The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Malia stepped carefully around a small pile of horse manure next the rolling door on the side of her neighbor’s barn.

So she was looking at the ground when she entered the cavernous interior. It took several seconds for her eyes to adjust to the dim light.

When she realized what she was seeing, the 30-something painter gasped.

Cara and Tanya Joplin—the neighbor couple used Tanya’s last name apparently because it was familiar in this part of the county (Joplin Road, the old Joplin Township, Joplin Hill)—were not just experienced farmers. They were a striking couple, in looks alone. To be honest with herself, Malia had to admit she had been attracted to them on very first glance in some inexplicable, unfamiliar, visceral and personal way. “Maybe it’s my new bucolic environs having their intended effect already!” she thought happily. But her practical, justifying side told herself she could and should learn from them. For weeks she had planned to stop by to watch them in action in daily life—to pick their brains about, well, farming.

Farming! That was the sort of information she had hoped to gain from the Joplins! How to drive the aging tractor left by a prior owner in Malia’s new shed! Which fertilizers worked best in local soil conditions! Tomato cultivation and staking techniques! The sort of specialized knowledge that came from having worked the land.

Not this, whatever it was!

She peered into the gloom, trying to make sense of what Cara and Tanya were doing … together …over by the abandoned ox stalls and the large equipment storage.

Tanya, the descendant of generations of farmers, was tall and lanky, with a ground-eating power walk befitting her heritage and those long legs, with lush dirty blond shoulder-length hair to match. But she was also endowed in her upper body in a way that seemed to Malia’s artistic sensibilities unbalanced, or disproportional, and to a shy, introverted inner Malia, frankly unfair, given her lean figure; and her face—Tanya’s carved cheekbones brought the word “queenly” to Malia’s mind.

Cara, the farmer’s Asian/Hispanic wife, was shorter, darker, almost unbearably cute and shamelessly bubbly. The obvious extrovert of the pair, Cara had huge eyes that, along with her looks and personality, seemed to bewitch people—— Malia, most of all—almost hypnotically.

But here, today, Cara was standing to one side, not actively attracting attention. In fact, her demeanor was atypically stiff, almost … mechanical.

Supervising? Was that what she was doing? She at least looked relatively normal, a farm wife doing reasonably farm wife-type things.

Tanya, however—Tanya’s model-like body was strapped to … a machine of some sort. A wide band of oiled leather hugged the woman’s flawless, glossy, tanned skin just above hips, which Malia’s artistic sensibility was just now discovering, naked as she was down there, mouthwateringly matched and complemented those expansive Slavic cheek bones.

The shapely farmer’s whole physique was canted forward, almost prone.

Her back was slightly arched, and her breasts….

Electricity ran down Malia’s spine leaving a tingling all through her body.

What kind of a machine was it? What was it doing?! Malia’s eyes widened as they followed the tube connected to the cups attached to Tanya’s … nipples down to a very standard looking … what?!—milk bottle?!

Was Cara milking Tanya? With a milking machine?

The scene was so far outside anything Malia had ever experienced or imagined in a relatively UN-sheltered life that she just gaped at first, trying her best to steady her breathing.

Her first instinct was to disappear. Vanish magically into thin air, or sink into the ground. Failing that, run! Run home, as fast as her legs could carry her, back to her safe bedroom! Hide under the covers and pretend she had never seen what she was seeing.

Or maybe process it all with a little gentle self-massage...

Could you unsee something like this? Had it already become a part of her life experience and in some way begun to change her perception of the world and her place in it? She thought of movies she had seen where the unimaginable was discovered right next door—Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives. Would she have nightmares now for weeks picturing Tanya with that almost dazed expression on her perfect face having her breasts pulled at—while she—and the—

Malia bit her lip, realizing that her lips were wet. Just a little. And her crotch felt tender, sensitive.

Why would this be hot?

As a professional artist, Malia very much believed in the sensual world and its ability to affect and shape us as human beings. That was what life was about at its best and worst.

