Sundays were the one day of the week I liked to let myself wander through town with no purpose. This one was no different. I threw on a gray shirt and jeans and looked myself over in the mirror. Brown eyes, thin, and a mop of hair on my head. Average in every way.
I headed out the door bound for an eclectic neighborhood I’d never visited. After grabbing a coffee and strolling for an hour I happened across a magic shop delicately crammed between a tattoo parlor and a record store. I popped in for a quick look - browsing through card decks, ouija boards, and old books explaining everything from how to brew Wiccan tea to how to make someone fall in love with you.
The jar sat on the highest shelf of the magic shop, behind a row of cracked porcelain masks and dusty bottles labeled things like Moon Milk and Widow’s Salt. I almost missed it.
It was small, squat, and sealed with black wax. The honey inside glowed dark amber, thick as syrup, with little gold flecks suspended in it. A handwritten label curled around the glass:
For the man who wants more of himself.
I laughed under my breath. “Cute.” The shopkeeper, a narrow old woman with silver rings on every finger, looked up from behind the counter.
“That one is not cute,” she said.
I turned the jar in my hand. “What does it do?”
“It gives appetite,” she said. “Weight. Warmth. Hair. Presence.”
My face went hot before I could stop it. I was twenty-three and built like a coat hanger. Narrow shoulders, flat chest, soft chin, patchy stubble that never became anything no matter how long I waited. I had spent years wanting to be bigger. Not gym-bro cut. Not pretty. Bigger in the way certain men were bigger: thick, hairy, solid, impossible to miss. Men with bellies that filled out flannel shirts, beards that swallowed their jaws, voices that sounded like gravel in a barrel. Men who got called bears.
At home, in my quiet little rental house at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac, I set it on the kitchen counter and stared at it like it might stare back.
“One spoonful,” I said aloud. “It’s not like it’ll work anyway.”
The wax broke with a soft crack. The smell hit me immediately: honey, smoke, pine needles, warm skin. It made my mouth flood.
I dipped a spoon in. The honey stretched in a golden thread, reluctant to let go of itself. I tasted it. For a second, nothing happened. Then heat bloomed behind my ribs.
I gripped the counter. “Oh.”
It rolled through me slowly, down into my stomach, up into my throat, out along my arms. My skin prickled. My T-shirt tightened faintly across my chest. I ran to the bathroom mirror.
At first I thought it was the lighting. Then I leaned closer and saw my jaw looked sharper, darker with new stubble. Not a full beard. Not even close. But more than I’d had that morning.
I smiled. My reflection smiled back, hungry-eyed.
The next day at work, nobody said anything at first. I sat in my cubicle and tried not to touch my face. By ten, I’d gone to the bathroom three times to admire the stubble that had thickened overnight into a real shadow. My cheeks, usually smooth, were rough under my fingers. My shirt clung differently too. Not much. Just enough that I felt aware of myself every time I moved.
At lunch, Marcus from accounting passed me near the vending machines and did a double take.
I shrugged. “Just forgot to shave.”
He grinned. “You should keep forgetting.”
That was all he said. But it followed me home. I told myself I wouldn’t touch the honey again. I made it until 8:17 p.m.
“One more,” I whispered, standing barefoot in the kitchen.
The second spoonful was easier. My body seemed to know what to do with it. The heat came faster, thicker, almost pleasurable in how overwhelming it was. My back arched. My knuckles pressed into the counter until they hurt.
Hair prickled across my chest. I yanked my shirt off. Fine dark curls were spreading from the center of my chest, gathering between my pecs, trailing down toward my stomach in a line that hadn’t existed before. My belly, always flat and forgettable, had softened outward slightly, warm and rounded under my palm.
My voice came out lower when I laughed.
By morning, I had to shave my neck but couldn’t bring myself to touch my cheeks. The beard was still short, but it was real now, dark and dense, with a mustache beginning to push over my upper lip.
“Dude,” Marcus said. “You look different.”
“Good different?” I asked, too quickly.
He looked me up and down. “Uhh. Very good different.”
That day, men looked at me. They noticed me. Not everyone. Not dramatically. But enough.
A guy at the coffee shop held my gaze too long. A man in the elevator smiled at me and said, “Nice beard.” My own reflection in the dark glass of the office lobby looked older, broader, less apologetic.
