Her name was Kelsey; I must've known her from somewhere, since Facebook was telling me we'd been "friends" for years, and she thought it was appropriate to ask for such a huge favor.  She wanted to surprise her bestie Carol, whose birthday was coming up, by becoming a dress for her.

Outside the machine, I balked when she made her selection.  I suppose it was my first sign of how momentous this day would prove in my own life, but of course at the time I had no reason to think of myself.  "Uh, you know that means a year, right?"

"Of course!" she shouted back at me, flashing at me a grin irritating in both its bright and its casual nature.  "Birthdays come but once a year."

I rolled my eyes.  Well, that'd be why she hadn't asked someone who might actually miss her.  I just hoped this Carol would appreciate the gift.

Once we were both fully inside, she walked me through my menu, giving me Carol's sizes, trying to help me find the image in her head.  At last I gave her a description that didn't cause her to wince and correct me somehow, and she chirped those fateful nine words: "that sounds perfect!  What do you want to be?"

I shrugged.  Why would I have anticipated this question?  I was there to transform her, not the other way around, and certainly not for a whole year.  So to her stupid question, I gave a stupid answer.  "I don't know, turn me into chocolate or something."  I think I was being facetious; today, picturing that moment, I envision then envisioning a chocolate statue, or a box of chocolates, which of course she wouldn't have made me since it would've defeated the purpose of her trip.  I must've known, though, that transformations like mine were possible.  Maybe I knew exactly what I was doing.

Before that day, people - usually fairly creepy bepenised people - would call me "mocha."  Once Kelsey'd pressed the button, I was pure chocolate.  I marveled at my hand, the way it moved, the way it obeyed my commands, despite looking and smelling like it held only an absurd facsimile of nerve or muscle.  I reached up under the base of my shirt and prodded my side to find a give like a Tootsie Roll, and poked a number of other places to find the same.  Finally, I decided to lick my right index finger; it dissolved into my mouth, its dissolution agonizing, but so tasty I almost didn't care, just as chocolate's bitterness is offset by sugar's sweetness.  I pulled it out, marvelling at my finger's new shape, the little cone protruding from the knuckle.

As I stared at my new finger, Kelsey cleared her throat.  "Oh - sorry," I said, and promptly hit the button that made her flutter to the ground, the dress she'd wanted to be.  The doors opened to reveal to the world on one side a chocolate girl with a conical fingertip and on the other a dress lying on the floor.  I brought that dress to the address it had given me to give it to Carol, and I haven't seen either it or Carol since, Venn or no Venn.

I went home to my boyfriend at the time, Whatchamacallim.  "Did you go to the tanning place?" he first asked.  I laughed and held up my index finger, which led him to raise an eyebrow.  He took my arm in his hands and, pushing up my sleeve, licked it as I giggled.  He then lifted my hand to his mouth, taking my truncated finger in his teeth with a goofy muffled roar.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm ea'im oo."

"No, you're not eating me.  Why are you not eating me?"  I pouted at him, mock-crying.  "Why aren't you feasting on my delicious chocolate flesh?"

He looked up at me, and hesitated for a moment before chomping down.  I hadn't really expected it to hurt, or to hurt a little, but I felt it throughout my entire body, waves of pain as if I really had lost a finger.  I let out an instinctive primal scream, and he gulped down the finger in a panic.  As I realized, slowly, how safe I was, whom I was with, how little there was to fear, that he'd done no more or less than I'd asked, my scream became a pained, loud laugh.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry I hurt you..." he said, surveying the dripping stub he'd left.  I just kept laughing.

What is pain, really?  What is it that bruises have in common with burns that makes us use the same word for both of them?  No child realizes that the sensation of a hot stove could, under slightly different circumstances, kill them.  Hell, no adult has really internalized it, but in all our pedigrees are countless simian aunts and uncles whose insufficient fear of fire killed them, and on some level we remember this every time the sensation presents itself.  But what if it couldn't?  What if you could lie down in a bonfire for days and no one could say thee nay?  This was what Venn Machines offered.  With them, there was hardly any death, and so all sensation was just... sensation, sensation we could never otherwise know without horrible consequence.