The tableau before her here, however—the vision, the sound, the smell was—well there was some fragrance she didn’t recognize. Hay, certainly, flowers maybe, and a warm loamy odor and—oh!

Oh.

She also recognized a rich musk she would previously have associated only with the bedroom.

Sex, yes.

Was it Tanya? Was it the smell of Tanya’s arousal? Was Tanya enjoying this in a sexual way? Well now that Malia thought about it—she pictured herself leaning like that ... with the machine—that would feel…hmmmm. She touched her own breasts before she got ahold of herself and shoved her hands safely into her pockets.

Was there a chemical in the air or was that her neighbor’s—Tanya, to whom Malia was not attracted of course, but who was, by any measure, something to look at, no question. I mean, just from an artist’s standpoint. Tanya would have made a terrific figure model. Maybe Malia could ask her to pose—? But could a woman get excited from having your breasts—what?!—the steady pull of the mechanism—rubber or latex there at the tip where Tanya’s breasts rested in the cups—was massage-like and mesmerizingly regular.

The gentle thumping seemed to trigger asympathetic rhythm in Malia’s brain. Thump thump thump thud. Spurt. Thump thump thump thud, spurt. Her stunned brain seemed to be synchronizing to that lulling cadence.

Malia caught herself leaning forward.

No! No no no!! It was appalling, my gosh, disgusting. Right!? Humans were not animals!

But if she disapproved so totally, why was Malia worried that her jeans might be showing a damp spot down where the seams joined between her legs?

As that very thought occurred to Malia, she also noticed motion down near where she had been avoiding looking at the perfect curve-in-profile of Tanya’s ass. Was the machine working separately there to push something up into Tanya?

Jesus! It was so perverted!

As Malia’s eyes adjusted now to the dim shadows and she looked determinedly away from the part of the machine where the smooth metal evidently curved up to become a dildo, she could see, too, that, in addition to the contraption at her chest and under her, Tanya had what looked like a SCUBA regulator against her lower face, and a kind of cap on her head.

The cap looked for all the world like a metal yarmulke.

But a metal yarmulke with wires and two tiny blinking LED’s?! Tanya’s head bobbed slowly, slowly nodding yes, yes to all Malia’s questions in, yes, a very bovine manner. What Malia could see of her eyes looked glazed, empty, cow-like.

The machine was evidently working on almost every part of Tanya’s body and mind and she was grunting along in matching rhythm.

Malia’s gasp of shock and the thickness of the air there inside the barn generated a coughing fit that disabled her for half a minute and thoroughly ended any hope of leaving unnoticed.

Or watching what was happening to Tanya in secret.

This could not be real. Malia actually pinched her own arm to try to snap out of the dream.

But the way both neighbor women turned their heads very slowly, as if moving through honey, their look so vacant and dreamlike—only enhanced Malia’s sense of the surreality of the scene. It seemed all the more like a weird dream, and with a dreamlike feel, her mind seemed to stall, to empty….

She could just watch, wait to see what happened next. She did not have to judge, or even decide how to react or how to handle it…

Just drink in the entrancing vision, the dream, and become—

Malia was pretty sure Cara and Tanya would not mind…

Wait, so was she getting used to the sight, the idea? Conditioned to the normalcy of it? The thought scared her and forced her into action.

Not knowing what else to do, but certain this was distinctly not right, and not really having a choice now, Malia stepped forward, still clearing her throat. She kept a polite smile gamely on her face. But her logical brain wondered—was it just plain inane to ask what was happening?

“Hi,” she choked out stupidly, coughing one more time. “Your breasts…”

“Your breasts?!” That was not what she had meant to say! Was it?! And she had definitely not intended to speak in such a low, husky moan. She’d meant to ask if something harmful was happening, because when she thought of her own somewhat smaller breasts—there, in that—that would hurt, wouldn’t it?

