My Uncle is a 16-Year-Old Girl - a short story

No, I’m not kidding when I say that my 35-year-old uncle just turned into a teenager in front of my very eyes.

I could still feel the phantom presence of the long-gone five-peso coin on my hand. I wish I had it back. But no, it was far deep into the depths of Ibig Lake, making its way down further onto the lake’s floor. I couldn’t take it back now.

“Why is the world bigger?” my uncle asked. She… he? stumbled forward, tripping over an overgrown root. He wasn’t yet used to his new body, I guess.

He hadn’t realized it yet. I didn’t want to break the news to him. No, this particular piece of news was far too delicate for me to break. “Can you help me out here, please?”

His eyes widened. “Wait, why is my voice different?” he cleared his throat. “Hello. Hello. Hello! Hello?” He looked at me for answers.

I didn’t have answers.

Instead, I wanted to laugh and scream. I didn’t know what to do first, so I did both at the same time.

I ended up crying, apparently, because the next thing I knew, I had tears welling up in my eyes.

“CLARA!” my uncle shouted. I sensed a teensy bit of desperation in his tone, almost as teensy as the pitch of his voice. He winced at the same thought. He covered his mouth with his hands, only to realize that his hands were teensy too.

I pinched myself. Ow. Okay, I wasn’t dreaming. I could have sworn I was. This was impossible. I pinched myself again. Ow, again. “Okay,” I told myself out loud, shaking my head and my hands to jolt myself back to reality. Did anything change?

Nope, my uncle was still a girl.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” I began. My uncle’s face grew increasingly befuddled. His mind had probably begun connecting the dots if he hadn’t connected them already. His cheeks started to glow red.

“What happened to me?” he asked.

I motioned to the lake.

He walked slowly to the lakeshore, his steps anxious, afraid, and slow. He peered into his reflection on the lake’s surface. He stayed like that for a while. The wind cruised overhead, ruffling tree leaves and making the small animals perched on branches skitter.

Somewhere along the shoreline, a buff dude, probably a little bit older than me, fell from his surfboard. Why he was trying to surf on still water, I had no idea. The splash of his fall disturbed the lake’s surface.

He peeked his head above the water and waved at us. I waved back. He introduced himself to me before, but it was a while ago. I’ve forgotten his name. Was it Kevin? Calvin?... Horace? Harl?

My uncle turned to me, his fingers examining his cheeks, then his nose, then his ears. His eyes opened widely. “Make it go back.”

No, that’s impossible. The coin already sank.

“I—” My own voice sank.

My uncle stomped his way towards me and grasped my shirt collar. “WHAT DID YOU DO!”

“I didn’t do anything! I don’t know wh— how— what did you wish for anyway?!”

“What else?!” He released his grip on my shirt, reluctant to answer. “NOT THIS!!”

That, I didn’t doubt. My uncle looked the same as he did a few minutes ago, only a lot smaller with softer, younger features. Instead of towering over me like he used to, we were now basically the same height. His shoulders were significantly smaller and less broad, and his face looked cleaner. His now less oily and more vibrant brown hair fell deftly behind his shoulders.

But the most glaring difference of them all—

“I think you should change into something more… appropriate,” I noted.

He noticed it too. His sando had now turned into what could pass as an awkwardly thin daster. “Shit.”

“I know,” I turned away and started moving back to the lakeside trail. “I have some clothes in my room. It won’t fit you perfectly, but anything else other than that would do, right?

“WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ME!!!” she screamed, following me through the trees. “WHAAAT!!” I could swear her shouts could rattle the snails sleeping four-feet underground.

We ran, moving through roots and bushes as we went. My family had a rest house by the lake, and we always went here during vacation trips and short breaks. It was a quick getaway place for us. A place of peace.

Not anymore.

Somewhere behind us, the surfer fell on the water again.

We closed in on the house. Thankfully, no one was outside. I didn’t want to explain the whole situation to the family. It was too much of a scramble to do. I doubt my uncle wanted to explain himself to anyone in his state either.

We hid behind the trunk of an old and wide Narra tree to scout the perimeter. “We have to make it to my room,” I said.

“Yeah? And how do you suppose we can do that, dipwad?”

He wasn’t helping, but I couldn’t blame him. “We’ll just have to sneak our way in. We can climb one of those low-branch trees and hop in through my bedroom window.”

“Okay, no. There’s no way I’m climbing a tree,” he stated with finality.

Ookay then. “Alright fine, we’ll just head on straight through and pray no one comes across us.”

He nodded.

“But first,” I said, “we need to have a plan in case someone does spot you.”

“What kind of plan?” he asked. His feet, which were now at least four sizes smaller than his slipper size, rubbed against each other, restless.

