Reconstruction - chapter 7 (Patreon)

The ceiling tiles in the recovery wing have a swirling pattern instead of the random divots I stared at back in August. I count twelve full swirls before my eyes stop focusing. My mouth tastes like dry gauze and old copper. The IV line taped to the back of my left hand pulls at the hair on my knuckles every time I breathe.

I try to shift my right leg. The femur doesn’t hum. It screams. A high vibration radiates from the marrow straight up into my hip socket. The joint feels packed with hot glass.

I drop my head back against the thin hospital pillow. The pillowcase is stiff and smells of industrial bleach.

The anesthesia is a heavy blanket weighing down my nervous system. I don’t know what day it is. I don’t know what time it is. They told me twelve to fourteen hours on the table. A surgical extraction.

There’s a plastic water pitcher on the rolling tray table next to the bed. Condensation on the outside of the pink plastic, pooling on the fake wood grain. One large drop tracks slowly down the side. It hits the puddle. The surface tension breaks.

The door clicks open.

Dr. Chen walks in, wearing faded green scrubs. She looks hollowed out. The skin under her eyes is bruised with exhaustion. She pulls a rolling stool over with her foot and sits near the edge of the bed.

Hayes is not with her. Dr. Aris is not with her.

She rests her elbows on her knees and looks at the floor for a long moment. The fluorescent light catches the silver rim of her glasses.

“Cole,” Chen says. Her voice is a dry rasp.

“The mesh,” I say. My tongue is thick. The words stick. “Is it gone?”

She looks at the white blanket covering my lower half.

“We had you open for six hours. We isolated the central nodes in the pelvic floor. We initiated the extraction sequence and flooded the surrounding tissue with the synthetic androgenic compound as planned.” She stops. She reaches into the breast pocket of her scrubs and pulls out a plastic pen. She clicks it twice. The sound is sharp in the quiet room.

“The primary mesh didn’t go dormant,” she says. “It anticipated the reset. The moment we severed the first vascular connection to the divergent tissue, the mesh in your femur initiated a structural collapse. It read the synthetic testosterone as a lethal pathogen. It started consuming your own bone marrow to repair the pelvic nodes. We watched your femur lose four percent of its density in twelve minutes.”

I stare at the swirling patterns on the ceiling.

“If we had proceeded,” Chen says, “your leg would have shattered on the table. The necrosis was instant. We had to abort. We closed the incisions and flushed the androgenic compound out of your system to stabilize the mesh.”

“You aborted.”

“We had to.”

“So it’s still there?”

“Yes.”

She doesn’t use the word permanent. She doesn’t have to.

I become aware of my body resting on the bed. They didn’t bind me post-op. The zinc oxide tape is gone. I feel the weight of the breast tissue resting against my ribs, glands throbbing with a steady ache from the bruising they took weeks ago.

Lower down, a catheter tube snakes out from under the blanket. The pressure of plastic routed into the female anatomy they just tried to cut out of me. The tissue is inflamed and swollen from the surgical attempt. Every shallow breath sends a wave of friction through the tucked folds.

“We’ll monitor the incisions for infection,” Chen says. She stands up, puts the pen back in her pocket. “You’ll be catheterized for three more days until the local swelling subsides. Meridian is covering all extended care costs.”

“Get out,” I tell her.

“Cole.”

“Get out.”

She nods once. She turns and walks out. The door shuts behind her.

The monitors beep. I put my left hand flat against the center of my chest, feeling the soft weight of the right breast.

I push my fingers into the tissue. Press hard, trying to find the flat plate of the pectoral muscle I built for twenty years. It’s buried deep under a layer of subcutaneous fat and swollen glandular mass. I grip the soft flesh and squeeze until it hurts, a hot pain that makes my vision swim.

I let go. I turn my head toward the window.

The sky outside is a flat, blown-out gray. December. The trees are stripped bare. I’m thirty-two and I’m fully, structurally female.

The frozen turf feels like concrete under my boots. It’s the seventy-eighth minute of the match. The stadium lights cut through the sleet coming sideways across the pitch.

