Merritt had seen that 1959 Disney movie The Shaggy Dog when he was 10. He’d liked it. It seemed . . . right somehow. The boy who stupidly turned himself into a dog and then intermittently went back and forth from boy to dog had seemed like a wimp and a loser to Merritt.. It seemed right, somehow, that these incredible forces were humiliating that boy at random. That was a boy born to be humiliated.
Merritt had never gotten into S&M. One girl he dated after getting out of college had wanted to slap his spectacular track star ass all the time but he couldn’t really get into it. Why should he want his buns to be sore? That wasn’t the way he saw himself. And, unless you counted an occasional pull of her hair, he wasn’t into hurting her at all.
He didn’t get any particular tingle out of that boy’s situation in the old Disney movie. It was just a reasonably entertaining movie with an unusual premise. Now that he had the Chronivac, He’d turned himself into a dog and he’d liked it. But it had been under his control.
All of a sudden, though, he was getting partly turned into a dog, in embarrassing ways, humiliating ways at random intervals. It was kind of like he was living the lead role of that old Disney movie and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. It was incredibly frustrating.
After being covered with fur on his way to a job interview, Merritt had a day where nothing happened. His nose didn’t blacken. He didn’t grow a tail. His fair skin didn’t cover with fur. His tongue didn’t triple in length. His penis didn’t stick to his abs.
He had a blissful day of normalcy and maybe that had reset his expectations and made that day after that even more vexing. Merritt left his apartment around lunch time intending to drive over to the local restaurant where he’d been eating when the old man had left him a note.
Merritt took one step off the landing outside the door and stopped looking at cops standing around doing nothing beside some sort of utility line work at the edge of the apartment complex parking lot. Just as he started to cluck his tongue at them, it all started happening. Within a couple steps a tail had sprouted out the top of his buns. Another step and his face had become pointy and his nose black. Another and his body had lost mass from 165 pounds down to 115. One more and he weighed 65 pounds and his body had shrunk and reshaped into the sleek lines of a greyhound. His ears became a bit floppy and he covered over with fur. It all happened without warning and in just 10 seconds and right out in the open. Luckily, the police standing beside the trench were all looking at their phones and didn’t notice that Merritt Sivertsen, 80 feet away, had suddenly become a dog.
He tried to spit out an expletive at this ridiculous situation but only let out a loud bark.
And, unlike the wimpy loser boy in the Disney movie, Merritt’s clothes didn’t just disappear. He had to step out of now ridiculous human clothes with his new dog body.
Great. Just great. He wanted to punch something. But, as a greyhound dog, against his will, Merritt figured that the only real outlet for his anger at the situation was to run. So he did, sprinting to the far end of the apartment complex and then across the street to a small park, where, from a small rise he lay down on the gras in the sun.
The situation was infuriating but he reasoned that he needed the cops to go somewhere else to get his clothes and get back to his apartment. He sighed through his wet black nose. It wasn’t all bad. It was rather pleasant lying there on his stomach, the sun warming his light brown coat of fur.
But after only a few minutes watching the cops. . .
Oh no.
He got bigger, lost his tail, his face reshaped, his shoulders widened and his body reshaped and he shed all his fur. In just seconds, he was Merritt Sivertsen again.
He was Merritt Sivertsen, naked in the middle of a public park. Unnlike the wimpy, loser kid in that Disney movie, he didn’t magically get his clothes back when he went from dog to human. In the middle of the day, Merritt was naked in a public park.
From behind him but a ways off he heard a woman’s shriek. As if shot out of a cannon, Merritt jumped up from that ridiculous position lying on his belly with his leg stretched out and his ass showing to the world, he scampered to his feet and then dove into a nearby patch of laurel bushes and other shrubs that were nearly 4 feet high. But among these shrubs was a series of vines that had climbed several nearby trees. When Merritt dove in, his feet got entangled in them.
He rolled around in the leaves trying to extricate himself as he heard two women squawking to someone, apparently a policeman in the distance. He rolled over onto his bare, tailless backside and tugged at the vines around his ankles. But there were three or four of them tangled around him. As he pulled himself free of one it almost seemed to further ensnare him in another.
Now, the voices were getting closer and he could pick out a man’s voice, apparently a cop, among them. With that voice just beyond the shrubs he finally pulled himself free, jumped to his feet and started sprinting away.
Women shrieking, the cop blowing some sort of whistle, and then telling him to stop all blended together. He sprinted his near Olympian best and quickly put 100 yards between him and the cop. He ran, completely naked, off one side of the park, across a two lane street and down past an apartment block.
There were some more shrieks from some older women but some younger ones just took out phones and filmed the beautiful naked guy running by them. Merritt tried to put one hand over his face. Just as he sprinted around a street corner, practically in mid stride, in mid air Merritt became a dog again.
