Tale #9:What Came and Went (In my Pants)

Tale #9: What Came and Went (In my Pants) (Sequel to 'Shortcomings and Goings' with a picture coming later this month) Content Tags: (Surrealism, horror, mental and physical regression, messy diapers) It was hard to believe, but I had actually begun to yearn for the little dignity that a third grade class had provided me, or even the dignity of a soiled Pull-Up. The beast had ripped my fate asunder, causing mass chaos in the short time since he'd last fed on my personalized reality. I was now in second grade, but still at the age of a third grader, though with the intellect of a Kindergartner, and to wrap it all up in a neat bow was the fact that my training pants had been traded in for diapers. None of it made any sense, and no one else around me seemed to realize any of this at all. I was a lone voyager on a sea of endless doubts and irregularities; I was being gobbled up by the big bad wolf that lurked just outside the front door, while everyone inside continued on with their humdrum little existence. To me, the sense of self-awareness was the most bitter part of the pill to swallow; if that creature had reduced me in some completely evenhanded way, to where I truly had the wherewithal of a tot, then I wouldn't suffer the indignities and horrors of having my life's tapestry unspun. The beast was ripping delicate threads out of place and slurping them up like the spaghetti dinner that I'd made a mess of the night before. Oh yeah. I wasn't just some dunce-cap-deserving pipsqueak that defecated daily in a diaper, I had even begun to lose such simple skills such as eating dinner without getting it all over me. By the end of my meal, I'd looked like a murder victim, with the amount of sauce that I'd gotten all over myself, and the strong, fresh smell of poop coming from my diaper hadn't helped either. I'd more or less gotten used to the diapers. Maybe it was because I didn't have much of a choice in the matter, and to lament deeply about it would be to bay uselessly at the moon. I had been in the Pull-Ups during the day for a little while, and they'd allowed me a greater sense of autonomy, but that too had been stripped away by my hungry little 'neighbor'. I was fully convinced now that nobody else could even see him. I never heard anyone mention him, and the few times that I had apprehensively brought him up, none of my neighbors or classmates had any clue what I was talking about. My parents even jokingly referred to him as my 'imaginary friend'. I could have almost laughed in their faces the first time I heard that. *Imaginary friend?* Nothing 'imaginary' could have done such things to reality itself; I very much doubt that Foster's would have ever taken him in at least. He still appeared from seemingly nowhere, though it wasn't like I ever saw him 'poof' or 'fade' in, it was more like he was always just in the corner of my eye until he was ready to feed. I even saw him staring at me through the window the other day. My mother had been in the room with me, vacuuming while I watched cartoons and feasted on Gold Fish. The feeling of being watched was overwhelming, but I didn't want to look; I was scared. I overcame my trembling and allowed myself to look, and there he was, right outside the living room window, with his face right up to the pane. Staring with those soulless, abyssal pits that he called eyes. Smiling... no not smiling, *grimacing*, with those fully bared teeth that were primed to gnash. He'd never looked as frightening as he did in that moment; it was as if the flimsy flesh facade that he'd stuffed himself into was beginning to burst at the seams and let the true, hideous berth of his otherworldly form emerge. I hadn't had the composure to scream, or make any sound at all. I was frozen in place, my own eyes transfixed on the vile visage that was telegraphing a profound hunger for me. The child-shaped monster awkwardly rose its hand, in a mechanical manner that betrayed inhumanity, and began to run its fingers across the glass. It then cocked its head and began to tap on the glass, increasing force with slap of the palm. All this time, my only comfort had remained that for whatever reason, it couldn't get into the house. It was awfully polite for this eldritch abomination to follow vampire rules, but my comfort was becoming very strained at this sudden sense of intent. It wasn't satisfied with waiting for its prey to come out of the burrow as usual, it was becoming more emboldened. I only snapped out of it when I heard the vacuum turn off, and my mother turn to scold me about what I could then clearly smell was a steaming pile beneath my buttcheeks. I'm not sure if I could even blame that on my current state of continence; even fully grown, I think I might have reacted the same way to something so horrible. I fidgeted on the couch, feeling the mushy squishiness of my own simmering waste beneath me with a mild disgust, but that wasn't at the forefront of what I thought was important right now. "Mom! He's at the window!" Just as soon as my finger was pointing to the cursed image that would forever engrave itself in my mind, the 'boy' was gone. There was no way that she couldn't have earlier seen him though, since he'd been lying in wait at the window for so long, but she only continued to chastise me about my 'poopy pants' and asking why I didn't ask to go use the potty like a big boy. Fortunately, as silly as it sounded to even use such a term, that event did give credence to a theory I'd begun to develop. The beast had only gotten a hold of me a few times since demoting me to Pull-Ups, and it seemed like it had been taking smaller 'bites' out of me each time, at least in comparison to the feeding frenzy from months past. My thought process, as oddly stilted as it had become, was that the creature had been a little too careless in its earlier attacks. I suspected that due to just how ravenous its hunger had been, that