My wife and I did a Freaky Friday switcheroo. Now she's gone and I really want my old body back.

My wife and I were out at the flea market when we saw it. Looking like an old stock ticker from the 1920s, the device looked to be made of polished brass. It appeared fragile and had many intricate parts behind a glass dome which looked to protect it from any outside forces.

I had absolutely no idea what it was, but my wife liked the aesthetics of it for our apartment décor.

“That would look so cool up on our display shelf in the living room, don’t you think? It's looked the same since we put it up.” She saw me looking restive and assumed correctly I was doing subtraction on the dwindling amount currently sitting in our chequing account. “It’s only four dollars.”

We had been trying to declutter lately, and go to a more minimalistic style, but at the same time, the thing really did look pretty dang cool.

“Sold,” I said, picking the heavy device up off the shelf. I carried it around with me for a few more minutes as we finished shopping, and my arm began to go numb from the weight of it. My wife looked at me struggling and agreed to head to the cash register and settle up.

After paying for our assorted items we went back home.

Almost as soon as we walked in the apartment door, Christine was busy removing items from the display shelf that hung above our couch in the living room. It was the first thing people saw when they walked inside, so we had used it to display a few pieces of high art we had obtained – A Spider-man/Green Goblin print, Funko bobble-heads, and artificial succulents from Dollarama.

The shelf looked barely capable of holding the heavy thing, as she set it down there, but I remembered using very long screws and carefully finding the studs to hang the shelf. She rested it there and the thing held, to my slight amazement and relief.

I reached up to adjust it as she was still holding it and we both touched it at the same time. As my fingers brushed against the glass, something extremely bizarre happened. There was a dizzying moment where I felt like I could see through two pairs of eyes at once, then suddenly only one again, from a different angle, now lower, and to the left of where I had been standing. I was still holding the glass-covered device, but I saw my arms were now thin and feminine.

“What the hell,” I said, my voice suddenly higher than normal. I looked to my right to see “me” standing there. It was the strangest feeling, like looking in a mirror but without its presence.

“Holy shit,” my wife said back, standing there and now inhabiting my body.

The shelf suddenly collapsed under the weight of it and everything fell to the floor. The glass covering the device cracked and shattered into a million pieces and the polished brass machine exposed behind it was now dented and warped. It was no longer making any noise, either. I suddenly realized the thing had been very faintly humming, so quietly that we didn’t even noticed until the sound was gone. But how was that possible, I wondered. There was no battery or plug on it. And the thing was about a century old by the looks of it. What was it running on?

We stood there gawking at each other for a few minutes. Just staring, jaws agape. How do you process such an event happening? It’s almost impossible. I felt panic rising in me and my breath began to come fast and shallow, my heart beating faster and faster. The world faded into shades of yellow, then red, and finally black. I went down awkwardly with my head hitting against the corner of the coffee table, hearing my own voice calling out to me as I hit the ground and pain exploded in my skull. I was conscious for just long enough to see blood pooling around me and to realize that this accident would require an ambulance.

I woke up in the hospital – still in my wife’s body. And she was nowhere to be seen. I felt anger rising up in me as I wondered where she could possibly be right now. There was no sign of her. My hand went up to the side of my face and I felt bandages there going up to my scalp.

Then I noticed the letter sitting on the table to the right side of the hospital bed. I picked it up and read it. It was written in my wife’s handwriting.

J, You always said I was exaggerating. Let’s see if you still think so. Have a nice life.

• C

I wondered what the hell she could be talking about, then felt the pain begin to flare in my belly.

The thing was, my wife had an incurable illness. Now I had her body, and thus now I had the incurable illness.

Guilt began to crowd my thoughts as the pain increased to the point where I could no longer stand it. I looked down and saw my belly had suddenly swollen twice its size. It felt like pressure building and building in my guts and I wanted to vomit from the force of it all.

I clutched my abdomen and looked around the room, terror and panic rising up into my gullet like a balloon. There, the call bell. I pushed the button and waited. I held it down. Minutes passed. I felt like I could scream. Then I really did begin to scream. The pain was extraordinary.

All those years I had stayed at home when my wife had gone to the ER. She had gone alone to suffer by herself in the waiting rooms and at first had scolded me for it, then became increasingly saddened and disappointed by my lack of interest in this terrible part of her life. As much as she hated her endometriosis it was a part of her.

