The Tail Is Uncomfortable
I was at a complete loss for how to explain this situation.
Just yesterday I had been a pathetic son stumbling home dead drunk on a friend’s arm. Overnight I had suddenly become a girl with a tail—and I had to account for the fact that I had been straddling Jihoo in that very form. In a panic I had called for Mom, yet now that she was here I could not find a single place to begin.
“Haah! Mother’s hangover soup really is something else. You ought to open a restaurant.”
“Hoho. That’s exactly what I’m doing, dear.”
“No—no! How can you even swallow food right now? Mom, your son looks like this!”
All my solitary fretting proved pointless. Mom and that bastard Jihoo acted as if my transformed body were nothing out of the ordinary and simply sat down at the table to eat.
Here I was, my head spinning because my gender had flipped overnight, and those two sat there as calm as ever. Their complete indifference raised my voice on its own.
“Min, you’ve awakened, haven’t you? Plenty of people reverse after awakening. Why make such a fuss?”
“W-well, that’s true, but—!”
It was common enough for ordinary people to awaken and end up looking different. Most of the time, though, the change stopped at beastfolk traits or unusual eye and hair colors.
“It’s just the gender that’s different. Horns and a tail are pretty ordinary, aren’t they? There was a news story about someone who woke up as a giraffe from the neck up.”
“E-even so…”
Granted, I was milder than the people who made the news. Those folks usually became unable to live a normal life at all.
Still, only my outward appearance looked halfway intact; everyday life was already a problem, wasn’t it?
Mom’s reaction went past calm and straight into “no big deal,” and somehow that steadied me as well.
“What really struck me was that the day I always expected had finally come. I’m just glad.”
“Wh-what do you mean by that, Mom?”
She covered her mouth with one hand and gave me a meaningful look, eyes smiling faintly. That expression made me more uneasy than anything else.
“Just think about the state you two were in a moment ago. Naturally I assumed you’d finally solved the gender barr—”
“Aagh! Aaaagh! What are you even saying?!”
Mom’s words betrayed none of my worries, and a shout tore out of me on its own.
“Honestly. Why have you been so angry all morning?”
“Because you started spouting nonsense first!”
What kind of outrageous thing was she saying about the childhood friend I had known for nearly twenty years?
Just yesterday we had cracked open soju together and talked absolute garbage.
“Every Christmas Eve the two of you stick together. I thought you’d finally made some big decision! There are all sorts of curious gadgets these days, you know.”
“Mom! Enough!”
“If it’s not true then it’s not true. Why do you keep yelling?”
I knew two grown guys hanging out every Christmas Eve looked weird, but Mom was not supposed to think that.
She had watched us practically live at each other’s houses when we were kids.
“Hey! Say something already! Stop just eating!”
I shook Jihoo’s shoulder while he continued shoveling food without a care beside me.
Our mother was casually ruining the bright future of a chaebol heir; the least he could do was open his mouth!
Maybe my intent finally reached him.
Jihoo set down the spoon he had been using to mix rice into the hangover soup, looked straight at Mom, and spoke.
“Mother. Is there any more of this cucumber kimchi?”
“Hey! Is side-dish talk what matters right now?”
Reached him my ass. He was just the same food-obsessed lizard he had always been about our home cooking.
Even after his twenty-year best friend turned into this, even after being mistaken for gay, the cucumber kimchi going into his mouth was still more important.
I was about to give that lizard a piece of my mind about what twenty years of friendship actually meant when—
“You quit your bullshit too and just eat. You’ve got a lot to do today.”
“W-what?”
The sudden seriousness in his voice stopped every word that had climbed up my throat.
“Haa… Once you’ve awakened you have to go to the Association for an exam and registration.”
“Ah, well, yeah…”
He was right. Awakened people needed to visit the Association as soon as possible to check their condition.
There was no telling what problems the changed body might hide, and a major accident could happen before they adapted to the sudden transformation.
“If you understand, sit down.”
“You’re right, but how long does that even take? Why say I’ve got a lot to do?”
I had thought it was a simple process—basic health check and personal registration.
That hardly seemed like enough to call it a busy day.
It wasn’t as if the Association closed early for the holiday.
“…There’s more to it. You’ll be busy. Eat a proper meal.”
“Well… if you say so.”
He worked as a professor at the Academy, so when it came to the awakened he knew things I didn’t. I decided to take his word for it even if the doubts weren’t fully cleared.
Following his advice to eat well, I meant to sit at the table—
“Why aren’t you sitting?”
“…I can’t.”
The enormous tail caught on the chair back and refused to let me sit.
I tried every angle, even perched on the edge, but the tail kept getting in the way.
“Just wrap it around your waist.”
“It won’t move the way I want…”
The plump lump of flesh only twitched faintly on its own.
The moment I tried to move it on purpose it locked stiff, as if broken.
“Am I… never going to be able to sit in a chair again?”
If I could never control this awkward tail, would I have to eat every meal standing for the rest of my life?
Most chairs had backs; without solving the tail problem that might actually be true.
“Does that mean I can’t take taxis either? Ugh…”
So I would be unable to ride any taxi that required sitting, and I would have to stand the whole way on buses and subways?
The thought of eating every future meal on my feet made my mind go blank.
“Taxis might be tricky, but with a chair like this you just turn it around.”
“Ah…”
Jihoo looked at me as if I were pathetic for acting like the world was ending over one tail, then spun the chair so the back faced sideways.
“R-right! Wait—how did you even think of that?”
