The Swap

by Ewa Andersson

 

You are walking a street just outside the most central parts of the city. To the left there is a large open space; a park mainly consisting of a smooth and very green lawn, practically empty just now. In a very, very short while you are going to be nearly halfway down the part of the street, which is parallel to the park.

You are sixteen years old and a girl. You are 5'4" with blue eyes and long blond, a bit curly, hair that reflects beautifully in the sunlight. You are neither thin or fat, just fairly normal with a clearly visible waist and usual female shapes. Most people, both young and older, men and women, would not hesitate to use adjectives like pretty, beautiful, or attractive if they were to describe you.

The ones knowing you better would also add words as diligent, ambitious, intelligent, nice and kind, but all this does not matter at all for the rest of the story for diagonally behind you, inside a tall building with a clear view over the park and the stretch of street where you just now are walking is a, for the moment, very severely psychologically disturbed man watching you through his telescopic sight of his precision fire arms. His hand does not tremble, and slowly the trigger is pulled closer to himself and in nearly the same split second the bullet penetrates, after having passed the green park, your head exactly at the point where "rear", "upper" and "side" have their joint locations, and is only a fraction of a second later leaving the scull at the right temple, just to stop dead and be totally deformed against the kerb. Some forensics will in a couple of hours' time find the bullet there.

While its course through your head the bullet tore off life important functions in your brain, and a very strong shock wave travelled through the tissue and made you in reality dead and the brain stopped processing impressions from your senses already when the bullet had a fourth of its deadly sinister path through your head left.

You didn't even notice that you fell on the street and got a nasty scratch wound on your right lower arm. The last thing your brain registered was a bit of a green grassy park, a grey, somewhat uneven pavement in front of you and a dark yellow parked Ford and a midnight blue Volvo which had just passed, together with the waning sound from that car mixed with the general noise from the town, and very, very faintly in the background, from one of the few trees in the park, a bird singing.

***

You are on the way to your work. You are pretty late. But your work is of that kind so you can, to a certain degree, self decide your working hours. You have a very good education. Apart from an M. A. You have also read a lot a other courses at different universities. Due to a lot of travelling around the world you have collected an enormous amount of knowledge and experience about many areas that are related to mankind and its conditions. It is just due to the amount of depth and width in your knowledge that you can have such a free work as you have.

In the back of your head you catch the sound of a siren but you are walking very far in on the pavement, close to the yellow stonewall of a building, and don't care any more about the sound which is coming closer. Instead your mind is focussed on what you are going to deal with immediately when you arrive at work, but while these thoughts are being processed in your brain the fire engine, which was the vehicle the siren sound came from, collides with a small lorry at the intersection just behind you. The lorry is thrown by the impact onto the pavement where it squeezes and crushes the whole lower part of your body against the yellow stonewall of the house you were passing.

Neither you did notice so much, except for a very strong pain during the tiny proportion of time from that the small lorry first touched you until you fainted because the body, for defence reasons, effectively turned off its receiving system for pain signals.

***

Someone with a cellular phone saw the girl falling on the street, hadn't heard anything running up to her just to notice she looked dead however calling an ambulance that quickly arrived and took the girl to one of the hospitals in town.

***

The driver of the fire engine wasn't more hurt than he, after having looked over the accident scene, himself through radio could call for suitable vehicles, one of which brought the crushed man to the same hospital as the girl.

***

You wake up in a hospital bed. You have no notion what you are doing there. You ask for the time and what date it is, and you are curious to find out why you are there, but yet you do not dare asking, being afraid of what the answer might be. While you are wakening from your anaesthesia and its coherent sleep you are getting more and more aware of pains in your head. They are not yet strong, more like a heavy stinging. When you have regained so much strength so you can move your arms you feel you have a large bandage around your head. You are urged by the nurse in charge to leave that alone, and she asks you if you need a painkiller. The pain isn't so great so you answer no.

While your thoughts are becoming clearer as the gas from the anaesthesia leaves your blood stream you become aware of another heavy stinging from your right arm on which there is a gauze and some large band aids, but there is also a totally unfamiliar pain experience in your stomach. You have your period.

