GQ1

by Solomon

How dead was the Macy’s Women’s Apparel department on that Tuesday morning?   Three of the sales associates were actually sorting outfits by size.   Yes, they had become so utterly bored that, just to break the tedium of watching the florescent lights reflect off the tile floor, the three sales associates fanned out and, remarkably, became productive workers.  So when the young lady in the blue jumper strolled into the department, that eager look of I-came-with-a-list in her eyes, the three associates swooped down upon her like carrion birds on a fresh corpse.  

“Good morning!”  “Can we help you?”  “Is there something in particular we can assist you in finding?”  “I love your shoes.”  “Would you like to hear about our weekly specials?”  

The young lady, whose name was Sarah and who so very rarely found herself at the center of anyone’s attention, squeaked a bit before replying, “Yes?”  

Yes – what?  The vast possibilities momentarily stunned the carrion birds, and this, fortunately, allowed Sarah the opportunity to regain a little of her wits.  

“I just got hired as an administrative assistant,” she said, “I need to buy some clothes.”  

Clothes!  The three birds grinned with glee.  This young lady – so shy, the way she kept tucking loose strands of her chestnut hair behind her left ear – had most definitely come to the right place.  Without hesitation, the birds tornadoed shy, diminutive Sarah around the department.  Before long, she had the makings of four outfits draped over her arm.  When one of the birds started gathering pieces of a fifth – yellow blouse, black cotton skirt, and oh, wouldn’t this polka-dot scarf look lovely against your skin! – Sarah had to say no.  Her arm could barely keep the four aloft.  So they showed her to the dressing room and she slid shut the red curtains to the cubicle and finally was alone.  

Relieved, Sarah hung up the outfits on one of the hooks and began to undress.  She made a point of avoiding the cubicle’s gold-rimmed mirror.  After all, she was as unimpressed with her appearance as everyone else seemed to be.  It was happenstance she’d even gotten this new job.  A truck was about to hit an old man and so she ran out into the street to push him aside.  She hadn’t even thought about the consequences to herself.  To her benefit, though, the driver of the truck had considered the consequences and had braked just in time to keep from flattening the heroic young lady.  Sure, the steel thermos that the old man had been carrying had spilled some of its gooey, foul-smelling contents onto her bare arms, but he was alive, and he was so grateful that he offered to buy her coffee, then and there.  It was over coffee that she’d revealed the reason she was outside at all in the middle of a Monday: unemployment.  That was when the old man had given her the job, right there on the spot.  It was the least he could, he said.  Would he be willing to work around her schedule as a part-time college student?  Of course.  Could she start on Wednesday?  Of course.     

Now all she needed was the proper outfit.  

The first she selected was a purple top with a lovely grey pantsuit combo.  She buttoned up the blouse over her wispy lace bra, barely necessary, to be honest, and then slipped into the grey pants.  The fabric felt smooth against her legs.  She rarely wore anything other than jumpers and sweats, so this was quite a pleasant change for her.  Without her awareness, a grin spread along her lips.  She then donned the suit.  The back collar nuzzled against her neck, and the sensation sent a current through her body.  Ooh!   By hiding her shapeless body underneath all that polyester nonsense, what had she been missing out on?!  

Sarah completed the outfit by stepping back into her heels and, with understandable insecurity, stared at her reflection in the mirror.  She actually looked almost not half-bad.   Her forearms itched a bit, but she refrained from taking off her suit to scratch at them.  She looked so professional in this outfit, so adult!  And she would be wearing this – or something like it – as an administrative assistant, making real money for the first time in her brief unlucky life.  It wasn’t the most glamorous job, but maybe she could look glamorous for it.  Maybe she could even put on a little lipstick and some rouge.  She could borrow it from her roommate Kaitlin.  Now if only her forearms would stop itching!  She rubbed the tips of her left hand’s fingernails across her bare right forearm – oh that felt so much better – and…

Wait.

Wait a second.

She glanced down at her arms.  Sure enough, the sleeves only came halfway down her forearms.  How had she not noticed that before?  And when she curled her arms, the cuffs traveled even further, nearly reaching her elbows.  Well, this wasn’t good at all!  Still, hadn’t her sleeves been long enough before?  Hadn’t they prevented her from scratching at her rash or whatever it was?  

Nerves.  That’s what all this was.  She was anxious about her job.  Nerves explained the rash.  Nerves explained her mistaking the length of her sleeves.  Nerves even explained how goddamn tight her heeled shoes were all of a sudden, her own shoes.  Anxiety caused sweat – sweat made leather shrink – it was all logical.  Yes, her shoes were not made of real leather, but still, the same principle had to apply, didn’t it?  

And now she was having difficulty breathing.  It felt like her shirt was strangling her chest.  Nerves indeed.  She reached down to adjust the collar, and that was when her elbow suddenly popped through the blouse fabric and now rubbed roughly against the inside sleeve of her jacket.  Man, what cheap material!   She tried to shrug off her jacket, but as she did so, her other elbow ripped through its blouse fabric.  Damn it!  Those three sales associate harpies were going to kill her for this – and it wasn’t even her fault!  

With a sigh, she sat down on the cubicle’s padded bench and stared forward at her reflection in the mirror.   Now the grey jacket’s sleeves were halfway up her forearms and it looked like her grey pants were shrinking as well.  She could make out almost six inches of bare skin between her uncomfortable black shoes and the bottoms of her pants.  Sweat made leather shrink and apparently it also made cotton or whatever this material was to shrink as well.  Maybe for nervous nellies like her, polyester was the answer after all.  

Either way, she had to take off these shoes before they strangled her toes blue.  

