“Yes!” said Lauren. “Post it already!”

“Okay,” I told her, “If you say you’re sure.”

I pressed the button on her phone and she giggled.

“There you go,” I said. “Your new facebook picture.”

I turned the phone to show her. The picture was the exact setting she was still in — her detached head on the kitchen counter, between an empty bottle of wine and what remained of her own glass. She wore an expression of mock surprise, as though she’d only just been separated from her body.

For a brief update and aside, I’ll just say the ‘conditions’ of my stay with Lauren had been well clarified over the past two hours since she first asked me to demonstrate my magic.

“Perfect,” she said, smiling at me. “You know, I wasn’t sure about this when Alicia first told me about it, but I really like this. I just feel small, and portable, and helpless but also … safe.”

I smirked at her, then picked her up off the counter, took the last glass of wine, and headed back to the couch.

“I’m also wondering,” she continued, “How long you can leave me like this?”

“Well,” I said, “The magic will last until I put you back together… You can still eat and drink like this… but also, I do have that conference that starts tomorrow, and I guess you’d also need to be at work.”

“True,” she said. “I don’t know how I could do my editing job when I’m just a little head. Or any job for that matter.”

“You’d make a pretty good doorstop,” I teased.

“Or a paperweight! Maybe a stamp licker. And … there’s this other kind of job I’m pretty good at,” she said, licking her lips.

“Yes you are,” I said, raising her up for a kiss.

“So,” I finally said, after a minute or two more. “Did you want your body back tonight?”

“How about we wait until tomorrow?” she said, grinning.

—

My own conference dragged on into dinner with some colleagues from my last job. It wasn’t until I was taking the Uber back to Lauren’s that I started to consider what might be in store for that night.

I thought about how this somehow involved Alicia. We’d both spent a summer together when I was doing a fellowship in Colorado and she was bartending to save up for a backpacking trip through South America. There was the occasional visit after that. Now we mostly just chatted online once in a while, catching one another up on the major events of our lives. Presently, Alicia was living in Oregon working for some type of education non-profit.

Both Alicia and Lauren had a similar adventurous streak. I didn’t know how they actually knew one another. Maybe that’d be a good conversation to have this evening, in between whatever sort of magic Lauren was going to ask me to do.

At least this always kept things interesting.

“Well,” she said, after I opened the door to her apartment, “Look who finally made it.”

“Hi,” I said, my voice sounding more tired than I meant to.

“Is that David?” said another voice. Alicia’s voice. I saw that Lauren had her laptop on the counter, and the two of them had a video chat open.

“Hello!” I said with more energy this time. “How’s life up in Oregon?”

“Rainy!” she said, grinning. “But I love it here. You need to come visit. Actually you both need to come and visit.”

“Want a beer?” asked Lauren, heading to the fridge.

“Duh,” I replied, sitting down at one of the kitchen stools by the counter. I turned the computer towards me a little bit.

“So,” I started, “Thanks for … putting this together.”

“That’s very diplomatic of you,” said Alicia, sticking out her tongue. “Actually, Lauren was just telling me about the fun you two had last night.”

“Is that right?”

I looked at Lauren in the kitchen, returning with two beers. Lauren bit her lip and raised an eyebrow.

“You have to let her try out being headless,” said Alicia. “Actually, I wanted to tell you, I’ve been learning a bit of magic myself.”

“Really?” said Lauren, excitedly. “Show me!”

Alicia grinned, and pushed her computer further back. She was in her bedroom (well, a bedroom anyway, presumably her own) and she sat up, then tiled the screen and camera to re-position.

“I’m not as good as David, but I’ve gotten a few things down.”

She held up her hands, then brought them to cover her mouth and nose. I saw her close her eyes and focus.

When she removed her hands a moment later, both her mouth and nose had vanished from her face completely. Her eyes seemed to smile.

“Oh shit,” said Lauren, her mouth wide with amazement. “That is awesome!”

We both clapped on our end while Alicia gave a thumbs up, then started to type on her end.

Of course, she said in the chat window, this means I can no longer talk…

“Probably the quietest you’ll ever be,” teased Lauren.

Alicia flipped her off.

“Can you make your head disappear?” asked Lauren, teasingly.

I can, she replied, But not re-appear just yet.

Kind of hard without a brain, she added.

“Magic on yourself is difficult sometimes,” I said. “But that’s still really impressive!”

There’s a studio near my apartment, Alicia sent. Hang on I need to fix this, I feel like I need to sneeze.

Alicia brought her hands back to her face and closed her eyes again.

