That’s All I Needed
by CouchCrusader

I like my job. As far as perks go, my favorite is the one where I get to crash face-down on the couch after work.

All right, all right.

Working with cancer patients—with all their anxieties, humors, hopes, and frustrations—does score pretty high on the fulfillment of purpose scale. And I have co-workers who get their work done, bosses who have my back, and the pay might just be enough to cover my student loans before I die. But when I come home to week-old dishes in the sink and heaped laundry on the floor, purpose takes a speedy hike out of the picture. Why would I want to spend my evening on chores when I can carve out that perfect angle in the sofa with my face?

Wait, hang on—aaah. There we go.

I'm an adult. Being an adult comes with responsibilities. I could tell myself up and down that working though five patient cases in a day over four was good and important, that taking out the garbage was necessary, that a tired body was a sign of a productive one.

On most days, I can even believe that.

***

The night I found that manila envelope leaning against my door wasn’t one of those days.

I had a mailbox downstairs. Why would the postal worker bring it all the way up here? I picked it up, expecting it to be something boring but a hassle to just throw in the trash, because they’ll put your info on everything and what self-respecting millennial has a paper shredder at home?

Whoever sent it, they provided no return information. But they had my name and address right, inked in looping, ribbony gold by some calligrapher’s hand. The envelope refused to flex in my hands; it felt like a folio of some sort. My eyes rolled, now that I knew it to be worse than I’d imagined.

I was the recipient of a timeshare invitation.

The ground saver shipping was a nice touch, at least.

The envelope came in with me pinched between two fingers, now that I was determined to learn just who thought I was one annual fee of three-thousand dollars a year separated from my material happiness. A slide of the finger under the top flap, and out came a thin, leather ledger with a plain cover.

Huh.

I flipped it open. No portraits of bikini-clad women laughing at the sun graced its marbled pages. No copy extolling the virtues of investment, not even the promise of a free steak dinner with a presentation. The pages within merely listed the dates through the end of next year, seven days to every double-page spread. Columns of hours rolled down the page beneath their respective dates, all of it inked in that same filigree gold.

Tucked between the cover and the first page was a note, again inscribed with that same golden script.

Rux,

Write in the time you need every day. It can be one hour, it can be twelve. It can be nothing. It could be ten thousand, but you’ll only get twenty-four. No asking more of any day than it can give.

You’re a wonderful plushie. Don’t ever tell yourself otherwise.
I read the note two more times, flipping through the ledger as I went.

Why would the package list my real name on the outside, and Rux on the inside?

Who’s Rux? Rux was the name I gave to my online avatar, the friendliest seven-foot-tall dragon plushie out there. For no reason at all, I took to going around as a sack of fabric and stuffing offering snugs, seats, or yeets on or off his big, plushy belly. So far, no one’s really told me, “Oh, grow up,” or “What’s wrong with you?”

Almost all of them ask, “when’s my turn?”

I pass it off as a self-debasing joke for reasons you can probably appreciate. The thought of my face posted up on the local news with “29-year-old man claims to be stuffed animal” in the chyron got my brain spinning in all the wrong ways. I’m not that man, I tell myself.

On most days, I could even believe that.

Write in the time you need, said my mysterious patron. I glanced around. I had the apartment to myself that night.

This was going to go either of two ways, both hilarious in their own right: either nothing would happen, and I’d score myself what was honestly a nice-looking planner for the rest of the year, or...

Or.

Nah. There was no “or”. I was so sure there was no “or”, that I undressed myself, wrote “6 hours” under the day’s date, and dropped on the couch.

Nothing. …Nothing?

As I suspected. Nothing.

My chest felt lighter as I made to get up, glad I could move on with my life.

I froze. My chest felt lighter. As in an honest-to-goodness glow within my chest, a warmth that, recognized, kicked my heart up into my head.

Something was happening. Something wonderful and terrific and impossible and sublime, something that caught the breath in my throat and gripped my gut and balled my fists. It seeped through my shoulders and neck, the tension from who knows how many hours of computer usage turning to dust, evaporated. Forgotten compressions in my spine reclaimed their verticality. The usual pangs for dinner left my belly. As it came back down to its normal place, my heart began beating more forcefully and yet more slowly at the same time, pulsing relief in manifest waves through my body.

It started with my foot, the warmth banishing all memory of chilly toes in the winter evening. The transition from five-toed, bony, skin-covered wedge to something larger, something swathed in maroon fabric, something rounder, with a single straw-gold pad where the ball used to be, was, strangely, not all that strange to watch. At some point, pressing against the floor, my foot ceased to have bones. The resulting lurch would have spilled me on the floor had I not caught an armrest in time.

It was a very cool feeling.

