Consensus, Day 1-1: Mail

Mae drummed her fingers to an invisible jazz rhythm on her dashboard as she desperately tried to keep herself awake. It wasn’t easy being a mail carrier, what with all the budget cuts lately during the peak of the online shopping boom.

Mail literally ran a country, and Mae certainly wasn’t being treated like the crucial backbone to society that she was.

Yet, she remained in high spirits. The pay was good, and the sheer satisfaction and gratitude of a wide-eyed patron finally getting that package they’ve been craving was arguably better.

Her route was full of friendly people, those who loved to thank their tireless mailman for her perilous yet essential work, understanding her plight. That was, until her mail truck turned the corner and she was instantly reminded as to why she was so tired.

“Please no packages for him. Please no packages for him. Please no packages for him.” Her repetitive muttering continued as she parked at the corner, sifting through her mail hoping, praying, that mere subscription magazines were all she’d have to deliver to his door.

The man she dreaded was none other than Howard Grove. No matter how optimistic of a mood she had on any given day, he’d always find a way to ruin it. His insults were cruel and demeaning, always targeting her weight, which she was already rather self-conscious about. Packages he ordered would always be insanely heavy. As to what they could possibly contain, she had no clue.

Massive mailman-hating dogs were less terrifying and stress-inducing than a stop at his house was.

Howard was a man who committed to a rigorous schedule, Mae had figured out that much. She kept trying to arrive earlier and earlier to his house, hoping that she’d be able to one day arrive so early that she’d miss him completely. But it was getting to the point where if she woke up in the morning any sooner, she’d fall asleep at the wheel.

Her heart sank as the largest package in the truck, the one she had been avoiding out of fear, revealed the accursed address of Howard Grove. Oh well, best to just get this over with and move on with your life.

But actually lifting this box proved to be a herculean feat of its own.

Her diminutive back muscles strained as she struggled to remove the box from the floor of her mail truck. She only managed to squeak it an inch above the ground before almost throwing her back out and dropping it on instinct.

“Jesus, is this fucking thing full of rocks or something?” Mae lamented, trying once again to lift the cardboard container, only to fail for a second time.

An alarm sounded off from her phone, letting her know it was now or never. Mae wasn’t sure how she did it, but she managed to approach at an angle that offered her a bit of extra leverage. All she knew was: such an angle would never repeat itself.

Exiting the mail truck, she wobbled to and fro as she struggled to maintain balance with the impossibly heavy package. His front lawn was quite sizable, and while the walkway was a straight shot to his house, actually walking straight was a feat unto itself. Mae’s petite stature forced her to rest part of the box’s weight on her own face just to keep it upright, but that meant she could only refer to memory as not to trip over Howard’s own porch steps.

Unfortunately for her, her memory under stress was not her strong suit.

She took a definitive step forward, one she expected to be no different than the rest, only for her stride to be violently cut short by her foot banging against the first stair of the house, which just so happened to be filled with concrete because Howard hated the thought of any small creature existing under his raised wooden porch and had the entire section filled off.

Despite everything, Mae’s first thought was still to save the package in her hands. Knowing that her fall was inevitable, she redirected her collapse rightward so that the box would land not on hard wood or pavement, but on the comparatively soft grass. When all went according to her makeshift plan, Mae breathed a sigh of relief. But she wasn’t out of the woodwork just yet.

“You brain-dead imbecile!” Shouted Howard’s voice from the porch. “Look what you’ve done! That package is fragile!”

“Y-yes sir, sorry sir,” was Mae’s immediate response. It had to be, after all. The customer was always right! It was a phrase that had been drilled into her head since the first day of the job. If there was one exception she wished she could apply to that unintuitive rule, it would be Howard Grove. Even as she lay on the grass before him, panting and sputtering, he still laid into her with insult after insult.

“You damn well better be sorry! Why do they even hire women to do such heavy lifting!? Back in my day, being a mailman meant being a mailman! Not whatever sad excuse of a delivery person you turned out to be! You’re short, you’re fat, you’re not even a looker! I mean, why would they even send someone useless like you to begin with?”

As the endless barrage of insults continued, Mae found her fatigue slowly but surely vanishing. At first, she was too ashamed and humiliated to even look Howard in the eye. Her plan was to simply lay there until he gave up and retreated, yet as she found her strength not only returning—but returning with a vengeance—a different plan was brewing in her mind.

Mae gripped the grass with newfound resolve, her firm fingernails effortlessly ripping a fistful of grass right from the soil. Her body shook, brimming with energy as she rose to stand tall. Was she… taller? No, she was merely no longer slouching. Yes... that was the reason. It was the only explanation that made logical sense.

“You want your package so badly? You can have it!” Anger coursing through her veins, Mae didn’t care that she probably couldn’t lift the package up again. She latched her fingers onto both sides of the box, the skin of her digits digging into the cardboard. And then, she effortlessly lifted the heavy box into the sky. She held it over her head like a caveman with a rock, it looked like she was ready to throw it as hard as she could. Instead, she placed the box atop the porch—on top of Howard Grove’s foot.

The bitter older man seized up in pain, becoming quite animated as he yanked his foot out from under the package and hopped to the nearest porch chair.

“Augh! You bitch! You harlot! You dropped it on my goddamned foot!” Howard shouted to the heavens, gripping his ankle in pain.

