I padded down the hall the next morning, hips swaying more than I meant them to, nightgown swishing at my thighs. Dad had already gone to work.
I found Mom in the kitchen.
“Call the high school,” she hissed.
I cleared my throat and dialed the attendance office, fingers shaking.
When the secretary answered, I announced, “This is, uh, Mary McKenzie. My son is sick. He’ll be home today.”
The false maternal cadence in my voice sounded practiced, almost convincing—if you didn’t know the original, you might believe the copy.
We spent the morning Googling, as if by sheer force of search terms we might undo what had happened. “Body swap real?” Mom typed, hunched over the kitchen laptop. I scrolled through forums where the answers ranged from the skeptical (“Check your meds, bro”) to the terrifyingly earnest (“Try a blood ritual under a full moon”). Nothing. I grew dizzy with hope and then hopelessness, the two emotions cycling over and over.
At noon, after hours spent trawling the internet for explanations and cures, Mom glanced up from the glow of her phone and told me—her own voice, weirdly empty of affect—to go take a shower and change. She didn’t look at me directly as she said it, as if seeing her own face attached to my posture and slouch might break her will to keep pretending we could fix this by lunch.
I dragged myself up the stairs and shut myself into the master bathroom. I locked the door behind me with deliberate slowness, hoping to stall the encounter with the mirror, but it was waiting for me anyway. The angle caught me off guard—slightly hunched, in my mother’s faded nightgown.
I tugged at the nightgown, hands trembling. The fabric resisted, as if it, too, didn’t want to let go, but then slackened and pooled around my feet, exposing the pale slopes and angles beneath.
Taking off the nightgown and unhooking the bra felt like I was doing something wrong, even though I’d done it the night before.
I reached behind myself, fumbling for the tiny clasp of the bra, fingers clumsy on the hooks. Eventually the catch sprung loose, and the straps fell with a snap against my shoulders.
The weight of my new chest shifted, settling with a slow, almost resentful jiggle, and I felt a flush crawl up my neck.
The bra had left marks on her body, I realized. There were faint red indentations from where the seams of the bra had pressed overnight, little pale lines at the shoulders, a weal right across the midsection, left by the elastic band.
I stared at her breasts in the mirror for a long time, unmoving, the unfiltered bright light above the vanity exposing every subtle color on her—my—skin: the faint dusting of darker pigment, the scattering of freckles, the pinkish-brown aureoles so matter-of-fact and, at this angle, maternal. I brought up a hand and hovered it over the new topography, not quite daring to make contact.
My memory served up an image of my real mother, in this exact position, years ago: I was twelve, maybe eleven, standing in the hallway outside my parents’ bedroom, half-squashed behind the just-barely ajar door. My mother—real, living, preposterously normal Mary McKenzie—was getting dressed for a dinner party, back to me, hair up, the zipper of a mauve cocktail dress stuck halfway. She had no idea I was there. She wriggled, then sighed, then slipped the shoulder straps down and let the dress slide all the way off, standing in her full mother-animal nakedness, completely unembarrassed.
My mother noticed the door wasn’t all the way shut, but she didn’t flinch or cover herself. She just caught my eye in the mirror, gave a tiny, unamused smile, and turned back to her dress, jiggling her breast into the right cup before yanking up the zipper.
I remembered that moment again now, standing in her bathroom, in her skin, the unfiltered light exposing every flaw. I saw the same practical indifference, the same disregard for frailty or shame. Her breasts were not the cartoon or magazine kind, not glossy or even symmetrical; they were a little drooped, their mass at odds with the slenderness of her ribcage, the stretch and splay of gravity.
This was a monument to years, to childbirth and stress and the maintenance of family, to the constant indifferent war of living. And now, somehow, impossibly, the machinery belonged to me.
This was the body I’d spent years in orbit around, the source of half my DNA and all of my infant food. I had inherited it, not by death but by accident—by a freak physics event, a hoax or a curse or maybe just God’s own prank.
I wanted to run, to jump out of the skin, but at the same time I didn’t. I wanted to learn its secrets, to know what the machinery could do.
