting out of prison for a long, long time. He attacked one of the arresting officers and we were forced to subdue him. Assault on a peace officer with a deadly weapon is a serious charge. It probably won't even be necessary for you to testify against him."

He looked at the adorable baby who was resting comfortably in his mother's arms. The white bandage that the EMTs had put on his head had a spot of blood that had soaked into the gause. He shook his head in irritation at the behavior of the man who they had arrested. Even though the baby had the body of a two year old, it was obvious to even the most casual observer that the baby's intelligence was subnormal. The officer had seen that vacant look in a baby's eyes many times in his career as a police officer. Usually that look indicated that the baby was the child of a drug user or had suffered malnutrition at a critical stage of development. Given the slowness of the baby's mother, he didn't think that either of those reasons was the cause of the baby's failure to develop normally. The similarity of the mother and child's faces told him that their shared genes was most likely the root of the problem. This child was likely to remain a mental infant the rest of his life. He couldn't understand how a grown man could mistreat a helpless baby like that. He would make sure that the felon's records reflected his propensity for abusing infants when he was sent to prison. Most of the prisoners in the penitentiary had families and didn't approve of violence toward children. Being the sort of men they were, they tended to express their disapproval violently. The prisoner would have an extremely rough time in the penitentiary. He would be lucky if he survived the experience.

Gina hugged her baby to her and was rewarded with a delighted coo in response. The officer left them to their own devices as they drove away. Gina took him to the couch and sat him on her lap. She put his hands together and tried to teach him to play pattycake but it was no use. His brain was too disorganized to make sense of her directions. He looked up into his mother's eyes with an expression of perfect trust and smiled winsomely. She brushed the hair out of his eyes and kissed him on the forehead, saying, "Can baby say something to Mommy? Come on, Honey. Try and say something."

Drool ran down his chin as he opened his mouth and gurgled, then said, "mmmuga...daaa....kaa!" Then he squealed in delight and peed in his diaper. Gina smiled and shook her head at her adopted baby's antics. She hadn't liked her brother very much, he had always made fun of how difficult it was for her to think. Now the shoe was on the other foot. She doubted that he would ever improve, every day he slipped further back into infancy. The blow on the head that his ex-student had given him seemed to be the last straw. He couldn't even say ma-ma now. It didn't matter. He'd be the perfect companion for her, he'd never make fun of her dim wits and big breasts again. The two of them would spend the rest of their lives together. Gina smiled when she thought of the baby clothes she could make for him with her knitting and crocheting. She had made him all those nice sweaters in the past and she had never seen him wearing them. He wouldn't have a choice now. He'd look darling in a set of little baby booties and matching cap.

She picked him up and carried him on her hip to the kitchen to get him his bottle. She felt something wet on her breast and looked down to see what was causing the sensation. He was idly sucking on her tit through her blouse with his eyes closed with a look of infantine rapture on his face. His sharp infant's sense of smell had picked up the faint odor from Gina's nipples and he had found the attraction irresistible.

Gina grinned at the expression of pleasure on her brother's face, he had finally found something he liked better than eating. Gina wondered if her doctor could give her something to make her give milk. She'd call him up and make an appointment tomorrow. It would be nice to breast feed her little baby boy. She was sure he'd enjoy her titties. What was the word he used to describe himself? Epi-cur-rean? That was it. He'd like his Mommy's titties, he was an Epicurean!

The baby murmured in pleasure in seeming agreement with his Mommy's plans and said, "mmmmmmmm!"

 

Chapter Five

 

Sunday's Child

by Jennifer Loraine

 

When that was, the soft mist

Of my regret hung not on all the land,

And I was glad for thee,

And glad for me, I wist.

Robert Frost, My Butterfly st. 18

 

Gino was looking very, very bad. Premature aging had caused his face to wrinkle up like an old man's and liver spots covered the skin on his hands. He had lost an incredible amount of weight in the last few months and his skin hung on his once magnificent shoulders like an old jacket draped loosely over a kitchen chair. The doctors had given us no hope. Unless there was a miracle, he'd be dead within a month. I was frantic from worry. We had stopped going to the bars months ago when he had started feeling bad. Our friends stopped coming by after seeing how bad he looked. The prospect of being prematurely aged by an unknown metabolic disease terrified them. AIDS they understood, but there was something horrifying about seeing a handsome man of twenty-five being turned into a doddering old wreck in a matter of weeks. Gino lay in his bed shivering with the cold of approaching death as I sat by his side and held his hand. We had been lovers for two years, weathering the storms of infatuation and anger that plagued the relationships of our friends. I had not spoken to my mother about what was happening to Gino. I'm sure she would have tried to help, but I was uncomfortable talking to her about my gay relationships. I'd have to say something to her soon if I expected her to be any help at all. Gino didn't have much time left.

Gina started coughing and I leaned over him to hold a basin underneath his chin for him to spit. He spit some brown crud into the basin and I wiped his chin with the cloth from the bedside table. He lay back weakly and I tucked the covers around his shoulders as he closed his eyes. I brushed the sweat drenched bangs from his eyes with my and kissed him tenderly on the forehead. He smiled wearily and let the fever tensed muscles on his face relax. I decided to call my mother as soon as he was asleep. I couldn't wait any longer. I sat quietly until his breathing became slow and regular before I got up from my chair and went into the living room to place the call to my mother.

The phone rang six times before she answered. If it had been during the week I would have called her laboratory, but this was a Sunday and I knew she'd be home working in her garden. I explained to her about Gino and she said she'd be right over. I went back into our bedroom to stay by Gino until she arrived.

A half hour later the doorbell rang and I went to answer it. It was, as I expected, my mother. She hugged me and kissed my cheek, looking concerned when she saw how I appeared. I hadn't slept in weeks and I looked it. Dark circles surrounding bloodshot eyes stared back out of the bathroom mirror when I went to shave in the morning. I hadn't washed my hair for days and I felt like hell. I had managed to keep the living room from looking like a pigsty by eating of the kitchen counter and piling the dishes in the sink. She took my hand and led me to the sofa so we could sit down and talk. I started to tell her about Gino and was suddenly overcome with emotion. Tears ran down my face as I told her how bad his health had become in the last two weeks. When I finished I put my face in my hands and wept like a baby. My mother moved next to me on the sofa and held my head against her own as I blubbered about my dying lover. After a while I quieted and she said she wanted to see Gino. She held my hand as we went into the deathroom to let her take a look at him. She took his pulse professionally and examined the skin on his hands before asking me to pull down the coverlet so she could listen to his chest. While I was getting Gino ready, she took a stethoscope from the side pocket of her jacket and put the pieces in her ears. She thumped his back and listened to each side of his chest before she turned to me and said, "Honey, how long has he been like this?""He started getting weak last Sunday. His joints ache and he has problems feeding himself. He hasn't been out of bed all day today, even to go to the bathroom. I don't know what to do! His employer fired him a month ago because they said they were "downsizing" the company, but I think it was because they didn't want their insurance premiums to go up if he had to go into the hospital. Nobody else was let go. My insurance won't cover him and the hospital in this county is privately owned. I've spent all of our savings on the medications that the doctors prescribed, but they didn't do any good," I told her with a broken voice.

She patted my hand and said, "Don't worry yourself , Honey. I know you've done your best. That's all anyone can do. Let's go to the living room and we'll talk about it."

I followed her out into the living room and we sat down together. She held my hand on her lap as she said, "Honey, I'm sure you've realized that Gino's chances are very poor. I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do for him. In five years, maybe five if I'm lucky, my research may be finished and I'd have something that might help him. But by then it would be too late for Gino. All we can do is make his last days as comfortable as possible. I'd be happy help you pay for the medications and the bills.""But momma, couldn't you use him in your research program? You said you might have something to help him in five years, haven't you discovered something that could help him now?", I asked her plaintively.

She shook her head sadly and said, "It wouldn't be ethical, Honey. Gino wouldn't be able to give Informed Consent. It's true that the animal models have worked extremely well, but that doesn't mean my work would be applicable to humans. I'm afraid it's out of the question, Darling. There is something I might be able to do though, I just remembered there is a researcher at my facility that is working on a new class of geriatric pharmaceuticals. His drugs are in the final stages of testing for FDA approval. I'll have a talk with him, maybe I can get some drug samples for Gino."

I decided to try to get her to talk about her research, maybe if she thought about it she'd think of something else I could use to help Gino with. I asked her tentatively, "You haven't told me about your latest research, momma. It's been months since I've talked to you, what are you doing now?"

She patted my hand again and said, "It's nothing to worry my baby's head about. I know you're a good boy and you did well in high school, but molecular chemistry is a little beyond the scope of your education. I don't think you'd understand. Your mother's had a lifetime of education in medicine and chemistry and I'm not sure I understand what I've discovered.""Can't you explain in small words so I CAN understand?", I whined."Well, if it will make you happy, Honey, I'll try. What I've discovered is that there are certain frequency combinations of electromagnetic energy that cause the catabolic process in mammalian metabolism to reverse itself temporarily and undergo a shift into an anabolic phase. I've been able to initiate an anabolic reaction, but without the usual accompanying growth. There are problems with the process, it's energy and materials absorbing. The lab animals stop catabolizing, but at a cost. Their bodies become smaller and the aging process seems to halt. The cellular structure of their bodies becomes less differentiated and simpler. In essence they become younger, but without the ability to grow any older. The magnitude of the change seems to be exponentially related to the amount of radiated dose to which the subjects are exposed.. I'm certain that there must be other frequency combinations that are safer and don't cause the shrinking and loss of ability to age. That's where my research is heading now. Now that I know that catabolism can be reversed, it's only a matter of time until I find a safer means of doing it," she said softly.

I hung my head and said, "You were right momma, I don't understand. Could you explain what you just said in simple words?"

She smiled warmly at her baby boy and said, "Those WERE simple words, Honey. Okay, let me try again. I can both stop and reverse cellular destruction in mammals, but the animals become younger. I other words, Honey, I can make animals healthy again. The only problem is that they get younger and don't seem to age.""Age? They get younger and don't age?", I asked with a rising note of hope in my voice.

Momma seemed to divine what I was thinking and said, "Honey, I know what you're thinking and it's too dangerous. We haven't established safe levels of dosage for humans. The closest I'd be able to come for an estimate would be the results from the testing on gorillas. Even if Gino was able to understand what the process was, I couldn't permit it. The process itself is too dangerous, there are too many unknowns."

I nodded and said, "Momma, there's one thing you haven't told me. What are you trying to do with your research? It sounds like you've got something that might help people, but all you can say is that it's too dangerous. What's it good for? What are you trying to do with it?"

She looked at me seriously and said, "I'm trying to make a healing ray, Honey. Something that will heal people's injuries and restore them to health.""Don't you have that already?", I pleaded."Don't you understand, Honey? The animals got younger and NEVER got any older. Do you think I want to unleash that on the world? Can't you imagine a world in which no one got any older? Don't you realize what would happen? If no one ever died, the population would shoot up overnight. The stock market would start fluctuating wildly when people realized what effect an eternally young population would have on spending and investment. There would be a rapid series of sharp cycles in the economy, followed closely by economic collapse. Mines would close, pipelines would be shut off and power companies would go out of business. Wars would start over dwindling resources. The lack of war materiel would force the Superpowers to go nuclear. The Third World would respond with biological weapons. Billions would die as a consequence of famine, disease and international conflict. In the end, the world would be owned by a few tyrants who would never grow old, never die. Change would be outlawed as dangerous. Science itself would be outlawed! Mankind would stagnate, imprisoned forever in the fossilized amber of an immortal existence. Is this what you want?", she asked fiercely."No, momma," I said contritely."Would you like me to make you something to eat?", she asked, "You're looking a little pale."

I nodded and she said, "Why don't you lay down on the sofa while I make lunch for you? You don't look like you been sleeping well lately."

I lay my head down on the corner of the sofa while she got up and made lunch for me. Exhaustion overtook me and I was asleep in minutes. She woke me up and tucked a clean kitchen towel into my shirt as a bib. Then she put a plate of sandwiches and soup before me on the coffee table. I ate half-heartedly while my mother nibbled at a sandwich to keep me company. When we were done, she picked up the plates and to them to the kitchen. She came back in the living room and sat down beside me on the sofa. I turned to her and began to weep making small sounds that threatened to turn into a cry. She gathered me into her arms and lay my head on her shoulder, letting me cry into the safety of her neck. She kept telling me, "I know it hurts, baby. I'm sorry," and making other mothering noises to soothe me. When I had quieted, she pulled me back from her shoulder and said, "I didn't know you were so interested in my research, honey. Would you like to see what I'm doing these days?"

I looked at her in gratitude for the offer and shook my head slowly, saying, "I'd like to come, but you can see how bad Gino is. There's no one else to take care of him. All of our friends are terrified of getting whatever he's got. I'm sorry, I'd really like to go, but I can't. He needs me, momma."

She took my hand tenderly in her own and said, "Gino's lucky to have a friend like you. I'll tell you what, I'll hire a nurse to come in and look out for Gino for an afternoon. Then you can come and see my laboratory. I want you to get out and get some sun. You look so pale."

I snuffled and told her I'd love to come if she could arrange it and she promised she would. She told me to wash my hair that night and make myself presentable, she'd have a nurse come by in the morning to take care of Gino for the day.

The next day the nurse came as promised and momma came to pick me up an hour later. We went to a small breakfast cafe to have something to eat before we went to her lab and then she drove me to see what she had been working on for the past two years. I was surprised how few people worked at her lab, I had thought it was a big research outfit. She explained that this was only a satellite facility and that she preferred to work with as few people around as possible. Momma said she found their personal problems distracting. She kept wanting to help them.

We went to her personal lab and went inside. I was a little disappointed in how primitive it looked. I had been expecting a complex array of computers and electronic devices. It looked a lot like an X-ray machine in a doctor's office. The healing ray was so simple a child could have operated it. The only controls I could see was the main power switch, an intensity rheostat, a timer control and delay switch. All someone would have to do is sit in the machine's target area and have it turned on. That was all there was to it. She showed me how easy it was to meter the dose and asked me if I understood. I told her we did and we moved on to her office.

Momma's office was something of a surprise for me. I had expected a neat office with a large desk and carpet. Instead it was a cramped little affair with books and papers stuffed into every nook and cranny. Home had never looked liked this, at work momma was a slob! She apologized for how her office looked, explaining that she didn't have time to organize it properly and she wouldn't permit the housekeeping staff to do anything more than a light cleaning. She didn't want her papers disturbed, she was afraid she'd never find them again.

We sat down and talked about Gino for awhile and then she took me out to lunch and a movie. I was surprised when she suggested we see the "Lion King", I hadn't seen it, but I had read it was a children's movie. I was even more surprised when I found myself crying in several places in the movie. Then she took me shopping and we went to a large mall were we looked at clothes. Afterwards, she stopped at Wal-Mart for some housewares for her. We were in the hardware section looking for picture hangers when she told me she had to go to the bathroom. She asked me if I would hold her purse for her for a few minutes while she went to the toilet. She explained that there had been a rash of thefts of ladies purses from the women's room lately and she would be more comfortable if she didn't have it with her. I agreed and said I would wait there. When I saw her keys attached to the side of her purse, I knew what I had to do. Suddenly the solution to Gino's problems became very clear to me. I got the attention of one of the men in the hardware department and asked him to make a key for me. He looked nonplused to see a man carrying a purse, but I'm somewhat effeminate and he just passed it off with a shrug. I gave him the key to momma's lab and he finished in a few minutes. He told me I could pay for it at either the automotive section or up front. I saw that there was no one at the automotive register and hurried over there to pay for it before momma got back. When momma returned, she found me looking at a set of tools meant for housewives. She commented on the fact that they were a rose color and I told her that I was planning to buy them myself. She told me that was too bad, pink had always been her favorite color and she had hoped I was buying them for her. I offered to buy a set for her and she told me to save my money, she would get one for herself in the future.

We drove home and I went in to check on Gino as soon as we got home. He wasn't any worse than when we left, which assuaged my guilt about leaving him with a stranger. I said goodbye to my mother and decided to take a nap before we went out later that night. I awoke about ten pm and went into the bathroom to get myself cleaned up before I got Gino dressed. Just on a lark I stepped on the bathroom scale to see how much weight I had lost in the last week. I hadn't been eating too well and I was sure that I had lost a few pounds from fasting. "Oh my God!", I thought as I saw that I had lost over fifty pounds. I looked down at my hands and saw the tiny beginnings of hundreds of liver spots. "I've got it too!"

