It was Sunday, we’d already done the chores, nothing was on TV, and sex was still off the table, so we switched bodies, just to see what it was like.
I was in him, and he was in me, and neither of us were ourselves, but we weren’t each other, either. Each of us was something new, so that the two people in our living room were entirely different from the people who had been there moments before.
My face itched in this body, and my fingers felt thick, and my groin hung with weight that I felt immediately inclined to protect. I pulled the skin at my elbows and felt my head for hair that wasn’t there and breathed deeper than I ever had before. “How do you feel?” I said, when what I really meant was “How do I feel?”
“Small,” he said, running my fingers over my torso and stopping at the hips. “How the hell is a baby supposed to fit in here?”
I went to the kitchen, suddenly starving, and ate cool ranch corn nuts, habanero jerky, and cold cuts from the fridge. “You should put some mustard on the ham and dip it in barbecue sauce,” he said, and what do you know, he was right.
In the afternoon we went for a walk, neither of us used to the length of our new strides. We saw a very tall man, and a pregnant lady eating clementines, and a woman in an “I Love Poodles” T-shirt walking a pug and a boxer. It was summer, and we were hot, but we were happy, for the first time in a while.
At home we lay on the floor and played with Pickles the cat. “Come to Daddy,” I said, and she went straight to the woman sitting across from me in my blouse and knee-high boots.
After a few hours I began to miss my body. This body had heartburn, and I really couldn’t get used to how big the fingers were.
“Hey, ready to switch back?” I said. He was in the bedroom trying on my dresses. He looked good in the slips. I ought to wear them more often.
When he didn’t answer I came up behind him and wrapped my arms around my waist, both of us staring at our reflection in the mirror. “After this, everything will be normal again,” he said, and he was right, nothing could save us from that.
We switched back and made love right there on the bed, my silk slip up around my waist. Then I held him, and he held me, no closer to figuring out what to do next, but relieved to have pushed the problem away, if only for a while.