The Kinky Wizard’s Ring - Chapter 4

Hello,

Continuing where we left off. Because of my magic ring, I was stuck at my sister’s house in the body of a doll, unable to move except around her brat daughter, who was keeping me prisoner. Also, my mom was coming to visit soon. Let’s see how I managed to get out of this hell.

***

Up in the attic that afternoon, Felicity decided I needed to play in the dollhouse. I could move again, but I made no attempt to escape. Where would I go in the middle of the day? My only hope would be to sneak out in the middle of the night. Until then… playtime. Felicity started by taking my discarded clothes and shoes and my purse and stuffing them all in a box, hiding any evidence that I was still in the building. Then, she put me in the dollhouse, stripped me naked, and made me wait as she picked out a new outfit for me.

I had a moment to consider my featureless body, my smooth nippleless boobs and the lack of holes between my legs. I was a neutered imitation of an adult woman, capable of beauty but incapable of pleasure. A maiden, but never a whore. I was like I had become some old-fashioned, sexist ideal of womanhood.

“Which one do you like more?” Felicity asked me, holding up two outfits laid out in her hands. On her right hand was a pink stewardess dress. On her left hand was a formal gown with a tiara.

“The flight attendant one,” I said, recalling my flight here. “At least, I’ll have a job that way.”

“Okay,” Felicity said and started forcing me into the jacket and skirt.

“Felicity?” I asked her as she worked. There was something still nagging me since the conversation over lunch.

“Yeah?” she said, struggling with the metal buttons.

“Does your dad really spank your sister, Judith?”

“‘Course he does,” she replied. “All kids get spanked if they’re bad.”

I sighed as she slipped my plastic feet into a pair of pink heels and set my pillbox hat on my head. As she gushed about how pretty I looked, I realized that old-fashioned was still very much current in this house.

***

Playtime ended eventually. What is there to say about it? I was a toy. Felicity moved me around and pretended I was doing stuff. Occasionally, she would ask for some response to what was supposed to be happening. I would play along. Basically, I was bored out of my mind, but trying to keep her from noticing. I came to resent her fingers, pushing me around, posing me. They were dirty fingers. When they were not covered in dust, they were getting sticky from candy or digging around in her nose for boogers. Stupid, sloppy, fumbling fingers. They bullied me. Once or twice, I suggested that she might let me rest for a moment. She set me on the carpet and pretended to play with other toys. In reality, she was poking me with her filthy toes while she pretended to focus on something else. Her disgusting, stinking, dirty feet nudged the side of my head “accidentally” again and again. She would not give me a single minute of peace. She had to manipulate me in some way every second she had me with her. I was so exhausted by Felicity that, when it came time for dinner, I welcomed the distraction my mother would provide.

My mother and sister were in the kitchen cooking dinner when Felicity carried me in. My mother looked well. My sister looked worn out as usual. As soon as we entered the room, my body went into doll mode again. I stiffened up and smiled.

“Grandma!” Felicity cried and ran over to give her a hug.

“Hello, sweetheart!” my mother replied, hugging Felicity back.

I was squeezed in the girl’s grip and pressed against my mother’s back. It was the closest contact we had shared in years. That I was an inanimate plastic toy seemed somehow appropriate at that moment.

The two made simple small talk that concluded with Felicity introducing me. “Look,” she said, presenting me to my mother. “It’s Aunt Maureen! She’s my doll now.”

My mother frowned down at me and said, “Jodie, how long did your sister stay here?”

“She left yesterday before we went to bed,” Jodie said, wiping her hands on a towel. “I guess she had to get home.”

My mother continued frowning as she examined my plastic face even more closely. “When did she have the time to make a doll like this for Felicity?” pondered my mother, asking no one in particular.

“It’s not a doll,” Felicity explained again, sounding somewhat exasperated at having to go over it again. “This is Aunt Maureen. She turned into a doll.”

My mother sighed and said, “Darling, people don’t turn into dolls. Most people don’t make doll replicas of themselves to give to their nieces either. Maybe I should just take that.” She reached for me.

Felicity clutched me to her chest, protectively. “Mom!” she whined.

“It’s not a big deal,” Jodie said. “Maureen probably just found a doll that looked like her at a shop somewhere. Maybe she found it at an airport. Who knows?”

“She’s putting wrong ideas in your daughter’s head.”

