Later that night, sitting on the wooden steps at the back of the Medical Facility, Gerlinde smoked and thought on xenochrony.<br/><br/>It was the play of her exhaled smoke through the gradations of light that brought xenochrony to mind.  As she blew the smoke from her lips, the pasty illumination of the shaded light over the steps made it look like rancid cotton candy.  Under the harsher halogen shaft of the fence lights hung, the smoke appeared a flat, shifting ocean of blue.  When it reached the dark of the empty exercise yard beyond the fence, it was immediately transformed to ghost fingers.<br/><br/>Cotton candy.  An ocean.  Ghost fingers.  All the same substance, but different things in different worlds.<br/><br/>Gerlinde looked at her fingers. Even with the rubber gloves, she had little red moons of dried blood under her nails.  She remembered how, as a child in grade school, she had fussed so when paint got under her nails after art class.  The paint had been the same bright red.<br/><br/>Both the same image, but different in different worlds.<br/><br/>Gerlinde took another drag and watched the smoke exist as three different things as she exhaled.  Xenochrony.  The word meant “strange time” in Greek.  It was a musical technique, very present on Joe’s Garage, when an instrument solo was extracted in whole from one song, and placed entirely in another song.<br/><br/>The same music, in a different time, taking on a whole different meaning.<br/><br/>Gerlinde shifted where she sat; her balls were beginning to ache again, piling up fresh loads of semen.  In a different time, she would be shifting for an entirely different reason.  Now shifting meant something entirely different—the mass that so often swelled with feeling in demand for relief gave the motion a different significance.<br/><br/>She slotted her cigarette in her mouth and took a drag, the cigarette standing like an erect penis, its tip blazing with deep color.  Gerlinde would not have made the association so readily; not in a different time.  She flexed her fingers in examination.<br/><br/>In a different time, Lisle had had fingers.  Now they were paws.<br/><br/>Gerlinde looked at the camp around her, watching cotton candy billow into an ocean into ghosts.  She realized that, as a youth, she had only imagined such a place in the black and white horror of the history books.  Now the old nightmare world of the Reich was a young dream again.  It had made<em>her </em>new.  Gerlinde felt like she was an old girl with a young man’s cock and balls.<br/><br/>She sighed and inhaled.  Xenochrony was everywhere.  And Gerlinde, a scholar of ligaments and skeletons and endochrine symphonies had to wonder what it meant:<br/><br/>Did it mean that the world was made of disparate pieces—both soft and hard, gentle and cruel, needy and satisfied—seemingly independent but actually all linked?  Was it the similarities that mattered?  If so, did that not mean that Lisle had not had fingers, so much as she lived most of her life with incomplete paws?  Had Gerlinde’s clitoris just been born an inadequate cock?<br/><br/>Or was it that world existed in disjointed pieces?  Did nothing fit together?  She had never really felt comfortable with the reactions of her clitoris, and now that it was a cock, she was just as curious and mystified and dismayed by it.  Lisle had fit poorly into the world of the Reich, and had ended up in its rubbish bin—in the Stalag.  Would she fit just as agonizingly wrong as a kitty?<br/><br/>Xenochrony.  It was a linkage or it was a liturgy of dissonance.  Gerlinde could not decide which.  Perhaps Joe’s Garage was a work of ironic genius.  Or perhaps its central, seemingly disingenuous message—that music should be illegal, as it caused trouble—was correct.  Gerlinde did not know.  She knew she was tired, though.<br/><br/>She finished her cigarette and fed her fish and fell asleep while unsuccessfully trying to jack off.<br/><br/><hr/><br/>0600 Hours.  Somewhere in the Stalag Namelos.<br/><br/>Gerlinde woke from a dream in which she was being scolded for turning in an incomplete book report on the Incarnations of Immortality Series by Piers Anthony, and for the first morning in a long series of mornings, she did not feel like jacking off.  She felt vaguely hung over.<br/><br/>She killed her alarm clock with a swat of her hand.  