The situation had changed from extremely serious to critical. If I didn't do something soon, neither Gino or I would survive. I rushed into Gino's bedroom to get him ready to go. It wasn't easy to dress someone who is semi-conscious; his head flopped from side-to-side loosely while I put his arms through the sleeves of his shirt and it was almost impossible to pull his pants over his bottom, but somehow I managed it and got him fully dressed. I put one of his arms over my shoulder and supported his waist with my other hand as we walked to my car. He had lost so much weight I had no difficulty picking up his legs and putting them in front of the passenger seat after I sat him down on the front seat. We drove to the lab where I helped Gino out and to the front door the same way I had brought him to the car. "This had better work," I thought, "Gino won't live another week if momma's machine can't cure him."

I sat Gino under the machine and went over to the control panel to set up momma's machine. I turned intensity of the machine up to full and set the timer for two minutes of dosage. I set the delay switch for thirty seconds. As soon as I got the machine to start the treatment, I'd run over and sit with Gino. Whatever happened, I'd share Gino's fate with him. I hit the power switch and ran over to sit down beside him. Gino smiled at me for the first time in weeks as I put my arm around his shoulders and hugged him to me. It was either be cured or die for us. There was no middle ground. The machine squealed in a high pitched tone before settling down to hum to itself. I watched as the air sort of shimmered about us. Something was happening! Gino closed his eyes and leaned his head against mine as the machine continued to work. I followed suit and closed my eyes too, hoping that when I opened them, Gino would be cured. After a minute under the machine I was feeling much better than I had a few minutes ago. I hugged Gino closer and felt the clothes I was wearing rustle loosely about me.

I opened my eyes to look at Gino and screamed. He was a little boy again! I struggled to get him from under the machine, but I became tangled in my clothes. If I couldn't free us soon, we'd vanish altogether. The door burst open and my mother stood in the doorway for a second before screaming, "Oh my God, help me! Get out of there!"

I waved my arms helplessly at my mother, I was hopelessly entangled in my clothes. Momma rushed into the shimmering field and pulled the two of us free of its influence before shutting the machine down. "What did you do, Honey? What have you done to yourself? Look at you! You can't be more than three years old!""Was sick, momma. Starting to get like Gino. Had to save us," I said, trying to control a tongue that was becoming increasingly more immature with each passing minute. She sat down between us and hugged our tiny bodies to her side as we regressed into babyhood. I looked up at her and saw that she had been affected too! The short exposure to the machine's effects hadn't reduced her to childhood like it had us, but the effects could be seen immediately. It was like looking at a series of old photographs being flipped in reverse order; the gray in her hair vanished immediately, followed by the crowsfeet in the corners of her eyes, the wrinkles at the corners of her lips vanished almost as soon as the grey in her hair had. I was seeing my mother as I remembered her from my childhood. Her cheeks took on a healthy glow as her brown hair became lustrous again. The change in momma however, was nothing like what the machine had induced in me. I squinted at my chubby hand and gazed at my stubby little fingers, comparing them to momma's hand wrapped around my chest and abdomen. Her hand had become huge in comparison to my small body. I leaned over her lap and blinked at Gino. He looked like he was little more than a year old. I tried to ask momma how young we would become and discovered that I could no longer speak. I bubbled and cooed in a futile attempt to talk. Momma tenderly untangled us from our clothes and I saw for the first time what I had done. Gino was a little baby again! I whimpered as I realized that I couldn't be very much older, perhaps only days older. Gino was an Aries and I was a Cancer, meaning his birthday was in April while mine was in June. He had been two months older than me, but I had been under the machine's influence a fraction of a second less than Gino. He waved his hands happily at me in lou of speech. At least he looked healthy, I thought. Momma looked down at me and said with tears in her eyes, "My poor, poor babies! What have you done to yourselves? You're going to be infants for the rest of your lives! What am I going to do with you?"

Gino gazed up at her with a pleading look in his eyes as if to ask my momma to take him in and be his momma too. Momma's heart must have melted at the sight of the two babies looking up at her so dolefully and because she said, "There's only one thing I can do, children. I'm going to take the two of you home and take care of you. Gino, I'm going to be your new momma. I'll treat you just like my own baby. No one will have to know that you were my son's lover. Poor Gino, you won't be able to have sex with my little boy again, you're too young to have sex with anyone, but you'll still be sharing a bed with my baby boy. The two of you can romp around the room and play with each other as much as you want. I'll see that you're never separated, you'll be eternal playmates. I'll dress the two of you alike and everyone will assume you're twins. You look similar enough for me to get away with that."

She gathered our clothes together and put them in a clean wastebasket lined with a garbage bag, then tied a knot in the top of the bag and pulled it out of the wastebasket. She set the bag down between us and picked us up one-by-one and put one of us on each hip, then bent over and picked up the bag. She walked down the hall with us riding her hip like infants. Our naked little bottoms hung out from underneath her arms. I hoped she'd find something to dress us in soon, I didn't like the idea of parading around in public without any clothes on, even if we were babies again.

She took us to her station wagon and buckled us in the backseat and started the car. Evidently she didn't take a purse with her when she worked late at night. We stopped at a convenience store and she left us in the car for a moment while she went inside. She returned a minute later, opened the backseat door and proceeded to diaper us with the disposables she must have purchased inside. A minute later and we were on our way again. She stopped at the all night Wal-Mart and slung the two of us on her hips again after taking her spare checkbook out of her glove box and putting it in her pocket. Momma carried us inside and put Gino inside the basket of a shopping cart and me in the infant seat. I blushed in embarrassment at the prospect of riding in the cart wearing nothing but a diaper, but there was no other alternative. Besides, I couldn't object. I had become incapable of speech.

She went to the baby goods area where she filled the cart with pacifiers, bottles, clothes, a large diaper bag, cloth diapers and other things to take care of us. Momma looked at the playpens and wrote down the name of one of them on one of the spare receipts from her checkbook and did the same for a crib, autoseat, a stroller made for twins, and a high chair. She had to pick Gino up several times and reseat him on the growing mound of baby things in the cart. We shopped for about an hour before she went to the cashier to have the basket rung up. I was surprised that instead of emptying the cart for the cashier to price the things she was buying, she handed the girl the list she had made and asked her to have a stockclerk get the items listed for her. The girl picked up the telephone beside her register and called for a stockboy while we waited for the stockboy to appear. He showed up quickly and whistled at the size of the order, saying he'd have to get a dolly to handle everything at once. Then he left us and we waited while the checker took care of a customer that walked up.

Thirty minutes later he came back with a low flat dolly stacked with boxes of baby furniture. The clerk rang up the purchases and asked her why she was buying all the baby things. She pointed out that we appeared to be almost a year old and she should have most of these things. Momma glibly lied that her sister and brother in law had died unexpectedly in an auto accident and that we were their twin boys. She said that she'd had to take a plane to get us and there hadn't been any room in the plane on the trip back to take any of our baby things home with her except our old, tattered diaper bag. She explained that she had forgotten our stroller and there hadn't been time to go back to her sister's house to get it before the plane left. I was astonished at my momma's ability to lie, she chattered on in a desultory way saying how she had been surprised how much time it took to get two babies ready for a trip. She told the clerk about how sorry she had been she had left the stroller at her sister's house when she got to the airport and had to carry us on her hips while she waited for the plane. The clerk looked bored and was obviously sorry she had said anything to momma about the size of her purchase.

Momma wrote a check and left the bags on the dolly under the care of the stock clerk while she took us to the car. This time she put us in the front seat while she moved the car around to the loading area were the stockboy was waiting with the dolly. Momma removed the autoseats from their boxes and put them in the back seat, fastening them down with the seat belts while the stockboy put the furniture in the rear of her station wagon. When she finished with the autoseats, she took us out of the front seat and put us one at a time into the autoseats and strapped us down securely. She packed the floor of the car with the bags of clothes and small items in front of the rear seat and passenger seat of the front. We drove home and momma left us in the car seats while she unpacked and set up the playpen. Then she came back and carried us into the house on her hips. Momma lowered us into the playpen and began bringing in furniture. We spent a long time waiting for her to get finished and Gino started crying. I guess he was thirsty, because when she stopped what she was doing and gave us baby bottles of water to drink, he stopped crying. Presently she came back and sat on her sofa in front of us."Well," she said tiredly, "Your room is finished. I guess I go over to your apartment tomorrow afternoon and begin moving your things. I don't know if I'm ready to be a young mother again, but I guess I'll have to try."

She looked at Gino and said, "My son told me that your parents were dead and there's no one to take care of you, so I've decided to be your mommy. The two of you will be my baby boys. Right now it's time to get some supper and then I'll tuck you in your crib for the night. I don't know if you two can understand me, but if you can I think you'll realize why I have to treat like babies; You can't walk, talk, or feed yourselves now and I'm sure you've lost your toilet training too. The only clothes that are made that will fit you are baby clothes. You don't have any teeth to speak of and you'll have to eat baby food and drink formula.

If your minds have regressed along with your bodies then what I'm saying doesn't matter, but if you can understand me, I want you to accept what you've become. I can't treat two boys in infant bodies as anything other than what they appear. People would talk and when people talk they ask questions. I can't have anyone asking questions about who you really are and how you came to inhabit infant bodies. So I'm not going to try to find out if you still have adult minds or not. I don't want to know. You're going to be treated like infants and I expect you to act like infants. In time, you'll forget about being adults and learn to adjust your new lives as babies."

She took some toys out of a shopping bag on the sofa and removed the packaging before handing one to each of us. I took the toy and turned it over in my hand slowly. It looked like a giant plastic keyring filled with brightly colored plastic keys. I was looking at one of the keys when I was seized with the intense desire to see what it felt like in my mouth. I glanced around and saw that momma wasn't watching and tentatively put the key to my lips. A flood of sensation washed over my face from the mere touch of the key. I pushed the key into my mouth and was rewarded with an extremely pleasant feeling. My lips began pulling at the key with sucking motions, causing a happy tingling to engulf my mouth and cheeks. Gino was looking at me like I had just committed the faux pax of all time. I smiled around the key at him and continued to suck on the key. I might as well enjoy myself, baby pleasures were the only thing I was going to get for the rest of my life. Gino took his toy and looked at it a long time before he put it up to his mouth and tried sucking. A beatific smile came across his face as he mouthed every part of his toy. Momma came back to get one of us to feed and picked Gino first. She laughed when she saw us sucking on our toys and said, "Do my two baby boys like their new toys? I guess I was wrong when I thought that you still had adult minds. Only babies suck on their toys like that. Come on, Honey. It's time for dinner."

She put her hands under his armpits and lifted him straight up out of the playpen with his toy still dangling from his mouth. Pauline carried him from the room out of my sight, leaving me to consider the consequences of what we had done. Now momma was convinced that our minds had regressed along with our bodies. I couldn't see how it would have made much difference in the long run, but it still disturbed me that it had happened. What had possessed us to start sucking on our toys like that? Would we start engaging in other infantile behaviors? So far neither Gino or I had peed or pooped in our diapers, but I couldn't see how we could avoid it. Even if we still had control of our bladders and bowels, we wouldn't be given an opportunity to use the toilet. I sat in the playpen, sucking on my toy keys and moping over the only future I could see for us; we would spend the rest of our lives as momma's baby boys.

Presently momma came back with Gino and put him in the playpen again. She bent over the playpen and said, "And now its your turn, baby boy!" and lifted me from the playpen and held me tightly to her bosom.

Momma carried me into the kitchen and sat me down in the high chair she had bought. It was constructed from molded plastic and looked about as comfortable as a cheap molded garden chair. The designers had gotten this one right though, the dimensions were perfect for a body my size and the ample padding cradled my bottom happily. She snapped a plastic bib around my neck and left me in the chair while she went to the pantry. I looked at the disgusting thing she had fastened around my neck; multicolored stains of some unidentifiable pureed food were streaked down the front of the bib. When in glanced down into the hard plastic pocket at the bottom, I saw small mounds of what appeared to be baby food in the bottom. Evidently Gino had used this bib before me.

Momma rummaged in the pantry for a moment before returning with several different colored baby food jars. She snapped the tray in place and opened an orange jar, laying the lid on the kitchen table next to her. I expected her to ladle the contents into a dish for me to eat, but instead she began to spoon it into my mouth. 'Squash', I decided after the first spoonful. Momma knows I hate squash! I wanted to retch! I tried to turn away, but she was too fast for me, another spoonful of the wretched stuff was in my mouth. Forgetting I couldn't speak, I opened my mouth to tell her I didn't like squash and had another load of orange foulness dumped in me. It was horrible! The stuff seemed to be everywhere! My mouth was completely full of pureed squash. There was even a big blob of the stuff on the tip on my nose. As much as I hated the idea, there was only one thing I could do, I had to swallow the vile concoction! I closed my mouth to swallow and discovered that my muscular control was on a par with the my body's age; my tongue went forward of its own volition, forcing a large part of the mouthful over my lower lip to drip incontinently from my chin onto the bib. Momma just smiled and spooned up the drips from the bib and put them back into my mouth. I gagged when I realized that the stuff was now mixed with the food that had dripped from Gino's mouth. Momma stopped for a moment to let me swallow and then began ladling it in again. In desperation, I tried to push the spoon away, but Momma told me sternly, "No! Don't be naughty baby boy, or momma will spank! Just a few more spoonfuls and this jar will be finished. Be a good baby and finish your squash!"

I struggled manfully to ingest the rest without fuss, but the stuff kept coming back up my throat after I swallowed it. Tears rolled down my face and I whimpered as momma shoveled in the last spoonful. I swallowed the mess in my mouth hoping the next jar would contain something a little more palatable.

It didn't. I hadn't realized just how bad pureed peas could taste. They had a sort of green, slightly granular texture on my tongue and the aroma that filled my nose and mouth was indescribable. The only good thing I could say (if I could have talked) was that at least the color was decorative. Runnels of green ran down my bib and mixed with the orange squash in a festive fashion. It looked like a work of modern art created by a particularly untalented and psychologically distressed painter.

The next jar was even worse and the less said about its flavor the better. It too had a granular texture and there was a distinct taste of vegetables in the mix. I would have hesitated to call it food, I'm not sure what I would have called it, but food would not have been my first choice. It had some vague meat flavor in it, chicken I hoped, but at least it didn't make me gag like squash.

Momma gathered up the jars and left me to consider my first meal as a baby. I guessed I would grow used to it in time, but I couldn't see that I would ever learn to enjoy it. I looked down at the ravages that dinner had caused. I was a mess; the entire front of the bib was covered with streaks of uneaten baby food. My hands were covered with a thin layer of food and if I looked cross-eyed at my nose, I could see blobs of orange and green dotting my face. Momma came back and wiped my hands with a damp dishtowel that had obviously been used to clean Gino after he had eaten. The towel was prestained with large blotches of orange and green. For a moment I envied Gino's taste in food; at least he liked vegetables, and green peas and squash were his favorites! My taste ran more toward rare steak and baked potato with chocolate cake for dessert. I tried not to think about dinner, the very thought of never eating anything but baby food for the rest of my life made me want to cry.

When she had finished wiping my hands, momma folded the dishtowel to a clean spot and wiped my face. Then she lifted me from the high chair and carried me back to my playpen before handing me my bottle of formula. I was grateful to momma for giving me the bottle to drink on my own, at least I could get the taste of the worse meal of my (adult?) life out of my mouth. Even infant formula would taste better than squash.

Momma waited until Gino had finished about three-quarters of his bottle before she picked him up and winded him, freeing a petite infant burp from his stomach, then she did the same to me. When my time came, I loosed a long guttural belch that sounded so loud, I could have sworn it should have echoed from the walls. I wanted to die in embarrassment.

Momma took Gino out of the playpen and left me to finish my bottle while she pot him in bed for the night. A few minutes later, she returned as I pulled the last drops of formula into my mouth. She picked me up and held me to her chest with my head over a cloth diaper she had draped over her shoulder. She patted my back and this time she was rewarded with a quiet little baby burp. Then she whisked me off to my new bedroom.

I was appalled at the scene in front of me as we came into the nursery. Gino was tucked sweetly into a crib sleeping soundly with his thumb in his mouth. His illness must have affected his mind, he was regressing mentally into an infant. At least he looked the part, he looked so charmingly innocent, he could have posed as a model for an advertising campaign. Momma tucked me in at the opposite end of the crib and I fell asleep immediately after momma finished tucking the blanket around me.

The next morning I awoke to the sound of Gino crying. He was standing at the side of the crib holding onto the rail with his diaper drooping low on his hips. He must have needed changing, I decided. I got on my knees and tried to stand up, but my leg muscles wouldn't support me unassisted, and I fell back to the mattress with a soggy thump. I put my hand down between my legs and squeezed the diaper. It squished wetly. I had wet the diaper and done God knows what else in it. The helplessness of my position overwhelmed me and I began to cry too.

