Downstairs, the basement light hummed and flickered as I sorted the basket into piles—Dad’s boxers, Mom’s sweaters, my own balled up running shorts.
I fished Dad’s white business shirts from the heap and tossed them in with a scoop of detergent.
One of Mom’s bras fell out. My heart leapt into my throat.
I stood there cradling it in my palm—beige, padded, the underwire cool and alien against my skin. I’d grown up with these things hanging from the bathroom doorknob, sometimes even traipsing around the house as a toddler with a pair of them on my head as an elaborate hat.
My hand trembled. This wasn’t just Mom’s anymore. This fit me now. The shape, the contour, even the faint perfume of her detergent and body lotion, all of it mapped directly onto the flesh and bone I was inhabiting. I was, in the truest sense, wearing her skin.
Above me, the floorboards creaked. My heart trip-hammered, and I froze mid-sort, waiting for a sign that she might come thundering down the steps. Nothing.
My hands moved—slowly—over my collarbones, then slid down, tentative, hesitant, to the curve of my chest. I pressed, just for a second, feeling the sweep and give of it, the resistance, the way the flesh rebounded under pressure. It was impossible, unspeakable, that this was me, yet every nerve ending screamed that it was. I tried to take a scientific interest: this is the mammary gland, this is all perfectly normal, but I might as well have been dissecting a live wire.
It didn’t feel like me, not in the least, but it was there, and I could not deny the strangeness of it. The thought flickered: “When this is over, will I be grateful or haunted by knowing what that felt like?”
I stood up and toyed with the cotton belt around my waist – the one holding Mom’s wrap dress shut, knotted off-center like a bathrobe, cinching the fabric against the new curves of my body. I stared at the knot for a long time, debating whether to pull it open and see myself, really see, or to leave it alone.
The knot slid away and the fabric fell, one side then the other, folding open over the strange geometry of my chest. I’d seen cleavage before, sure, in a thousand glossy ads or peeking out of shirts at school, but to see it from this angle—down my own front, the way the skin shadowed and pressed—was uncanny.
For a minute I just stood there, dress open, arms slack, gazing down, lost in two layers of confusion: the weird erotic pulse, and the deeper, more existential recoil.
I refastened the dress with splayed, trembling fingers and dumped the bras and underwear in with the rest of the laundry.
In the bathroom, I found myself facing the mirror. I reached for her toothbrush—a sickeningly intimate act. I saw myself—her—spit and rinse. The mundanity was what made it so grotesque.
I had to undress, too. I peeled off the dress, letting it drop to the floor. My arms and shoulders were hers. I unhooked the bra and let it dangle from my arms, then off and into the hamper. I noticed the stretch marks, the faint blue veins lacing up from the armpit, the birthmark I’d always seen on her but never cared to really look at. All of it was scrawled over the chest and belly that I’d never paid more than half a minute’s consideration to in life.
Her pajamas were folded at the foot of the bed, soft and pale blue, smelling of her—of me, now, I guess. Slipping into the nightgown felt obscene. I felt large and exposed, my heart beating with anxious, arrhythmic thuds as I climbed under the covers.
Then there was the business of sharing the bed. Dad was already in there, snoring lightly, his open mouth letting out little rasps, his forehead slack and defenseless. I tried not to breathe too loudly as I slipped in beside him, careful to keep to my mother’s side of the mattress.
I spent a long time cataloguing sensations that were never meant for me: the slack weight of breasts, the tangle of longer hair at the nape of my neck, the unfamiliar heft in the hips and thighs.
My hands looked strange in the dark, smaller and more elegant, the veins and knuckles less pronounced, the nails painted, glossy and feminine and faintly blue in the streetlight bleeding through the blinds. I pressed my palm to my face, feeling the contours of the bone, the delicate ridge of cheek, the soft pad of lip, then traced the edge of my jaw, which no longer had the rough catch of stubble. The touch of my own hand felt foreign, and so did the flesh receiving it.
I lay awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling, listening to Dad's steady, oblivious breathing beside me. I wondered how long this would last, if tomorrow I'd wake up back in my own body, or if this was permanent.
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