Margaret Mary Aquino sat on the rusty steel girder under the trestle bridge, her back against one of the piers and her legs drawn up to her chest, wrapped by bony arms with protruding elbows. The bridge above provided little protection from the drizzle that had soaked her thin top and ragged jeans, and left her hair a sodden birds’ nest.

Another girl might have cursed the cold that seeped into her bones, but Margaret Mary was beyond curses. She’d been cold and hungry so long that she barely remembered what it was like to feel any other way. Two years since she’d run from the home that had become unbearable, so foolishly confident in her ability to find something better.

First she’d found refuge with a group that was squatting in a place on the outskirts of town, but they’d wanted her to contribute. She couldn’t get a job, not even one that paid under the table, and begging brought in pennies. Eventually they turfed her out. Before long she was blowing greasy guys in the back seats of junky cars for the price of a sandwich.

After a few months, she was so dirty and scrawny that no-one was interested.

A car rumbled overhead, rattling the plates that held the traffic. She could feel the vibration through the girder where she sat, just enough for her to think about what it would be like, to be on top of the bridge rather than under it. To be in a warm car, with decent clothes. Dressed, fed. Thinking about who knows what. Making dinner, maybe. Or getting home and relaxing. Watching TV.

She was too tired to shake her head. Too beaten down to imagine a different life.

I’m done, she thought, and this time, she meant it. What’s the point of going on?

Far below her, the dark water swirled and spun over boulders big enough to crush a house. The river had sung its dark song to her every day for the past six months, seducing her one empty promise at a time.

Tonight, she promised. Now.

She stood.

~o~O~o~

Len was on his way home, another work-day in his rear-view mirror. The cheerful facade he wore in the office started to fray by the time evening rolled around, but he stayed late anyway. The boss wanted him to retire and make way for younger blood. He knew that was why Ramsey had scheduled a one-on-one with him for Monday morning, and he was expecting a full-court press.

Len could retire, even though he was only sixty-three. He had more than enough money. House paid off, 401(k) beyond solid. Pension sufficient to cover regular living expenses. He was set up in a way that most people would only dream of.

The idea terrified him. Work was all he had. It kept his mind off of all of the things he didn’t have and never would: A spouse. Children. Friends. He would have nothing to do but sit in a comfortable chair in the house that was all paid for, and face the demons he’d been running from his whole life.

The thwop-thowp-thwop of his windshield wipers was barely enough to keep up with the constant drizzle, and occasional flashes of lightning suggested that the storm would get worse before he reached home. He took the right and drove onto the structure which the bronze plaque on the first pier identified as the Staff Sergeant Eugene F. Allen Memorial Bridge.

He felt the usual clench in his gut as he drove onto the bridge; acrophobia wasn’t his biggest issue by any stretch, but it was real and always had been. It was an old and familiar twinge, though, like a bone that aches in cold weather at the place it broke decades before. He paid it no attention. Truth to tell, he was little more than an autopilot on the drive home, barely conscious of the sights and sounds around him, unless something was out-of-the-ordinary.

Nothing was. He couldn’t see Margaret Mary, crouched on the structural girder beneath the bridge deck. If he had, perhaps he would have stopped. Perhaps not. But he didn’t, anyway. He remained lost in his own thoughts, consumed by his personal dramas, paying little attention to anything around him.

It’ll happen, he thought, whether I fight or not. No amount of extra hours, no willingness to do tasks far beneath my paygrade, or to suck up to Ramsey, will delay the inevitable for much longer. They’d give him a nice send off, tell some fine stories, pat him on the back. And then, sure as fireballs in hell, they’d send him packing.

And when they did, he’d have no choice but to really look in the mirror.

There was a stop-light just off the bridge on the far side, blinking yellow at this time of night. Visibility was poor so he brought the car to a full stop. Then lightning split the sky, hitting a darkened church steeple not thirty yards away.

And just like that, the world was transformed.

~o~O~o~

Margaret Mary had no fear of heights, but she made up for it with an irrational fear of drowning. She’d told herself not to be silly; the rocks would surely end her instantly. It was a long drop. Still, she needed to psych herself out before taking those final two steps.

Just as she told herself she was ready, the lightning came. She hadn’t even been looking that direction, but the fierce brilliance seemed to burn her eyes and she threw up an arm to shield them.