It was for that reason I shouted at him through laughs and screams - "Yes!  You've hurt me!  Keep on hurting me!"

An adorable look of horror came onto his face as I offered him my middle finger, Bosco blood still trickling from my index stub.  "And chew this time," I said.  Hesitating twice as long as before, he chomped down again, and once again I screamed, this time really more of a loud wince.  I looked into his eyes with a hungry smile as he held my finger in his cheek, and I reached for the buttons of my blouse.

He first began to chew with that same cute horror, slowly, reluctantly.  That second bite, my body spasmed, and I fought to maintain eye contact even as I fought to undress.  I saw his expression brighten a bit, and it would brighten with every bite, with every spasm.  When I was naked in all my chocolatey goodness, he gulped my finger down.

It was then that I told Whatchamacallim that he could do whatever he wanted to me, that he could and should eat me, beat me, break me, rape me, until such time as I said "carob."  That was years ago, and Whatchamacallim has long since taken up residence in a drawer, but to this day I've told no one "carob."

Returning to that night, soon I was supine on our bed, bare naked, covered in little nibbles, most of them leaking Bosco, every inch of my chocolate his for the taking.  He stood naked above me, erect, but it was his hand that was first to touch me; he dug his fingers into my right eye socket, around the eyeball itself, digging deep until he was able to, with a sharp yank, pull it out entirely.  Sweet, syrupy gore burst from my eye socket, trickling down to my mouth, where I lapped it up.

Whatchamacallim took my eyeball between his teeth, where I could still feel it, even though I couldn't see through it.  He gave me maybe three seconds to take in the sight with my remaining eye, to feel him against my lost one, before he brought down his teeth.  He licked the goo off his lips as he chewed and swallowed my eye, every motion of his teeth sending a shock through me, tenfold that of my fingers, far greater than those little nibbles from my flesh.  "Eat your heart out, Bataille," he said.

That gave me an idea that would define my life more than I could have imagined then.  I pulled my tits apart to expose my sternum.  "No - eat my heart out."  With a nod, he rushed off to grab a claw hammer (which looked less than sanitary), which he brought down in the clearing I'd created on my chest.  I could hear almost as strongly as feel my ribs crack as he brought it down again and again, until a field of chocolate bone jutted up through chocolate skin.  With that, he used the claw to pull the skin away from the wound he'd made, until the opening around my heart seemed to be large enough to accommodate both his arms.  As soon as the opportunity presented itself, he reached down and yanked out my heart, a considerable piece of rib protruding from it, veins and arteries splashing chocolate all over the bed as they snapped.  Whatchamacallim soon chomped down on one chamber, spurting chocolate all over his face.  Looking like a delicious coal miner, holding my heart, he smiled down at me.

As the vision faded from my remaining eye, all sensation faded from my body, all the glorious pain becoming numb.  I didn't realize, very quickly didn't have the mental faculties to realize, what it was I was experiencing, my first encounter with what I'd come to know as a dear friend - I was dying.  I remember that very faint picture of Whatchamacallim swallowing that first bite rattling through my empty brain as it rushed to fill the growing void.  Everything, everything, ran scattershot through my brain, and  each thought in turn was displaced by that single image, until it alone rattled through my mind, easing it into homogeneity even as it itself faded.  And then there was nothing, not even a woman to know what she'd lost.

I woke up naked on the cold floor of the Venn machine and stood automatically with a yelp.  Whatchamacallim, eyes like plates, stared at my naked body as I stood.  "You... you were dead..."

I tutted.  "I was candy.  If you'd turned me into a candy bar, would you have panicked when I stopped moving?"

"Well, no, but... well..." whatever he came up with to say, he didn't say, because in a fit of pique, I had turned him into a bonbon.  The doors opened, and I gulped him down whole without thinking about it.  Only then did I turn to see the cars whizzing by and realize what I'd done.