My gray keeper jersey is soaked. The neoprene vest underneath restricts my ribs. The mesh closed the surgical incisions in under three weeks, the way it closes everything now, burning through whatever I eat to do it. Aris didn’t clear me for this. Nobody cleared me. I told Doyle I was dressing and dared him to bench his captain in front of the room, and he gave me one last start. Every breath is a gasp. The cold air burns the back of my throat.

We are down one-nil.

The opposition is fast and aggressive. They smelled blood the moment we walked out of the tunnel. They know the captain is bleeding power.

A loose ball spills out of a midfield tackle. Their striker, a kid who looks nineteen and runs like a sprinter, touches it past Chad.

Chad doesn’t even try to turn and chase. He’s gassed, and he quit trusting me to clean up behind him weeks ago. He just drops his head.

The striker is in alone. He drives into the eighteen-yard box.

I step off the goal line. I have to cut down the angle. I tell my legs to drive.

The fast-twitch fibers in my thighs are starved of testosterone. The stride’s gone short, the new pelvic tilt throwing my weight wrong, the hips fighting me.

The striker looks up. He sees me hesitating. He doesn’t try to shoot around me. He just chips the ball.

A soft lob that floats up into the sleet.

I plant my right foot. The Lattice holds the bone steady. I launch upward, extending my arms.

My vertical leap is short. The vest locks my shoulders, and I can’t get full extension. I reach my gloves up into the freezing air.

The ball sails three inches over my fingertips.

I land heavy. My knees buckle. I turn around just in time to watch the ball bounce once on the frozen chalk line and hit the back of the net.

Two-nil.

The away supporters in the upper deck erupt, a roar over the sound of the sleet.

I stand in the goalmouth. My chest heaves against the rubber binding. I stare at the ball resting in the nylon mesh.

Doyle doesn’t yell from the touchline. I look over at the technical area. He’s standing with his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his winter coat. He looks at me and shakes his head.

He turns to the bench and points at Danny. Danny strips off his warm-up jacket and grabs his gloves.

The substitution board goes up a minute later. Number 1 in neon red. My number.

You don’t substitute a goalkeeper in the eightieth minute unless there’s a catastrophic injury. Or unless the manager is announcing the game is lost and the captain is the reason.

I walk off the pitch. The walk takes hours. The plastic studs clatter against the frozen ground. I pass Danny near the touchline. He keeps his eyes on the frozen grass, somewhere south of my face and well clear of the rest of me, and jogs past to take his spot in the ruins of the defense.

Doyle hands me a towel. He doesn’t pat my shoulder.

“Get warm, Cole,” he says.

I bypass the bench. I walk straight down the concrete tunnel. The squeak of my wet boots echoes off the cinderblock walls. I reach the home dressing room and push the door open.

The room is empty. Silent.

I sit on my wooden bench. I drop the wet towel on the floor. I don’t take my gloves off. I just sit and listen to the distant, muffled roar of the crowd outside.

An hour later, the match ends. The squad files in. Nobody speaks. Nobody throws a boot against the lockers. They strip off their wet gear in a funereal quiet.

Doyle walks in and stands in the center of the room. He looks at the exhausted men.

“Regeneration session at ten tomorrow,” Doyle says. “Danny, you start preparation for the cup match on Saturday. Cole, I want you in the gym. You’re still coming off the hernia.”

He turns and walks into his office.

The starting job is gone.

I unlace my boots with numb fingers. I pack my duffel bag, slipping into a dark gray t-shirt and jeans, and walk out of the building.

I unlock the deadbolt and push the door open. The apartment is warm. The air smells like cheap vanilla soap and roasted chicken.

Mari is in the kitchen, wearing a t-shirt and jeans. She’s packing leftovers into plastic containers. Santi is at a friend’s house.

She turns around when she hears the door shut. She sees my clothes soaked from the rain, the slump of my shoulders. She watched the match on the local broadcast.

“Cole,” she says. She puts the plastic lid down on the granite counter.

