Twenty seven days.

I've been locked in this body for the 27th day in a row now, and nothing seems to indicate that I will ever again go back to normal. I've got a pretty good routine going on and I'm just about as good as you can get at moving myself around or using everyday objects. Better get used to it than spend my days whining.

I still have my eyes closed but I can feel a hand resting across my stomach and its contact secures me. As long as I have her, everything should be fine. Doesn't matter much if I can't do certain things or take care of myself entirely, she'll be there for me when I need it, right? The alarm on her cellphone resonates for a while through the room before I hear her wake up and shut it off. When she reaches over my shoulder and kisses my cheek, her face feels weird. It feels hairy and more rough than usual, like she has.... a beard?

My blood freezes in my veins and I tense my entire body. The hand gently runs in my hair and a voice comes to my ears:

"Morning beautiful." It says.

It's definitely a guy's voice, there's no arguing that. I squirm between the sheets and move my short arms nervously. Where am I? Have I been drugged? Kidnapped during my sleep? Is Roxanne okay? I start to breathe heavily and the voice comes through again.

"Shhh shhh, what's wrong sweety? Did you have any bad dreams last night?"

The voice doesn't sound malignant or mean, but actually caring. The hand runs through my hair and tries to calm me down as another kiss reaches my lips. I don't recognize his voice, but there's something in the way he said sweety.....

I open my eyes and shriek.

The guy has red hair and on his chin grows a beard only a few days old. He moisturizes his lips nervously and I notice that the color of his hair seems to match my girlfriend's usual hue. But what strikes me the most are his eyes. They're definitely Roxanne's. Marsh green, big and wide, with eyelashes so long it made other girls jealous. They stare back as they try to understand what is frightening me. He lays a hand on my shoulder and grabs my left arm in the process as if he would hold my hand. Just like she... No no no, this can't be real.

I clear my throat and answer.


"Nothing." I lie. "It's just that I wasn't expecting your face to be so close, that's all."

He sighs. "Phew, I thought I had gone ugly during the night. You got me reassured!"


He leans in for a kiss and heads off to the bathroom. From the bed, I can hear him pee, standing. So that's a guy for real and not some bad makeup joke. But what IS happening?! I free myself from the blankets and wriggle my way up to lean against the pillows. When he comes back, I take a good look at his body, spot the bulge in his boxers, and notice something hanging from his neck. Something nobody else in the world could be wearing. It's a thin silver chain I remember buying Roxanne for our 2 years anniversary and hanging from it is a ring her father gave her. So this is her now? My girlfriend's a guy?

He grabs one of my bras and takes my shirt off, exposing the same body I've been using for the last 27 days. No legs to speak off, and two short arm stumps that barely reach my breasts. Fortunately, I've learned how to navigate the appartment as well as take care of myself since then. It's still a lot nicer to be able to hold on to something without any help, but I'm becoming more at ease with this body every passing day, which is a good thing considering the current streak I'm going through. He straps it, slips a different shirt back on and carries me over to the kitchen. Waiting patiently on my chair, he prepares toasts and a glass of cold water for me. I keep observing his movements while he moves around the room and I eat breakfast. The way he slams the cupboard doors systematically, how he extends his foot backwards from the sink to close the fridge door, his irrepressible urge to flip various ustensils through the air after picking them up... It's impossible. How can she... I mean, I've been losing my limbs periodically for a year now, who am I to judge what's weird, right? But how in the world did my girlfriend turn into a guy? Does this mean I'm attracted to men now? I try not to look too worried.

I know Roxanne had an important presentation at work today. Does he work at the same firm? Is he working on the same projects, with similar schedules? Has her life been entirely transfered to a new body without her noticing anything?


I risk it. "Are you ready for the big day?. You seem pretty stressed out." I lean forward to take another bite of toast.

"Yeah, I guess I am." He turns the coffee pot on and pours himself a bowl of cereal. "I just need to remember not to stop breathing and everything should be alright."

"Well", I say before swallowing, "I'm very proud of you, honey."


He smiles back to me and it becomes unequivocal. I've seen this face a million times before and I can still see Roxanne's traits underneath his beard. Does he switch back and forth between genders as well from one day to another? I'm not ready to ask that yet. I finish my bread and drink some of my water before getting scooped up again and carried around for my morning prep. When he puts me down on the couch, he collects his things and packs his bag. Before heading out, he kneels in from of me.


"So, um, I just gotta clean the car a bit and I'll be right back okay? It's a real mess. Then I'll bring you to the nursery."


What.