Such a simple fix existed, and I had been making a fool of myself alone. Embarrassment washed over me.
“I usually just handle it with magic, but dragonkin have tails too. You saw mine when we were kids.”
“D-did I?”
These days his hair was only a little unusual and neither horns nor tail showed; he looked like an ordinary person.
But when we were little I really had run around with a tail-wagging Jihoo.
Now that I thought about it, he used to clutch his tail tightly with both hands when getting into a car and turn the chair just like this when sitting down.
“You could’ve told me from the start. I wasted all that effort.”
“…Hah.”
I hid the awkwardness by blaming him, sat down, and started eating.
Throughout the meal I could feel Jihoo glaring at me from the side, but this was nothing new between us.
I ignored his stare like always and shoveled rice into my mouth.
“Wow. This cucumber kimchi is amazing. Mom, is there a lot more?”
Yeah, the cucumber kimchi really was good.
Only after I started getting ready to leave did I realize the plump tail was not the whole problem.
“Hey. I told you we’re busy today. Stop zoning out and get ready.”
“…I know!”
I knew perfectly well I needed to hurry, yet my hand simply would not reach the bathroom doorknob.
How am I supposed to wash…?
The tail sticking out behind me and the horns on my head were secondary. To shower I would have to take my clothes off.
I could not summon the courage to face my transformed body directly.
I could just go in, wash quickly, and come out, but I could not keep avoiding the changed body forever simply because looking at it scared me.
“Screw it.”
“Shit! Hey, take your clothes off inside!”
With a whatever-happens attitude I squeezed my eyes shut, grabbed the hem of my top, and yanked it upward.
Behind me Jihoo spat curses the moment I started stripping, but there was no stopping now. I threw off the rest of the clothes and stepped into the bathroom.
Even after the door clacked shut I could still hear his swearing clearly through it. I locked the door and forced myself to ignore him.
“Haa…”
My heartbeat thundered in my ears as if it might burst.
My tightly shut eyelids trembled as though glued together and refused to open.
I could not keep them closed forever, so I carefully lifted the tensed lids just a crack.
“Ugh…”
Through the narrow gap I met the eyes of a strange girl in the mirror, her face twisted in distress.
Messy hair, arms pitifully covering her body—a horned girl with unfamiliar emerald-green hair.
“Shiiit…”
An irritated sigh slipped from the girl in the mirror.
This was already the second time I had faced my reflection, yet the girl’s face still felt foreign and unpleasant.
The sense of loss I had not felt while noisily sitting at the table earlier, and the rejection toward a body that did not feel like mine, both rose at once.
Yet in a corner of my heart a faint sense of achievement and a strange thrill also stirred—because I had finally awakened after half-giving up on it.
Even with my face scrunched, only my lips kept twitching for that reason.
“Huu…”
The expression on the girl in the mirror was as tangled as my own feelings, a messy swirl of emotions.
Unfamiliar and unpleasant, yet at the same time excited like a child who had just received a gift.
Perhaps the appearance of this girl who had let me grasp again the dream I had quietly abandoned was not entirely hateful.
“Still, this is a bit much…”
Even so, I simply could not look straight at the bare form of a strange girl.
I blasted the shower’s hot water onto the mirror until my reflection could no longer be seen properly.
Steam fogged the glass and the girl’s outline smeared like green and white paint swirling together until it vanished.
Only then did I start a shower that was nothing more than standing under the hot water.
“Kinda heavy.”
I stayed under the spray longer than usual, and the already long hair grew heavier than I expected.
When I finally finished and reached for a towel the way I always did, just drying my hair left the cloth soaked and dripping.
So now one towel was not even enough for my whole body. Even tiny things like this reminded me I had changed.
I had no choice but to take out a second towel and carefully wipe myself while trying not to notice the new sensations.
Even after the second towel was too damp to use, water still dripped from my huge tail.
“Haa…”
On the way back from the Association I would have to buy a stack of oversized bath towels.
If I kept using ordinary ones there would be no towels left in the house.
I let out a small sigh and began the struggle of drying the massive tail with a third towel.
It was big, heavy, refused to move the way I wanted, and stuck straight out behind me, so wiping it was pure misery.
Same problem as sitting in the chair earlier—the tail itself was just inconvenient.
I even wondered whether a larger body with longer limbs would have been easier, but the creepy weight I already felt on my chest made my head shake side to side on its own. Getting any bigger was out of the question.
This size was better.
“Son! I left a change of clothes outside the door!”
I had felt a little hurt that my only son had changed like this and Mom still joked so casually, yet hearing she had prepared clothes for the son who had walked into the bathroom empty-handed made something warm rise in my chest.
Knowing she worried about me even if she never showed it, I smiled faintly, opened the door, and picked up the clothes she had left.
A pure-white blouse, a white sleeveless undershirt, and a lightly pleated black skirt…
Black what?
“Uh, Mom’s clothes…”
The combination soared far beyond anything I had imagined. The faint smile that had been on my lips and the hands holding the clothes both began to tremble.
Between the clothes I was crushing in a death grip, a scrap of black fabric fluttered free and landed on the bathroom floor.
I stared for a long time at the black scrap growing wet on the tiles, then finally could not hold it in any longer and screamed.
“What the hell is this?!”
“Oh my. Is the size wrong? I bought the underwear at the convenience store.”
I had been wrong.
Mom just wanted to mess with me.
I spent a long while shouting inside the bathroom and arguing with her until Jihoo, who had sighed at my shrieking, tossed a more reasonable set of clothes in front of me.