“It’s harmless,” Jodie said, indicating that she wished for our mother to drop this conversation, already. “Come help me with the vegetables, please.”

My mother sighed and gave me one last dirty look before turning to help my sister. It was almost amusing to think that, even as a plastic doll, I was still earning my mother’s disapproval.

***

They ate dinner, while I sat on Felicity’s lap, listening. I tried to sleep, but there was too much noise and movement for me to rest. I was stuck there as an unwilling observer, passively collecting crumbs in my doll hair. When Felicity was done eating, she lifted me up to sit me on the edge of the table.

My mother sighed.

“What’s the matter, Mom?” Jodie asked.

“That doll,” my mother said. Although I could not see her face, I could hear her frowning.

“Maureen’s doll?”

“That toy should not be on the table. And, you know what else, I’d rather you take it away.”

“It’s harmless,” Jodie reiterated.

Felicity picked me up and guarded me in her unclean hands.

“You can’t be letting the girl get away with such nonsense, even at her age.”

“She’s six.”

“That’s old enough to learn a lesson or two about her aunt.”

Felicity asked, “What’s wrong with Aunt Maureen?”

“She’s a wicked woman,” my mother said. “You should love and respect her, but you should not look up to her. She’s no role model.”

“Why not?”

“She lives in sin,” my mother said, not elaborating beyond that. “What she should do is repent and find a man to settle down with and raise a family.”

I felt like screaming or crying or running or kicking something, but all I could do was grin my vapid plastic smile.

“She’s not wicked,” Felicity replied. “She’s a good doll.”

My mother sighed and said, “Maybe bring the doll to Sunday school. I could teach you what a woman needs to do to live righteously. Your doll could play at being a good wife to her husband.”

“Okay,” Felicity said. “I’ll play at being a good wife.”

My mother smiled at the girl. I had no stomach to turn, but I felt the sensation, anyway.

***

Judith was already asleep on the top bunk when Felicity lay down in bed on the bottom. Jodie tucked her daughter in. Then, she kissed her on the forehead and wished her a good night before leaving the room. Felicity kissed me, her giant lips smushing against the whole side of my head. Then, she set me on the floor beside her bed.

I lay there quietly for a while, listening to her breathing, waiting for it to calm. When I was confident that she had fallen asleep, I got to my feet and snuck to the door as stealthily as I could on my plastic heels. Fortunately, the nightlight in the room made it easy to navigate, and the door was still open a crack, leaving plenty of space for me to sidle through it, out into the hallway.

Having gotten further than I had hoped, I now had to start planning how to get out of the house. As I walked, I wondered if there might be an open window somewhere or a cat flap on a door. I would need to climb down the stairs, first, but...

Then, I heard something that made me freeze. A toilet flushed down the hallway. My head spun nearly halfway around to see a light on behind the closed bathroom door. The sink ran, and I heard someone washing hands. I looked around for a place to hide. The hallway was empty, though. I would need to make it to the stairs. I took off running as fast as my stiff legs would move.

The bathroom door opened with the stairs still a good distance away. I kept running, hoping that whoever it was would not notice me.

“Hey,” said a boy. “What’s that?”

I let myself fall over, and played dead. My hope was that he might think he had imagined seeing me moving if he examined me and found me as inanimate as a normal doll. I faked the smile that had been forced on me many times today and waited on the floor for him to pick me up. As his heavy footsteps approached, I kept mentally chanting, “Plastic. Doll. Stiff. Smile. Plastic. Doll. Stiff. Smile…”

A damp hand, gripped me around the legs and lifted me into the air. Then, I was face-to-giant-face with a frighteningly enormous 12-year-old Bryan.

He looked me over curiously as I tried to hold as still as I could, smiling at him, desperately. “I saw you running,” he said in barely more than a whisper.

I felt terrified, but I did not react.

He carried me into the bathroom and shut the door for some privacy.

“You can move,” he accused me. “I know what I saw.”

He waited for a reaction, but I was as dead solid as a stone.

Bryan smirked, and I fought back a shiver. “Fine,” he said. “If you’re just a doll, then you won’t mind me popping off your head, right?”

He gripped my head between his finger and thumb and started to rotate it to the right. My smile fell a little, but I held out. Still, I was horrified. I had no idea what would happen to me if he removed my head. Maybe nothing. Or, maybe it would kill me. Soon, he had spun my face 180 degrees around, and I could feel the joint at my neck starting to loosen. I had only a second before it was too late.