Mae pressed her finger into her cheek in mock surprise, almost reveling in his insults. “Aww, did I drop the box on your little foot?” she played up a caricature of a silly bimbo. “I didn’t mean that, after all, I’m just a stupid little woman, aren’t I? And being a mailman is a man’s job, right?”

She didn’t wait around to hear any more of his pathetic retort. Mae was done listening to anything he had to say. Sure, she’d probably see him again the next day, but she hoped that such an event would be the last thing he’d want to do. Sure, the old fool could report her, but such an event could be easily shrugged off as an honest mistake on Mae’s part. After all, Howard was no stranger to crying wolf and playing up little inconveniences about his experience towards customer service. They’d chalk it up as an honest mistake blown out of proportion.

When Mae left her mail truck to deliver the package, she had been a tired, overworked mailwoman struggling to deliver a package to an unsympathetic recipient. However, upon returning to her truck, it was as if she had been born anew. She felt well-rested, ready to run a marathon even. Her mail delivery route was still a few more hours, but she was prepared to drive the whole rest of the day!

Unsure if she was even experiencing reality, Mae took a quick look at her reflection in the rear-view mirror. She had been told that if a person was hallucinating or dreaming, they wouldn’t see any reflection at all. At first, she was thankful to see a reflection, but then, she was dumbfounded.

Was that… was that drop dead gorgeous woman in the mirror really supposed to be her? Stunned in disbelief, she stopped the car, pulling out her phone and using its front camera to pan across her entire body.

Sure enough, the high-quality woman in the phone’s low-quality camera was her. Whenever she blinked, this woman’s perfect, lengthy eyelashes mimicked the movement. She sucked on her lip, and the woman in the reflection was eager to bite down on her perfectly full, pillowy bottom lip. The woman brought a hand down to the side of her smooth, contoured cheekbones and Mae’s hand was right there with her.

And yet, her perfect face was only one part of the complete puzzle. She tilted her phone screen downwards so that she may view the rest of her delectable body. Not even her bulky mail carrier outfit of a long sleeve shirt and thick vest could hide the bedazzling body blooming beneath.

It was as if her chub and muffin top had spontaneously stretched inward and downward, adding more height to her perfect legs and supple thighs. Her ass still filled the seat out perfectly, but now with an hourglass figure she could be much more proud of.

Mae didn’t even need her phone anymore. Her bountiful breasts took up most of her vision as her head found its way downwards. It was as if she had gone through a second puberty at the rather mature age of 35.

She frantically tried to get a better look at her burgeoning form, anticipation building as she slowly removed her clothing. Button by button, her bulky vest peeled away, her body blooming out of it like a blossoming flower.

Even with a dress shirt and a padded bra underneath, her powerful erect nipples peaked through, demanding visibility. Returning to the woman she still couldn’t believe was the same person as her, Mae utilized her reflection to look beyond her breasts, noting just how toned her new stomach was.

She began to unbutton her dress shirt next. While the process took about the same time as the disrobing of her vest, it could not have felt more agonizingly slow. Mae wanted to see her new body in its full, uncensored form. She needed to.

Giving up at the last two buttons when there was a much easier option, she ripped them off in a single effortless tug. Her perfect abs were now exposed to the air, a toned tummy worth marveling over.

She almost felt herself getting lightheaded at the sight of them. Mae had never considered herself to be particularly beautiful, nor did she consider her body as one worthy of putting the effort into making it beautiful—yet here she was. A simple mailwoman with a body that a supermodel would kill for. She felt her hand reaching lower, feeling the smooth contours of her new and improved sex. She began to absent-mindedly pleasure herself, narcissistically marveling over her own body within her mind.

However, Mae’s very important thought process was interrupted when she realized that she hadn’t even gotten Howard’s signature for the package. She’d get reprimanded for that back at the office for sure. Despite what should have been the mood killer for the rest of the morning, the suddenly sexy mail driver wasn’t phased by the news in the slightest.

“I’d like to see them try anything now that I’m easily the most beautiful mailperson working for them,” Mae remarked, an ever-widening smile growing upon her face. “Not to mention, I could just easily drop a heavy box of my own choosing atop my superior’s foot. That’ll shut them up for sure!”

She giggled to herself, buttoning up her shirt as she did so, ready to continue on the day. “Mmm, yes, the things I could get away with now that I’m sexy and strong. Only a fool would dare cross the path of Mae the mailwoman!”

As Mae laughed at her increasingly destructive hypotheticals, Howard walked back into his house with a limp. To call him furious was the understatement of the century. The beautiful woman yesterday warned him this would happen, and yet she was already nothing more than a pretty vistage within his mind’s eye. He had long since forgotten about any lessons he should be learning from this, choosing instead to double down on his anger.

“Curse that damned mailwoman and her damn malpractice!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, he himself being the only one in this situation who was and would continue to be cursed. Regardless of his pain, he was an upstanding employee and would not miss a day of work even if it killed him.

As he left his house after struggling to bring the package in—already in a worse mood than most days—he noticed that his female neighbor was now sitting outside on her porch, peacefully enjoying a meal as she took in the breeze from her wheelchair. His brow furrowed at the sight of her.

It was only six o’clock in the morning.

Today was going to be a long day for Howard Grove.