The Accidental Detective

by Trismegistus Shandy

 

Val has made major sacrifices to be able to transition. When they return to their hometown for their estranged mother's funeral, they hope they can reconnect with their old friend from school, but they have no idea what that meeting will lead to.

CW: Discussion of terminal illness and death, manslaughter, traumatic injury, self-harm, memory loss, brief mention of body parts

 

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I was late getting to the airport because my car battery had died overnight, and then the TSA delayed me further because “You don’t look like the person on this driver’s license, ma’am.” So sue me, I was having a masc day when the photo was taken. Nothing I couldn’t handle, but it took extra minutes I couldn’t spare. So I missed my flight and had to punt to the next one, and don’t get me started about the car rental place or the traffic south of the Atlanta airport, but I still managed to get to Barnesville with half an hour to spare until my mother’s funeral.

I wasn’t wearing this black dress for my mother, but for Karina. She’d been gone only a few months, and it was still raw. But I figured I’d let my uncle and my mother’s friends I wasn’t close to think it was for Mom, even though they knew we had hardly spoken since she’d rejected me when I came out. I was mainly here to see my cousin Megan, the only relative I was still close with, and I wouldn’t mind seeing her little brother Cody, who’d also been decent to me when I came out. And she was mainly here to support her dad, who was apparently pretty broken up over losing his sister, even if he and Mom didn’t see eye to eye about how “permissive” he was with his lesbian daughter.

I was also curious and interested to see my old friend Ben from middle school and high school. Megan had told me he’d moved in with my mother during her final illness, and acted as her caregiver for her last few months. I wondered how that had happened. And whether I could forgive him for being close to someone who had hurt me so much.

When I walked into the funeral home, I looked around and saw a standing sign with adjustable letters, listing the current viewings – “Donna Cornett” was in room three. Three older people were standing around outside room three, talking in low voices; I recognized two of them as people from Mom’s church. I nodded a polite hello, but didn’t engage as I slipped past them into the room.

There were seven or eight people standing around in small clusters. A couple of more people I thought were from Mom’s church, but wasn’t sure, were over by the casket. I figured I’d check and make sure Mom was dead a bit later, but first I’d go speak to Megan, who was sitting at the other end of the room with her brother Cody and a small child that I figured was Cody’s son Logan.

I didn’t see Ben. If he’d been taking care of Mom for the last few months, he’d probably be at the funeral, right? If not, I could look him up later, before I went home.

“Hey, Val,” Megan said in a low voice as I walked up to them. “You have an okay flight?”

“Yeah, once I finally got on a plane. Hi, Cody. Want to introduce me to the young gentlebeing?”

Cody smiled. “Hey, Val. Wasn’t sure you’d be here until Megan told me you were coming.” He got Logan’s attention (he was looking at a board book, something with platypuses and quokkas) and said, “Logan, this is your cousin Val. They’re your Aunt Donna’s kid. Can you say hi?”

Logan looked at me with big eyes. “Hi,” he said, and waved.

I waved back. “Pleased to meet you, Logan.”

“Kelsey’s gone to change Ava’s diaper,” Cody said, “and Dad’s around here somewhere – I think he went to go over some last-minute stuff with the pastor and the funeral director.”

“Is Jenna with you?” I asked Megan. She and Jenna had been dating since before I’d met Karina, though they’d only gotten married a couple of years ago.

She shook her head. “She didn’t feel like coming. I’m honestly surprised you’re here.”

“It’s mainly to see you. And Ben, I hope. You know if he’s going to be here?”

“He said he would, he was here during the viewing last night,” Megan said.

“Do you know how he wound up staying with my mom and taking care of her?”

Megan shrugged. “I only know what Dad told me, and I told you basically everything I know.” She looked at Cody, who nodded. He lived a lot closer to Barnesville than Megan, though not right in town anymore, and it sounded like he was on better terms with Mom.

"I think he stayed in touch with her after you left. Helped out with repairs and maintenance around the house, and did some shopping for her after she got too weak to leave the house a lot of the time. Kelsey and I helped when we could, but it’s a bit of a drive, and he was right around the corner. And then he was out of work for a while and having trouble making rent, and she was getting to need more help, so he moved in.

“And then she left the house to him, and Dad’s really upset that she didn’t leave it to me and Kelsey, but honestly it’s fine. It’s a pretty house and it would be nice to have a place clear of a mortgage, but the commute wouldn’t be so nice, and I don’t think I’d feel comfortable taking something that should have been yours.”