As frustrating as this was, it was better for him in the short term. Behind him, he could hear cops on radios calling in to chase a “slender young naked guy”. Though they weren’t after him at the moment, Merritt wanted to put some distance between himself and them.
This began an incredibly frustrating day for Merritt. He got pushed further and further from him in the course of more than a dozen transformations. His time as a dog or a young man was totally random, but each time he was his slender, attractive human self he found himself running for his life and seemingly attracting half of the DC police force. Each time he was a dog, no one was after him and strangers would reach down and pet him.
He also found that, ironically, he was doing all his thinking in his forced canine form. As a naked young guy, all he could do was sprint and try to avoid cops. As a dog, Merritt could ponder things at leisure.
So many cops had seen him by late afternoon that their description was getting much more detailed. As Merritt the light brown greyhound, the trotted next to a police cruiser and heard a report over the radio. The dispatcher was asking all units in the area to look out for a “naked young man, early 20’s, Caucasian, light brown hair, six foot one, 170 pounds, very fast, probably some kind of runner” and named the two streets at the intersection where he’d just turned into a dog again.
And right there, next to a police cruiser, Merritt turned back into his naked human self. Two cops coming back to their car from the donut shop saw him sprinting away and called to others on the radio. They didn’t even try to run after him. But, up ahead, he saw another cruiser a mile off approaching him. And from the left he heard another one approaching from a side street.
He turned right, hard sliding on his bare ass across the hood of an expensive car stopped at the intersection. He ran through a crowd of people with now two cops on foot and three approaching cruisers with sirens chasing him. He bolted down another side street and seeing that being human was a real problem for him right now, he wished he was a dog again. But nothing happened. He sprinted around another corner and, remembering the words from the movie, said, between panting breaths, “In Canis Corpore Transmuto! In Canis Corpore Transmuto!”
Nothing happened right away but out of sight of pursuing cops for just a few seconds, He suddenly felt it start again, in mid stride, Merritt slid down the evolutionary ladder a ways and found himself not desperately pursued naked man but man’s best friend.
He watched the cops turn the corner and look around frantically. It was a wide open street and he’d only been two seconds ahead of them. There wasn’t time for him to have gone in any apartment in this neighborhood of expensive brownstones. The cops were beside themselves.
“Where the fuck did that naked ass pretty boy go?!” spat one.
Merritt milled around wanting to snicker at them. But he realized that he had bigger problems. He was now three, maybe four miles, maybe further from home. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t familiar with this neighborhood.
He was so lost in thought, in his canine form that he barely even noticed a whole bunch of kids approaching, 8 or 10 boys and girls and he never saw the van that parked behind them. They all wanted to pet him and Merritt decided to luxuriate in their attention, letting them pet him all over for a few minutes.
He was enjoying all these hands on him when a black loop was swung past his muzzle, over his head and then tightened at his neck. Only it wasn’t just a loop, it was a dog collar.
“Gotcha!” a ferret faced guy suddenly beside him called out and Merritt realized the desperate straits he was in. Another guy, much heavier than the first was also grasping at him trying to attach a leash to the collar.
Merritt started to set his paws to leap to the left, away from them, but he would have bowled over some 6 and 8 year old kids hard. He got a break though, when one pudgy kid stepped on the foot of the fat guy who gave a slight yelp just as he was attaching the leash to the collar.
Merritt the greyhound sprinted away and, over his shoulder saw that the van was painted as “DC Animal Control”.
“Oh, god!” he said but all anyone heard was the greyhound emit a few small barks as it sprinted off.
Merritt took several turns in a network of small side streets. He was completely lost now. All he knew was that it was an area of small shops amidst one of the older and richer sections of DC.
Merritt reveled in the purposeful use of his greyhound speed and was sure that he was at least a few streets from any possible pursuers. He loped down another side street, almost showing off his greyhound agility, that he could travel so fast while barely trying and suddenly realized that it was a dead end.
He looked around at the doors opening onto this alley. It was very odd. You couldn’t figure out quite what any of them were. At the closed end, a van stopped and turned around. Merritt circled around it easily, his canine movements almost balletic. He saw that, outside one unmarked black door were two very large guys, six foot six and 280 pounds both, dressed in odd leather outfits and standing behind a low iron rail talking to each other.
The van’s side door opened and then shut for no reason that Merritt could tell and the van started to pull away. As it did, Merritt the greyhound, with a dog collar and a leash, was standing at an opening in the low iron rail and suddenly felt himself transforming again.
As he stood up, human again, Merritt the naked, slender athlete saw the two huge guys eyeing him and a tall blond woman in a skimpy leather dominatrix outfit emerged from behind the unmarked black door. She took one look at him and smirked.