In the silence that followed, Gerlinde’s mind leapt to the pasty mess her mouth felt like.  She had not brushed her teeth the night before, and her tongue felt like an ashtray.<br/><br/>One discomfort made her aware of all the rest.  She was obnoxiously hungry and had a strange haze of disorientation between her ears.  Her cock was rigid, but in an uninterested inertia.  She muttered, muzzy with aches, as she rolled out of bed.<br/><br/>She didn’t turn on her usual music.  First, she resolved, she would brush her teeth.  Walking to the bathroom made her conscious of the jiggling weight of her enormous breasts.  They felt ever-so-slightly tender.<br/><br/>Gerlinde stretched her arms above her head to confirm it.  And, yes, the lift of her breasts revealed them to feel puffy.  Gerlinde reckoned she might be getting her period soon.  Despite the attendant discomforts, that made her feel better—an affirmation that she was still very much a woman.<br/><br/>“Yay for my eggs.” Gerlinde yawned, still stretching.  Half-hearted as it sounded, she meant it.  Any joy it might have brought was banished as she had to squint into the bleary light that came on in the bathroom.<br/><br/>What did she do last night?  Gerlinde did not remember drinking.  Reminiscence was aborted as she caught a sight of her face in the mirror.  She grunted in anger and dove out of view.<br/><br/>Snatching up her peaked SS cap from the top of the toilet seat, Gerlinde seated it on her tousled hair.  She did not like seeing herself in the mirror without the cap.  It always made her feel nauseous and slightly alien.  She felt like that enough this morning, for whatever reason.<br/><br/>With the grinning skull shining from her hairline above the shiny black bill of the cap, Gerlinde leaned in to the mirror.  She stuck her tongue out.<br/><br/>No, no evidence of drinking or being sick.  She fetched up a see-through blue plastic toothbrush – a crude, general issue instrument that was already beginning to wilt its bristles from her relentlessly hard brushings – and squeezed toothpaste on it.  The paste looked like caulk, and Gerlinde was distracted with reflection on the one summer that she had convinced her mother to let her fix the roof of their family's home, what with her father recovering from a minor bout with arrhythmia.  She had really enjoyed fitting it together—pasting on the cake-brown shingles, thick enough to look almost tasty.<br/><br/>Gerlinde began brushing.  She figured she’d probably never see the old place again.  It had been two months since she wrote her parents to report that she had survived her scrape with an exploding tank on the front lines.  The letter had been painfully terse, lean and raw the way the skin of a scraped knee was.  She had left out the details of her new anatomy.<br/><br/>Spitting into the sink, she tried to remember if omitting those details had been a deliberate deceit or if she had still been in denial.  She supposed it didn’t matter.  She wouldn’t see the old place or her folks again.  If she was lucky.<br/><br/>Twisting her lips so that she could watch herself scrub like a manic chimney sweep at her molars, Gerlinde realized she didn’t feel so wistful about being estranged from her old life.  She was a new person now, she reasoned—same memories, same qualities, different world.  It was like the musical technique Zappa used; Gerlinde tried to recall the name.<br/><br/>Xenochrony.  That was it.<br/><br/>Gerlinde’s face went stark with shock and she nearly dropped the toothbrush.  She stared into the mirror as the realization hit her.<br/><br/>Lisle.  Kitty.  Whoever.  Gerlinde remembered what she had done to the girl.  That was enough of a shock to have her staring.  But it led to remembering where she had left the girl – kitty; whatever – last night.<br/><br/>Flossing would have to wait, Gerlinde thought as she scampered from the bathroom, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.  She made for the kitchen, imagining her bare legs and feet blurring—Looney Tunes speed.  Daffy Duck’s voice echoed: Feets, don’t fail me now!<br/><br/>In the kitchen, she glanced over her shoulder.  Sure enough, there was the profile she expected to see—that she was shocked to see—tucked by the doorway into her bedroom.  It was the wicker outline of a large pet bed.  She didn’t have to notice the shape under the fluffy pink blanket to know the bed was occupied.