“No problem,” I said. “I knew when I came out that this might happen. It was worth it.” And worth the other sacrifices I’d made.

“I would have told you earlier if I’d known,” Megan said. “It’s news to us; we didn’t know what was in her will until yesterday.”

“Did Ben know?”

“I don’t think so,” Cody said. “If he were expecting to inherit something, he’d probably have been there with me and Dad when we met with Aunt Donna’s lawyer.” Then his eyes focused on something over my shoulder, and he said, “Oh, there he is now.”

I turned around and looked.

Ben was there in my earliest memories, at my thirteenth birthday party. I don’t think there were a lot of guests – Ben, and Megan and Cody and their parents, and maybe one or two other friends from school or church, who I don’t remember as well. Us kids wanted to play video games, but Mom was determined to put on a “traditional” birthday party, with games like Pin the Tail on the Donkey. We fussed about it at first, but then we had a lot of fun anyway, and Ben and I wound up playing video games later, after Uncle Charles’ family and whatever other guests there were had gone home.

He was a skinny little kid when I first remember him, and didn’t put on a lot more muscle as he went through puberty, but that had changed since I’d last seen him, the summer after my freshman year of college. He hadn’t gone to college, but had stayed in town, apprenticing to a handyman. When I had come back to Mom’s house for the last time, he was still living with his parents, and that was never a good situation – there was a reason he spent as much time at our house as possible, and it wasn’t because of my mom’s cooking.

He was there the day I came out to Mom, near the end of that summer; he’d stopped by to say hi during his lunch break, and I figured that was a good time to come out to both of them. Ben was a little confused, but seemed supportive for the brief period I was able to gauge his reaction before Mom recovered from her shock and went into a rant that drowned out anything else Ben might have said. I was out the door on the way back to college within the hour. I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage the rest of college without Mom’s help, but the next semester was already paid for, so I might as well get some use out of it.

Later, I talked with Ben on the phone a couple of times, and he apologized for not standing up for me more to Mom. But we lost contact over the next few months as I dropped out of college, went to work full-time, and found someone with a cheap apartment who was looking for a roommate.

When I saw Ben walk into the viewing room at the funeral home, he was a lot more muscular than he had been when I’d seen him last. All that physical labor had built him up pretty well.

I walked over toward him. He didn’t seem to notice me at first, but when I said, “Ben, hey, it’s Val,” he startled. He looked kind of messed up, now that I was close enough to see, with bags under his eyes and – no. Bags under his eye and the glass orb that had replaced the other eye.

How had that happened? For a moment I felt a conclusion jump coming on, but I suppressed it. It was far more likely he’d lost the eye from an ordinary accident than through a deliberate sacrifice for power.

“Oh, hey, Val, I didn’t didn’t recognize you at first. You, uh, you look pretty good.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve gotten lucky with my transition.” And paid a high price, but without that lucky break, no love or money would have gotten me this body. Or the one I wore last week, or the one before that.

“I’m surprised you’re here,” he said, “after what happened before.”

“It’s not for her,” I said. “It’s for you and Megan, and Cody. And Uncle Charles. Have you seen him?”

“Not since last night.” He glanced at the floor, then back at me. “He, uh, told me about your mother’s will… that she left the house to me. But it should be yours, you –”

“That’s very generous,” I said, “but if you took care of her when she needed someone, you have as good a claim to it as anybody. Even if she would have let me into the house, I’m not sure we could have put up with each other 24/7 for however long it was, unless she had become a very different person than she was when I saw her last.”

“Yeah, she was… kind of different. Her temper was worse as she suffered more pain, but when she had good days she regretted what she’d said to me and apologized.” He looked down at the floor again. “And sometimes she seemed to regret other stuff, too… Maybe if she’d lasted another six months or a year, I could have talked her around to calling you and inviting you for a visit. But we’ll never know.”

“That might have been good. Might have been a disaster. Like you say, we’ll never know. But what else have you been doing since I left town?”

I didn’t find out for a while longer, because right about then Uncle Charles walked in with a short, stocky man about his age, who said, “May I have your attention. The funeral will be starting in the chapel in ten minutes. Let’s all start moving that way.”

