Entangled (caption) - part 1 (free version) (Patreon)

Part 2 is available here.

"...and..."

It comes out of my mouth and it isn't my voice.

Too high. Too light. A woman's voice with a laugh still banked in the back of it, like the sentence had been headed somewhere funny and my mouth is where it ran out of road. The laugh doesn't land. It hangs there half in, half out, and nobody finishes it.

And my fingers are already moving. They're at the middle of my back, on a clasp I can't see, working it, and they know the trick of it - pinch, twist, done - a two-part move performed blind, without asking me. Two skinny straps let go of my shoulders at the same time. Weight drops. Swings. Settles.

I have never owned a bra. Never put one on a body or taken one off one, never had one reason to learn that taking one off is a thing with a technique, and my hands just ran the whole maneuver in the dark in under a second. Ten thousand hours of practice I don't have.

The room is wrong. Not rearranged-wrong. Not my-room-after-a-party wrong. Wrong like it was never mine and never will be. Lamp on a nightstand. A glass of water with a smudge of lipstick on the rim, pale pink, a thumbprint of a mouth. A ceiling fan turning its slow circles and ticking every time it passes the same spot, tick, like it's been doing that for years, like this room has a whole life that started long before I fell into the middle of it. There's a shirt on the floor. A woman's shirt, soft-looking, buttons up the front. Jeans with the legs inside out. One sock, balled, coral at the toe.

For three seconds, five, I stare at the water glass and can't stop. Somebody drank out of that tonight. Somebody stood right here with lipstick and thirst and a whole evening in front of her, and her mouth is my mouth now. I can taste cherry. Fake cherry, sweet, a little waxy. I have never in my life tasted cherry off my own lips before.

There's a black seam where a second ago should be. I reach back for where I was, and the reaching is all there is. It's like patting your pockets for keys and finding the pockets sewn shut.

Because if I look down…

I look down.

Hair comes off my shoulders when I tip my chin and swings into my face, sticks to my lip. It's long, longer than anything that has ever grown out of my head, and it smells like flower-and-sugar shampoo, warm off a scalp, and the scalp is mine. The smell rises off my own collarbone and follows me every way I turn, close as a girl walking one step behind me. The lip it sticks to is slick. Gloss. My tongue finds the cherry again without being told.

I catch my own smell when I lift my arm, and it stops me. Under the shampoo there's a body smell, warm, faintly sweet, nothing like me. Twenty-six years of the same smell coming off me in the morning and this isn't it. This is somebody's skin doing its quiet work in the dark, and I'm the one wearing it.

My hands…

Small. I hold one up in the lamplight and it's just small. Narrow at the wrist. Soft over the knuckles, no scab, no callus, none of the little rough roads of hair that are supposed to run from knuckle to wrist. Nails on the ends of these fingers, real ones, long enough to catch and snag in the hair when I shove it back. I turn the hand over, then back, watching the lamplight sit on the nails. Somebody's hand. That's all I can think. Somebody's hand, attached to me at the wrist, answering when I tell it to move, and that's worse somehow than if it didn't.

I pinch my own forearm, hard.

It hurts way more than I meant it to. The skin is thin there and there's nothing under it to speak of, no meat, the pinch closes on soft and my nails leave little white crescents that go pink, and the pain runs up the inside of my arm and lands in my shoulder, bright, and I feel it. Whoever this is, she felt that. We felt it together, and I'm going to be sick.

Under my sternum, a heart is going faster than any heart I've ever owned. Quick and high, fluttering at the base of my throat like a bird hitting a window, over and over.

The straps are still hanging off my arms. My hands bat at the straps, work them down off my elbows, and then the whole garment comes away, flung somewhere soft, and the weight on my front lets go.

And doesn't leave.

It drops and it stays. Two warm heavy weights hanging off the front of me, pulling at my shoulders in a slow roll when I move, swinging a half-beat behind the rest of me, arriving late everywhere I go. I turn to see where the bra went and they swing with the turn and then keep going a little further on their own, and something in the stretch of that runs straight down through me - a heat, chest to groin - and the cold air moving off the vent is tightening the skin, and every degree of the tightening reports separately. Both of them. Two small bells being rung by nothing at all.

That is not how a chest works. I've had a chest for twenty-six years. A chest is bone and flat and nothing. You can slap a chest. It doesn't ring.

I press my palms flat over my sternum just to stop everything moving, and there's give - flesh moves away from my hands and comes back - give, give-back, warm, heavier than the size of them makes any sense for, two bags of warm water somebody strapped on me while I wasn't looking. My heartbeat is in them. I can feel the beat through my hands and through them at the same time. When I breathe they ride the breath, up, down. There are faint red lines pressed into my shoulders where the straps were, dents, the ghost of the band still wrapped around my ribs like a sock mark, and some dumb animal part of me actually misses the thing, reaches to be re-fastened. The body misses its harness. That's how I know it's been wearing one for years.

