The Housewife

It had been months since the accident—if you could call it that. The accident being me, in a fit of sleep-deprived curiosity, accidentally possessing the body of Penelope Grayson, a random housewife in a Connecticut suburb, while waiting at the bus stop. It was supposed to be a joke. My wife, Mandy, and I had always been tinkerers; we scavenged estate sales and lab closures for oddities, and that particular Saturday, we’d found a battered black box, gnarled with switches and a patina of dust, labeled only “Phasmatron Mk. II.” It hummed under our touch and, on a dare and a bottle of Pinot Grigio, we’d decided to try it out. We didn’t know what it did, only that the instructions were written in manic blue fountain pen and included the words “mind transference,” “caution,” and “don’t get stuck.” You can guess which warning we ignored.

The next thing I knew, I was inside Penelope. I felt my original body collapse against Mandy, who screamed and shook me—her—but it was too late. At first, we thought we could reverse it, like rebooting a laptop, but the Phasmatron never worked again. Mandy took the box to every engineer and crank in the tristate area, but no one could get a peep out of it.

I keenly felt the wrongness of occupying another human’s life, but what else could I do? Penelope’s consciousness was… absent. Not erased, just dormant, like a hibernating animal. I tried to live her life as best I could, picking up clues from her phone and calendar, her shopping lists and grocery receipts. I faked my way through conversations with her friends, her barre class, her book club. And I did my best to avoid her husband, Tom.

I told Tom—Penelope’s husband, now technically my husband—that Mandy was a friend from college, someone who’d moved into town recently and taken to dropping by. He didn’t question it. I expected him to notice something was off—he had to, right? But Tom barely seemed to notice me at all, at first. He was a pleasant, gentle giant of a man, with a thick neck and a comically sincere smile, and a career in accounting that bored him so profoundly he spoke about it only in sighs and head-shakes. I went through the motions of suburban domesticity, thinking it would only be a week, maybe two, until Mandy figured out how to get me out. But the days stretched into months, and I became… Penelope.

Except Mandy didn’t know the worst part. She didn’t know that I—me, the original me—found Penelope’s body irresistible. I adored her. She had a slender waist and delicate wrists, but her hips were round, her thighs milky and strong, her ass so perfect it sometimes felt sculpted. Her breasts were full and heavy, with dark, sensitive nipples—when I took a shower, I had to avoid looking down or I’d get distracted and lose track of time. Every morning I’d catch sight of myself in the bathroom mirror—myself, Penelope, with her mussed hair and sleep-creased cheek, and I’d feel an involuntary rush of arousal. I started experimenting: painting her lips, curling her hair, wearing bras she’d kept for “special occasions.” I’d pose in the mirror, arch my back, run my fingertips over the soft curve of my belly. Sometimes I’d touch myself, and the guilt afterward would nearly drown me.

But even that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was Tom. I never meant to be attracted to him. I’d always considered myself straight, or at least firmly rooted in my marriage, but something about being Penelope rewired me. Tom was dorky, but he cared. He’d bring home her favorite flowers, or slip a note into her purse saying “I love you, P.” He’d watch bad TV with me and laugh so hard he’d cry. Once, he let me paint his toenails for “practice.” And slowly, insidiously, I started to crave his attention.

It started with little fantasies. I’d imagine him coming up behind me while I folded laundry, kissing my neck, running his hands over my hips. Or I’d picture myself—Penelope—sitting in his lap, whispering dirty nothings during football games. I’d lie awake at night, listening to his soft snoring, feeling my heart thump in her chest, wondering how much of this was Penelope’s biology and how much was just me, lonely and desperate.

But the most dangerous fantasy was the one where I actually let myself be with him—fully, as Penelope. I knew Mandy wouldn’t approve, but the thought of it haunted me. And then, one night, Tom brought up the subject of kids.

We were lying in bed, me in Penelope’s favorite pajama set—a silky pink camisole and shorts—when he rolled over and looked at me with a seriousness that made my stomach flip.

“We should try for kids again,” he said.

He was smiling, hopeful, but there was a nervous quiver in his voice.

Mandy and I had been trying for kids before the possession. It was the background music of our life: fertility tracking apps and vitamins, the obscene intimacy of timed sex, the dashed hopes each cycle. When it didn’t happen easily, we drifted along, half-committed, promising each other we’d “focus more next year.”

But lying next to Tom, whose gentle warmth was now my blanket, I realized what he was really asking: what was wrong with his wife? Why had she grown cold and circumspect, why did she freeze whenever he touched her, why did she seem to flinch from her own life?

I rolled toward him, letting my thigh rest against his. In the moonlight, he looked almost boyish, hopeful. I wanted to be cruel, to tell him the truth—that his wife was gone, that some interloper haunted her flesh, that he spent his nights curled up with a stranger. 

Instead, I placed Penelope’s palm on his chest, feeling the prickle of his hair, the tremor in his pulse. I let my nails trace light lines along his collarbone, just to see him shiver.

“Maybe we should,” I heard myself say.

He turned off the light but left the curtain open, so moonlight filled the room with a pale, shifting glow. He kissed me as though we were still newlyweds—softly, then with mounting urgency, his hands trembling as they slid beneath the hem of Penelope’s top. The touch startled a whimper out of me, part reflex, part arousal, and I flushed, mortified, at how quickly my body responded. I tried to imagine how this looked from the outside: a loving husband reconnecting with his wife.

When he finally pushed inside me, I felt at once invaded and completed. The sensation was overwhelming—not just the exquisite friction or the fullness, but the way Tom gripped my waist, how he whispered my name (“Penny, oh, Penny…”). My body betrayed me. I arched and moaned and clawed at his back, desperate for some anchor. I came, hard, with my face pressed into his shoulder, and before I could catch my breath, he followed with a shudder. He pulsed inside me, and I clung to him, shaking.

Afterward, he held me in his arms, his heart thudding wildly against my cheek. I lay there, terrified and exhilarated, unable to believe what I had just done.