The Overalls

Aaron listened to the music thrumming in his ear, pumped through the thin white cord by the iPod set to shuffle in his shirt pocket. He kept his chin anchored on the seat in front of him, no one was sitting in it. The bus was empty save for himself and the driver, who was presumably real, and not some sort of public transport apparition; Aaron smirked at the thought of a ghostly bus driver passing his spectral exams, only to be assigned a post out in the middle of the countryside. With no one to scare but the occasional pensioner making their trip to the shops, who was probably closer to death than life. Aaron had a morbid imagination, he fully admitted that. But it was a necessity on dull bus journeys like the one he had been on for the last two hours.

This was the second bus. The first was a coach which took him from his suburbs to the city, this was an old banged up single decker. Its patchy upholstered chairs suggested the company had tried to disguise its anachronistic origins, though it did a poor job at hiding the disrepair. It was hard to mistake that shaggy brown and red fabric that was everywhere on public transport in the eighties. Not to mention the way his entire skull felt like it was subject to a localized earthquake, each and every time the bus restarted its engine per stop. No one was getting on when those doors swung open, hinges screaming to fling them wide. Unless, like Aaron originally thought, the bus was haunted; maybe he just couldn’t see the ghostly people sitting around him.

Despite the pulsation of pop music that rattled his skull, Aaron could still hear the laboured roar of the engine. It droned and growled like an old dog on its hackles, barking with enough force to occasionally shake the entire bus. Aaron could feel his teeth chattering again, but he was too lazy to raise his head from the rest. He rummaged through his jeans pocket for his phone, sighing when he realized he had another half hour to go to his destination.

He opened his emails. Surprised that he still received a decent 4g signal this far into the country. Aaron shifted, finally parting his chin from the headrest to lean back into a less uncomfortable position. He began to re-read the email which had been the catalyst for the entire journey. He had poured over it a dozen times by now. But he was on a limited data plan and too broke to pay for a top-up, so it was either going through the weird email - yet again - or counting the farm animals that passed the window. He counted sheep about ten minutes ago, so email it was. A man can only count so many sheep.

“Dear Aaron,

It is with a heavy heart and sincere condolences we must inform you that your uncle Gus has passed away. We are aware you were not frequently in contact with your late uncle; however, it is our sworn duty as the exactors of his last will and testament to see his wishes carried out. To the fullest of our capabilities. Enclosed you will find an attachment, containing a copy of your uncle’s will. It states that you are the sole inheritor of his land and all items found within the estate.

Sincere Condolences and Best Wishes, the Offices of Bell and Izar.”

Aaron put his phone down. That email was definitely not something he expected to receive at three in the morning on a Saturday. It was shocking.

He didn’t even have an Uncle Gus. He checked both his paternal and maternal trees and found nothing. His parents didn’t know anyone by that name either. They were especially sure that Aaron didn’t have any family in the highlands, considering his roots were traced elsewhere. So this was either a colossal mix-up, or something strange indeed. He hoped for the latter. Aaron made his money broadcasting horror video games online. Even publishing the occasional essay on some hidden gem, or a development history that was particularly storied... or strange. Maybe it was because of his profession, maybe he was just terminally morbid, but the idea of a spooky letter promising him an equally spooky house interested him.

Aaron didn’t have the most developed sense of self-preservation. He blamed horror movies. It probably wasn’t their fault, but he had to blame something.

Aaron took the attached copy of the will to a proper law firm, a free one - of course - he wasn’t made of money. They looked it over, cross referenced everything, then came back to Aaron and declared it was legitimate. He had gone from an apartment dwelling streamer, with a dwindling cash stream, to a homeowner. He would have preferred something a bit more metropolitan, but they had fibre-optic internet in the countryside these days, so maybe the distance from civilization wouldn’t be unbearable. He did like his privacy, this was just a more extreme form of it. Can’t be bothered by other people if there aren’t any.

The bus came to a stop and the thick accented driver called out to Aaron as a courtesy. Aaron hoisted his heavy bag over one shoulder, then departed from the apparently-not-haunted bus. Oh well, next time, he thought. “Thanks,” he said to the driver.

“You know the way big guy?” The driver’s familiarity with him was unwelcome but Aaron didn’t let it show on his face. “It’s a bit of a hike, you know. Up that path towards the hills, you’ll find your little farm. Just make sure to avoid sharp objects.” He laughed, then closed the bus doors and drove off. Aaron shrugged then paused for a moment, realizing he never told the driver where he was going.

“Alright... maybe ghost-rider of the bus from the 60s was off kilter,” he said aloud to comfort himself, finding the silence to be more isolating than he first admitted. “But, psychic bus driver?” He resumed walking. “I didn’t see that one coming.