So we did. I won’t go into detail about the funeral; Uncle Charles gave an eulogy, as did Mrs. Morel from Mom’s church, and then a younger man, not much older than me or Ben, preached a funeral sermon. I later found out he was the new pastor of Mom’s church, the man I’d known as pastor having retired a couple of years ago. Then we all drove to Greenwood Cemetery, where my grandparents and great-grandparents and some great-uncles and aunts were buried, and heard the preacher say a few more words before Mom’s coffin was lowered into the ground. I’d never gotten around to viewing the body, but maybe it was just as well.

After the graveside service, I said to Ben, “I’d like to catch up some more while I’m in town. Would later this evening be a good time?”

“Sure,” he said. “Your uncle’s family and your mom’s friends will be coming over to the house for a reception after this. And you’re welcome to stay at the house if you haven’t already paid for a hotel – not in your old room, unfortunately, that’s where I’ve been sleeping, but either of the other bedrooms.”

“That’ll be great,” I said. “I’ll see you there in a bit.”

The house looked a lot like it had seven years ago, when I’d left home for the last time. Most of the furniture and decor was the same, although as Ben showed me the rooms on offer, I saw that there was a hospital bed in Mom’s bedroom, and that her old queen-size bed had been moved into the guest room. It didn’t look like Ben had made any mark on the house, at least outside his bedroom, which had the door closed. I brought my things into the guest room and sat down on the bed to rest for a few moments, and as I did, I felt something. It was directional, coming from my left. I got up and went over in that direction; there wasn’t much there except the wall dividing me from Ben’s bedroom.

I hadn’t had magic for all that long, and I wasn’t that skilled with it. The biggest thing I’d managed to consistently do so far was to adjust my body when my sense of my own gender changed. Karina was the only other person I’d told about it – obviously I couldn’t keep it hidden from her – and she had been eagerly waiting for me to figure it out more and be able to help her out with some body issues. But affecting someone else was a lot harder than yourself, it turned out, and about all I’d managed to do before her accident was remove a couple of moles.

I hadn’t had any contact with any other mages, either, except briefly with the person who DM’d me the ritual to sacrifice something for magic. And they had been kind of a lurker in the gender-fluidity server, never saying much, and leaving not long after that. So I couldn’t know for sure. But I had a feeling that what I was sensing from Ben’s bedroom was magic. What else could it be?

Suddenly his missing eye took on a new meaning. Or well, a meaning I’d briefly considered and dismissed. The way he’d buffed up so much since I’d seen him last also seemed newly significant. But there’d be time enough to find out about that after the guests left.

I’ll pass over the reception. Ben was kept too busy as the host to have much time to chat, even though I could see he was run ragged, working on too little sleep and wracked with grief worse than any of my relatives except Uncle Charles. I spent most of the reception chatting with Megan and Cody and Cody’s wife Kelsey, and dandling little Ava on my knee and singing to her, and making up stories for Logan; I tried to interact with Mom’s church friends as little as possible, but I couldn’t avoid them entirely. The less said about that, the better. I also spent a little while talking with Uncle Charles and Aunt Sharon.

He was looking kind of out of it and didn’t seem to know what to say. Finally, he said, “You’ve lost a lot this year. Your wife and then your mother. Sharon and I would have come to the funeral, but Sharon’s dad was in the hospital and we were spending a lot of time with him…”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.”

“I don’t think he’ll be with us much longer either. I know you and your mother didn’t get along in her later years. I tried to talk her around, see if I could get her to let up on you some, but she didn’t want to talk about you. She wasn’t always easy to get along with, but it still hurts, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said, and gave him a hug.

Then Mom’s church friends and cousins started leaving, and an hour or so after the last of them left, Cody’s family left, and Uncle Charles and Aunt Sharon left around the same time. They were going to spend the night at Cody’s house in Macon before driving back to their home in Madison, Florida. Megan didn’t stay much longer, and then it was just me and Ben.

“You look pretty worn out,” I observed as we sat down in the living room together after saying goodbye to Megan. “You want to just go to bed and catch up on old times in the morning?”

“Don’t know if I could sleep,” he said. “I haven’t been sleeping much. I was up and down in the middle of the night a lot, taking care of your mom, and getting naps during the day when I could, and since she died I’ve slept even less. I think my sleep cycle is permanently messed up.”

“That sucks,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask how you wound up being Mom’s caregiver?”