"The... nursery?" The words barely escape my mouth.

He goes on. "Yeah, on thursdays you go to the nursery, remember?" I give him the faintest of nods. "Good, then give me 10 minutes and we're ready to go. This morning we're grabbing Catherine on the way, too. If you want you can call her to say we're coming in about half an hour." He kisses me and leaves with his bag.


Wait a minute. What's this all about? I waddle to the side of the couch to where my cellphone is lying and I drop on my stomach. I use my nose to navigate through it and find Catherine's contact info. I poke the screen and call her. After 10 seconds of waiting, she finally answers.


"Hey beautiful!" She grunts and wheezes, like she's at the finish line of a marathon. "How's it hanging?"

"Well, I'm a little shaky this morning", again trying to sound normal, "but nothing to be worried about."

"Perfect then!" She pauses, inhales deeply and sighs directly in the microphone. "Are you two close from home yet?"

"No Rox.. um.. has.. He's gone downstairs to clean up the car and then we're leaving to get you."

"Cool. Mark left an hour ago already and I'm starting to feel lonely!" She giggles and her laugh manages to make me smile. "My phone was still in the other room so I had to hurry the fuck up when you called. Tipped over midway and rolled for the rest of it. Now I'm all dizzy as well as sweaty."

I bite my lips before answering back : "I mean you probably have time to change by the time we get home, don't you?"

"Between you and me Sarah, I have neither the time or the limbs for that right now. Alright then, I'll be waiting! Ciao!" Then, she hangs up.


That can't mean what I think it does. Contracting my abs and bringing my hips closer to my face, I arch my back and push myself upwards with my chin. I turn around and spot the remote, drop down again before inching forward a tiny bit to reach it. I turn the tv on with my tongue. The company logo flashes briefly before vanishing, letting the image come up. It's the morning news, but instead of the usual host, an impressively corpulent woman, it's a man. The equally round Paul Stevens has taken the place of Paula Stevens. As the camera switches to show other journalists, the women reporters I'm used to see have all been replaced by men with similar names. Kerry for Carrie, Chris instead of Christina... All the usual men are still there, but no women.

I flick through the channels and find the same thing elsewhere. Women are gone. From the sports channel to the weather channel, along with History and Science ones: not a single woman in sight. The shows are hosted in their entirety by men. I go back to the news. I'm sweating now. Pushing myself up with my arms, my neck is craned towards the tv, pleading for it to show me another living woman. There's no way this has gone global, right? Why would that be? Paul announces a shift in financial allocation for our country's healthcare plan and comments it as positive for the citizens and particularly for the maternity wards that were going through rougher times in the last few months. Does that mean they'll show other women!? When the screen switches to a live report, my head implodes. I can feel every single muscle in my tiny body weaken as the images strike me.

The journalist, named John Pollack, is standing in a room full of pregnant women, showing a wide array of pregnancy progressions, all being examined by male doctors. The reporter drops on his knees to interview an extremely pregnant woman, whose face radiates with joy and imminent motherhood, sitting in a cushionned chair. 

She is completely limbless.

8 months and a half pregnant, without a single lump of bones protruding from her shoulders or her hips. She answers the reporter's questions gladly, her shoulders moving up and down, pointing this or that way, the movements of her torso now limited by the size of her enormous belly. He stands up and moves over to another woman, who barely shows. She says she's 4 months in. The same joyful look on her face. Dark brown hair contrast heavily against the paleness of her skin. The stub of her left arm is shorter than mine, and I believe I can see the faintest of bumps in the fabric of her pants which would give her the stump of a right leg.

The camera zooms out again. Shows other women. Barren shorts and shirts, brief limbs, noone seems bothered. In the back, they're transfering a fatter woman from her wheelchair to a hospital bed. Her back archs when they lift her, but again : no limbs.

Tears are rolling down my cheeks now and I change channels again. Don't tell me this is generalized. Please, tell me this is a very disgusting joke, I'll take it. And I'll laugh as hard as I can. And then we can never talk about it ever again. I find a home decorating show. Surely there should be at least one woman here! What's a decorating show without an overly agitated lady? Yup, there she is. Looking around at the brand new living room the renovating crew offered her and her family. She's resting in what has to be her husband's arms. She can't keep herself from gasping at every new element she notices, excitedly pointing around the room with her right leg, the only mobile portion of her body except her head. It's about as long as her upper leg would be, but a lot narrower. When she gets put on the floor, she uses it to push herself forward and walk around the room.