There's no hair anywhere on my chest. The skin there is so smooth, new skin, doing nothing I'm used to skin doing.

There's a mirror on the dresser, and in it a woman with her back to me, mid-strip, hair down her spine. The woman raises her hand when I raise my hand. I don't look at her face.

It's wrong lower down too. It's been wrong this whole time, I was just too busy to feel it. Hot. Hot and slick between my legs, and my body keeps reaching for something down there, keeps checking for a weight it expects, and there's nothing. Nothing hanging, nothing there, just flat and changed, and I can feel my own pulse sitting inside it, a whole heartbeat in tissue I didn't have this morning. My thighs touch each other, top to knee, and when I shift my weight they glide. Skin on skin. I never once in my life thought about the gap between my thighs. Not once. Until it was gone.

My hands find the shape of my waist on the way down, the curve in above the hips, and map it without permission. I've been a plank my whole life. This is an hourglass, an actual hourglass, and my palms know how to hold it.

My hands go hunting down my sides next, patting along my hips, feeling for the waistband of my shorts. Because I went to sleep in my shorts. Because this is a dream, and in the dream I would still be wearing…

There's elastic. Low, thin, the last fabric on me, a strip of lace riding the very edge of my hips, and my hands have it before the thought finishes, yanking it down over the hipbones - and the hipbones are wide and sharp, they get in the way, there's a geometry to getting anything down off this body there never used to be - and it drags down the fronts of my thighs, and one foot steps out of it, automatic, a little toe-point move, and the air is everywhere.

Everywhere. Places that have never once been outside. Skin that has never been rained on, never seen pool water, never been seen by anyone, front and back and in between, and the AC is running and it's like standing in front of a freezer with the door held open, and the goosebumps come up all at once, tailbone to nipples and back, and I grab at myself with both arms, cross them over whatever I'm made of now, and do this hunched little shuffle in place, like I can hold the cold off with my elbows. Like there's a corner somewhere to go stand in.

Behind me, bed springs shift. A small sound. Weight settling.

There's a man on the bed.

He's been there the whole time.

He's propped up on one elbow in the unmade sheets, shirt off, jeans still on, barefoot under the covers, square jaw, hair pushed back, comfortable as furniture. His phone lights his chin blue and he lays it down slow on his chest, unhurried, like he doesn't want to interrupt what I'm doing. This is his room down to the smell of him, and I've never seen him before in my life.

He pats the mattress. Twice. Soft.

The room was dark in my head until this exact second. My room, my panic, my private ceiling fan, one person in it and that person me. It wasn't. It's his room. I landed in his room, and I've been stripping in front of him since I got here - the clasp, the straps, the elastic, every move my hands made - I performed a whole strip for a stranger, and he thinks it was for him. Why wouldn't he. Look at me. Look at where we are. Clearly that's what this is. Clearly that's what I am, in this room, at this hour.

His eyes do the thing.

Chest first, face second, a flick down and back up, and then a small smile that says the measurement came out fine. I've seen that exact flick ten thousand times. I've done that flick. From over there it looks like nothing - half a second, a glance, guys do it, whatever. From in here it's a hand on a scale. It's being lifted, weighed, and set back down slightly rearranged.

And my arm crosses my chest. My other hand drops low, flat, shielding. Just like that. A move I never learned, a posture I've watched from the cheap seats my whole life, and this body snaps into it cold, knows the choreography better than it knows anything. Cover. Because it's not the same, being looked at like this. From in here, it's being measured for something.

He holds a hand out. Palm up. Not demanding, just open, waiting, like it's obvious what comes next, like what comes next has always been obvious.

"Hey," he says. Warm, easy. "You okay?"

I open my mouth to say something true - my name, what happened, help, any of it - and what comes out is:

"I'm on my period."

Her voice. Breathless, high, apologetic, ending on a little up-tilt like a question. I hear the words land in the room and I want to reach into the air and take them back out of it. I don't know where that came from. I've never said that sentence in my life, never had a reason to, and it was just sitting there loaded, the first door my brain found lit - the one reason, the universal reason, the reason with a whole polite architecture built up around it, the thing you say - and my mouth grabbed it on the way past, same as it grabbed everything else tonight.

The man doesn't answer right away.

He looks at me. The smile goes away in stages, the way ice comes off a windshield. The eyes stop first. The mouth hangs on another half-second, optimistic, then quits.

"You had it last week," he says. Flat. A beat late, like even he can hear the beat.

"Dani," he says.