<br/><br/>Gerlinde shook her head as she whipped open the fridge.  What had she been thinking?<br/><br/>Taking an inmate into her room?  A patient recovering from surgery no less?  No matter that she had injected a lingering sedative into Lisle at the close of their conversation.  What could have possibly entered her mind?  She must have been drunk.<br/><br/>Gerlinde grumbled as she realized she had tugged the wrong items from the refrigerator: Pomegranate juice, spinach and walnuts; her usual breakfast.  She crammed them off to one side as she grabbed what she actually wanted—protein shake, buttercream flavored.<br/><br/>Seriously—<em>seriously</em>, she thought.  What could have come over her?  Why had she offered such a thing?  Why had she gone<em>through </em>with it?  Was she really beginning to think of the girl as a pet rather than patient in possible agony?  Clipping off fingers did not a kitty make—not overnight.  Did she think her murmurings during the surgery had somehow hypnotized Lisle into this new personality?  Yes, they may have done something, but without the effects of the glutamate cascade she planned to introduce later in Lisle’s transformation, the girl still had a human mind at her disposal.  Sedated, traumatized, yes, but her full intellect.  Had she thought she was some kind of latter-day Kreskin, programming the girl?<br/><br/>Gerlinde growled again as she found herself pouring the shake into a glass.  Lisle would not be using a glass.  She glanced about for a bowl, and found a few, but they were all too small.<br/><br/>With a huff, Gerlinde resolved to settle herself.  She wanted to have a cigarette; take that time to think things over.  That was time she didn’t have, though.  Not when kitty –<em>Lisle</em>; whoever! – might wake up at any moment.  Gerlinde focused, finding her calm place.<br/><br/>She envisaged a cellar in Munich, her second boyfriend’s place, where she had enjoying her fair share of amber evenings: Prog rock and marijuana smoke billowing time about in a happy, dreamy mess.  She inhaled and smelled again how fresh that boy’s socks had always smelled.  She exhaled as if blowing out a bong hit.<br/><br/>Gerlinde felt alright.  Emotional, kind of achy, but alright.  She focused.  Things got nice and cleanly mechanical:<br/><br/>Drawer open.  Grab straw.  Check messages—only one on the phone, and the LED display on the antique, deco curvature of the black phone showed it came from Scharführer Kluge: A confirmation that the special item she had ordered made for kitty puss puss was ready and waiting inside her door in a brown paper wrapped box.<br/><br/>Gerlinde sighed and rolled her eyes again as she remembered what that special, custom-made item was.  Seriously.  What had she been thinking?<br/><br/>With the straw in the glass of buttercream protein shake and the glass in hand, Gerlinde made her way to the edge of the large pet bed.  She reflected briefly how ridiculous her little cotton panties might look, strained nearly see-through around her cock and balls.  It didn’t matter; she figured Lisle would not be in a particularly judgmental mood.<br/><br/>Lisle was still sleeping, curled in the bed under the fluffy blanket, just her snowy face peeking above its rim in a halo of brown hair.  Lisle was sponge-cleaned, emptied of the vibrator, smelling like organic soap.  Gerlinde sat beside her and watched her breathe.  As she watched, and as silence settled its satiny hand over the bedroom, Gerlinde felt a maternal glow open up inside her—fresh and new, but powerful as it was yesterday.<br/><br/>It was an intoxicating feeling and it was part of how Gerlinde had gotten into this mess.  She welcomed it all the same.  It made the bedroom seem like it belonged more to a fireside storybook than a world of gray gravel and electrified fences.  Gerlinde felt more happy than guilty as she reached out and pet Lisle’s head.<br/><br/>As she pet, she thought only of petting.  Maybe it was wrong, she reasoned.  Worse, she realized it could be dangerous.  But more than those things, it was peaceful.  It felt right.  Few things did these days, and Gerlinde allowed herself to keep petting and watching Lisle sleep for as long as it took the kitty to wake.<br/><br/>And when kitty did wake, it was to find Gerlinde gazing down, a buttercream shake between her pale thighs, petting her with a hand that smelled vaguely of toothpaste.