Another day. It’s just. Another day.

As my alarm goes off, I let out a loud PSHHT and it stops just as quickly as it started. I’ve got 5 minutes worth of tranquility before it’ll ring again. Lying on my back, like most mornings waking up, I arch it back as far as I can until I can’t physically hold it any longer and let myself fall back on the mattress.

My mouth is slimy, my entire body feels tingly ; yesterday’s last glass one wine must’ve been too much. I wish I could just jump out of bed and get some water. I could just ask for Nic’s help and get a sip out of his bottle, but I want to let him sleep a few more minutes, if my alarm didn’t already wake him up, that is.

Before rolling out of bed, I start with my routine exercises. Warming the shoulders up, twisting my abs, contracting muscles from the top of my head (metaphorically) down to the ones in my pelvis in quick succession. I’m already feeling better, but there’s this itch I can’t quite scratch off. I’m not even sure where it is, it’s just… uncomfortable. I guess I’ll figure it out on the way to the bathroom sink, the only thing I managed to convince Nic to renovate at my level. I prepare my body for half a twist towards Nic, gathering inertia for the swing, and a full force one towards the floor to get me out of here…

BONK

“Jesus fucking Christ…” I let out in a whisper.

There’s usually a cushion there that prevents me from hitting my head on the floor. I hate when Nic does that. I know for a fact that he like to boost himself when he plays his games, and he uses my fucking cushion. Then he forgets about it and I get a prune on the forehead. And my elbow hurts like a bitch too….

“MY ELBOW?!?!”

I shouted that at the top of my lungs. My left elbow hurts! I drag the articulated fleshy sticks out of under me, and MIRACLE!! My arms are back! And my legs too!! I fold my arms around them and start sobbing, tears of joy rolling down my cheeks. Surely this can’t be real. I bring my right hand up to my face and take a good look at it. One, two, three, four… Not even a finger missing! Same on the other hand, and all toes on both feet!

I wipe my tears and shakily stand up, unstable on two legs never I thought I’d see again. In under ten swift steps, I reach the kitchen cabinets and pour myself a glass of water, quickly chug it down and make my way back to the bed. The whole adventure took less than 30 seconds, instead of around ten minutes. I play the film in my head of having to twist my butt around the room to get anywhere… Hopefully I can stay like this for a bit. I stare down at Roxanne’s fiery tangled mess of hair and let out a sigh of relief. Everything’s finally back to normal. Except maybe that the mattress is still set directly on the ...

Mmmh.

That can’t be good.

When my alarm rings again, I let out a sharp yelp before clumsily slapping myself in the face to try and silence it, but too late. Rox is stirring awake now, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Unless it is.

No, this is too familiar a sight (from overhead). Still semi-conscious, I can see she’s fighting against the sheets, and they’re winning. The way they fall flat where they shouldn’t, how they’re still perfectly put where her feet should normally be...

“You awake babe?” She asks me groggily.

“Umm… Yep. Widely so, too.”

“Can you fetch me some water, I feel so… numbed out.”

“Suuuure..” Does she… know? “How did you sleep? You didn’t move as much as you usually do.”

“Okay, but I felt pretty slumped, too. Too much wine, probably.” As she wriggles under the sheets, part of her hair falls across her face and she tries to blow it off without much success. “I don’t feel so good..”

“Should I just… Let you wake up and come back in 5?” If it’s like me, she’ll be totally aware of how fucking weird this is, except I never told her about it. How would she react? “Rox?”

“Something’s not right, Sarah. I can’t feel my arms, or my legs.” In her eyes, I see her attempt at moving her limbs. She cranes her neck to look at herself. “SARAH?! I can’t move!!”

“Fuck.” I mutter. I walk over to her side of the bed and sit in front of her, crushing her imaginary thighs. “Roxanne, look at me.”

“What the hell? Why can’t I feel your weight on my legs?!” She arches her back and shrugs her shoulders, her left one poking out of under the sheets slightly. From the look of it, it’s not encouraging. “Sarah, help me! Help me, I can’t pull myself up!”

“Roxanne, look at me, look at me, listen to me.” She stops panicking for a moment, her eyes set on mine. “I can’t explain everything, but trust me I know what you’re going through.”

“What’s going on?! Please tell me!”

“Take a deep breath, then.”

I pull the sheets off of her hoping for the best, and getting the worst. Only wearing a tube and some panties, you’d have to be blind to miss it. She’s got a mix of my old hips and Catherine’s shoulders, giving her a total of absolutely nothing to help her with.

