After the Magic, Part 1 of 3 [Tier 2 and 3 Exclusive] (Patreon)

One

“Ok, Aimee? Don’t be mad…”

***

Excerpt from Aimee’s journal:

I had the strangest dream. It wasn’t like any I’ve ever had before. There was no story or…event. It was like a collage. A mosaic of scenes, people, and places. Sometimes these things seemed familiar to me–even if there was something off about them. The vantage point, or the perspective, or something. Other times, these sights made no sense to me at all.

Most of the time, though, I just felt safe. Warm. Cared for. I craved comfort at all times, and rarely did I feel like I was lacking it.

But, too, I remember everything feeling like a struggle. Even just moving around felt like a challenge. Everything was exhausting. I sought comfort so much, because without it, I felt helpless.

I’d hesitate to say it was a good dream. But it certainly wasn’t a nightmare.

***

“Don’t be mad at what?” she spat. “Did it work? Or not?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that question, but I tried: “Well…”

“Something’s not right, here.”

“I know,” I said. “But…”

“Everything’s different,” she said, her eyes zipping across the room. “Your hair! Your hair doesn’t normally look like that. And you weren’t wearing those clothes a few minutes ago.”

“Right, I’m trying to explain that…”

“This is our bedroom,” she said. “But it’s not. Things are missing. There are things here I don’t recognize.”

“Okay, so…”

“And…I’m fucking naked? I never took my clothes off. Molly, when did that happen? I was just lying on the bed a moment ago, fully clothed. Suddenly, I’m naked and there’s just this thin sheet draped over me?”

“It’s going to be hard to explain,” I said. I wondered if I looked stressed. I felt stressed. I felt a lot of things: glad, happy, nervous. Terrified.

“Did you, like, knock me unconscious? How long was I out for?”

I sighed. “Well…you weren’t unconscious. But you were…out of commission for a little bit.”

“Out of commission? What the hell does that even mean?” She started to sit up in the bed, struggling a little. My instinct was to help her, but I stopped myself. She eventually got there herself, clutching the bedsheet against her bare chest to hide as much of her flesh as she could. “How long was I…out of commission?”

“Don’t be mad.” I said again. But I know her, and I know that it’s probably only making her angrier to hear that. Rightfully so, I suppose.

“Just tell me,” she said, speaking through gritted teeth. “How long was I…out?”

“Seven months.”

“Am I…sitting in a wet spot?”

“Yeah…probably.”

***

So.

You know how everyone seemed to have a, sort of, ‘pandemic hobby?’ Like, that thing that you put all your energy into when you couldn’t do anything else? My Insta feed was chock full of people who suddenly had a thousand plants, or who were cooking every dish they had ever heard of. People were collecting records and comic books. Making art. Dancing. So many new video game streamers were born.

Aimee and I? We thought we’d dabble in the ol’ black arts.

Magic.

I wouldn’t say this was a completely random decision on our part. Long before quarantines, we were teens who had embraced the dark side. We called ourselves ‘goths,’ though we tried not to say that word aloud too much–every other so-called goth believed they were the only ones actually embracing the lifestyle correctly.

We wore black clothes and dark makeup. We listened to a lot of black metal. We hated everyone else. That, to us, was ‘goth.’

We had mostly grown out of that phase of our life, though some of it trickled through into our 20s. Aimee was an expert with a deck of tarot cards, while I still believed in filling every room with crystals and gems.

Really, the big takeaway from our teen years was how inseparable we’ve always been. We were best friends. And, eventually, lovers. There was never any question that this was how we wanted it to be forever–just her and I.

But the isolation of the pandemic’s quarantine inspired us to sift through our past a little. We weren’t too keen on the idea of bringing back all the black makeup and spiked collars, but there was something about the idea of exploring witchcraft that seemed to hit the spot while we grew bored of everything else in the house.

I won’t speak for everyone who shows an interest in magic and the occult, but when I say that we were getting into witchcraft, we didn’t actually believe we’d be shooting fireballs from our fingers or raising long-dead pets to life. It was about putting energy into the world. Calls that we hoped would be answered by the spirit world.

