The machine hummed with a low, expectant thrum, its silver shell glowing faintly in the dim workshop light.
Alex’s aging mother, Eleanor, clasped her hands together, a wistful smile on her face, “Just a few minutes, Alex. To see him one last time. To feel the way things were, just for a little while.”
Alex nodded, his own heart aching with a grief that had never dulled. He’d helped her build the chronometer, a project born of their mutual mourning, a testament to a life cut tragically short. But while she wanted to revisit a specific, beautiful memory, Alex had a different agenda. He wanted to truly experience it, and not just as a bystander. With a casual flick of his wrist, he adjusted a small, unmarked dial on the side of the console, a genetic pairing sub-frequency he’d added without her knowledge. He set the coordinates for the summer of ’98, just a week before his tenth birthday, when the family was on a road trip to the coast. He pushed the activation button.
A violent, shimmering flash of blue light consumed them. Time stretched and snapped back into a single point, a dizzying, nauseating journey. When the world solidified, the air smelled of salt and sun-baked upholstery. They were in the old family car, parked on a bluff overlooking the ocean.
Alex’s eyes fluttered open, and the first thing he registered was the gentle weight of a summer dress on his lap. He looked down and saw a pair of slender, tanned legs, the kind that had graced the pages of fashion magazines in their time. A gasp escaped his lips, a light, melodic sound he didn’t recognize. He brought a hand to his face and felt the delicate curve of a jawline, the smooth skin of a cheekbone, and a shock of perfectly curled blonde hair. He was in his mother’s body. He was beautiful.
The car’s window was rolled down, and wind tugged at his hair, pulling strands across his—her—face.
He looked outside. His long-deceased father stood outside of the car, overlooking the bluff. For sixteen years his father had been an absence, a collection of anecdotes and photographs. Yet here he was, alive and solid, humming a tuneless song as he surveyed the restless sea.
The urge to throw open the car door and sprint straight into his father’s arms was almost unbearable. Instead, Alex pivoted, knees knocking awkwardly under the faded dashboard, and peered into the back seat.
There was the child version of himself: round-faced, cheeks pink from a day in the sun. The boy sat slack-jawed, hands knotted in his lap, and blinked at the woman—his mother—who was staring back with an expression somewhere between terror and awe.
“So,” he said, voice trembling with equal parts adrenaline and glee, “I guess we’re here.”
Eleanor, in his childhood body, gave him a look that might have stopped time itself.
“Alex,” she said, “What did you do? What—what is this?”
“I mean, it worked, didn’t it?” He stroked the hem of the summer dress, marveling at the featherlight fabric, “Isn’t this what you wanted? To go back? To see him?”
A tremor passed through her.
“Not like this,” she hissed, “Not in… not in your body. Alex, put us back.”
He cocked his head, letting a curl of hair fall artfully over his eye, “You never did like surprises.”
“Why would you want to be me anyway?”
Alex considered the question. A thrill of shame quickened in his borrowed chest. You’re not supposed to want this, he thought.
He couldn’t tell her the truth. He couldn’t tell her that he—a grown man with receding hairline, a lovely wife, two teenage children, an inbox of work emails waiting for him when he returned—fantasized about his mother’s younger body. That after the funeral, he had found her high school yearbook in a box in the basement, and thumbed through every page, staring at her cheerleader smile …at her perfect body.
Alex was sixteen when his father died. He’d masturbated furiously to those photos.
He’d dreamed about this moment: about the wind in her—his—hair, the unspooling sense of possibility, the vertiginous pleasure of touching his—her—breasts.
So of course, when it came time to test the machine, to really test it, he’d programmed the destination not for a neutral observation post, but for the moment when his mother was at her most beautiful, her most powerful, her most herself.
He shrugged, shoulders unfamiliar beneath the summer dress’s thin straps, “I was curious.”
He shifted, letting the dress ride up, watching Eleanor’s eyes flick to the exposed thigh before she looked away in horror. Alex pretended not to notice.
He raised his arms, stretching languidly, feeling the twin weights of her breasts shift beneath the cheap cotton. He arched his back, savoring the way the dress tightened, outlining his form.
“Do you two wanna go for a swim? We have the whole beach to ourselves here!” his father called.
“No,” his mother whispered, “We need to figure this out.”
But Alex was already exiting the car, accidentally knocking against the steel door with her much wider hip.
He balanced himself, legs wobbling in sandals with their worn, molded indents, and made his way to the back of the old station wagon. The wind battered at the thin cotton of the dress, pressing it to his—her—stomach and thighs, and he felt simultaneously exposed and emboldened.
