A word beforehand: Categorization seems to be primarily important to many Literotica readers. "The Futanari," contains an element of science fiction as I understand it, but perhaps not as purists do. To my mind, my stories don't fit neatly into categories. Their pedigree is as muttly as their author.
A note about format too. Literotica formatting collapses the spacing between sections in my stories, leaving the reader without a marker that signals a narrative jump. Alternating trios of slashes (///) and back-slashes (\\\) now serve as the marker.
Lastly, this is it, folks, my final story for Literotica. Thank you for stopping by and giving it a little of your time. Salud.
*****
The Futanari
At dusk, sheet lightening flickered from one quadrant of the sky to another. Mikio paused on the path. The sky was clear. First stars and constellations were beginning to show. She thought the light must be a trick of her eye until she saw it twice, unmistakably, faint sheets of brightened darkness, without apparent cause.
Auroras?
she thought. There had been a forecast of heightened sun storms.
Her heart jumped as the meteor appeared from the east. A stratospheric arc of light that blazed to a count of three before breaking into a thousand tentacles that sprayed earthward and evaporated into the dark. Above, the meteor left a ghost of its trail, an ephemeral wisp of smoke so high above the Earth that it reflected the light of the sun that had already set.
The sound arrived, wholly unexpected, a distant boom, like a rolling thunder. She was aware that the sensation in her chest was an artifact of her accelerating imagination, but as the boom rolled overhead, Mikio felt a concussion of air, an unlikely thrum.
Then,
Whap!
as though the ground had been slapped, something struck the path sixty feet ahead and threw up a column of dirt, looking as though a
jinn
had suddenly appeared in the dark, risen from the ground.
\ \ \
The column fanned laterally with a mild breeze and resembled a figure opening its cape to one side. Mikio pulled her flashlight and aimed as she ran toward it. Dazzled by the speed and wonder of events, she let herself imagine that an
ikiyō
or a
jinn
or some otherworldly spirit, by some infinitesimal possibility, might have been present for an instant. The shape dissipated in the jumpy beam of her flashlight, as the heavier particles fell away and the fine dust thinned to invisibility.
At the impact site she found a cone, about nine inches deep and three times as wide at the rim. At the bottom sat an object smaller than a pea, be-be-sized, round and pitted.
Mikio held the flashlight between her teeth and from all fours picked the meteorite out of the cone using a tweezer from her utility tool. She placed her palm beneath the little stone and felt a lambent heat.
/ / /
The Hounds are already on the way,
Mikio thought. It was her term for the searchers and scavengers who converged on impact sites to scour for space debris. This meteor had been more than big enough to resister. Space rock must have shot up in value recently, so much so that governments had closed assess to several site-rich areas. Some had even suggested that the Hounds were government units.
It would be imprudent, even foolish, to leave the cone intact, open to discovery; at the same time, she felt it would be irreverent to simply fill it in, bulldoze the path with hands and feet. She set the meteorite aside and gathered clean pebbles from the immediate area, enough to fill three-quarters of the cone. She made a little ritual of placing them one by one, then poured sandy dirt over the top to make it blend with the path.
The one marker she left was a shallow handprint, which she could obliterate when she walked again in the morning.
She kept the meteorite in her fist as she walked back to her cabin, her academic retreat.
This thing in my hand survived catastrophe.
She imagined, beginning with the fireball, the successive break up of of the meteor into smaller and smaller fragments, each fragment reincinerating as it fell, each deflected into a new trajectory when hitting successive layers of the atmosphere. It seemed that from the depths of space, the little stone had been skipped to her feet, a gift from the outer heavens.
\ \ \
Mikio set the meteorite on a white porcelain dish and placed it on a shelf reserved for treasured finds. They included the intact exoskeleton of a land crab, a hummingbird nest and a perfectly preserved carapace of a large horseshoe crab. Over the next two days she returned to the stone frequently to relive the moments of discovery. The auroras, the meteor streaking bright and exploding into a shower of fragments. The
whap
on the ground and the dust cloud changing form in the beam of her flashlight.
On the evening of the third day, Mikio was startled to notice a change in the shape of the stone. It looked incrementally larger, a fraction less spherical. She dismissed this as a misperception, a trick of dim light and tired eyes after a long day — an impossibility. Yet Mikio dreamed that same night that she returned to the dish and saw not the stone but the seed of a pomegranate. The premonition that it would soon replicate itself a thousand times was disturbing enough to wake her.
In the morning Mikio avoided the shelf. Her focus turned to writing the final chapter of her dissertation and she worked at it solidly throughout the day. Sometime toward evening, satisfied with her progress, she decided to put every last grain of uncertainty to rest, and examined the stone in better light. As she peered closely an icy chill crawled through her skin. There was no doubt that the stone had changed shape and looked less like a spherical be-be and more like a tiny pear.
/ / /
Her mind went into a spin of thoughts. A fungus? Carried from space. Survived the incineration. A metamorph?
She wished that she had been systematic from the beginning, weighed the stone and measured its dimensions . It puzzled her that she hadn't recognized the obvious before, that a meteorite might carry danger.
She moved the dish to the spare room, sequestered it, closed the curtains and locked the door behind her. Her first duty lay in the safety and welfare of others, that much was firm in her mind, and she determined that it would be her guiding principle in the morning, when she would make her final decision whether to report the stone, destroy it or lock it away. If there was no further change, she could consider a delay. If the slightest change in shape or size was apparent, she would call the university and set in motion the confiscation of the stone. That was her plan.