Momma came in the room and changed the two of us before taking us to the living room to sit in our playpen. Then momma gave us both baby bottles filled with juice and let us finish them before she fed each of us a jar of mixed cereal. The cereal wasn't too bad, in fact I sort of liked it. If it hadn't been ground into a puree, I think I could really get to enjoy the stuff. The jar that followed it was truly vile, the label on the jar said it was bacon and eggs but it smelled like the eggs had been overcooked, they had a slight hydrogen sulfide reek that bespoke poor preparation. I'd have to be out of my mind to like that stuff! When we finished momma dressed us in T-shirts and put us in her car to go to our apartment with her. It would be the last time I would ever see Gino's and my love nest.

Momma took a large packing box into our bedroom and disappeared from sight. Gino and I looked at each other in apprehension at what she would find in our closets. The master bedroom had a large walk-in closet that Gino and I had divided in half for each of us to use. My clothes were on one side of the closet and Gino's were on the other. At the end of each clothes rack, on the other side of our 'normal' clothes, were our clothes for 'special' occasions. Momma would know immediately whose clothes were whose; aside from differences in size, (Gino had been quite a bit taller and more muscular than me), the clothes momma had given me for birthdays and Christmas were only on one side.

What was momma going to say when she found our 'special' clothes? I had never discussed that aspect of my life with momma. What would she say when she found our makeup boxes and wigs on the top of the shelves? I shivered at the thought. There would be no doubt in her mind when she saw the sequined gowns hanging from the racks what our 'hobby' had been. Actually, it was less a hobby than a business venture for us. We had a 'sister' act that we performed in one of the gay bars on weekends. We sang show tunes and did imitations of famous stars of the screen. We were a popular attraction until Gino became ill. How would momma react to the discovery that her son was a female impersonator? Or would she think that I was simply a gay transvestite? Would she get angry? Would she start yelling at me what a pervert I had been? Worse, would she blame it on Gino and throw him out on the street? Would she put the two of us up for adoption? No, I decided, she couldn't put us up for adoption without disclosing how we had become babies again.

I realized to my horror that the solution was far simpler than that; all she had to do was abandon us. She could take us to a secluded area of a city park and leave us sitting in our stroller! All she would have to do is 'discover' us and tell a park ranger she had found some abandoned babies. That ranger would call the police and we would be taken into custody by the police. If they investigated momma, all they would find is that she was a widow and had a baby some twenty years before. She'd be off the hook and we'd spend our lives being shuttled between one foster home and another when the authorities discovered that we were not going to grow up. People might be willing to adopt a baby boy, but not when the baby was going to remain an infant its entire life.

We waited apprehensively for the explosion that was to come, but we heard nothing but the sounds of packing coming from our bedroom. Momma came back into the room to get another packing box and shot us an enormous grin. "What was that supposed to mean?", I wondered.

Momma completed her packing and said, "Whoo, I'm glad that's done. I'll call a mover tomorrow and have the boxes put into storage until I can figure out what to do with them. I found a copy of your lease so I'll call your landlord too. I think I'll tell him that you've both become terminally ill and gone into a hospice. I'll tell him he's welcome to keep the deposit and the balance of the rent. That should be enough for him to keep from nosing about. I'll call the utility companies while I'm at it and have the phone, water and electricity turned off too. I haven't seen a newspaper on the porch so I guess you don't have home delivery. I'm going to have to remember to go by the post office and file a change of address for you two. In a month or so, I'll mark your mail as 'Addressee Deceased, Return to Sender' and that should be the end of it. I'll call the director at the lab tomorrow and request emergency family leave for the next two weeks. That will give me enough time to take care of your affairs and prepare my request for retirement. Right now, I'm going to take my babies shopping."

She picked up her purse and pushed the stroller out to the porch, locking the door behind her. Then she put us in our seats in the car and off we went. I was amazed at my momma's lack of response to our dresses. She hadn't said anything to us. What was going on? Surely she couldn't have missed them. Why was she taking us shopping? She had bought enough clothes at Wal-Mart yesterday to last us until winter. What was she planning?

We started going from one store to another buying clothing. Momma never showed us what she was buying, she would park the stroller facing away from the clothes rack she was looking at and put the clothes over the handle of the stroller. The only thing we saw was the very first thing she purchased; several pairs of matched pink frilly baby sunbonnets and blousy pull-over tops. When we got to the car after we went into the first store, she put us in the car and put the pull-overs on us then tied a sunbonnet around each of our heads. The effect was transformational. What had appeared to be two baby boys dressed in diapers were now two baby girls! The lacy sunbonnets left no doubt in anyone's minds what we were. Our short hair was completely covered and the combination of the sunbonnet and pull-over with their puffed sleeves and lace trim gave us a very sweet petite feminine look. What was momma thinking?

We went from store to store, buying clothes in each one without letting Gino or me see what she had purchased. In one store, Gino must have gotten thirsty because he began whimpering loudly. Momma checked his diaper to see if it was wet. When she discovered it wasn't, she reached into the diaper bag on the rear of the stroller and took out two bottles of formula for us. The thought of drinking room temperature baby formula made me want to retch, but I was so thirsty I didn't care. I wanted to start whimpering like Gino too. We pulled at the nipples eagerly the second we got our mouths around them. The formula tasted glorious! I hadn't realized how hungry I was or how satisfying formula could be. We had almost finished the bottles when momma strapped us into our baby seats in the car to go to the next store. Momma put the package of clothes she bought into the trunk with all the others and got into the drivers seat while Gino stared at each other in questioningly. Oh how I wished we could talk to each other again!

At the next store the inevitable happened; I messed in my diaper! It came so easily that I hardly knew what was happening before I realized what I had done. I had thought I was just letting out a little baby fart. I gave it a little push to get it over with and before I knew it, I was sitting in a diaper filled with a very slippery warm substance. I was horrified! I started crying in rage and frustration. Gino must have pooped in his diaper too, because he got a startled look on his face and turned red, then started crying too!

Momma bent over and put three fingers of one hand down the front of my diaper, saying, "Are we wet? Does babykins need a dydee change?"

She felt around inside my diaper for a moment and said, "Well..., you're not very wet. Are you poopy?"

She picked me up and held me over her arm on my stomach while she pulled back the diaper on my bottom to peer inside and see if I had pooped. It was a humiliating experience. Everyone in the baby department understood what she was looking for. She put me back into the stroller and picked up Gino next and did the same to him. His expression grew crimson in embarrassment as he found himself draped over her arm helplessly with his bottom in the air for everyone to see. Momma shook her head and said, "Oh dear, we made big poopies in our dydees! Don't cry babies. Momma will get you changed right away."

She glanced around the room for a few minutes, evidently looking for someplace to change us, before she started rapidly wheeling us to the rear of the store. My bladder opened up soon afterwards (I couldn't tell exactly when) and suddenly I realized that I was dripping wet. When we got to the back of the store, momma headed right for the women's restroom. "Oh God!", I thought to myself, "Not in there! Please, please God! Don't let her change us in there!"

She pushed open the door with the stroller and we found ourselves surrounded by women brushing their hair, repairing the damage to their makeup and chatting happily while changing their babies' diapers. Gino and I stopped our crying and looked around the room in wonder. This was something that had always been off limits to me as an adult. I had often wondered how women's restrooms were accoutered. The smell of the women's restroom was unlike anything I had ever experienced; it was an odd combination of feminine perfume and disinfectant. Not like the smell of the nurses I had been near during Gino's illness. This wasn't a hospital smell, reeking of science and professional femininity, but different odor entirely. It was a smell of contrast, something that denoted the difference between the industrial chemical treatments used by an impersonal corporation and the real women who used the facilities. I sniffed again and realized that there was something else in the air, something that tinged the air with a peculiar odor that I couldn't place, something half-remembered with pleasant memories that seem to linger long after the original source had vanished. There were stalls as I expected and a long mirror over a counter with several sinks that I couldn't see; from where I was sitting all I could see of the sinks were the plumbing pipes beneath. I had to infer the presence of the sinks from the plumbing. On the wall opposite the mirror were three baby changing stations. They seemed to be long boxes that folded down from the wall to make changing platforms. I noticed that one of them had a long blue web belt dangling from the middle. They must have straps to hold down a baby if he started wiggling too much. They were all in use by mothers changing some very dirty squalling babies. I shuddered when I thought that soon I would be joining them.

Momma waited her turn patiently and chatted with the other mothers about how filthy the restroom was. I looked around to see what she was talking about, but I couldn't see anything wrong. It looked clean to me! Obviously, it wasn't clean enough to suit these fastidious women! Their main complaint seemed to be the trash cans that had been placed between each changing station. They talked about how smelly they were, but I couldn't tell from were I was sitting. After a while it was momma's turn and she took Gino out of the stroller and put him on the table. He waved his arms and legs ineffectually trying to get momma to stop, but momma ignored him and changed his diaper without slowing down. I felt sorry for him, but there was nothing I could do for my former lover. Soon I'd be up on the table wearing nothing below my waist as momma changed me. Momma put Gino back in the stroller and then it was my turn. I closed my eyes at the embarrassment that was to come. I felt myself being laid down on a hard padded surface and strapped into place. The odd smell was much stronger now. Momma leaned over me and whispered, "Don't cry, Honey. Momma will get you into a clean dydee soon." I held my eyelids shut tightly as I felt her loosen one side of the diaper and then the other. She pulled the front of the diaper down between my legs and I was hit by a blast of cool air. The chilled dehumidified air evaporated the surface moisture on my legs and crotch and made me shiver in cold. I clenched my abdominal muscles in response and suddenly all the women around me started laughing. I felt the cold sodden diaper being thrown back into place and wondered what was happening. One of the women suggested that momma rub my tummy for a few minutes to be sure that I had finished. Momma told her I was a "little pisser" and started massaging my lower abdomen. I was astonished at momma's language, momma had never talked that way around me before. I felt the diaper grow hot in front of me and realized what I had done; I must have started peeing again the minute momma pulled down my diaper! After a minute momma pulled the soggy diaper away and began to cleanse me with a babywipe. My eyes flew open in surprise as the alcohol laden wipe touched my skin. It was cold! I whimpered and waved my arms trying to tell her how cold the wipe was but she didn't understand. No wonder Gino had been trying to get her attention! She lifted my legs and wiped my dirty bottom off with an unsoiled part of the diaper before cleaning me with the babywipe. The smell that came from the mess I had made was awful! I shivered as she lowered my to the pad while she bent over to get a clean diaper. I felt a light touch on my skin as the odd smell became overpowering. I looked at what momma was doing to me and saw where the smell was coming from. She was powdering me with baby powder! Then she lifted my legs again and slid the diaper underneath my bottom and fastened it tightly around my waist. She picked me up and held me close to her face and said, "There now, Honey. That wasn't so bad, was it?"

I shuddered as she lowered me back into the stroller and fastened the straps between my legs and then secured Gino in the same way. My crotch was still chilled by the alcohol and exposure. All the women were making jokes about how men were "little pissers" their entire lives and how it was up to women to keep them from making a mess of themselves. I heard one of the women remark as we left how 'sweet' the twin boys had looked in pink blouses and lace. She said that we'd probably grow up to become very 'sweet' boys one day. The heavy emphasis on the word 'sweet' made her implication obvious, and the rest of the women howled in laughter. My face blushed hotly as momma pushed open the restroom door with the front of the stroller and we left.

Momma continued her shopping as if nothing had happened. In a way I guess, nothing had. Gino and I had only had only acted in the way she had expected. We had become her babies in her mind and she didn't expect any other behavior from us. She took us home and took off our new sunbonnets and pull-overs after putting us in our playpen, then left us to play in our diapers while she unpacked her purchases and washed them. She put some of the toys she had bought for us in the playpen with us to keep us occupied while she worked. I know it seems incredible that two grown men who were only inhabiting baby bodies and were otherwise undisturbed mentally would play with baby toys, but that's what we did. First, Gino picked up the stuffed animal that was sitting next to him in the playpen and began suc king on its ear. He smiled and hugged it as if it was a long lost friend making me wonder what I was missing. I tried it and discovered to my intense delight how happy and content the mere touch of the toy made me feel. Soon the both of us were rolling on the floor of the playpen and giggling happily.

Momma came back to find us happily engaged in play with our toys and stood at the side of the playpen smiling down at us. She grinned and said, "I have a surprise for my sweet little babies. Something I think you've wanted for a long, long time. Who wants to be first? Gino? Wouldn't you like to try on your new clothes?"

She turned to me and said, "How about you, Honey? Momma got some nice new clothes for you, wouldn't you like to try them on? They're all nice and fluffy from the dryer. I tell you what, since Gino is new here, I'll let him be first to try on the new clothes."

She reached down and put her hands underneath Gino's armpits and said, "Come on, Sweetiepie. Momma will dress you up."

She took Gino into the nursery and came back with a little girl in her arms. At least it appeared to be a little girl at first glance. When I looked closer I realized it was Gino in a baby girl's party dress. If I had been able to talk, I would have been speechless in shock. He was dressed in an infant's party dress that made him appear even younger and more helpless than he had before. The effect of the sunbonnets and pull-overs had been nothing compared to this. They had merely made us appear childishly feminine, but this outfit gave him a soft, overdressed, delicate appearance that only baby girls can get. His eyes were glazed over in a look of dependent hopelessness. As it was, I could only gape in awe at what momma had done. Momma had put one on the new su nbonnets on his head to cover his lack of hair. The stiff crinoline skirt puffed out to his sides and made no pretense of covering the matching plastic rumba panties momma had put over his diapers. Nothing he ever dressed in or even fantasized had made him appear as sweetly petite as he did now. His inner self was exposed for all the world to see; momma had turned him into a baby girl. She sat Gino in the playpen beside me and said, "Isn't she the most adorable thing you've ever seen?"

I sat on my knees and watched as Gino bent over to crouch on all fours. His skirt stood up stiffly from her behind and framed the rumba covered diaper in lacy layers of petticoats. He crawled a few steps and then stopped, giggling and cooing foolishly in apparent delight. Momma had achieved in minutes with an infant's party dress and a sunbonnet what we couldn't have done with hours of preparation time and the most expensive gowns and makeup. Gino was a little girl. It didn't matter what he had between his legs, that was a mere bagatelle. This was the reality of his being. The effect wasn't even spoiled by the bulge of the thick diaper under his panties. It only emphasized how helpless and dependent he was. His appearance practically guaranteed that any adult who saw him would be seized with the desire to pick him up to cuddle and fuss over the charming baby girl they saw creeping innocently at their feet. It made me want to throw-up.

Momma nodded in approval at the effect she had created and said, "Okay, Honey. Now it's your turn."

I wailed in terror at her plans for me. It's true I had always wanted to be a girl, but nothing like this. I had always wanted the nice looking guys to notice me, to appreciate my good looks. I had fantasized in high school that I could entice the star quarterback from his girlfriends and make him mine if I had only been allowed to dress as I pleased. Later on, I had enjoyed making myself up and dressing in the sexiest women's clothes I could find. But this, this wasn't what I had envisioned for myself! This wasn't the allure of women I had sought to capture for myself, this wasn't sexiness. This was a loss, a passivity, an abandonment of sexuality. If I let momma go through with this I wouldn't even be a boy any more, only some sort of living doll for my momma to play dress up with. I screamed in torment as momma carried me from the room.

I fought with momma until she grew angry and said, "That's enough, little girl. Momma's put up with all the foolishness she's going to for one day. Why can't you be more like pretty Gina? She had no problems with her new clothes. I know you like wearing girl's clothes, I found your makeup and dresses in your closet. Now be still while momma gets you dressed.""Little girl? Gina?! What did momma have in mind?.......Oh no! She couldn't.....She wouldn't.....Nooooooo!", I screamed incoherently.

A few minutes later I found myself plucking at the ends of my starched skirt as momma tugged the matching rumba panties over my knees and up my legs. I had lost. I had given up all hope of becoming a "real" man in high school and replaced it with my own vision of what I wanted to be. I would be an 'undiscovered' star, an entertainer, someone of wit and culture who would rise above the uncultured neolithic baboons with whom I had the misfortune to be classmates.

Now I was nothing, less than nothing. I was only the satisfied gleam in my momma's eye as I sat adorably in my pink baby doll dress waiting to be delivered into the sight of my one time lover. I hung listlessly from my momma's hands as she picked me up and carried me back into the living room to sit with my "sister" Gina. Tears of utter defeat rolled silently down my face as I sat there looking up at my momma. I felt betrayed, abandoned by my inner desires. I didn't want men to look at me like this. I only wanted to hide, to find somewhere safe where no one would see me. I wanted someone strong to wrap their arms around me, to huddle me close to them and save me from what I had become.

