Tidal Backlash (Monthly tale - 11) X

(Woman into sea turtle)*

The pine trees on both sides of the road didn’t hide the seashore at all, their scent mixed with the salt in the air as dusk fell.

A rusty brownish pickup truck travelled down the road, Esther Sherman was behind the wheel.

It might be hard to believe that in her day to day life she worked driving an actual truck because she was so far from the stereotype that comes to mind when you think of a truck driver, even a female one.

Skinny was the first thought that would cross your mind, skinny and tall, a long thin neck, fuzzy dark eyebrows, with short shoulder length hair dyed red, a prominent nose that she thought exuded personality and bags under her brown haggard eyes.

She was wearing clothes that were too baggy for her small frame, old jeans, old boots... a plaid blue shirt with a big weighty darl jacket, without any jewels, trinkets, makeup or even wrist watch.

Her long fingers tapped the wheel, on one of them you could still see the mark of a ring, she had a slight smile on her pale lips, it was a pleasure trip and she loved driving, going from one place to the other, a sedentary life wasn’t for her, perhaps that’s why her marriage had failed so badly.

It wasn’t because Esther was a bad person, far from that, she was quite an excellent one, everybody agreed with that, maybe just a bit annoying and stubborn, but being a good person didn’t made her a good wife... or a good mother...

“So... how are things with the band...?” she asked.

Joel, her son, was sitting at her side, in the co-pilot seat, he was a boy in his early twenties, wearing dark clothes, with a piercing in his nose and a pink tuft in his dark hair.

He grunted without raising his eyes from the cellphone, but Esther didn’t hear him.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“I left the band...”

“Why? You loved that band.”

“None of your business, Esther...”

“It was because that g...”

“None. Of. Your. Business. Esther.”

The boy said her name with that tone, a tone that made Esther’s lips twitch.

They continued driving in silence for a while until Joel snorted with annoyance.

“This was your super-important-super-plan that had to ruin my weekend no-matter-what? Going to the beach at night?” he said in a condescending tone.

Esther’s fingers gripped the wheel tighter.

“We aren’t just going to the beach, it’s something more... super-special.”

Joel focused part of his attention on his mother, raising an incredulous eyebrow.

“What is it then...?”

The woman looked at him, with a confident smirk.

“We are going to see how the sea turtles nest!”

Her proclamation was met with more silence, a rolling of eyes and another snort.

“Pffff... Lame!”

Esther frowned.

“It isn't lame! It’s a unique thing to witness, you can only see it once a year! A wonder of nature!”

“Lame and boring, I don’t want to waste my time watching fishes shitting eggs!”

“First of all: Turtles aren’t fish, you idiot, they are reptiles! Second: This is important for me, we came here when I was pregnant with you... it was... magical, those green fellas crawling from the sea, laying hundreds of eggs, giving all that effort for their tiny kids...” Esther’s eyes watered slightly as she remembered a better day during better times.

“Lame, boring AND disgusting...” proclaimed Joel and then went back to his phone.

Esther sighed deeply.

The pickup truck turned to the left, moving between the pine trees, reaching the sandy shore.

Some vehicles were already there, their drivers and occupants scattered around the isolated beach.

Mother and son left their car and went out onto the sand, they walked around as Esther saluted the other nature enthusiasts who were impatiently waiting for the arrival of the turtles.

Joel sat on a rock with his phone and time began to pass.

It was cheerful at first, but as the hours passed and the dusk gave way to the moonless night... the turtles didn’t arrive...

Another couple of hours after that, people were starting to get bored, illusion was replaced by disappointment and when the news that the turtles had arrived at another beach were shared the people began to leave.

Esther said a nervous goodbye to the others as they left one by one: The young couple, the two elderly women, the happy hippie guys...

And so, son and mother were left alone in the darkness of the beach.

The woman turned on her truck’s potent lights so they could see where the waves and the sand met, she walked towards Joel and his phone and stood near her son, rubbing her arms.

“Uff... it’s getting cold, do you want a blanket? I have one in the back of the truck...”

“I want to leave already, Esther.”