“An alibi,” I answered. “Your real name is Christopher, right?” Sometimes I forget my family members’ names. Especially my uncle, because we all just called him Toy. “Now you’re Christine, my friend from school who came all this way to visit. And if you do talk to my parents, don’t forget to say ‘po’.”

I didn’t give my uncle a chance to answer. I dashed up the porch sneakily. Verifiably hidden, I swung the door open with ease.

I didn’t expect the door to creak. I forgot how old and rickety this house was.

“Clara you’re back!” a voice from upstairs announced. It was all fine until I heard the legs that carried that voice walk its way down. Each step made my heart throb faster.

My uncle was behind me. He tugged at my shirt, his face evidently grim. Same as mine.

I wanted to turn back, to go back to the lake, to dive into the water and retrieve the coin from its watery grave. I wanted to close my eyes and wish my uncle was back to his old self. But it was too late.

Far too late. A hand clasped my shoulder. It was Mom. “Clara! Where’ve you been?” she smiled, a smile I felt embarrassed to reciprocate “And who’s that with you!”

Your brother-in-law. “Uhmm someone… I uh— met in school. My friend in school! Came to visit me here.”

“Oh! Is that right?” She continued to smile. “Well, come on in. What’s your name?”

My uncle looked visibly sick. “Christina,” he said quickly. Don’t forget the ‘po’, I thought. No one spoke. Mom didn’t answer back. She expected the ‘po’. He forgot the ‘po’. Mom scrunched her nose and went by.

“Tell me if you need anything, okay?” she told me. “Oh, by the way, have you seen your uncle recently?”

Christina and I looked at each other. “No,” we both said.

Mom blinked. “Okay,” she said, moving on to the kitchen to do some cooking maybe.

“Let’s go,” I whispered, and we got on up to my room. Luckily, my dad and brother were nowhere to be seen.

I opened my cabinet and handed him one of my thick hoodies. It was red and had a white star sewn at its center. Christina wore it immediately. “That feels better,” she decided.

“Do you want a br—”

“No,” he asserted.

I grabbed a chair and set it next to my uncle, while I sat on the bed. Facing the window, the lake shimmered bright as the setting sun colored the sky a splash of red, orange, and purple.

The day was ending, and dinner would be here soon. We would never be able to survive dinner.

“We have to figure out how to turn you back,” I spoke.

My uncle peered outside the window, looking at the lake. “I didn’t expect it to actually be magical. That the lake had real magical properties. This is insane. Insane!!”

I sat there puzzled. I didn’t think it’d work too, honestly. I’d never really tried it myself before, because I didn’t believe it. I thought it was all baloney. Apparently not. I remembered Mom wished on the lake once before, though.

“How did it feel?” I asked. “The whole changing process?”

My uncle’s face turned red immediately. “DO YOU THINK I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THAT?!”

“Shh!! Can you keep it down?” I looked around to see if anyone was approaching. “Stop shouting. The family would think you’re this old grump, which you are. But we’re sort of pretending that you’re not, remember?”

“Ay, fine. Fine. I’ll be calmer.” He said that last word as he rolled his eyes. “It felt weird,” he admitted. “It was like... it just happened. It’s like how you wake up, you don’t feel it until it’s there. And then bam! Suddenly, I’m like this.”

“Suddenly you’re like that,” I repeated.

“Yup.” He picked a Rubik’s cube up from my desk and started fiddling with it. I did that whenever I was nervous. I don’t think “nervous” gives the current situation much service.

I picked a pen up from the other side of the desk and I spun it around my fingers. It’s what I did whenever I needed an answer to something. Whenever I’m stuck on a problem or a puzzle. Whenever I’m stumped on solving the Rubik’s cube that’s in my uncle’s hand.

“What if I just wished myself back?” he asked.

“Doubt that’d work,” I replied. “I knew there were conditions to the wishes and that one of those conditions is that a person can only make one wish ever, but I’m not entirely sure. I never really listened to my mom about this before. Because you know… I didn’t think it worked. It’s worth a shot, though.” My pen glided from one finger to another, spinning as it turned.

The Rubik’s cube clacked as my uncle solved it. As fast as that, three colors were done.

Then a voice boomed from below. “Dinner’s ready!!”

I dropped my pen.

My uncle dropped the cube.

We sat beside each other. Across us, Mom scooped a spoonful of nilaga, while Dad helped himself to the rice. I could feel their eyes looking at me, then back to Christina, then back to me. How could they do that while not spilling a single drop of soup or a single grain of rice onto the table?

I cursed their hand-eye coordination.

“Clara,” Dad greeted. “Where’s Toy? Wasn’t he with you?”

My uncle lowered his head, his eyes staring intently at his clean plate.

“I don’t know,” I lied. “We went out to the lake together but he went back before I did so…” I got a spoonful of rice too. “Didn’t you guys see him?”