He shrugged uncomfortably. "Well, after she kicked you out, I was pretty upset with her, but… I’m kind of a coward. I just excused myself and went home. And I didn’t go back for a while. But one Saturday I was off work, hanging out at home, and my parents started fighting again; I just had to get out of the house. So I went out and hung out at the Pastime Grill, nursing a cup of coffee to make it last, and reading comics on my tablet. Well, your mom came in with one of her friends, and they ate lunch, and then your mom came over to my table and said, ‘I haven’t heard from you for a while, are you doing okay?’ And I should have said something about the way she treated you, but I just sort of mumbled that I was doing fairly okay, considering. And she said she was having trouble with her utility room light flickering, and could I come check on it?

"So I did, and she offered to pay me for it and I refused because it was such a nothing little job, the bulb had worked a little loose somehow. Vibrations from the washing machine, maybe. And she said I should stay for supper instead, and I said sure.

"And so that sort of thing went on for a while, and even after I started renting the Sadlers’ mother-in-law suite, I kept going by to help her with stuff, changing the oil on her car or doing little repairs. I did work up the courage to talk to her about you once, about a year after she kicked you out, but she wouldn’t listen.

“And so that went on for years, and her health got worse and I started doing more for her, shopping for groceries and taking out the trash, and then cooking and doing the laundry too, and then when I was having trouble getting enough work and was looking at being evicted soon, she told me to move in with her and help take care of her. She figured she’d need to go into a nursing home otherwise, and she wanted to avoid that if at all possible.”

“She told you?”

“Well, yeah, kind of. I could have said no, of course, but she helped me out so much when I was a kid, and I did need a place to live and a job, so…”

We were quiet for a moment, and then he said, “So what have you been doing since I talked to you last?”

“I went back to college after Mom kicked me out,” I said. "My next semester was already paid for, and I figured I had until the winter break to figure out funding for the spring semester and the year after that. I got my boss to give me more hours, and applied for more scholarships and loans, but when I did the budget, it just wasn’t going to be a good idea, even if it was possible. So I dropped out and started working full-time, and planned on finishing some sort of bachelor’s degree at a community college after I saved some money, but I still haven’t. I started writing more, and finally managed to finish something I thought was good enough and sent it to a magazine. It didn’t sell, and after trying a few more magazines, I decided I’d post it on one of the free fiction sites under a pen name. And it got a lot of good feedback from the readers, more than I expected, so I wrote some more that were tailored for that site, as well as trying to write things for a more general audience and sell them to magazines. I set up a Patreon a little while later and started making grocery money.

"And I saw that some of the writers on that site were offering commissions – they’d write a short story or even a novel based on your specs for money. I figured that was worth a try, so along with my next story I posted commission rates, and started making some money that way.

"Then this woman, Karina, commissioned a story from me, and while we were chatting back and forth on Discord about what she wanted it to be about and what kind of tone she wanted, we really hit it off, and became friends. We kept chatting about all kinds of stuff on and off throughout the day, during breaks from work and whenever I had a free moment. And we realized we both lived in Amherst, and decided to meet up in person.

“A few months later, we got married.”

“Oh, wow,” Ben said. “Congratulations – oh. You don’t look happy.”

“She died five months ago,” I said. “Slipped getting out of the shower and hit her head on the sink, and died before the paramedics got to the house. I was in the kitchen cooking breakfast, and listening to a podcast, and didn’t hear anything. When she didn’t come to breakfast after I hollered that it was ready, I went to check on her, and found her lying there…” I shuddered and took a deep breath. “Anyway, yeah. I inherited the house and had an insurance payout, plus her savings – she’d been making pretty decent money as a software developer – so I don’t need this house or any of Mom’s stuff. You deserve it.”

He looked down again. “I really don’t.”

“Well, I don’t know who does. Cody said he didn’t want it, it’s too far from his work. I don’t think Megan and Jenna would want to live in a small conservative town like this if you paid them. And neither of them helped Mom out as much as you did – not that Mom would have let Megan darken her door any more than she would me.”

“I should at least let you look over your stuff that she didn’t throw out, see if you want to take any of it. I found some of it in the attic and some in the closet of my bedroom.”

“Oh. Um, yeah, let’s do that tomorrow, maybe.” There was something else I wanted to get to first.

“Do you mind…” he said hesitantly. Then, “Never mind, I don’t want to pry.”

“Go ahead, if it’s too personal, I’ll say no and won’t hold a grudge.”

“Do you mind telling me more about, uh, being gender-fluid and how you transitioned? Not, like, gritty medical details,” he hastily added. “But like, when you came out you said you sometimes feel like a man and sometimes like a woman and sometimes like neither, right? And today you look exactly like any other woman, if I didn’t know you before I wouldn’t know you weren’t born that way, so I don’t know how you could look like a man or… not either, on days when you feel that way?”