That is not my name. That's so close to my name that it goes through me like a fishhook - it sounds like my name, it sounds like my mother leaning out the back door in July with the screen banging, calling me in for dinner - and it's hers, it's this body's, it comes out of his mouth warm and worn, a name he's said a thousand times, said into her ear, said with his hand on her face. And he's starting to sit up now, the bed frame shifting under him, and I'm starting to understand how big he is. Forearms. Shoulders. The easy way he holds all of it. He could pick me up. That arrives as a plain fact, the same way the fan ticks, no drama attached.

His face is doing something. I can see the question getting ready to form. Once it forms, I'll have to answer it in this voice.

I'm already moving.

What's on the chair is a flannel - his, huge, smells like detergent and a cologne that's suddenly way too much of everything - and I'm shrugging into it with my arms going through the wrong holes first, sleeves hanging past my fingertips, buttons out of the question, so I clutch the front shut in one fist and hold on with my life. There's a bag on a hook by the door, small, leather, a little brick of a purse, and my hand takes it as I go past - doesn't ask, nothing tonight has asked - and swings the strap over my head. It lands diagonal across me, cutting right between my - across me, and the bag slaps my hip with its keys and its hard little corners.

"Levi, what the hell!" and then it drops, quieter, almost hurt, "Did I do something?"

Levi, my last name, too. I don't stay around to answer.

The deadbolt is a thumb-turn and my thumb is small and there are nails in the way, and the door, when I pull it, is heavier than any door has a right to be, like it's full of wet sand, and I haul on it with my whole body, feet skidding on the hardwood - and then it gives, and swings out, and there's a hallway on the other side.

Beige carpet with a diamond pattern worn into it by ten thousand trips to the elevator. A wall light clatters on over my head, the kind on a timer, harsh. Behind one of the doors a TV laughs at something - canned laughter, quiet, then laughing again - and farther down, somebody's onions, and it's all so normal. It's a Tuesday night in a building where people live whole lives, and I'm running down the middle of it barefoot in a man's flannel with nothing under it, a purse banging against my hip. 2C. 2B. I read the numbers on the doors as I pass like they're going to mean something.

I run badly.

Two years of track in high school. I know how to run. This body runs like a different vehicle with the seat bolted in the wrong place. Everything's lower. The power comes from somewhere new - the hips do a roll on every stride that I can't cancel no matter how hard I try to lock them straight, and the stride comes up short no matter how far I tell my legs to reach, and on top of all of it the weight on my front is bouncing. It hurts. A sharp tug in a place I can't brace and can't flex anything against, and underneath the hurt something else is riding along with every stride - that heat again, flash after flash - and I do not have time for it, I do not…

My lungs are smaller too, or I'm in worse shape than I've ever been in, because three dozen strides in and I'm pulling air like a chain smoker. Hair whips into my mouth. Something ticks at my jaw every step, tick, tick, and it takes me most of the hallway to figure out it's earrings. Her hoops, swinging.

The fire door at the end has a push bar. I hit it with both hands and my whole weight and it gives like something being persuaded, slowly, grudged, and my nails click off the bar. Nails. On a fire door. Even my exits are different now.

Cold concrete under my feet. Green emergency light. A low electric hum in the walls, in my teeth. My breathing comes back at me off the concrete doubled and tripled - a stranger's breathing in a stairwell. Hers. Mine. Ours, whatever this is.

Down one flight. Half of another. My feet are small too, of course they are, and they slap the concrete louder than my feet have ever slapped anything, these little slaps echoing up the walls, and some absurd part of me is embarrassed by the sound. Somewhere above, the fire door clunks shut on its own weight and the building goes back to being quiet, and I stop, because my legs are shaking, and I stop because it turns out there was never anywhere to go. No plan. No keys to anything of mine. No one I could call who would know this voice, and no sentence I could say to anyone that explains any of it, because there is no sentence. There's a woman's mouth and a stranger's name and a man two floors up who knows what this body smells like.

My knees fold. I sit down on the steps.

Cold bites straight up through me. The flannel rides up the second I sit, bare skin meets concrete, and I hiss through my teeth - actually hiss - because it's that cold, and the goosebumps run from my tailbone up my spine and out down both arms, and my skin feels thin. Thin and new, like the top layer of me got peeled off somewhere between his door and here. The chill lands on places that never used to be outside in any weather. The tops of my breasts where they meet my ribs. The insides of my thighs. The soft of my belly. Everywhere there used to be hair and now there's just skin, going colder by the second, and I look down the length of myself and there's coral polish on the toenails, chipped, and it does something to me that the whole rest of the night hasn't managed yet. Somebody sat somewhere, some evening, and did that. Painted those toes. Waited for them to dry. All of that happened to this body like weather happens to a place, years and years of it, and I got dropped in with none of the memories. Just the paint.

I'm sitting on different bones. Wider, further apart, and they tip my pelvis back when I land so I have to put a hand on the step behind me just to stay sitting up. Even sitting down got renegotiated.