The thing was, since the mall Venn machine was right in the center of regional commerce, something of a prudish culture surrounded it.  If you wanted to TG your partner or make them a pastry, that was fine, but if you were to take in a dead chocolate girl, too mangled to wear clothes, dripping cooling hot fudge everywhere, that was no good.  You'd get "blood" all over the floor and probably get banned, which would be a shame since it's got the only DQ for some thirty miles.  For that reason, he'd taken me out into a machine that had appeared in a rest area, a rest area that had lacked even restrooms until its town had decided to put them there (around the same time as the lockers), only because the machine had become enough of a draw people had assumed they were there already, and boys especially tended to... mark their displeasure at finding otherwise.

And so, I had left myself naked in the middle of the highway, with nowhere to keep a coin, nothing to do but use the machine to shield my body from lascivious traffic.  Of course, it wasn't too long before some boy, hairline just starting to go, looking like most houseflies could leave him reaching for the towel, had pulled in riding his rim.  I didn't want to step out into the open, so I just peeked out and shouted - "you there!"  The boy looked up from his jack.

"...uh, hi... so... I guess that's your car over there?"

"My partner's," I said, "but I ate him."

"Ah - so you're saying you need someone to help you get him back?"

"Yes, please."

"Youthere" went to the controls, whisper-shouting through ten pounds of ham, "one, two, three years...."  He paused, waiting for a reaction.  Honestly, not only had I not checked at the time, I still don't know today how long Whatchamacallim had set the machine for.

"Oh, sorry, are you trying to troll me?  Because I kind of figured we were just going to cancel once my boyfriend was out."

"Hmm."  He got in the machine, and I darted around to the other side, as soon as the doors closed, a faint lurching sensation hitting my esophagus as my boyfriend appeared before me, shooting me a dirty look, but taking off his shirt anyway, with a sidelong glance to the man on the other side.  As for that man (...some twenty pounds too light for anyone to use that word with a straight face, but he was man enough to get Whatchamacallim's side-eye), he didn't even wait for us, but just jabbed the cancel button before I'd even finished buttoning up.

"Well, all that was... something," said Whatchamacallim.

"Sure was," I said.  "Got a penny?"

Whatchamacallim took a long look to see if I was serious, then gave me the penny with a sigh.  "Poor Canadians, paying four times the price," I said as I activated the machine again, not changing the settings.

"So I'm guessing you want to be chocolate again?"

"Mm-hmm!  Just thought I'd try it a little longer."

Once we were in, there was a defeated look in his eyes as he said in a flat affect, "animate chocolate."  Devoid of passion he ran through the options until I could be approximately what I'd been.  Once the changes had hit, I lunged toward the screen, opening my dark eyes to go with my best madwoman's rictus grin and shouted at the top of my lungs,  "TALKING DILDO!"

His expression did not change, a look of confusion coming to him only as my own theatrical expression faded.  "Were you trying to get a reaction out of me?"

"Y-yes?" I said.

"I mean, I don't mind being a dildo for a while."

"You see the duration, right?"

"Well, yeah, but if I can talk, you'll bring me back, won't you?"

"Yeah, but..." I was about to say something, but then I saw that I only had about fifteen seconds left.  "Oh!"  I quickly scrolled through various colors, styles, and interpretations of "talking," before settling on a bleach-white one, a spartan semi-rounded cylinder in shape, with blinking lights that I hoped he'd be able to control.

(He can.)

The doors opened, showing our new forms to Youthere.  Insultingly, despite the nearly naked chocolate girl in the one bay, his first glance was to her new vibrator in the other.

"Uh - you guys used a locker, right?"

...dammit.  Of course it'd be an easy fix, but frankly, I wanted to try out my new toy - and old/new body - a bit first, so Youthere drove me home.  While we were in the car, I looked down at the new acquisition in my hands.  "So - does this work how I think it does?"  Lights moved like a marquee in response:

-IS THIS "HOW YOU THINK IT DOES"?

"Pretty much, yeah."

-DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE DOOR, BTW - I WAS TOO PANICKY TO REMEMBER TO LOCK IT

I hadn't actually thought of that.  Probably should have.  "Good.  I mean, not good, but good."

When we got home, Youthere gave me his number "if you need me"; I gave him a peck on the cheek for his trouble.  As I walked away, I saw him out of the corner of my eye using a finger to transfer the mark from his face to his tongue and turned to wink back at him.  After a quick survey to make sure no one had taken up residence in our apartment, I held Whatchamacallim before me.

"Hey," I said, "quite a day."

-SWEETIE, YOU SCARED THE HELL OUT OF ME BACK THERE

"Heh," I said, "sweetie."

-HUNH HUNH
-BUT NO
-I WAS REALLY FUCKING SCARED
-I MEAN, I'VE HEARD WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT VENN MACHINES, OR I NEVER WOULD HAVE DONE THOSE THINGS, BUT IT'S DIFFERENT WHEN YOU'RE LOOKING AT YOUR GIRLFRIEND'S CORPSE
-I KINDA THOUGHT YOU DIDN'T NEED YOUR... ANYTHING
-WHICH YOU DIDN'T REALLY BUT I THOUGHT YOU'D KEEP MOVING NOT JUST ONLY MOSTLY DIE
-I CAN'T DO ANYTHING LIKE THAT AGAIN

I sighed and nodded.  "I'd figured."

-BUT I KNOW YOU WANT TO

"So... you're telling me to dump you."

-ISH?
-THE KIND OF BREAKUP WHERE YOU USE ME WITHOUT RESTRICTION TO FULFILL YOUR SEXUAL WHIMS WHILE YOU RUN AROUND FREELY WITH OTHER PEOPLE

"It's what boys are for."

-I DON'T KNOW ABOUT THAT
-BUT I KNOW WHAT THE FORM I'M IN NOW IS FOR
-SO LET'S GET TO IT

I was a bit reluctant, to be honest... but I did kind of owe him.  After some time not really going anywhere, I wandered off into the kitchen and got a chopping knife.  Once I'd gotten him into a position I could hold him between my legs, I brought down the knife and cut off my left hand.  It didn't take long after that, the waves of pleasure from my loins and the waves of pain from my arm creating a transcendent resonance, amplified by the high of all the blood I was losing.

(Fortunately - maybe - the arm clotted shut before it could kill me again.)

As for the car we'd left in the rest area, since that was undoubtedly the reader's biggest concern, I called Youthere a few days later.  Since I was on the insurance, I could pick it up, but I'd need a key.  There was an obvious solution - take Whatchamacallim back to a Venn Machine to get his key - that not one of the three of us mentioned.  Instead, I took $200 of Youthere's money to the dealer to get a new key, after which I spent almost another $200 of Youthere's money - $30 more than necessary due to the two days spent waiting for the key - getting the car off the tow lot, plus another $20 for the Lyft so we wouldn't have to juggle cars.

(Youthere fixed my arm while we were out, and topped off my three years.)

That was the first time I went to bed with Youthere.  It's strange, looking back - there was no discussion, no real question, not like the awkward flirting between me and Whatchamacallim a year or two before.  All through the ride home, he was not-so-subtly sniffing me, which didn't seem too inappropriate, since after all, I knew I smelled good.  When we got back to my garage, where he was parked, he began to stare at my new arm, which I extended, since after all, I knew I tasted good.  When he'd tasted my arm, he leaned in for a taste of my face, which I allowed, since after all, I kind of wanted to fuck him.

As we went back to my newly christened bachelor pad, I gave him the same spiel I'd given Whatchamacallim.  He seemed to light up a little - but then, so had he.

Thinking about it, he didn't actually fuck me that night.  Instead, after plenty of licks and nibbles on the way to the bed I'd once shared with Whatchamacallim (and was still sharing with him, albeit in a slightly different fashion), rather than penetrate anything with flesh, he laid me back on the bed, and without a second's warning, penetrated my navel with Whatchamacallim's longest, thinnest kitchen knife, almost a little sword.  I gasped for air as it became harder to breathe; he slammed the knife down through my side, splitting me open.