The arm she lowered an instant later was not her own.

A sound escaped her lips. A whimper, perhaps, as her mind raced to make sense of the world around her. It was warm, for one thing, with heat coming from both the comfortable leather seat and the dashboard in front of her. She was looking at the old Methodist Church through a windshield that was being cleared by wipers that needed new blades.

One hand was still on the steering wheel. Thick palms, sturdy fingers. Visible scars. It was clean, dry, and male.

Len Vansittart. The name came to her, out of nowhere. A life history slid into place like a key fitting into a lock, turning the tumblers one by one. The parents, long gone. The years of school. The job, the boss. The people who said ‘hello’ and laughed at his jokes and stopped asking questions years and years before. People he knew well, but who’d never really known him. The future that seemed to be closing in – the same future he was trying so hard not to face.

I’m . . . Len Vansittart? This is my body? My car? I have . . . a house? Money? A job?

She sat in the car, stunned, as the rain came down, harder and harder still. Rain that sang through the tall trees that shaded the road that ran along the river, soaked the well-trimmed grass and danced on the asphalt, gleaming in the light. Amid the craziness, her whirling thoughts kept circling a central truth: I’m dry. It’s raining, and I’m fucking DRY!

Minutes passed as the sky grew darker and the rain harder. Lighting continued to sizzle in the near distance, and thunder shook so hard even the superb German suspension of Vansittart's car — my car? — could not wholly compensate. It occurred to her that she would need to move; that she couldn’t just stay at the stoplight forever. People didn’t seem to be on the road in the downpour, which was sensible, but someone was bound to come along eventually and she would look suspicious just sitting there.

The thought of being discovered seized her hard, despite the fact that she hadn’t done anything wrong. She hadn’t really done anything at all, come to that, and she had no idea who had done something to her, or how, or why. But, child of a broken and dysfunctional home, product of the street, paranoia was as ingrained a reflex as blinking.

She stole a nervous glance in the rear-view mirror. There was no car behind her, but what she did see caused her adrenaline to spike. By the closest pier, a figure was crawling up from below. Pale, slight, hair like pitch, clothes both ragged and soaked.

Run!!! Desperately, she accessed her new memories. Driving! Vansittart could drive. How? How? The memories came in flashes like the lightning. It was all there — gas, brake, steering. Signals. Lights.

She looked back again. The small figure rose and looked around as if drunk, or confused. Then it took a step towards the car. Two.

Margaret Mary stomped on the accelerator hard and the car lurched forward, causing her to panic and slam on the brakes. Driving a car is as much a matter of muscle memory and confidence as it is one of abstract knowledge. But a quick look behind and she hit the gas again, not quite as hard, while her male hands clenched the steering wheel in a death-grip. Somehow, she made it across the river road without an accident and kept going, jerking forward and shuddering to a stop every dozen yards.

~o~O~o~

Len's eyes closed involuntarily in response to the brilliance of the lightning strike directly ahead of him. His surprise turned to terror when he reopened them and found himself staring into an abyss — a long drop to certain death. His high-pitched scream pierced even the crack and roar of the thunder and he collapsed backward. By good fortune or blind luck, his back rammed the pier and he instinctively reached back with both hands to steady himself.

Panting, petrified, it was only then that the rest of his situation began to penetrate Len's consciousness. The first thing he noticed was the cold that went through skin and muscle to settle in the very marrow of his bones. Cold and wet and misery.

Then he noticed the gnawing hunger. The awareness of many meals skipped, and hours since his body had had any sort of fuel whatsoever.

The body itself was only the third thing he noticed. It felt sufficiently wrong that, despite his terror, he looked down to see that rain had plastered a thin cotton top to his torso, and the torso had two modest mounds of flesh that were, beyond any doubt or question, female. What’s happened?

It was hard to get his brain to function; fear was attacking him like an army of chittering rats. But a flood of memories, alien at first, proved strong enough to penetrate. The abusive Filipino father with the weakness for drink. The welts on her slender back from his hard leather belt. The escape . . . the running. The fear. And, later, the begging. The hunger. The cold.