Her neck still straining, I put a hand on her stomach. “Rox…”

She doesn’t move, doesn’t even breathe. Her shoulders are so empty they’ve receded towards her neck, and her hips look just like mine used to, deprived of everything that could ever look closely like a leg. I reach up to her neck and cup her empty, rounded right shoulder as softly as I can. She recoils, as much as she can that is, and turns her head towards my hand.

“Say something.”

Gradually, she seems to test her body. She rocks her hips to one side, then the others, then shrugs her shoulders trying to reach God knows what. She looks back at me and lifts her shoulder back into my hand.

“Help me up.”

Her voice is calm, almost robotic. One hand behind her back, the other on her belly, I sit her in front of me. Writhing, agitating, she’s testing her limbless body again. As she tries to push one hip forward, she topples onto me, letting a gasp escape through her teeth.

“Am I dreaming, Sarah?”

“Would you like me to tell you you are?”

“That answers it.” I push her back up and keep a hand on her neck to stabilize her. What’s happening to me? Where… Where are my arms? Where are my legs?”

Her voice is mostly calm now, but I’m guessing she doesn’t want me to keep going around the pot. “You lost them overnight. Magically.”

She looks down at her hips, sinking in the mattress under her weight. “What the actual fuck? How?”

“I don’t know. But before today, I was limbless instead of you…”

“That’s bullshit, I would’ve noticed! Don’t you think it’s obvious enough?”

“It is, but the point is nobody noticed, it was as if I had always been like this. Pictures, events, memories, everything got replaced. Here, remember your competitive swimming medals?”

I point to her left where they normally hung, to an empty spot on the wall. In one corner of this particular area, a painting I’ve never seen before now hangs. It’s a landscape, made in the style of Bob Ross. Signed in the lower right corner are three letters we can both read from this distance : R-O-X.

“That’s dumb, I never painted anything in my entire life! How could I have done this without any arms?!”

“I’d say using your mouth, that’s what we used for practically everything without arms or even hands.”

“We? Who’s that we? There were other people, Sarah? What. Is. Happening?”

“Like I told you, I don’t.. know…” I clear her face of a few misplaced hair and rotate her so she faces me. “Look. This is your body now, at least for today.”

I cup her left shoulder with my hand, feeling the pointy spot where her collar bone and scapula fail at merging into her arm as she stretches her muscles. She turns her head towards it and gasps.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

“That feels so… Normal. Like… I know my arm’s supposed to be there, but I can’t manage to imagine what it used to feel like…”

“We all had that problem, it slowly goes away until you can’t remember much about your old body. Your old reflexes, motions, and sensations just kind of blur out.”

“Bring me up on the countertop, please. In front of the mirror. And tell me all you can remember.”

As I carry her lightweight-self across the room, both hands on her bum, I continue talking. “Up until recently, I was the one affected by this. At least as far as I knew. About two years ago, I woke up just like this, or almost I guess, and at first it came and went over the next few weeks. One day I stopped changing back and for a whole month, you had to take care of me as if we never knew anything else than this.”

“What do you mean take care of you?”

“Here, hold this.”

I fish the hairbrush out of the first drawer and present it to her. Instinctively, I see her right shoulder jolt forward meaning to grab it and I let it go. It clinks hard in the ceramic sink and she startles.

“That’s one of the things you did, but then there’s also everything else. Cooking, showering, dressing me, helping me do 99% of what I used to be able to do myself.”

“ And you didn’t tell me?”

“I was afraid of your reaction…” I gently brush her hair and put them up in a clean ponytail as I talk, “and I kinda tried to, but you just wouldn’t listen.”

“Wow I’m sorry.. I guess it would’ve been hard for me to convince you of the same thing. So it’s been a month or year of… amputee you… now it’s my turn?”

“Not exactly…” I slide her on the side so she can take a look at her behind. “After the first month you became a guy…”

“What the fuck?!”

“I know, I know… I’m not saying it makes sense I’m just telling you what happened. And that morning, we kind of entered a parallel world where all the women were like this. With some variations, but we were all just torsos and stumps.”

“Everyone?”

“No, just us, girls I mean. Like I had these short arms,” I do a sawing motion on my arm where they used to stop, “but no legs at all. I could kind of grab onto a few things but mostly just used my mouth and tongue. Catherine was the opposite, two short legs but shoulders like you. A different combination for every women, some with nothing at all, but nobody noticing a single thing.”

“And I was a guy…” She frowns. “It would’ve been complicated if we had both been like this, right?”

“That’s exactly what I thought, but not much of it makes sense. Like… Life is real, this can’t happen overnight!”

“So… what happens next?”

“Breakfast?” I propose cheekily.

“Alright, care to put me down?”