The bag has slid around to the front of me, and through the flannel I can feel the shapes in it. Phone. Ring of keys. Hard little corners. Sweat is cooling on me now, in places that never sweated before - the small of my back, the creases of my elbows, under and between my chest, where a slow line of it is crawling down between my breasts, and I can feel every inch of the crawl on the new skin. New plumbing. The body cools itself in places the old body never thought about.

I try standing again, to keep moving, because moving felt like doing something. Bad idea. Standing up, the blood drops out of my head and the stairs tilt, and walking is a whole new negotiation - the hips roll even at half speed, like the body has one gear and it's this one, and my legs are shaking in a fine fast way I can actually see in my thighs. I get four steps down and stop, and this time when I sit, I sit where I am.

I get my breath down off the ceiling. In through the nose, out slow.

The heart is still going at the base of my throat, fast, fast, fast.

And down between my legs, it's picked up the same beat.

I sit on the cold steps and try to put that under adrenaline where it belongs. Elevated heart rate. Blood moving. Bodies do things when they're scared, it doesn't mean anything, it's plumbing.

Except it's not just the beat. It's a throb riding the beat. Swell and fall, swell and fall, every single one, in tissue that feels swollen and warm and primed, and the heat of it isn't fading with the cold or the fear, and it should. Fear should shut this whole department down. Fear is the opposite thing. I've been scared plenty of times in my life - the night my dad's surgery ran long, a car spinning on ice at two a.m. - and no part of me south of the border ever had a single opinion about any of it.

It started before I got here. And nobody called it off.

I squeeze my thighs together, which turns out to be exactly wrong. Exactly fuel. Pressure the body thanks me for, warmth spreading up out of it like a cup tipping over low in my belly, and I let go fast and the warmth keeps going anyway, lazy, on its own schedule now. My nipples are stiff against the flannel and the flannel is a rough brushed weave, and every breath drags them across it, and each of them reports separately, both bells again, rung by cloth now. There's a flush crawling up my sternum. I can feel the edge of it moving, blotchy, wide, across my chest and up the front of my throat and into my face, heat coming up out of me like a fever breaking in the wrong direction.

I keep wanting to say it out loud to somebody: this isn't mine. I didn't bring anything in here with me. I was in my own bed with my own flat chest and my own heartbeat and my own name, and now I'm two floors under a man who says that name every day like it's nothing, sitting on cold concrete while the body keeps doing whatever she was doing when she left. She was halfway to somewhere in that room with that man, and then she was gone, and I got dropped into the middle of machinery that doesn't know there's nobody driving. It just keeps going. It doesn't care whose hand came off the wheel.

His hand on the mattress, that palm-up - I don't remember any of it, I've never met him, and something in me remembers him anyway, remembers the whole shape of the evening she was walking into, and leans toward it like it knows the way.

In the bag, the phone buzzes.

Against my hip. Short buzz, long buzz - a call. Then again. The vibration runs up the strap and sits in my hip bone, and this skin - her skin, turns the buzz into warmth too, folds it into the pile. I don't look at it. If it's him, it's him. Who else has this number. He's lying on that bed with the sheets shoved down and the lamp still on, holding the phone, saying her name into it, patient, half-annoyed, half-something-else, and I can't hear that name one more time tonight. It sounds like my name.

Twelve steps between here and the landing. I count them with my eyes. I count them with my hand flat on the concrete, cold climbing up through the palm. My other hand is on my stomach, holding everything still, and through that palm I can feel my heartbeat twice - once at the wrist, once lower, deeper, and the lower one is stronger. That one is not asking my opinion.

I go through what I still have instead, the one place that's still mine. I know my name. I know my address. I know where my mother keeps the good scissors, and that my car is due for inspection in March, and that I fell asleep in my own bed - my own bed, after my own late night in mom's lab, after I touched the thing in the case I wasn't supposed to touch. It's not much. It's a rowboat. It's holding.

I try to think my way out of it. Tax forms. The parking lot at work in February, gray slush, wind coming off it like a slap. Nothing lands. The body isn't on that channel. The body is somewhere else, somewhere warm and crowded that I can't see into, and down there the grip-and-release has started - slow, deep, a clench I'm not doing, on a rhythm of its own, and every time it grips, the warmth steps up another stair.

My eyes sting. That's new too. The sting runs over into a sniff and a tremble in my lips, and I'm apparently going to cry, sitting on concrete in a green stairwell in a borrowed body. I'm going to cry in a body I didn't ask for, in a man's flannel clutched shut with one fist, while whatever she started climbs and climbs and doesn't care who's in here.

The phone buzzes again. I hold very still and let it ring itself out, and the buzz sits in my hip bone and adds itself to everything.

Green light ticking overhead. Hum in my back teeth. Somewhere above me, the building being quiet. Somewhere above that, a ceiling fan ticking past the same spot, forever.

And on every single beat, a little more.