Or would it feel like a lover’s mouth….? Nnngh.

Later, looking back, Malia would kick herself: What was she!? A fourteen-year-old boy just discovering an intense adolescent interest in female mammaries? She was not into breasts … not that much. Was she? Yeesh!

Malia felt dizzy, and when she took a deep breath to calm herself, realized there was in fact something in the air. A chemical. Maybe the machine discharged something other than … what Tanya was discharging.

“Hi, Malia! Yes! I think they are double D now!” Cara said brightly after a moment, looking straight into Malia’s eyes.

In what looked like a doctor’s jacket, with large pockets and a weird corporate logo on starched white polyester over her own impressive bosom, Cara grinned widely. She reached out and touched the side of Tanya’s breast, stroked it. Tanya grunted and Cara ran her hand all the way down her wife’s flank as if unable to hold herself back.

“They are enlarging properly, according to specs, wonderfully,” she said with a strange sense of professional proficiency. But then she smirked lasciviously, “She’s looking better and better every day, isn’t she, Mal? Her whole body is being touched up, and her pheromones—can you smell her?”

The charming coquette held her hand to her nose to sniff it and then held it out to share generously with Malia.

And Cara’s incongruously well-manicured little hand looked oily.

But as it turned out, Cara was welcoming Malia warmly, Malia’s brain told her, and that was something. Right?

“We hoped you’d stop by!” Cara released a lever she had evidently been holding on the side of the machine, the machine in which Tanya was restrained, and skipped over to give Malia a hug.

“We hoped the grocery store was not going to be the last we saw of you! We have been thinking of inviting you over for dinner every day since you moved in next door, but especially since we saw you last Tuesday!” She shot her eyebrows and looked at Malia with a bland expression. “You intrigue the heck out of us, to tell the truth! A professional urban artist gracing our provincial corner of the country?! So exciting!!” Something about the way the nubile young woman said ‘exciting’ made her obvious efforts at flattery fall a bit flat, but teased at Malia’s crotch. More so, and again.

And it was mildly disconcerting to Malia that she had been identified and become the focus of her neighbors, when she had assumed she was mostly anonymous here in Joplin County. She had moved to the country, after all, to get away.

But it was hard not to notice how attractive Cara, also, was, how beguilingly lovely.

In abstract aesthetic terms, naturally.

“We told you we wanted to get to know you better, you remember!?”

For a moment, to Malia’s desperate psyche, Cara’s behavior seemed almost defensible. Considered just so, it could be interpreted as just a new neighbor welcoming a recent transplant. Grasping at the at the familiar in Cara’s reception, and hoping the lively ruralist would have some explanation to reassure her, Malia returned the hug at first. Maybe there was a rational explanation. Different places had different customs. Malia had eaten insects on safari in Africa, live mountain squid in Seoul. (The latter had been surprisingly crunchy!) Maybe there was some standard procedure in farming that involved …

But any sense of normalcy returning flew out the window when Malia heard a clacking and, looking over Cara’s shoulder, saw Tanya pushing forward hard with her hips and her chest. Her breasts seemed to bulge and begin to shake, as if—as if—

Was her mouth opening?! Was she groaning!?

Was Tanya orgasming?!

It was unbelievably embarrassing and shocking.

And also—yup—unbearably hot.

How can I find this so hot!? Malia wondered.

She noticed distantly that Cara was continuing the hug a bit longer than seemed appropriate. Cara, her beautiful, almond eyed neighbor was gripping Malia and stroking her—her, Malia’s ass…

Malia jerked. She felt Cara’s touch on the back of her neck with the oily hand and it was so sensual it made her skin tingle.

Or was there something in the oil?

Malia swallowed.

This was not—she was not—her pussy was soaking her panties, she could tell—but—

“Why does it feel so good just to be touched?” Malia thought. Had it been that long since Roger Dawson, her last ex? Was that even his name? Her recollection was hazy. But her uncertainty itself answered the question in one sense.