Aimee once pointed out that it wasn’t all that different from people who believe in the power of prayer. She wasn’t entirely wrong…but we didn’t really like thinking about it like that–so we didn’t.

But, things were starting to change. Much like how the quarantined ‘plant-mommy’ went from a shelf of plants to having her entire house turn into a jungle, eventually you just want more from the hobbies you use to distract yourself from reality. There’s only so many gems and crystals we could collect. Only so many bundles of sage we could make to smudge out negative spirits. Only so many tarot readings we could give each other.

We wanted something else. We wanted…well, maybe the kind of magic that allows you to shoot fireballs and raise the dead. We wanted magic that did something.

As with most hobbyists, all of our searches started online. We’d watch videos of people casting spells. There was no definitive proof that they did anything, but they believed it had–and thus we did too. We bought the books and gathered the spell components that they recommended and tried to start casting some spells.

The results, as one can imagine, fell between ‘nothing happened’ and ‘I’m pretty sure nothing happened…but maybe?’

Disheartened, but never deterred, we stuck with it. We did even more research and began collecting books that fell outside of what the ‘influencer witches’ of social media were suggesting. One rabbit hole would lead to another, and soon enough, we were up to our necks in old dusty books we had ordered from around the world.

Then, at last, progress. A spell cast on a single tomato seed on a Thursday night had led to an entire tomato plant on Friday morning, with a ready-to-eat harvest of tomatoes waiting to be plucked. It was amazing. It was terrifying.

It was hard to say what had changed. Were we just reading the right spells? Using the right books? Did we just believe enough now? It didn’t seem to matter–it just worked. And in the weeks that followed, we had a few more successes. We made a shoe levitate for a second. Aimee set a cardboard box on fire. I filled an empty glass with water that came from seemingly nowhere.

As they say: with great power comes great responsibility. We knew we needed to be careful. While we may have tapped into incredible cosmic forces, we still knew next to nothing about how. One slip up and who knew what could happen. We could catch the house on fire. Worse, we could catch the state of Ohio on fire.

But nobody’s instinct, when discovering something fascinating and amazing, is to show restraint. We told ourselves that we were being careful, but being careful should have meant stopping before it was too late.

***

“No more dragging your feet, Molly,” she said. “You have to tell me what happened.”

I sighed. I was trying to. “Do you remember…seven months ago?”

“I don’t know,” she said, still sitting up in the bed with the blanket pulled up to her chest. “When I think of seven months ago, I think of, uh, January.”

“Well. It’s 2022 now. February.”

“Fuck,” she said. “Fuuuuuck.”

“I know. It’s…been a while.”

“Where was I?”

Now we were getting into the really hard questions. “Well, you were here.”

“How could that be? I don’t remember a single thing.”

“You…weren’t exactly…you.”

Aimee sighed. “Okay. So, then, who was I? What was I?”

It was time to spit it out: “Aimee, you were a baby.”

***

We had discovered a strange spell, described as one that ‘altered the timelines of living things.’ We tried it on the tomato plant–the same one we had sprung to life overnight early in our magic adventures. Truthfully, neither of us actually believed the spell was going to do much. Not all of them did, and this specific one seemed to vague to actually know how to gauge its success.

But in the dim candlelight of a summer evening, as Aimee read from the book while I drew symbols with chalk and melted wax, we watched as the plant slowly shrunk in size. Its leaves receded and it seemed to shrivel back into the planter it had originally come from.

Almost immediately, I could see the wheels turning in Aimee’s head. I tried to warn her against any other application of a spell like this, but I worried it fell on deaf ears. She assured me, many times, that she wasn’t going to do anything irresponsible. But in the nights that followed, she filled pages of her notebook with possible variations on that spell that she could use to control just how much something might…de-age.

Over and over again, I warned her to be careful. I told her that, while she may have believed she knew what she was doing, she didn’t actually know anything at all.

Over and over again, she told me not to worry.