The name. Margaret Mary Aquino — the first two syllables the sole legacy of a mother she'd never known; the latter two the grudging gift of the father she’d grown to both hate and fear. I’m Margaret Mary Aquino?

I’m a GIRL?

He remembered, and her memories hit with a force and specificity that was impossible to deny. He remembered the slow ebbing of options that had brought Mary Margaret to the bridge that night, as doors to a better future seemed to close one by one. He remembered the moment of resolve, and the step she’d almost taken, just before the lightning hit. The sense of it almost overwhelmed him, just as it had done to her.

But Len remembered himself as well, and six decades of life gave him armor Margaret Mary had never developed, as well as perspective no nineteen-year-old could possibly possess. He was not ready to die.

Getting off the bridge was, nonetheless, the hardest thing Len had ever done. He had her memories of climbing down the crumbling cement of the pier nearest the road, then scooting along the support girder until she’d reached the middle of the span. He knew he had to retrace her movements, but he had to do it in the dark and pouring rain while his own fear of heights played a devil’s symphony on his limbic system.

He was weak — or his new body was. Even before Margaret Mary left home, she’d been a doll-like echo of her paternal grandmother’s porcelain perfection. Two years on the street, she was undernourished, rail-thin, and anemic.

Len would not allow that weakness to stop him. He clung to the girder like a barnacle as he inched his body forward along its length, clutching even harder each time a gust of wind threatened to tear him off the narrow ribbon of metal.

Exhausted as he was when he reached the far pier, he did not dare to pause lest the fear paralyze him once again. He pushed himself to scrabble up the cracked and broken cement, clinging to the rain-swept surface with both hands and feet.

He remembered that Margaret Mary had lowered herself down until her feet could reach the section of the pier where the spalling had created a rough staircase, so at the top of his climb he had to pull himself up to the bridge deck with arms that were so tired they were shaking. Twice he failed; the second time, he almost slipped and fell to the death Margaret Mary had been contemplating.

Terror at his close call provided that little bit extra that he needed; on his third try he managed to just get his waist level with the deck, and then he collapsed forward and thrust his arms over his head. In his own body, the balance of his weight would have been fully on the deck, but his delicate arms, shoulders and torso made the maneuver touch-and-go. He felt himself start to slide backwards and frantically swung his left leg upward. With the side of his knee wedged onto the deck, he had sufficient leverage to pull the other leg up too.

The fear and the exertion had, briefly, driven off the deep sense of cold, but now that he was still it returned in full force. He knew he had to keep going and so he did, one painful step at a time. Off the belly, rising to hands and knees. Rocking back until he could bring his butt over his heels and his torso upright. Getting one knee up, foot planted. Resting both hands on the upright knee. Using the raised leg and both hands to push upward, getting the other leg planted.

He staggered, almost fell, but managed to stay standing.

Exhausted, cold, hungry, he looked around stupidly, trying to make sense of the world he was seeing. The bridge behind him. River beneath. Sky heavy with cloud and air thick with sheets of rain. Ahead, a blinking yellow light, and a car waiting at the intersection.

The car would have been unremarkable to most people, but it was his car. He knew it. And dim dashboard light was sufficient to show that there was someone behind the wheel. He took a step forward, then another.

Suddenly the car surged forward, stopped, and pushed forward again. He watched it go, too brain-fogged to make sense of what he was seeing. What are you doing?

The car continued its lurching movement across the river road and up the hill, looking for all the world like it was in the hands of a juvenile junky. Not having any better plan, Len followed in its wake.

He wasn’t able to move quickly; in fact, he could barely keep going. But one thing his brain was still able to process was that stopping was not a viable option. He was too cold and too exhausted. If he lay down somewhere – anywhere – he might not get up again. All the effort of getting off the bridge would have been wasted.

He just kept his head down and put one foot in front of the other, again and again and again, hearing the squelch of his sodden sneakers every time he set one down. He could feel the sharp pain of blisters, made worse by the wet, but decided there wasn’t anything he could do about them.

He lost sight of the car as it topped the hill, but he kept going blindly forward. Up the hill, past the 24-hour gas station he’d stopped at more times then he could count. He’d had money in his pocket then. Now, he knew, he didn’t.

The rain started to let up as he got to the top of the hill. Looking down, he saw his car about four blocks away. A police car was parked behind it, lights spinning, and an officer was talking on his radio. The thought of walking four more blocks was almost enough to defeat him.