“Don’t be silly, the turtles will arrive at any moment, it will be cool!”

“It wouldn’t be cool even if they do arrive! Didn’t you listen the surfer guy? The stupid things went to another beach.”

“That’s not what sea turtles do, they must have got it wrong, you will see, they will arrive at any moment...”

The boy rolled his eyes, shaking his head.

“Jeez...”

Esther crossed her arms, loudly inhaling the salty aroma, the lights on her back, projecting a long shadow that reached the sea...

Midnight was left far behind and the turtles still didn’t arrive.

“Esther, please, let’s leave already!”

The woman shook her head softly, without looking back at her son.

“Let’s just wait a bit more...”

“I’m freezing my ass off!”

“They will arrive at any moment...!”

“I don’t care! Fuck them! You are delusional!”

“And you are a shitty son!”

Their voices rose in the night above the clashing of the waves.

“Because my mother sucks!”

Esther looked at him, frustration giving strength to the flames in her eyes as she raised her arms.

“Yeah! Sure! Blame me for everything! I try to make a unique and fun memory for you and that’s how you repay me?”

“If this is your idea of fun then thanks for nothing! I wish I had stayed with dad...”

A grin of hate painted a smirk on Esther face as she crossed her arms.

“Of course, of course, with daddy and his nice new bitch, no?”

“The fuck are you talking about?”

“You know perfectly well!”

“What do you want me to say? At least she’s at home when I need her!”

“There you go! Very nice! You think it was easy for me?”

“It must have been!” chuckled the boy. “You left us!”

Esther, pale with  rage, pulled the cellphone from Joel’s hand.

“You care more about this thing than about your own damn mother!”

“What are you doing?! Esther, no, stop! STOP!”

She walked towards the shore and threw the phone to the sea with all of her strength, it made a small plop as it hit the water.

“NOOOOOOOO!” yelled the boy, standing on the rock. “You always ruin everything!”

“AND YOU RUINED MY LIFE!” she shouted even more loudly towards the sea, spitting saliva with her eyes and her fist closed. “I WANT TO SEE A FUCKING SEA TURTLES LAYING FUCKING EGGS! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”

The last scream was one of pain, it made her neck grow stiff and tears flow.

Esther collapsed onto her knees, grabbing her sides, curling into a ball as the pain crushed her and she kept yelling.

A tide of information overflowed her brain, new images, new knowledge, ways to see and move around the world hidden in the belly of the oceans.

She was deep under the vast sea, struggling, her clothes were heavy, she couldn’t breath, she was naked, a large sea turtle approached, a male one, he began to rub his hard belly against her nude back, the hook at the end of the tail holding her in place, she spread her legs, the penetration spread the walls of her hairy vagina, her scream muffled bubbles, her big white panties completely soaked.

“Esther! Esther!”

Joel’s hand brought her back to the beach, she was still down on the sand, grabbing her sides, the boy was shaking her, with a hand on one of her shoulders, looking down, worried, scared, but not as scared as she was when she looked at him from her lowly position.

Her skin was pale, but in a yellowish way - sweaty, sickly, disheveled, trembling, her eyes rolling, absolutely terrified, not because she had just had psychic sex with a male sea turtle, not because she felt repugnance at herself from having enjoyed it, no, she was terrified because she knew exactly what would come next.

She wanted to puke, but instead she began to sob and cry while mumbling uncontrollably.

“Oh, oh god, please, no... no... I can’t... I can’t... I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I didn’t agree... I didn’t agree! Please, shit, shit, shit...! Fuck... it isn’t fair, I don’t wanna...!”

“Esther! Esther!” Joel shook her shoulder again. “MOM! What the fuck is going on?! You’re scaring me!”

Esther looked up at her son, as if she was seeing his face clearly for the first time in many, many years, she wanted to say so many things and now she had so little time.

“I...I... Hmmmpfh!” her lips sealed and her cheeks swelled. “J-just... leaaaveeeee!”

Quickly she lay down on the sand on her back.

“What are you doing?!” asked the boy. “STOP!”