***

“What…do you mean,” Aimee said, shaking her head. “A baby? Like…”

“Like you were a few-month old baby, Aimee. A literal infant. Just…tiny. Helpless.”

“What the fuck?” she said, with the cadence of someone who had just been offended by a tasteless joke. She said it again, this time with anger and confusion seeping into her tone: “What the fuck? You’re joking, right? This is some sort of elaborate prank. I fell asleep on the bed and you went and styled your hair differently. Took my clothes. Moved things around.”

“I, uh, really wish I had, Aimee.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I refuse to believe it.”

“I…I think I could prove it,” I said. Except I didn’t think I could prove it–I knew I could. There was an actual baby in our apartment for seven months. Regardless of where you get one from–babies change everything.

Aimee sighed, clearly trying to recenter herself. She reached under the sheet, feeling the bed between her legs. “Why am I sitting on a puddle?”

“You probably, uhm, wet yourself.”

“What the hell, Molly. I don’t wet the bed.”

“M-maybe you don’t now,” I said. “But…you did. You, y’know, needed…diapers.”

She laughed, as if she was just playing along with the joke–even if she didn’t actually believe it yet. “Right, right. Diapers. Because I was a baby and babies need diapers, right? I suppose I shit my pants every day too?”

I pointed over to the dresser where there was a stack of baby diapers resting atop it. There were little piles like that all over the apartment. “Well…babies can’t control themselves.”

“I have to tell you, Molly. Whatever fucking bit you’re trying to pull of right now, it’s not working. You’re pissing me off.”

She attempted to get out of the bed, but she instead fell flat on her face.

***

Too often, when we look back at big traumatic events in our lives, we’ll say something like: “If only I had done more. I could’ve stopped this from happening.”

Let me tell you something–I’m pretty sure I did everything I could’ve. I hid some of the books. When I saw her getting ready to try casting a spell again, I’d interrupt her or purposefully try to interfere. And, when all else failed, I simply asked her not to continue down this path.

Nothing had happened yet. She hadn’t done anything bad. But after she had regressed the tomato plant back to a seed again, she had become completely consumed by the idea of taking that magic and applying it to herself.

“I don’t want much,” she’d say. “I just want to take a few years off. Just two or three. Because if I could do it once–I could do it a thousand times. And if I could do it a thousand times…you and I could be together forever.”

Reciting those words now, I’m tempted to laugh. It’s a surreal concept; one that feels pulled from a science fiction movie. But we were starting to play with actual magic now, and that sort of thing didn’t seem impossible.

When I look back on those last days, before Aimee cast her final spell, I’m reminded of my grandparents. My grandfather was a heavy drinker, and my Nana had done everything she could to stop him. She’d dump his beer down the sink. She’d hide his wallet and car keys. They were both retired, and she had nothing but time to watch over him. And yet she could never do enough. She’d fall asleep, and he’d get a beer. He kept a flask at the woodpile. And in the garage. And even hidden in the bathroom. If he wanted to drink, he was going to drink.

If Aimee wanted to cast her spell, she was going to cast her spell.

I had run some errands one afternoon, and came home to find the house was almost completely dark, save for the soft orange candlelight spilling out of our bedroom. I knew, at that moment, that the time had come. She felt confident enough in her studies and abilities that she could cast the spell that would turn back the clock on her body by just a little bit.

I ran to the bedroom, screaming and yelling for her to stop. “If you absolutely have to do this,” I shouted as I ran, “could you at least wait for me to be there?”

In the center of the bedroom floor, surrounded by a series of circles and arcane symbols drawn onto the wooden floor, was Aimee.

She had cast her spell, and something had gone terribly wrong.

***

I helped Aimee to her feet. She didn’t seem quite able to stand on her own, but I helped to hold her naked body in place. There were tears in her eyes, and she shook her head bitterly.

“You have to take it slow,” I assured her. “You weren’t…you for seven months. You can’t just expect to walk around like normal. You probably have to…”

“Relearn how to walk?” she spat in frustration.

“Maybe not relearn. But you’ll need to take your time before you’re back to your normal self again.”