“Stop!” I shrieked. “Please.”

Bryan was so startled that nearly dropped me. He turned my head back around to face him again. The astonished look on his face would have been comical if it were not for the fact that he was a giant and I was trapped in his grip.

“Wow,” he said. “You really are Aunt Maureen.”

I sighed and said, “I am.”

“What happened to you?” he asked.

I was too frightened at that moment to make up a lie, so I told him the truth.

***

When I finished talking, Bryan looked at me for a long time, while contemplating my story.

“Please,” I said. “Just let me out of the house. I can find my way back to my hotel room. I’m sure the wizard will get bored before then and turn me back to normal.”

His thumb creeped up to the mounds on my chest and rubbed across them. Despite being plastic, I felt it.

“Don’t,” I begged, but I had little hope that he would listen.

“Quiet,” he said and began pulling down his pajama bottoms.

***

I’m not going to describe what Bryan did next. I assume you can imagine some possibilities, but I guarantee you it was worse.

When it was over, he started rinsing my body off in the sink. As small and as young as he was, he managed to make quite a mess of my plastic body. He soaped me up to finish cleaning me. I just hung limp in his hand, letting it all happen. I had found it surprisingly easy to dissociate from my doll body during it all. After toweling me dry, he gathered up my clothes from the floor where he had scattered them.

Then, he sat me beside the sink as he finished cleaning himself up. “Don’t say a word about this,” he warned me, while pulling up his pajama bottoms. “It didn’t happen.”

At that moment, I saw a lot of his namesake in him.

Finally, he carried me back to his sisters’ room and set me on the floor by their doorway, dropping my doll clothes in a heap in front of me. He walked off to his room and left me there alone in the hallway.

I gathered up my clothes and carried them into the girls’ bedroom. After struggling to get dressed, I gave up and went to sleep naked.

When I woke up the next morning, Felicity asked me why I had no clothes on. I told her I had been feeling too hot to sleep. She would never even have understood even if I had told her the truth.

***

Bryan avoided me and his sister by skipping breakfast. I wondered if he was feeling guilty. More likely, he was worried about getting in trouble. After eating, Felicity spent the morning dressing me up as a housewife in a sleeveless dress and forcing me to romance Babra’s boyfriend doll. I played along. I found the whole scenario to be unpleasant, but it was blissful compared to what Bryan might do if he had time alone with me again. I was in a bind. I needed to get away from the house, but if I left Felicity, then Bryan might find me. No doubt, he would try to catch me again tonight if he could.

The wizard had not intervened in the past day, and I assumed that he was resting up after all the transformations he had put me through since the start of this misadventure. There was a good chance that he would be out of commision until tomorrow. Somehow, I would need to stay glued to Felicity’s fingers until then.

“Why are you wicked?” Felicity asked me out of nowhere.

“I’m not,” I said.

“Grandma said…”

“Grandma’s wrong.”

“Why?”

“She just is.”

“What did you do?”

I sighed. “One day she caught me kissing a girl.”

“On the lips?” Felicity asked with a disgusted look on her face.

“Yes,” I said, defiantly. “She was my girlfriend.”

“Girls don’t have girlfriends,” Felicity explained to me as if I were an idiot. “Girls have boyfriends.”

“I’ve had both,” I said. “Some girls have girlfriends, some boys have boyfriends. Some have both. I’ve had both. It’s called being gay.”

Felicity giggled. “That’s not real. It’s silly,” she said and laughed in my face.

I knew Felicity was a child. I knew she was a product of this backwards family. I knew she had the same messed up Sunday-school understanding of the world that I had as a girl. Of course, I knew she didn’t deserve my hate, but I hated her right then. She had been keeping me here against my will, ignoring my pleading to let me go. She had forced me to play her games. She was my jailer, and I wanted out, which meant I was ready to be cruel to her to get free of this prison. I was done playing along.

“Fuck you!” I told her, and kicked Babra’s plastic boyfriend in the crotch sending him flying out of the dollhouse. “Fuck off! I’m not playing anymore. I’m done.”

Felicity was momentarily stunned by my outburst. Then, she sneered down at me.

“That’s not a nice word to say. That’s mean,” she growled and grabbed me. “Apologize.”

