I felt a sense of relief, a bizarre comfort in the knowledge that she, too, was grappling with the new, alien sensations of my old body. It wasn't just me navigating this strange new world. We were both in it, together. If anything, it felt like a fair exchange. My mother was exploring me, and I would continue to explore her.
I walked to her closet, a place I had always seen as a sacred space, full of secrets. I ran my hands over the various fabrics, a riot of colors and textures, each piece a small fragment of her adult life. I pulled out a simple denim dress, a silk scarf, and a pair of worn-in leather sandals. I felt a sense of daring, of excitement. I wasn't just putting on her clothes; I was putting on her life, her persona.
As I dressed, I paid careful attention to the small details. I knotted the scarf just so, letting it drape around my neck in a way that felt both elegant and casual. I let the dress fall over my hips, feeling the familiar heft and sway of a woman's body as I moved. I looked at my reflection in the full-length mirror, turning from side to side, a silent, critical observer. I saw not just Mary, but a new version of her, a version that was bolder, more confident, more... me.
I went to the kitchen and began to prepare dinner, a new, almost effortless rhythm settling over me. I chopped vegetables, browned meat, and seasoned a sauce with a deftness that felt utterly natural. I wasn't a boy trying to play a part; I was a woman preparing a meal for her family.
My mother, in my body, entered the kitchen, a faint look of awe on her face. "What are you doing?" she asked, her voice a low, hesitant murmur.
I smiled, a real, genuine smile that reached my eyes.
"Making dinner," I said, the words feeling foreign and powerful on my tongue, "What does it look like?"
She stared at me, a flicker of something unreadable in my eyes.
"It just... it's not like you to be so..." She trailed off, unable to find the right word.
"So what, Mom?" I asked, a wicked grin spreading across my face, "So what?"
She blinked, caught. "So... put-together," she finished, a tremor in her voice. "So adult. It's just weird, that's all. You never used to—"
"Maybe you didn't know me as well as you thought," I said, a little too fast.
My hands shook, but only a little.
I saw my own face looking at me—my old face, the one I remembered from school pictures and bathroom mirrors and the blurred reflection in my laptop screen. The jaw flexed with something like anger, but the eyes were wide and wounded.
I wanted to go back to the days when she was just Mom and I was just her son.
I tried to speak, to make it simple, but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I looked at my—her—hands, the faint blue vein that curved up from the wrist to the thumb, the small, pearl-pink scar on the knuckle from when she’d cut herself opening a can of beans. They were so foreign and so familiar all at once.
I pinched a hangnail, worrying it until it oozed a crescent of blood. It centered me.
Finally, I said it: "Mom?"
I swallowed. "I'm scared," I said, and suddenly it all came loose, the words tumbling out, raw and frantic and desperate. "I think I did something wrong. I think I did something really, really wrong and I don't know how to fix it."
She moved toward me, slow and careful, like I was a wounded animal. "What is it, honey?" she said, and for a fleeting moment the Mom-ness surfaced, the old warmth. But it was off, a trick of ventriloquism, my voice doing her lines.
I pressed on. "The other night. When Dad came home. In the bedroom. I—" I couldn't say it, not yet. I tasted metal on my tongue.
She waited, silent, arms crossed so tightly the knuckles blanched.
"My body," I managed, "your body, it just... did what it was supposed to. I didn't know what to do. I was just there, and I was you, and I felt—" I choked, the sob punching up through my chest, "I felt everything."
She stared at me, the horror blooming across her borrowed face like spilled ink. Her lips skinned back from her teeth.
"What are you talking about?" she said, the words a death rattle. "What do you mean, 'your body'? What did you do with my body? What did you do with him?"
"It wasn't like I wanted to," I said, and the tears were real now, burning my cheeks. "It was all for you, Mom! I wanted to understand, I wanted you to see I could do it, that I could be you."
Her jaw pulsed, a tic I'd never noticed before.
"You're not a woman," she said flatly, her voice gone cold and hard and merciless. "You're a boy."
I shuddered, the cold of it running down my back. "I had to. He would have known. He would have noticed if I wasn't you. If I didn't welcome him. I just had to do it, Mom. It was part of the role."
“You could have said you had a headache! You could have found another way!"
“I liked it, Mom,” I silenced her, “When he was inside of me as you, I liked it when he used your name. I liked it when he pulled my hair and called me Mary. It made me feel—"
I broke off, unable to describe the surge of pride, the animal pleasure of being her in that moment.
“It made you feel what?” Mom—me—hissed, her voice so sharp it could have opened a vein. “Special? Proud?”
I nodded, refusing to look away from her. “It made me feel like I was finally real. Like I mattered. Like all the years of being nobody, of being a fucking shadow in my own house, were over. I mattered to him. To you. To myself.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Mom spat, “What kind of monster would do that?”
“Hey, I’m your mother now” I retorted, "I do what I want."
“I am your mother.”
“Prove it.”
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