Mom was still lying on the sofa -- I wasn't sure if she'd been there all day, ever since I left. I sat down beside her and told her about my visit with Will, hoping it might encourage her to get up and walk around more. She smiled -- she saw right through my attempt to manipulate her, but it seemed to work anyway, because she said:
"You're a good friend to Will. Can I lean on your shoulder for a while, too?"
So I stood next to her, and she slowly stood up, putting one hand on the arm of the sofa and the other on my shoulder. The blanket slid off her, and I gave a loud "eep!" and shut my eyes; she wasn't wearing anything under it.
She laughed. "You won't be much help walking if you don't watch where we're going."
"Mom! I can't..."
"I don't have anything you don't have, now... okay, a couple of things, but it doesn't matter now. I need your help; your Dad's at work, and it's just us -- I won't say us girls, but, well. I think you know what I mean."
"Do you need me to help you rig a blanket so it won't fall off you?" I opened my eyes again, and tried to keep my eyes on her face.
"Not just yet. For now, just help me get to the bathroom. I could probably do it on my own, but I'll feel more comfortable with your help -- I've fallen down several times, going to the bathroom by myself when your Dad wasn't here..."
So I helped her get down the hall to the bathroom. I was going to leave her there, but she said: "Stay. I need to talk to you about something, and now's a good time..."
I wondered what it could possibly be that couldn't wait five minutes. I reluctantly stayed there with her, wondering if she might need more help than Will did, and dreading the necessity, but not wanting to let her down.
She sat down on the toilet with her hind legs and butt, but her front legs and upper torso were still standing up straight -- it was weird. From where I stood by the sink I could see that her breasts were now on her underbelly, about a quarter of the way forward from her privates; they were a lot smaller than before. She had nothing between her front legs, not even hair.
It turned out that she wanted to ask me if Uncle Mike had told me how a girl was supposed to wipe after peeing. I turned beet-red, and said no, -- he'd said we weren't really girls, and what we had wasn't really like what girls had... So she explained, and demonstrated, and I saw what Will meant about being so flexible. Then after she washed her hands, she wanted me to show her what I meant about not really being like a girl. I figured I might as well, or she'd keep on at me about it until I gave in.
She knelt with both pairs of knees, and inspected my crotch, while I looked at the ceiling and prayed that it would be over soon. Then she grabbed my arm and the doorknob and pulled herself up, and said: "Well, no, it's not really the same. But it's similar enough that I think what I said still applies. Be sure you remember it."
"Okay," I said, pulling up my pants. "Can you please get some clothes on? I can help if you want..." I explained how we'd gotten Will bundled up to go outside, and how Mrs. Benson had made herself some oversize skirts to cover her lower torso and legs.
"That sounds good," she said. "I should have been working on something like that. Maybe I can make something out of a sheet or blanket, but first I need to eat something. Are you hungry?"
By then I was, so she laid down on the sofa again and I went to the kitchen to fix us something. I opened a couple of cans of vegetable soup into a pyrex dish, added some water and spices, and started heating it in the microwave.
Mom had been snacking on salad all day, but it didn't stop her from eating her share of the soup. I was worried about her, and Will, and all the other centaurs -- how many of them were starving because they didn't have anybody to fetch or cook for them and they were too weak to walk? How long would it take them to build up their leg muscles enough to walk steady? They ought to have better stamina than us bipeds, once they were finished, but it seemed to be taking a long time.
"Have you been out of the house since the change?" I finally asked her.
"Not really," she said. "Not for very long. For the first several days I just couldn't walk, and I'm still not very strong or steady... and it's been cold enough that I didn't want to go out if I didn't have to."
"I bet we can work something out," I said, "with blankets and sweat pants and stuff."
So she directed me where to find her fabric scissors, needles and thread, and showed me how to use them -- she hadn't used them in a long time, she said, and wasn't very good at it. Still, by the time she was too tired to work on it any more, we had pieces of a skirt cut out of a couple of sheets and had sewn several of them together. It didn't come out quite right at first, and we started working on hemming it to the right length all around so it would come just to her ankles and she wouldn't trip over it.
After she went to bed, I turned on my computer and started my IM client to see who I knew who was online. Mostly it was friends from a long way off, people I'd met through art or gaming forums and knew only online. In between some chat with them, I unlocked the encrypted filesystem on my external hard drive and looked at my collection of naked pictures.
