Forever Magic

Chapter 1
A Strange Delivery

For Ethan Alexander, it began like any ordinary day. The plan was simple in that there was no plan. It was a Tuesday. No. It wasn’t even that particular. It was an any-given, plain old, same old everyday weekday. He would go to work like always, bash the keyboard for 7 hours like always, and finally come home and enjoy beer and age-old sitcom reruns, like always.

Did this apparently dull life bother our protaganist? After 20 years of it since leaving college full of aspirations? Even Ethan himself would concede ... not really. It was a comfortable, sustainable pattern. Ethan had quickly realised towards the end of his 20s that merely fantasising about the wonderful things he could make of his life while under the influence of longterm-lethal amounts of alcohol was not only more fun but rather easier than any real attempt at advancement. This, then, was how he found his life in the morning.

It was an innocent knock at the front door that jolted Ethan off one such train of thought on the morning in question. It had to be the mailman, of course. But what reason would there be for him to knock? thought Ethan, quietly rising from his bed, wondering in the process whether there was anyway he could possibly avoid facing strangers at this raggedy-looking hour. He couldn’t recall ordering anything recently; though, walking from the kitchen through the hall, he racked his brains thinking through the numerous things he’d ordered that had simply never showed up. It had, surely, to be one of those, he guessed with a faint stab of excitement.

"Mr. Alexander?"

"Yah, that’s me."

"Small package for you, if you’d just sign - right there."

Ethan obediently scribbled his name, or something ambiguously approaching it, curiously eyeing the small packet in the mailman’s hand. The shape and size of the mysterious item didn’t seem to fit any of the prodigal purchases he’d previously considered it might contain. He thanked the mailman and disappeared back inside, picking at the opening of the packet even while walking back to the comforting scent of his favourite coffee emanating from the kitchen.

The second thing that occurred to Ethan after opening the packet was that there was no accompanying delivery note, no invoice, no, nothing of the kind within. No explanation, then, for the first thing he naturally noticed - what he found, removed, and placed, agog, on the polished table top next to his matching white latte mug. Nothing in this mystery delivery but a spring-scented little girl’s pair of panties. White, cotton, utterly non-descript, just a pair of panties, "Ages 7-8" printed on the label in the plainest of fonts.

Ethan took his eyes off the strange delivery to check the time. It was, he mused habitually, time to go to work. He put the panties back in the packet and put them in the middle of the table. He’d resume this mystery after work, he told himself.

Approaching the front door, however, something strange happened. Ethan had always considered himself quite the scatterbrain, but what he felt with overpowering spontaneity was nothing like his usual distractions. Reaching for the door, he realised that he couldn’t focus on anything but the strange underwear, and that every move he made away from them made the feeling only more powerful. Turning the handle, he realised almost with embarrassment that he was inexplicably hornier than he had ever been in his life, like his very sex could explode at any second; and Ethan knew, deep down, that there was no way he was leaving the house. Something, like a voice, was simply telling him this. He wasn’t leaving until he did something. He put his bag down by the door and walked, a little wobbly, back to the kitchen. He needed to see those things again ... so badly. He knew it was ridiculous ... but he’d never felt like this before.