Len walked toward them anyway.

~o~O~o~

She would have driven away. Punched the accelerator and damn the consequences. Margaret Mary had a few encounters with the police under her belt, and not one of them had been pleasant. When she saw the lights behind her, she’d been petrified.

Terror, however, had scrambled her still-developing reflexes. She hit the brakes rather than the gas, then tried to do both, then hit a curb, hard. The engine cut out, and she sobbed.

The heavy beam of a police flashlight centered on her as the officer walked forward. Her erratic driving was a big red flag, so he was on trigger alert. He’d already sent the plate number back to the station.

She looked up in terror as he drew level with the window, not having the first idea what she was supposed to do.

After a moment, he wrapped on the window with the hand that wasn’t holding the flashlight. “C’mon, open up.”

She shook her head, her eyes wide.

He frowned, then reached behind with his free hand.

She shrank back, sure he was about to point a gun at her, but all he did was thrust an open wallet at the driver’s side window. She saw an elaborate badge in metal and enamel. Noted the name. Kincade. She remembered Officer Kincade!

“Open the window,” the man barked, “or I’ll have to force it.”

Seeing that she had no choice, she fumbled on the armrest until she found the buttons that lowered the windows. She inadvertently started to lower the wrong window, but she recovered before he barked at her again.

“Alright,” the Officer said. “Let me see your licence and registration.”

She had no idea what he was talking about . . . until, suddenly, she did. It was a new memory; one that seemed to belong to Len. A dusty road at sunset back when he was in college; a police cruiser; having to pull out the necessary documents. She nodded spasmodically, felt in her back pocket for the wallet Len always carried there, and pulled out the licence. Then she went into the glove compartment where he’d kept his registration.

Officer Kincade took the documents back to the squad car and sent the information to the office. They confirmed that the car was, indeed, registered to Lennart C. Vansittart, that he had no outstanding warrants, and no history of DUIs or other vehicle offenses. There’s always a first time.

He walked back to the Mercedes and had the driver take a breathalizer. He was surprised to see that there was no evidence of alcohol. The guy’s eyes weren’t red or dilated; there was no smell of either booze or weed.

He had the man get out and take a field sobriety test. He passed, though he looked pretty shaky. Finally, Officer Kincade said, “Look, mister . . . uhhh.” He tried to figure out how to pronounce Len’s last name, failed, and gave up. “I don’t see anything that indicates you’re under the influence, but there’s no way you should be on the road. What happened?”

Margaret Mary had had a little time to think, while she was walking heel to toe and putting first one index finger, then the other, on the tip of her nose. She hadn’t always managed to get out of trouble, but her batting average wasn’t bad. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to sound humble rather than scared. “I was driving across the bridge, and this bolt of lightning hit the church steeple, right in front of me. I kinda lost it.”

The strike had been very visible and Kincade had seen it – Good thing they got a grounding wire on that sucker! – so he nodded. “Okay, I guess that makes some sense. But the way you’re driving . . . no way it’s safe. Tell you what. I can give you a ticket for reckless driving, which you’ve absolutely earned, and it’ll cost you some bucks. Or, you let me drive you home, and you can pick up your car tomorrow when you’re in better shape. Your call.”

Margaret Mary didn’t spend a lot of time thinking it over. She wasn’t confident she could get the car back to the place where Len lived without crashing it, and she wasn’t used to thinking of fines as something she would ever have the money to pay. “I . . . I think I’d better ride with you.” She knew how to sound submissive.

“Okay, then. Let’s . . . .” He stopped and looked behind him. “Maggie! I told you to move on! This town don’t want vagrants!”

Margaret Mary flinched when Kincade spoke, but fortunately he wasn’t looking her way and didn’t see it. She followed his gaze and froze.

~o~O~o~

Len flinched as well. He wasn’t used to thinking of police officers as threats. In over sixty years, he’d known a few and they’d all been fine people. When he’d interacted with officers in their official capacities they had always been polite.

The look he was getting from the officer standing by the man he’d seen in the mirror his whole life was anything but polite, and the new memories he was still trying to integrate were screaming a warning. No! Not Kincade!