By Thursday night, the jar was half empty.
Each spoonful came with a promise.
Then my shoulders spread until old shirts pinched under the arms.
Then my voice dropped so low the automated phone system at work stopped recognizing me.
Then my beard came in all at once, a thick black-brown mass that covered my cheeks, jaw, and neck, with a heavy mustache that brushed my lip and made me look like some lost mountain man standing in a fluorescent bathroom.
I loved it. That was the worst part. I loved rubbing both hands through it. I loved the dark hair thickening over my chest, my shoulders, my forearms. I loved my belly growing heavy and round, no longer something I could suck in, but something powerful and warm that pushed against my shirts and made me look lived-in, animal, real.
I loved the way my hunger sharpened. I ate everything. Eggs, toast, steak from the fridge at midnight, peanut butter from the jar, spoonfuls of honey after every meal. Not the magic honey. Regular honey. It tasted thin now, almost insulting.
By Friday morning, I could barely fit into my work clothes. The buttons of my largest shirt strained over my belly. My beard had grown wild overnight, spreading high on my cheeks and down my throat. My hair was longer too, thicker, unruly. I looked like an older brother I’d never had. Or a father. Or a warning.
In the office lobby, the security guard frowned at me.
“It’s me,” I said, giving my name.
He blinked at the sound of my voice.
He stared at the photo: skinny, clean-faced, nervous. Then he stared at me.
“How old is that photo?” he said.
I tried to laugh, but it came out like a growl.
Upstairs, my coworkers barely hid their reactions. Some were fascinated. Some were afraid. Marcus didn’t joke anymore. He watched me from across the break room as I devoured two vending-machine sandwiches and wiped mustard from my mustache with the back of my hand.
“What the fuck happened to you? Are you having an allergic reaction all over your body? Are you okay?” he asked.
Something in his tone irritated me. The concern. The softness. The assumption he could ask. I stepped closer before I meant to. Marcus stiffened.
“I said I’m fine,” I rumbled.
The room went silent. I went home early. That night, I stood in the kitchen with the jar in my hand. There was only a little left. A dark golden smear clinging to the bottom.
I could stop. I should have stopped. My reflection stared back from the black window above the sink: huge shoulders, heavy belly, beard spilling down my chest, eyes bright and feverish beneath a lowered brow. I looked like every man I had ever wanted to be, exaggerated until he became something else.
“Last time,” I said. But my voice did not sound like mine. I scraped the jar clean.
The final change came in my sleep. I dreamed of trees pressing close around the house. Of digging my fingers into bark. Of smoke, meat, cold air, wet leaves. Of men looking at me with fear and wanting mixed together until I couldn’t tell the difference.
When I woke, the bed frame was cracked. My feet were at the end of the mattress. My body filled the room with heat and musk. Hair covered me in a thick dark pelt across my chest, belly, shoulders, back, arms. My beard had become enormous, bushy and untamed, with a broad mustache that hid my mouth unless I pulled it aside. My belly rested heavy in my lap when I sat up.
I strained to stand and my shoulders brushed against the door frame as I left my room.
“No,” I whispered. It came out like thunder.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. A message from Marcus.
Are you ok? I’m really worried about you.
I looked at my hands. Bigger. Rougher. Nails thicker than they should have been. I typed slowly.
Then I deleted it. What was the point?
By afternoon, I had eaten almost everything in the fridge. By evening, I found an old cigar box in the back of a drawer, left by the previous tenant. I had hated the smell when I moved in. Now I opened it and inhaled. My whole body relaxed.
I sat on the back porch under the darkening sky, massive and shirtless, belly fur shifting in the cool air, beard spilling over my chest. The first cigar tasted like smoke and earth and inevitability.
A neighbor’s dog barked at the fence. I turned my head. The barking stopped.
My phone buzzed again. Then again. Friends. My mother. Marcus. I ignored them all.
Somewhere inside me, the skinny kid I used to be was panicking. He wanted to call the magic shop. He wanted to beg the old woman for a cure. He wanted his badge photo to match his face again. But I swallowed that voice until he was nothing but an echo.
I leaned back in the porch chair, felt it creak under my weight, and dragged one hand through the enormous beard that had taken over my face.
The honey jar sat empty on the kitchen counter behind me. For the first time all week, I did not tell myself it was the last time. There was no more honey. And there was no going back.