I pressed a fingertip, against the soft upper curve. The flesh yielded. I slid the finger downward, tracing the orb’s fullness, then the pale slope beneath, the soft, damp-sheened undercurve that grazed the ribs. My stomach turned, not with revulsion but a queasy, vertiginous awe.
I cupped the breast with my palm, feeling the heft, the gentle swing as I lifted and released. The nipple pebbled instantly, gooseflesh radiating outward across the skin.
Every time I’d pretended not to look at the older girls at the swim club as they twisted the strings of their bikini tops, arching their backs to dry in the sun; all the moments I’d held my breath at sleepovers when someone’s older sister or mom walked by in a towel.
My reflection was both an invitation and a dare. My mind flickered back over the millions of hours spent in digital rooms: Xvideos tabs under the covers, the warm flex of my own cock in hand.
Now the script had flipped, and I was tasked with both possessing and experiencing the thing.
I could not look away because there was no away; the anatomy was unremittingly present, mine by default.
My hand hovered, then settled.I wanted to let go, but my hand did not. Instead, it traced a circle around the aureole, marveling at the concentric ruffles and the impossible softness of the skin, until the nipple furled tighter and the memory of imagined suckling, infantile and pure, collided with all those other forbidden images.
These were my mother’s teats, the source that had fed and sustained me before I even had language, and now they were my own.
I envisioned some invisible chain running backwards through time, every woman in my bloodline passing down the same set of architectural plans—each blueprint slightly revised, but all constructed for the same double purpose: to nurture and to outlast. I saw the first teenage girl with these breasts, giddy and terrified in a prairie sod house, then her daughter, and then her daughter’s daughter, the shapes migrating from generation to generation until they finally landed here, on me.
There was no point postponing the shower any longer. I stepped in and cranked the water, bracing myself for the cold, but it sputtered to life warm, almost hot, and the steam fogged up the mirror immediately.
The spray drew a red blush up my chest, the heat soaking in everywhere, loosening the tense, unfamiliar ligaments. I closed my eyes and let the water pummel me for a while.
I washed my hair, though I’d never done it like this before—long, careful strokes, holding the length in both hands, working the shampoo to the ends with the heel of my palm the way I’d seen her do in the rare moments she let me watch, the water dragging it into a slimy rope against my spine.
Her armpits were soft and vulnerable, hairless in a way wholly unattainable for a teenage boy. The legs were long and lean, the musculature familiar in theory but foreign in the way they curved out, never in. The inner thighs were warmer still, thin-skinned and insistent, and I kept expecting that, at any second, my real mother would appear behind the curtain and hurl me out of the room for going too far.
Instead, there was only the hiss of the water and my own unsteady breath. I wanted to be efficient, to finish quickly, but my hands kept hesitating, as if registering the enormity of what each contact meant.
I tried to wash the breasts as if they were just another body part, like elbows or knees, but they refused to play along. They responded. They swelled and shifted in the lather, refusing anonymity, demanding awareness.
I tried to focus on the simple mechanics of showering, the utilitarian choreography of soap and scrub and rinse. The breasts—my breasts—were easy enough to justify: they had to be washed, didn’t they? Skin was skin, even if it responded.
But the next step, the final frontier, loomed below. I stood, dripping, the suds swirling down my borrowed stomach. It filled me with a cold, electric dread; my brain recoiled, refused to resolve the geometry of the thing. I thought if I squeezed my eyes shut, if I lathered blindly and fast, I could get it over with and never think about it again.
I tried, I really did. I told myself: This is not a violation. This is not significant. This is the routine maintenance of a body that, by some clerical error in the universe, now belongs to you—however temporarily. You’re not a pervert, you’re not a freak, you’re just a caretaker.
When my soapy hand slid down, over the new convexity of hip bone, and the first touch of wet curl encountered the tip of my finger, I almost recoiled. The patch of pubic hair was not the wild, chaotic jungle I’d harbored in my old body, but a slim, precise triangle. I felt an intrusive, involuntary pride: my mother kept it tidy.
Beneath, the vulva looked nothing like the airbrushed diagrams from sex ed or the monstrous close-ups from porn. It was a shy, folded thing, its textures subtle and ambiguous.
When my finger made contact with the labia, the sensation nearly shorted out my brain. There was no script for this, no cultural referent for the feeling of touching your own mother’s genitals from the inside out. It was horrifying.
