Cheater's punishment

Opening scene

Dylan comes home late at night. The house is dark. His girlfriend Mia is waiting silently in the living-room armchair. She is calm but clearly angry. She tells him she knows about all the girls he has been cheating with. Dylan insists those girls mean nothing, that they are just worthless bimbos, and that he only loves Mia. Mia replies that if that is how he sees them, then that is exactly what he will become.

Turn 1 of 7

Dylan begins to protest that Mia has lost her mind, but mid-sentence he notices his height is rapidly decreasing and his muscles are shrinking. Panic sets in.

You open your mouth to tell Mia she's insane, that this is some kind of sick joke, but the words catch in your throat like a bone. Your tongue feels too large suddenly, or your mouth too small, and when you try to speak again your voice comes out wrong—higher, breathier, unfamiliar even to your own ears. You look down at your hands and watch your forearms narrowing, the thick cords of muscle that took years at the gym dissolving like sugar in rain. Your shoulders pull inward, your chest compressing, and you stumble backward because the floor is farther away than it should be, your center of gravity shifting wildly with each inch you lose.

"Stop," you manage, but it sounds like a whimper, like something a stranger might say in a dream you're having about someone else. You grip the doorframe and feel your fingers lengthening, the knuckles softening, your nails catching light from the streetlamp outside as they grow glossy and almond-shaped. Your jeans sag at the waist and pool at your ankles; you reach down to hitch them up and find your hips have flared outward, the bone structure beneath your skin rearranging itself with a sound like wet gravel shifting. The panic hits then, real and electric, sending your heart hammering against ribs that feel suddenly too delicate to contain it.

Mia hasn't moved from the armchair. She watches you with the patience of someone observing a clock tick toward the hour they already know.

"Your shoes," she says quietly.

You look down. Your running shoes gape open, enormous now, and your feet inside them have narrowed to half their width, the arches rising, the toes shrinking and aligning themselves into something decorative and impractical. You kick free of them and stand barefoot on the hardwood, smaller than you have been since middle school, your balance uncertain, your body a foreign country whose language you do not speak.

"This isn't—" you start, but your voice breaks upward again, and you clamp your new lips together and feel how full they are, how strange against your teeth. The hallway mirror catches your eye from across the room, and you turn toward it without deciding to, drawn by the same morbid compulsion that makes drivers slow for accidents. You don't want to see. You have to see.