Jungle Swap - part 1 (Patreon)

The ground was solid under his boots. That registered first — boots, not his, and the laces were tied differently, double-knotted — and then the weight hit him. Not a metaphorical weight. Actual mass, hanging from his chest, pulling forward, the shirt fabric pressing against it. He looked down and his stomach dropped. The shirt was khaki, unbuttoned two buttons, and inside it was — he reached up without thinking and the moment his hands made contact through the fabric he sucked air through his teeth. Every nerve ending right there, close to the surface. He snatched his hands back and stood very still.

The jungle didn't pause for any of this. The macaw on the branch above — red, indifferent — shuffled sideways. A capuchin below it was eating something with both fists. Behind them, half-swallowed by the dark between the tree roots, something spotted lay watching. He was aware of being watched. He was aware, suddenly, of how far he was from anything — no city sounds, no pavement, no other people — and of how much smaller this body was than his own, the arms thinner, the shoulders narrower, the muscle that should have been there not there.

And then he noticed the damp. A warmth, low and close, the fabric of his underwear pressing against him in a way that had no analogue in his own experience. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and it shifted with him, intimate and strange, and he understood with some bottom-floor part of his brain that this body had a whole interior geography that was foreign to him. Another sensation started to make itself known — his bladder felt full. He stood in the wet jungle air with his hands held slightly out from his sides and tried not to touch anything, while the disc behind his left ear pulsed once with misdirected heat.