She repeated back my words, her voice sounding depressed: “My normal self.”

I nodded.

“If I wasn’t normal, then what was I?”

That was a complicated answer. “You were you. Just a different…version of you.”

“A baby.”

I nodded again.

“What then?” she asked

“What do you mean?”

“What did you do…after I turned into a baby?”

“What else could I do?” I said. “I loved you. I took care of you.”

“You took care of me?”

“Yes.”

“Fed me?”

“I did.”

“Clothed me?”

“Yes.”

“Bathed me?”

“Yes.”

“Changed…diapers?”

I nodded again.

“But…how?”

“It wasn’t easy,” I said. “But I imagine it wasn’t unlike what any first time mother goes through. You just…adapt. Learn. And what once seemed impossible suddenly becomes normal.”

“But…what about the rest of the world?” she asked. “Weren’t people looking for me? What about my job?”

“Well…you definitely don’t have a job anymore,” I said. “But you didn’t really like that one much anyway.”

“What about my mother?”

“It wasn’t easy,” I said. “Maybe we’re lucky–though that doesn’t feel like the right word–that you two weren’t all that close. She called a few times. I made a lot of excuses and lied a lot. You were sick. You were traveling. You had a new job. You…just weren’t available at that moment. It wasn’t just your mother, it was everyone, you know? Friends. Old co-workers. Honestly, if it wasn’t for this damn quarantining, I doubt I’d have been able to pull it off for as long as I did.”

“Fuck,” she said.

“Pretty much.”

“W-wait,” she suddenly said, staring down at her naked body with a look of panic on her face.

My eyes followed hers, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure what she was looking distraught about. But then I saw it…a strand of urine flowing down her thigh and ankle and pooling on the floor around her feet.

“Walking might not be the only thing you have to get used to doing again.”

“Goddamit,” she said. “Do I really need to be potty trained again?”

***

The Aimee that I knew and loved was not lying at the center of the symbols and candles. The body that lay there was one I had never seen before, though I knew in an instant that it was still Aimee.

It was just a baby. An infant. The poor thing was swimming in clothes that were far too big, and while she wasn’t crying, she was softly moaning and squirming about, desperate for someone to comfort her.

But I had never spent much time around babies. I didn’t know the first thing about caring for one, and I wasn’t especially eager to start now. I picked her up, holding her far out in front of me like she was a filthy piglet, and I carefully put her atop the bed. And then I just left her there while I poured over Aimee’s notes. I flipped through pages of her notebooks and scrutinized her diagrams and drawings. Scanned the pages of the old dusty books she had opened on her desk.

I had no idea what spell she had used to do this to herself in the first place. Thus, I had no idea what spell I could use to reverse its effects. For now, and for the foreseeable future, Aimee was simply an infant again.

***

Aimee couldn’t yet walk on her own, but she could at least keep herself upright and hobble across the room if I supported her. I helped her into some panties and an oversized t-shirt and I helped her out of the bedroom and into the kitchen where I sat her at the table.

“You should eat,” I said. “And drink.”

“Has it been a while?” she asked.

“N-no,” I said. “It wasn’t that long ago that I, uh, fed you.” The words seemed insane to say aloud, even if it was the truth. “I just think that it’d be good for you. What do you want? I’ll make you anything in the entire world.”

“What was the last thing I ate?” she asked.

“Uhm…pureed banana.”

“Ugh, gross. And I ate that? I liked that?”

I shrugged, laughing. “Believe it or not, it was your favorite.”

“Babies are so fucking dumb,” she said. “Can I just have a grilled cheese?”

“Of course.”

But first, I just needed to hug her. I wrapped my arms around her tightly, pressing my face into her hair. I kissed her head over and over again. I had been so caught up in her return to adulthood that I hadn’t taken a moment to appreciate that Aimee, my best friend and lover–who I hadn’t seen in seven months–was back.

“God,” I said, tears streaming down my face. “I missed you so much. I mean…you were here. But it was different.”

There were tears in her eyes too. “I…I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t really know what it was like. But if I was gone for that long…I’m glad to be back too.”