She slept fitfully. A dream even more alarming than the pomegranate seed jolted her awake. It had been explicitly erotic, which was rare for her. As Mikio was bending to pick up a flower on her bedroom floor, an invisible penis penetrated her from behind. It slid effortlessly deeper and deeper and seemed it could snake its way far enough along her spine to choke her. She stood up, expecting to feel pain. Instead, the penis vanished from inside of her and left a sense of cleanliness. An unexpected heaviness made her look down. The penis was now hers. A voice told her something terrible.
The stone is a jinn.
Anxiously awake, Mikio noted the time. 1:11.
\ \ \
The words kept her awake.
The stone is a jinn.
The dream recirculated in her thought - she bent to the floor, felt the unexpected entry, its silky glide, and the pressure building inside. She had to pee and was unawarely touching her puss. She imagined stroking her erection, feeling its sway between her legs, its heat in her encircling hand. And she came very close to orgasm, very close, until the ghost of a thought intruded and her excitement evaporated. A thought about the stone. Had it thrown spores? Has it shed a virus?
She got up to empty her bladder. A voice said,
Shame on you
and she answered,
I am ashamed.
A moment later, she said aloud, "Destroy it," then returned to bed and slept.
/ / /
In the morning Mikio checked her messages. then let her tea steep in the kitchen while she showered. Wrapped in a bathrobe, she drank the tea outdoors, in warm sunlight. I'm procrastinating, she thought.
I'm afraid to face it.
She dressed, then washed the tea cup and the tea pot and the dish and the grapefruit spoon, and once they were all towel dried and put away, she went to the spare room, stood with her hand on the knob while taking a deep breath, then unlocked it and strode in, switching on the light.
No change. No change at all. Thank the good sweet Earth, no change.
\ \ \
Mikio worked outdoors, under the shade of the trees, listening to crows cluck and cackle in the woods. She ate her lunch outside and throughout the day made progress in her chapter. By late afternoon, a sense of normalcy had returned.
After dinner she showered for the second time that day and put her hair up and got ready for bed. The bed sheet was turned down before she thought of checking the stone to confirm, again, that it remained unchanged. She went to the spare bedroom, hoping to put her mind at rest and enjoy a night of perfect sleep.
/ / /
Panic seized her the moment she flicked on the light. The stone was inexplicably larger, twice its previous size. Thread-like roots had spread from its base, radiating toward the circumference of the dish. Thin tendrils had sprouted from the top, symmetrically paired. Four more had sprouted at the bottom.
She crawled from the room and when she could stand she went to the kitchen and rinsed her mouth, which had gone bone dry, then took a glass mixing bowl from the cabinet and returned to cover the stone, contain it with the inverted bowl.
She spent a miserable night in her car, afraid to stay and afraid to drive away.
\ \ \
She woke up hungry and cold at sunrise and had to pee behind a bush. Two hours later her cell rang inside the cabin. Mikio ran in just long enough to grab the phone and exit. It was Fumiko, her closest friend.
"I'm coming out," she said, "tonight, for the weekend."
"Oh no, no, you can't, Fumi, not so soon. I'm —"
"Soon? I haven't seen you in weeks. You're like a hermit out there alone. You don't text. Or you text monosyllables. It's not healthy, and you must be bored to death."
"No, I'm —-"
"Your anthropology can wait. The break will do you good. Besides, I
have
to see you."
"Fumi, I can't, it's —"
"Miki, I have to see you. I'm in crisis."
"It's the wrong time, Fu. I'm all stressed out."
"Then it's imperative that I come. Both of us are crazy."
"No, it's dangerous here."
"With idiots looking for space rocks?"
"You can't come here now, Fu. Next week, okay?"
"Rice and beans, I can't. Get that spare room ready."
\ \ \
Hours later, Mikio waited at the turnoff from the side road to her cottage. Fumi braked to a stop and looked up from the car, laughing.
"You couldn't wait to see me!"
"No, Fu. We have to leave."
"You're crazy! Leave and go where? This is paradise. And I need to use your bathroom."
"Fu, don't even get out."
"Then get in."
As Mikio settled in her seat, the car sped forward. Mikio screamed. Fumi parked by the cottage and said, "Loneliness has made you insane. You've lost your mind."
Mikio caught her by the arm before she could open the front door. Her look of alarm, tears filling her eyes, her mouth twisting in confusion and fear, startled Fumi.
"What on Earth is wrong?"
"It's not from Earth," Mikio said. "I'll tell you everything."
She swore Fumi to secrecy, then described the night she found the meteorite and its subsequent transformation. Fumi said, "You're shitting me."
"Have I ever been one to make up ridiculous stories?"
"No, you collect them and write about them."
"But I never lie, not to you."
"So far as I know. You've always been dull that way."
"It's alien, Fu. I don't know what it is or how dangerous it is, or how criminal I've been to keep it this long. It's growing and changing. I'm really scared and I can't let you be contaminated."
"You silly puss, you say you've had this thing for how many days? You picked it up, held it in your bare hands? If it's going to contaminate you, it already has. And since you and I have already touched, consider me contaminated too."