No! No, she had to get back her autonomy, be Malia—she raised her arms—

Released, Cara leaned back, but slid her hands to clasp Malia at the waist. The way a close friend or parent would. Not improper or rude per se, but very familiar, personal.

The pretty farm wife looked hard and seriously into Malia’s eyes. “We have so much to teach you,” she smiled.

“To teach me? To teach me?” Malia was not sure if she had spoken or just thought this.

The sound of the machine just four feet from them was loud and penetrating, it occurred to Malia, but also—steadying? Cara’s eyes were like dark, deep bottomless pools in which a dozen newly-met new-to-the-neighborhood artists could easily drown. Malia felt herself losing track of time, forgetting what she was doing there, what she had been thinking.

It felt weirdly good. The feeling went with the novelty in some artistic sense, maybe, like new music and dance. You adjusted as you decided if you liked it and learned the notes, the steps, and before you knew it, with catchy ear-worms, you were singing along, dancing like everyone else.

And maybe this thinking was a way to escape mentally, Malia ruminated self-consciously, her shocked mind finding a way to cope. Finding a solution or, just … giving in.

Yesss.

Had someone said, “give in?”

Malia listened closely and realized the machine was putting out some sort of a combination of music and vocals. She had by chance read recently that a Turkish farmer had increased milk production in his herd by putting CR goggles on his cows. They played soothing music, if Malia recalled correctly, displayed bucolic scenery?

But that was cows!

It was all too much too fast. Malia had never considered herself weak, easily influenced or suggestive, but here she was accepting the impossible.

And she was definitely not lesbian, although she had many friends. She never had been before now anyway—

Malia shivered, wobbled on her feet.

But Cara was there to hold her. Beautiful sweet Cara. And just as a matter of context, it was very warm in the barn and the machine continued throbbing in that oh-so restful pattern, like a pulse, or—a ticking watch. There was a voice or a chant, something, not just the smell, in the air, maybe even radiation, or a vibration. Was she being intentionally drugged? Were they trying to program her? And why did that make her clit throb?!

Just then, coincidentally, Cara reached up with her hand as if to pat Malia’s shoulder and suddenly Malia felt a prick in the side of her neck.

Had Cara just doped her?

But—somehow that did not outrage her. It was all very nice somehow.

Pleasant.

And Cara was lovely, kindly, personable—sexy. So was it OK?

Of course Tanya was a frigging smokeshow.

To be fair, Malia certainly did not feel bad from a physical standpoint. Whatever Cara had done to her felt very good, to be honest. So she was in the Joplin barn. She had chatted with her new neighbors at the King Soopers just that week, and they had been intelligent, friendly, open, very much the kind of neighbor Malia had been hoping to meet in her new life. She had stopped by to visit, as neighbors do. And Cara had drugged her. It was comforting to be included somehow.

Cara, watching Malia’s eyes carefully, spoke right then, as if to affirm Malia’s thoughts and seal them in.

“Very good,” that warm voice said. “Good. You’re beginning to change, to accept. You are as good a subject as we’d hoped.”

And Malia realized Cara was right. She was feeling so good. It felt very very very good just to let it all wash over her and just be…good…

“Good girl. Good good girl.”

What?!

Malia jerked herself back to reality—0

“I—I—wondered if you had a rake…” she choked out.

Cara blinked. Blinked again. Her face took on a different expression as abruptly as an old-time tv channel change.

Then she chortled as if Malia had told a good joke. She patted Malia’s arm affectionately. Lovingly.

“Oh of course. No shortage of those on a farm, I mean—I guess!!”

Cara pattered on very much as normal even as Malia realized she was being by the hand closer to the machine with Tanya in it, so that it was harder to concentrate on what the perky farm wife was saying and more and more impossible to ignore what was happening with all the new high tech equipment bolted in next the antique thresher, as Malia had been trying so hard to do.