“No!” I said. “I won’t”

“You’re being disobedient,” she shouted. “Apologize!”

“I don’t fucking care,” I told her. “You’re a nasty little brat. Eat shit!” I would have spit in her face if I still had any moisture in my plastic mouth.

Her eyes flashed with fury, and she threw me across the room. My hollow body bounced off a chair and came to rest on the dusty floor. It hurt, but my body was undamaged.

I laughed. “Is that the only way you know how to handle someone disobedient? You get violent? Just like Daddy?”

“My daddy is a good man.” She was stomping over to me with her dinosaur-sized feet.

“You’re daddy is a pig, and I know he beats everyone in this house.”

She kicked me down the stairs. The impact of landing on the floor spun my head around backwards, and I felt as if my arm nearly detached. However, I was still able to move everything, I was undamaged. If she got anymore rough, though…

She stomped down the steps to me, and I looked up at the monster coming to get me. I was surprised to find that I no longer feared her. However giant she appeared, I saw how small she was inside. How small everyone was in this house. And, in some backwards way, when she picked me up and squeezed me in her fist, I felt free of this small town in a way I had never felt before. I was over it all. Done.

Felicity stepped out into the hallway and said, “I’ll flush you down the toilet for being dirty.”

“You’ll only be making a mess you’ll have to clean up later,” I retorted.

She grunted in fury. “Fine, then,” she said. “I’ll just tear you apart.”

As with Bryan last night, I felt terrified at the thought of what might happen to me if she removed a part of my doll body. She gave me no time to react. Before I knew what was happening, she had already popped my arm out of its socket and pulled it free of my body.

I could still feel my arm, even with it detached from the rest of my doll body. I sensed something strange happening on my hand. The fingers were being spread apart.

Something metal dropped on the floor below.

We both looked down to see the wizard’s ring lying there with its odd gem looking reddish purple in the light of the hallway. Felicity dropped me and my arm on the floor and looked at the ring. I had a moment to decide if I would lunge for the ring or for my severed arm. I went for the arm. Felicity grabbed the ring and stood up.

After some contortions and rolling around, I managed to pop my arm back into its socket. I tested moving it around, and it felt normal, at least as normal as a doll arm can feel.

“Is this the magic ring?” Felicity asked, gazing at it in wonder.

“Give it back to me,” I demanded. “It’s mine.”

“You belong to me,” she said. “So your ring belongs to me too.”

“Don’t put it on,” I warned her.

“I’ll do what I want,” she said, slipping the ring on her finger.

I sighed, but I was curious to see what would happen to her now.

“I wish…” she said, pausing to think of something. “I wish that everyone would love me. I wish that mommy would love me most of all.”

“It’s not a wishing ring,” I said, but then I saw something strange happening to her skin.

Felicity’s whole body was getting darker. At first, it appeared that she had a sun tan. Then, all of her body became dark brown. Even her eyes and teeth turned brown. She looked down at her brown fingers and asked, “What’s happening to me? Why do I taste chocolate?”

She began to shrink, her clothes growing looser on her as she got smaller.

“No!” she cried. “I don’t want to be little.”

She kept shrinking. Soon, she was a doll-sized nude chocolate girl standing over a heap of clothes. She tried to pull the ring off, but it would not budge. Suddenly, she went stiff, and I saw her arms lower to her sides.

“I can’t move,” she said. “Help me!”

A brown rectangle grew out from her back, forming around her whole body like a frame. She had become a bas relief of a girl, a bar of chocolate with a chocolate girl pressed into it. She fell over backwards, and I recalled some old scifi movie in which a guy had been frozen into something like a slab of concrete. That is what Felicity looked like, then, only chocolate in her case.

I wished I could have just enjoyed seeing her get what was coming to her, but then I remembered the ring was still on her finger. I would need to get it out of her chocolate somehow if I wanted to put it on again.

“Felicity?” Jodie called from the stairs as she ascended them. “What’s all the shouting about?”

As soon as she saw me, my doll body went stiff again, and I toppled onto the floor, having become immobile once more. Apparently, the wizard’s rules about adults were still in effect even with the ring removed from my finger. I lay on my side, smiling. Fortunately, I had a good view of my chocolate niece and her mother walking over to us.