“It’s fine to ask,” I said. “When I first went back to college after coming out, I started figuring out how to get estrogen. I wanted to take just enough to start looking more androgynous, so I could pass as a man or a woman with the right clothes, makeup and so on, but not go on taking it indefinitely like a binary trans woman until I had a really feminine figure. I wouldn’t be on Mom’s insurance much longer and I didn’t have insurance through my job waiting tables at the noodle place. Well, I won’t go into details, but I found a semi-affordable way to get estrogen – I didn’t want much – and took it off and on for a while when I could afford it, and learned to get really good at makeup and changing my hairstyle and, you know, padding for when I was feeling fem. And mannerisms, that was probably the most important. But yeah, all that was kind of tedious sometimes. I eventually figured out a better way…” I paused. “Do you mind if I ask how you lost the eye?”

He chuckled nervously. "Yeah, why not, while we’re sharing personal stuff. It happened during a brief period when I went traveling around out west. I was looking for a town that was big enough to support a handyman but didn’t already have one, you know, maybe one where their local guy had just retired or something, and visiting some cool national parks while I was at it. I never found somewhere I wanted to settle down. I was wasting money on gas and motel rooms, earning a little of it back with odd jobs here and there, and then I got a job in this tiny town in Nebraska, fixing up a curtain rod in this this kid’s bedroom.

"Somebody had hung it too low, where an inch of sunlight came over the top of the curtain unfiltered, so I had to take out the brackets and drill new holes for them. Anyway, this bedroom was kind of messy, you know, toys and clothes on the floor, and his mom had gotten him to clean most of them up before I came in, but he’d missed a few. I stepped on a Lego block at one point, kicked it over toward the closet and didn’t think any more about it. But then I was pretty much finished putting in the last bracket, and I was climbing down from the ladder and slipped, and fell on the floor. It was carpeted and I wouldn’t have hurt myself too bad, except that there was this toy sitting there, some kind of warrior holding up a sword, and it impaled my eye. I spent the night at the hospital in North Platte, and came back to Barnesville not long after I recovered.

“If they’d been a rich family, I might have tried suing them, but they weren’t that well off, just barely middle class enough to hire somebody to fix the curtain rod for them. They paid for my emergency room visit, and let me stay in their guest room while I recovered enough to drive, and I could tell it was going to really strain their budget. And it wasn’t really their fault, it was my carelessness getting off the ladder. If I’d fallen the other way, I could have hit my head on the bedstead and gotten killed. I kind of wish it was somebody else’s fault, somebody with deep pockets for a big settlement. Might have been worth sacrificing the eye for that, but probably not.”

Sacrifice. I’d been pretty suspicious, and now I was sure. Losing the eye while hundreds of miles away from Barnesville and everybody he knew was a good cover story. I’d bet if I went to the hospital in North Platte, they’d have no record of his visit. No, he’d sacrificed an eye for magical power, the way I’d sacrificed my childhood memories, and he’d left town for a while to avoid having to explain to his local friends and neighbors why he had an eye one day and none the next, with no real injury and period of recovery.

And he probably suspected I had magic, too; thus the hints, the toy sword in his story, like the sword or long dagger used in the ritual, and deliberately working in the word “sacrifice.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “We don’t have to keep dancing around the big stuff. I know what you’ve done; I did the same thing, and I’m sure you can guess why –”

He was staring at me, and before I could finish my sentence and end with a nice dramatic demonstration of my magic, he blurted out: “You know?” He started trembling as he went on, “I’m sorry! I’m a horrible person and I knew it was wrong but I was so, so, tired and I don’t know why I did it, but please believe me, I didn’t do it for the house – I didn’t know about the will!”

Stunned, I stared at him. “Do you mean –?” I started to ask, but he kept talking over me, a flood of words that had been pent up by terror and guilt.

“– It was just that I hadn’t slept, I’d been up like three times during the night to give her medicine or help her get to the bathroom or something, and then I messed up breakfast because I was so sleepy and she yelled at me again, and I was thinking about how she’d go on yelling at me until she died, and that could be another year or two, and I couldn’t move out until I got another job and I couldn’t look for another job while I was so busy taking care of her and I couldn’t keep living there and not take care of her, and besides everyone would blame me for abandoning her to a nursing home even though she wasn’t blood kin. And then she started having an episode, you know, and she fumbled for her inhaler and knocked it on the floor, and it skidded under the chest of drawers, and she was gesturing for me to get it but couldn’t breathe, and all I could think of was that I was glad the yelling had stopped. So I got down on the floor to look for it, and then I just sort of laid there and maybe I dozed off for a second. And then I jerked awake, and I was horrified and started scrambling for the inhaler, but by then it was too late.” He was sobbing now.

