Thump. The te-morning sun stabbed little pinpricks of light through the weave of the bnket. I blinked, squinted, and forced my eyes shut. Was it my head that was pounding? My skull still felt funny.

  Thump. It was no use; I was in that worst of morning states, the one where you'd really like to go back to sleep, but you're already awake, damn it, and no matter how you huddle under the covers and try to force yourself, you're just killing time until you finally give in and get out of bed…

  Thump. I yawned, stretched, and poked my head out from under the covers. The bnket felt funny sliding across my ears, but I was too caught up in remembering what I was doing on Nicole's couch to give it a second thought.

  Thump. Rasputin, perched on the armrest, passive-aggressively thwapped his tail against my head. So that's what it was; I batted at him, annoyed. He made a show of not flinching, then very deliberately rose, slunk to the floor, and stalked off elsewhere. I shot him a Look as he left, channeling my annoyance at having to get up into ire at cats and their stupid performative coolness; then I got to my hands and knees, slipped, lost my bance, and tumbled gracelessly off the couch and onto the floor.

  I wobbled to my feet and shucked off the bnket. I felt…not exactly dizzy, but off somehow; my sense of bance was still wonky, and my limbs felt discoordinated. It reminded me of adolescence, when all your proportions are changing by the week, or by the day…

  I gnced around the room, hoping nobody'd noticed. No such luck; Snickers was watching me warily from atop the bookcase. I frowned and made a point of turning away, feeling that weird ck-of-response in my ears again; then I noticed the Kit-Cat Klock on the wall, which read 10:37. Shit, I thought, I'm te for work…! But no, Nicole'd called me out, hadn't she; why was that, again…?

  Actually, I heard her over in the other room, talking to…I wasn't sure. Students? Coworkers?° Well, I didn't want to interrupt, and she might have her webcam on;°° plus, remembering what we'd (apparently) been doing the st few days made me incredibly self-conscious. I slipped quietly out the door and returned to my own apartment.

  ° (One of the stranger things about everyone going work-from-home was how much likelier you were to py spectator to someone else's daily routine.) °° (Another: how much warier you had to be about showing up on someone's Zoom call. It wasn't hard to guess what her students'd make of a disheveled, pajama-cd man in the background of their teacher's apartment.)

  The pce still smelled strangely unfamiliar. There was a part of this scent that I recognized as me, but my brain for some reason construed it as belonging to someone else, which made me uneasy. I could put up with it for now, but it made me want to, I didn't know, go rub my head on stuff – which was a weird thought, but then a lot of things were weird tely. Anyway, first things first, I had to use the bathroom.

  …One of the strange cultural effects of the virus was the number of things that filtered from weird little niche subcultures into the mainstream simply because they were suddenly apropos. To wit: in gender-bender fiction (or so I gathered,) the omigod-my-dick-shrank!? moment was a long-established trope, but in the st few months it'd been flogged to hell and back by Internet memesheep, and was already so tired and shopworn that it'd just shown up in a Saturday Night Live sketch.

  Which is absurd: anyone who's ever had one (including most of the people making the jokes) can tell you that the size fluctuates constantly depending on time, mood, weather, etc. Absolutely nobody, upon finding their member a little smaller than usual when they go to take a leak, is going to think holy shit I'm turning into a woman! when the likelier takeaway is huh, must be colder out than I thought.

  You know what is a sudden and very unexpected eye-opener, though? Dropping your drawers and feeling the waistband tug at your tail.

  I was instantly aware that something was Not Right here. Like everyone on the pnet 'til recently, I'd lived my entire life with my spine ending between the buttcheeks, and the sensation of the estic crimping part of it – a new, free-hanging part, a part that had not been there yesterday – against my gluteus maximus rang all kinds of arm bells. I yanked my sweats off, pulled down my underwear, and nearly sprained my neck trying to get a good look at my own backside before realizing I could just look in the mirror.

  And there it was: a little stub of backbone around 2–3" long, covered in skin that was only just starting to sprout a coat of peach-fuzz. Without the fur, it looked more like something you'd see in a tabloid article on the Sacred Monkey-Boy of the Himayas than anything – but I knew damn well what it meant, and when I gnced back up I saw that my ears were just a bit pointier and fuzzier than I remembered, to boot.