Jodie looked down curiously at the pile of her daughter’s clothes. Then, she glanced at me. I was powerless to do anything but watch as Jodie noticed the chocolate bar resting there in the middle of the clothes.

“Felicity?” her mother said. “Where are you? You can’t just leave food on the floor in the hallway.” There was no reply. I imagine that her daughter was desperate to tell her mother what had happened to her. Too bad that she was just a helpless chocolate bar now. Her mother stared at the bar for a few seconds, and I wondered if she had noticed the girl printed into the chocolate. Had she recognized her daughter?

Clearly, Jodie did not. She picked up the chocolate bar and stuffed it in her mouth, taking a big bite out of her daughter. She moaned in delight at the flavor of Felicity’s chocolate body as she chewed up the chunk that included her daughter’s head. I tried not to think about what Felicity was experiencing right then, being chewed and dissolved in her mother’s saliva and swallowed down her throat. Her mother kept eating her, bite after bite. Less and less of the girl remained until the last remaining morsel of her was devoured.

As Jodie licked the melted remains of Felicity from her fingers, there was a rumbling in her belly. Her stomach growled like a lion. Then, it began to expand. Her already swollen pregnant belly swelled even more ripe, growing just large enough to contain a second baby beside the one already in the womb. The new arrival began to squirm in her amniotic prison, as if attempting to escape. As relieved as I was to realize that Felicity still existed, I tried not to imagine what she must be thinking now, having been regressed to pre-birth.

In response to going from carrying a single baby to twins, Jodie’s face went green, and she vomited on the floor. There was no trace of chocolate in the bile that she puked up. However, there was something shiny and metal in the middle of the puddle of sick on the floor, but Jodie ran off to the bathroom before she could notice it.

As soon as the bathroom door was shut, I was freed from my immobility curse and got to my feet. I walked, slipping through the puddle to pick up the ring, which had grown back to its normal human size. I tried to put it back on my finger, but it would not shrink to fit me.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s time to go.”

The ring did not change size, so I started running towards the stairs, carrying it with me.

However, just before I reached them, I heard someone run up the stairs towards me. My heart sank when I saw Bryan step into the hallway. He spotted me standing there below him, holding the ring in my hands.

He grabbed me and lifted me up. “What’s that you’re holding?”

“It’s… a crown,” I lied. I mean, at that moment, it was the right size to fit my head.

Bryan smiled. “It’s your ring,” he said. “The magic ring.” He pulled it from my fingers.

“Wait,” I said. “Give it back.”

He ignored me and stared at it with the same wonder as his sister had.

An idea came to me. “Please, don’t put it on,” I said, trying to sound sincere. “You don’t deserve its wishes.” I waited, hoping he would take the bait.

“Hmpf,” he scoffed at my pleading. “You can’t tell me what to do, doll.”

He dropped me to the floor. I looked up and watched gleefully as the little prick put the ring on.

“Cool,” he said, looking at it. “You know what?” he asked me. “I think I’ll make my first wish about you. I wish that I was the one that owned you. I wish you were mine.”

I smiled as I saw him begin to shrink. For the first few seconds, he did not notice his body changing. He smiled smugly down at me, unaware of how his hair was growing longer and his face becoming younger and rounder. When his jeans began to slip off his diminished hips, he became aware of how loose his clothes felt and how his longer hair was hanging down past his face.

He grabbed the hair and asked, “What’s happening to me?” His croaky boy voice had become more high pitched and girly but oddly familiar.

Bryan could not see it without a mirror, but I recognized the face of the person he was turning into: a girl, half his normal age, who had just been turned into chocolate and eaten by their mother in this very hallway.

His jeans and underwear dropped to his ankles, and his hands gripped his crotch, discovering what had disappeared from there.

Bryan shrieked like the 6-year-old girl he had become and stumbled off in a screaming panic, stepping out of his shoes as he went. By the time he made it to the stairs, he was wearing only his oversized T-shirt, which covered him almost to his knees.

Right next to his pants, lay the wizard’s ring, which must have fallen from his hand as he panicked.

I retrieved the ring again and said, “Okay, that was great, but it's time to go now. Please?”

The ring shrank down to fit my doll finger, and I managed to slip it on.