I was too stunned to go over and hug him, which would have been my normal reaction to someone I cared about crying. He’d… what? Killed my mother by being deliberately slow in responding to a crisis? Only from the way he told it, I wasn’t sure it was as deliberate as he was blaming himself for.

This wasn’t what I’d been suspecting, but that didn’t mean that the evidence I’d seen wasn’t there.

After too long a delay, I did get up from my chair and go over and hug him. “I don’t know all the circumstances,” I said. “But it sounds like you were sleep-deprived and exhausted from doing two or three people’s full-time jobs for months on end, not to mention mentally exhausted from putting up with Mom’s temper. You probably weren’t in your right mind.”

“I don’t know if I ever will be again,” he said. “But you said you’d done the same thing… what did you leave out of that story about how your wife died?”

“What? You think –?” I felt revulsion that he would think I’d do that to Karina, but suppressed it. He didn’t know her, hadn’t seen what our relationship was like. “…No, that’s not what I meant. When I said I’d done the same thing, I meant that I’d traded my childhood memories for magic, like you traded your eye.”

Now he was staring at me like I’d said that the President was one of the Fair Folk. “What the actual fuck?” he asked.

Huh. I may have miscalculated. But how…?

“Okay,” I said, “I might have read too much into what you said about your eye being a sacrifice, but what is that thing in your bedroom?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “You said you traded your childhood memories for magic? And what thing in my bedroom?”

“Like this,” I said. In for a penny. I’d been feeling more androgynous the last hour or two than I had that morning, so I shrank my breasts, shortened my hair and turned it green, and adjusted my face to be a bit less feminine. For lagniappe, I gave myself jerboa ears.

Ben’s eye near about popped out of his head. “Holy shit.”

“You’ve never seen anything like this, have you? Then what kind of magic am I sensing from your bedroom?”

“There’s something magical in my bedroom?”

“I felt it not long after I got here. Been waiting to ask you about it once everybody else was gone and we’d gotten caught up.”

“I’m gonna need a minute to think about this.”

“Okay,” I said.

We sat in silence for a little while. A couple of times Ben started to say something and broke off. I wanted to say something too, I was still reeling from the revelation that Ben had let Mom die… or at least blamed himself for her death… but I made myself stay quiet.

“So you have magical powers. You can change your body like that and, uh, what else?”

“Not much yet. I can sort of nudge people to be more agreeable? It’s not exactly mind control, but it helps smooth things over a little sometimes. Like at the TSA checkpoint this morning. And I was working on trying to do some stuff for Karina like this,” I pointed to my tall ears, “but it’s hard; the most I managed to do was remove some moles.”

“She wanted you to give her rabbit ears?”

“These are jerboa ears, and no, that was just an example. Mainly it was dysphoria stuff, but she wanted to be able to have cat ears and a tail when we were alone together, and I never managed it.”

“What’s a jerboa – Never mind. You said you gave up your childhood memories for that?”

“Yeah. Everything up to age twelve. My earliest memory of you is from my thirteenth birthday. Also my earliest memory of Mom, Megan, Cody, and Uncle Charles.”

He started to say, “Why would you –” and broke off. After a pause, he said, “I don’t get it. But I read about, y’know, trans stuff, after you came out to me, and it sounds really awful, feeling like your body doesn’t fit right. But who did you trade those memories to? What did they want them for?”

“Do you want to give up something big for magical power? Something like an arm, or years and years of memories, or your ability to recognize faces?”

“No way. Holy shit, I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

I felt really bad for him. He had been worn to the bone for months, doing the work of several people with never a break, and then after a big fuckup, he was dealing with crushing guilt on top of that. Now I’d misjudged the situation and added another big stressor. But it was too late to back out.

“Then I don’t think I’ll tell you. Not demons, I’ll tell you that, but they aren’t entities to fuck around with either. But let’s go see what that thing I’m sensing from your bedroom is.”

“I have no idea what it could be. Wouldn’t it be something you left behind, one of your things I found in the attic or closet?”

“I didn’t have these powers back then.”

“Oh. Okay. I have so many questions. But I guess we can go look at my room and see if we can figure out what you’re feeling?”

