They passed a group of counter-protesters clutching signs.
He was supposed to be there now: screaming. Instead, he was here, knuckles white on the edge of the window, a stranger inside himself, watching himself vanish into the chaos.
Mike, driving steady with that post-adrenaline casualness, craned past the steering wheel to ogle the remnant protestors as they trickled across the intersection. “Figures,” he snorted, then muttered a punchline about looting and “thugs” that landed with all the subtlety of a two-ton elephant. The joke was meant to be a comfort, a way of pulling Lizzie—him—back into their shared bubble of easy contempt.
He wanted to go home—not to any home this body knew, but to the one in the city, the one with the creaky radiator and the milk crates stacked as bookshelves, the one where he’d felt like himself.
But the only home was wherever Mike was steering him.
He pulled into a suburban development, all tan siding and chemically green grass, the houses identical except for the occasional flag out front, faded from too many seasons of angry sun. The garage door yawned open to swallow them whole.
Inside, the house was an air-conditioned mausoleum of tastefully coordinated throw pillows. Mike turned off the alarm with a practiced thumb, hung his keys on a ceramic hook that read “Live Laugh Love,” and fixed her with a look of muscular concern.
“You want a drink?” he offered, already heading for the kitchen.
Milton followed.
Mike produced two cans of Miller Lite.
“You did great out there,” he said, popping the tab and handing her one, “Those Antifa punks didn’t know what hit them. You were brave.”
Milton nodded, lips pressed into a smile.
The beer was cold and bland, but he drank it anyway, letting the bubbles fizz behind Lizzie’s perfect teeth. Mike’s face was ruddy with post-rally warmth, still in the afterglow of a shared enemy, but Milton could only nod and sip and watch the domestic tableau play out: the fridge stocked with organic eggs and Diet Coke, the hand-stitched prayer over the kitchen mantel, the calendar full of names and dates he didn’t know. He drifted, an astronaut in borrowed flesh, as Mike retreated to the living room and flicked on the news.
He had to get to a mirror, see the full extent of the disaster. He went upstairs, every step a small recalibration of balance, hips shifting, knees careful not to knock, and found the master bath.
He stared at the woman in the mirror. She was admittedly beautiful, eyebrows arched to a sharp angle, lips plumped and immaculately glossed.
He tried a few faces in the mirror. Raised the left eyebrow. Smirked. Anger, surprise, confusion, disgust—each landed with the same artificiality.
He turned his attention to the …obvious anatomical differences.
He quickly redirected his attention to the next, more obvious set of changes: the heavy swell beneath his shirt, the unfamiliar underwire bite below his ribcage, the mind-bending sight of cleavage where his bony sternum ought to be. He pulled the neckline out, peered down with both academic curiosity and private dread. There they were: breasts. Actual, honest-to-god, undeniably real breasts, held aloft by a complicated array of straps and cups, their size and shape a source of immediate logistical confusion. The skin there was paler, softer.
He tried to look past the breasts but found his attention circling back to them, stubborn and magnetic. They neither felt nor moved as he’d expected. When he reached up and gave one a tentative poke, the sensation registered not just locally but as a whole-body shock, radiating up his spine. He staggered in the mirror’s gaze, trying not to panic.
He undid the top button of his jeans, hands shaking, and braced himself. There was nothing where there should have been something; instead, a smooth, unbroken line of flesh beneath a triangle of pink lace, a geometric certainty to the absence. He stared, mind lurching through years of anatomical assumptions, all now rendered moot. He pressed his palms to the lightning bolt of his new hips, the startling width, the gentle inward cant of the thighs. The geometry was all wrong, the angles softer, the curves more present than any twist of posture could ever fake.
He turned sideways, studied the silhouette, the way the small of his back arched and the rear jutted out—impossibly round, a cartoon of femininity. He traced a trembling hand over the curve, sucked in a sharp gasp.
He gripped the edge of the sink, knuckles white, and tried to steady his breathing.
“Holy shit,” he whispered, testing the voice again, caught off guard by its silver-plated bell-tone, each syllable tumbling out in an almost bubbly cadence.
He tried again, a little louder, and this time the phrase broke into a nervous, high-frequency giggle—a sound he had only ever imagined as a parody, now ringing out, involuntary, straight from his own throat.
He stared at the mirror, daring himself to look away, but the image was magnetic in its wrongness. The softening of the jawline, the way the delicate brows winged up at the temples, the height difference, of course, her blue eyes. He catalogued the teeth, too white and perfectly spaced, the hollow at the base of the neck, and the slope of collarbones rising to meet round, padded shoulders. Everything was smaller, more precise.
He leaned closer to the mirror, watching the minute shiver of each eyelash as he blinked.
He placed a hand against the glass, fingertips splayed as if measuring the narrowness of each digit, the polish glimmering in the vanity lights. He turned his head, watching the cascade of hair—a sheet of platinum that bounced and fanned with every motion—then reached up and ran both hands through it.
He’d always wondered, in the most deeply hidden folds of his brain, what it would be like to have unfettered access to a woman’s body. Not just to touch, but to inhabit. To know, truly, what it meant to be beautiful and soft and desirable, to understand the secret grammar of femininity. And now—however it had happened—he was here, with a body that could, at least in theory, do whatever it wanted.
He was supposed to be freaking out, but a part of him—maybe a bigger part than he wanted to admit—was already thinking about the possibilities.
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