The rest of the journey took place on foot. A fact that Aaron, being an athletically disinclined shut-in, found less than optimal. The cool air of the highlands mingled with his hot skin. He was itchy and clammy by the time he reached the village street. It was suitably deserted, with a fine fog rolling in from the hills above. It was a bit strange for there to be no lights on in the early evening, but maybe it was a secret village of vampires. Maybe it was haunted. He was getting bored of the haunted prospect by now, so he thought of a dozen other scenarios while he fumbled for the keys in his jeans pocket and walked up to the door of his new home.

It was a small, detached house. Two stories, red brickwork and double-glazed windows - warm in the winter, he thought. Then shuddered, hoping the water was still running. He turned the key, opening the plain white door with a frosted glass window that was so normal it began to crush his dreams of owning a spooky house. The lights were still on, everything looked normal. Still fully furnished, there wasn’t so much as a cobweb or a patina of dust to infer a spectre might jump out at him.

“So much for a haunted house,” he said. He kicked off his shoes and climbed the stairs, locating the shower room. The bath was considerably larger than he was expecting for a house this size. Aaron was a large man, soft around the middle - which was his aunt’s way of calling him fat at Christmas, before segueing into her latest diet story. He was particularly large around the waist, which he was proud of. He liked being able to crush another man with his thighs; even if it meant he never had a computer chair last more than a year because of them.

“Alright, if anyone wants to spook me in the shower. Feel free,” he said to the non-existent ghosts. His cold sweat stained clothes were thrown off unceremoniously, christening the new house with its first layer of clutter. More would follow.

Aaron turned a knob and sighed blissfully as hot water ran over his hand. He gleefully placed himself under the shower head and paused. “Wait, I didn’t bring any shampoo with me... ugh, idiot.” He looked around, then found an entire array of soaps and gels for him to use. He turned them over in his hand, eyebrow raised. “... scents of the south, fresh grass, what the hell kind of a scent is ‘shiny badger?’” He squirted some of the last option into his hands, then recoiled at the potency of latex assaulting his nostrils. “Ugh, holy shit... I like some weird smells too but who wants to smell like a balloon?”

One long shower later and Aaron emerged, smelling like fresh grass instead of fresh balloon. He found some towels. Too large for him by far, which was a change from being too small like the ones he had in the city. He dried himself off and looked in the mirror, to see an animal staring back at him. Then he blinked and his own face stared back at him. Fair skinned cheeks pink from the heat of the shower, a shock of damp brown hair and blue eyes. “Okay... weird,” he said.

Aaron moved into the bedroom. He paused in the doorway, thinking he might have been transported somewhere other than the little village house in the highlands. The room was decorated with a monochrome cow print for wallpaper, with a rubbery cow’s skull hanging from the foot of the bed. Everything in the room was styled like some ranch owning cowboy’s wet dream, only shinier and squeakier. Like someone had set off a bomb that turned everything in the blast radius into a balloony version of itself, and ground zero was the bedroom of someone who was REALLY into farmers and the wild west. Aaron explored the room, naked and mostly dry. He wanted to find something to wear, even if it did belong to a dead guy with a weird inflatable farmer kink.

He got what he wanted. Well, not what he wanted, but it was exactly what he expected.

Overalls. Electric blue and made entirely from soft, shiny material that squeaked very gently if you rubbed it hard enough. Aaron slipped them on. Surprised by how comfortable they were, he ran his hands along them and hummed to himself. “These feel pretty good. Gus, you had good taste.” He said aloud, admiring himself in the mirror. He didn’t think he looked half bad in overalls. They sagged, far too large for him, but there was a certain niche appeal. “Maybe I should gain a few more pounds and start an onyfans,” Aaron smirked. “Horror streamer turns hillbilly himbo? Could hit some real gold there.”

“Or you could pull the cord.”

“Who’s there?” Aaron looked around, but found no one. “If you’re going to haunt me, you could at least do something a bit more original than a disembodied voice and cryptic bullshit.”

“Just pull it, everything will make sense.”

Aaron looked back at the mirror, half-expecting a demonic face to be looking over his shoulder. Instead, a ripcord dangled from the overalls which wasn’t there when he put them on. Without anything to lose, he pulled it. Calling the voice’s bluff.

“Alright I pulled it, now what?”

“Enjoy.”

Hissing filled the room. Aaron felt warmth rise from his feet, all the way to the top of his head. A gust of hot air blew from inside of him. He stumbled as his right foot turned monochrome, then pulsed with an alien sensation he couldn’t describe. It was something between pain and pleasure, like a deep massage that undid the knots in your muscles; you only felt the benefits afterwards. But this happened all in the space of a minute. He struggled to keep his balance. His foot, a regular human extremity, was now squeaking like a balloon and shaped like a cartoon badger’s paw. “Wait, what!?” He cried out.