“Tanya probably has at least a dozen rakes! Clippers, shovels, hoes! Everything you could want! She’s a bit of a ho’ herself anyway! She loves this stuff…” The off-color comment drew its own particular giggle. “She’s always working away in the fields, all across the acreage!” Cara bent her knees and shimmied her hips, to indicate what, Malia had no idea. “But now she is learning to do it for the Company. And looking more and more, mmmmm, attractive, can we agree?” Cara laughed cheerfully, perfectly positive and lovely in every way.

Things were just getting weirder and weirder and Malia recognized she was getting drawn into the whole scene against her will.

She had no choice to look at the gleaming mechanism and Tanya, she and Cara posed like saleswoman and buyer checking over a new car.

Then with a glance over at Malia, Cara said, “But you are probably wondering what is going on here!”

Uh, yeah, Malia thought. You think!? Duh!

That night, when she recalled what had happened in Tanya and Cara Joplin’s barn Malia realized she had never really gotten an answer to her question. Any of her questions.

How had Cara explained it?

Malia cringed thinking that she knew more than she wished or than was healthy about her neighbors…! She congratulated herself that she had extricated herself pretty quickly—although she was having a little trouble recalling just what she had said, and how she had left.

But what had Cara said, again?

Had Cara really described what was going on as … voluntary brainwashing?

What was that!?

But that was what it amounted to, didn’t it?

The idea of Tanya’s body being incorporated into a biology-altering, mind-changing mechanism of the kind that, Malia assumed, was normally used on livestock was disturbing enough. (How must that feel?!) But mind control—this was the first time Malia had considered such a phenomenon might actually exist outside of 1950s-era Cold War flicks. Could people have their thinking modified so … easily? And what kind of love or relationship was at work here when—what had Cara said? She was training Tanya to be … like her!?

“I know this is hard to understand now,” Cara had said looking, again, deep into Malia’s eyes. “But they trained me in part to be able to train Tanya. Do you see?”

Oh. OK.

As if that explained anything.

What did that even mean!?

As Malia pictured her later, Cara had shaken her head as though tossing off silliness—joking aside now—and as if she was getting serious.

“Mal,” she had said, “She wants to be trained. Just like I wanted to be trained. It feels so good to learn. Do you understand now?”

Understand!?

Not even a little.

But her body was somehow in empathy with the idea...

Worse their obedience was apparently to some weird crypto corporation about which there were all kinds of rumors. Rumors that it was created by some foreign intelligence agency. Or maybe the CIA. Or—this was the wildest—aliens, a company originating on another planet as a way to subvert and take over the human race! Malia had pretty much ignored what she had seen and heard—news and social media were everywhere here in Joplin County, like a constant socializing propaganda campaign—because it was so obviously apocryphal conspiracy baloney.

But this with the Joplins sure seemed real. Tactile as the pigments on her canvases. I mean it was going on right next door to where Malia now lived, in the neighbor’s barn.

And brainwashing—subverting the will of unconsenting OR consenting women—was wrong! Evil, really.

What else could you call it?

And how could rational people—seemingly intelligent talented women like the Joplins—subscribe to such craziness?!

What had been done to them, to make them subscribe to all of this—and could that be done to her, Malia?

And, yet again, why would anyone want that? Or why would her pussy seem to love the idea?!

Worst, why did it somehow seem so tempting to her, a thirty-four-year-old art history MBA from a good family, yadda yadda yadda?! Malia had to reject the very idea. It was so wrong, so wrong.

But right then that’s exactly what Cara had said, in fact.

“It seems so wrong. So wrong. Mmmmmm. I get that, Mal, sweety.” When had she become “Mal” to Cara or Tanya? Or Cara’s “sweety?!” “At first. But then—think about it Mal! Picture Tanya again and how happy she is becoming. Feel how hot it is! Can you imagine wanting it? She has been made to want it, and that is just what should happen, do you see?”