Sarah bent down to reach for her left shoe and heard a loud rip.  Immediately she blushed.  She must have split the back of her pants.  Wouldn’t that just be perfect?   All she needed now was to be back in high school and have the other girls pointing and laughing and her humiliation would be complete.  However, the seat of her pants didn’t feel any different.  To make sure, she shimmied her butt a bit along the bench.  Nope – the seat of her pants was still intact.  Then where had…

Her eyes darted forward to the mirror and she saw her answer in the reflection.  The back of her grey jacket had split open and was now nothing more than a vertical yawn.  Frowning, Sarah rose up and turned around to get a better look at the damage.  She reached with her right arm to touch the frayed grey fabric and her right arm made it the whole way but her right sleeve did not.  The shoulder seam howled a moment and then split in two, both on the jacket and on the blouse.  She could see her right shoulder now, naked as the day she was born, and her fingers touched that bare flesh instead.  Curiouser and curiouser.  She tried to reach around to the hole in the back of her jacket with her left arm and, as expected, wrecked that shoulder seam too.  And yet it still felt as if her clothes were constricting her, her pants as well now that their hemline had neared her kneecaps.  She could discern the outline of her thighs under the taut grey material.  The phrase “second skin” had acquired a new appreciable meaning.  

Absently, she brushed some dark hair from her forehead – and froze.  

Dark hair from her forehead?  Since when were her bangs that long?  Now more than a little confused, she turned her attention back to the mirror and nearly fell over in shock at what she beheld.   Her once-brief hair dangled down, down, down, mere inches from her bare shoulders.  And then it touched her shoulders, slid against her skin.  She watched it and she felt it.  Her hair had grown.  And unless this mirror was a lot smaller than she’d first suspected, her whole body was growing.  Her bare shoulders nearly extended past the gold frame and if she stood at perfect posture – holy crap, the top of her head was now about the height of the gold frame!  How tall was this mirror?  How tall was she?!

Her shoes, complainers that they had become, at that moment answered her questions by simultaneously rupturing at their rear seams and side seams, revealing the flesh of her feet as if they had been hiding behind a pair of doors and those doors were slowly, slowly opening.  There were her feet, the toes mercifully not blue and not even in much pain anymore, jutting past the sole of the shoe and making fresh contact with the carpet floor.  Her heels too touched the carpet.  The soles of her shoes were completely covered by her bare feet, with the leather uppers resting to their sides like discarded remains.  

Sarah opened her mouth in bewilderment and took a deep, steadying breath...and naturally this led to even more fabric destruction, this time to the front of her purple blouse, to the top three pearl buttons as they catapulted ping, ping, ping against the wall and then fell, lifeless, useless, to the floor.   But the constriction persisted ever still, and it had to be her lace brassiere which was the culprit, but that wasn’t too much a concern because the clasp was easily accessible through the open back of her jacket and blouse and all she had to do was reach around with both hands as she had done every day for her adult life and…uh-oh.  The brassiere had become so tight on her torso that she couldn’t lift the clasp away from her skin to unhook it.  Oh God.  She was going to die, six and half feet tall and strangled to death by her underwear.   Good luck to whoever had to write that obituary.  And she wouldn’t even get a chance to work a day at her new job.  She wiped away a tear from her eyes.  The front of her pants popped open, her hips readying their turn at busting some seams.  At that moment, the sides of her sleeves gave up the ghost and the grey and purple fabric fluttered to the red carpet floor.  

The upper half of her head had risen so tall that it superseded the mirror.  It was about to supersede the top of the cubicle.  And then – what?  The ceiling tiles?  The roof of the department store?  The clouds in the sky?  She didn’t even want to think about it.  And she had more pressing concerns anyway – literally pressing.  The side straps on her brassiere had finally begun to fray.  As she watched them with eagerness and anticipation, she noticed that her breasts themselves seemed to be overflowing the cups, producing a loveline of cleavage she could never have achieved even with a WonderBra.  But this didn’t make much sense.  Growing taller was one thing.  Growing fuller breasts?  

As if any of this met the most casual definition of logic.  

But what did it matter, because finally, finally the suffocation came to a loud and lovely end as the brassiere’s side straps snapped away and the garment joined the collection of shredded rags at Sarah’s feet.  She shrugged off the strips of jacket and blouse left on her body and now stood topless – and buxom.  Amused, she hefted each breast in her hands.  So this is what it felt like to be a Playboy centerfold…if Playboy centerfolds neared seven feet tall!  Ha!  A chuckle escaped her lips.  Was this funny, this unexplainable experience funny?  Sarah chuckled again.  Sure.  Why not.  She now had the body of a goddess.  That certainly wasn’t tragic.  

Down below, her pants hadn’t fared any better than their cousins up above.  Most of the destruction came from her thighs, but her hips had done more than their fare share of damage, and before long the ruins of her grey slacks had collapsed from the battlefield of her massive, magnificent body.   Now only her white panties remained, painted along her groin.  The dark bushy hair of her pubis filled out the front, strands poking out here and there.  Sarah was delighted – but impatient.  Why did her panties have to be so stubborn?  Didn’t they know when enough was enough?  And so, with an exaggerated sigh, Sarah hooked a finger under the waistband and tugged, no more than one would tug a grape off a branch, and the panties tore away, and she was naked from head to toe, eight feet from head to toe, her head fell above the red curtain cordoning off the cubicle, her long toes well outside the bottom of the red curtain, her shoulders pressing against the side walls of the cubicle, her erect nipples brushing against that soft, lovely, velvet red curtain, mmm.  Her chuckles became a laugh.   Now what, she thought.  Now what indeed.