She woke up all buzzed wires and rough edges and stood outside Lenny’s gathering the nerve to enter. Took her four tries ‘fore she finally gathered the might but just like anything else once she’d set her mind on something there weren’t no stopping the follow through. Put one foot in front of the other until door in hand, body on the other side.
She’d come up with the plan three weeks ago after seeing one of ‘em late night TV advertisements right ‘bout the time Gawd went to bed and it just sorta took. Weren’t nothing special, just a Rockwellian image of a well-to-do-lady standing by a door as the words In the future, you’ll be able to buy bodies to change into.
Her why were simple, Lenny’d done took up an affair and she simply couldn’t stomach it. Boiled down to nothing else. It’d gone on for a year now and in her gut she’d known all along but her heart wouldn’t let none of her parts get to talking so the message’d got bottlenecked up near her gallbladder never quite making the truck. Caused for a helluva case of reflux that’d leant for a constant carry of rolled up tums in her flannel jacket and a little cough that never could find the mend.
She and Lenny’d met up when they’s just kids, barrel full of dreams filling their insides but time’d got away from ‘em as it often has a tendency to do and life’d got rather hard and sticky and ‘fore they knew what’s what, twenty years airplaned past ‘em. Kids were grown. Jobs less satisfying and the lengths of silence between ‘em crater wide. Not to mention the world changing as it’d done. Whole swaths of folks displaced, industries died out, and not hardly enough money to keep up.
How she’d found out ‘bout Lenny were docile, he’d left a note out on the kitchen table to a woman named Barbara like he’d felt the urge to scribble some affection and then just plumb forgot. Age’d finally won the battle against stupid.
When she’d showed up to the body getting store, quaintly named Buddy’s, she was taken aback by the feller working the counter not named Buddy nor very friendly if she were to tell it true but she saddled up unafraid and said, “Woman, mid-twenties.”
Man asked, “price?”
To which she responded, “whatever this’ll buy,” and slid a wad of currency his way.
Man behind the counter removed a color coded card from out a drawer and pointed to one of four doors at the rear of the room. “Left,” he said.
As she walked on over to the pockmarked line of individuals waiting to enter, she looked down at her yellow card and wondered what all cautionary signs had led up to Lenny stepping out of their bed and ‘fore long she had a head full of assumptions and not much else. To the right of her the three doors were line-less and though this perhaps should’ve been her first clue, she ignored her gut again and shuffled through.
Come the other side, she had full expectation of seamless exchange, a body for a body. But much like the man behind the counter, Buddy’s wasn’t a place for niceties and the woman on the floor were all zipped up black and blue. Woman was a discard, thrown away like all ‘em years spent with Lenny felt like, but it was all she had and so she clung to the chance of a restart, waiting for the future to take hold and grant her something new.
And sure enough once she’d slipped down in the woman, spreading her senses into the synapses and crannies of what being someone else’ll do, she began to understand the dilemma not often accepted. Ain’t no coming back once a mind set on what to do. So she made her way over to Lenny’s, scrapping out the last of what she could salvage in her chest, and opened the door and walked on through.
Lenny greeted her with open arms not one bit confused, kissed her cheek, and said, “Barbara, it’s so nice coming home to you.”
~ fin ~
Ashley Erwin writes Southern Pulp. Sometimes she does it well. Mostly, she slings dranks and peddles whiskey until the day comes that she doesn’t. She is the author of A Ballad Concerning Black Betty or the Retelling of a Man Killer and Her Machete. Her short stories can be found at Cheap Pop, Shotgun Honey, Switchblade, Revolution John, and soon to be Cowboy Jamboree’s “Grotesque Art.
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