Kevin's 18th birthday was quiet, a small cake with his dad and girlfriend, Tina, mostly because it was a Thursday night and they'd planned his party for the next night, Friday, to have more time and more friends, a more senior-year type shindig.
With only 5 weeks left in the school year, all his friends had already had their 18ths. Kevin's was second to last and each of the parties leading up to this had gotten more and more odd as people tried to come up with new party ideas.
Tina's mother was a stickler for being 'home-on-time', so after some modest present openings Tina kissed Kevin on the porch and drove off.
Reflecting on this as he walked back in the house, Kevin knew the reason for the day's delay, but still was disappointed at the anticlimactic actual-18-day. He'd built it up in his mind, and he knew it was out of scale, but the disappointment still crept in.
Kevin's father, David, had seen them go out the front door together and hoped they got some good kissing in. His marriage had ended 6 years before, badly, due to his ex-wife's opioid addiction. The divorce was barely finalized when she passed from an interaction-overdose, and her death weighed on him. He'd always thought there was something more he could have done for her, a different way he could have handled things.
Of course, addictions aren't decided on. They happen, a combination of brain-vs-biochemistry and chance, a medical tragedy confused with morality, and frequently aren't fixable. Aftereffects keep the tragedy rolling, lives stolen or shat upon by what's happening inside someone else.
David knew from tragedy, he felt the pain, and he tried to keep moving, but it was harder and harder, physically, but mostly emotionally. He had choices but few that appealed to him, and even fewer that he felt could make a measurable difference in his life. That said, he loved his son, and he delighted in Kevin having at least a little good-stuff in his life.
For his part, Kevin came back inside and sat on the couch next to his dad for a moment, and got a hard pat on the shoulder of welcome and sort-of congratulations. They both didn't say things, partly from shared pain at the loss of a person not there, and partly from just not knowing what to say.
Patterns of what to say, and not say, are sometimes Set in Stone.
Preoccupied enough to discount his dad's show of affection, Kevin said goodnight and went upstairs.
His dad worried him, more and more as time passed. The weight problem just kept building, and the pre-diabetes made him more a fixed blob of furniture than the armchair he sat in.
At least the armchair knew that it was furniture.
Back in his room, Kevin answered the congrats texts from a couple of friends and then got ready for bed, settling in to read before he slept. The book for the night was a very odd book he'd gotten at a garage sale a couple of weeks before.
Kevin's party, he'd decided, was going to be a 'Roman Toga' party. Since the book he'd found was written in Latin, he opened randomly and started trying to translate some of the text using his phone's 'Translate Latin -- English' feature. He wanted some cool phrases to speak to the crowd, like he really knew Latin, even though he very much didn't.
The phrases were oddball, reading more like a cookbook than a novel in places, but had long sections of text decorated with fancy doodles that partially obscured the words. The book had no title, but the first page had words that read, "Satyrical Dionysian Symposia".
Misreading Styrical as 'satirical' instead of relating to Satyrs, Kevin just felt (mistakenly) good that he knew what it sort-of meant: satires were comedies that overplayed a viewpoint on one side, over-agreeing, to make fun. And Symposium meant lecture, so this obviously was a satirical lecture about some Greek god or another -- he'd heard of Dionysus, vaguely.
Kevin's history teacher had once said (in reference to Plato's pamphlet) that "Symposium" really meant 'drinking party', a memorable fact that delighted his students and motivated them to read the work, which mostly concerned the nature of what-is-love-really.
Getting out a set of post-it-notes, Kevin put markers under phrases that were set apart from the others and looked pretty easy to read out loud. He'd use those at the party to make it sound like he was all Roman or whatever.
The fact that Symposium, Dionysus, and many of the words were Greek, and not Roman, didn't matter to Kevin one whit. As far as he knew, everybody back then wore bedsheets and sandals, so it still worked.
The hard work of pronouncing the long, unfamiliar, and calligraphically-written words was paying off, though, as he found he could definitely get better at the phrases if he repeated them several times.