“I’m sorry,” he said, ignoring the warnings from inside and out. “I saw this guy driving, and thought he might need some help.”

Officer Kincaid frowned, turning to the man he’d just pulled over. “You know this person?”

Except that he didn’t say “person.” He used an old slur for people from China.

Margaret Mary looked hard at the waif standing in front of her. Seeing the ratty clothes, matted hair. The eyes that seemed to overwhelm the face. She saw the need. The pain.

“No.” She shook her newly male head decisively. “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

Len stepped back, looking like he’d been punched.

Kincade got right in Len's feminine face and poked a hard index finger into his midriff. “We’ve been through this, chick, and I told you before. Pick another town. If I catch you here again, I’ll find a charge and make it stick. Now, git!”

Kincade’s hostility, coupled with the ordeal of the past half hour, was too much. Len sank slowly to his knees, head bowed, as Kincade strode off, leading the person who wore his old body to the cruiser.

Margaret Mary didn’t look back.

As the cruiser’s taillights faded into the distance, Len tried to make sense of Kincade’s hostility and Margaret Mary’s denial. Why were they treating him like some kind of leper? He was just cold, tired, and hungry. Was that a crime? A sin?

But Margaret Mary’s memories were now his to access, and he realized that what he had just experienced was, for her, just another day ending in “y”. And now, it would be his life. Kneeling on the pavement, soaked through, exhausted, Len did something he hadn’t done in years.

He wept.

~o~O~o~

“Thanks,” Margaret Mary said. “I’ll be sure to get the car tomorrow.”

“You do that,” Officer Kincade said, once more the solicitous local peace officer. He nodded once, then walked crisply back to his cruiser and drove away, feeling positively benevolent.

She fished the keyring from her pocket and walked up to the front door. There was no light, so she spent a moment identifying the right key and getting it into the lock. Then she was inside.

The first thing she did was to lock and deadbolt the door behind her. Then she leaned against it, pausing to calm her pounding heart.

She had been terrified to see her former self show up, first at the bridge and then when she’d been pulled over. Whatever magic had spirited her from that life into this one, she didn’t want it to somehow reverse. If that . . . woman? . . . touched her, who could say what would happen?

But whoever that was – a shadow of her own self, or the real Len Vansittart, or someone else – he, she, or it had been left on her knees in the rain, miles away. And Margaret Mary Aquino was by God never going back to that miserable life.

Gradually she grew calm enough to reach over and turn on the hall light.

This is MINE? All this?

Slowly, she went from room to room. Living room. Kitchen. Breakfast area. She went up the stairs. A bedroom that had been converted into an exercise room. Another that had been converted into a study.

No guests ever stayed at this house.

Then the master bedroom. She sat on the bed, almost reverently. Never in her life had she ever felt anything so comfortable. She hated to move, but she needed to take care of business, so she went into the spacious en suite bathroom. From habit, she started to sit as she began to lower her pants, but then she caught herself.

She began to laugh, a little hysterically. “Really? I’ve gotta deal with one of these?” Shaking her head, she reached inside her shorts and pulled out her penis. She took aim, released, and laughed as a steady steam of urine hit the pot. When she finished, she instinctively grabbed a bit of toilet paper. No, she reminded herself. Guys don’t wipe.

Finished with her business, she turned and caught her new image in the mirror. Her first, involuntary, reaction was to look away.

But she forced herself not to. She supposed he had a decent enough face, for an older white dude. Broad forehead, brown eyes, sharp nose, strong jaw. The markers of age, though, were everywhere. The gray hair. The rough skin. Age spots. Wrinkles. Both muscle and flab she had never experienced in her life. Hair in places it had no business growing. Chest, arms . . . hell, there was even hair growing in her nostrils!

“I don’t care,” she said fiercely. With a last defiant look, she turned from the mirror and went back into the adjoining room, where the sinfully soft mattress called to her seductively.

It had been close to two years since she had been in a position to worry about changing clothes for bed, much less hanging anything up. But the suit and the heavy shoes weren’t meant for sleeping. She stripped everything off and left it all on the floor.