I wiped the tears from my eyes and began pulling ingredients from the counter and fridge to make her a grilled cheese sandwich. “I swear to god, Aimee, I’m going to make you the best fucking grilled cheese you’ve ever eaten.”

She laughed. “Honestly, anything sounds better than pureed bananas.”

I turned the stove on to start heating a pan while I buttered some bread and opened a few slices of american cheese. As basic as cuisine got, but it had always been a staple in Aimee’s diet. I was so happy to have her sitting at the kitchen table again that I’d have made her a thousand grilled cheeses if she wanted.

I was keeping one eye on her at all times. Partly because I just missed seeing her adult face and her long, flowing, hair that I hadn’t seen the last few months. Partly because I was still looking out for her. Every one of her movements seemed to involve a great effort. Even when her hand reached up to rub her own face, it looked as if she was trying to figure out how she used to do it.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She laughed. “That’s the really big question, isn’t it?”

“Sorry, I meant, like, are you okay to eat? Do you need help?”

Her eyes narrowed and she scoffed. Classic Aimee–fiercely independent. “I know how to eat.”

“I know, I know. I just…”

“I feel like I can do most things,” she said. “I know how to do things. I just think it’s going to take a little time for my brain to connect all the dots again.”

“Of course. That makes sense. Well…if there’s anything I can do to help…”

“I got it,” she said, a little more sternly. But then she sighed and shook her head. “I’m sorry, Molly. I know you’re just trying to help. And I can’t begin to imagine how much you helped me the last few months. I just… I want to be me, you know?”

“That makes complete sense to me,” I answered. I flipped the sandwich out of the pan and onto a plate. I had just begun to cut it in half–triangles, like she always preferred–when I heard a strange noise coming from where Aimee was sitting.

It sounded thick. Bubbling. A sputtering series of noises that had a gross, oozing, connotation.

“Oh my god,” Aimee said, lifting up her dress and looking down at her panties. “Oh my fucking god!”

Her pastel pink panties had begun to expand, as a dark mass crept into them. It spilled out the leg holes and onto the chair–a soft brown sludge.

“Am I…pooping my pants?” she asked, looking up at me with pure terror in her eyes.

“It’s…it’s not a big deal,” I said. I was sure that it was easier for me to say–I had seen her do this countless times. Though it was always in a diaper.

“I…but…I didn’t even know that I had to…”

“I know,” I said, immediately rushing to her and cradling her head against my chest. “It’s okay. We can take care of that.”

“I gotta get up,” she said. “I have to take a shower. I have to…” She struggled to get up on her own, failing when her ass had lifted about an inch or two off the seat. She fell back down, her ass making a sickening ‘splort’ as she landed in her mess once more.

Tears were in her eyes as she looked up at me.

“Molly, I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s okay,” I assured her. “I’ll take care of you.”

***

The first few days were probably the hardest. My time was split in so many pieces that I could barely keep track of anything. Thankfully I worked from home, so it was never especially difficult to keep up appearances with my employer and give the illusion that I was around. Meanwhile, however, I was doing my best to retrace Aimee’s steps–pouring myself over every antique book she did. Going through her notes. Researching everything I could online.

And, too, there was an infant in the house now. Not my friend. Not my girlfriend. A literal infant who couldn’t take care of itself. I often wondered if the adult mind of the Aimee I loved was trapped in that tiny body, but it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t the case. She was regressed in both body and mind.

I wondered who I should call about this. Doctors? Child Protective Services? Her mother? But when I tried to imagine how those calls went, they never seemed good. Who would believe me? Worse, when they didn’t believe my crazy story, and they found that I had an unknown infant, there was no way that they’d just leave us alone. Aimee would be taken from me, and who knew where she’d end up after that. I even wondered if I’d somehow end up in prison. I wasn’t sure how such a thing would happen, but it was far too easy to think about the worst case scenarios.

Right away, I knew I had three main objectives: I needed to find a way to reverse the spell. I needed to hide the truth from everyone else, at all costs. And, most importantly, I needed to take care of Aimee.