“There!” she said, pulling her hands away. Then she sneezed.

“How does that feel?” asked Lauren.

An impulse occurred to me, and I cupped Lauren’s own nose and mouth in my hand. I blinked, and wiped them away.

“MMMM!” she said, punching me on the arm.

Alicia cracked up. “I knew you would get along. Or at least that Lauren would enjoy this.”

Lauren rolled her eyes, and then gave me a look full of daggers.

“Seriously,” continued Alicia, “You both should come visit! And I’m sorry, but I should really go. Meeting some friends for drinks tonight.”

Lauren gave a thumbs up and waved.

“Sounds good,” I said, “And since I’m speaking for both of us now, I definitely think a trip to visit you is a good idea!”

Lauren gave a second thumbs up.

“Okay! You two have some fun,” said Alicia. She closed her computer and the chat ended.

Lauren suddenly wrapped me up in her arms, and moved in for a kiss. Well, maybe not technically a kiss, but I made the most of it anyway. She backed away from for a moment, then picked up her beer, only to realize she still didn’t have a mouth.

“MMM!” she said, making a gesture with the beer.

I laughed. “Okay,” I said. “Hang on a sec.”

I cupped her face again, letting her mouth re-appear.

“Thankth,” she replied, taking a long sip of beer. “Hey whaht about mah nothe!”

“What nose?” I teased.

She leaned over to look at her own “reflection” from her laptop’s camera, still turned on.

“Ahm like mith potato hed,” she laughed. “Ith thith whaht you’re inthu?”

“You know,” I said, restoring her nose with another quick movement, “There are some magic studios that specialize in facial features.”

“Hmmm,” she said.

I tried to keep a straight face.

“Hey what the fuck!” she said, catching a glimpse of her image on the computer again.

I had replaced her nose, although upside down.

“You’re so mean!” she said, giving me another punch in the shoulder.

“It’s an improvement!” I teased. “It’s what all the kids are doing these days.”

“I just,” she started, then looked back at herself in the computer again. “Okay, I need a real mirror.”

She grabbed her beer in one hand and my hand in the other and dragged me into her bedroom. Turning on the light she took a couple seconds to stare at her bizarre reflection in the mirror.

Then she just broke down laughing, which then became a fit of laughing and giggling, only starting over every time she looked back up to meet her reflection. She snorted accidentally, which only caused the cycle to repeat.

“I look so weird!” she said, turning back to me. “I love it. What else can you do to me?”

“Hmm,” I said. “Well, let’s see here.”

I first turned her nose around the right way, then took a step back.

“We really need a good Obscura,” I told her.

“A what?”

“Like the bad we used last night. You can’t make magical changes when someone is watching. Sort of a quantum mechanics thing, where observing something changes the result.”

“Oh, so the grocery bag was not just for show,” she said. “Well, it’s hanging by the door if you want it.”

“Or this will work,” I said, taking a long silk scarf that was hanging on a rack by her closet.

“Okay. Go ahead. Make me into something freaky.”

“I’ll give it a shot,” I said. “But I’m not as practiced at this stuff. Vanishings and pulling someone apart is easier, making changes is a little more work.”

“Whatever you need to do.”

“Just hold still until I take off the scarf.”

I draped the scarf over her head, then cupped one hand over her eyes and another behind her head. I focused, drew the energy, focused some more…

After about 30 seconds I pulled away the scarf.

Lauren blinked in the mirror, her mouth just hanging open for a moment.

“I’m a cyclops?” she said, reaching up to touch the large eye that now took up the center of her forehead.

“Is that freaky enough?”

“It’s a good start!” she said. “And you know, this type of stuff is something I could really keep during the day, as opposed to being a decapitated head.”

“I suppose you could, if depth perception wasn’t important.”

“Okay,” she said. “This is cool, but I know you can do more.”

“All right then,” I said. I whisked the scarf onto her face and then off again, restoring her.

“That was quick,” she said, blinking.

“It’s much easier to restore someone to the way they were than to make new changes. And going from one change to another … well, I’m just not that good at it,” I said. “Like you need to keep all that stuff you want in your head at the same time, and if I lose control of it…”

I trailed off.

“What happens if you lose control of it?”

“Did Alicia not tell you about that?”

“No, she didn’t!”

“Um… well…”

“What is it?”

“Well,” I started with a sigh, “If I lose control trying to keep too much happening, my own head will explode.”

Lauren’s eyes lit up. “Like magically explode?”

“Yes, like I’d be … headless, but okay otherwise. The difficult part of that is that I can’t just bring my own head back from nothing. It requires… well, another skilled magician at least.”

