The Sunday Game: An Abstract

This abstract is the opening scene of a classic novel by Alan Barrie that was the all time number one bestseller in the classic publishing line, Lee Brewster’s MARDI GRAS PRESS. A revised edition of this classic is now available in a Kindle Edition on Amazon, but this opening chapter stands on its own just fine.

Chapter I

I can’t tell you how much I owe my Aunt Emily. With gentleness, warmth, and understanding, she took me in after my parents died. I was only eight years old, but she guided me through my grief with such firm, soft reason that I soon took up again the strands of my young boy life — schoolwork, sports and games, friends and family.

Aunt Emily was already past 60, had been ill, and was largely bedridden. She was fairly well off, and we lived with two servants in a fashionable suburb of Chicago. I went to the good local public schools. My friends were from there and from our neighborhood. My home life with Aunt Emily was comfortable, warm, and safe.

By age ten, I was already intelligent enough to understand how lucky I was to have Aunt Emily, how horrible some alternatives could have been. She loved me, and for that love and for all she gave me, I loved her too very much. I would have done anything for her.

It was when I was ten, after I was there about a year and a half, that she first nervously asked me if I would play what we came to call “The Sunday Game.” I couldn’t possibly say no.

I’ll never forget it. It was late on a Sunday morning. We were alone in the house. The servants always went to their rural home in southern Illinois from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning.

I had been lying on the carpeted floor of Aunt Emily’s bedroom, in a white t-shirt and jeans, reading, my hair falling around my face. Aunt Emily had been reading in her bed. I felt her eyes on me.

“What’s the matter, Aunt Emily?” I asked.

“Nothing, my dear,” she said. “I’ve been trying to work up the courage to ask you a favor.”

“What is it?” I asked, getting to my knees and leaning my elbows on the side of her bed.

“You’re not going to like it,” she said. “But I wonder if you’ll do it for me anyway?”

“Tell me,” I said.

“You know that many years ago, I lost a daughter to pneumonia. I’ve been thinking a lot lately that she was just your age now when she died.

“What you don’t know is that you look exactly her. She would have been your first cousin, remember? But you look so much like her, you could have been brother and sister.”

“So, what do you want to ask me to do?”

“Come here,” she said, brushing my hair forward with her fingers so that it fell over my eyes like bangs. “You see,” she said, “with your hair around your face like that, you look even more like her.”

Finally, she was able to get it out. “Will you play a game with me this afternoon? After lunch, I’m going to get out some of her old clothes. Will you let me dress you up in them? Just once. Dress you up like a girl? I want to see how much you’ll look like her. It would be nice to have a girl who looks like her around for an afternoon . . . even if it’s just pretend.”

It sounded crazy to me, and I didn’t really want to do it. But I loved her so much; and I knew how much I owed her. It seemed to mean so much to her. I told her that I would do it.

After we had lunch, she told me to go play in my room for a while, and she’d get the clothes ready. She asked me to take a bath before I came back and gave me some stuff to put in the tub. She told me to wear just a robe when I came back.

After playing in my room for a while, I started to run the bath. I poured in the stuff she gave me. It smelled girly — like spring flowers — and was just a little bit oily.

I soaked in the warm tub about ten minutes and when I got out, I smelled with the perfume of spring flowers too. And my skin felt silky.

I walked to her room in my robe. Laying on the foot of the bed were some girl’s clothes. Softly, almost whispering as if nervous, Aunt Emily told me what to do. She handed me a pair of girl’s panties . . . with no fly.

Step by step, I followed her instructions.

Standing, with my robe on and my back to Aunt Emily, I put on the pair of soft cotton girl’s panties, white with little pink and blue flowers. First, I put my left foot through the leg hole that was bordered with blue cotton lace. Then my right foot through the other leg hole. Slowly, I pulled the panties up my legs. I noticed that the flower print was on the outside only as I pulled the soft white cotton up over my little penis and behind.

Now, Aunt Emily asked me to take off my robe and face her. It felt so funny standing there in front of Aunt Emily in girl’s panties, just in girl’s panties, panties with little pink and blue flowers and with pale blue lacey trim around the leg holes, a boy, naked except for girl’s panties. For the first time in my life, I felt a little stiffness come into my penis. I didn’t really understand it, but I was embarrassed about it anyway even though I was pretty sure Aunt Emily wasn’t noticing anything.

Next, she told me to put on the girl’s socks she handed me. They were very thin, white, and long, and when I first pulled them on, they covered my knees. But Aunt Emily showed me how to fold them down to right below my knees. I noticed that there was a subtle diamond pattern woven into them that caught the light. They looked delicate and pretty.

A little girl’s under vest came next. It matched the panties with little pink and blue flowers. The neck was scooped low, front and back. The tiny pale blue bow pressed into the center of the neckline sat tight against my flat white chest right between my covered-up flat pink nipples.

Aunt Emily picked up a party dress. She bunched it in her hands and told me to lift my arms over my head, face her, and slip my hands through the sleeves as she let it settle down over my body. I’d never felt anything quite like it before . . . the soft material floating down around me . . . so this is what it felt like to put a dress on.

