Free Waking Beauty by Elyse Friedman

good-lookingness and then find someone on precisely the same plane. Someone in his or her own league.
    If life were like school, Nathan would have had a moderately attractive girlfriend. But out in the real world, people don’t couple up with their appearance-equals. In the real world, ugly but powerful men can get cute women. If the ugly, powerful men happen to be wealthy, they can easily attract the beauties. (And bully for them. It doesn’t work in reverse. A fat woman with a Porsche is just a fat woman with a Porsche.) And if the powerful, wealthy men are also handsome, they can use up the pretty starlets like Kleenex.
    Unfortunately for moderately attractive Nathan, most women would want him only if he came with a snazzy job or a fat bank account—or at least great expectations for bank account girth. They weren’t terribly interested in a thirty-two-year-old video clerk/plant waterer who had no money,little ambition or future earning potential, who dwelled in an atomic bachelor apartment in a horrible high-rise on the sorry side of town, and who possessed a strangely shaped head.
    I was interested, but it was of no consequence. I remember thinking: If only Nathan were uglier, disfigured in some way—missing a limb or two, maybe afflicted with a harelip or a hideous full-body skin condition. Chronic eczema. Acute psoriasis! Like the Singing Detective (only not in pain and not hospitalized). Some rudely stamped combination that would sink him down into my league—not even the little leagues, more like twenty thousand leagues under the sea.
    I reproached myself for mulling it over.
Quit it, idiot. Abandon hope. And for fuck’s sake, stop feeling sorry for yourself. There are worse things than being alone. Are there not worse things than being alone? You have freedom. Food. Shelter. No tanks rumbling down your streets. No burqua. Think of how lucky, tucked safe in your bed as calamity rains down on the world, tragedy, torment, disease, famine, drought, war, terror…
My brain churned with the misery of the masses and mine. Shortly thereafter I drifted into my usual uneasy and fitful sleep.
    How funny to reflect back on the thoughts that filled my head that night—typical lying-in-bed thoughts after a typical day in the life of Allison Penny. It was my last night as me, but I didn’t know it.
    If only I had known.

After

1    
    Something was amiss. I felt it even before surfacing into consciousness. Though my eyes remained shut, my body was slowly gaining awareness, like a lens bringing something gradually into focus. As I emerged from the muck of sleep, I sensed a peculiar lightness about myself. I sensed
length
. My hand moved instinctively to my belly, to cradle the warm swell of flab, but my hand found a vast absence instead, a taut flatness. One nanosecond of total incomprehension followed by a powerful blast of fear and adrenaline. I flung back the duvet and gawked at my body.
Not my body!
A new body.
Not mine!
A completely foreign form. I sprang from bed and stood on the alien legs. I clutched at the flesh. It was real.
Not a dream!
This body contained me. My disoriented brain wasn’t able to process the nonsensical information. Catecholamines spewed from my nerves into my throbbing heart. I blacked out.
    When I came to, I went through a similar though marginally less horrifying series of shocks, gawks, and realizations. This time I didn’t faint. Instead, I rushed to my bedroom window. It was morning. The sky was blue (not crimson or green, or filled with spaceships). My next-door neighbor, Mrs. Silva, was in her backyard, calmly watering her recently planted vegetable garden. Her daughter, Debbie, was seated at the picnic table, playing with Barbie dolls. Everything seemed normal. Apparently, only I had changed.
    My heart was still going like Buddy Rich on a mad timpani, but my breath was beginning to slow and even out a little. Tentatively, I tried the voice. “Hello,” I said softly.
Not