My first memory of being inside that house was me awaking to the sounds of two voices.
“I think he's waking up.”
“Yes, he looks to be coming around.”
“Give him a few minutes.”
Before I fully opened my eyes I was lost in the sensorial assault on my body. I was bathed in the coolness of crisp clean linens, feeling the delicacy of sheets covering me, their scent of cleanliness a mixture of laundry detergent and fresh air as if they had been hung out on a clothes line to dry. I could barely distinguish my skin from those sheets, feeling scrubbed and aired out also. Also were the scents of apples blowing in an open window, and other aromas, fresh baled hay and cow manure from a grassy pasture and the sweetness of moisture from a recent downpour.
Beneath the lightness of the sheets my body felt weighted down, not by any mechanical means, but by the muscles that defined it. They were foreign, those muscles; a change, no matter how subtle, in my physical structure. My fingertips were pressed against the sheet on which I lay, and they too felt foreign. As I opened my eyes completely they were massaged into focusing by a soft hazy white glow. Staring into my face were three other faces; young men of similar age and appearance.
“How do you feel?” the one with baby blue eyes asked, looking into mine.
“Where am I?” I asked, my throat raspy but not sore. My words sounded different, not unfamiliar, just different, as if I hadn't spoke them for some time and was on the verge of forgetting their simple meanings. The men around me each smiled differently giving me the impression they had each interpreted the question a different way and were trying to compose in their heads a friendly response.
“You're in a safe place,” the one with the gray-blue eyes said. “Are you in any pain?”
I didn't know why I would be. Although other than the opening of my eyelids and my fingers feeling the sheet, I hadn't voluntarily moved any part of my body. I didn't ache or have the sense that I had been injured in any way. I wriggled my toes slightly beneath the sheet and felt relief that my stillness was not paralysis. In thinking about my body, the entirety of it, I was aware that I was naked and that my skin felt like new clothing; its surface was courser and the hairs on it more numerous. I looked down the length of my body and while it was the same length that I recalled, the terrain was different. I had become mostly a flat plateau from my neck down.
“I'm not in pain, but I'm thirsty,” I said.
“Of course,” said the one with the gray-blue eyes as he raised a glass straw extending out of a glass of water to my lips. I sipped on the cold water watching the condensation on the outside of the glass turn to drops that slid down over his fingers. The two men stood silently watching as I drank. When satiated I pushed the straw away from my lips with my tongue.
“Where am I?” I asked again
“An outpost,” the one with the bright baby-blue eyes said.
“Then it's done?” I said.
They both nodded their heads. The one with gray-blue eyes put his hand on my arm compassionately then quickly pulled it off as if he had overstepped his bounds. “You can stay here and rest for a while or you can get up and get dressed,” he said. We put some clothes on the chair that we were told ahead of time would be the right size for you.”
I glanced over at the chair, at the pants, shirt, underclothes on it and a pair of work boots placed on the floor in front of it. “Give me a few minutes,” I said.
“Certainly,” they said in unison and started to leave the room. “If you need anything we'll be downstairs,” the one with gray-blue eyes said. Then they went out the door closing it behind them.
Staring up at the ceiling for several minutes I was immersed in the thoughts of how smooth it was, without a bubble, crack or imperfection. It was like a field of painted silk that stretched from wall to wall, corner to corner. I pulled one arm out from under the sheet and reached toward the ceiling, stretching and wiggling my extended fingers noting the stark contrasts between the tan of my arm and the perfect white of the ceiling. Then there on my forearm I saw the small blue tattoo. I pulled it closer to my eyes and read: David.
I sat up and swung my legs around to the side of the hospital bed I had been lying in. For just a moment I felt dizzy and briefly closed my eyes and allowed what felt like sand in my brain to shift into a level plane. When I opened my eyes the room seemed barren, with nothing on the bright white walls except recessed lighting that beamed out diffused light. There were no marks on the wall; clearly nothing had ever been hung on them. The open window was the only thing other than the closed door that broke up the monotony of the room. I pushed aside the sheet that had been covering me and stood up. Looking down the length of my body I saw the changes: no breasts, the addition of male genitals, hair on my legs, subtle changes in my musculature. Naked, I walked to the window and looked out.
