Brad's hearing came back to him first... he heard cars honking, the rush of a gentle breeze, the steady prattle of a woman's voice, and the steady clack clack clack of high heels on cement. Then it was his sense of touch... he felt the warm sun on his face and shoulders, the cool air on his knees (his knees?), and the steady pumping of his feet, which seemed to be arched awkwardly forward and upward. Then his senses of taste and smell checked in, and he took in the aroma of lilac and the sweet taste of cherry on his lips. At last his sight flooded back in, and he found himself looking in surprise at a New York City street scene.
He stopped in his tracks... and suddenly found that it was difficult for him to get a solid footing; his ankles wobbled unsteadily. Looking down, he saw to his utter shock that he was wearing high heeled boots... and a black skirt... and a light purple tank top. A purse hung from his shoulder, and shopping backs swung loose in his hands.
"What the hell?" he muttered.
Looking around himself desperately, he saw a young woman in a floral dress standing next to him, looking at him in surprise. And past her...
Oh wow. Oh wow.
Stepping unsteadily forward on the slender heels of his boots, Brad approached the store window and looked in utter astonishment at the reflection staring back at him. Where he should have seen himself dressed in an unflattering tank top and skirt, Brad saw the face of a pretty woman in her early twenties, her long brown hair blowing gently in the breeze. Her sizeable breasts pressed against a tank top identical to the one he wore, and a black skirt hung over her feminine hips. Brad gaped, and the woman in the glass gaped in unison.
Brad had heard something on the news about people switching bodies, but he hadn't paid much attention to the report; he'd assumed it was about a TV show or something. He certainly hadn't imagined that people were actually switching bodies, in real life. Things like that didn't happen in reality. They happened in comic books and movies. Bad ones. But here, in his own mirror image, he saw proof that...
No. He was dreaming, right? This couldn't be real.
"Are you okay, Erica?" said the blonde woman in the flowered dress. He watched as her reflectiion took a spit next to his own feminine reflection in the store window. "You look kind of..." Then suddenly the other woman's eyes went wide, and she grabbed Brad's arm. "Oh my God, Erica, look at that dre--"
Suddenly the woman stopped talking for a moment. She stood perfectly still, her mouth open, staring into the window. Then she blinked rapidly and leaned closer into the glass, her eyes wide. "What the hell just happened?" she muttered.
That was what Brad wanted to know.
.Missy was confused.
One minute she had been on the street, shopping and talking with her best friend Erica. The next she was here, sitting in an alley in a pile of garbage. Okay, not quite a pile... but she was surrounded by beer cans, food wrappers, and cardboard, and there was a soiled blanket beneath her and a garbage bag next to her. That was pile enough for her.
Had she been attacked? Had she been mugged? She didn't remember being mugged, but she had blacked out. Or... was it whited out? In any case, there had been that weird flash of light. Maybe someone had knocked her unconscious and... God, she didn't want to know what they'd done with her. In any case, they must have left her here in the alley when they'd finished with her. Missy knew New York City was a dangerous city... but she'd been with a friend in a nice part of town in broad daylight surrounded by tons of people. People didn't get attacked under those kinds of circumstances, did they?
And then another question occured to her. If she was here in this alley... where was Erica?
Missy pushed herself up... and then, for the first time, she noticed what she was wearing. She was dressed in very dirty, very smelly clothes. A heavy wool jacket, a stained t-shirt, torn jeans, and ragged men's shoes. So someone had knocked her out and stolen her clothing. Stolen her dress. Stolen her two thousand dollar designer dress. And, she realized, looking herself over more carefully, they had stolen her purse and all of her jewelry, too. And her six hundred dollar pair of heels.
She fumed.
And now she had to walk home dressed like a bum. Missy hated bums. They were so dirty, so pathetic, so persistent. And they liked to bug Missy especially because they could tell that she was rich. Bums loved rich people as much as rich people hated them. Missy didn't want people to think she was a bum... she had friends. She had a reputation. Her daddy had a reputation.
But she didn't have much choice, did she? So, getting to her feet, Missy left the alley and headed out to the sidewalk... And then, suddenly, a little way down the street, she saw... herself?