Momma started to put me in the playpen with Gina and stopped with a surprised look on her face and then sat heavily on the sofa with me on her lap. She looked down at her breasts as if something magical and unknowable had taken place. I noticed that there was a small spot of moisture on both sides of her blouse in front. A half smile stole across her face and she began unbuttoning her blouse slowly, savoring each button in turn as if in anticipation of some treasure she was sure she would discover within.

Momma stuck her right hand in her blouse and felt around, then withdrew her hand suddenly, looking closely at her palm. She grinned enormously and said, "Momma has something I think you've forgotten. Momma had almost forgotten about it herself."

She pulled me up onto her lap and unbutton the rest of her blouse as I watched with huge eyes. "She couldn't be....", I thought in desperation."It's just not possible!", I screamed to myself as I watched her gently lift her turgid breast out of the confines of her blouse.

She pulled me close to the object I had rejected so long ago. I tried to move my head away, but she forced it back tenderly into its proper place. I began to cry in frustration at my helplessness as she brushed my cheeks and lips with her nipple. My lips sought her of their own accord and she filled my mouth. I was enraged, how could she do this to me? My lips tugged at her tit greedily and a jet of hot milk squirted over my tongue. I tried to push the foul thing away and found instead my hands wouldn't obey me, they grasped the thing a brought it deeper into my mouth. I couldn't fight her with my body, the infantile lusts were driving it over my objections. All I could do is look up at her with a gleam of hatred as I nursed at her breast.

Momma must have understood what I was feeling because she said, "I'm sorry, baby girl. I know it's not what you wanted in your life. It's not what I wanted for you either. But the time for objections on your part is over. This time you're going to be happy in spite of yourself. You don't have to struggle with being a boy any longer. You going to be my little girl for the rest of your life. I'm going to see that you wear nothing but the cutest sweetest clothes I can find. You won't have to worry about anything, no one will ever know you were once a little boy. You and your sister Gina will spend the rest of your days in momma's arms sucking at her tiddy."

I twisted my head around to see Gina's reaction to the horror momma was proposing for us. All I could see on Gina's face was a slack infantile expression. His mind had broken under the strain. Momma saw "her" lack of interest and pulled the other breast out for Gina to see. Instantly 'her' expression changed into one of hungry interest.

I wept as momma pulled my head back to her and my world filled with her breast. I was alone. My lover had gone, retreating into the safety and security of infancy. I wondered how long it would be until I followed him into cheerful idiocy. I felt my diaper grow warm in front as I started to pee in response to the feeding. I knew soon I'd poop in them as well. I closed my eyes and sucked hard on her tit as I tried to forget what was happening to me. The room was swirling around me. The last words I heard that night was my momma cooing down at me, "Good girl! That's momma's baby girl! Poor baby, I wish I had done this long ago. I never should have brought you up as a little boy the first time. How desperately you and Gina must want to be girls. All those clothes a nd makeup! There must have been ten thousand dollars worth of dresses in your closet. Mommy's sorry she tried to make you something you weren't. Don't worry, Sweetiepie, mommy will make it up to you. You won't have to be a boy anymore. When you wake up, baby girl, you're going to have a new life. Momma's going to give you a new name."

In the morning I woke up in a room I hadn't seen before. It seem a lot like a room I had slept in before, but it was softer and more feminine than I remembered. The pink curtains made the bright sunlight glow rosily within the room. Lace ruffles abounded in profusion. I looked lovingly at my twin sister Gina sleeping in her little pink flannel sleeper. I looked down and saw that I was wearing the same thing. I was happy momma lets her sleep in the same crib with me. I stood at the side of the crib and surveyed the boundaries of my demesne.

I had a vague memory of my life being different......"larger" somehow. I felt like something was missing, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. I felt my bowels cramp and pushed back in response. I was immediately rewarded with a warm feeling that ran down my crotch and pressed hotly against me. Something happened behind me and I felt a weight pull at my waist and hips.

I felt dizzy and swayed against the crib bars. I sat down in surprise and the warm semi-solid thing behind me oozed delightfully between my legs. I chortled in joy as I felt my bottom slide in the slippery stuff. Gina opened her eyes and began to giggle happily. I sit there drumming my feet against the mattress wondering why it getting so hard to think. Everything think fuzzy like teddy bear. I chuckle at pretty sunlight in window. Everything so pretty! Gina is pretty too! Movement above me caught my eye and I looked to see what it was. The pale pinks, blues and yellows of a cloud of plastic butterflies twisted slowly in endless circles above me as I reached out joyfully to try to touch the mobile hung on the headstead of the crib. "Butterfries! Pretty, pretty butterfries!", I squealed to myself in pleasure.

Mommy come in! She smile down at me and I giggle and go pee-pee some more. I luv my mommy! Mommy look big. I smile and lift my hands to be picked up and held. I want be my mommy's baby girl forever and ever! She pick me up and whisper how she love her baby girl. She say she going to have "shower" and invite all her girlfriends to come over and name me. I start whimper. I used have name, but now can't remember. It make me sad not having name. I happy only girls come "shower", boys are scary. Mommy says girls come and bring Gina and me lots of pretty baby dresses. I like dresses.

Mommy sit in rocking chair and hold me on her lap. She take out tiddy thing and put it in my mouth. Mmmmmm. Mommy hold me close and pat my bottom while I suck. I suck until I all full. Mommy pat my back and I make big sound. Everything so pretty, so nice, so soft. Then mommy puts me in high chair and feeds me breakfast. It taste wonderful! I make happy noises to tell mommy how much I like this food. It so soft and creamy, I don't have to chew at all. Mommy asks me if I like my 'eggy-weggies' and I chortle happily. When I finished, mommy put me in crib while she give tiddy thing to Gina. I crawl around crib and watch mommy and my sister. Gina look so happy laying there with mommy's tiddy thing in her mouth. Soon Gina full and mommy pat her back too. She make noise and then mommy feeds her breakfast. After Gina finished, mommy puts her on top of drawer thing to change her dydee and put dress on her. It beautiful! Then mommy do same thing to me.

The snaps on my sleeper make funny popping sounds when mommy open them. I laugh and laugh while mommy take down my dydee. I suck on toes while she wipe sticky stuff off my behind. Then mommy put dress on me and pick me up to put on hip. She get Gina from crib and put on other hip. Then she take us to her room and stand in front of mirror to let us see what pretty baby girls we are. She put her arms underneath our bottoms to lift us up. She hold our legs and knees to her chest with her arms and we put our arms around her neck. We so cute! Mommy tell us so even though drool is running down our chins. Our bottoms peek out from under our dresses! I can see our bottoms covered with cute pink girl dydees! I smile at picture in mirror and hug mommy tightly. Mommy tell us we never change, we always be her beautiful baby girls, forever and ever. I giggle and put thumb in mouth. I be perfectly happy except one thing..........I can't 'member who I was. I wish I 'member my name. But I not worry. I not need 'member who I was. I mommy's little girl now! Soon mommy's friends come to give me a name. Then I be a real baby girl just like Gina! Then we all live happily ever after!

 

Chapter Six

 

Monday's Child

by Jennifer Loraine

 

No memory of having starred

Atones for later disregard,

Or keeps the end from being hard.

Robert Frost, Provide, Provide st. 6

 

I've changed!

I'm no longer a forty-one-year-old Ph.D., working in my lab. I'm here at my colleague Pauline's home and I've become a little boy again. I've been here since yesterday afternoon when the transmorgification experiment when awry.

As a scientist, I knew that bodily metamorphosis was theoretically possible, but the emotional part of my mind refused to believe it. My associate in the lab had spent the last ten years perfecting a device that rearranged cellular structure; taking templates from existing human beings and altering them with a computer, enabling the operator to change the physical characteristics of individuals into whatever human form she chose. Her working hypothesis was ridiculous at best; how could an electrogravitic field change someone's appearance? She had explained that the field didn't actually "change" the body's appearance at all. It merely formed a template which the cellular material "flowed" into. It also reduced the molecular bonding to the point where the cells were allowed to flow and created a temporary chemical stasis field so rebinding could not take place until the new template had been 'filled". The stasis had the side benefit of suspending consciousness while the transformation was taking place. If the template was carefully chosen she had said, the subject's free radicals would be nearly eliminated, resulting in an extension of life expectancy. I had repeatedly tried to dissuade her from her dangerous experiments, but had not succeeded. She had continued with lab animals until it was obvious she could do as she claimed. At that point, it was foolish to order her to stop research as I had planned. All the approbation and kudos that would be mine as head of the lab would be claimed by whatever researcher who discovered the process in the future. What we needed, she kept telling me, was a human subject to test the hypothesis. She assured me that there'd be virtually no risk to the subject, each element of her hypothesis had been extensively tested on the lab animals. When I told her that the principle of Informed Consent would exclude everyone but someone privy to her research she decided that I should be the test subject. She explained that she couldn't be the subject because she had to operate the device and aside from a few part-time student assistants, there was no one else available to act as a test subject. She attempted to cajole me by saying that she could give me the looks and stamina of a twenty-year-old. I remained unconvinced that the benefits of the process justified the risks even when she described the improvement it would make in our sex life. She finally induced me to be a test subject when she pointed out that I would be hailed as a scientific hero for subjecting myself to the 'dangers' of being the first human subject. When I demanded to know 'what dangers' she was talking about, she blithely told me that the risk was absolutely minimal, but that the world would interpret the story differently. I agreed, foolishly dazzled by the prospect of the honors success would bring me.

I stood in our bedroom and gazed in the full length mirror upon the same image of a toddler I had seen earlier in the day; a handsome two year old in white underpants and a T-shirt. The underpants were padded...training pants.

I was surprised how comfortable they felt. I modeled them in front of the mirror thinking what a good looking child I made. If only I hadn't had a protruding belly, I could be a professional child model. Maybe if I wore the pants a little higher up, I could disguise my tummy. I tugged at the top of the pants to adjust the waist and suddenly I started to pee uncontrollably. What was happening to me? This would be terrible for my image! She had assured me that even though my body appeared to be younger, I would retain complete control of my voluntary functions. I grabbed my crotch with both hands to stop the flow, but it kept coming. The squeezing of my hands compressed the sponge filler of the pants and I began to drip all over the floor. I couldn't control myself! I sank down in front of the mirror and wept in shame at what I had become. A few minutes later my colleague came in and found me in a sobbing, sopping heap on the floor. She took me into the nursery and undressed me, then wiped me off with a baby wipe and put me in a clean pair of training pants. I was mortified!

I was sorry I volunteered to be her guinea pig. She'd had such success with animals that my confidence level was high, and I hadn't anticipated any problems. The first changes she made were subtle. The color of my hair, the shape of my nose; always changing my features back as quickly as she altered them. Gradually, we started making dramatic changes; rearranging my cells to give me a younger body. Last week, I was a teenager, then she changed me back to my old body again without any problems. We were so happy that the experiment had been a success that we had danced around the lab. I was so sorry later when I had to tell her our engagement was off. I had confused professional respect and sexual attraction for love and had finally come to my senses. Besides, I had already hired her replacement and would be replacing her within two months. I was tired of having to reason with a headstrong middle-aged female and the prospect of working with an amenable graduate student was too good to pass up. My position as lab director was prestigious enough to attract any number of attractive female students to act as my general assistant and gopher. I had decided that I had no desire to have a scientific rival working for me.

This change was different. We had decided to start fresh after the weekend with a new run of experiments on Monday morning. Instead of attempting a regression into an intermediate age range, we decided to attempt a massive transformation. Pauline argued that all the previous tests were only a precursor to the final tests. She wanted to regress my body to the toddler stage of development. I was hesitant at first. I was afraid of what the consequences might be for me mentally. Pauline argued that none of the other changes had caused any changes in consciousness, why should this one be any different? Even if it did, the "normal" template for my body had been saved. All that would be necessary to restore me to full functioning was another transformation into the no rmal template. "What could be safer?", she demanded. We ran the transformation and everything went smoothly. However, when she tried to return me to my former state, nothing happened. The machine charged and seemed to be working properly, but the only template that would load into the processor was the current template. In effect, I was stuck! All day I've been trapped in the body of a baby. The world around me is a huge place that is strangely familiar, but terribly frightening.

At least I had something decent to wear. My colleague is a gem! When she saw the change the machine had induced in me, she had just what I needed in her purse. She reached in and produced a set of training pants and an undershirt that were exactly the right size. They couldn't have fit better if she had measured me, then gone out and bought them especially for me.

Pauline took me to her house last night to take care of me because I'm too young to take care of myself anymore. I didn't get to see her daughter Gina last night because she was spending the night with a friend. I was glad I didn't, my good looks have always impressed women of any age and Gina's no exception. I don't want my present condition to change her opinion of me. Not that I'm any less good looking now, it's just that I lack the mature masculine qualities that cause women to swoon over me. I'm sure that Pauline is doing her best to get me back to my normal self. After all, what woman would choose the company of a toddler when she could be in the company of an Adonis?

Before we went to bed, Pauline talked me into allowing a female attorney friend to come over and talk to us this afternoon. She wanted her friend to prepare a full-power-of-attorney for Pauline in case she can't reverse the process in the next few days. I was stubborn at first, but when she started cooing to me in that low, sexy voice of hers, I relented. Ever since I was a little boy, I've never have been able to resist a woman's attentions.

Pauline teased me this morning at breakfast by saying she'd put me in diapers if I messed my pants. I'm scared she really means it. She has a half joking manner that sometimes I can't fathom. One minute she's all smiles and then the next she shoots me a quick glance that freezes my bones. The next time she looks at me she's all smiles again with a decided coo in her voice. It's a good thing she had a crib for me to sleep in, otherwise I would have had to sleep in her bed with her. I don't think that would be a good idea at the present stage of our relationship.

The attorney came by and surprised me by having the document already drawn up. All it required was my signature. She was accompanied by an attractive young female paralegal who acted as a notary. I smiled at the paralegal in a mildly flirtatious way as she stamped the documents over my signature and was rewarded with a smile in return. Pauline gave me a dirty look when she saw the way I was acting, so I decided to behave myself until she could change my body back. The frown on Pauline's face told me I had better say something to take her mind off of my dallyings, so I told them that I had thought that it took a day or two to prepare a power-of-attorney. Pauline told me that she had asked her friend to begin work on the document last week for use in an emergency. My colleague had surprised me again with her apparent prescient abilities. I been wondering all day why she had a nursery already set up in her house, when she doesn't have a baby! Her daughter's almost twelve years old. Not that it matters, I'm sure it's just a happy coincidence. As usual, she's ready for any eventuality. How does she do it? How does she always know what I need and when I need it? Maybe I should have kept my promise and married her. She wouldn't find out about my extra curricular activities if I was reasonably careful.

I messed in my pants an hour ago and she put me in diapers. It was a humiliating experience. I didn't want to be diapered and tried to tell her, but the words just wouldn't come out right. All I could do is babble excitedly like a tot. She told me to be quiet and finished diapering me. Then she took me to the lab again and gave me another treatment to give me back my old body, but it didn't work. I didn't get any bigger. When the treatment was over, she smiled at me and shook her head to tell me it was no use before taking me back to her house.

I creeped into her bedroom on my hands and knees and looked at myself in the full length mirror while she changed out of her lab clothes. A drooling baby face stared back at me from the glass. I'm even younger than I was before. I can't be more that a year old. She picked me up and put me in the playpen she had set up in the family room. She told me her daughter will be home in a few minutes and then she'll have a talk with the both of us. I'm tried to tell her how thirsty I was but all I could do was gurgle. I started to cry in frustration and she seemed to understand and went to the kitchen to get me something to drink. When she returned, she gave me a baby bottle to suck on instead of water in a glass. I pouted as I sucked on the nipple. I'm not sure I could still hold a glass, but it made me mad that she wouldn't even let me try.

Her daughter came home and she told Gina that she now had a baby brother! Pauline told her that there was an accident at work and I had been turned into a baby. She was sorry that she couldn't give her a father as she had planned. I had broken off the engagement last week and had had the accident before I could change my mind. Pauline told her that she hadn't mentioned it to her because she had thought that there was a chance I would change my mind. She said she was going to adopt me and take care of me just like I was her own baby. Then she made the two of us dinner. She put me in a high chair and fed me baby food like I was an infant. I guess I am, but I still hate the thought of being fed.

