After the Wave

Chapter 5
Prodigal Son

Chapter Description: More on Lizzie and her quest for Richard... and dignity. Based on ideas from the community.

Chapter V: Prodigal Son

Under traditional circumstances, the sight of a barefoot, obviously-diapered 18-year-old girl exaggeratedly struggling to make her way across a cruise ship’s deck in record time would have seemed odd. But the entire boat was in chaos. Everybody had their own share of problems with which to deal.

Lizzie saw this firsthand when she eventually made it to Richard’s cabin. The door was unlocked, as her longtime boyfriend had promised-- but, as she crinkled her way into the bedroom, she heard the oddest of sounds. It reminded her of a young child tearfully huffing and puffing in resignation and shame. The sound seemed to be coming from the bathroom, whose door was practically shut, but ajar enough to let a vertical strip of light into the sleeping quarters.

The girl approached the door cautiously, then gently pushed it open.

If she hadn’t seen pictures of Richard as a child during their courtship, Lizzie would have been dumbfounded. As it was, she was horrified.

There was little Ricky Goldberg, all five years of him, sitting naked in a bathtub full of slightly-soapy water. He was being dutifully bathed by a middle-aged woman whom Lizzie recognized immediately as her boyfriend’s mother. The baby-blond five-year-old in the tub had his face screwed up in sorrow and humiliation. When he looked up and saw his girlfriend surveying the situation, his face tightened up even more and tears freely bled from his eyes. He wept openly.

The slight change in his demeanor tipped off his mother, Debra. She turned around to find Lizzie standing in the doorway. Debra reacted not one bit to the teenage girl’s bizarre attire.

“Haven’t you ever heard of knocking, little girl?” she scolded. “I’m trying to give my angelic boy a bath here.”

Lizzie found herself frozen in the doorway. She had a perfect view of every detail, but she could only mumble an embarrassed apology and stand stiffly in the doorway between the bedroom and the bathroom, her bare feet glued to the threshold.

Speaking of “stiffly,” if I might say, the Wave had not been kind to Richard, who had apparently been among the ones hit the hardest. His two-inch erection poked up from between his legs like a dandelion in June. He was helpless to do anything as his mommy mechanically, repeatedly, soaped up a washrag and bathed his hairless crotch, working suds into his thighs and penis.

Lizzie could see the intelligence in Ricky’s eyes. There was no doubt that he was her teenaged boyfriend. He was just wearing the body he’d had when he was five years old. A pleading, but wordless, version of it.

The young girl couldn’t tell whether she came to the scene too late and that the bath was nearly over, but, as a rubber ducky floated innocently from behind Rick’s back and to his side, Lizzie bore witness to the ultimate result of Debra’s hard work.

Solid white jets of semen shot from Ricky’s penis, what remained from his handful of years as a grown man, dissipating into misty clouds in the warm bathwater. Debra was either oblivious or ambivalent to her son’s orgasm. She kept going, cleaning, stroking. Ricky kept going, shooting, crying. It was the most cum he’d ever shot at once-- and the strangely empty sensation he felt immediately afterward indicated to him that it was likely the last cum he’d ever shoot.

Lizzie watched with sympathy, but still, she couldn’t move. She couldn’t move as Debra lifted her crying, soaking son out of the tub; Ricky’s penis was already wilting to one inch and the sudden rush of cool air shrunk it still further. Lizzie couldn’t move as Debra grabbed an elegant Turkish towel and dried off her little boy. It wasn’t until Debra took the naked Ricky by the hand and moved towards the doorway that Lizzie was freed, backing away to allow the two of them into the main cabin.

As she led Ricky towards the center of the room, Debra looked plaintively at Lizzie. “Honestly,” said Ricky’s mother, “I don’t know why it takes some babysitters so long to develop proper manners and common courtesy. I almost hesitate to let you babysit Ricky tonight while I spend a couple hours at the bar. But it’s a little too late to find someone with a bit more strength of character.”

Lizzie was surprised by her sudden employment as her boyfriend’s babysitter, but she had no intention of debating it. She and Ricky had to go and find answers and a solution. Or, at the very least, the assistance of others.

Or, at the very very least, some flattering outfits.

Ricky’s crying had abated slightly, the boy not wanting to look weak in front of the girl to whom he’d gladly given four years of his adolescence. It seemed like a distant memory. But he was blushing, his face as hot as a Venusian mare, as Lizzie looked at his tiny, hairless, pudgy frame. His pathetic excuse for the penis he’d proudly shared with her on numerous romantic occasions. And when his mother turned him around to ready him for his Pull-Ups, Lizzie could tell Ricky’s itty-bitty butt was blushing, too.

He had never revealed to her how late he had been to serviceable continence.

Ricky’s darkest secret was on fully-illuminated display as his mommy put him into training pants in front of his girlfriend. In a perverse variation on what had so recently happened to Elizabeth, the teenaged five-year-old stepped one foot into one leg, and his other into the opposite. Though a child of his physical age would have no reservations about allowing his mother’s face so close to his privates, Ricky’s mental age turned the experience into a slow-motion nightmare. Not until his blue racecar Pull-Ups were safely and securely hugging his crotch, the legbands tucked in by his mother’s fingertips, did the mortification of his mommy seeing him naked give way to the mortification of his girlfriend seeing him in toddlers’ underwear.

The entire experience confounded Lizzie still further. What were these bizarre and infantile items doing on a cruise line chartered to host a senior prom for a class of high-schoolers and their chaperones? Had they been placed on board in advance? In truth, the Wave had changed more than a few molecules around, and that was the explanation that escaped Lizzie as she struggled to uncover the meaning of it all.

Lizzie resolved to take Ricky to the captain’s chair. It was all she could think to do.

Debra had already left the room to while a way a couple of hours at the ship’s bar. Ricky simply sat on the ground, leaning against the bed and sucking his thumb. If he was going to be an effective companion to a girl 13 years his physical senior, he would need footwear, and he would need a shirt.

After a thorough search of every nook and cranny of the cabin, Lizzie brought Ricky a pair of tiny socks and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sneakers perfect for a kid his age. She had no such luck with locating a shirt.

So, as Lizzie took Ricky by the left hand (as his right was still having its thumb sucked), she led him out of the cabin and onto the deck, the boy clad in only socks, sneakers, and Pull-Ups. A small roll of baby fat spilled over the waistband of his training pants.

Ricky Goldberg was grateful for the warm evening seabreeze.

This story doesn’t end happily either, I’m afraid. As the duo crinkled and toddled their ways towards a captain’s chair that no longer existed, they discovered that the cruise ship’s deck had become infinite. It was just one long, long stretch of platform, repeating itself into oblivion. It was but for the grace of fate that a second boy -- this one chronologically 18, but physically two years old -- stumbled his way up to them. He was quite soaked.

Lizzie and Ricky hadn’t the supplies required to change him. So the trio simply held each other until the dimensionally-warped boat made it to port.

Elizabeth Hannon adopted both boys as her own. The two little boys played together in the bathtub, but it was more out of a sense of emotional necessity. And, as she bathed them, Lizzie could only shit her diapers. It was hard raising two babies when she was essentially one herself.