The nurse says that when you have woken up so much, and that everything so far looks really well you could now be moved from the ICU to an ordinary ward.

Two assistant nurses kick the catches that prevents the bed from moving when it is parked so the bed is freed. Then they grab hold of the bed ends and drag you with the head end first out into the corridor, into an elevator, out into another corridor and finally through a door into a small yellow tinted room where you are left alone for a little while together only with your alarm button to press if there should be any emergent need.

After a while, perhaps a rather long time, you are still very tired and drowsy after the surgery, and your perception of time might not be totally valid, a couple enters your room. They are about your age. They stop. Hesitate a short moment, and then the woman, with joy in her voice calls a girl's name:

-Karen!

You actually think they are they are lost, or that they are from the mental ward, or that they mean somebody else in the room so you lift your aching head to see to whom she is talking, but their eyes are still directed towards you and you definitely can not detect a fourth person in the room.

Maybe it was wrong of the doctor in charge to let these people in, but they had been very persistent and really demanded to meet their daughter.

What they get to see is the body of the daughter, mainly unharmed, apart from the bandages on the head and the right arm, lying in a hospital bed. For them the one lying in the bed really is their daughter, their own flesh and blood. Why didn't she recognise them immediately they thought for a brief moment, before the words of the doctor slowly began to affect their consciousnesses. Reality could really outdo the abstract. They are beginning to understand what really has happened and leave, rather filled with great sorrow, the hospital room and you are now alone again.

Later, you still don't know how much, due to the same circumstances as earlier, someone enters the room. You recognise her as your wife. Her reactions are completely opposite. She stands completely at a loss, seeming to believe that she has been directed to the wrong room, by some jerk at the hospital who can not ever discern a teen-aged girl from a middle-aged man, and that this jerk, for the benefit and security of the public, immediately should be replaced.

You now have the initiative and say your wife's name. She is of little faith, but by the sound of your voice she arrives at the conclusion that there is somebody knowing her that is talking to her, so she carefully moves closer to the bed where you are lying. You repeat her name again in the same way and she approaches you further. Also in her brain there is an ongoing process in which she is trying to grasp another doctor's words. What he had told her was really simple and obvious, but in this very moment these words are transformed into a very concrete reality.

In the bed she sees the body of a sixteen-year-old young and probably very beautiful girl lying. The amount of beauty is hard to decide due to the bandages and the sickly yellow-greenish facial colour, matching the covering blanket. This young girly bed creature talks to her in the same manner her husband used to do but with a totally different voice. It is the voice of young girl, however somewhat hoarse after having had a rather large tube down the throat during the surgery.

The presence of your wife makes you stronger. You get more and more aware of your body. The anaesthesia is leaving your body and your body feels more and more alien.

Your wife leaves the room after a short conversation to get home to brood. Who is she really married to? With you in the bed? That seems totally ridiculous! A thirty-five year old woman married to a sixteen-year-old girl. Still: It is in that body all your mutual experiences and memories are. It is in that body that all your knowledge about your children and friends are. It is from that body that greetings to your relatives can come as before. It is just the outer shape that has changed radically. The mouth of this body will still deliver the same thoughts, values and opinions as earlier held by the man she used to live together with. There is something about that creature which is familiar, luring and attractive, but not in a physical way.

You recover quickly after the surgery, which really was not extensive. All that was done was that the skull of the newly shot sixteen year old girl was opened and the brain from the exactly as newly crushed man's body was installed instead, in the same way a well functioning car could be made out of a totally wrecked one and a car where the motor has broken down completely. To join the nerve fibres to the spine was easy once when the medical science found out how to do it.

You find your body very unfamiliar. The both persons of your age that entered your sickroom already on the first day have actually visited you again. They still feel very strongly for you. A big part of their daughter is still alive, and as you get rid of more and more bandages, and regain more and more of a healthy skin tone you get an appearance exactly like their daughter's before that fateful day when she for the last time experienced the city. They have also met your wife and talked the situation through. She is still interested in you for what you know and can, while the couple really wants to see you grow up, and to follow your development, but still they have great difficulty in understanding that you can not recognise them, or know anything about their past, their other children, their relatives, or about the daughter's room or their house.