My parents shook their heads. Mom spoke, “Maybe he’s just lapping around the lake. I’m sure he’s fine.”

“No,” answered Dad. “It’s getting dark. It’s dangerous out there. He might get abducted. Or worse, get eaten by a bear. Or worst, get abducted by a bear.”

“There are no bears in Laguna, hun,” said Mom.

My uncle made a jerking sound, like he was trying to prevent a laugh. That made my parents notice him even more.

“Get some food, Christina!” urged Mom.

“Christina?” Dad set his utensils down on his plate. “I don’t think we’ve met before.”

My uncle looked up to them. We all looked at him back, all wondering what he’d say.

“Uh—” he started. He took a scoop of nilaga and placed it on the rice he had on his plate. “We haven’t. I’m… new?” He looked at me, unsure of his own origin story. I had the nagging temptation to face palm. It took all my will power not to, but keeping my hand from slapping the center of my forehead was like trying to pull two magnets of the opposite poles apart. “I—” he continued. “I’m a school friend of Clara. We have chemistry together… po.”

Chemistry? I don’t even take Chemistry yet!

“Ohh is that right?” Dad raised one of his eyebrows. “Okay.” He continued eating.

“You said you went to the lake together?” Mom asked. “Did you finally make a wish?” She smiled.

“No, Mom.” I took a swig of water from my glass. “I don’t have anything to wish for. Besides, it doesn’t…” I was about to say ‘it doesn’t work,” because that’s what I usually say. Never in a million years would I have imagined that I was usually wrong. “Never mind.”

“Huh,” Mom eyed me. “Why don’t you just try then?”

I chewed on. “Because—” I realized I didn’t have a legitimate answer. Why didn’t I try? Why didn’t I just wish for something? Anything? Not that it’d hurt me if it worked. But then I looked at my uncle and I felt relieved that I never did. “Wait, didn’t you try before?”

Mom was pleased that I asked the question. “I did!” she said elatedly. “I didn’t quite expect what I got, but it worked out.”

“What did you get?” my uncle blurted. His plate was now almost totally empty. He had a manner of eating way too fast for his own good. Too fast, forgetting the ‘po’.

Mom’s ears perked up. “A wedding ring.” She smiled, looking at me then to Dad. “From your father of course.”

“And what did you ask for?” I followed.

“To be a young girl again.”

I didn’t make another sound for the rest of dinner time. I heard Mom ramble on about how their love made her feel like she was a teenager, young and full of life. Dad said something about making his own wish too, about how he always wanted to talk to fish. I finished my plate and headed straight to my room. My uncle did the same.

“This is your mother’s wish,” my uncle said, waving his hands around his body.

“You are little,” I answered. “And you are a girl. So it checks out.”

“How did this even happen?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Maybe her wish got transferred to you somehow?”

“You mean it staggered?”

“I mean it’s delayed. Like, what if, each person’s wish got transferred to the next person who made a wish, and so on?” I implied. There wasn’t much to go on, but it seemed like a logical assumption.

“Fat chance. Do you honestly think no one else but your mom made a wish on the lake for the past, what, decade? At least? And why would it be transferred in the first place?”

“I don’t know.” I realized I’ve said that sentence a bunch of times just this one day. “But we don’t really have a lot of straws we can grasp on here.”

“Yeah, that means you have to make a wish. Means you have to wish me back.” He got up and started towards the door. I grabbed his shirt sleeve before he stepped out of the room.

“Not now,” I said.

“Why?” He shook my hand off. “The sooner the better?”

“Bears,” I answered, shaking my head. “Or whatever. I don’t want to risk it. Tomorrow, though. First thing?”

My uncle stomped from the doorway to the bed, picked up a pillow, and threw it down on the floor. “Fine,” he resigned, lying down on wooden floorboards. “But before that…” He took his phone out of his pocket and started violently tapping away at the screen. “I’ll tell your parents I went… somewhere. Gah! Such a hassle.”

It wasn’t yet nearly the time I usually went to sleep, but I wanted the day to be over with. I closed my eyes wishing everything was back to normal. I forced my eyelids together.

I thought of the lake, and how I threw the coin nimbly from my hand to the far end of the water. I remembered the way the face of the coin shimmered as it rotated, reflecting the setting sun’s light with every motion. I remembered the light radiating from my uncle’s body as he transformed.

I drifted to sleep to the sound of my uncle’s sly fingers bashing against the glass of his phone.

I knew I was dreaming when I saw a large ship sailing on a sea of pillows. A long diving board extended from the ship’s deck. I stood on a floating island of turtles, the shells of each one of them shifted with my weight. From the dive board, the surfer from the lake jumped and flipped 360°, landing perfectly on a single turtle shell. His grayish black hair curled and tangled on his head.