She would tell me how it was as common as diabetes, but nobody really seemed to know or care about it in the medical community. She’d come back from the ER and tell me how EMS workers would hurl insults at her in the waiting rooms, saying, “I saw you here yesterday, you fucking junkie. Why don’t you go home and let them deal with actual sick people?”

“It’s as painful as child birth,” she’d tell me while reading articles online, and I’d roll my eyes. “That’s what it says right here. It’s like cancer. It just spreads and spreads and takes over your entire abdomen. You grow cysts and this horrible tissue that’s sole purpose is to cause pain. Eventually they have to remove your entire reproductive system if it gets bad enough.”

What a lemon, I've been stuck with, I remember thinking to myself at the time.

I was feeling her pain now, though. Quite literally. All these years I had scoffed at her, thinking she had been exaggerating. That she had Munchhausen’s or some such thing, just looking for attention by seeking medical care and sympathy. I thought she hadn’t known how I secretly felt, but she did. After all this time, she was just going to fucking leave me here to suffer.

Finally a male nurse dressed in navy blue scrubs came in.

“Oh, you’re awake! Let’s get a quick set of vitals.” He looked at my hand still gripping the call bell with white knuckles. “Did you need something?”

“I’ve been in so much agony since I woke up, can I please get something for the pain? I have endometriosis and it hurts so bad right now.”

“Endo-what-a-dosis? I don’t know what that is. I’ll call the doctor but they’re pretty busy right now. It might be a while.” He slapped the blood pressure cuff on my arm and put on his stethoscope.

He held it up to my chest and brought it down to my breasts before I even had a chance to say anything else. Bringing it down through the gown, he listened to by breathing as the blood pressure cuff inflated. Then he pulled up my hospital gown roughly and held the stethoscope to my belly, listening to the horrible sounds it was making.

“Geez, you’re bowel sounds are pretty hyperactive.” I looked past him and saw an old man was staring at me from the bed across the room. He was touching himself beneath the blankets.

“Can you close the curtains, please?”

“Oh, sorry. I’m done. I’ll give the doc a call.” He turned around and left, leaving the curtains open.

I lay there, feeling violated and exposed. The old man got up from his bed and came over to mine.

“Hey, young lady,” he said.

“Please leave me alone,” I told him.

“Fuckin’ rude bitch,” he spit at me, his warm spittle landing on my cheek. “You should learn to be polite when a man is talking to you.” He didn’t leave, just came closer and leaned in towards my face. His hot breath smelled of chicken salad with too much mayonnaise.

I had been tall as a man, around six and a half feet, but as my wife I was only five two. The old guy towered over me and as I tried to push him away he grabbed my wrists and held them down. I was too stunned to scream. I tried to kick him but my feet were tucked in tightly under too many blankets. He let go of my left wrist and used his right hand to begin to choke me as I clawed with futility at his face.

“You want it, bitch? I can give it to you.”

The nurse walked back in.

“Leonard! Get back to your bed! We’ve talked about this! No touching the other patients!”

What the hell? So he’s done this before, I thought to myself as the man let go of me and walked away with a sulking look on his face.

“Keep him the fuck away from me!” I screamed.

“Calm down, lady, geez. He’s just an old man. He doesn’t even know what he’s doing. He’s got dementia.” He was looking at me like I was a heartless monster. “Huh. Not in too much pain anymore I see?”

“What!?”

“You were complaining you had so much pain a few minutes ago. You look fine to me, now. Are you on something at home? Dilaudid? Percocet? Oxy? The doctor’s not comfortable prescribing opioids right now so he gave an order for some Tylenol.”

He handed me a little paper cup with two regular strength in it. I gulped them down dry, knowing, just knowing, that they wouldn’t do anything.

“You need something else?”

“A new room?”

“Ha! Yeah, you and a million other people. It’s a pandemic, lady. Doctor wants to discharge you once you’re up and moving, so physio will be in to see you in a minute. Assuming you can walk, we’ll get you out of here later today.”

The rest of my hospital stay was thankfully short but full of agonizing pain, and I got home and gulped down twice the dosage of my wife’s pain meds. She was always complaining they made her constipated, so I ate a fig bar afterwards and gulped down some apple juice.

I went back into the living room and looked at the device on the floor that had caused all this. It was laying there, looking burnt out and broken.

My abdomen and my entire body still screams with pain and I don’t know if I can live like this. I’m truly terrified if this is it for the rest of my life, that I won’t be able to take it.

I really want my old body. But I don't think my wife is interested in trading back.

JG