And the thing was, Malia had. Suddenly it had sounded good, hot. The perversity, the wrongness—Cara was right—was making it hot, hotter.

Malia had barely resisted pawing her own crotch while staring into Cara’s eyes. She had stopped herself from leaning into kiss those luscious olive lips right as they were annunciating these very words only with the utmost effort.

Cara looking into her eyes! Malia could not look away! She tried and could not tear her eyes away.

“Wouldn’t it feel great to be a good girl? Doesn’t it feel great to feel yourself giving in, changing, beginning to want what you know you never would have wanted, because it is made sexy and you want…me? You want Tanya now, don’t you, and you want to do what I say!”

Above the beautiful mesmerizing eyes, Cara’s eyebrows went up like she had presented the winning argument at the end of a long difficult court trial.

“Say it to yourself!” Cara whispered, pressing. “Say it! ‘Good girl. I want to be a good girl.’” She had nodded then at Malia, watching her, like a teacher with her best pupil, giving her a chance to repeat what she had said.

To learn. Yes. Yessss.

“Nooooo. No, its not right! It’s wrong, Cara!” But something in the back of Malia’s mind was wondering even as she said it, if scientific advances or “the aliens” had some unknown technology capable of producing a radiation that would influence weak human minds, and their procreative instincts and biology, playing on the sexual aspects of our humanity? It sounded hokey, matinee B movie-like. But the effect as she was experiencing it was so strong. It was overwhelming, incredibly so. Malia was resisting only by the skin of her teeth. She so wanted to be a good girl, to give in to Cara! That was not imaginary. She wanted to do what Cara was telling her. More, she knew it excited her so much she would likely orgasm if she simply thought of it a little longer!

Malia had broken free away from Cara’s mesmerizing gaze only by marshalling all the will she had .

And her “no” sounded more like “unnngghh.”

Tanya was off the machine then, still nude, except for that suggestively-positioned strap still around her waist. Like a sexy, low garter belt. Malia could not help but look down between the gorgeous farmer’s muscular thighs, to see—how damp and swollen her pussy lips were.

The skin there and all up her back and arms was so tender looking, so perfect. And Tanya’s pale searching blue eyes! That hair and that body! Something so strong about her personality, now giving in and changing. Being changed…

Tanya stepped closer.

“It feels good,” the svelte rancher hissed, sounding not at all like the mighty farm queen Malia had imagined from the first time she had seen Tanya. Right now the farmer sounded bridled, drugged and satiated, and oh-so-sexy. Her voice was hoarse, smooth, milky smooth!

She held out the silver helmet to Malia, “Don’t you want to try it? I love being obedient. I am learning so much!”

And the thing was, Cara had repeated almost in perfect synch at the same second, word for word. “She is learning so much.”

Cara had wrapped her arm around her wife with one hand cupping Tanya’s ass. Malia could not avoid looking down to see the caress. It was so sensual, lewd. “She is learning so much.” Both neighbor’s eyes looked intense and their body language was painfully provocative. But their voices sounded robotic. Why did that make it even hotter, Malia could not figure that out but imagined herself speaking in that same robotic voice as she opened her legs, bared her breasts… and took the helmet to fit it carefully, almost religiously, on her own head. Climbing onto the machine to be milked and modified, changed ...

But she was not this! She was Malia, and artist! She was not a toy of the Company!

At least not quite yet...

“Are you guys kidding me?” was what Malia had actually said.

“You’re beginning to feel it, aren’t you?” Tanya responded unfazed. “Don’t imagine you are stronger than I was, and Cara got me, nnngggh.” With the spiky helmet now gripped in her other hand the elegant farmer reached long fingers down there and stroked Malia’s jeans right in the crotch.

Malia had staggered with the intensity of the feeling.

She had only barely mustered enough of herself to say, “No! This is too strange and wrong. I don’t understand.” And she had let her legs keep her moving on to and out the door.