That first night, I had no baby clothes. No bottles. No crib. No diapers–as I quickly realized when Aimee began peeing on me as I held her in my arms.

I wrapped a hand towel around her bottom, swaddled her in a large blanket and rushed to the store that night, spending a decent chunk of money on anything that looked like it could be useful in the days to come. I bought a crib. Clothes. Pacifiers and baby bottles. Baby powder and baby shampoo. Wipes. A car seat. A stroller. Diapers–so many diapers, of various sizes, as I had no idea what size she’d need.

She cried a lot. All night, sometimes. I watched a million YouTube videos, and ran twice as many searches on the web. Everytime I put a new diaper on her, it seemed like she’d just have another accident. I could barely keep up with it, and things like research into a way to reverse the spell had fallen by the wayside.

Whether I liked it or not, I was a mommy.

***

I had managed to help Aimee up from the kitchen table, and I carefully escorted to the bathroom. It wasn’t the destination I had grown used to bringing her when she messed herself…but I wasn’t changing a diaper. And I wasn’t sure that Aimee was ready to see what I had done with the guest room yet.

“I can take it from here,” she said as we reached the bathroom door.

“You can’t even walk well yet,” I said. “I think you better let me handle this.”

“N-no way, Molly. There’s no way that I’m going to let you clean my shitty ass…” She sighed, perhaps realizing that I had done exactly that for the last few months.

“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” I said. “It’s just on a…slightly bigger scale.”

“Ugh.”

The best strategy was to help her step into the bathtub, where I peeled her shirt off and helped slide her soiled panties down her legs until they fell to the base of the tub with a wet splat.

I had no idea that the next words out of my mouth would be: “Looks like someone made a big stinky for Mommy, huh?” I felt ashamed of myself in the second I finished saying the words. It had just slipped out–a weird habit I hadn’t even realized I picked up.

“What the fuck did you just say?” she asked, looking down at me.

My face blushed as brightly as hers. “Fuck. Aimee, I’m so sorry. I…didn’t mean to say that. I’m so used to changing diapers for a, uh, baby, and…”

She sighed, tears welling in her eyes. I could sense that she accepted that, though she didn’t like it. “Is…is that what you called yourself? Mommy?”

I bit my bottom lip for a moment, debating what I should say. But the truth felt like the best option. She deserved that.

“I did. It wasn’t the original plan, I guess. Like…I never thought of myself as ‘Mommy.’ But the longer it went on, and the more people saw us together and just assumed that I was your mother…the easier it was to just roll with that.”

“People…saw us? In public? They saw me as a baby and you carrying me around?”

“It was seven months, Aimee. I couldn’t just lock you in a closet, you know?”

“Yeah,” she said, her tone much softer now.

“Can you reach to the wall?” I asked. “If you can brace yourself and hold yourself up, I can clean you up.”

“You…you shouldn’t have to do that, Molly.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. I probably didn’t have to add anything else, but I found myself saying the words anyway: “I’ve wiped your butt a lot the last few months.”

***

Baby Aimee had become my life. I gave her every moment of mine that I could. It was the least I could do really. Until I figured out how to reverse her spell, she’d need me.

Most of the time, I could handle it. There was a tremendous learning curve for being a parent, but it never deterred me. I was devoted to being the best mother possible.

Also, I had no clue that carrying around a baby automatically gave me access to a vast network of other local mothers. Everywhere I went, I met another young woman carting around an infant or toddler of her own. We shared advice and tips. Recommended brands of ointments and baby food.

Sometimes, it was easy to forget how I had gotten my baby in the first place. There were days, weeks even, when I was just a mother and she was just a baby.

I loved being a mommy.

How much sooner would I have had Aimee back if I hadn’t grown a little…complacent with the predicament I found myself in?

***

She would know far better than I, but if I was to guess, having her girlfriend wipe her ass in a bathtub as she struggled to stay standing straight might have been amongst the most embarrassing moments in her life. If there was any consolation, I hoped that it was the fact that it was me cleaning her up, and not anyone else. I wiped as much of it from her skin as I could before running the shower, using the handheld wand to clean away the rest.