So we got up and went to the room that I’d slept in throughout middle school and high school. Probably long before that, too, but I don’t remember. Ben opened the door and let us in. The sensation I’d felt earlier was back, stronger now, and coming from the shelf over by the window.

The room looked very different from when I’d last seen it, but there were still traces of high school me. The furniture was a mix of the stuff I’d had here – that was my old chest of drawers, for instance, and that shelf was the same one I’d had stuffed with books – and newer stuff like the bed and the computer desk. The posters and photos on the wall were mostly new, except for the Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow poster. I couldn’t even remember seeing that movie, I’d lost it with my other childhood memories, but I remembered having that poster on my wall and deciding, for whatever reason, not to take it with me when I packed up my things for the last time.

There was also a photo of me and Ben, taken around our sophomore year of high school, that I recognized.

“Over there,” I said, pointing. The shelf I’d used almost entirely for books was about half full of books and half full of toys and models. I walked over to the shelf; the feeling seemed to be coming from one of the lower shelves. I bent down and looked closer.

“Yeah, that’s some of the stuff I found in your closet after I moved in and I was rearranging stuff to make room for my things. A few of your toys from when we were kids. You don’t remember any of that?”

“Nothing from before I was thirteen, like I said.” I reached out and gingerly touched the thing I thought the feeling was coming from, an action figure that didn’t look familiar. “What’s this?”

“I don’t know. Some kind of off-brand G.I. Joe, I guess? I don’t know what franchise it’s from, if any, but I do remember when you got it. We were hanging out, riding our bikes around the neighborhood, and there was a yard sale at that big house over on Laurel. You spent your allowance on a couple of toys and books. There was this and a Darth Maul figure and I think a Diane Wynne Jones book? I bought a couple of Ninja Turtles figures, a Rafael and a Splinter if I remember right.”

It felt strange and uncomfortable to have Ben retailing exactly what had happened at a time that was not just lost in the fog, but completely cut off from me. “I can definitely feel something strange from it, but I don’t know what. Let me try sort of poking at it.”

I had no idea what I was doing, but I pushed a little magic at it to see what would happen. The figure’s arm jerked and I startled, falling over on my butt. Then its legs moved, and it walked across the shelf, jumped down onto the floor, and picked itself up before continuing to walk across the floor. I scooted out of its way and picked myself up.

“Are you doing that?”

“No, I don’t really know how. All I did was push a little magic at it. The way it’s walking, that’s the magic that was already in it, I just activated it.”

The toy got to the chest of drawers, where it got down on its hands and knees and crawled under it. Ben and I continued staring at where it had been, and after a moment I laid prone on the floor and and looked under the chest of drawers. It was still crawling along, trailing dust bunnies in its wake. A minute later it crawled out from under the chest of drawers on the side and stood up again.

“How did it get like that?”

“I have no idea. My best guess is that whoever lived in that house had given up something big for magic, and they… enchanted this for their kids? And then sold it in a yard sale, maybe when their kids outgrew it? Or their spouse sold it after they died and nobody could make it walk anymore.”

We kept staring as the little soldier patrolled the bedroom floor.

Ben yawned. I couldn’t help it, I yawned too.

“I need to get some sleep,” I said. “Let’s talk more in the morning.”

“Uh, yeah. Good night. – Uh, is that thing going to keep walking around all night? Not that it isn’t amazing, but…”

“Huh. Here, let’s see…” I pushed a little magic at it again and it switched from a walk to a jog. “No dice. I’ll see what I can figure out tomorrow. For now, maybe just put it in a drawer?”

“Okay.”

It took me a long time to get to sleep, and I suspect Ben was lying awake just as late.

When I woke up, I was feeling kind of masc, so I gave myself a trim little goatee, a little more muscles, and a dick and balls. Then I got one out the more casual of the outfits I’d brought and went down the hall to the bathroom to take a shower.

Afterward, I found Ben in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal and staring blearily at the toy soldier, who was patrolling the table.

“He kept going all night?”

“Yeah. I took him out of the drawer this morning and he just started going again as soon as he wasn’t wrapped in a T-shirt. You don’t have any idea how to make him stop?”

“There must have been some way to do it that didn’t take magic. Whoever made this would have wanted their kid to be able to make it start and stop without asking them, right? But I don’t know how it works.”

“Maybe there’s like a spot you’re supposed to touch or rub?”