It was pretty much what I'd feared: they weren't particularly interesting to me anymore. Most of them, anyway. I said "naked pictures" instead of "porn" because not all of them were porn; a lot of them were what grown-ups call real art. Those Italian artists in the Renaissance painted a lot of naked people, and I'm pretty sure you have to look in a really small town to find people who call that porn. Anyway, some of them still looked interesting, but not in the same way, and some of them were just boring or disgusting. They were the same ones that were disgusting but fascinating before, mostly, the ones that were just porn with no pretension to being art. I deleted them, and experimented with looking at some of the paintings of naked people, and then at some other stuff, not on the encrypted part of the drive, pictures of tigers and wolves and squid. The naked people were still more interesting than the animals, but not a lot more, and I found I was looking at their faces a lot more than their breasts and crotches. They weren't any more interesting than pictures by the same artists of people with clothes on. And they weren't exciting, however pretty -- I didn't seem to have anything to get excited with. Nothing to get hard, obviously, but what I had didn't seem to get wet either.
Oddly enough, in some of the pictures I found my attention drawn to the backgrounds, the flowers and trees and stuff. I wasn't sure why. I searched on Google Images for landscape paintings, and a lot of what I found was boring, or just interesting enough to look at once, but some of them were really fascinating, and I saved local copies of them.
Dad still wasn't home from work when I went to bed.
-----
Sunday morning, though, he was up earlier than me, and woke me up at nine-thirty or so to remind me to get ready for church. I did.
"Mom, are you coming with us?" I asked her, after I'd gotten out of the shower and dressed. She was lying on the sofa, covered with a blanket, again.
"I don't think this thing is quite ready," she said, fingering the unfinished skirt. "You can help me finish it this afternoon, and maybe I can go to evening service with y'all."
There were fewer people at church than usual. And there were plenty who weren't going anywhere again, or not anytime soon; when the pastor (who was now a Smyrna wolf like Dad) prayed for people in the hospital, and the families of people who'd died recently, it was a much longer list than usual.
Some of the centaurs I saw were wearing homemade skirts kind of like the one Mom and I were making; a few had skirts that looked professionally made, and some of the men were wearing two pairs of pants held up with suspenders and the space between them covered with makeshift materials, the way Will and I had bundled him up. Our church was inside the centaur region, but with so many dead or in the hospital, and so many of the rest unable to walk or drive yet, I think most of the people who showed up were Smyrna wolves or Allatoona otters or Kennesaw chameleons. I hadn't seen any of them before, though I'd heard about them; they were bald and their skin changed color to match what they were standing or sitting on.
The pastor preached about how we needed to help people in need, particularly the centaurs who couldn't walk or drive yet, and other people who were injured in car wrecks on Valentine's Day, and so forth. After the service there were a couple of people at a table in the vestibule recruiting volunteers to visit people at home and help them out.
Dad stopped to talk to someone, and I walked over to the table where a couple of Smyrna wolves, a man and a woman, were talking to a couple of people. Once I got close and heard their voices I recognized them as Mr. and Mrs. Barnes -- Mrs. Barnes used to be my Sunday school teacher, when I was in fourth and fifth grades. I waited until the other people they were talking to left, and said:
"I can't drive yet, but if one of the other volunteers can give me a ride to people's houses, I could help them out with stuff around the house."
"We'll be glad to have you, Jeffrey," Mrs. Barnes said. "What's your schedule like? Do you have any after-school activities on certain days?"
"No," I said, "nothing scheduled."
"Or maybe your father can give you a ride?" she asked. I turned to look and saw he was coming toward us.
"Are you volunteering?" he asked. "Good for you, son."
"If you think it's okay," I said. "I know Mom needs a lot of help too, but maybe not so much that I can't go out and help other people too?"
"Sure," he said.
"I haven't seen Darlene," Mrs. Barnes asked. "Is she...?"
"She's better," Dad said. "Not bedridden anymore, but she can't walk very far at a time -- she just started walking a few days ago." He didn't say anything about her not having decent clothes for her new form yet.
"She said she might try to come to the evening service," I said.
"I hope she can," Mrs. Barnes said.
We talked about when I could help out with their ministry, and then Dad and I left. We stopped for groceries on the way home, and bought lots of vegetables and salad fixings, and lots of meat, mostly ground beef and chicken, but also a couple of steaks.
We found Mom on the sofa, working on hemming her skirt.
"I can help with that, if you want, after we bring all the groceries in," I said.
"Thanks," she said, "but at this point it would be hard for both of us to work on it at once... Why don't you fix some lunch while I keep working on this?"
"Okay."
Dad and I brought the groceries in and changed clothes, and then we both started cooking -- Dad cooked some ground beef, and I stir-fried some vegetables for me and Mom.
"Can you save me some of that?" I asked Dad.
"Sure," he said. "How much?"
I put a little ground beef on a plate and put it in the refrigerator for later -- I couldn't eat it in front of Mom -- and then put a couple of plates of stir-fry on a tray and took them into the living room. Mom looked up from her work and smiled.
"Thank you, Jeffrey."
We ate, and I told her about talking to Mr. and Mrs. Barnes about going to help bedridden and homebound people. "But I don't want to go off and leave you alone, if you need help here," I said.