“We should probably talk about this,” I said, helping her out of the bathtub and into a towel.

“Talk about what? The fact that I apparently have no bowel or bladder control?”

“Yeah. I mean…you’re right, you probably just need to be, uhm, potty trained again. But that doesn’t happen in a single day, you know? In the meantime you probably need…”

“Don’t say it, Molly.”

“I…I think we need to just address the elephant in the room head-on. You…should start wearing diapers.”

“That…that doesn’t even seem fair,” Aimee said, little streams of tears running down her cheeks again. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I…I don’t want to wear diapers.”

I was of two minds. On one hand, it did seem rather unfortunate to need to wear diapers as an adult–especially when she had so many other things to think about post-transformation. On the other hand…she had been wearing diapers for the last seven months. They’d just be a little bigger now.

“I’ll take care of everything,” I said. “I’ll find some for you.”

“Okay,” she said, wiping away another tear. “But…you don’t have to help me with them or anything. I can change myself.”

“Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

Maybe she’d have a better range of motion by the time we got some diapers. Maybe she could change herself. But…who knew changing her diapers better than me?

I immediately began researching options for adult diapers. There were plenty of choices online, but I’d still need to have them delivered–and that could take a few days for even the quickest delivery option. I needed diapers today.

***

After the first few weeks, I knew I had to step up my baby-care game. I was still putting time into reading the old books filled with knowledge about the black arts–yet I had little to show for it. I had yet to figure out what combination of spells she had cast herself in the first place, let alone figuring out how to reverse it.

I had cobbled together a supply of basic baby needs, but it quickly became clear that I needed a more permanent setup. It was hard to say how long it would be before Aimee was no longer a baby, and it seemed unfair to her if I was to just keep living like this was a temporary issue.

We have a spare bedroom in our apartment. It had mostly acted as my home office, though it also tended to be the place that junk went when we had nowhere else to put it. It seemed as good a time as any to clean out that junk. Old clothes, ugly decorations and impractical kitchen appliances that had been gifted to us that we stashed away because we didn’t have a need for them–I got rid of it all. I moved my desk out to the living room too.

I made that spare room into a nursery. At first, I tried to keep it simple. What were the essential things that I needed for Aimee’s well being and comfort? I moved the crib into there. I got a changing table. A rocking chair where I could rock her to sleep on nights that she got fussy. I bought her some baby toys and a mobile to put over the crib. It all felt a little…condescending. But, for the time being, she was a baby. And that was what babies needed.

Every week, I found myself adding a little more to the room. I’d end up painting the walls pink, and I’d get cute decorations and stuffed animals to put on display. Sometimes I’d stop and look around, afraid that I was getting carried away. It felt wrong to enjoy being a mommy so much, while Aimee was stuck in a body without any agency or knowledge of what had happened.

But I also believed that I was doing everything that I could. Eventually, I’d figure out a way to bring Aimee back. And until then, didn’t we both deserve to be happy and comfortable?

***

I took a drive to the grocery store and had a look at their options. While they had adult diapers, there was something about their quality that I just didn’t trust. Blame it on having changed baby diapers for the last few months, but I felt like I could judge a diaper’s quality quickly, and I just couldn’t imagine these cutting it. I tried a few more stores, even some local drug stores, but was met with the same disappointing products. At the last drug store I went into, my desperation had brought me to pull aside an employee and ask if they had any other options for adult diapers besides what was on the shelf. No, she said, they didn’t. But she might have known of one other option.

I was coming close to just settling and buying a few packs of cheaply made ‘incontinence briefs’ for the time being, so any other options seemed favorable to me.

“There’s this store just outside of town. I don’t know much about it, but I think they, kinda, specialize in adult diapers.”

“Okay, sure,” I said. “Like a medical supply store?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But…I don’t think it’s for folks who have a medical need.”

I scratched my head. “What other reason would someone want adult diapers?”

The woman just laughed at me.