Eventually, he got tired and went to sleep, warm thoughts in his head about Tina's boobs (which he'd recently seen and played with) and the prospect of Doing It, as they'd planned for the night after his party, Sunday night.
Tina's controlling and over-possessive mother was going out of town for work the next week, so they'd have time to repeat it, they hoped. Tina, as a mostly pre-approved thing, would be staying with a friend. Little did her mother know that her friend, Cassie, was Completely Onboard with Kevin going over to sleep with Tina at her then-empty house and 'Having Fun'.
Kevin suddenly felt tired and turned out his light.
He didn't fall asleep, exactly. It was a rushing blackness, an overwhelming sense of motion, but without wind. It wasn't a dream-state, he hadn't fallen out of bed, but he wasn't where he started, and he was Really Really Sure he hadn't done this himself.
Where "here" was resolved slowly as he managed to open his eyes, his actual eyes, not some dream version of eyes. The difference was clear.
Yet, where he was? It made ZERO sense!
Blinking the 'sleep' out of his eyes, Kevin looked up to the underside of a tiny, thatched roof mud-brick hut. He had a sense of calm about him, but he knew the rest of his logical brain was just going berserk over how he could be where he was.
He technically knew he was dreaming, or he wasn't, because of what he saw, but the sensations were genuine, not dream-state, not disconnected and jumbled like dreams are.
It had the tangible, definite feeling of actually being in a place.
He heard birds chirping and felt a slight breeze through the window overhead.
He couldn't be where he was, but... he definitely Was Somewhere.
He thought, "How in the fuck?"
Turning over on his side and pushing himself up from the floor mat, he knelt on the dirt floor and took stock of where he was. For one, he was very naked. He usually slept in his (tighty-whitey) underwear, so that was different. But, looking down his body, what he was seeing was NOT the soft, over-pudgy roundness of body, the very-not-fit and not-trim yes actually fat version of Kevin that he didn't particularly like about himself.
He'd always sort-of blamed his dad for giving him the genetic "gift" of mega-pudgy.
Instead of that fat body, he saw a very different one, that still felt like himself. He could move his legs, his arms, open and close his mouth and fist, these were HIS, but they looked very different.
For one, he had Serious Muscles, plus a pretty deep tan... with no hair on his arms?
And... Wow - He Was now UNCIRCUMSIZED. That's a change!
Getting to the less obvious things, his hairy chest was gone, too. It was bare instead. He'd had a patch of thick hair there since 8th grade and didn't quite know if it was manly or just unkempt.
In fact, he was almost entirely hairless. Reaching up, he found he still had head-hair, but it was cut far shorter than he normally kept it, almost to a flat-top.
A strange sound was coming from outside, kind of a repeated squishing or sloshing sound.
Whether the gravity was less or he was just overpowered, his push up to stand went very fast and he almost found he'd jumped. A window was in front of him, small and at eye height, just enough to see the reddish dusk- or dawn-like sky. He didn't know if it was morning or night, but it kind of felt more morning-ish. Maybe it was the birds that were the clue, he thought.
A doorway stood at the head of the bed, but instead of a door, the way was blocked by several sets of Venetian-blind-like mats made of twigs pierced by two strings.
The problem of his being naked was very front of mind for him, despite all of this being odd beyond measure.
Casting his eyes about for just anything to use, he even considered the mat he'd awoken on. It had no sheet or blanket, just the thick sewn-shut bag of straw, not a viable garment.
The door/blind didn't look detachable. He shrugged and decided he might as well go outside.
Peering out, he saw a pretty, early-20's woman, clad in a top-only tunic barely reaching her mid-thighs. She was standing, or rather stomping, in a wide knee-high barrel of grapes, maybe 15 steps away.
He had to pause -- the small bit of her legs he saw looked like they were glowing.
More than that, he didn't want to come out of the hut. He was naked.
