Tale #163: A Marked Man (Part 1: The Mad Libs)

Tale #163: A Marked Man (Part 1: The Mad Libs) (Content Tags: Supernatural, reality changing, messy diapers, age regression, humiliation, shifting of roles, girlfriend as antagonist, commission) She should have known better than to expect that Calvin would act like the responsible adult that he claimed to be. He was halfway to thirty now, wasn't he? Shouldn't that be plenty old enough to act like a man, instead of a petulant boy? Hadn't he promised her that he'd chip in around the house? Or that he'd put more effort into scouring the job market? That he would put in the effort to prove that he had what it takes to be a provider? Calvin had very clearly stated that he would become better; when they had decided to move in together, he’d held her in his arms, and he’d whispered sweet reassurances in her ear. Vivian felt like such a fool. Worse than that, she felt as though she’d been betrayed by her own sense of judgment. It was the same judgment that she’d been scrutinized for by her mothers. So arrogantly, so ignorantly, she had scoffed at their scorn; they’d told her the true colors of men, but Vivian had been so confident that Calvin would be different. She had been so sure that she could direct Calvin into being everything that her mothers said he wasn’t. But ultimately? They were being proven right. They’d been living together for a few months now in this cozy little duplex, and Calvin’s facade had been slipping ever since. For the first couple of weeks, the red-haired man had put in some modicum of effort, but those efforts had been decreasing with every day going forward. She hadn’t been able to see it when they had first started dating a year prior to that, but it had become more clearly obvious that Calvin had simply been putting on an act during that time. The ‘man’ was really just a little boy who had pretended to be a grown-up, and long enough to lull Vivian into a false sense of security. Gone was the man who would pay for dinner, who would happily listen to her play the piano, who would ask her about her day, or who would dote on her needs. That man may as well have never existed, because it hadn’t been who Calvin really was; no, that man had been nothing more than an illusory disguise. That man, who she had fallen in love with, and who she’d thought had been the one who would prove her mothers wrong, had been little more than a trap in the shape of a man. A human pitcher plant, and she’d been the insect who was taken in by the sweet scent of the nectar. It was frustrating, and on a smaller level, it was also humiliating. She hated to think that Calvin could really be this lazy, selfish man-child. Vivian also couldn’t help but hate herself a little bit, because she still cared so deeply for him; even in the depths of her disgust with his behavior, she still had a sort of love that bubbled deep within her. Was it the same kind of love that she had started with? Perhaps not. Perhaps that romantic love had met a permutation, and so it was no longer the same type she’d once had. She couldn’t help but wonder if the same could be said for Calvin himself. Did he still see her as the woman who he’d deigned to read poetry to? Who he’d stayed at the bedside of, whenever she had felt sick? Or was his love altered into something less altruistic? The way that he acted toward her wasn’t tinged at all with malice, but with the selfishness and entitlement of a child. If she didn’t know any better, then she would have to assume that he didn’t want a girlfriend, but instead a mommy who would clean up all his messes. He wanted to be loved, to be cared for, to be doted on, but not as a respected adult should be. Calvin was a child. The immaturity as a whole wasn’t a deal-breaker, since Vivian wasn’t wholly ignorant to the hearts of men. She knew that deep inside, all men had an inner child that yearned to be set free, but to be an adult meant to find the means to pacify that child. Playing video games all day in dirty underwear, while beer cans accumulated on the coffee table, until the point of passing out for a nap? That wasn’t the work of a big man who deserved to be treated as such; that was little more than the immature wiles of a naughty brat whom had proved he couldn’t handle such freedoms. Vivian had tried to talk with him about it too, as a reasonable partner might, but that had only led to more broken promises and accusations of ‘nagging’. It was ridiculous on the face of it, since it was hardly nagging to request that her boyfriend help contribute to the household in some clear way. If he wasn’t working and making money, then he could at least get some chores done while she slaved away for a paycheck! He could cook, or clean, or at the very minimum, be emotionally present for her whenever she came home from the office. Too many times she had kicked off her shoes after an arduous day, and come in to see that he’d Doordashed himself fast food on her dime, and was passed out drunk on the couch in nothing but his underwear. Her physical attraction to him had all but died by now, even as he whined about her ‘withholding intimacy’ from him. How could she be intimate with him now, though? The very thought was tainted by the oedipal reality of the roles he’d painted their household relationship with. No longer was there any sex appeal to be had; she simply couldn’t look at him that way. She was far more his mother, than she was his lover. She was herself a child of the Fates, but she’d always wished to live like the humans did. There was no intrigue to the cosmological samba that her mothers kept busy with, not to someone like her; no, she was far more interested in living the normal life of a normal woman. There was no rush, no harm in keeping eternity waiting, and she honestly believed that she could see something that those crones could not. Vivian thought that she could pierce through the veil that separated such worlds, and that she could find the means to truly understand what it meant to be a mere mortal; wasn’t that the most sensible? To live like a mortal, before becoming the bearer of the threads that