After dinner they took me into the living room to watch tv with them. Her daughter held me while I sucked on my bottle of formula. The formula didn't taste that bad, I decided, and I finished it quickly. It wasn't too long before I messed in my diaper. Pauline took me into the nursery and changed me while her daughter watched and asked questions about how to change my diapers. Pauline went through every step of the process and when I started to fuss, she put a pacifier in my mouth. It was humiliating. She tucked me into the crib and that was the last I saw of her before I went to sleep. I woke up later in the night and was thirsty again. I tried to call her to come help me, but I still couldn't talk. I started screaming and soon she came in with another bottle. I began sucking it and fell asleep with the bottle in my hands.

I woke up in the morning with a horribly messy diaper. Every time I moved it squished beneath me and the smell of ammonia was overpowering. I started crying without even trying to call for help. All of a sudden, her daughter was in the room, undressing, cleaning me up and rediapering me. Then she carried me to the kitchen and strapped me into the high chair, tying a bib around my neck. I closed my eyes and yawned sleepily while Gina prepared my breakfast. The next thing I knew she had spooned a heaping helping of baby cereal into my open mouth.

I snapped my mouth closed at the intrusion and was surprised at how good the baby cereal tasted! It wasn't nearly as bland as I had thought it would be, in fact, I was shocked at the intensity of the flavor. I wondered at this for a moment until the reason occurred to me. My taste buds had regressed until they were as sharp as they had been when I was a baby! The transformation hadn't only changed the appearance of my body, it had actually repaired it! I ate the food with gusto as she continued ladling the cereal into me.

When I finished, Gina wiped my face and hands with the bib and gave me a bottle of infant formula to drink. I marveled at the sweet aroma and flavor it had as I nursed on the nipple. No wonder babies loathed to give up their formula to be weaned! The warm formula went down easily and sat perfectly on my stomach. She took the bottle from my hands temporarily and patted me gently on my back. I belched hugely and she gave me the bottle back. I smiled in embarrassment, but she just tousled the hair on top of my head.

Her mother came in the kitchen and told her it was time for school and that she would take care of me. Pauline picked me up and settled me on her hip as she walked Gina to the door to she leave for school. After Gina had gone, Pauline carried me into the family room and sat down with me on the couch. She told me that she knew I could still think like an adult, but could not speak due to the immaturity of my vocal and oral muscles. She told me that she intended to take care of me until I got better and I should think of her as my mother. It felt a little strange to have a mother to take care of me at my age, but I realized that I had no choice. I wasn't able to tell her no. Now that I was a baby again, I had to have someone take care of me. I was just glad she was there when I needed her. I felt ashamed that I had treated her so shabbily.

She put me in a playpen in the middle of the floor while she cleaned and vacuumed the rug. I wondered why I hadn't had the courage before to marry her. Pauline was so....competent, so strong, so nurturing. As I watched her, I realized just how impressive she really was. She made me feel so protected and cared for. I was in awe of her, She wasn't a professional colleague or even a sexual object anymore, but a Goddess! She was above my petty likes and dislikes. She was my maid, my nurse, and my caregiver. I wanted to lay in her arms and simply stare up into her lovely, gentle eyes. I fell completely in love with her at that moment. I knew she was right, I needed her.

Later that morning Pauline had some friends over for coffee. No one there understood that I was a thinking, mature adult (except for Pauline). Her friends smiled as one of them put me to her shoulder and patted my diaper padded bottom. I drooled and jabbered, trying desperately to talk. One of them told Pauline that she was amazed that my eyes seemed to respond to everything around me. She said it was almost like I understood what they were talking about. At that point everyone wanted to hold me and play with me. They passed me around the room, sitting me in various women's laps while they tickled my stomach and made baby-talk to entertain me. When they were finished bouncing me on their knees and playing with me, my colleague put me in the playpen and gave me a bottle of juice to drink. I moped in the playpen while her friends told her what an adorable baby she had adopted. A few minutes later I wet my diaper and I began crying in embarrassment. Pauline rushed over to the side of the playpen and took me out to lay me on my back on the floor. My embarrassed cries became screams of outrage when she unfastened my diaper in front of her company and proceeded to change me then and there. She shushed me and tickled my stomach in an attempt to quiet me as she pulled the diaper down between my legs. Then Pauline laughed and pointed to what she said was the reason for all the fuss. I had pooped in my diaper! I whimpered in mortification as she lifted my legs and wiped my behind with a babywipe in front of her admiring friend s. All they could seem to talk about was what a cute little wee-wee I had. They seemed to think it was hilarious. She rediapered me quickly and held me to her shoulder, patting my diapered bottom to comfort me. When I refused to be consoled, she told her guests that it was time for my nap and put me in my crib. I lay on my back in the crib and drummed my feet against the mattress in rage and frustration as Pauline closed the door behind her. I screamed and cried until I was too hoarse to do anything but whimper. After about an hour I fell asleep out of pure exhaustion and didn't awake until Pauline came to take me to the lab for another treatment. The results were the same as the other attempts; I didn't get any bigger that time either.

Later, when we were alone in my room, she laid me on my back on the baby scale. She wrote the numbers on a clipboard and told me how well I was doing. Then she sat in the rocking chair, put me on my stomach, over her knees, and took my temperature. She slapped my little bare bottom lightly when I kicked or wiggled. She warned me with a chuckle that if I wasn't a 'good baby', she'd keep me like this forever, a wet little plaything for her and her daughter. I giggled and laughed at her playful threats; I trusted her and knew she wouldn't do anything to harm me. She smiled and hugged me and told me she'd be my mommy forever. It made me feel good to know that she'd always be there to take care of me and I fell asleep in her loving arms.

When I awoke again Pauline was changing my diaper on the changing table. She was talking to me the whole time, but I was having trouble understanding her. The words she used seemed so big! I wished she would talk so I could understand her. Then the thought hit me that I could understand her perfectly the day before. Was I losing my ability to think? Would my mind regress until I couldn't think anything but baby thoughts? It was scary and I started to cry. Pauline started tickling me and I forgot all about what had made me cry. I laughed and laughed. Pauline chuckled too, to see how quickly she had stopped my crying.

I was thirsty so I whimpered a bit as I lay there on the table. She asked me what I wanted as if she expected me to answer. I cooed up at her in the most ingratiating way I could and she asked if I wanted my B-O-T-L, at least that's what it sounded like she said. I lay there and whimpered some more until she asked, "Do you want your ba-ba, Honey?" I chortled in pleasure as she identified what I wanted. She stuck the ba-ba in my mouth and I sucked on it while she did all those nice feeling things to me. She sprinkled the white stuff on me and rubbed it all over me, then pulled up the white thing between my legs. It bothered me for a moment that I couldn't remember what the thing between my legs was called. All I knew was how soft it was and nice it made me feel. Then she put a soft crinkly thing over the white thing and picked me up to cuddle me.

I was deliriously happy. My thoughts seemed to drift in and out in a warm, contented glow as she carried me back into the big room with the thing where I played in the sunlight. She put me down on the floor and I crawled around the floor while she picked up and talked into a white thing in her hand. All I knew was that she seemed happy too. She smiled and laughed and even giggled in places as she talked. I couldn't understand what she was saying, she used big words like "promotion to department head", "Nobel prize" and "rejuvenation". I knew she was talking about me though, because she kept looking over at me when she said it. She got an evil grin when she said, "I've subjected him to repeated treatments to make final downward adjustments to his age and arrest his development permanently". She also said words like "revenge", "liar" and "cowardly fool" with a frown on her face. It scared me a lot and I started to cry. She picked me up, sat me on her lap and let me lay my head against her breast while she talked on the white thing. She looked down on me and said that "I've taken care of him" and "he'll be a baby for the rest of his life". That made me feel good again. She talked and talked, saying things like "complete and total regression to infancy" and "accelerating mental deterioration". I fell asleep again in her lap.

i wake now. pretty light in crib! it dance back and forth, funny, funny light! i chuckle and laugh and try to catch light. i can't. it move too smart, too fast for me. i move my bottom against the crib. it squishes nicely. it feel good to squish bottom. i do it whenever the thing on me feels squishy. i here how long? i not remember. yesterday? many days? i not know. i not care. this my home now. i look around room and see my things. i see my crib. i see my rocking chair. i see my toy box. i not know names, but i know my things. i feel warm between my legs. i look down to see warm thing and see funny things at end of feet. i put the funny things in my mouth to see how they feel/taste like. they warm and wriggly. it tickles to suck them. i put the thing on my hand in my mouth and suck. it feel gooood. good. good. good. i feel good. i look up and see thing moving over crib. i play and hit it. it moves good. pretty colors. see how pretty? i giggle again.

door thing on wall open. it mommy! i laugh and lift my arms to be held. mommy lifts me high, high, high and holds me in her arms. i laugh and laugh and laugh. pretty mommy! she lay me on my back and take white, soft thing off my arms and chest. it make funny snapping, popping sounds when she opens it. i chuckle, she so funny! she pull thing down my legs and take it off my feet, then pull wet thing down between my legs. it smell like nice squishy stuff. i chortle and pee everywhere.

mommy laugh and tell me i good baby, i mommy's wet plaything! yes, yes, yes! i wet! i pee and make more wet. she put binkie thing in my mouth and i suck while she wipe squishy stuff off me. mommy laugh some more and ask me if i proud of the poopie i made in my dydee. i chuckle and let binkie thing fall out of my mouth and she smile and say yes, she see i pleased with what i did. she tell me she pleased too and put binkie back in my mouth. binkie thing feel good in mouth. she lift my legs and put soft thing under my bottom. she rub me with soft white stuff i like so much. it make me feel good! she make me feel good!! she put white thing between legs. i kick and wriggle in delight. she take binkie thing out of my mouth and put her finger in instead. i suck it like binkie. mommy pleased i do this. she say she not need to give me anymore treatments. she say i finished getting younger. she say i just right age.

mommy pick me up and hug me to her, then kiss me on top of head. she say i her baby now. she say i be her baby forever. she say i never change, never grow up! i chuckle when she say this. i want to stay a baby. i want to be hers forever and ever! she say i make her rich. what is rich? whatever it is, it make her happy. i happy that she happy. she say she love me. i know she luv me. i luv her. i coo my luv to her. i luv my mommy!

The mother looked up from the rocking chair where she sat going over the research paper on induced regression she was preparing for publication and smiled at her infant son. She wondered if she would ever get over the pleasure of seeing her ex-fiancee and scientific rival reduced to babbling infancy. She had considered killing him when he told her he was breaking off the engagement, but this was a more fitting end for the louse. It was worth all the trouble of changing his dirty diapers, bathing and feeding him to see him like this, she decided as she went back to her work. Next week she would enroll him in daycare permanently so she could get on with reorganizing her lab. She smiled as she thought about the graduate students she had hired, not one man among them. If necessary, she'd bring him to the lab and let one of her pretty grads change his diapers and take care of him for the day. She was sure he'd like that. He always enjoyed having young women fawn over him when he was the lab director. Of course she had told the pert grad student that he had promised a job that her services would not be required. She had found the job application in his desk the day after he had told her their engagement was off. She knew it was petty of her to exclude her from the group of new assistants she had hired, but she didn't feel like looking at the face of someone who her fiancee had been chasing. He had his wish now, she smirked; he'd spend the rest of his days being watched over and having every whim attended to by adoring women. All she had to do was adjust his age to match his infantile desires. Once he had made the necessary 'mental' adjustment, he was perfectly happy to spend his days in diapers, sucking on his ba-ba and making goo-goo eyes at any buxom female who passed by. She glanced over at him and knew she was right. He was content now. In a way she had done him a favor, he had gotten what he wanted most out of life and all he had to give up was one small thing; his mind!

Sitting in the crib was an adorable little boy with curly brown hair and big blue eyes. He appeared to be a little less than a year old. He was swaddled in thick cloth diapers covered with translucent blue plastic panties. The late afternoon sun streamed into the nursery and seemed to crown him with an aura of gold. He sucked his thumb charmingly as he snatched at the illuminated dust motes and thought, "baaammmm....gaaahhh..nnammmgga!"

 

Chapter Seven

 

Tuesday's Child

by Jennifer Loraine

 

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season.

Robert Frost, Reluctance st. 4

 

"Oh my God, she's changed!", I thought to myself as I looked at the shrunken body of my chief assistant wreathed in the smoke from the destroyed machine.

All the tests had gone perfectly and were hadn't expected anything to go wrong when we put our first human subject into the matter transmitter. I couldn't understand it, we had teleported objects hundreds of times without the slightest problem. All last week we had sent test animals across and they had been fine after teleportation. We had tried to think of everything to insure her safety; we had even scheduled the experiment on a Tuesday so everyone could recover from their weekend before attempting a test on a human subject. Gina looked healthy, which was a blessing. But it was her size and apparent age that concerned me, her body looked like it had rejuvenated into that of an four or five month old baby. I had one of the medical researchers examine Gina while we replaced the charred remains of the output amplifier stage and put another test animal in the machine. This time the chimpanzee we were using for a test animal regressed into its infancy.

I wondered what could be going on. I was in a panic, I had no idea what to do to restore Gina to her former state. I sat in my office wondering what my next move would be. I didn't know how to take care of a baby, I just didn't have the training or experience. Then it came to me, I'd call Pauline! She knew how to take care of babies. We could care for Gina until I found some sort of solution. I punched in my home phone number on the keypad and waited impatiently for her to pick up the phone. She answered and I told her breathlessly what had happened and asked for her help. She told charge of the situation immediately and said she'd be right over.

The researcher had just finished his examination of Gina when Pauline arrived. Pauline met me in the office and was demanding more details of the mishap when the researcher arrived with Gina. She was a sight! She smiled and cooed at the sight of Pauline and put out her arms to Pauline to be held. Pauline turned to me and said coldly, "Why isn't that baby in diapers?"

I was astonished at the stunning simplicity of her question. If Gina was a baby again why hadn't we diapered her? I turned to the researcher and said, "Pauline's right. Well?""Uhhh," the male researcher temporized, displaying typical male ineptitude with infant care, "we don't have any baby diapers.""What do you put on the chimps when you handle them? I don't recall there being an item for chimp diapers in the lab's budget, but I do recall there being several items listed that were described on the supply list as various sizes of baby diapers.", I told him firmly.

The researcher stood in front of us without moving as if he was waiting to be told what to do next. Pauline looked at him with a gimlet eye and said, "Well?"

He looked at her stupidly and I sighed in exasperation, then I said patiently, "Go and get some diapers on that baby!"

After he left with Gina, I asked, "What do you think I should do?""Can you change her back?", she asked. "We don't know at this point," I explained, "We have to find out why the machine has suddenly started regressing the test subjects. Once we know why the machine malfunctioned we might have a chance at restoring Gina to her proper age.""It's obvious Gina can't care for herself in her present state. Have you decided who will look after her until you can restore her?", she asked. "I hadn't gotten that far in my thinking," I told her. She just snorted and muttered something under her breath about men being incompetent to handle their own affairs much less take care of a baby. She said, "I'll take care of Gina. I'll need to borrow your study for use as a temporary nursery." "We have a spare bedroom we aren't using. Can't you put her in there?", I pointed out, "I wanted to keep that room available in case something untoward happened to you," she said dryly.

I blushed hotly and said, "Go ahead and use my study." There wasn't any point in arguing with her, she would just do as she pleased in any event and it was easier on everyone if I acquiesced early in the game. She told me it would be some time before she got home, she intended to buy baby furniture and supplies before she went home. I started to ask her how much it would all cost when I saw the resolute look in her eye and stopped myself. This wasn't a game I was going to win. If I told her she was spending too much money she'd just spend that much more. I could save myself money if I kept my mouth shut and let her take care of Gina in her own way.

Presently the researcher came back with a diapered Gina and I directed him to give her to Pauline. He handed Pauline the infantine body of his former colleague like he was handing over a ticking time bomb. His motions were careful, but he was obviously relieved to have the responsibility for Gina taken over by someone else. Pauline swung Gina over one hip and then started walking out of the room saying she'd talk to me that night.

I sighed as I turned to the researcher and asked him what he had discovered. He told me that apart from being a baby, Gina appeared to be perfectly healthy. I told him to rejoin his study group and that I would be with them in a minute. After he left, I took a large dose of Tagamet and then went to join the group myself. When I arrived the group of researchers had discovered what was happening to the subjects; apparently the mapping function on the receiving end was remapping the state function into an earlier entropic state. How it was occurring or why was anyone's guess at this point. Our main concern was finding the differences between the device's expected function and its produced function. We decided that if we could understand the changes the device was introducing we could establish a gradient relationship and incorporate a filter routine to control the output.

We all worked until it was late and then I ordered everyone to go home to get some rest. This wasn't a problem we were going to solve in a few hours and it wasn't going to do our productivity any good to get exhausted. I told everyone there was a news blackout on the results of this experiment and warned them about the potential fallout from the press if they got wind of what happened to Gina. I asked them to keep quiet about that days events and to keep them secret from everyone including their spouses.