“Okay,” she said, giggling a bit. “I won’t make you try it, but I’d love to see your head explode. What were you attempting anyway with Alicia?”

“She wanted me to turn her into a cat. It’s really hard to change people into animals, and the only thing I’d ever done before was turn someone into a frog.”

“Classic,” said Lauren, half mockingly.

“She ended up covered in fur and I blew up my head. She had to walk me down to a magic studio like that to get everything fixed.”

“Hmmm,” said Lauren, reaching to run her fingers through my hair. “What else have you done with Alicia? Like magic on you? All she told me about was the stuff you did to her.”

My mind went to one memory, that I didn’t immediately verbalize. My expression must have betrayed me because Lauren immediately picked up on it.

“C’mon!” she said, jabbing my side. “Tell me!”

“We went to a magic studio,” I said. “And she had them remove my brain and put it in a jar.”

“What?” she said. “Okay, you need to tell me this story. You can do more weird stuff to my head later on. Lets go sit down in the living room.”

We both went to her couch, where she put her legs up on my lap.

“Okay. Why did she want to keep your brain in a jar?”

“Have you ever been to a magic studio?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Okay, well so far I’ve just been improvising with whatever is around. And I’m not even that good, at least not compared to the people who work there.”

“You can do a lot more than I can!” she said, grinning.

“Thanks. I try. Anyway, like if you really did want to carry your head around and still have full control over your body, they’d have the stuff to do it there. So this was part of a trade that we made… it was the summer we first met.”

“What was the trade?”

“Well, I wanted to spend a week in her body,” I said. “You know, just to see what it’s like.”

“You were Alicia? For a week?”

“Well,” I explained, “I wasn’t exactly Alicia, but I basically, yes. I spent a week as a girl.”

“Was she in your body?”

“No, she didn’t like being a guy… I mean she tried it, but said it felt too unsettling.”

“What was she then?”

“Nothing really. They call it ‘suspension’ at the studios. Basically she didn’t exist, except for this small crystal thing they use to keep the link going.”

“Hmm,” said Lauren. “Well, I would definitely want to try out being a guy.”

I raised an eyebrow at her, and she returned my glance.

“Anyway,” I continued, “In return for that, she had them take out my brain…”

“And what was that like?”

“Well,” I said. “Like I said, studios have more stuff than I do at hand here, and much more skilled and experienced magicians. But essentially, I was either a brainless idiot who’d do anything she told me, or a brain in a jar hooked up to a webcam, or, if she hooked me up together, I was pretty much ‘normal’ except that I had to carry around a jar with my brain in it and make sure it stayed plugged into my head.”

“Wow,” said Lauren, her face showing some excitement. “So if you took away my brain, I’d just do anything?”

“Kinda what you’d expect. You don’t think about anything, you just do stuff. She had me do her chores, or … serve her other needs.”

“That sounds hot,” said Lauren, climbing up on top of me. “So if I could take away your brain and I told you to just eat my pussy…”

“You’d need to be more specific,” I told her. “Like if you tell someone without a brain ‘eat my pussy’ they may try to actually eat it…”

“Ahh,” she said, “So I’d tell you to lick my clitoris…”

“Right,” I said. “Or in Alicia’s case, a lot of things like ‘match these socks’ and ‘rub my feet.’”

“Interesting,” said Lauren, looping her arms around my neck. “I think I’d have fun being bossed around like that.”

“Giving you any ideas?”

“Too many ideas,” said Lauren, locking her eyes with mine. “I want you to mess with my head some more, I want to have my head cut off, I want to be a brainless slut that does everything you tell me… I just don’t know.”

She started kissing me. I ran my hands down her sides to take two handfuls of her ass.

“I’m here all week,” I told her, “So maybe there’s time for all that stuff.”

“Well,” she said, leaning back so she was sitting on my knees. “A couple things. I had a lot of fun as your little toy last night, but I’ve been wanting some of my own all day, so whatever we do… I want to keep this.”

She patted my hands that were already resting on her hips.

“I’m amenable to that,” I told her. “Let’s start with that head of yours…”

Lauren just grinned, leapt up and grabbed the cloth tote bag, eagerly putting it on over her own head.

I closed my eyes for a second and focused.

After a long moment of hesitation, Lauren reached up and removed the bag. She flung it aside and her hands immediately moved to the empty space where her head had been, down to her shoulders and neck.

It took her maybe 20 seconds of that before she gave me a thumbs up with both hands. Then she started taking off her top.