bound them? To understand their tribulations and triumphs? To experience love and loss? They’d warned her about men in particular. They’d told her that men could not be trusted to control their own fate. She might have argued against such a notion back then, but she found herself second-guessing herself now. Perhaps it was true that men could not be given such a responsibility; living a life in the mortal world had slowly built that premise up, and now living with one, it felt all too true. One late afternoon, after she’d had a particularly trying day at work, she had come home to the house again in disarray. The one thing she had asked Calvin to do that day, was to clean up after the messes he had made. It was such a simple request, and yet, the man had been incapable of even doing something as easy as that. She texted him to ask where he’d scampered off to, while keeping her temper level, and he had the gall to inform her that he’d gone out with ‘the boys’ to play a game of pickle-ball. There was no apology for shirking his duties, nor even a mention that such duties had been put upon him in the first place; it was as if he saw her requests as mere suggestions, and he’d opted to not take them. While cleaning up the living room, which she knew she shouldn’t, she came across something particularly juvenile that he must have been occupying his endless free time with earlier in the day: it was a ‘Mad Libs’ book. It was the sort of thing that would make sense to be in the backpack of a third or fourth grader, as something amusing they found at the Scholastic book fair, but hardly something that a full-grown man should be preoccupying himself with. The sight of it made her anger flare again, and it made that feeling of him being an overgrown child return. She left it on the coffee table for a while, as she wandered about the house to take care of the many other chores that had been left unattended, but the book sat at the forefront of her thoughts. She cleaned up his ‘toys’ and trash from the living room, she put away the food he’d gotten out in the kitchen, she made the bed, she cleaned the piss off the seat of the toilet, and she threw his dirty underwear in the washing machine. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when a delivery came to the door, and she mistakenly thought it was the lamp that she had ordered; opening up the package, it became obvious that it was instead some expensive little figurine. It was a toy. Maybe it was meant to go on a mantle or in a cabinet, but at the end of the day, it was a hundred dollar action figure. Opening up a bottle of red wine, she sighed and found herself back on the couch, with the childish book strewn out in front of her. A few glasses in, and she’d retrieved something else: a marker. It was no ordinary marker though, no, it was the one thing she had brought with herself into the mortal world. It was a utensil of immense power, which had the capability of altering the fate of whomever or whatever she wanted. She hadn’t initially wanted to bring it with her, because she thought that it might become a crutch, but her mothers had been quite insistent on taking at least one thing. If she was ever in a serious bind, then this marker could change the world around her, just with a swish of its tip. Her words would have power, in a way that they could never have otherwise. Flipping through the pages of the Mad Libs book, she came across the most recent page that he’d lazily scrawled in pencil. Reading through it, in her wine-fueled fury, actually got her to let out a hearty laugh. “He thinks quite highly of himself…” She mused with a grin, wondering if the poorly scribbled delusions on the page were at all representative of the man himself. ‘Hello! My name is CALVIN, and I am TWENTY-FIVE years old. I live in a MANSION, and have lots of MONEY. People always say that I’m VERY STRONG and that I HAVE A BIG DICK. My favorite thing to do is to GET RIPPED, and BITCHES think that I’m really good at it! My least favorite thing is GETTING NAGGED, and I try to ZONE IT OUT whenever I can.’ Some parts of it made her angrier, but the absurdity of it all was too much to stay mad at. It almost looked like a cry for help, from an insecure little boy. In all the ways that it mattered, that was exactly what it came across as. Vivian pursed her lips and decided it was time to change a few things; if Calvin was going to play the self-obsessed writer, then she would become his editor, and she’d make things a little more accurate. It was high time that the supposed man get a dose of reality, and the best way to do that was to change the way that his reality operated altogether; maybe if he got a chance to recognize how immature he’d been, then he might find the resolve to actually grow up. Was that wishful thinking? Perhaps, but at this point, it was all she could think to do, at least short of breaking up with him and kicking him onto the streets. She pitied him too much for that though. After all, he was just a little boy, wasn’t he? With tipsy bemusement, she uncapped the marker and posed it right above the page, so that she could overwrite everything he’d put down: ‘Hello! My name is CALVIN, and I am NINE years old. I live in a CHILD’S BEDROOM, and have lots of TOYS. People always say that I’m VERY CUTE and that I AM TOO OLD FOR DIAPERS. My favorite thing to do is to WATCH CARTOONS, and MOMMY think that I’m really good at it! My least favorite thing is USING THE POTTY, and I try to GO IN MY DIAPERS whenever I can.’ There was an irony in matching Calvin’s immaturity with her own, but she felt as though this was a far more accurate picture of who he was. Their bedroom had all sorts of his ‘toys’ on the shelves, he watched what she considered to be cartoons for children, and the state of his underwear betrayed a failure in pottytraining. Perhaps she was being harsh in some categories, but after everything she’d become fed up with, she didn’t see an issue with it. As luck would have it, since it wasn’t something she’d thought too much of, she’d only just finished writing these things down as her boyfriend had been getting ‘dropped off’ by his friends’ ‘mommy’. He didn’t have his own car beforehand, so it was likely that he’d used her credit card to hail an Uber to go play with his friends, and now that reality had shifted, getting a ride back with his ‘friend’ had turned to something more fitting. The other young men he’d been hanging out with would unfortunately be caught in the crossfire, and they would become his unwitting classmates in elementary school once more, but Calvin’s own mind wouldn’t be so luckily ignorant. Since Calvin was the epicenter of the rewrite, his memories would still remain of who he had once been, though they would mix and mingle with the new memories that this reality gave him. If left this way for too long, then his old memories would eventually dissolve, and the new reality would become all that he knew; for the moment though, he would be dealing with some serious confusion as to what had just transpired. The doorbell rung, and Vivian got up from the couch to go answer it. On the other side was a young woman in her thirties, who Vivian could only imagine was the regressed mother of one of Calvin’s regressed friends. In front of her was a little ginger boy with lots of freckles and wide green eyes; he was wearing a little baseball uniform, which made enough sense to Vivian, as the reality alterations usually did their best to keep things consistent when changing. Since Calvin had been off playing a ‘sport’ when the shift happened, the new reality had accommodated that concept. “Hello, Vivian! So good to see you again. Your son has quite the imagination.” The woman chuckled, giving the boy’s head a gentle pat. “Viv! You gotta help me, somethin’ made me all small!” Came the squeaky cry of the half-pint being mentioned, his big eyes getting wet with tears. Vivian smiled, “Thank you for bringing him home. I’ll carpool next time, okay?” It was fortunate that Vivian had already been a few years older than Calvin before all of this, since if she had been the same age as him, then the implications would have been a little less savory. As it was, she was a very young mother to the little boy that had once been her boyfriend. As the older woman left, Vivian helped to usher her ‘son’ into the house, as if he’d really taken on the role that she’d set for him to have. “Your uniform is filthy, Calvin. You must have really been hustling out there.” She quietly mused, acting as though nothing was out of sorts. “V-Vivian, don’t you recognize me? Don’t you know who I am?” She wondered for a moment if she should play dumb, but she knew that he wouldn’t properly learn his lesson if she didn’t make it obvious. Calvin was a little thick in the head, so he wouldn’t take any changes to heart unless he knew the reasons why fate had turned against him. She took him by the hand, noting how much smaller and smoother it had become, and led him toward the couch. “Of course I know who you are, Calvin. You’re the cute little boy that is always making messes that I have to clean up. You leave your dishes, and your trash, and your toys, all for me to pick up. You spend money you don’t have, and you spend all your time playing and being lazy. You won’t get a job, you won’t cook a meal, and you won’t consider anyone else’s feelings but your own. His mouth gaped wide in shock, and Vivian took his chin in her hand as she knelt down. “You already expect me to do everything for you, don’t you? You can’t take care of yourself. Can’t feed yourself, can’t do your own laundry… Hell, you don’t even wipe your own ass that well! What else does that describe, but a child? So, that’s what you are now...No, that’s not true, since you already were one. You just look the part now.” His shock and fear took a turn, and his face got pink. “I-I AM NOT! How did you even DO something like this?! Are you some kind of witch?!” The young woman smiled, “Something like that, sure. Now, why don’t we get you cleaned up, hm? I don’t want you tracking dirt everywhere, since I just cleaned up.” “No! I want you to change me back, right now! I-I’m not even a normal kid, b-because…” Without warning, her other hand went down and gave his groin a gentle squeeze, where she could feel that the puffy padding below his baseball pants had become soggy and swollen. “Because of this? Because of these little diapers of yours? Maybe some time back in diapers will help you to remember that you’re supposed to be cleaning off the toilet seat, and that your underwear isn’t toilet-paper that you wear around your waist.” Calvin’s face got redder, “Vivian! I-I don’t wanna wear DIAPERS! I promise I’ll do better, please! Just give me another chance!” “Maybe in time, if you prove that you deserve it. For now though, I think you’ll just be a little boy.” “B-but…!” His argument died in his throat, because as soon as the words were supposed to arrive, what came instead was a gassy outburst in the backside of his thick padding. Those emerald eyes widened again, though for very different reasons, and his mouth hung open once more too; this was a different kind of shock for him to undergo, where he was getting a real chance to recognize just how far he’d fallen in the last ten minutes. It was exactly the sort of humbling experience that Vivian thought he was in desperate need of, if he was ever going to mature for real. “Uh-oh! Sounds like someone has to make a big present for mommy, doesn’t it?” The woman teased, giving Calvin a pat on the bottom. “N-no, I...Please don’t make me…” “Make you? I’m not making you do anything, sweetie. That’s all you.” He clutched the back of his pants with both hands, as if he could stop the avalanche from proceeding, but it was a horribly futile effort. The flatulence didn’t let up, only rippling louder and wetter than before, and the boy began to whine in a shameful indignation. It was obvious that he wanted nothing more than to regain some semblance of control over his bowels, but that kind of control had been plucked from him, like a feather from a bird. His pleas would go on for another few moments, but when push came to shove, they were meaningless words that did nothing to impact the world around him.