When I got home, Pauline was waiting for me. She asked me to explain, in detail, what had happened to Gina and how I was going to fix it. I told her what we had discovered and what we planned to do. I promised that I would keep her updated on the results from the lab. I asked her where Gina was and she told me that Gina was in her crib. The week passed rapidly and I found myself watching Pauline care for Gina with increasing jealousy. I resented her intrusion into our life together. I knew it was silly to be jealous of an infant, but I wanted Pauline to cuddle and take care of me, not a baby version of one of my lab assistants.

We made some progress at the lab in understanding what had happened, but none at all in finding a way to help Gina. We were able to construct and incorporate a local remapper into the machine that allowed us to control the amount of regression to some degree. The subjects still regressed into infancy, but it was late infancy rather than the early infancy that Gina had suffered. Our attempts to restore the test subjects failed utterly.

We decided that our attempts to restore their entropic states to normal amounted to an attempt to create a state in the future. It seemed that there was an infinite sheaf of historic states folded into the present state, but once a subject was regressed, the information about the states occupying the interval between the present state and the remapped state was lost. Essentially there was no information on which to map the present state onto the future state. We theorized that there was a quantum restriction on our ability to remap to a state that was the same as the present state and therefore only historical states could be mapped. The energy requirements to remap went up as the selected historical state became closer in time to the present. Our power consump tion figures indicated that there was an exponential relationship between this interval and the power required to map, i.e., as the interval between the present state and the desired state approached zero, the required energy to remap became infinite. We had hopes that in the future we could reduce power consumption by the machine so we could reduce the difference between the subject's present state and the minimum historical state that could be achieved to a few micro or milliseconds, but for the present we were limited to years. As for Gina, as far as we could tell, there would never be a way to restore our infant colleague. Gina was stuck.

When I went home Thursday night I told Pauline what we had discovered. I explained to her that I would call Gina's family the next day to see if they couldn't take custody of her. Pauline was upset with me for insisting that we had to send Gina back to her family but for once I was adamant, Gina had to go. Keeping her without her family's sanction was tantamount to kidnapping.

Friday night Pauline barely spoke to me. She sat on the couch with Gina cuddling her and making mothering noises. I was green with envy. I tried to imagine what it must be like to be a baby again. The thought gave me a strange, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach like there was something I was missing, but I couldn't imagine what my childish id was trying to tell me. I looked at Gina sitting in Pauline's lap nursing her bottle happily. At least she had a good home to return to. I had contacted her sister and told her what had happened. After an initial period of disbelief her sister understood I wasn't joking and told me she'd be here tomorrow to pick Gina up and take her home. She said Gina had been her older sister and there was no one else to take care of her. She told me that their parents had died in an auto accident a few years ago and that she was married and had a little boy in kindergarten.

I explained that we weren't sure whether Gina would grow up again, but the X-rays we took immediately after the accident weren't promising. We had submitted them to a discrete radiologist last week for evaluation. The epiphysis's on the ends of Gin's long bones were missing and without growth plates not even growth hormone would help. We had a veterinarian evaluate the X-rays of the test animals and produced similar results. Apparently the remapping function was defective and had corrupted the template. I offered her sister a large sum of money for Gina's care in return for her signature on a release of liability. I pointed out that Gina had signed a release before participating as a test subject and that a court would almost certainly hold that she had given informed consent to the experiment. In short, the Board felt that although they were immune from liability they wanted to take care of an injured employee. All they asked for their munificence was that her sister remain silent about the accident. She told me she understood and she be wanted to take care of her sister no matter what age she had become. She said that she had always wanted a little girl of her own and that she and her husband had been trying without success to have another baby. She thanked me for the offer of money and told me not to worry, she would remain silent and take care of Gina as if she were her own baby."There but for the grace of God go I", I thought as I watched Gina's diapers being changed by Pauline. The idea occurred to me this afternoon that matter transmitters could really be considered a form of dimensional travel. What if instead of traveling to another position in the same universe, the transmission was being made to another parallel universe that was so similar, so congruent, that they had matter transmitters and were making the same journey. Maybe we weren't spanning our space-time continuum at all! Maybe we were taking a shortcut into another universe just like our own. If so, how could we tell? What if the data corruption didn't occur on our side at all? What if the corruption occurred on the other side? I hadn't been able to explain why the unit had self-destructed. What if the two units had locked onto each other and gotten into a feedback loop? If that was true, were we really building up matter from elementary particles? If we were, were we limited to merely transmitting matter rather than transmuting it into other forms? Gina's condition suggested we could make any changes in a body that we wanted. We could make someone tall or short as we pleased. If someone was ill all we had to do what transport them to a receiver and edit the illness out at the other end. We could even defeat that most relentless of predators, time. We could make someone as old or young as we liked. If I accepted the theory that there was an infinity of universes, then anything could happen. From that viewpoint, I decided that everything must happen at least once. How big a role did chance play? What if something had broken down and there had been a delay? Wou ld Gina have been okay? What if I had started testing on another day, would that have made a difference? Would there have been a victim? Or would my machine have claimed someone else's maturity? Had I been rejuvenated in some far off universe instead of Gina? Or was that universe here and now, closer to me than an electron's diameter, just waiting for me to pass through and become one with that universe's reality. I looked at Gina again and thought about what it would be like to be Pauline's baby. Would she love me? I was sure she would. I asked myself whether I would like to be Pauline's baby and found myself shivering in anticipation. The thought produced a sensation of longing, of an unfulfilled need in me. That was silly I decided. I was a man and real men don't want to be babies. "No", I chuckled to myself, "it could never happen. Not even in an infinity of universes. The grace of God has nothing to do with it. I'm simply too much of a man for it to happen to me."

I glanced at Gina sucking on her nipple contentedly and felt a silly urge to suck my thumb. Suddenly I felt an urgent need to go to the bathroom. As I hastily got up and went into our bedroom to go to the master bathroom, I saw my reflection in the dressing mirror on the wall. I saw to my horror that there was a large dark damp spot on the front of my trousers. I had peed in my pants! I ran to the bathroom in a race against time as I felt my bowels rumble threateningly in my gut. I flew through the door and was unbuckling my trousers as they let go and filled my underwear with a soft sticky substance. I moaned as my bladder released and added to the mess, "Noooo. The doctor cured me. This can't be happening. I don't want to be a baby again!"

My pants slipped from my hands as I sank to my knees in defeat. The puddle of urine seeped into the knees of my trousers coldly as I whimpered in failure. Memories that had been buried for a year by hypnotic drugs and shock treatments came flooding into my consciousness. There was an eighty percent chance that the treatment would have been permanent. Evidently I was part of the minority in which the effects were only temporary. I wanted to curl up in shame and hide from the world. My life was over, I'd never be a man again. My head jerked back in fear as I heard a voice say to me, "It's happened again. Hasn't it, Honey? After all we've been through. I'm not going to coddle you and try to potty train you again. If that's the way you want to live your life, then I'll treat you the way you deserve. Let me get Gina tucked into her crib and then I'll come back and clean you up. Don't move, I'll be back in a minute."

She came into the bathroom and said, "Stand up. That's a good boy. Now step out of those pants. Leave them there on the floor, I'll get them later."

She held out her hand as I slipped off my shoes and stepped out to my trousers. "Come on," she said taking my hand, "Let's go to your room and I'll change you.""Our bedroom?", I asked hopefully.

She shook her head sadly and said, "You know which room I mean, Honey. The one you used before your treatments. If you're going to act like this because there's a baby around, there's only one thing I can do. You're going to have to start wearing diapers again and sleep in your old room. Come on, baby, let's go. You're dripping all over the floor.""Are you going to tell my doctor?", I asked timidly as she led me down the hall.

She looked at me and said somberly, "No, Honey. The time for doctors and treatments is over. You've had your chance. You're ill and you're never going to get better. It's time we faced up to it and deal with it as best we can."

We reached the door to my old room and we stopped in front while she reached into the pocket of her pants and produced a large old fashioned key. Pauline unlocked the door and swung it open, saying, "Go on, you know where I want you."

The room was exactly as I had left it a year ago. Everything was sparkling clean and free of dust. I shuddered as I realized she must be cleaning it once a week to keep it ready for me. I shuffled over to the twin bed sitting stripped to its plastic mattress protector next to one wall. It was offset from the wall about two and one half feet, enough to let her get to both sides of the table while I was laying on it. I lay down on the table on my tummy and she said, "That's not how I want you Honey. Now be a good baby and turn over on your back.""But I'll get the mess all over me!", I protested."You let me worry about that, baby. Now turn over," she told me firmly.

I rolled over obediently and waited for her to pull down my filthy briefs. Instead, I head the soft swishing sound of metal on metal and felt something cold against my leg. The elastic waistband popped up and snapped up around my waist and lay limply on my stomach. She moved around to the other side of the table and I felt the leg opening become loose on the other side as she scissored her way through the fabric. "Please,...please don't cut them," I begged."Why not, Honey? You're not going to be wearing them again. In fact, you're never going to wear adult underwear again," she said grimly."I'm sorry. Please don't do this to me! I didn't mean it. It was an accident! I did everything the doctor wanted. I even had shock treatments to make me stop. I can't help my self!", I whined."I know you did, Honey. Do you remember what the doctor said? There are legal limits on the number of ECT treatments a doctor can give someone and you've had all the treatments they can safely give you. I know you've tried, Honey." She pulled the front of the briefs down in front and said, "Lift your legs, Honey. You know what to do."

I pulled my knees back to my chest and held them with my hands as she wiped the poop off of my rear with a babywipe. She shook her head and said, "Oh dear! Just look at what the drugs they gave you to reduce your sex drive did to you."

Pauline took my testicles in her hand and wiped them off in another babywipe and said, "Poor baby, your balls aren't any bigger than shelled peanuts. No wonder you haven't been able to perform like a man. I wish you'd have shown me what they looked like. I thought you were faking to get sympathy from me. These aren't any bigger than a little baby's balls. Don't worry, Honey, I won't be asking you for sex. Now lift up your behind, Honey, so mommy can put a clean diaper under your bottom."

I did as I was told and let her pull the diaper up between my legs and tape the sides together. Tears of self pity rolled down my face as she gave the top on the diaper a final tug to cover my stomach and helped me to a sitting position. "Come on, Honey. Mommy's going to make a phone call and she wants you to talk on the phone."

I shivered in apprehension as I asked, "Who are you calling, Pauline?"

She looked at me sternly and said, "I don't think you should be calling me by my name until you stop acting like a baby. Until you start acting your age, you'll call me mommy."

I hung my head and said, "Yes, mommy."

She took me into the living room where she placed a call to the home of the lab's Board of Directors. She told them Gina's transformation had been a terrible shock to me and the stress had affected my health. Pauline explained that my ulcer was bleeding and the doctor had told her that it might be serious. He had recommended a period of rest until my condition stabilized. Pauline told them she was sorry but I was going to have to take a leave of absence from my position as lab director and put me on the line to confirm. My voice quavered as I told the president of the board that my wife had described my feelings exactly and that for reasons of health I was forced to take a leave of absence. I promised to send him a letter of explanation on Monday morning and handed the phone back to Pauline. "There, Honey. Doesn't that feel better? You won't have to go to nasty old work any more until you're feeling better.", she said, taking the receiver from my hand and placing it on the hook. Come on, Honey Let's get you to bed. It's time for your nap!""Nap!", I quailed, "I don't take naps!""You didn't take naps when you were a man. Now that you're a baby again you'll take a nap every afternoon. Don't worry about the letter of explanation. I'll type one up while you're taking your nap. I'll sign it and deliver it myself on Monday. You don't have to do a thing, except be yourself. Now get yourself to bed, baby! Mommy's got things to do!", she said swatting me hard on the fanny.

I was herded into the spare room that had been my bedroom when I had been ill. I heard the sound of a car door and looked out the window. It was Gina's sister. I watched through the curtains as she walked to the car carrying her 'baby' sister. It was a relief to see Gina go. I laid back down in bed and thought about everything that had happened to me in the last few years and what I had become. I was sorry I was so weak. I had always had a desire to be a baby again. When I was a teenager had secretly slept in 'diapers' I had made for a time. The 'problem' resurfaced when I was a graduate student after I saw an old rerun of a 'Twilight Zone" episode titled, "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain". It was about a man who convinces his scientist brother to inject him with an experimental youth drug to please his wife. The man is inadvertently regressed into babyhood when the untested drug causes too much rejuvenation. The story tripped some sort of hidden desire in my subconscious and all I could think about for weeks was what it must be like to be regressed into a baby. I would get an erection just thinking about it. Even the word "diaper' became erotic. Finally, late one night I went to an all night grocery store far from my house and bought a package of adult diapers. I went home and put them on, intending to masturbate and then sleep in them. When I awoke the next morning, I discovered to my horror that I had wet the diapers in my sleep. I removed the wet diaper and took a shower before going to class. After that I wore diapers to bed about three times a week. I discovered that if I wore diapers to bed, more often than not, I would wake up in the morning with a soggy diaper. This didn't worry me at first, I thought it was my subconscious playing games with itself. It wasn't unit I started to wet the bed when I wasn't wearing diapers that I began to worry. I went to see a urologist who could find nothing physically wrong with me. Until I could get control of my bladder again during sleep, he suggested I wear incontinent briefs to sleep. He suggested I see a psychiatrist to see if there wasn't a psychological component to my enuresis. I promised him I would and went home to think. A psychiatrist was out of the question; long term treatment of psychiatric problems are expensive and I didn't have any medical insurance. I would just have to wear diapers and hope for the best.

A year later I met Pauline. I had just gotten my masters and was working on my Ph.D. We dated for a little over a year before we decided to get married. My doctoral thesis was accepted and made quite a stir in the Physics community. I was invited to test my theories at a research laboratory and accepted. Pauline and I got married and we moved here where I became the director's assistant. Everything was fine for the first months, then the urge to sleep in diapers returned with a vengeance. I snuck around for a few months wearing a cloth diaper under the sweat pants I wore on weekends until Pauline caught me. Then we had the biggest row of our marriage. She insisted that I go to a psychiatrist to treat me for my pedophilia. I tried to explain to her that I wasn't a dangerous pervert, I only liked to sleep in diapers. In the end, I bowed to her wishes and went to a psychiatrist. The doctor examined me and found that I was, as he explained, a sexual infantilist. He told me it was not uncommon and usually harmless unless it got out of hand. He told me it was considered treatable, but the treatments might have long term side effects. When I asked him what they were, he told me the drugs used to reduce my sex drive during the treatments might produce long term impotence. Having been only recently married, I rejected his offer of treatment out of hand. I suspected my marriage might not last too long if I began it by becoming impotent. I explained my concerns to the psychiatrist and he agreed it probably wasn't a good idea. He offered to speak to Pauline about my 'problem' and I readily agreed. The next day Pauline accompanied me to the doctor's office for a consultation. When he explained to her about my infantile fixation she appeared relieved and gave me the strangest look. She agreed that if my fixation only made me want to sleep in diapers occasionally, she wouldn't object. She told the doctor that her main concern was that I was some kind of sexual psychopath. The doctor assured her that my behavior, although mildly deviant, was nothing to be concerned about.

On the way home we stopped at a grocery store. Pauline said that she needed to buy some personal toiletries and asked me to wait in the car while she went in to make her purchases. She came out carrying a large paper bag and put it in the trunk without letting me see what was inside. Pauline had an enigmatic smile on her face as she drove the rest of the way home in silence. She took the bag out of the truck and carried it in the house refusing my offers to help. She made us a late lunch and suggested we take a nap. I agreed happily, thinking she really meant for us to play bedroom games. After lunch she told me to watch the news while she got the bed ready. I smiled in anticipation at the thought. A few minutes later, she came in the living room and told me it was time for a nap. I walked into the bedroom expecting to find her nightgown laid out on the bed for me to admire before taking our 'nap'. Instead, I discovered she had spread an old sheet over the comforter on my half of the bed. She followed me in our bedroom and told me, "Strip off all your clothes, Honey, and lay down on the sheet on your tummy. Pauline removed her own clothes as I stripped mine off and threw them on the chair.

I laid down on the sheet and she proceeded to rub my back down with lotion. She seemed to take an extra long time massaging the lotion into the skin of my buttocks. She kneaded and pushed the muscles of my behind until they were completely flaccid while I moaned in happiness. When she had finished with my bottom she slapped it playfully and told me to turn over. Then she began rubbing my feet with lotion, working her way up my legs until she reached my groin. She stopped there and began again at my shoulders and worked her way down my body all the way to my crotch. I lay back in an ecstasy of physical pleasure as she lovingly massaged my testicles while saying, "Do you like this baby? Is this what mommy's little boy wants?".