When my cellphone starts ringing, I yell at the top of my lungs. I am drenched in sweat and drowning in fear now. It's a guy called Nick, whose name's followed by two hearts. After traveling across the couch the opposite way and rubbing my breasts on every cushion in existence, I poke the screen with my nose and stick my face on the phone.


"Hello!?" My voice sounds hysterical.

"Hey sweety, it's me. There's a problem with the garage door, I can't seem to open it. The landlord just got here and is taking a look at it, it shouldn't be much longer."


I try to talk but I can't say a single word. As they rise through my lungs, they get stuck in my throat and can't manage to get out. I'm panicking. Air can't seem to fill my lungs properly.


"Honey, are you alright? You're breathing quite hard in the microphone. Don't worry about it, okay? I'll be back in another 10 minutes tops, just.. Just hang in there okay?"

"...y... yea...yeah okay. You're right... love you.."

I detach my face from the phone and end the call. I'm boiling inside, there's no way this is really happening. I get upright and turn around to get back to the remote. Laying flat once again, I reach a cooking channel where chefs are presenting meals to a panel of judges. THERE!! There's a woman! She's alone at a men's table but there she is! The camera focuses on her. She's in her thirties, wearing rectangular glasses and her hair are held back in a clean pony tail of jet black hair that exposes her shoulders. Her left is devoid of any growing flesh but on her right side lives an arm that reaches out almost as far as an elbow. If near her shoulder it's about the size of a normal arm, it narrows abruptly, quite litterally like a funnel, on which a single finger has formed. In her plate, the main dish has already been cut into smaller pieces. She's able to hold on to a fork with her exceptional arm and eat along with the others. When it's her turn, she comments the dish and gestures ridiculously toward the chefs with her reduced piece of limb.

I close the tv, absolutely terrified at what I just saw. Maybe it's a national day or something. The Promote Female Morphological Diversity Day and every women on screen has to be limbless for the occasion. That would explain the little to no variation between my own body and those of women on-screen. I swing my buttocks to the floor and move over to my computer, alternatively swinging my ass cheeks forward to walk on my rump. Using a dull pencil secured between my teeth, I hop on Google and type "women no limbs why". I take a deep breath a hit Search. I click on the first link that seems to address my question and start to read. It's written in simplified terms said to be accessible even to regular citizens.


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The problem with how evolution works is that it can be tricky for us to decode the reasons it occurred a specific way. Evolution does not plan anything or think about the direction in which it proceeds. It just goes forward! We can mostly infer results and explanations based on logic and fossil evidences, but these remain what they are : speculations.

This particular situation is no different and has been interesting mankind for a long time now. Why don't human females have limbs just like their male counterparts? There isn't a single species known to the scientific community where such a phenomenon occurs. In lots of cases, either the male or the female will be bigger than the other, a phenomenon called sexual dimorphism. In some species, the male gets executed right after the sexual act, or fuses with the female, acting as nothing else but a sperm sack. In others, hermaphroditic organisms enter a sparing contest in which the loser gets injected with sperm and ends up the mother of their offsprings, but nothing as extreme as what can be observed with humans has ever been found in nature.

The first occurences of this phenomenon were discovered on fossil remains approximately fifty thousand years old. These correspond to a time when, after having mastered the art of craftsmanship and agriculture, the human race entered a new era. An era marked by the establishment of towns and villages, which meant the individuals did not need to travel as much as before and, while the men plowed the fields or adventured out to hunt and capture wild animals, the women were left at home to bear the babies to term in the calm of their homes. With little to nothing to do, limbs became useless accessories for women, monopolizing part of the body's energy that could have be used more efficiently during their pregnancies. This new organization of society leads researchers to believe that women afllicted with genetic anomalies affecting the growth of their limbs had an evolutionary advantage over those with fully grown arms and legs. Their bodies being smaller, they could have survived eating smaller rations than woman with complete limbs and thus more efficiently live through times of famine and scarcity of ressources. Over time, the length of women's limbs gradually decreased, leaving the fingers, toes, hands, and feet behind, stored away deep in the genetic code, litterally transforming the human female into a living factory, with it's prior purpose being the production of new members of the species : babies. When women became hardly more than torsos with functionning reproductive organs, the energy efficiency of their bodies capped, rendering them perfect at what evolution had shaped them to accomplish.