I drop my bag onto the bare floorboards. It hits with a dull thud. I walk into the living room and stand in the center of the space. I’m dripping freezing water onto the wood.

“Take the wet gear off,” she says. She walks toward me. Her dark eyes are full of a calm empathy that I suddenly hate.

“I lost the job.” My voice is a raw scrape. “Doyle benched me. Danny starts on Saturday.”

“I saw.” She reaches out and touches the wet shirt. “You’re freezing. You need to get under the hot water.”

“I don’t need a shower.” I pull away from her touch. I step back. “I need my body back. I’m bleeding power every day. I can’t jump. I can’t command the box. The whole room looks at me like I’m a corpse taking up locker space.”

“You had a bad game.” She keeps her voice steady. “You’re recovering from a surgical trauma. They cut you open. You shouldn’t even be walking, let alone playing.”

“The surgery failed, Mari.” I hurl them at her. “They aborted it. The mesh is permanent. Female. Weak.”

Mari stops. Her face hardens.

“You are not weak,” she says. “You’re just changing. The biology changed. You’re still Cole.”

“I’m not Cole.” I step toward her. The bulk of my frame towers over her, but the threat is hollow. “Cole was a two-hundred-pound wall. Cole owned the eighteen-yard box. I don’t own anything. I’m a joke, playing dress-up.”

“Stop it.” She points a finger at my chest. “You’re throwing a pity party because you lost a soccer match. The world doesn’t end because you aren’t the captain anymore. People adapt. You adapt.”

“Adapt.” I laugh, a harsh sound. “You want me to adapt to this. You want me to accept that I’m bleeding through my shorts once a month. You want me to accept that I have to wear sports bras.”

“Yes.” She doesn’t flinch. “If that’s what the body is, then yes. You deal with it. You figure out a new way to live.”

“You don’t get it.” I wave my hand at the kitchen. “You get to leave. You get to go back to your normal life. Your double shifts and your kid. You get to be what you are. I’m a freak, and you’re visiting the exhibit so you can feel generous.”

I said something I can’t take back.

Mari just looks at me. The empathy is gone from her face. Her eyes are flat and cold.

She walks past me. She doesn’t brush my shoulder. She goes to the kitchen counter, picks up her worn leather clutch, and walks to the front door.

“Mari.” I’m just scared. “Wait.”

She grabs the brass doorknob. She doesn’t turn around.

“I don’t visit exhibits, Cole,” she says. “And I don’t have the energy to babysit a man who hates himself more than he loves the people trying to help him.”

She opens the door and walks out. The deadbolt clicks shut behind her. I stand in the narrow hallway and listen for her Civic to start in the street. I strip out of my wet shirt roughly and hurl it to the floor. The violent motion leaves my breasts swaying, a heavy, unwelcome tug against my collarbone.

The air conditioning is off, but the draft from the windows makes the hairs on my arms stand up.

I strip off my jeans and look down at the wet clothes at my feet. The dark gray t-shirt tangled and jeans. They smell of frozen dirt and stale sweat, something metallic underneath that might be the sleet. A puddle of freezing water spreads outward from the pile, seeping into the seams of the oak floorboards. I don’t care about the floor.

My skin is covered in goosebumps.

I walk into the bathroom. The floorboards creak. I don’t turn on the overhead switch. The fluorescent bulb has a buzz that grates against the back of my skull after a match. The only light comes from the streetlamp outside the small frosted privacy window, casting a greasy orange rectangle onto the white tiles.

I look at my silhouette in the dim light, in front of the mirror above the sink.

Thirty-two years old. The face looking back is still mostly the one off the billboard, a little softer through the cheek and jaw than it was in the fall, still the keeper who told Tulsa to buy season tickets. From the neck down there’s nothing of him left. The face is the last of it, that and the voice when I talk, the two things that haven’t gone over yet. The neck’s thinner than it was, the slab of muscle that used to brace my skull through collisions mostly gone.