I became rock hard in reply and she said, "Ahhh.. So I was right! This is what you want! Could it be that mommy's baby would like something else?"

I whimpered in sexual frustration and she said, "I think you're about ready. Don't you?"

Pauline got on the bed on top of me and straddled my body with her legs. Within a minute she was stroking me with long, slow movements of her body. I writhed in a torment of delight as she began stroking faster and faster. My world exploded as we climaxed together gloriously. She grinned at me and said, "Did you enjoy that, Honey? You've been such a good boy that mommy has a present for you. Now close your eyes and roll over on your tummy."

I complied, wondering what she had for me that could possibly top her last performance. I felt her rub something soft and soothing over my bottom and heard the crinkling of plastic next to me on the bed. She told me to turn over and close my eyes which I did unhesitatingly. Pauline must have put a pad beside me I thought because I felt my bottom raised from the bed slightly as I rolled over onto my back. The next thing I knew she was rubbing my crotch with the silken substance that she had been rubbing on my bottom. A fragrant perfume reached my nose reminding me of something I had smelled long ago. Baby powder! She was putting baby powder on me!

I immediately became erect again causing her to say, " Baby likes this, doesn't he? Wait baby, the best is yet to come. Now lift your legs Honey. No, don't open your eyes yet. You'll have to trust me. You can do that can't you? Spread your legs. That's right. Now put them down again."

I heard the sound of thin plastic as she pulled something up between my legs. Her breasts brushed against my stomach as she tugged at one side of my waist with something and then pulled at the other side. I shivered in renewed sexual excitement. "She couldn't be...Oh God, she must be...", I thought as she stopped.

I wanted to thrash about, to bite the pillow, to grab her breast and suck like a baby. I was willing to do anything to release the throbbing urgency I felt. She took me be the hand and told me to sit up without opening my eyes. I sat up and she helped me to my feet. We took three small baby steps and she told me to stop and open my eyes.

I looked and saw my reflection in the full length dressing mirror. I practically collapsed when I saw what I was wearing. She had diapered me!

The white plastic of the disposable diaper stood out starkly against the bronze color of my skin. My erection made the diaper bulge hugely out in front. I had never been this horny in my life! The muscles of my legs tr embled threatening to collapse beneath me. I was weak with excitement. Pauline grinned and said, "What an adorable baby you make, Honey. Now you're all ready to take your nap."

She patted me on my fanny and I orgasmed helplessly in my diaper. I sagged against her as she smiled in success. I melted weakly in her arms. She helped me to the bed and tucked me in as I tried hopelessly to thank her. She climbed in bed beside me and explained that she too had a secret. She said that she had always wanted a baby, but had had an infection when she was very young that had made her unable to bear a child. She told me that she was sorry that she hadn't told me, but she hadn't been able to gather up the courage to tell me. I told her it was alright and soon we were both asleep. Later that afternoon a was awoken by a kiss on my forehead. I rolled over and felt her hand on my thigh exploring my diaper. I snuggled up closer to her as she slipped her hand down the front of my diaper. It was clear what she wanted, I wanted it too. "Honey," she exclaimed in surprise, "You're sopping wet! Oh my God! Don't tell me you wet your diaper!"

She leapt out of the bed and came around to my side of the bed. I cringed in terror as she tore the bedclothes off me and glared down at me as if I were a naughty toddler. "I'm sorry...I didn't mean to..", I whimpered in my defense."Silence!", she roared. "Did you pee in our bed deliberately?""No....no, I wouldn't do anything like that.", I plainted."Have you ever wet the bed before?", she demanded."Yyy....yes," I stuttered in fear."How long ago and how often?", she demanded.

I told her the story of what happened to me in graduate school and what the doctor had said. She looked at me seriously and said, "I've said you can wear a diaper to sleep in and I'm not going back on my word. But if you think I intend to wake up in a wet bed, Honey, you've got another thing coming. You can sleep in the spare bedroom if you going to wet your diapers. Now get up and take a shower. We're going to Wal-Mart to get a plastic mattress protector for the bed.

That night she diapered me again and make me sleep in the bed of the spare bedroom. I was mortified by the way she treated me. She acted like I was a barely trained toddler when she put me to bed. The next night I begged her for the privilege of sleeping in the bed with her. She told me I couldn't wear a diaper if I was going to sleep in the same bed with her. I told her humbly that I'd rather go without diapers than sleep alone and she allowed me the privilege of sleeping at her side.

The next morning I awoke in a puddle of urine. She rolled over in the wet spot and woke up in a rage. She told me what a no-good pervert I was and hauled me out of bed by main force. I cowered at the side of the bed as she stripped it and toweled the mattress dry. She manhandled me into the bathroom and ripped the sodden diaper off of my body. Then she pushed me into the shower and turned on the cold water full blast. In a few minutes she pulled me out; a wet, shivering, terrorized mess. She toweled me dry roughly and then dragged me to the spare bedroom where she forced me to lie down on the bed and be rediapered. I wept at her treatment of me and kept begging to be forgiven, but she slapped me on the face and told me that she had married a man, not a unhousebroken toddler. She made me stay in diapers the rest of the weekend and use them as if I were a baby.

When Monday came, she let me wear underwear to work and I kissed her and thanked her profusely for forgiving me. Our relationship had undergone a profound change since Friday. I wasn't my wife's equal since the doctor had explained my infantilism to her. Strangely, she had still respected me when she thought I was a psychopath, but now I was only a bedwetting, immature husband who had to be taken in hand and dictated to like a little boy.

Tuesday morning I wet the bed again and she told me that I could consider the spare bed my own. She said she had no intention of letting me sleep in her bed again. She forced me to wear diapers to bed every night and started making me wear diapers during the day on the weekends. After a while, things settled down and both of us got used to having me wake up in wet diapers. She seemed to get over her anger and allowed me to parade around the house wearing my diapers in the evenings after work.

Almost imperceptibly, I started to regress after that. I'd wake up with my thumb in my mouth and several times she caught me sucking my thumb while we watched TV. I tried to hide it but the urge was too strong for me. Half the time I was unaware I was doing it. It was difficult to remember at work and I began sucking on the ends of pencils and pens to keep my mouth occupied when I wasn't speaking of eating.

That week the director called me into his office. Despite the events of the past few weeks (or perhaps because of them), I had managed to solve some seemingly intractable problems that we had been working on. The director told me he was pleased to tell me that the board had decided to share a percentage of the profits the patents were expected to produce. He told me that this would be a legal assignment of a share and would be unaffected by whether I stayed at the lab or choose to leave in the future. The director reminded me that Dr. Land of Polaroid-Land had become a millionaire in just such a way. He slapped me on the back and told me that if the projections of profitability materialized, I could expect to be a wealthy man in a year or two. He also told me that he had asked the Board to name me as the executive director of the lab. The work that I had done had convinced him that I was the right man for the job. He said I could expect to hear the decision of the Board by the end of the week, but he had been privately assured that the appointment would be approved. I thanked him and went back to my office in a daze. Too much had happened to me in the past two months. I simply wasn't capable of dealing with everything that was going on.

The situation became more difficult at home as Pauline stopped discussing family and household issues with me and merely told me what decisions she had made. I was annoyed by her treatment of me, but I couldn't see any way to get her to respect me again. Frankly, I was ashamed of how I was acting and didn't want her to comment on it. My thumbsucking became more conspicuous at home and her dealings with me became more and more condescending. She never called me by name, but only by the endearments, Honey or baby. If it became necessary to explain something to me, she would tap her foot impatiently and tell me in excruciatingly simple terms. She wouldn't allow me to drive anywhere but work by myself and insisted on overseeing my performance of the smallest tasks. I felt like I was being scrutinized constantly under her watchful eye.

My appointment for executive director came through with a substantial increase in pay. I was given management authority over all pending projects as well as a staff of my own. Life had become a study in dichotomy for me; at work I ruled my own fiefdom with full authority and autonomy while at home my privileges were becoming more restricted and childlike. It seemed like the more honors that were heaped upon me professionally, the more contempt I was held in at home. I started having stomach pains from the stress and was taken to a specialist in Internal Medicine by Pauline. His diagnoses was that I was showing the initial symptoms of an ulcer. The doctor gave me a prescription for Tagamet and told my wife that she should restrict my diet to bland foods served with plenty of milk. She smiled as she assured him that she would see that would be all I ate.

All the stress made me suck my thumb more frequently in front of her until it became strange for her to see me without my thumb in my mouth. I started having 'accidents' in my diaper before going to sleep. I'd be sitting there on the couch beside her watching TV and suddenly discover I was peeing in my diaper. This caused her to go out and buy a plastic upholstered easy chair for me and make several terry cloth covers for the bottom cushion to keep me from damaging the chair. After that she refused to allow me to sit anywhere in the living room but 'my' chair. She stopped letting me wear anything over my diapers at home and developed the disconcerting habit of sticking her fingers down the front of my diapers at odd times to see if I was wet. She bought several pairs of loose fitting warming suits and jackets for me to wear over my diapers when we had to go out together. Pauline also bought some large overalls for wear at home that she intended to modify into rompers by ripping out the leg and crotch seams and putting in large snaps. She decorated the front of the bib with appliques of teddy bears she had bought at the fabric store. She would greet me at the door every night when I came home from work and take me directly to my bedroom to put me into diapers and rompers for the evening.

After I had an 'accident' at lunch one day and had to come home for a clean pair of trousers she hid my shorts and made me wear incontinence briefs under my clothes.

I could feel myself slipping more under her control every day. My behavior at home became childish; I started throwing temper tantrums if I couldn't watch the TV programs I wanted to see. She would wait patiently for me to finish, then tell me I'd been naughty and put me to bed. When my tantrums became more frequent, she stopped letting me have drinks with caffeine in response. She explained that both anger and caffeine increased the production of stomach acid and if I couldn't hold my temper, she would have to do what she could to keep my ulcer from becoming acute. My morning coffee was replaced by a glass of milk before I went to work. I had milk at every meal and the unaccustomed milk sugars made my stools loose.

I was losing it and I knew it wouldn't be very long before I had an "accident" in my diaper of a different type. When I broached the subject to her, she introduced bran into my diet. The bran made more stools more firm, but my regularity increased to the point where I had to go several times a day. Fortunately, ulcers were common among my colleagues and the trips to the bathroom at work were interpreted as symptomatic of a worsening stomach condition.

Dinner at home had become pure hell for me. Pauline had kept her promise to the doctor immediately and stopped serving me the spicy foods that I enjoyed. Gradually the meals she served me became simpler and more suited to a child's taste than an adult's. She still ate adult meals, the money she saved by serving me hot dogs and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches was spent on more expensive dishes like Rack of Lamb and Filet Minion for herself. Pauline started monitoring my bowel habits constantly. She would ask me every morning before I went to work whether I had had a bowel movement. If I hadn't, she would take my bologna (ugh!) sandwich out of my lunch bag and replace it with a plastic baggie of prunes (double ugh!).

Pauline starting taking the active role in our lovemaking, deciding if and when we would make love and then making me lie passively on the bed while she mounted me and took her pleasure. My wife's domination of me had an energizing effect on me at work. I pushed through several projects ahead of schedule by personally solving whatever riddles had been slowing research. It seemed like at work I could do no wrong; I fairly sparkled with creative insights. Work had become a form of play for me and I wallowed in it happily. When I entered the room the occupants became quieter and when I began to speak, the room became hushed. Even the secretaries who as a group had never been impressed with the ivory tower types who they were forced by an unkind fate to serve, became willing worshipers at the temple of my ego. In a crowning moment, the lab director had his third heart attack and I was selected as his successor. My earlier brilliance had dazzled the President of the Board and they looked forward to making obscene amounts of money from my work.

My standing at work reached its zenith as my status at home continued to crawl toward its nadir. Sex became a rare event for me as Pauline seemed to loose interest in having "normal" relations with me. Not that she was sexually frustrated, she would force me to get on my hands and knees every night in front of the couch and "pleasure" her with my tongue while she watched porno movies on the VCR. On Saturday afternoon after a large lunch of mixed vegetables, I had the "accident" I had feared. Pauline was sitting on the couch with her legs spread wide for my "services" as I knelt in front of her and prepared to render her the attention she felt I owed her. I got down on my hands and was bowing my head into her lap when an ominous rumble came from my gut. The all too familiar need to visit the bedroom made me stop and ask for permission to leave and take care of my physical demands. Pauline grabbed me by the ear and forced my head back into its submissive position. I resumed my duties praying she would be satisfied quickly, but my hopes were dashed when I heard the sound of the tape being rewound. I released a small fart followed closely by another. "Oh God," I prayed, "Please let me hold it in a little longer!"

Pauline was writhing on the couch in front of me as she approached a crescendo of passion. I felt my bowels start to move and tried to pull away from her, but she pushed my face deep into her bush as she started to climax. She groaned in ecstasy as my overburdened bowels let go and I began filling the diaper. I saw her eyes glaze over in passion and was quietly slipping away to sneak into the bathroom when the smell of what I had done hit her. She flew into a rage and told me what an infant I had become, then she seized me by the hand and led me into the front hall. She grabbed a double handful of clothes from the closet and took them into the living room while I waited, quivering with fright in front of the open closet. When Pauline came back she told me to get into the closet and stay there until I learned to behave myself. She locked the door behind me and I stood for hours in the darkness before I finally sat down. I was terrified of what she might do, I whimpered at the door until she told me to stop my caterwauling or she would take a hairbrush to my behind. About an hour later she came to the closet door again and told me she had to do some shopping. I moaned silently as I heard the news. My bottom had started itching and I knew I must be getting a bad case of diaper rash. I felt like I had to BM. By the time she got back, I would have pooped and peed in my diaper again. I stood until my legs wouldn't hold me and then I sat down in the tiny closet in the mess I had made. I sucked my thumb while she was gone and tried to think about other things rather than the itching. After a while I fell asleep leaning against the wall.

The door opened and I sleepily opened my eyes up at the blinding light in the hallway. Pauline was standing there shaking her head saying, "Look at you. Did you poop in your dydee again? I'm ashamed of you. Look at the mess you've made on the floor! Did you know you're sitting a big puddle of pee? You're nothing but a baby! Get out of there, baby!"

I pulled my thumb out of my mouth and struggled to get up. The sodden, overfilled diaper hung heavily on my hips and drooped dangerously. I looked down and saw she was right, I had made a big mess! I stepped out of the closet and she said, "Get down on your hands and knees baby. You can crawl to your bedroom for your diaper change. I don't want to see you walking until I tell you it's okay to act like a toddler again. You're not going to be mommy's baby toddler anymore, from mow on you're going to be mommy's LITTLE baby. Little babies don't walk or talk and I don't want to see you do either until I tell you its alright. Do you understand?"

I hung my head and softly said, "Yes, mommy.""What did you say? I thought I just told you I didn't want to hear you talking. Now get down on your hands and knees and talk to me like a baby. Say 'gaaa'!"

I got down of the floor at her feet and said quietly, "Gaaa?!""Louder!", she commanded."Gaaaaa!!!", I almost shouted."Again!", she demanded."Gaaa!", I replied."More! I want to hear you talk the way you did when you were only a year old.", she ordered."Aga..bmmm goooo gahmoga!", I returned. I began to pee again and panic overtook me. I started to cry like a real baby! She made me crawl down the hall and into my bedroom as I wept and cried to be changed. She helped me on the bed and unfastened my diaper, saying, "Ohhh, mommy's baby is sure 'tinky this afternoon.

Pauline changed my diaper and made me spend the rest of the afternoon playing on a blanket in front of the TV. When it was time for dinner, she made me crawl on the floor to the kitchen where she bibbed me and fed me baby food she had purchased earlier that day at the grocery store. She wiped my face with a baby's feeding bib and gave me a bottle of formula to drink when I had finished eating. Then she held my hand to 'help' me toddle to the living room. Shortly after dinner I pooped in my diaper again and she changed me on the blanket in front of the TV. We watched the tube until eight thirty when she told me it was time for bed. I whimpered in frustration at being forced to go to bed so early in the evening, but she told me that little babies had to get their sleep. Not being allowed to talk kept me from arguing with her, so I reluctantly went to bed as I was told.