  My mouth fell open, revealing canines that were slightly longer and sharper than usual. I remembered my tender nipples, and lifted my shirt to find that not only were they a little puffy, but yes, the flesh underneath was just beginning to swell suggestively. For a long moment I simply stared, mind racing, running down the checklist of things that'd puzzled me tely and assembling them into a picture that made a terrible amount of sense of it all…

  It all added up, whether I liked it or not: the euphoria, sudden social neediness, twitchiness and distractability, odd behavior and cravings, heightened senses, the mysterious thrumming in my chest, even Nicole's cryptic remarks…damn it, she'd known, hadn't she!? As addle-brained and deep in thrall to it as I'd been, I probably reeked of it to her senses. And now I understood why the pce smelled funny to me; I was never going to smell like that again, was I? Never going to be that again… I began to tremble – from stress? Anger?

  …no, wait. It was because I still had to pee.

  My cheeks burned, and so did my ears, under the fuzz; it felt insulting to have a moment of personal crisis unraveled by primitive biological need, but I couldn't prevent the usual sense of catharsis° from mellowing me out at least a little bit.

  ° (Damn it.)

  Not for long, though. The shock of realization prickled at the back of my neck, and there was a sinking feeling in my gut. This can't be happening, I thought, then felt like an idiot for thinking it. Of course it could; it'd already happened to…what were we at now, tens of thousands? Oh, who even knew; it wasn't like I'd kept up on the news the st few days. It'd happened to my neighbors; I'd watched it, right before my eyes. And now, inevitably, Fate had gotten around to me…

  But why, damn it!? I'd done everything I was supposed to, hadn't I? I'd spent weeks holed up in my apartment, avoiding human contact even more zealously than usual, wearing uncomfortable protective gear when I was out in public, getting panicky any time someone got too close to me, and for what?

  It wasn't fair, I fumed, washing my hands. I had, I knew that much…as much as anybody could've. Okay, I could've tried to jury-rig something with the toilet, but that'd only postpone matters; I could've gotten contactless delivery on my groceries, but wouldn't they charge you for that? I could've stopped checking the mail, hermetically sealed the front door, huddled in the bathroom with the lights off, waiting for the Angel of Fluff to pass over the house…

  I felt a sudden fre of nerves, a wave of twitchy panic washing over me. Almost reflexively, I found myself casting about. Maybe I could look on the Internet; maybe there was some new breakthrough. Maybe somebody'd found some unorthodox but possibly effective home remedy. Maybe there was something, anything I could do to stop this…

  …but, well, I knew better than that. I'd spent more than enough time trying to keep myself abreast° of the situation; if there was something like that out there, I would've heard about it, and I hadn't. But I had heard plenty of anecdotes about this or that idiot inflicting some awful new variety of snake-oil on himself for fear of losing his—

  ° (Oh, perfect, another one for the not-even-a-cat-pun-but… file.)

  I shook my head. I couldn't deal with this, not first thing in the morning, not as twitchy and addled and overwhelmed as I felt right now. I needed time to process, a chance to clear my head; I could come back at it when I was stable and rational again, when I could handle it like an adult. Right now, what I wanted most was to just not think.

  I slipped my boxers back on, stalked to my desk, and sat in my chair, carefully situating myself and hunching forward to minimize the chance of brushing that thing against the seat; I certainly didn't need any reminders of it. MUDding? I thought; but no, I really wasn't in the mood for pretending to be someone else. I donned my headphones, tried and failed to make them sit right, doffed them again, and spent the following hours engrossed in mindless violence.

  AnnouncementAnd at long st, we're back! It took me a long time and a lot of experimentation and recalibration to get past some of the things that'd stumped me initially (and to dial things in tonally,) while others resolved themselves pretty easily; I also needed to get enough of a buffer built back up that I could be comfortably certain of making it to The End without - fingers crossed - missing updates or having to go back on hiatus.

  Things're finally at that point, though, and I'm thrilled to start sharing the rest of the story - I really fell back in love with it during the publishing of the initial fragment, and the characters have rarely left my mind since I resumed work on it. I'd like to offer a hearty thanks to everyone who read and commented on the first run, and a warm welcome to anybody just tuning in - very gd you could join me =^_^=