I tried to move fast, a janitorial swab, in and out and done. I lathered the outside, then the gentle, furrowed lips, careful not to push too deep.
But my hand slipped, and two fingers nestled right where the seam split, the place that, in theory, contained the clitoris.
I yanked my hand away as if I’d touched a burner. My cheeks flushed, my vision tunneled, and I found myself staring at the fuzzy outline of her—my—body in the foggy shower glass.
I’d like to say I stopped, that I rinsed off, toweled dry, and retreated. But I couldn’t help myself.
But I was still a perverted teenager.
My hand drifted back toward the place it had just left, the magnet of curiosity pulling it in.
I let my hand linger, then move in a slow, trembling circle, just around the perimeter of the bundle of nerves. The heat built instantly, radiating along my pelvis and up through my stomach, and I could feel my legs beginning to shake with the force of it. I was so simultaneously mortified and enthralled that my brain split in two: one part cataloguing the horror, the other part helplessly riding the waves as they came.
A terrible, fascinated hunger took hold of me—a need that was not quite sexual, not quite maternal, but somewhere in the swampy, vibrating borderland between—and my free hand strayed back to the breast, cupping and then squeezing it with the same persistent curiosity that powered my other hand lower, between my legs. The mixture of sensations was dizzying, a queasy, addictive feedback loop: as my fingertips circled the aureole, imperceptibly firmer now with heat and blood, my other hand wrung impossible shocks of pleasure from the new, nerve-dense territory of my crotch. I was groping at myself—no, not myself, my mother, but in some perverse and totally accurate way, yes, myself—with both hands, unable to stop or even slow down. The hunger built rapidly, irrational and desperate.
My thoughts stuttered, rewound, replayed: the unspooling reel of every time I’d watched my mother’s hands as she cooked or arranged flowers or buttoned her blouse.
Every memory of her, every love and hate, every brief, embarrassing touch—her hand on my feverish forehead, the idle way she would rest her palm on my shoulder as she corrected my grammar—converged on me now.
But then, as if forced by some outside director, I became the mother, standing beside the stove with a wooden spoon, slumped in the front seat of the Civic.
I was both: myself, and the thing that had made myself possible.
There was no way to remain clinical, no way to preserve any illusion that this was just research, just hygiene. My body—her body—arched into my hand, the back bracing against the slippery tile, the knees buckling, the toes curling against the wet floor. I was making noises, thin and startled, the kind I’d never made in my own voice, and the sound of them only drove the feedback loop further.
The climax, when it arrived, was not a summit but a shattering. There was no neat bell curve, no single point of detonation and denouement—a male orgasm, in my prior experience, was a missile launch, a sharp, upward rush and then rapid descent. This was something else entirely. The first crest came out of nowhere, a sudden, lurching shock that made me drop the bottle of shampoo with a hollow clatter in the tub. The next was softer but spread wider, echoing out in strange, concentric circles, rippling through my pelvis, my stomach, my chest, my shoulders. The skin went goosepimpled, and every hair, even those still wet and plastered from the shower, stood at attention.
I lost my balance and staggered, catching myself on the cold tile wall, the impact leaving a faint red mark at the heel of my hand.
I couldn’t believe it. I had just masturbated in my mom’s body.
As soon as the last aftershocks faded, the terror drained out my toes, and I leaned back against the tile, hair flattened to my face, a sprawl of unwashed, warm-blooded animal.
The body was still my mother’s, Mary McKenzie, age forty-three, a caseworker and a gardener, but I had staked a private flag inside her, planted it so deep no one would ever see it.
The sense of taboo was colossal; part of me wanted to scream in horror, to bathe in napalm, to throw the whole machine into a volcano. But another, baser part felt a surge of accomplishment that was as pure and elemental as the crest of orgasm itself.
I rinsed off fast, eyes squeezed shut, and when I stepped out of the shower. I toweled off. My legs felt shaky and new, and my chest still prickled with a fading echo of the earlier pleasure.
I wrapped the towel around the torso, automatically cinching it at the underarm, the way I’d watched my mother do a thousand times. The breasts made it tricky; they wanted to escape, to be acknowledged, to be known.
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