it'd made some unforced errors in plucking pieces from my life's puzzle. With my current form, it had gotten less and less access to me; it couldn't come inside the house, and it didn't seem to manifest whenever I was outside with someone else. Now that I was a shrimpy, dimwitted, diaper-dependant little grade-schooler...I was *rarely* alone outside my house. Even times that I *could* have gone outside without supervision, such as in the backyard, I'd played the wuss and said I was too scared to be alone out there. That wasn't a lie though, I was *terrified*. My mom waited with me for the school bus, and she picked me up from school. I made sure to always be with someone when I was at school too; I refused to be alone if I wasn't inside my house. I was going to starve this thing until it collapsed as an emaciated husk, putrefying into a well-earned grave. I had to wonder if a predator would so willingly abandon the prey it had spent so much effort in tracking or ensnaring, if the alternative was to become patient to the point of complete starvation. I could just outlast it, right? How much more sustenance could my meager form even provide? If it couldn't take anything else from me, then it'd have no choice but to abandon the hunt, right? I couldn't be sure of it. The window incident, which I internally referred to as the 'slipping of the mask', had been but one peculiar piece to examine as of late. The other had been my most recent encounter with him, the one from a couple a weeks ago, where he'd cemented my descent into diapers. I had still been in my third grade class at that point, and while I wore Pull-Ups during the day, I still used the toilet at about a 75% success rate. It'd actually been the encounter that had made me become firm on my policy of never being alone. I'd asked to use the bathroom, which had earned some snickers from my smarmy classmates, who were well aware that I was accident-prone to the point of still being in training pants; my teacher obviously didn't want to deal with smelling a pantload in her classroom or cleaning up a puddle, so she'd been more than willing to excuse me from the lesson. Though with my academic reputation, she probably didn't think it was any big loss for me to be missing any of her class... Either way, I'd found myself trotting down the hall to the restrooms. I passed by teachers and other kids on their way to destinations unknown, but by the time I had reached the bathroom, my solitude had become obvious. Solitude at first. I hadn't even made it halfway to the stall before I could feel its presence. Corner of my eye, lurking in my blind spot and salivating at the thought of what it might be able to devour. My veins froze completely over, and much like with the window incident that was to come, I found myself paralyzed in a primal fear. Primal was a good word for it too, because it was a feeling that I considered had become vestigial in modern times, now that man no longer languished horribly under the crushing weight of the food chain's bottom. I could feel that he was right behind me, but I couldn't hear him breathing. Now that I think about it, I don't think I'd ever seen his diaphragm move. It was a small detail, but a rather pertinent one, and only further evidence that he could only approximate our form without understanding of how it should function. I suspected if I were to lift his shirt, that he'd have no navel, but even that assumed that his clothes were separate from the rest of him. I'd never seen him in a different outfit before, so it was entirely possible that his clothes were simply an extension of this 'skin suit' he masqueraded in. Regardless of the intricacies of his form, he had successfully stalked me into a very lonely corner. "...When was the last time that you pooped in a diaper?" I had pitiful hopes that such a question couldn't possibly be utilized against me; I had no real memories of when that would have been, as I would have been too young to remember any of it. Apparently though, regardless of my own ability to recall such an event, his question had probed so deeply the recesses of my mind, that I could suddenly remember a time when I could have been no older than three. "...I just turned three, and my parents were trying to pottytrain me. I didn't want to give up my diapers. Right after they made me sit on the training potty for thirty minutes, once they put my diaper back on, I hid behind the couch and took a huge dump in my Luvs." This wasn't some made-up fiction to appease the beast; I could genuinely feel that memory flickering vividly in my mind, like it could have happened yesterday. In the middle of recounting this tale, I heard some sloppy sounding farts coming from below, and I had a sense that my shorts were getting much more snug. My Pull-Ups were turning into real diapers, to match what I'd said about my memory, and like that memory, I was taking a big smelly dump in the newly formed pair of babypants. Unlike last time, I didn't have to check to make sure that this was the case, I just knew it must be true. The entity had begun to ask another question when the bathroom door opened. Coming in was an 'older boy', maybe in fourth or fifth grade. I suddenly felt that the dark presence had vanished, instantaneously at that, replaced by a much less intimidating scoff from a sneering brat. "...Eww! Did the little baby crap in his pants?" He snarled, gesturing wildly at the large lump in the back of my shorts; it looked like I was smuggling an exceptionally large baked potato back there, only accentuated by the bulk of the diaper and the tightness of the shorts. Now, weeks after that event, and with some time after the window incident, I was trying to feel strong in the face of unrelenting paranoia. I had to guard what remained of my puzzle, of my tapestry; I had to starve this beast that came and went as he pleased. If I couldn't, then what would remain of me after much longer?