That morning, the first sensation Suzuki recognized was a physical “compression” that felt as if it were crushing his lungs.
He attempted to inhale as he always did. However, something was forcefully restraining his ribcage from expanding outward. He tried to spring out of bed by reflex, but his body was unnaturally heavy. Or, more accurately, his center of gravity had shifted—displaced several centimeters downward and forward from its intended coordinates.
In the dim bedroom, he pressed a hand to his chest.
Suzuki’s former chest had been flat—loosening slightly with his late forties, perhaps, but still maintaining the fundamental rigidity of a male skeleton. What existed there now, however, was a mass of warm, soft adipose tissue, seemingly overflowing from his palm. When he pressed his fingers into it, the flesh distorted unnaturally as if seeking an escape, sagging under its own mass.
“…!”
As he tried to speak, the back of his throat convulsed. What emerged was a damp, low-pitched female voice—one he recognized with a start.
He crawled toward the mirror as if dragging himself from wreckage. Reflected there was neither a phantasmal young girl nor a youthful maiden. It was the naked torso of a “mature woman” approaching her late thirties or the threshold of her forties.
This was not a body sculpted for aesthetic appreciation. The line from the neck to the shoulders had lost its masculine angularity; instead, it was rounded, covered by a layer of fat that obscured the thick trapezius muscles. The undersides of the upper arms wobbled with the slightest movement, and the skin was etched with the fine lines of life’s exhaustion.
The depiction of this “weight” was particularly uncanny. The breasts in the mirror pulled the surrounding skin downward with unrelenting gravity simply by existing. The areolae were widened, and the lines leading toward the lower abdomen were marked by countless pale fissures—stretch marks resembling silver threads, suggesting either rapid weight gain or the history of childbirth.
“Kaori… san…”
Fragments of the previous day’s memory surfaced in Suzuki’s mind. A joke she had whispered in the corner of a dimly lit maid café.
*”Would you mind switching with me, just for a day?”*
At that moment, her eyes had not been smiling. It hadn’t been an offer of salvation; it was a curse designed to thrust the “cage of flesh” she was forced to bear onto someone else.
Suzuki lowered his gaze to his feet. Around the waist, thick fat had accumulated as if forcibly wrapping itself around an adult male skeleton. The inner thighs pressed against each other even while standing, trapping body heat. As he tried to walk, the friction of flesh against flesh sent a slimy sensation to his brain.
This was not a noble phenomenon like a “soul swap.” He had simply been forcibly poured into the vessel of “time, fat, and fatigue” that a woman named Kaori had accumulated over many years.
He reached for the pile of clothes prepared in the closet. It was a maid uniform—something he had previously viewed only as a “sexual symbol.” Now, however, it was no mere fabric. It was a steel-like restraint, meant to stem the expansion of this ever-increasing flesh and correct it into a shape deemed acceptable by society as a “woman.”
With every reach, the flesh on his back felt taut and strained. When he leaned forward, the mass of his chest ruthlessly compressed his esophagus, bringing a surge of nausea akin to acid reflux. Suzuki felt a wave of vertigo as he realized exactly how much energy the owner of this body consumed every day just to “maintain a form.”
There was not a shred of exhilaration. There was only the desperate premonition of the endless battle against gravity that was about to begin.
If you’d like to read more, check it out here
コメント