The woman took off her jacket, with one hand she raised her shirt until she reached her white bra, with the other she pulled down her pants and panties until she made Joel recoil when he saw the edge of her dark pubic hair.

“NghhhhHHghhh!”

Her despair was palpable... and sweaty, she clenched her buttocks, the flat wet surface of her belly going up and down, she clenched her vagina, she clenched her teeth, a gasp, a grunt, something swelled just below her navel.

Esther moved the hand holding her pants, leaving more of her hairy crotch out than inside them, to touch the thing that had formed inside her stomach, it was oval and clearly visible even before she touched it, it was hard, alien.

“What is that...?” asked her son, pale like the missing moon in the sky.

She looked at him, her face wet with two different salty drops, she gulped.

“A sea turtle egg... to be laid by a female sea turtle...”

Joel shook his head.

“What the hell does that shit mean? Just pull up your damn pants already so we can leave...!”

The boy took another step back when the woman clenched her lips again as the second egg formed inside her belly.

“I’m not gonna... I can’t...”

She felt the sand against her tiny nude butt.

“What do you mean you can’t?! Of course you ca...!” Joel’s voice broke with the third egg. “Mom... Mom you are scaring me...”

“I know... I’m sorry... I’m so sorry...” the fourth and third egg joined the first two, she kicked off her boots. “I don’t know how... I don’t know wh... I have been a bad... woman... person... a bad mother...”

“Stop!”

“Just shut up and listen to me for once!” Esther breathed deeply and with five eggs in her belly she removed her pants and her panties and then continued talking, pretending as best she could that she wasn’t half naked in front of her son and his eyes weren’t looking directly at her pubes and puss. “It’s cosmic fuckery, or a bad joke, or some shit... I’m not allowed to continue going like that, like this, to continue as a woman... that’s why I’m filling with sea turtle eggs... because I’m going to become a sea turtle...”

Joel shook his head.

”That’s insane...!”

“I know... but how do you explain this?” she put both hands on her once perfectly flat belly, it had seven eggs already inside, their bulges around her navel. “It’s... I am a sea turtle... I can’t stop it... we can’t stop it...”

“W-will you come back? You will come back... won’t you?”

Joel looked at her eyes as he asked that, Esther shuddered in doubt, the implications of the situation overwhelming her, she decide to not lie.

“Maybe... perhaps... I will nest, I will lay and I will leave and that will be it for Esther Sherman as a woman... but... someday... who knows...? I don’t... I... If...”

The woman lowered her eyes, ashamed of admitting her doom, she took off her shirt silently and then her bra, the nipples topping her small boobs were very hard and stiff.

Completely naked, except for her socks, she sat on the sand that she had already laid on her back in and Joel realized just how skinny and feeble his mother seemed without clothes.

Esther lowered her eyes, her eggs had broken through the ceiling of the first dozen.

“Just... Just get back to the car... call your father... don’t... worry about this... about how I fucked my poor dumb self up... not much... if you can...”

Then she tried to get up, instinct telling her that she should already find the proper place for the laying, but she didn’t even manage to half stand up before slamming back down, belly against the sand.

She couldn’t walk, of course, she was going to crawl, not on fours like a mammal, but as the marine reptile she was going to be...

Beyond any humiliation, sobbing and gasping, filling with eggs, she began her slow crawl, dragging her arms and legs as if they were already fins, getting covered in sand under her son shocked glance, until she felt it, on her nose and her pussy, the right place.

Esther looked back, regaining her breath, when she felt fingers on her feet, Joel was there, taking off her socks, some tears flow.

“Thanks...” she said. “I’m scared... I don’t want to be alone...”

“Then don’t say stupid shit, goddammit... I can’t even call dad, you threw my phone in your stupid sea, remember?”

The mother chuckled.

“I almost forgot...”

“Aren’t you turtles supposed to have a good memory?”

“Isn’t that elephants...?”

“I don’t know anymore...”

“How will you get back home...?”

“I got my driving license a couple of week...”

“Oh...” the mother blinked a couple of times, forgetting about her humiliating state she smiled kindly. “That’s great! Super great!”