“If that was it, we probably would have triggered it accidentally when we were playing with it as kids. I assume we played with it, anyway? How old were we when I bought it?”

“Probably ten or eleven?”

He ate in silence for a bit while I poured a cup of coffee, looked over the cereal selection and poured myself a bowl of store-brand not-Cheerios.

“You really don’t blame me for what I did?”

“No. It was kind of a shock, but… Like I said, you weren’t in your right mind. But there wouldn’t be any good in making you go through a trial and prove it. I won’t tell anyone.”

“But I can’t benefit from it. Please, tell me what to do with the house if you won’t take it.”

“You need a place to stay,” I said. “But I figure this house has bad memories for you, after what happened. So I think you should rest and recover, you’ve been overworking yourself for months, and then start looking for work. Once you’re earning money again, you should probably find another place to live and then maybe give this house to Habitat For Humanity.”

“It doesn’t seem like enough of a punishment.”

“I don’t think I believe in punishment. Just various ways to keep people from doing crime again. You’re not the kind of person that’s going to go out and kill people, so there’s no point in locking you up. As long as you’re not saddled with that kind of overwhelming responsibility again… just don’t ever take another caregiver job, and you won’t be a danger to anyone. And if you still feel guilty, maybe do volunteer work. Maybe for Habitat; you have the skills to help build houses, right?”

“Yeah… I could do that.”

Ben finished his cereal and took his bowl to the dishwasher, then poured himself another cup of coffee and sat back down with me.

“So how long have you been a wizard or whatever?”

"It was not long after Karina and I got married. I was on a Discord server for gender-fluid people, and somebody on the server DM’d me and told me about this ritual I could do to get the ability to shapeshift and maybe do other magic stuff eventually. At first I thought it was just roleplay, you know, but then when I looked at what they’d sent me closer, it just felt… real. Like I could tell it was nothing to undertake lightly, but it would work. And I asked them a bunch of questions, and they answered a few but said there was a lot they didn’t know. I talked it over with Karina, and I decided to do the ritual. Karina thought about doing it too, but decided against it. The person that had sent it to me said I would eventually be able to transform other people, once I got a lot of practice, and Karina said that would be good enough for her.

“And I won’t go into detail about how it worked, but it did. It took me a while to get the hang of it, though. At first I could just change my body a little bit here and there, not big changes all at once, but eventually I got to where I could change pretty much anything about myself, and I started being able to do a few other things.”

“And that helps you feel better? Like I guess you’re feeling like a man today, so you made yourself one?”

“Exactly.”

“And was it worth it?” he asked. “Giving up our first meeting, how we went to see Sky Captain and The Incredibles together, all the games we played and the stories we made up and the comics we drew? And all the stuff from before we even met; you told me you could remember stuff from when you were three years old! Hardly anybody remembers stuff that far back. I don’t think I remember anything before kindergarten.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “I obviously thought so, back when I could remember all that stuff. It must have been a hard choice – I must have valued those memories highly, or giving them up wouldn’t have gotten me magic. But the dysphoria was unbelievably bad at times, and that’s pretty much gone. Once in a while when I’m in public, I have to stick to the same body longer than I want, but Karina and I have – I mean… We pretty much stayed at home since COVID anyway, we ordered groceries and everything else online, and this is the first time I’ve gone more than a few miles from home since she died. Since before the pandemic.”

We watched the soldier walking around for a while in silence, the tiny quiet taps of his plastic feet on the Formica surface the only sound aside from the hum of the refrigerator. Then Ben said, “Well, I don’t understand it, but I’m glad you’re doing better.”

“Thanks.” I ate another spoonful of cereal, and then said: “You should come visit sometime. I don’t want to go another seven years without seeing you.”

“Yeah, I should.”

“Actually,” I said, “why not now? Or within a few days, maybe. Before you start looking for work again; it would do you good to get away from this house for a while.”

“Yeah… now’s probably the best time, before I find work and get busy again. I’ve got a few things to take care of here first; the home health company is sending somebody out to pick up your mom’s hospital bed, oxygen concentrator and CPAP machine sometime this week, and I need to meet with your mom’s lawyer about the will, but yeah. I’d like to do that.”

By the time I finished eating and we’d loaded the dishwasher, we’d hashed out our plans. Ben would be coming to stay with me for a week, starting next weekend. We’d hang around the house, playing games a lot and talking even more, and maybe we’d maybe go to Boston or Providence for a day of walking. And maybe… maybe he could tell me about some more of those memories I’d given up.