I began to grow. My plastic skin softened, and the void in me filled with flesh and bone. This hallway, which had seemed so endlessly long and tall, shrank around me as I rose up. It felt great to be nearly human-sized again. I was feeling great until I noticed some unexpected changes. My giant doll boobs had shrunk to more human proportions, but they kept on shrinking, leaving me flat-chested. The same was true around my hips and ass. My curves were disappearing. Even as I grew taller, it seemed that I was losing maturity. Then, I felt my crotch swell into something more masculine. Although this was not my first time growing a dick, it was the smallest I had ever had. When I was just about five feet tall. The growth stopped. I looked down at my pubescent boy body and was hit by flashbacks of last night.

“Ew,” I said, hearing Bryan’s croaky voice come from my mouth. “You turned me into him? Gross.”

At first, I thought this was just more cruelty from the wizard, taking another opportunity to mess with me while I was vulnerable. Then, I noticed the clothes Bryan had left behind when he ran off. I hesitated to put them on until I heard the commotion downstairs as Bryan’s freakout got everyone’s attention. I needed to get out before people started asking questions. I pulled up his tighty-whities and jeans and put his socks and shoes on. Shirtless still, but otherwise clothed in his outfit, I understood how the wizard had actually done me a favor. Had he grown me back into my normal body, I would have been stuck naked in the hallway, days after I was supposed to have left the house, with one child missing and another one having a mental breakdown. If someone had found me in that situation, I would have been in real trouble. Being Bryan, however unpleasant, was a perfect disguise at the moment.

I sprinted up to the attic, moving swiftly in his small body. After a quick glance around, I found a drawstring bag and stuffed my clothes and shoes and other possessions in it. Then, I carried it downstairs, past the bathroom where my sister was still retching, then down to the first floor.

“Bryan!” Adam called me when he saw me. He was standing in the hallway just outside of the living room where the real Bryan was bawling his eyes out in despair over being turned into a little girl, while his other sister, Judith, half-heartedly tried to comfort him with a loose hug. “Something’s wrong with Felicity.”

“I know,” I said. “There’s a lot of things wrong right now.”

I walked past him, and he said, “Wait, where are you going?”

“Away,” I said. “I’m leaving.”

As I passed through the kitchen towards the door to the garage, I heard a man yell at me, “Where are you going?”

I turned to see Bryan senior standing in the kitchen with his phone in his hand. I couldn’t tell if he was calling for help or trying to avoid his kids’ problems.

“I’m leaving,” I repeated.

“No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re telling me what happened. Did you do something to Felicity?”

“No, not my fault,” I said. “Honestly, I’d blame bad parenting for this whole mess.”

Bryan senior moved more quickly than I thought was possible for a man his size. He landed an open-hand strike on my temple that bounced my head off a wall and dropped me to the floor. A moment or two later, once my dazed head had cleared, I saw him standing straddled above me. Apparently, expecting me to cower beneath him in fear. He should have been guarding his crotch better. I landed a solid nut shot on him with my heel and scrambled away as he slumped to his knees, wheezing in pain.

“You bastard!” he whimpered.

I found my balance and fumbled open the door to the garage. I pressed the button to open the big door, found the bike Bryan had been fixing up when I first saw him this week, and hopped on it.

“Get back here!” his father yelled as I started riding away, unsteadily at first due to my head still being somewhat woozy. I thought he might chase me, so I made sure to start pedaling as fast as I could, at least until I reached the end of the street, where I turned and put the house out of sight. I cut through a field that I remembered from my childhood here and mentally charted a course to the hotel. Fortunately, no one thought twice of seeing a shirtless boy riding around with a bag slung over his shoulder.

I stopped off in a wooded area near the hotel and stripped off his clothes. In the cover of the trees and bushes, the wizard grew me back into an adult woman, piling generous feminine weight onto me. For the first time in days, I felt like myself. Gladly, I got dressed in the clothes I had been carrying with me and hid Bryan’s clothes and shoes away in the bag where my clothes had been. Next, I abandoned his bike in a ditch, before shouldering the bag again and exiting from the trees.

It was a short walk from there to my hotel. I kept calm and moved at a leisurely pace, so as to draw as little attention to myself as possible. Once I was safe inside my room, I let out a huge sigh of relief and collapsed onto the bed. Then, I lay there until my racing heart slowed down and I felt ready to prepare for my journey home.

***

I got a phone call from Jodie the next day as I sat eating breakfast, having just finished unpacking from the trip. I felt safe back in the confines of my own apartment, but I knew that I would need to handle this conversation carefully or else things might get complicated. I answered the call.

