Chapter 5: Homecoming Horror
The key scraped in the lock with a sound that was usually the welcome home of a thousand ordinary days. Today, it was the click of a cell door opening. Andrea pushed the door and stepped inside, her shoulders slumped with an exhaustion that was more than physical.
I moved to follow, and my new hip connected with the doorframe. Not a hard bump, but a full, definite brush of the curved bone against the wood. It was a foreign point of contact, a prominence that hadn’t been there before. I stumbled, caught myself on the frame. My hand—slender, tattooed—looked grotesque against the familiar, chipped white paint.
“You okay?” Andrea asked, her voice hollow.
“Just… wide,” I mumbled, and the inaccuracy of the word choked me. I wasn’t wide. The body was compact. But the architecture was all different. The center of balance was in the hips, not the chest. Navigating doorways was now a calculation.
The smell hit me first. Not just home, but home left behind. Underneath the lemon polish and the faint dust was the ghost of my coffee from three weeks ago, the bitter note of abandoned routine. And something else, faint and medical—the antiseptic wipes Andrea must have used, trying to cleanse the air of stagnation.
The living room was a museum of my death. My favorite mug, a chipped Batman logo, sat on the coffee table, a brown stain etching the bottom. A comic book lay splayed on the arm of my chair, frozen mid-read. The blanket I used was still crumpled on the sofa. It was all exactly as I’d left it before the drive to get pizza, before the headlights that didn’t stop.
Andrea stood in the middle of the room, not looking at any of it. She was a statue of grief.
I took a few steps, the boots too loud on the hardwood. My gaze was drawn, magnetically, to the hallway mirror. It was an old, full-length thing with a crack in the corner from when we’d moved in. I’d always avoided it, a habit from a lifetime of mild self-consciousness.
Now, I couldn’t look away.
A stranger walked into the glass.
She was short. The platform boots gave her height, but the proportions were undeniably petite. The black tank top strained over curves that were cartoonish in their exaggeration—the cinched, impossible waist only emphasizing the violent swell of hips and the heavy, rounded breasts pushed up by the lace bra. The skirt was obscenely short, the fishnet tights a web of shadows on pale skin. Tattoos coiled up her arms, a splash of color and chaos. The pink ends of her black hair were brittle looking. And the face… God, the face. The plump, glossy lips, parted now in a perfect ‘o’ of shock. The silver stud in the eyebrow. The dark, smudged liner around eyes that were too large, too bright with a horror that the face itself didn’t seem built to express.
Sabrina Mooers stared back at me.
I blinked. She blinked. I raised a trembling hand. She mirrored me, the web tattoo on the back of her hand stretching.
A sound escaped me—a low, wounded animal noise. It came from Sabrina’s throat, from Sabrina’s lips.
Andrea turned. She saw me staring at the reflection, my body rigid. Her face crumpled. She hugged herself, as if holding her own pieces together.
“It’s…” I began, but no words existed.
“I know,” Andrea whispered.
“This isn’t me.” The voice was wrong. The sentence was mine, but the instrument was someone else’s.
“Justin…” She said my name like a prayer, but her eyes were fixed on the reflection. She couldn’t reconcile the two. I was a ventriloquist’s dummy, and the act was a tragedy.
A wave of claustrophobia hit me, so intense my vision swam. The clothes were a second skin of torment. The bra was a wire cage, the underwire digging mercilessly into my ribs with every shallow breath. The skirt’s band was a tight, unforgiving tourniquet around the softest part of my stomach. The thong was a persistent, maddening friction. I felt every inch of fabric, every seam, like a brand.
“I can’t… I need to get these off,” I gasped, clawing at the strap of the tank top. My fingers, clumsy with panic, caught on the thin material.
Andrea jolted into action, the teacher in her taking over from the grieving wife. “Okay. Okay, just… come on.” She steered me away from the mirror, down the hall toward our bedroom. Our bedroom. The thought of entering it in this body made my knees weak.
She pushed the door open.
Andrea went to the dresser, my dresser, and pulled open the bottom drawer. She took out a pair of my grey sweatpants and an old, soft MIT t-shirt. The clothes looked absurdly large in her hands. They were relics from a giant.
“Here,” she said, her voice thick. “After you… clean up.”
Clean up. The euphemism hung in the air.