"Don't worry," she said. "I don't need you here all the time, and in a few weeks, or maybe just a few days, I won't need much help at all."
After lunch she worked on the skirt some more, and asked me to bring her some other sheets so she could pick out ones to make into more skirts. After that, I started cutting out pieces for another skirt. When I was done, I went to my room and got out my drawing pad and pastels.
"Do you mind if I draw you, like this?" I asked her.
"I look like a scarecrow," she said.
"It's just a sketch," I said. "I'll do another version later, after you've filled out again."
"All right," she said, "but don't show it to anybody unless I say it's okay."
So I did several quick sketches of her, propped up sideways on the sofa and putting the finishing touches on that skirt, and then started working on a better version, still a little sketchy. I wondered if I could ask Will to pose for me in just his shorts, sometime -- probably after he was strong enough to stand up for a while.
I hadn't brought my art supplies with me to Uncle Mike's apartment, thinking I was just going to be in Athens for a couple of days and would be too busy visiting with him and going to the concert and stuff to draw; when the visit wound up stretching out for a week, I borrowed some pencils and printer paper from him and did a little sketching, but I was really glad to be home and have access to my good paper and pastels.
Dad had been sitting at the kitchen table, reading, while he finished his lunch and for a good while afterward. He went around the long way to the bathroom, I later realized, so he could brush his teeth and use mouthwash before talking to Mom -- he didn't want meat on his breath when he kissed her. He snuggled in next to Mom on the sofa; she put aside the skirt and they hugged and kissed, but I thought I saw a little bit of hesitation, and it hurt. I mean, when you're little you're embarrassed to see your parents kissing, it's "mushy stuff," and when you're older you're embarrassed for a completely different reason, because it's weird to think about people that old having sex -- but however much they embarrassed me sometimes, I had sense enough to be glad, too. I knew too many kids at school whose parents were divorced, or looked like they might get a divorce any time now, and I was happy to think that my parents looked like the sticking-together kind.
But when I saw her hesitate a little before letting him hug and kiss her, it worried me. Could they still stay together after changing in such drastic and different ways? And if not, what would happen to me?
I was just about to start a sketch of Dad when he said: "Do you feel like going to the evening service, honey?"
"I think so," she said. "I'll have to lean on you or Jeffrey a lot. First let me model this thing, and you tell me if it looks decent enough to wear to church."
She pulled off the blanket and stood up, bracing herself on his arm. As the day before, she was just wearing the T-shirt and socks. "Help me get it on, Jeffrey?"
I went and picked up the skirt, figured out where the hole was for it to go over her head, and put it over her head while she held on to Dad's arm. I messed up, and it wound up covering Dad's head and shoulders as well as Mom's upper torso and half of her lower torso; only Mom's head stuck out of the top, barely. It was an easy mistake to make, there was a lot of material in that thing.
They laughed, and started fiddling with it to get it off Dad's head and over the parts of Mom it was supposed to cover. A minute or so later, we got it situated, and I thought it looked pretty okay -- the seams were a little rough in spots, it was obviously amateur work, but the hemline was fairly even, and it came about halfway down her calves, which was what she'd been aiming for.
"That should be fine," Dad said. "I think we're going to have to modify our expectations of dress, what with all the changes -- I can barely stand to wear a suit anymore, and when warmer weather gets here, I don't think I'll be able to stand it at all. Certainly that's fit to wear to church, or to work when you're ready to go back."
Mom walked into their bedroom, leaning on Dad's arm, and studied herself in the full-length mirror. I didn't follow them; I went and changed clothes for evening church. I sat down to read for a few minutes until Mom and Dad were ready for church, but Dad knocked on my door sooner than I was expecting.
"What is it, Dad?"
"I helped your mother into the tub," he said, "but she said she wants you to help her get out and dry off -- I said I would do it, but she didn't want me to get my fur wet, it would take too long to dry it again before church. I'm sorry you've already gotten dressed."
So I changed into casual clothes again and went to help Mom. That was seriously embarrassing, but not as bad as watching her demonstrate how to wipe after peeing, and in the next few days I had to help her in the bathroom several times; eventually I got used to it.
Mom laid down in the back seat on the way to church; when we got there it took both me and Dad to help her out of there, and she complained that her legs were cramped.
"We'll get a bigger car as soon as we can," Dad said. "Maybe even an SUV or van, if we can't get anything more fuel-efficient that you can fit comfortably into."
Evening church was pretty uneventful; lots of people were glad to see Mom, and after the service she and several other centaur ladies sat around talking about clothes, how to make them and who you could hire to make them, for a while before we left. I hung out with some guys my age, none I was as close friends with as Will, while we were waiting for our parents to get done talking; they asked me where I'd been, of course, and I told them my cover story about being in Huntsville with Aunt Karen and Uncle Dave. I felt bad about lying in church, but not for very long.