Sunday morning I woke to find I had messed in my diaper again. I cried to get Pauline's attention for thirty minutes before she came in to change me. The irritation of the day before had developed into diaper rash during the night. I whimpered as she spread diaper cream thickly over the affected area and put me into a clean diaper. If this continued I would be diaper dependent by the end of the week. For that matter, I wasn't altogether sure that I wasn't diaper dependent then. She made me crawl to the kitchen where she fed me a huge bowl of sweetened oat bran for breakfast. I spent the rest of Sunday as Pauline's baby. I peed and pooped in my diapers all day as if I was a baby again. On one occasion I wasn't even aware that I had made a mess. I had been playing on my blanket and the poop had slipped out of me without any warning or sensation. When the odor reached Pauline, she got a clean diaper and knelt on the blanket beside me intending to change my diaper. I had gotten used to the smell of dirty diapers by this time and hadn't noticed. I was surprised and embarrassed when, without a word, she made me lay on my back and proceeded to change me. I threw a temper tantrum in frustration and was soundly spanked with her hairbrush after Pauline had removed my diaper and cleaned my behind. I wept and mooned up at the mommy my wife had become, trying to beg her forgiveness with my expression alone. Monday morning she cleaned me up and helped me get ready for work. I was allowed to walk and talk again, but I was acting irritable and petulant. When I went to the door to go to work, I had a bowel movement in my pants. I began to cry and Pauline offered to change me before I went to work. I told her I was never going to work again. I couldn't face my colleagues knowing that any minute I might poop in my pants. I told her that as of that minute I was retired. We could live off of the income that my share of the patents that the Board had given me.

She was livid! She told me it might be six months before the income from my share started coming in. I refused. I told her that had no intention of ever going to work again. She told me if that was the way I felt I could stay home from work that day. She would call the lab and tell them I was sick. She insisted that I go and talk to my doctor about my incontinence. I agreed only to get her off my back. She took me back to my bedroom and took off my incontinent briefs and cleaned me up. Then she put me in diapers and a t-shirt to wear while she called the doctor for an emergency appointment. She was able to get an appointment for eleven o'clock. I spent the time watching the morning cartoons on TV while sitting on my blanket. At ten she came into the living room with one of my rompers in hand. I quailed at the thought of wearing rompers and diapers to see the doctor, but she told me that the decision had already been made. When I became stubborn and refused she got her hair brush and threatened to spank me until my bottom was blistered. I passively allowed her to dress me and off to the doctor's office we went.

She escorted me into the psychiatrist's office and explained how my behavior had regressed into the childish state which the doctor saw displayed before him. I listened silently as she told him how I started wetting my diapers at night and then during the day. She told him about my 'poopy accidents' in my diapers. He looked at me with an ill-disguised sympathy for my obvious illness. When she told him about my thumb sucking I almost choked. While I had been sitting there listening to Pauline vilify me, my hand had snuck up to my face and slipped my thumb in my mouth. I jerked it out quickly in embarrassment and shifted position on the sofa. The cloth of my overalls stuck to the fabric of the sofa putting strain on my crotch snaps. The snaps burst open at once and the seam parted to reveal the diaper I was wearing beneath. I was mortified. Pauline glanced over at the sound as smiled as she saw what had happened. She looked at the doctor as if to say, "See? Look at him! I was right, wasn't I?"

I cringed under the doctor's thoughtfully gaze and tried to make myself smaller on the sofa. All at once my bladder cut loose and a large yellow stain began appearing in the bulge of my diaper. I started to whimper in shame at what had happened. The doctor nodded and said, "I see what you mean and I'm afraid I agree with you. You husband needs institutional treatment and quickly, before this develops into a full blown psychosis. I have the papers here necessary to begin proceedings to commit him. With what I've seen here today, I don't think there'll be any problem in getting a judge to agree to a ninety day commitment for observation."

He turned to me and said, "Unless of course you wish to agree to a voluntary commitment? You understand that if you commit yourself there won't be any court records. If you arrange to pay for the treatment yourself without going through your insurance company I don't think there'll be any problem with keeping your treatment confidential. You can tell your employer that you've gone into the hospital for treatment of your ulcer. If you cooperate I think we can have you out of the hospital in two to three weeks. Of course that assumes you are willing to continue treatment on an outpatient basis. What do you say?"

I nodded and he said, "Good! Now there are some other matters we need to discuss. Pauline, your husband's neurotic sexual fixation has developed into an obsession that threatens to become psychosis. I'd like your permission to give him electro-convulsive therapy to break up the compulsive patterns that are destroying his personality. We'll do that in the hospital. I'll also give him treatments with a drug called Versed. It's a hypnotic/amnesiac that will allow me to dig deeply into his subconscious. It will also allow me to give him posthypnotic suggestions to modify his behavior and improve his subconscious self-image. Statistically there's an eighty percent chance that the suggestions will be followed by the patient exactly. The amnesiac properties of the drug will keep him from remembering the treatments and amplify the amnesiac properties of the ECT treatments. He'll be unable to remember the details of this entire episode. It will just be a hazy memory to him. After we release him, I'll begin treatments for his sexual deviation. I'm afraid that that the treatments will affect his sex drive for some time to come. I'll have to give him medications that will reduce his sex drive to nothing for a while. In time his obsessions will lose their power over him and disappear. Since there's nothing organically wrong with him, I think I can promise you that he'll regain his bowel and bladder control by the time he leaves the hospital. If the treatment I've suggested is acceptable to you, then we'll begin right away. I'll take him to the hospital myself. All you need to do is sign the pap ers."

The psychiatrist took some papers out of his desk and began filling the forms out and pushed them across his desk toward Pauline when he was done. She sign and then the two of them looked meaningfully at me waiting for my response. I had no choice, if I didn't sign, they'd get a judge to commit me and my position at the lab would be forfeit. I signed reluctantly and the psychiatrist made a phone call to arrange for my admission.

The trip to the hospital was uneventful, I stared out of the side window silently as I watched the world speed by. I was taken to a locked ward where I was locked into a private room after reliving me of my clothes. It was humiliating. I was forced to disrobe in front of a nurse who I could have sworn was hiding a smile when she saw my wet diapers. She told me to sit on the chair while she got something for me to wear. When she came back I saw that she had a stack of disposable diapers in hand. She made me lay on the bed so she could change and put a hospital gown on me.

The details after that are hazy to me, I guess the doctor wasn't wrong about what the drugs and the ECT treatments would do to my memory. My next clear memory is being in the doctor's office dressed in street clothes. He was giving me an injection in my arm to reduce my sex drive. I remember thinking that I couldn't remember anything about my treatments, only that I thought it was ridiculous for a grown man to have to wear diapers and I was glad Pauline had made me go into the hospital. I was still anxious about receiving the sex drug and hoped that all this effort on the doctor's part wasn't going to be wasted. Within a week my testicles shrank into minuscule organs and the final treatments began. The doctor told me that he'd have to keep me on the drug for some time after my daily psychiatric visits had stopped. I hid the changes in my sex organs from Pauline because my lack of manliness had made me deeply ashamed. Pauline was especially nice to me during this period, she never demanded that I make love to her. She was apparently satisfied with the only thing I was able to offer her; oral sex. Having forgotten what had most of what happened during my illness, I was astonished at her understanding and patience with my sexual dysfunction.

My illness was understood to be an ulcer treatment at the lab and my fogginess of mind was attributed to the tranquilizers I was taking. I wasn't as brilliant as I was before but I was still a solid careful researcher. When the suggestion came down from the Board of Directors to build a matter transmitter, I finally understood why I had been hired. I had written about the theoretical possibility of matter transmission in my Doctoral Thesis. They alluded to my thesis in the meeting I had with them and told me that I was the man they wanted to head the project. I spent the next year building the prototype of the machine. I had to take larger and larger doses of Tagamet to enable me to function. The stress of loosing my wonderful ability to immediately see the solutions to problems battered my psyche daily. My colleagues didn't seem to mind. It was less ego bruising to have a 'normal' genius for a boss rather than the superhuman genius they had had before. I felt like I was cheating when I referred back to my original notes from my thesis to build the machine. A few months ago, I could have done it from memory alone. My psychiatrist assured me that most of my memory would return in time, but there was regretfully, always some loss of intelligence associated with ECT treatments. I was nervous about my performance, but my notes and my team carried the day and we built the first prototype for testing.

*************

Pauline was right, I deserved to be treated like a baby! The treatments had only been temporary, I would spend the rest of my life in diapers pooping and peeing like a one year old. I awoke in my bedroom with a wet and dirty diaper as I expected I would. My world had collapsed around me. The only bright spot in my life had been work, but now that was gone. Pauline would dominate every aspect of my life from now on. I cried in frustration when I thought about what I had lost; my job, my dignity, my freedom, even my wife. All I had now was a mommy who had loved me once as a man, but now cared for me as her adult baby. My life was laid out for me in a boundless vista upon which were strewn heaps of dirty diapers and empty formula bottles to the limits of sight. I would measure time not by the calendar, but by my feedings and naps. My cries became wails of torment when I realized that mental regression was inevitable for me. One month, perhaps two would be all I had before my mind retreated back into the serene contentment of infancy. I was doomed by my fate as certainly as Gina had been by my infernal machine.

The door opened and Pauline came in to change my diaper. She made soothing, mothering noises over me as she cleaned me up and put a fresh diaper on me. I blubbered incoherently as she slipped a t-shirt over my head and pulled my arms through the short sleeves. When she finished dressing me, she pulled me up to a sitting position on the bed and sat down beside me. Pauline pulled me to her breast and hugged me to her comfortingly, stroking the back of my head and murmuring motherly endearments into my ears. I held unto her desperately, babbling my love for my mommy. She took a kleenex from her pocket and helped me blow my nose before she tenderly dried my tears. She helped me out of bed and held my hand as we walked to the kitchen.

Pauline pinned a bib around my neck and began to lovingly feed me a breakfast of oat bran. I ate the mush willingly, enamored of the attention my mommy was lavishing upon me. I finished the bran and she got up and when to the refrigerator, coming back with my ba-ba filled with cold, sweet, refreshing formula. She held the bottle for me as I suckled on the nipple thirstily. When the bottle was half-empty she gently tugged the nipple from my lips and got up to stand behind me. Pauline patted me quietly on my back to wind me and produced a huge belch in short order. I looked up and smiled at my benefactor adoringly. My terrors had evaporated like rain drops on a warm summer's day. She wiped my face with the bib and led me to the bathroom. After giving me a quick bath, she shaved me and took me by the hand to my nursery. She dressed me in one of my rompers and put a pacifier in my mouth before helping me into my socks and shoes. Then she led me into the living room to sit on the couch. She went to the hall closet and brought me one of my old nylon windbreakers to wear over the teddy bears on my romper, then carefully brushed my hair. Pauline fastened the zipper on my jacket and grabbed her purse and keys and took me to the car.

I watched the other children playing in their yards as she negotiated the neighborhood in her car. I hadn't a care in the world; I knew Pauline would take care of everything, including me. She drove into my parking spot at the lab and took the pacifier out of my mouth and helped me out of her car. The lab was closed as usual on Sunday but Pauline had my key and let us in. I stood at the console I had spent so long designing and answered Pauline's questions without thinking why she wanted to know how to operate the machine. She led me over to the testing stage and made me sit down before she left to man the control console. I chuckled at the pretty lights as the main power supply came up and the computer came online. The whine of charging capacitors bore into me and alerted me that something was wrong. I was in the machine! What was Pauline doing? I started to scream, "Pauline, please...Nooooo". The lights in the room flickered and........

The world had changed before my eyes, everything was huge and terrifying. I felt trapped in the tent-like clothes that swaddled my body. I started to cry in fright. Pauline turned off the machine and ran to my side. She quickly untangled me from the clothes I had been wearing only a few minutes before. I quieted immediately as she pulled a folded diaper from her back pocket and laid me on my back. I marveled at how easily she was able to pick up my feet and slip the diaper under me. I hadn't realized how strong she was before. Thirty seconds later she had fastened me securely into my diaper and was picking me up to ride on her hip. I put my hand on her breast as was surprised that I couldn't cup my hand over it like I used to, my hand had become tiny. "Ohhhh," I thought, "that's how she can pick me up. I've gotten smaller, a lot smaller."

She knelt down and folded my clothes into a loose bundle with her free hand, then picked them up. Pauline turned out the lights behind her and locked the door as we left the lab. When we reached the car, she unlocked the trunk and took out the auto seat she had bought for Gina. She sat me on the floor of the car while she wrestled the seat into position and buckled it in place. Then she picked me up and sat me in the infant seat. I was surprised at how comfortable it was, the padding allowed my to rest my head against the side and watch as she pulled the strap up between my legs and connect it with the shoulder straps. Then she tightened the straps against my body and took my pacifier out of her pocket and put it in my mouth. I looked at the world in renewed wonder as the cars and streets passed by my window. Presently I became sleepy and drifted off to sleep.

I woke up sitting in a grocery cart facing my mommy. She went to the baby aisle and began filling the cart with supplies; diapers, babywipes, baby food, extra bottles and formula rapidly filled the cart in front of me. To my intense delight, she bought an assortment of baby toys and put them in the cart as well. From there we went to Wal-Mart. Everything started getting fuzzy like I had been drugged and I began to have trouble thinking. The colors in the room danced around me as I sat in the Wal-Mart cart. Mommy held up the prettiest rompers next to me. They looked so soft I reached out my hand to touch them. They were pretty! Pretty blue and green with my favorite pictures of bears on them. I chortled happily when I saw mommy put them in the cart. Mommy was ge tting the pretty clothes for me! She put in more and more and more. My mommy was getting lots and lots of clothes for me to wear! She put in lot of other things too; lots of things that goes around my neck when I eat, clothe things to wash me in my bath and pretty things to put over my dydee. I clapped my hands in joy at all the pretty things she was getting me. She even got me a soft, soft, blue blankee to sleep with. She went over and got cloth things to put over the windows and bear pictures to put on the wall. Then we went home. Mommy put up the playpen she had got for my friend Gina and let me sit in it while she made my room pretty.

I fell asleep and woke up in mommy's arms. She was carrying me to my room. Mommy stopped by the hall mirror and showed me what she had dressed me in while I was sleeping. I saw an adorable eleven or twelve month old baby staring back at me dressed in a darling baby blue sleeper. "Pauline must have put me in a nighttime diaper," I thought.

The outlines of the diaper bulged prominently around my bottom. My open mouth exposed toothless gums, I couldn't see any rear teeth in the cute baby's mouth reflected in the mirror. Drool was rolling off my chin and dripped onto my chest heightening the impression of infantine incompetence. Pauline had solved my problems, I wouldn't have to worry about what people thought of me for wearing diapers and sucking my thumb. All they would see is a charming baby boy. I smiled up at my mommy in gratitude for the change she had wrought.

She laid me down in my crib and leaned over to talk to me. It was hard to understand her; the words were too big. I heard her say, "I hope you know that I love you, Sweetiepie. I've decided to be your mommy. I'm sorry I had to turn you into a baby, Sugar. I couldn't stand to see you the way you were, baby. The thought of having to take care of an adult sized infant was overwhelming. I knew you were too big for me to take care of myself. You weren't going to get any better, Honey. You were only going to get more and more helpless as time went on. You'll be easier to take care of now that you're baby sized. You're so small now that you weigh next to nothing. I won't have any problems carrying you around or changing you. Now we'll both have what we wanted most in life; I'll have a little baby of my own and you'll get to stay a baby for the rest of your life. It doesn't matter that you're never going to get any older. Mommy will take care of everything, you'll see. You don't have to be embarrassed about wearing diapers now. No one will think anything of it. You'll be mommy's little baby forever!"

I stretched out my arms to her and she leaned over the crib and began tickling me. I chuckled in glee as she said, "I'm going to call the lab tomorrow and tell them you became very depressed and went to your lab today. I'll tell them I was worried and followed you to the lab. When I got there I discovered you had turned the machine on and were sitting on the test platform. The lights dimmed and you were turned into a baby. They'll think you destroyed yourself in remorse over what happened to Gina. No one will ever know what really happened. I don't want you to worry your little head about the money, baby. Your mommy has a plan. I'm going to call your insurance company and tell them you've been disabled in a laboratory "accident". Since you can't walk, talk or do anything for yourself, the company won't have any choice but to find that you're one hundred percent disabled. I'll also apply for Social Security Disability for you. With our savings and your disability checks we'll do fine until the money from the patents comes through. I won't have to work. You'll have a full time mommy to take care of you the rest of your life."

She tucked me and kissed me on the forehead saying, "Sweet dreams, Honey. Mommy loves you. Tomorrow will be the first day of your new life."

I gurgled happily and peed in my dydee as she turned out the light and I drifted off into slumber. The winter of my discontent was over, now came the eternal springtime of my mother's love.

Finis coronat infans

Contact the author at jennifer@phuze.com

Other Stories by Jennifer Loraine

 

Copyright 1998 by Jennifer Loraine. All rights reserved.

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