Esther wiggled her freed toes, laying face down, with her legs open and her knees bent, feeling bloated and stiff, but already having left behind the degradation of the humiliation.

The warming comfort on her chest was turning into a heat.

“Could you move...? Please... I should start digging...”

Joel obeyed and gave her some space.

Scratching holes in the ground with her fingers Esther kicked with her legs bending only her knees, sending a splash of sand up in the air and then she did it again and then again, slowly digging the hole to lay the eggs inside her belly.

“This is so fucking dreadful...” she gasped, exhausted, resting for a moment, her soaked reddish hair covering her face and her tears.

“N-no... No!” said Joel, kneeling behind her. “You are doing great, let me help...! How deep does it needs to be?”

Esther looked back at her son, she smiled and continued the pelvic motions of digging.

“Quite a bit more...”

Joel began to help her mother with his bare hands.

“It wasn’t a girl...”

“Uh...?”

“I left the band because a guy...”

“Did he bullied you?” Esther looked at the blush in her son’s face and understood. “Oh... Oh... It’s alright, nothing wrong about it... you know, no?”

“Yes...” mumbled him. “Thanks...”

From time to time Joel’s eyes slid up and he saw the hairy crotch under the swollen belly and the vividly moist, red lips of the woman’s wrinkled sex, he also noticed that Esther’s feet seemed wider and more flexible with each scoop of sand, but it wasn’t any of those things what made him stop.

“Oh, god, mom...”

“I know...!”

“MOM! Mom, you are growing a tail!”

“I KNOW!”

Esther bent her back backwards, leaving her chest and tits high, a posture worthy of any expert yoga class.

She shut her teeth and eyes as her pelvis cracked and reshaped, her buttocks separated, exposing the circumference of her butthole which was dragged by her spine as it stretched the skin beyond it’s boundaries, sculpting a fleshy, pointy tail.

“Fucking shit!” moaned the mother, feeling as her vagina slid upwards, merging, with several slimilly disgusting sounds, with her anal cavity, that now rested near the middle of her tail. “Lord! Please! Aaaaah...!”

Her legs were shortening, her feet ridiculously large and flat, having lost their toenails, they were closer to resembling what they would be in the end.

The woman spat some sand that had gone up her nose, then she snorted, raised her new tail and opened the skin in the middle of it, revealing that reptilian cloaca that it was hiding.

Joel remain with his mouth open for a full half minute before the tail was lowered.

“You are... going to be... a sea turtle...”

“I know... I am...” Esther began to dig again, scales starting to cover the tip of her tail and rear fins. “I told you... It’s... not fine... but... something... something indeed...”

“This is so crazy...”

She nodded, focused in her work.

Her son was going to help her, but he froze for the hundred time that night when he noticed yet another thing.

Given the situation, it wasn’t so weird that neither of them had noticed that three sea turtles had slowly and peacefully come out from the sea and were now close to them, two of them laid down to the left of Esther’s digging spot, the other, which seem the oldest and largest that had seaweed in her shell, on the right.

“Hey... Hey look...” mumbled Joel. “They really came...”

Esther grinned in her struggle, but she couldn’t answer, her shoulders cracked loudly and began to separate widening the gap between them.

She grunted as her neck stretched away from her deforming torso and some of her hair began to fall.

The sea turtles, more experienced in their behaviour, quickly caught and overtook their metamorphosing sister in digging their holes, making Esther finish last despite her son’s help.

Her lower body, legs and rear, were completely turtle like, flat and reptilian, almost totally covered in yellowish scales, her pubic hair detached from her skin, mixing into the sand.

“It is time..” she gasped, her voice sounding strange, as if she didn’t have enough air in her lungs. “Space...”

Joel obeyed, Esther was breathing heavily, the strange oppressive weight of the shell growing on her back and below her tits was disturbingly warm.

“Hmmmmm...! Ngggggggh...! Grrrrrhhhhhg...!”

She raised her tail, the cloaca open, slimy fluids oozed out and with a heavy drop the first egg fell onto the sand.