I got up while I still could; my legs grew warm, swelled into ovoids, and additional patches of straw-gold emerged from the maroon pile wrapping around the outsides of my thighs. I wouldn’t say lifting my paws—yeah. Paws—or bending my knees became tough to do. Rather, as supple stuffing enmeshed and absorbed muscles and tendons, movement became acts of deliberation, joints became suggestions. But I could still move, and adjust my stance as it widened, feeling giddy as my pelvis descended toward the floor.

My stomach, ever-present shame in its perennial dad-bodness, coalesced with mounting heat and bloomed outward in near-spherical fullness. Realizing where this was going, I waddled toward a less-crowded part of the living room before I swelled past two feet wide, three, then four. Gold fabric ran up my front like a carpet and punctuated my growing sides, meeting maroon at the seams.

Either the floor was retreating from me now, or the ceiling was getting closer. No, it had to be both—my belly was literally pushing the rest of me higher as it continued to swell. I grew past six feet, maybe to seven?

The base of my spine flared up, just to the verge of burning, and from there maroon and gold fabric erupted outwards in a thick cone and lengthened, prompting a turn of my hips so that it crashed against the wall and not the floor lamp. I grunted as this new tail connected, and I had to brace my paws a little harder on the floor so I wouldn’t be pushed back out into the furniture.

All throughout this transformation, my heart had continued its steady and slowing tattoo inside my chest. Now, as the changes overcame my ribcage, almost-but-not-quite purging its contents with racing heat, I felt my heartbeat begin to fade. A whiff of panic as I realized what would happen to my lungs—an attempt to take a deep breath cut short as stuffing devoured them! But before I started to suffocate, something like lungs swapped into existence within my plushifying chest, so that if I wanted to take a deep breath, I could.

And so I did, and when I pressed a hand against my new chest, it sank in deep without any ribs or organs to stop it. Change came quickly to my arms from there; my fingers retreated into my palms and filled out into generous, thumbed bappers. A new equilibrium emerged between my paw and my chest as the stuffing in both gave against each other in equal measure.

With the rest of my body transformed, the last changes wrapped over and around my head as if I’d dipped it into a sun.

My face pushed out into a soft maroon muzzle, my eyes grew larger, my ears grew larger still—but the rumble of motors and wind outside the windows faded into quiet. Thick spikes of pink grew from the top of my head and forked behind the corner of my jaw in tufts, the other branch descending the back of my neck in a crest that met up with the one growing upwards from my tail.

I took a final, ponderous step into the living room, and turned my arm over to look at it with mouth agape. One by one, the last patches of skin on it and the rest of my body were swallowed up in soft fabric. Decorative stitching emerged from the pile of my new skin, tracing meridians over my limbs, belly, and sides like little snakes, but in a way that was far from unpleasant. Then, little by little, the all-radiant heat catalyzing my body began to fade, and stuffing began to coalesce within me.

And then I was complete, a transformed plush dragon, with a preposterously ponderous belly hanging perhaps a single foot off the floor.

I let myself drop on my new plush butt, and all I could do for the next several minutes was move my paws over everything they could reach, which was now just barely beyond the apex of my belly. I could sit forward a little, though the contractile power of stuffing left something to be desired. If I needed to scratch my legs or tail, I was out of luck.

But I realized that didn’t matter. I could move, but I could also sit there as long as I wanted. I could look ahead and imagine friends coming over to sleep on me, or cuddle me, or throw me around as they pleased. I remembered what a friend said about chucking himself off the highest places he could find if he were to become a plushie.

It was a winter's night, in an apartment without central heating, but I was warm.

And—best of all—whatever wound up replacing my brain had no inclination to worry about work that next day, or needing to drive to the grocery store. I was a much simpler thing now, a pile of stuffing enclosed within a fabric shell, and my thoughts modulated to match. I was content to sit there for hours, blissfully adrift in a form without internal tension.

Going to bed that night was even better, even if I did spill off the far end of my mattress a little bit. I was a big stuffed plush dragon, what did I care? I knew, as I drifted off, that though I’d wake the next morning human in shape, I’d be renewed in soul.

***

I don’t write in the ledger every night I come home. Sometimes those loads of laundry have to be done, or else I’d have to write down the story idea burning in my brain all day. But that’s fine. I think it’s having the option to walk away from all of that at times, a life I live because I have to, that makes it so much more palatable.

In the meantime, I can experiment with what I can do when I plush out. A large sketchpad and easel lets me doodle even with paws. Typing on keyboards doesn’t happen at all, but text-to-speech still lets me join in with my group chats.

Don’t even get me started on what I get to do with empty boxes from work.

Someone out there, some kind and incredible spirit, gifted me with the chance to live a life I want. Tonight is the evening before a three-day weekend, and the ledger lies before me, “24 hours” written under each of the coming days.

I set my pen down, lean back, and close my eyes.