Behind her she heard Cara saying, “Awwww, we scared her off. She’s not ready yet.” And Tanya’s rich alto answered, “But she is so close. She just needs a little more …” and though Malia had been looking back to see them kissing, and holding each other, the door had swing shut behind her, so she never heard the end of the sentence.

What did she need?! Now? In her life? Sexually?

Lying in bed that night Malia decided it was just the drugs. And they would wear off, like Ecstacy after a rave.

The oil they had rubbed on her? Nothing.

That prick on her neck? Her imagination.

The behavior of the past two days—this was not like her.

She looked in the mirror and thought she spotted a tiny hole, like a needle piercing—of course if it was this secretive Company, they would be good at concealing things like that—but it was behind her neck where she could not see it easily, even holding a hand mirror and looking over her shoulder.

But then there was definitely something in the air and Cara did seem to have some sort of hypnotic power. She was—both the Joplins were Nnnngghh.

Malia felt way over-matched.

If it was terrifying and so wrong, how was it so hot, too? That she was overmatched and being made, or about to be made into a hypersexual, controlled automaton hit her right in the pussy and it felt heavenly.

Alone in her bedroom, Malia said to herself—just to test it out, to see how she would react—it was just her own little empirical investigation—“I want to be a good girl. I want to obey.” It was stupid. And weird. Crazy sick. But just a test:

“A good girl. I want to be a good girl and obey.”

But when she said those words, even alone there in her room the effect was so powerful that she fell over onto her bed convulsing and moaning, like an animal, a thing, a shortcircuited robot.

She orgasmed from the thoughts alone. And then she touched herself and orgasmed again.

She said it once more, automatically, and now in that robotic voice—who would not want that feeling?!—just to confirm what was happening to her (what was happening to her??)—but with emphasis:

“I want to change. I want to be remade like Cara and Tanya. I want to become a good girl for the company. To be implanted.”

‘To be implanted?’ What was that? Malia was not sure if she had heard that part right or noticed anything about Tanya’s head, underneath all that luscious thick hair … but it sounded even hotter, so she just went with it and said it.

“I want to remade for the Company. I want to be implanted so I can be controlled and—” this was a new thought also—“attract other women—”

When she came to herself minutes later, Malia found she was kneeling on her bed, gripping her breasts in one hand, with three fingers of her other hand thrust all the way up inside her, sweaty and dripping from more orgasms than she could count.

She had to stop herself.

She had to stop this, whatever it was, she knew, if she wanted to survive. To still be Malia.

She had to do something about it, anyway. She could not just go on with her day, her week, her life as though nothing was changing, even as that word took on its own electrical charge. Now that she knew about … this.

Malia had looked at her latest project, a landscape with her creek with the water feature in the foreground and the Joplin’s picturesque old barn and farmhouse in the back, and—the barn pulled at her, but not the painting. Her art seemed pointless, dull.

She saw Cara’s eyes, Tanya’s hips and thighs, their smells; she felt their presence over there less than half a mile away, close enough to walk in five minutes—would they come over here and take her?? should she look and bar her doors?!—and felt the alterations in her own brain, as though wires were threading into her skull to rewire her brain—or at least imagined them.

Malia considered going to the police, of course, but what could she tell them? As untoward and evil as this all seemed, was there an identifiable crime? It seemed impossible even to annunciate what had transpired in law enforcement terms. She pictured herself trying to explain what she had seen and experienced to some world-weary rural desk sergeant and actually laughed. At the very idea, at herself, a prim urban professional trying to discuss in country terms to a cynical local—what?!

She shivered at the idea too. The idea of showing them how she was being remade, perhaps.

She considered getting tested for drugs in her system, but finally decided she needed to talk about all of this with someone, a friend or confidante she could trust. So ultimately she went to see her friend Natalia, who was a licensed therapist—who had been Malia’s therapist—and was also now, since the pandemic, practicing as a nurse.

But that did not go as Malia had expected either.