Parallel to these modifications, a new gender of sterile and sexually undifferenciated organisms, known as neuters, arose through human evolution. The neuters were once more frequent than they are today, and were thought to be the caretakers of the gestating females and children, with one or two neuters being able to care for a small village's population. As our civilisation evolved into greater and bigger cities and states, men started taking part more in family-related activities, which would possibly explain the constant decrease in neuter birth numbers across the centuries. What an extraordinary discovery it was! Humankind evolved organisms specifically to facilitate the care of biologically active women and youngs. A trait frequently observed in species of social insects like ants and bees, but never before seen in animals!

Traces of these evolutionary processes can still be found to this day. Neuter-based nurseries still exists in most major cities of the world, but neuter birth rates are as low as ever. These people usually have a strong desire to care and protect others, just like their ancestors did, and more often than not work in these facilities. Regarding the female anatomy and limb growth, it is clear that there are still a lot of variation between family lineages, but also between members of the same family. Commonly, short bones will grow on one or both shoulders, from a single hip or on both sides, to form articulated limbs of various length, remnants of what they once were. For others, nothing ever develops on their scapula and pelvis. In rare cases, fingers or toes will appear at the end of these limbs, and only a few times a year around the globe a complete arm or leg will develop in a baby girl. According to an old Viking tale, the last woman on Earth born with arms and legs was a member of what is now the people of Sweden, and was the fiercest warrior the world had ever seen. Since then, that is the curse of every women. The wonderful biological functions enabling them to welcome an embryo and nourrish it until it becomes a fully formed organism, but the crippling affliction of limb reductions and helplessness, a truly unique characteristic of our species.


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Well there it is. I am speechless in front of my computer screen. The clouds of fear and anger that shrouded my mind stepped aside, leaving behind a thin mist of acceptance. That would explain why Roxanne is now a man. We wouldn't have been able to take care of ourselves without an arm or two. I figure that things won't change anymore for me, the following days staying like the last 27, but the world has shaken for everybody else, too. And I seem to be the only witness of it all. 

According to a few searches on the internet, woman have very limited functions in society. Without arms and legs, it's pretty hard to be an effective worker and the system doesn't seem to have adapted for us with industrialisation. Special schools for girls teach exactly the same things as primary and high school do, but things get messy after that. Most of the girls have no great work aspirations and are satisfied simply by filling their biological duties. Is this the 50s? Women staying at home while men do everything else? Although, those with exceptionnal motivation and attitude do seem to be able to fit into the higher reaches of society. Here, a high school teacher, lucky enough to have a complete arm and hand, teaches while perched on top of a table. She moves arounds by pushing herself up and around. A few women made it into politics, some with but most of them without any limbs to speak of, and managed to gain respect even with their physical disadvantage. Most of the actresses and pop stars I know still exist, again confined to the limits of their own bodies.

I can't help but laugh at the ridicule of certain music videos I find on the web. A woman in her twenties squirms and undulates, standing on all four of her short limbs, while another one simply lays on her gigantic breasts and sings while looking at the camera. The concept of the next one is pretty cool, I gotta admit. Black silhouettes carry the young lady around like a mannequin and set her behind moving cardboard cutouts which creates the illusion of her having limbs. Between transitions, it is made absolutely clear she has none since the figures take good care of holding her by the shoulders and hips. 

I switch over to my Facebook to check on it. On my profile video, I still look the same way I did for the last few weeks : Laying in an inflated tube, living the life in one of my friend's pool. An oversized straw comes out of my glass, just about in reach of my thirsty lips. Behind me, many of my close friends are visible too. Catherine, with her short thighs, courageously launches herself off the wooden deck into Mark's protective arms; Sylvia, as brief as can be, rests on a patio chair; Nicky, also limbless, being held by her husband, exposes her growing belly to the world in her new bikini; When she comes into view, Nora waves at the camera with her sole limb, half an upper-arm that ends with two fully-formed fingers. She leans forward and is able to grab a plastic cup by herself and drink from it. 

When I hear Nick coming back up the stairs, I shut down my pc and waddle towards the couch again. When the door opens, he towers over me and grabs my coat. It's crazy how tall people seem when you can never stand up.


"There you go."


He wraps me in and zips it up. I remember this coat from my usual limbless days, my mom had sewn the sleeves shut for me to prevent them from dangling around when I moved. While her work wasn't top notch, today's version of my coat doesn't even compare. The sleeve length fit my arms so perfectly I'm sure clothes now have stump lengths included in the measurements. And this model was clearly made for legless ladies. The coat itself extends all the way beneath my torso to covers my hips and rump just like a diaper. 

He grabs my phone on the way out and carries me down to the car, where he sets me in the raised and adjusted passenger seat. When I'm strapped in, he installs another one at the back for Catherine, sits in his own and promptly starts the car.


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