Chapter 35: Mock Meditation
The air in Chloe’s living room tasted like sugar and static. John sat cross-legged on a worn patch of carpet, dodging a sticky spot with his knee. The holographic disco ball spun lazy patterns across the ceiling, painting his face with shifting pinks and blues.
“Posture’s a wreck. Straighten your spine. You’re not a question mark,” Amy’s voice intoned inside his skull. It was weirdly smooth, a mockery of a guided meditation app.
John adjusted, his bones creaking. Chloe was perched on the edge of her vinyl couch, trying to look supportive and failing miserably. She had a bag of gummy worms clamped in her teeth.
“Good. Now, breathe in. Hold the chaos. Breathe out. Release the pathetic clinging to your old, brittle form.” Amy’s words were calm, surgical. “Visualize your masculinity. Not as some solid thing. It’s a construct. A transient chemical state. See it dissolving. Like sugar in hot tea.”
John squeezed his eyes shut. He tried. He pictured a lump of raw, brown sugar—him, he guessed—plopping into a steaming mug. It just sat there. Stubborn.
“It’s not dissolving,” he muttered.
“Because you’re willing it to be a rock. It’s sugar. It’s porous. It’s vulnerable. Let the liquid in.”
He breathed. Out. The sugar lump in his mind wavered. For a second, he felt a strange looseness in his joints, a warmth in his gut that wasn’t embarrassment. It was a scary, yielding feeling. Like his insides were becoming less dense.
A snort came from the couch.
John’s eyes flew open. Chloe had a hand clamped over her mouth, her shoulders shaking. “Sorry,” she wheezed. “It’s just your face. You look like you’re trying to telepathically fold a fitted sheet.”
The warmth vanished. The sugar lump fossilized. “I can’t do this with an audience.”
“The world is an audience, John. Chloe is just front row,” Amy said, her serenity cracking into familiar impatience. “We’re skipping to step three. Affirmations.”
“Oh god,” John said.
“Repeat after me: I am not confined by one shape.”
John stared at a lurid floral pattern on the wall. “I am not… confined by one shape.”
“Louder. With feeling. Or I’ll make you sing it.”
“I am not confined by one shape!”
“My beauty is versatile.”
He swallowed. “My beauty is… versatile.” This was worse than the time he’d had to present his senior project with food poisoning.
“I am radiant in many hues.”
“I am radiant in many hues.”
Amy’s voice dropped, became hypnotic. “I am beautiful in pink.”
John hesitated. The words felt like gravel in his mouth. “I am… beautiful in pink.”
“Again.”
“I am beautiful in pink.”
“Believe it.”
“I am beautiful in pink!” he shouted, his voice breaking, directed at the disco ball.
A tingling started at his toes.
It wasn't the transformative surge he got from an erection. This was slower. Insidious. It felt like a thousand threads of warm silk were being woven through his skin, wrapping around his ankles, spiraling up his calves. He looked down.
His jeans and sneakers were gone. His legs were bare. And up from his ankles, a shimmering, carnation-pink material was materializing, knitting itself seamlessly over his skin. It was sheer. He could see the pale hair on his legs beneath it, blurred and distorted. The silk—it had to be silk—tightened with a gentle, final pressure as it reached his knees, then his thighs. It wasn't painful. It was precise. A perfect fit he never asked for.
He made a choked sound, scrambling back until his shoulders hit the coffee table. A bottle of glitter nail polish toppled over, spilling a tiny galaxy of silver across the floor.
“See?” Amy said, her tone one of clinical satisfaction. “The circuit listens to intention. Even borrowed, forced intention.”
“Get it off,” John whispered, clawing at his legs. The stockings felt like a second layer of nerve endings. His fingertips caught on the delicate fabric, threatening to snag. “Get them off me!”
“They are a part of the ensemble. A foundational layer. You accepted the hue. The form follows.” Amy paused. “Stand up. Look in the mirror.”
Chloe had stopped laughing. She was just staring, her bag of candy forgotten in her lap. “Whoa,” she breathed, not in mockery, but in genuine, uneasy awe.
John didn’t want to stand. He didn’t want to see. But his body, humming with Amy’s will, pushed itself upright. The stockings changed everything about his movement. The slide of fabric against fabric, the subtle sheen catching the disco light. He felt elongated. Exposed.
He shuffled toward the full-length mirror leaned against the wall, its surface streaked with adhesive from old decals. The reflection that greeted him was a fractured collage of a person. His own familiar, horrified face, pale and staring. His lanky torso still in his rumpled gray hoodie. And below the waist, the gleaming, feminine pink, cutting a stark, surreal line across his upper thighs.
“This is monstrous,” he said.
“This is control,” Amy corrected. “A controlled, localized application of the transformative principle. You didn’t get an erection. You didn’t fully change. You merely… accessorized. This is what I mean by using your new limbs.”
John’s breathing was shallow. He watched his reflection’s hands, his own hands, tremble as they hovered over the stockings. He was split in two. A war of sensations. The warm, clinging silk on his legs felt disturbingly pleasant. The sight of it on his body filled him with a nausea that was entirely his own.
“Tomorrow,” Amy said, her voice shifting back into a planning rhythm, “we work on the walk. The walk informs the posture. The posture informs the presence. You can’t be Amy Smith, my socially acceptable camouflage, if you move like a folded lawn chair.”
John’s eyes were locked on the mirror. The pink seemed to be seeping into his perception, tinting the edges of the room. This wasn't a costume he put on. This was a layer of him being pulled to the surface, like a photograph in a chemical bath. He had shouted the affirmation. He had, in some deep, coerced part of himself, accepted the premise.
The circuit had listened.
He saw not just the stockings, but the ghost of everything else around them in the reflection: the neon, the glitter, the chaotic femininity of Chloe’s world. It was a blueprint. And he was the raw material.
“The first lesson is always the hardest,” Amy said, not unkindly. It was the flat tone of a fact. “The flesh learns. It adapts. Soon, this will feel less like an invasion and more like…”
She let the sentence hang. John finished it silently, staring at the man in the mirror who was wearing stockings.
More like himself.