Without the binding, the chest is undeniably female. The glandular tissue expanded over the last two months, fueled by the estrogenic cascade Chen tracked on her tablet. The breasts are heavy mounds that rest out of place on the broad shelf of my ribcage. The yellow and purple bruising from the ball impact back in November has faded, but the skin around the areola is still swollen.

They aborted it. The mesh started eating my femur to fix the damage. They closed me back up and left it running.

I press my right hand flat against the center of my chest. The calluses on my palm are thick and rough, a battered goalkeeper’s hand pressing against soft female tissue. I squeeze the flesh. A hot ache radiates through the gland. A structure I don’t want, bolted to my skeleton.

I trace the line down my stomach. The ridges I built there are mostly gone, soft under a layer of fat that wasn’t there in the fall. Low down, just above the pubic bone, thin pink scars mark where the surgical team went in to cut the nodes loose. The waist nips in sharply. The hips flare out. The pelvic tilt shifts my center of gravity forward, changing the way the femur sits in the hip socket. When I stand with my feet together, my inner thighs press against each other. For my adult life, there was a gap there. A clear space of air between corded muscle. Now the skin rubs.

I lower myself onto the edge of the cast iron tub. The porcelain is freezing against the back of my thighs. The shock of the cold makes my stomach muscles tighten.

I take off my compression shorts and spread my knees, resting my forearms on my thighs. I look down into the shadow between my legs.

The coarse hair was shaved by the preoperative nurses at Meridian. It’s growing back in stiff, itchy stubble. I reach down with my left hand.

For thirty years, the hand went down and found a familiar weight that responded to gravity and touch. Now the fingers find a cleft.

I’ve avoided looking at it, avoided touching it outside of the shower. I shoved trauma pads against it to absorb the menstrual blood. I squeezed it into undersized spandex to flatten it. I treated it like a wound.

But the surgery failed. The door is shut. This is the architecture now.

I press two fingers against the outer folds. The tissue is warm. It doesn’t feel like a graft or a tumor. It feels like it belongs there. The body accepts the lie.

I pull my hand away. The fluid is shiny on my fingertips in the orange light from the window. The smell is undeniable.

I reach over and turn the cold tap on the sink. I put my hand under the stream and wash it off. The water freezes my knuckles. I turn the tap off.

I stand up. The joints feel loose, unspooled. The gravity of this new body pulls at my hips.

I walk out of the bathroom, past the wet pile of gear in the hallway, into the bedroom. It’s dark. I don’t turn on a lamp.

I walk over to the mattress and sit down. The springs groan. I swing my legs up and lie back against the pillows.

The sheets are cold. I don’t pull the blanket up. I lie there bare in the freezing air, looking up at the ceiling. The fan clicks faintly.

I knew how to stand to project mass. I knew how to hold my shoulders to make strikers second-guess their runs. I kept my chest rigid. I kept my knees slightly bent, ready to launch. I lived inside a tense armor.

I take a slow breath.

I let the armor go.

I tell my shoulders to drop. They slump backward into the mattress, losing the square set.

I stop holding my ribcage tight. The heavy breasts settle sideways against my chest, soft and unstructured.

I let my knees fall inward. The wide pelvic tilt turns my femurs inward, thighs pressing together in a relaxed geometry.

Doyle gave the starting job to Danny. The club is moving on. Mari took her keys and walked out the door. The surgical team packed up and left the mesh intact.

I’m not the captain of Arkana FC anymore. Not the wall.

Tomorrow morning I don’t have to pull the neoprene vest over my head. I don’t have to crush my ribs to survive the locker room. I don’t have to smuggle my underwear out of the laundry bin so Gary won’t see the bloodstains. I’m benched. The performance is over.

I’m just a person occupying a female body in a dark room.

I close my eyes. I don’t try to change the way my hips sink into the mattress. I let the new gravity take me down.

The illustrated version of this chapter includes images of Cole post-surgery, during the game, with Mari after, then alone, nude, in his apartment. It also features an explicit scene of Cole touching himself.

Read ahead to the next chapter here.