“Hi, you are…?” I asked.

“Billjamin. You can call me Billjamin.”

That woke me up. What the hell kind of a name is Billjamin?

As the sun started to rise, my uncle and I made our way to the lakeside clearing. On the way there, I bumped into a hard surface. The hard surface talked. “Hi,” he said.

“Hey.” It was the surfer. “You’re… Billjamin, right?” I tried to smile.

The surfer’s face twisted uncomfortably. “What? Where did you get that?”

“Well—” Don’t tell him you dreamt of him. Don’t tell him you dreamt of him. Don’t tell him you dreamt of him. “I dreamt of it.” Welp.

He burst out laughing. “Dreams are probably the only place you can get a name as silly as ‘Billjamin’.” He held his hand out. “My name is—” Then he made these weird gurgling noises with his throat. The sides of his neck started to move in ways humanly impossible.

I was too much in awe to say anything.

He smiled. “But you can call me Carl.”

“What was that?” I tried imitating the gurgles.

He shook his head defiantly. “No! No!” Then he gurgled again. “What you said was—” He copied the gurglings I made. “But my name is—” And he made yet another set of gurgles. They sounded identical to me.

My uncle pulled my shirt. “Let’s go!” he beckoned.

I followed, waving goodbye to the surfer. “See you soon, uhh… Carl!”

We reached the clearing, and I brought out three five-peso coins, the only three I had left on my drawer. “You first.” I handed a coin to my uncle.

“Here goes nothing,” he said. “I wish I was back to normal.” He threw the coin to the middle of the lake. Plop!

We waited. We waited and waited and waited. Nothing happened.

“Yeah, my turn then.” I grasped one coin and palmed it. “What is it that you wished for again?”

My uncle shifted nervously.

“Come on now, I need to know.”

“I wished foryourfathertohaveabignose.”

“What?”

“I said I wished foryourfathertohaveabignose.”

“You wished for my father to what?”

He made an extended arc from his nose bridge to the tip of his nostril. “To have a big nose, okay?”

“Why on earth would you wish for that?”

“I don’t know! It was a throwaway wish. I never thought it’d work anyway.”

I took a deep breath. If I made my wish now, there’s a chance Dad might just wake up to find himself in full possession of an awkwardly long nose. But his nose was already big, I thought. Would that cancel out the wish, because the wish was already true?

I didn’t have much to go on in terms of precedent for these things, but dealing with my dad with a big nose would be much easier to handle than my uncle as a girl. So I threw the coin to the lake.

The coin sank below the water. Above the lake’s surface, sparkles of light glittered in and out of the air. Something had happened. Something that wasn’t my uncle turning back to normal.

“I’m still a small girl, Clara,” he stated the obvious.

I nodded. “I know. I know.” I paced around the lake. “We need another…” A few footprints marked themselves on the shoreline.

“Carl! Carl!” I shouted. He shouldn’t be that far from here. He couldn’t possibly walk that fast, right? And in a quiet place like this, sound should travel easily and undisturbed. “CARL!”

But there was no response.

I craned my head up so my neck would be fully extended, and I did the best gurgle I could possibly do. It sounded like I was desperately trying to extract phlegm from my throat.

It must’ve worked, because from the far bushes, Carl appeared. “You called me by my name!” he said, as he jogged towards us.

“I need a favor,” I told him when he was near enough. I gave him a five-peso coin, the last one I had on me. “I need you to wish.”

“Wish?” he asked, though it looked as if his question was one out of politeness. His eyes told me he was familiar with this.

I looked at Carl. “Mhm. I need you to wish for my uncle to be back to normal.”

Carl smiled. “And why would I do that?”

I felt my uncle’s angry eyes set on him, steaming beneath his small frame. He was seconds away from exploding.

“Because,” I said. “You’re a fish, and we’re kind of the reason you’re here in the first place.”

Without a moment of hesitation, Carl flipped the coin high. As it arced in the air, he said “Fair enough. Tell your father I said ‘hi’.” The coin landed into the water.

A bright flash of light emanated from my uncle’s body. I had to turn away to not be blinded. I heard a splash and the water lap, realizing that it was Carl swimming to somewhere I couldn’t see. Probably back to his home.

When the light dispersed, my uncle stood tall again, in his usual oily, lanky, long, frail, and old self. He did a couple of awkward stretches to jolt energy back to his limbs. “That’s more like it!”

For the first time in the past day, I felt some sort of calmness.

But then a large booming shout disturbed the peace, shaking even the leaves from the branches they were in. “AAAAAARRRRRRRGGHHHHHHHHH!!!”

“That,” noticed my uncle. “That would have to be your father.”

#shortstory #shortstories #literature #fiction #nonsense #family