“Hi, Jodie,” I said, sounding as neutral as I could.

“Maureen,” she said. “I’m so glad you picked up. After what you said before you left, I wasn’t sure…”

“What’s the matter?” I asked, apparently sensing the worry in her voice.

“It’s Bryan,” she said. “My son. He’s gone missing.”

“Oh no!” I said, sounding concerned.

Breathlessly, she explained, “He had some kind of fight with his father, then he rode off. We haven’t seen him since then. The police are searching for him, but they can’t find him anywhere. They did find his bike in a ditch, but that was all. There’s an alert out for him. We’re scared that someone kidnapped him.” I heard her tear up and start sniffling. “I’m so scared.”

“Oh, Jodie,” I said in my most comforting tone. “I’m so sorry.”

“He didn’t say anything to you before he left? Did he? You don’t have any idea where he could be?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I-I can’t think of anything. I’m sorry. We didn’t talk at all, really.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I have no idea. I wish I could help you.”

Jodie sighed and blew her nose. “If that’s not all,” she said, continuing her story. “Somethings wrong with Felicity. She’s acting all strange, trying to convince us that she’s actually Bryan. It’s really crazy. I don’t know if it’s just the stress because of her brother disappearing or… something else.”

“That’s strange,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Jodie.”

“She’s also telling stories about a doll and a ring that you had with you.”

“That old antique ring I was wearing?”

“Yes,” she said. “Did anything happen between the two of you with it?”

“Not really,” I said. “She was showing me her dolls up in the attic, and I think she mentioned that she liked the ring. That was it, though. I remember that she had some elaborate stories involving the dolls.”

“What about that doll you gave her?”

“What doll?” I asked, innocently. “I didn’t give her a doll.”

“She had a doll that looked just like you. She kept saying that the doll was you.”

“Well,” I said, “she didn’t get it from me. Are you sure it wasn’t just one of Mom’s old dolls from the attic? Felicity seemed to have dug out a lot of old toys up there.”

“I don’t know,” Jodie said. “Maybe it was. Mom didn’t recognize it, but I doubt she’s seen those dolls in years.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know where she got it, but I definitely never gave her anything.”

“Okay,” Jodie said, sounding convinced. Then, she went quiet for a long while.

“I wish I could help you, Jodie,” I said.

“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll let you know if we find something. Bryan, my husband, he might call you up, you know, in a more official capacity, for the investigation.”

“Okay,” I replied, having expected some kind of police interrogation.

I had nothing on me that would connect me to a missing child. I had disposed of the bag with the boy’s clothes and shoes in it at the airport. Someone might have seen me as the boy while riding through town, but I was sure no one had seen him anywhere near my hotel room. I did fly home days later than they would have expected, but I could make up some excuse for why I took so long to leave if I needed to. For the most part, I felt that I was in the clear.

“Please let me know if you find him,” I said.

“I will,” she said. “Mom’s here to help out, but she’s just about as flustered by it all as I am. What’s more, I’m feeling unwell. The baby’s been making me ill for some reason. Maybe it’s the stress.”

“Maybe,” I said, while thinking about the surprise waiting for her during her next ultrasound. “Maybe you should try to get some rest.”

“I will,” she said. “Yeah, rest... I’ll talk to you later.”

“Later,” I said.

Jodie hung up.

***

Her police officer husband called a few days later and gave me a basic interrogation. I made sure to keep my story consistent. I left the night I said I did. I knew nothing about what happened after that. He sounded bored by my story, so I assume that he bought it. And, that was the last I’ve heard about it. As far as I know, the case has gone cold.

***

And, that’s it. That was the big adventure. I went back to my old home town. Things got weird. I came back. I wish I could give you some kind of resolution, but the closest thing to a moral I can think of is something like “don’t mess with stuff you don’t understand” or “don’t be a horrible person.” I suppose there doesn’t need to be a moral.

One thing I can say for sure is that I feel bigger now. I’m not any physically larger than the wizard normally keeps me, but that’s how I feel. Big. Maybe it’s a consequence of having been so small. Maybe. Maybe it’s something more. Whatever the reason, I feel big, and it feels good. It feels good to be me.

I’ll update you again if there are any new developments with the ring. Until then. Take it easy.

Thanks,

Mo