He popped the trunk, which yawned open with a pneumatic sigh. Inside was a chaos of towels, sand-flecked sunscreen bottles, plastic pails and shovels, and the duffel bag.
He rummaged through the layers: a pair of his father’s gym shorts, a long-sleeved t-shirt, flip-flops, and then, folded with a precision that struck him as uniquely maternal, the bikini.
The sight of it made him shiver.
It was the one he remembered most vividly from family photographs and from the memory palace of his adolescence. The triangular top and the high-waisted bottoms, a little retro, a little sexy.
He pinched the fabric between two fingers, testing its stretch and texture. He couldn’t help himself—he pressed the bikini to his face, inhaled chlorine and sun, and for a dizzy second he was fourteen, hiding in the laundry room, guilty and electrified.
He ducked behind the car, his heart racing, hands trembling with the illicit electricity of what he was about to do. There was no one on the overlook but the three of them—father standing sentinel, mother and son swapped in the flickering limbo of the impossible—and yet Alex glanced around with the nervous energy of a teenager caught shoplifting. He slid his fingers beneath the hem of the summer dress, marveling at the supple elasticity of skin, the invisible hair, the warmth in the crook of the knee. The dress, a relic of 1990s mall fashion, clung stubbornly to the borrowed body, and it took some wriggling—an unfamiliar flex of waist and hip, a contorted shrug—to peel it away.
He felt the fabric pool at his feet, leaving him suddenly exposed in the salt-bright air. There was a shudder, a brief pang of vertigo.
Alex looked down and saw, really saw, what he had only ever glimpsed in old photographs or imagined in fevered adolescent dreams. Breasts, full and high, tipped with dusky pink; the subtle concavity of the belly; the soft, maternal arc of thigh and hip.
He ran a palm over the ribcage, feeling not just the alien contour but the pulse, the literal heartbeat, of his mother’s body. It was a sensation so uncanny, so immediate, that he almost laughed. He could feel the wind graze the fine hairs on her arms, could smell her sweat and skin, could taste the anticipation and terror at the back of her throat.
He hesitated, knees locked, and looked sidelong at the car’s window, half-expecting to see the face of his mother—real mother, not the child version—peering back, aghast. But the glass only reflected his new self, hair wild and eyes shining, transformed into the woman he’d worshipped and resented in equal measure all his life.
He glanced at the bikini, limp and brightly colored in his hand, the final totem of the transformation. He could feel the pressure of memory, the weight of all the hours spent projecting desire and envy onto this impossible ideal. He thought about the bathroom door locked against the world, the magazine cutouts stuffed under the mattress, the certainty that he would never be her—until now.
He bent to slip on the bikini bottom, relishing the friction, the slow, tight shimmy up her thighs, over her hips, and the snap of elastic around a waist that was not quite his own. He fumbled with the top, fingers clumsy, until he remembered the trick of tying the back first, then looping the neck. The triangulated fabric cupped her breasts.
He straightened and took a breath, feeling the ocean wind and the sun and the new, unfamiliar gravity of his own body. He was his mother, precisely as she had been.
Behind him, the door to the station wagon creaked open. Eleanor—ten-year-old Alex now, clambered out. She stared at him from under the shaggy mop of his own childhood haircut, her mouth working soundlessly.
“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice high and breaking.
She heard the crunch of footsteps on gravel, drawing closer, and the panic in her chest splintered into new, sharper fragments. Their father—her long-dead husband—was almost upon them.
Alex, meanwhile, seemed to be basking in his new form, twisting a lock of blonde hair between his fingers, steadying himself against the car with the practiced grace of a woman who knew her body was meant to be looked at.
He shot Eleanor a conspiratorial smile, one that might have been endearing in any other context, but now felt like a betrayal—a desecration.
“You said you wanted to see him,” he whispered, his voice low but unmistakably his own mother’s, “So let’s see him.”
“Beach time, huh?” he said, resting a heavy, calloused hand on the window frame. “Let’s get moving before the tide turns.”
Alex smiled, radiant and confident.
“Coming, darling,” he said, and Eleanor heard her own mother’s playful inflection executed with chilling precision.
She felt herself forced to respond in kind, to play along, to be the child. She followed them toward the overlook.
She watched as Alex in her own body strode toward her father. The way he swayed his hips, the way he flashed her dimpled smile, the way he touched her father’s arm and ducked her head to laugh.
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