My skin maintained enough elasticity that it bounced apart once he was through my transverse muscle, causing syrupy chocolate gore to splash up onto his body, soaking his clothes, even up to his mouth.  Most of my innards, made by the Venn Machine a homogeneous fluid below my lungs, slid out with no resistance from the gash whose footprint was too substantial to be called a gash, or even an orifice, but something more like a third axilla somehow gunked up with the entire contents of my torso.

He took one side of the wound he'd made in each hand and tore me apart, taking my lower half and nailing it by one ankle to an armoire, the other dangling down limply to make me do - and I could feel it - an involuntary split.  The last thing I remember before that night's death came over me was a sensation of scattered warmth on my upper half, Youthere decorating me as Horus might a confection for a Set who'd developed a sweet tooth.

I woke up this time in a sack, I think over a day later, and as usual, he turned me back into the chocolate girl I'd been, and we headed back.  The chocolate stains were gone, of course, reclaimed by me on my last trip to the machine, and the sheets changed, but there was still the gaping hole in the mattress where he'd skewered me to it, in a lack of homeostasis that served and serves as a sobering reminder of what forces we - not just the two of us, but all of us who Venned - were playing with.

In my next "session" with Whatchamacallim, I related the whole incident to him (not mentioning the elephant in the room regarding the keys) and he responded simply:

-ABOUT TIME

The damage to the mattress must have hit Youthere as hard as it did me, since while he would do things to my body, and even to his own, that I couldn't have envisioned if you'd described them to me before the machines' advent, he'd be careful never to damage his bed again, or anything else that had always been inanimate.  He did come up with the workaround of turning friends, the sort of friends you might fuck on, into mattresses he could carve up to his heart's content, but after one or two times most of them either got spooked or took up something more long-term with someone else.

As for the forms he had me give him, indeed, he did take on a variety, but none so eminently given to abuse as a hunk of processed fat and flavor given life.  Mostly monsters, anthros, etc.  He asked to be TG'd early on, which I vetoed on the stated basis that I had no more interest sharing my bed with a woman than he with a man (although his behavior in some of the trains he's run on me in the interim leads me to question the height of that bar), but the real reason is that if I shared a bed with a woman for too long, I'd feel guilty about forgetting her name so often.

In any case, since then I've been a kept woman.  I've been eaten to the point of death hundreds of times by dozens of people, and I've loved every moment of it.  The apartment I shared with Whatchamacallim was sublet until the end of the lease, then dropped, and his car, for all the trouble we went to getting it back, was sold.  I don't know exactly where Youthere gets the money to "keep" me, only that he pays his rent with money orders.  Last week was the three-year anniversary of our meeting, which I know because a certain resident of our bedside table drawer appeared underneath.

There was not one word of discussion between us while he was human, which was somewhat unusual, in light of the fact that he all but serves as my therapist.  Hell, I think that might have been the only day I was alive that we didn't talk at all.  Rather, I took him straight to the machine in the mall, where I found his form again, not one word spoken.  He didn't even remember to lock up his keys, not that it would have mattered since the car they went to was long gone.  After all, when you've been in a drawer for years, where else are you going to go?  (I wonder where Kelsey is now...)

Someday, I expect - I hope - that as Youthere carves me up, enough of my offal will seep into his furniture and/or be eaten by a disparate enough group of fuck-friends that what he brings back to the machine won't be enough to reform.  Hell, maybe there'll be more than enough, but this time, for whatever reason, he just won't bother.  I wouldn't know either way, of course, long dead as always.  The only difference to me will be that instead of waking up in the machine, I'll wake up wherever I do wake up, three years later.  Most likely he'll have moved on from me by then, maybe even forgotten the day.  He'll be whipping some other girl bloody on his chocolate-soaked bed, and suddenly, the stains will vanish and I'll appear beneath her, still dizzy from the grave.

I can't wait.