Beyond Ourselves: Stories of Minds, Bodies, Genders and Identities

By Liam Slade

From writer Liam Slade (Kristi's Mom, I Changed Sexes With My Wife) comes a new collection of short stories that look at what happens when people are taken beyond the limits they thought they had: their bodies, sexes, hearts, minds, and very selves are put to the test, and all are left changed.

A down-on-his-luck husband and father must undergo a shocking transition to keep providing for his family. A man pays the price for one disastrous night in his youth. A fairy tale Queen searches for the perfect match for the Princess. A car salesman struggles to come to terms with a changing reality. All these and more in a series of stories that explore the meaning of "Beyond."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liam Slade
• Release date: Feb 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224640713

Liam Slade

Liam has been writing stories of transformation and identity for over 15 years, including many years helping helm the Trading Post Blog (under the username A.M.) He is fascinated by gender and age transformations, and anything that takes one person out of being what they thought they were. He writes to try to grasp experiences that are impossible in real life and examine exactly what makes a person who they are.

Book preview

Beyond Ourselves

Stories of Minds, Bodies, Genders and Identities

by Liam Slade

These works are copyright 2024 Liam Slade, all rights reserved, not to be reproduced without explicit permission. The following are a works of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual events or persons living or dead is unintentional and coincidental.

Also by Liam Slade

I Changed Sexes With My Wife

Kristi’s Mom

Partsexchange

The Princess Awakening

A Holiday Wish

Both

For more, please visit http://liamslade.com/

Follow @LiamSladeTF on Twitter or @liamslade.bsky.social on Bluesky

Contents

Introduction

Who Wears the Pants?

Pieces of Crystal

Oleg, Ollie and Olaf

Merger

Confessions of a Body Thief

The Girls

I Woke Up Like This

Outroduction/Notes

Introduction

The mind wanders.

At this point, I’ve written a handful of works, all of which I’m proud of to a greater or lesser degree – whether because I attempted (and maybe even pulled off) something interesting, or because I connected successfully with readers, or both. I’m fairly restless as a writer and I am probably disproportionately afraid of repeating myself. My works cover similar topics, and are all definitely written by me, but are mostly about different things covered in different ways. It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to do anything new, but I am always looking for what has not yet been done by me.

The great anxiety of my life is to only be one thing. My writing about transformations does not come from a dislike of what I am or appear to be, but out of a lament that I might only get to be one thing in my life. That I can’t try on different lives and selves the same way one samples clothes.

That’s a little melodramatic – nobody is truly stuck. You can change your job, your career, your relationship if you have cause to do so. But my problem is, you’re only one thing at a time: if you’re here, you’re not there. If you’re male, you’re not female, if you’re married, you’re not single, if you’re old you’re not young. My writing is my way to try to get around this and sample all the lives I am not living. I write about it, and I also write as it.

I don’t want to be the same type of writer over and over again, although I accept that there are certain traits that will always be with me. My challenge to myself was to create a set of stories that didn’t repeat themselves even as they felt like they came from the same place, a collection that felt like a wide spread of what I can do and where my mind goes. Maybe I succeeded, maybe not, and maybe the result leaves people wishing I could settle down and write more of what they like. I don’t know but I’ve had fun trying to find out.

These stories cover a lot of the same topics differently. I wanted to see how many different writers I could be: maybe the answer is seven, maybe the answer is one. I hope that they are all interesting in their own ways, even as they differ from other things I have done.

I called my site – and this collection – Beyond Ourselves for a reason: because that’s what the stories are about and that’s where I try to go when I write.

Enjoy and be kind,

Liam Slade

Who Wears the Pants?

It was a sad day for Roy Dunn when he came home from his job at the manufacturing plant for the last time. It was early spring in 1974, and Roy had occupied a place on the assembly line for twelve years, beginning right out of high school, as he prepared to marry his sweetheart Susie. He had been groomed for a role as floor manager that somehow never materialized, and then just as the company was coming out of a winter haze, it was determined that Roy, and a dozen other faithful employees, were no longer needed. It was the first time he or any of his fellows – the gents he would go for Thursday night beers with or watch the Bengals games on Sunday – had heard the term downsizing. Pulling his ’71 Oldsmobile into the carport and walking up the front stoop to his split-level home on Grackle Blvd, Roy felt like a man brought low. Toting his steel lunchbox, his posture was slumped and defeated. The only life he had ever known was ending. How would he explain this to Susie, or little ten-year-old Jacob and eight-year-old Anne Marie?

He put on a brave face. This was only temporary. They were still going to live the American dream. Things would have to turn around. People have to make things in this country, and he was the man to do it.

The world didn’t think so. He went on nine job interviews and none of them amounted to anything but a handshake and a well-wish. There were too many Roys competing for too many of the same jobs. McGrath Plastics: No. Sealy Enterprises: No thanks. Krauss Chemical: Perhaps in the fall. But Roy couldn’t wait that long. He had a family to feed.