Even I could tell that the dress was already by then a little bit out of style. The top was black velvet. Tight to my slim torso. Puffy cap sleeves. A scoop neck front and back showed off my white smooth upper chest and back against the black velvet. The velvet went below my waist, but at my hips, flared out into a red and black gingham plaid skirt. All of a sudden, it felt so funny having bare legs, bare skin all the way up to my panties under the tent of my skirt.

As I turned my back to Aunt Emily so she could zip the zipper, I got a strong whiff of the perfume of spring flowers that I remembered was coming from me . . . and I suddenly felt faint.

Aunt Emily grabbed me as I started to fall and said, “What’s the matter, baby?”

I said, “I don’t know. I feel so funny. This feels so strange. Wait a second. It’s okay. I’m okay. What’s next?”

“Here, put these on,” she said.

They were patent leather, of course. They were black and shiny. As I held them up in front of me, I could see my face in them and below my face, my scoop neckline. My fingers weren’t used to doing the tiny buckles, so Aunt Emily had to help me.

Fully dressed in girl’s clothes, I sat on the edge of the bed as Aunt Emily brushed my hair into soft waves around my face. As she worked from behind, I stared down at my two knees and the four or five inches of my thin, bare thighs that were sticking out from the short hem of my dress. In a slow rhythm, I kicked my feet in thin white socks and black patent leather shoes with silver buckles.

Aunt Emily dusted my face with a little powder. I almost couldn’t believe it when she told me to face her, and she opened a tube of pale pink lipstick. She slowly, carefully put lipstick on my lips. Then she painted my short fingernails with pink polish.

Aunt Emily got out of bed and walked with me to the full-length mirror in her room while my nails were drying.

I couldn’t believe it as I stared at myself. It all hadn’t taken that long. As I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t believe it.

Suddenly, I was a girl.

My thin, hairless, bare legs sure looked like a girl’s legs for the several inches between the top of the socks and my skirt hem.

My lips had pink lipstick on them. And with my hair brushed forward like it was, my face sure looked just like a girl’s face. My nails were pink. My dress fit perfectly. I could feel the air around my thighs, and I thought of the pink and blue little flowers on my panties.

Aunt Emily reached around me and fastened a heart locket on a thin gold chain around my neck so that it dangled against my bare chest above my scooped neckline. She gave me a gold bracelet watch to put on my wrist.

“What shall we call you?” she asked.

“Don’t you want to call me by your daughter’s name?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t really want you to be her, to take her place. I just wanted to have a girl around the house this afternoon. This is so nice. You look so wonderful, so natural . . . and … so  . . . ” (she hesitated, but then seemed to decide just to say it out), “so pretty, so very pretty. Would you be willing to do this for me every once in a while, on Sunday?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It feels awfully funny.”

“Well, you don’t have to decide now. But what shall we call you today?”

“Chrissy,” I said immediately, and I didn’t know why.

“Right. Chrissy you’ll be.”

“Now, Chrissy, here’s a handbag for you with a long shoulder strap to complete the outfit. Every girl needs a purse. You wear it like this.”

It was patent leather to match the shoes. A little envelope of a bag on a thin strap. I put the strap over my shoulder and rested my hand on it. My pink nails glistened.

Under Aunt Emily’s instructions, I tried walking around the room to feel what it was like to have a skirt moving around my legs. Aunt Emily showed me how to sit, how to smooth my skirt under me as I sat down, how to keep my knees together and cross my ankles. For a while I walked right out of the room and around the house … down and up the stairs. The hem of my skirt tickled my thighs as it swung when I walked, and I found myself watching how the skirt molded itself around my leg as I climbed each stair. Even when I was out of the room without Aunt Emily watching me, I found myself feeling, moving differently . . . automatically . . . moving like a girl. Every time I passed a mirror, I was amazed. I looked totally like a pretty little girl, a girl a little younger than my real age of ten.

I spent all that day as a girl. I read. We watched television. I even ate dinner as a girl. By the end of the day I was very used to it … smoothing my skirt as I sat down, crossing my knees, being kind of delicate with my hands, even thinking about stuff I was watching on TV a little differently. It sure did feel different than being a boy. But not bad.

Chapter II

Aunt Emily seemed to be hesitant to suggest the Sunday Game again the following Sunday. But, in fact, although I hadn’t been thinking about it constantly all week, as I went through my normal boy’s routines of schoolwork and play, it had been on my mind.

As the week progressed, I realized that I was actually looking forward to playing the Sunday Game again. Probably because it was so secret, with just the two of us in the house and only the two of us in on it. And because of the sense of loving intimacy it created between my much-loved aunt and myself, surprisingly for a ten-year-old boy, I wasn’t at all embarrassed by the Game. I wanted to do it again. As long as we were just the two of us alone in the house when we did it.

So, on Sunday morning, when Aunt Emily didn’t mention the Game, I brought it up myself. “Aren’t we going to play the Sunday Game?” I asked.

“What’s that?” she responded.

“You know, where you dress me up, and I make believe I’m a girl.”

“Do you want to . . . really?”

“Sure. It was fun.”

“That makes me so happy. Well then, go ahead, take your bath. Here’s some perfumed bath oil and some bubble bath for you to use.”

So, that’s how it came to pass that we played the Sunday game every week for years.

Tags: crossdressing, featured, fiction

Category: Fiction