Or someone who looked like her, anyway. A lot like her. And the other Missy was wearing her dress, her shoes, her jewelry, wearing her purse. What on earth was this, anyway? Was this some imposter trying to steal her life?
Storming down the street, Missy shouted, "Hey, you!" at the woman who looked like her. The street was crowded, and she found herself brushing past people as she walked; people didn't defer to her the way they normally did. One guy scowled at her as she passed, and muttered, "Out of the way, jac--" ...but he rest was lost in the crowd.
But Missy didn't care what these people thought. She had a life--and a very expensive dress--to get back.
"--kass." Steve heard himself speak the last half of the word he'd been saying before that strange flash of light had appeared in front of his eyes. right after the homeless man with the big bushy beard had bumped into him. Then Steve was silent... what had just happened?
"Did you say something, sweetie?" Steve turned and saw a round little woman in her forties with thick glasses and wearing an "I (Heart) New York t-shirt looking up at him.
Steve frowned. "Sweetie? I..."
Then he looked down at himself... and was shocked by what he saw. He was wearing a t-shirt with the Statue of Liberty printed on it, and he had a city map unfolded in his hands and a camera hanging around his neck. He looked like a tourist. Steve hated tourists.
It took Steve a moment to understand what had happened to him... but when he turned and saw the faint reflection of a pudgy man in his forties in a car window, wearing the same t-shirt he was wearing and holding the same map, he put the clues together. Steve had heard the news on NPR that afternoon. He'd read a couple of articles online. People switching bodies. A whole town turned upside down. Prison riots, car crashes, escaped murderers, all sorts of chaos. Steve had been fascinated by the reports... at first it had all seemed too impossible to be real, but NPR was usually pretty reliable, and the sites he'd checked online were very reputable. And here, staring back at him from a car window, was living proof that it was really happening.
But last he'd heard, the swaps had been confined to one small city in a completely different state. Steve didn't remember the city or the state... he thought it was one of those ones in the middle of the country somewhere, but he wasn't sure which one. In any case, as of half an hour ago, no one had been switching bodies anywhere near New York City... and if that had changed, he would have heard about it by now. And yet here he was, in the body of a damn tourist.
Across the street was more evidence. Steve saw a crowd of people stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, all of them looking very confused, and in the middle of the crowd was his own body. A little bit farther down the street, he saw the homeless man with the bushy beard arguing with two women, both of whom were visibly upset.
"Hank," the little woman with the glasses said, putting a hand on his shoulder, "are you--" The woman stopped in mid-sentence, then blinked and said, "Who are you? Where's my mama?" Steve realized that the woman had switched had switched as well. He'd heard the switches were spread by physical contact... and in a city like New York, it was impossible to walk half a block without accidentally bumping into someone.
This was going to be bad...
The world was spinning.
Dizzy, Gretchen closed her eyes tight. Was this a stroke? She had a history of strokes in her family... she'd never had one herself, so she didn't know what a stroke was like, but this felt like it could have been a stroke. First there had been a flash of light, then the world had spun around her, then she'd started to feel incredibly dizzy. Now it felt like she was being tugged backwards. There was a cold metal bar in her hands... she held onto it tightly so that she wouldn't fall over, but the terrible phantom force behind her still pulled at her. Gretchen called out her husband's name--"Hank!"--but he didn't answer.
Slowly, tentatively, she cracked her eyes open... and as she took in the sight before her, she realized what was really happening. She was on a merry-go-round, the small metal kind like on the playground at her school back in Iowa. The spinning feeling was the spinning of the merry-go-round, and the tugging feeling was centrifugal force pushing her away from the center of the merry-go-round. As a schoolteacher, Gretchen knew all about centrifugal force.
None of that explained the flash of light, though. Or, more importantly, why she was suddenly riding a merry-go-round instead of standing on a sidewalk with her husband puzzling over a map of New York City.
Suddenly, Gretchen felt her hands slip from the bar in her hands, and she flew off the merry-go-round and struck the ground hard. Somewhere nearby she heard a woman scream, then shout, Jamal!" But she didn't hear anything else. Whether from dizziness, shock, or her collision with the ground, Gretchen's world went black, and she lost consciousness.
