Free The Convulsion Factory by Brian Hodge Page A

change. He says I’m doing it because as a boy I was so threatened by the thought of wanting to make it with my mother.” Hysterical laughter. “Freudian quack.”
    “Answer me one thing,” Gary said, low and electrified. He yanked open his shirt to bare his chest. “Just what the hell is happening to me?”
    They stared at his nipples, in full extension, plumped as though ready to nurse. By now a pattern of four more pink-brown welts had erupted beneath them, down his ribs, like especially prominent mosquito bites.
    Alexis smiled broadly, mischievously. “Isn’t that sweet. You empathized with Lana more than we gave you credit for.”
    “This is some kind of joke to you?” Gary shouted. In that moment he wanted to hit Alexis, woman-in-the-making or not.
    “It must’ve been love.” Gabriel leaned in to dart his once-feminine tongue onto a nipple. Unexpected pleasure trilled through Gary, horrifyingly intense. For a moment he wanted to feel it again, ever the hedonist.
    He snapped his shirt closed, head aswim. “But I’m not the one who was taking hormones.”
    “When two people love each other,” said Gabriel, “a little bit of each one stays inside the other. From you, Lana took a certain amount of independence, I think.”
    “And this is what I got from her? Tits?” His laughter rivaled Megan’s in hysteria.
    “It’s much more than that, Gary, surely you can feel that by now,” Gabriel said.
    Gary peered down his torso and felt a rush of vertigo. With a clearer head maybe he could make sense of this, pinpoint some allergic reaction as the culprit. But a clearer head was at least a morning away.
    “I don’t want this, I don’t understand…”
    Gabriel propped his head atop a loose fist. “Do you know what the worst part of being us is? The very worst aspect?”
    The question sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Try for an answer, any answer: “Your body is wrong, a prison…? What? Just tell me.”
    “That’s it for me, all right,” Megan said.
    Gabriel cocked his head. “Not quite.”
    “Oh, isn’t it?” Megan shrieked, then stood and whirled on Gary. “I hope you know someday what it’s like to wake up every morning with something like tumors hanging between your legs! Because that’s what these are to me!” Clumsily, she hitched up the tight black dress she wore. Her genitals were framed within a garter belt and the tops of her stockings. “These are wrong! I don’t want them and nobody will help take them away from me! ”
    Alexis rolled her eyes. “I hate when you’re like this, girl. You’d think it was PMS.”
    Gary watched, mortified, as Megan lowered herself enough to plop her genitals, flaccid from estrogen, onto the tabletop. Something new in her eyes, though, a drunken madness made worse by grief.
    “Nobody cares,” Megan murmured, “I’m a joke and nobody cares,” then she seized Gary’s wine to smash the bottle against the table’s edge. She held the dripping, jagged remnant and for a moment it gleamed like surgical steel.
    “Just a few little cuts, it’s no big deal,” she said.
    Blood was drawn at the first firm stroke, Megan’s face twisting into an agonized mask of rapture and liberation. Alexis screeched and pushed herself away in the booth. Gabriel reacted with more sorrow than shock, shutting his eyes as Megan continued to saw.
    New sights, sounds, tastes, sensations … damn them all. This was too much. Gary bolted to his feet and reeled from the booth. Fixed his eyes on the way he’d come up and lurched toward it. A moment later a firm hand gripped his elbow to steer him another way.
    “Let me help you,” said Gabriel.
    He tried to wrest free. “I just want out of here.”
    Gabriel held firm. “And this way’s quicker, I promise.”
    Gary struggled another moment, then saw the exit sign glowing where Gabriel pointed, and surrendered.
    Gabriel hustled him through the gathering crowd, and when they burst through the exit, released his