It is time for you to leave the hospital. The healing has gone very quickly for the young body. The couple has been there with some clothes for you. Panties, bra, a bright red wide, but short, skirt, a white blouse with some lace and embroidery which is buttoned in the wrong way from what you are used to. You were forced to get help from the woman to get the bra on properly. That was also a new experience, which also the blue shoes with a one-inch heel and straps were.

You realise that at your home you do not have a single item of clothing fitting you, so your conclusion is to follow the couple home to get suitable things out of the girl's closet.

You are somewhat crouching throw the corridors of the hospital. Not because of the pains, but for the reason you are felling very awkward, and even ashamed, by the clothes you are wearing, even though they fit very well. The swinging of the skirt around your legs feels totally weird, but when you realise that people either don't notice you at all, or that the ones doing so, rather seem to appreciate what they are seeing, you straighten up.

At the doorway to the hospital there is a guy just under twenty that turns his head and whistles. You perceive it in the back of the head in the same way as you did with the sound of the fire engine. You believe that it doesn't have anything to do with you, but somehow you feel bad at heart.

At home at the couple's place you pack up more panties, bras, pantyhose, blouses, skirts, dresses, a swim suit, a couple of jeans, slacks, shoes, some of which being high-heeled, some heavier outer garments for colder weather, and also what was found in a bottom of a drawer – a matching set of panties, bra and suspender belt in Burgundy coloured delicate lace, which she had bought in an attack of liberation from the mother and home, but since hasn't had the courage to use except for try-on sessions in her own room.

When leaving that house the woman raises a finger in the air making you understand that there is one thing more and you wait. She goes away but shortly returns with a package of maxi pads, which she hands you with a knowing and sympathetic small smile.

You make an agreement to be allowed to come back to get more thing should the need arise. They want to assist and help you as much as they can. They are very helpful and understanding, and also showing great thankfulness over, that at least, the body of their own daughter, can remain to exist, even if her good girly heart and psychological identity no longer live.

You take the things in a taxi and get home to your own apartment. Your wife does not know how to behave. Is she to hug you, even kiss you welcome, or what is she to do?

For a while you live together with her, but realise that it can not go on. Your body's hormone system makes itself more and more known. You are no longer as upset, and not so disgusted, when you notice that young boys stare persistently at you.

Finally you move to an own small apartment, but you still have some contact with your wife. Still, you have many mutual experiences, and your conversations are very refreshing for both of you. You also have contact with the couple, but they occur more and more sporadically.

Pretty soon you can go back to work. Your subordinates have at first very hard to submit to your decisions. What they saw was a young girl, hardly dry behind her ears, and such are hardly anyone used to obey in work life – but as time passed your decisions were accepted because they were well grounded, really thought through, and seemed to come out of many years' experience, which they also were.

One night you decide on taking on the most feminine items of clothing you have in your closet. You have started to getting used to the feeling of the otherwise foreign soft slinky materials. You have practised a little and can now make your hair look not too bad, and you can put on a discrete make-up and to button a blouse is really a child's play.

You go to a restaurant with a pub where you know there are usually a lot of younger people. You have become a few years older now, and entering the bar is not a problem. You have some drinks, and as your weight is much lower than earlier the effect of them becomes much more powerful than you had anticipated.

After a while a young man steps up to you and starts talking. The evening in the bar continues and finally you follow him home. You are rather tipsy at the time, but you really enjoy it, ever though you are extremely scared of your own reactions in this new situation. You are still a virgin, but the thing you are most afraid of is how you will think it feels to be kissed. But when held in his arms you totally surrender and you feel like you have melted.

Some years later you marry a man, but not this one. You had some children, and thanks to the new body you turned eighty-seven, counted by the girl's age. Sadly you were rather senile the last sixteen years.

 

Ewa Andersson

 

 

 

*********************************************
© 2002 by Ewa Andersson. All Rights Reserved. These documents (including, without limitation, all articles, text, images, logos, compilation design) may printed for personal use only. No portion of these documents may be stored electronically, distributed electronically, or otherwise made available without express written consent of the copyright holder.