Before Joel could say anything, the second egg dropped near the first.

He looked down at her mother, how her body was being shifted, he looked around, to the other turtles that were just like his mother, doing the same egg-laying effort covered by the shade of the night’s darkness.

“Good job...” he whispered, sitting down on his knees at the side of the near bald head of his mother.

“Taaaanks...”

A voice that sounded more like a gasp, her nostrils turning upright, pushing her face forward into a vaguely beak shape.

“Are... are you cold?” asked Joel.

Esther shook her head.

“Nooouuu... Nuuuu aaah aaall...”

She opened and closed her dry lips, laying egg after egg, not feeling the sand with her belly any more, her bones snapping loudly, reforming and compressing her form into what she was going to soon become.

The smooth lower shell covered her breasts, denying her that mammal qualification, the upper one, bigger and darker, resting across her back.

Joel put a hand on one of Esther hands, feeling the heat of the changes, how the nailless fingers merged one with the others, how the human hand was replaced by a turtle fin.

Her head wasn’t human, but not entirely turtle, but the body which it was attached to was hard to recognize as anything other than that of a sea reptile.

Esther stretched her neck forward, then back, it seemingly sank down inside her body, she looked up at her son, with her big darkening eyes, opening her toothless mouth.

“Aaaam... swooorryyyy...shooou swouuuryyy foooor... fuuuuuor throoowing... yuuu... phooooneeee...”

Joel gulped, holding back his tears, putting a hand on the turtle shell as his mother’s face irreversibly faded away above.

“Don’t be stupid, idiot, how can you worry about that at the moment? For fucks sake, it’s okay, it doesn’t matters, it doesn’t matters... I wanted to buy a new one, so... the perfect excuse.. I... I am the sorry one here, not you....”

Yet she keep using the last of her speech for him.

“Nuuun muusssh leeeef... Aaaammm... haaaw to leeeave shuuuun... don wannaaah musshhh... wuuut... maaaah nathuuuure....”

“It’s fine, mom, really... it’s fine... Just be careful, OK? I... I will be here, when you come back... next year... every year...”

“Yuuuh... Uuuuuhhh...”

Looking clearly at her son’s face as her vision grew distorted the woman remembered her self, way younger, human, standing happy in this same beach, her feet naked on the sand, her breasts swollen with milk, her sweater raised so she could had both hands over the tense and soft skin of her very pregnant belly, the turtles leaving, the sun rising.

A good memory.

She tried to chuckle, but it sounded wrong, inhuman.

“Aaaah... Aaaaah... almooooosh... doooon...” it was so bizarre, seeing a crying turtle trying to speak as a person with all of her effort as she laid eggs, but it didn’t last long. “Yuuuu... Ammm pruuuuuod... Yuuuu guuud... kiiiiii...! Aaaaa... Annnn... Nhhhh...”

With those broken words, Esther Sherman lost her voice and what was left of her human form, just a turtle laying her eggs with her sisters, as if that had always been her only form.

A while after that, after the sometimes exasperating woman, the non-perfect mother, completely mutated into her unfair fate, the last of the eggs were finally laid, the turtles began to cover the holes with sand, with care, slowly, methodically and after that, when the eggs were safe, at that same pace they began to move back towards the sea, using their fins to slide their shells over the sand, going back towards home.

The turtle nearest to Joel was the slowest of the group, she looked back at him and grunted before following her companions, slowly dragging her short heavy body towards the waves.

Joel took a moment to wipe the sand from his eyes, when he looked up he could barely distinguish one turtle from the other, soon he couldn’t even see them as they disappeared under the foam of the tide.

He stayed there, in silence, listening to the relaxing dance of the waves, to the wind in the branches of the pine trees, crying a few tears.

Esther’s clothes were all over the place, her underwear, her boots, her tears and sweat, her hair, the head one and the pubic one, still on the sand, her son and life... it all would soon be taken by the salty water, like the trails that the sea turtles had left in that same sand.

Joel snorted, the sun began to rise from the sea… the colors shining in the ocean... it was beautiful... a good memory indeed, even after all he had seen…