Waking Up

You wake with the worst hangover you’ve ever experienced. Your head is being used as drums. Your mouth has spent eternity in the Sahara. You feel like you’ve run a marathon. Every muscle in your body aches. Standing up makes your head spin. Somehow you stagger out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. Every step is a struggle. You feel unbalanced, as if your body is not your body, as if with any moment you’re about to fall.

The first glass of water hits your mouth like paradise. The second drowns the desert of your throat. The third and the drumming of your head starts to fade. By the fourth your gulps are no longer ****. By the fifth you can even leave the sink. Walking still feels weird.

The clock in the living room tells you it’s five in the morning. You’ve been **** all night. You half walk, half fall to the sofa and slump there. What’s happened. Everything feels weird. Especially your legs. Something keeps brushing your inner thigh. You glance down. Your white underpants are a ripped mess, shredded cloth dangling from elastic. What the? How? You brush the cloth away.

You freeze.

Now you’ve never had any complaints about your junk, but you’d readily admit you were nothing special. Average length. Average breadth. Just average. That’s not what’s there now. Between your legs is something else. You’d assumed on seeing the ruined underpants, that the brushes on thigh were strands of that. No. It was the monster where your penis used to be. It’s currently flaccid but it’s as long now as it was erect before. And it broad. And behind it is the biggest set of balls you’ve ever seen. No wonder you’ve had trouble walking.

It must be an hallucination. It can’t be real. When you reach out and touch it, it feels real. It feels part of you. But no. How?

The armlets. You haven’t taken them off. You must still be wearing them. You glance where they were and see no metal. Have they dropped off? No, where they’d been are black marks. Yes, on both arms, black marks. Black marks perfectly replicating the symbols that had been on them. Have they burnt the symbols onto you. Carefully you reach up to touch them, expecting to feel the tenderness of burnt flesh. It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like flesh.

That doesn’t make sense. You must find the armlets. You rush into the bedroom. The armlets are not on the bed. They’re not on the floor. They’re not under the bed. You can’t see them anywhere. And suddenly a thought hits you.

The symbols were on the outside of the armlets. The inside was smooth. So how have the symbols burnt into your flesh? That doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense. The armlets have disappeared and been replaced by these tattoos? It’s as if the armlets have merged into your flesh?

Merged with you. Transformed your penis and balls. Turned you into a sex god.

That doesn’t make sense. That can’t be true. But what other explanation is there?