One night he looked around the dinner table, and if he hadn’t been a man, he would have cried: little Jacob in his ballcap, just home from practice. Anne Marie in her ballet tutu getting ready to go to rehearsal after dinner. And Susie. Poor Susie, she deserved the world. She had just started taking that trendy new medication that all the wives were raving about, and he wanted to be able to keep affording it. They were scrimping and saving, eating discount canned ham for dinner. Susie suggested she could start looking for work, perhaps at a daycare or as a nanny, but Roy wouldn’t hear of it. He was bound and determined to rescue his family himself, his way.

The lowest moment came in late May. The sink was backed up. Roy was too proud to call a plumber to come look at it, and anyway they wouldn’t be able to afford it. Roy was no handyman himself, but he spent all day under that sink with Jacob handing him tools and in the end, he still had to call a plumber, and it cost double to fix what Roy had thought he fixed in the first place.

When little Jacob accidentally lobbed a baseball at his mother’s favorite vase, Roy blew his stack, fuming and raving about straightening up his behavior. Even Susie, the ostensible victim of this attack, pled with her husband for clemency – He’s just a boy, she pled, but Roy huffed.

I’m the man of the house, if I’m not going to teach him discipline, who will?

But for all of his bluster, the man was hurting inside. Eventually it became hard for Roy to even get out of bed. Days would come and go. Susie would leave the house – spending the day running errands or at the Women’s club, Roy wasn’t sure and didn’t care to ask – and Roy would sit alone, trying to muster up the gumption to get back out there and pound the pavement. Day after day, it was becoming harder to face the world.

It occurred to Roy that the Missus had her stash of pills in the nightstand, some new medication they were prescribing that was all the rage. They were designed to brighten her spirits and make her feel less melancholy as she lived her life. Why shouldn’t it have the same effect on him? It was hard to admit that he might need something to buoy his spirits and give him the kick in the pants he needed to get back on track as a husband, father and provider.

Without a second thought, Roy helped himself to one little pill from the orange bottle. He washed it down with a cup of water. As soon as he felt it settle into his stomach, he felt a warmth emanating from within him, like a morning cup of coffee times ten. It was a jolt that shot suddenly from his midsection out to his fingertip and up and down his back. The sensation was so instant and overwhelming that it caused him to double over and fall to his knees.

Was this right, he wondered? Was this how the medication was supposed to work? He began to shiver, it was as if the temperature in the room had shifted instantly. His senses played havoc with him as colors morphed before his eyes – the red drapes of the bedroom turned a shade of burgundy, and suddenly he could detect the leftover odor of last night’s tuna surprise clinging to the pans in the sink. His insides churned. His breaths were shallow, his chest felt heavy. As his muscles spasmed, he sat back against the bed and waited for the sensation to pass.

The racing of his heart began to slow, and his breath, quivering, returned to normal. Good heavens, he muttered. He turned into a crouched position, and, resting his arms on the firm top of his mattress, he pressed himself to his feet. It seemed as though the bed – and the room itself – had gotten larger.

No, he soon realized: he had shrunk. His white button-up shirt had become a tarp over his body, loosely covering down far below his waist. His dockers, which had been belted firmly against his potbellied frame, slipped down to his ankles the moment he stood up. His knees knocked together in the chill.

He held his arm out at length before him, pushing the now-billowy sleeve up his narrow, soft-skinned arm. It was like a child playing dress-up, a thin, noodly limb with slender fingers on petite soft hands. Something tickled on his scalp – hair! Long strands of silky brown hair fell from his head and curtained his eyes. He pushed it behind his ears, shocked at its sudden length and body. Examining it, he whispered, This can’t be…

He turned to face the mirror on Susie’s makeup table. When he saw the figure in the reflection, his jaw dropped.

She didn’t look like any girl Roy knew: with her stringy hair falling over her plain face, her hunched over posture, and her baggy white men’s dress shirt and bare legs. He crept closer to look at himself. She was somewhat plain, anonymous looking, with a long nose, wide mouth and almond eyes – pretty in the way young women mostly are but not eye-catching, unadorned by any kind of cosmetics. But it was shocking to see her at all: this stranger in the mirror. Roy lifted a hand to cover his open mouth and the girl in the mirror did the same. Great Scott! he heard her gasp, her voice octaves higher than his natural tone.

If that’s me… then I’m…

He hiked up his shirt in a hurry, and sure enough, between his legs – skinny, pale things – was naught but a patch of dark personal hair and a flat patch of skin. He grasped at it hoping to coax out the instrument he knew was normally there, but there was nothing but a slight, fleshy slit, which he accidentally breached, ever so slightly, with his fingers. The contact tingled and caused him to shiver.

He gasped again. That was quite enough of that. He paced the room manically, wracking his brain for any kind of solution, or next move. Pulling frustratedly at his hair, he considered his options. Staying put was out