His entire leg followed. He couldn’t see beneath the overalls, but he knew it was black and white like his new paw. His left foot transformed with even more abruptness and he could feel the change creeping up his leg, like slow moving liquid on his bare skin. “Okay this... isn’t what I was expecting.”

The voice returned, deeper now, more pronounced. The southern drawl was palpable. “But it feels good, don’t it?”

Aaron blushed. A hand moved to his crotch. He felt himself stiffen. The voice was right, it did feel good. He thought the warm shower was bliss, but this was on a whole different level. His eyes went askew, and he fell back on to the bed. He watched the blue overalls pull taut and he realized what was happening. “I’m... inflating?”

“Like a balloon.”

“Like a balloon,” Aaron repeated, his accent mirroring the voice’s southern drawl with perfect mimicry.

The change was all too sudden. He was floored, he couldn’t think straight. Drunk on the hot, airy sensations pumping underneath his skin. Aaron tried to piece together some way to call for help. He wanted to return to the bathroom and find his phone in his discarded jeans. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized he didn’t want it to stop. He wanted to see what would happen. Morbid curiosity and his lack of preservation had culminated in a bizarre, almost horrific scenario that he had no wish to escape from.

“I feel so light,” he said in a stupor. He humped at the air and rose a few inches from the bed. He barely weighed anything.

“And that’s only the start. We’re going to have so much fun, you and I,” the voice pictured itself in Aaron’s head as a tall heavyset badger man. Wearing identical overalls, with the same pull cord and everything. He tipped his straw hat and flashed him a smile.

“What’s going to happen to me?” Aaron asked. He looked at his hands. Watching the light flicker through them as his peachy skin became transparent, then desaturated into black and white badger paws. They still had thumbs. More like badger paws through the lens of human anatomy. Except without the fur. Aaron giggled, he giggled now, apparently. “Am I going to blow up like a big balloon and become part of the furniture?”

“Oh naw,” the badger in his head replied. “Nothing as boring as that.”

Aaron struggled to move his head. He could feel the inflation speeding up. His silhouette deformed and rounded even further. His plump rubbery legs and arms were being sucked into the spherical shapes of his torso and belly. Oh, that belly. It was the star of the show. As it grew and reshaped him into a more simplistic shape, it seemed to dominate everything around it. The room, his vision, even his limbs. If it kept growing, it could dominate the world, he thought.

“Something’s building inside of me.”

“Inside of ‘us’ you mean.” The voice replied.

Aaron’s cheeks filled up with air until they smooshed his mouth to a point where he struggled to speak. So he resigned himself to communicating with the mind-badger with his inner voice. That was something he could do. That was normal. What was normal now, anyway? He was a balloon! Balloons are silly, logic doesn’t apply! Oh, everything’s spinning now.

“Everything’s getting weird.” He said, silently. He watched his body from the outside. It was a cartoonish thing. All silly round shapes, a collection of stubby round digits on puffy paws connected to thick sausage limbs connected to a big, grand, almost badger shaped balloon. “We’re getting so big,” he said.

“We are...” the voice replied. “We’re going to do what all good balloons are meant to do, partner.”

Aaron knew the answer but there was something compelling him to ask anyway. “What do good balloons do, partner?”

Aaron’s body filled the majority of the room. It pulsed in an unpredictable rhythm. Sometimes it swelled a few inches then deflated a little. Sometimes it expanded several feet, stayed there at the limit of its elasticity and teased its own destruction before it subsided and returned to a less ominous size. Although Aaron was no longer connected to that body, he still felt the phantom twinge of arousal. He looked at it longingly, desperately wishing it was his.

“If you want to find out,” the badger grinned. It materialized as a ghostly shape over Aaron’s body, just over the hole left by the ripcord and invited him. “Then let’s go home.”

Aaron’s consciousness floated over, joining the badger. Together they became air and pushed themselves deep into the balloon that used to be Aaron. That balloon moaned, loudly, quivered and stretched one last time as one of its paws pressed dangerously into the sharp edge of a bedside table.

Then it burst with thunderous force.

Scraps of latex fluttered down to the carpet. Larger pieces of the balloon that used to be Aaron draped over the bed, the upholstery, the lamps. There was nothing left of the human who had rode the bus to the highlands. But he wasn’t gone, not completely.

When sunrise came, the latex evaporated into a black and white mist. It coalesced in the bed, underneath the covers. Forming a shape.

Gus stepped out of bed. Shiny as can be, bright as a big ole balloon badger ought to be and ready to start the day, “Alright Aaron--” He started saying aloud to, then shushed himself. “Oops, almost forgot. It’s Gus now,” he proclaimed with a slap of his squeaky overall clad belly. He placed a thumb between his teeth and blew, swelling his gut to its proper morning size.

“Alright Gus, it’s time to start the day!”