She had Len’s memories, though she was still processing them. She knew where to find everything in the house. She could discern all his private thoughts, all his secrets, just by focusing her attention on them. But one secret she had known, from the instant she’d found herself in his body, because it had dominated his life since childhood. She knew why he had no wife, why he slept alone, why he never even invited people over. It was the same thing, more or less, that dictated Len’s choice of sleepwear.

A lacy negligee.

Margaret Mary had never worn anything like it, even when she still had a roof over her head and a parent who — with much grumbling and resentment — occasionally bought her things to wear. His beneficence had never extended to frilly nighties. She realized, with a start, that she could wear one now.

She thought about it. She’d never had any desire to be a man, except early on when she’d had her first periods. Sometimes she’d wanted to dress like the other girls, back when she was still in school, but that was more about fitting in. She got teased by the girls who had nice things to wear, when all she had were old jeans and second-hand tops. Now, she could be just as girly as she could want. Sure, she’d look kind of foolish, but she was alone in the house . . . just like Len had always been.

She thought about his life. Although she knew the things he’d said and done, the things he’d seen and heard and thought, memories didn’t really connect her to the things that he’d felt. The the memory of having felt something is, at best, a pale and inadequate substitute for the feeling itself.

She knew he’d experienced something called ‘dysphoria,’ and she knew what that word meant. But she didn’t know what dysphoria felt like, and without that emotional understanding, his actions seemed strange to her. Why be a hermit outside of work, cutting yourself off from everyone, just to dress up like a girl and think about what it would be like to be one? Why?

Len’s life made no sense to her, and she dismissed it with a firm shake of her head. “If being a freakin’ dude – even a feakin’ old dude – is the price I’ve gotta pay for having food, and a house, and scratch, then fine. I’ll be a dude. It’ll be weird, but so what?” She padded over to the dresser and found a pair of boxers and a T-Shirt. Extra large. Natch.

She climbed into bed, an enormous smile on her face. She wasn’t hungry, or cold, or uncomfortable. The only nagging worry that she had was that somehow the change would be reversed, and she would be back in her old body, facing the same problems that had driven her to the brink. But even that worry was not enough to keep her from falling into a deep, blissful sleep.

When she woke, it took some minutes for her brain to catch up with everything that had happened. The events of the prior evening felt so like a dream, she couldn’t believe that she was still in Len Vansittart’s body, with access to all of his memories. She lay in bed for a while, taking it all in. Luxuriating in the moment.

But one of the downside of her new body was the need for far more frequent bathroom breaks. She realized that Len hadn’t gone through an entire night with one in years, and her body was giving strong signals that having done so would bring consequences in short order.

As she got out of bed she staggered and fell, fortunately into a wall that allowed her to catch herself. Between the weight distribution being new to her experience, and an older man’s stiffness in the back and knees, her balance was off.

She felt stiffness in another area as well, an experience that was equally unfamiliar. “Fuck, this body’s a disaster,” she muttered. But she got herself to the bathroom, did her business, and was relieved that the morning wood returned to a less obtrusive form.

For a moment, she considered getting dressed. Her Len memories told her it was Saturday – something Margaret Mary had stopped tracking within months of becoming homeless – so she had nowhere she was expected to be. The whole work thing . . . need to think about that.

Ultimately, she decided that the boxers and t-shirt she’d worn to bed were more than sufficient for what she planned to do next: Go to Len’s adequately stocked refrigerator and have all the food she could eat. Maybe even figure out how to make something hot to drink. Chocolate, or coffee. Anything.

The kitchen had bread and butter, cheese, fruit, cereal, milk, eggs. She knew what to do with at least some of that. Rather than work through Len’s memories, she poured Wheaties into a big bowl, drowned them in milk, and sat down at the kitchen table. Already, her mouth was watering. Food!!!

Len would have eaten it without a thought, and normally did. Food was fuel, as far as he was concerned. But to Margaret Mary, every bite was a revelation of taste and texture. She loved the crunch. Even the faint smell of over hyper-processed grain was a delight.

When she finished the cereal, she worked her way into Len’s memories and figured out how to use the Keurig machine on the counter.

If cereal had been fine, coffee was a revelation from God. Just the rich, earthy smell was enough to send her into orbit. She took one sip, then another, then turned to go back to the table, afraid that the intensity of her reaction would cause her knees to buckle.

She screamed, and almost dropped her precious coffee.

– To be continued.

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