She was looking at me, at the body, with a mixture of pity and profound discomfort. “You should probably take a shower. It might… I don’t know. Help.”
A shower. The most mundane of acts. The thought of it now filled me with pure, undiluted terror. To be naked. To see it.To touch it.
“I can’t,” I whispered.
“You have to,” she said, softly but firmly. “You smell like hospital. And… and you need to see. To know what’s…” She couldn’t finish.
She was right. The clinical smell was on me, in me. But the alternative was worse. I looked from the familiar, soft clothes in her hands to my own hands, adorned with chipped black polish and ink.
Numbly, I took the clothes. The soft cotton of my old t-shirt felt like a promise against Sabrina’s fingertips.
Andrea backed out of the room, pulling the door closed with a soft, definitive click.
Alone. I was alone in what used to be my sanctuary with the greatest violation imaginable.
The bathroom was worse.Smaller. More reflective. The mirror over the sink was a cruel, focused sequel. I avoided it, my heart hammering against the cage of my ribs. The process of undressing was a slow-motion humiliation. Each removed piece felt like a surrender.
The tank top went over my head, catching on the piercings in my ears. I flinched. The bra was a complex mechanical puzzle. My fingers, trembling, fumbled with the clasp at the back. I couldn’t do it. I reached over my shoulder, contorting, but the angles were all wrong, the dexterity lacking. Finally, in frustration, I gripped the front of the cups and pulled the whole thing down my arms and over my head in a brutal, wrenching motion.
The release of pressure was immediate. Then, the weight.
They fell. Heavy, full, a profound and shocking drag on my chest. I couldn’t not look down.
My breath stopped.
Two pale, full breasts hung from my chest. They were larger than I could have conceived. The skin was milky white, with faint blue veins. And in the center of each, a pierced nipple—small silver rings through the dark, pebbled areolas. A wave of nausea rolled through me. I swayed, grabbing the counter. The cool marble bit into my palms.
The skirt and tights and thong followed in a frantic, scrabbling heap. I stood there, in the middle of the bathroom, completely exposed.
The absence between my legs was a physical scream. My brain demanded a topography that was no longer there. In its place was a smooth, hairless expanse, folds of flesh, a terrifying vulnerability. The silver piercing there—a tiny barbell—gleamed under the lights, a decoration on a wound. My hands flew to cover it, a reflexive, useless gesture. My hips were wide, my thighs thick, my ass a pronounced, soft curve I could feel just by standing. I was a sculpture of exaggerated femininity, a parody of a woman drawn by a horny teenager.
I stumbled into the shower, not bothering to look at the rest of the tattoos that doubtless covered me. I turned the water on as hot as I could stand and scrubbed.
The water on my new skin was a revelation. It was more sensitive, every droplet a distinct sensation. The soap slid over slopes and curves that had no business on my body. Washing my hair was an ordeal—the thick, dyed mass of it, the awkward angle of my neck. My fingers traced the contours of my skull, finding the raised, tender scar from the transfer, hidden under the hairline.The proof.
I used my old shampoo, the familiar scent of pine tar. It was a mistake. The clean, masculine smell clashing with the rose-scented body wash I’d grabbed created a dissonance so profound I gagged. I was contaminating my own memory.
Finally, shivering, I turned off the water. I avoided the mirror, wrapping myself in a towel that was too small, failing to cover both my chest and my hips. I pulled on the sweatpants. The drawstring waist had to be cinched tightly to keep them from sliding off the narrow hips, but they pooled around the ankles. The t-shirt was a tent, the neckline drooping over one shoulder. I looked like a child playing dress-up, a grotesque mockery of both my past and my present.
I opened the bathroom door, steam billowing out into the bedroom.
Andrea was sitting on the edge of the stripped mattress, holding a framed photo from our wedding day. She looked up.
Seeing me in my old clothes did something to her. Her face, already strained, seemed to collapse inward for a second. Then a weak, watery smile touched her lips. “There you are,” she breathed, the lie so fragile it hurt.
But when I walked, the empty, loose fabric of the sweatpants brushing between my legs, the unsupported weight on my chest moving freely beneath the shirt, we both knew the truth.
I wasn’t there at all. I was just a ghost, wearing a borrowed shroud, trying to remember how to haunt a life that had already buried me.