Sunlight bathed a bright green lawn that stretched to a two lane road. The lawn, this house I was in, was bordered by a white rail fence. A huge tree heavy with foliage was on the left side of the lawn. On the right side where the fence was open, a gravel road branched off from the road and led up to the house. On the other side of the gravel driveway was a horse paddock where a large palomino stood at the rail around the paddock, its head hanging over it and nibbling on blades of grass longer than the rest of the lawn. A large black crow and several robins were on the lawn hopping about from spot to spot. On the other side of the road there was a forest, thick and dark. There were no other structures in sight.
I turned and put on the clothes left for me, and other than being aware of the heaviness of the boots, the clothing made me feel no different either. I had gone to sleep on my home planet a woman and awoke a man on this one. They had prepared me well for the change, but I worried that I should feel different at least about who I was, but I didn't. I was now David, the same person with a different name and different body on a different planet. There were no Davids on my planet. There were no men.
I opened the door and went out into the hallway. It was a world apart from the room I had just left or the world I came from. Along both walls heads of wild animals affixed to smooth and shiny wooden plaques were mounted along the walls. Some I was familiar with, like the lion, tiger, deer, moose and buffalo, but others I wasn't, but all stared from their taxidermied heads with black marble eyes. In between the heads were photographs in 8 x 10 mats and frames of hunters on safaris holding an assortment of weapons, most posing with broad smiles with their foot on a dead animal. The photographs ranged from early twentieth century to present day.
The shift from the sterility of the room to the environment of glorifying ritual slaughter of animals couldn't have been more profound. My heart beat hard against my chest and I became conscious of the thudding sound of my boots on the wood floor as I went to the top of the stairs. As I descended the chairs a cloud of noxious odors hung in the air; stale smoke, sweat and alcohol. At the bottom of the stairs I entered yet another world.
The room off to the left of the bottom of the stairs was a combination living room and junkyard. Along the walls in stacks as tall as I was stood everything from empty beer bottles to used auto parts. Paintings in cheap frames on black velvet of nude women were hung above the junk piles. In the center of the room five battered, worn overstuffed chairs faced the only wall not covered by a painting. The two men who had been with me when I awoke were each seated in a chair looking at a large flat screen television. Image after image of war scenes with dead bodies, ruined cities and blasting armaments of all kinds flashed into view then out. There was no sound, just the images. The two men turned to me as I entered the room.
“Did you find your name?” the one with gray-blue eyes asked me.
“Yes. I'm David,” I said.
“I'm Nick,” he said holding out his arm for me to see his tattoo.
“I'm Jake,” the other one said.
“What is this place?” I said sweeping my hand about the room and up the stairs.
“It's a place of men,” Nick said.
“Not of all men,” I said. “It can't be.”
“That's true, but it is representative of the men they want us to be,” Jake said. “It's part of our training.”
* * *
In late evening as the sun began to set behind the forest on the other side of the road the shadows behind the house grew longer and darker. I walked among fallen apples from trees whose branches were thick and weighed down with them. The aroma of apples, rotting and fresh, perfumed the air. Nick and I had placed the palomino in the stable for the night and gave it fresh hay and water before locking the stable and walking out into the cow pasture. There were no cows in sight but the fresh piles of manure that spotted the grass we were walking through was clear indication they had been there recently. A flock of wild turkeys noisily made their way along the edge of the pasture bordered by another forest. Nick carried a rifle, its long barrel resting on his shoulder, the butt in the palm of his hand. He looked like one of the pictures of the soldiers in the photos in the upstairs hallway, only with jeans and a flannel shirt instead of a uniform.
“This isn't what I was expecting,” I said.
He put his finger to his lips and looked about nervously. “Not so loud, they have listening devices everywhere, even in the ground.”
“So what if they do?” I said just a little quieter. “It's not as if they're going to send me back home. Men, especially the version of it that they want us to be, wouldn't fit in on our planet.”
“You saw the same videos before you volunteered that we all did,” Nick said.
“Those were about how they wanted to change our bodies so that we would fit into this world's image of men, not that they wanted to change our personalities.”
“You can't change one without changing the other,” he said taking the rifle from his shoulder and aiming it at the turkeys but not shooting.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “But how do we affect any change on this planet if we're engineered to be the same as everyone already here? We were all told we were to be pioneers in the mental evolution of man as a species, not become caricatures extolling the worst traits of the human male species,” I said, my voice rising.
“Don't you get it?” he said. “Our planet intends to see to it that the society of mankind doesn't advance beyond where it is at present.”
“You know that and you don't fight against it?” I said.
“Hush,” he said looking around nervously again. “I only have two days more here at this outpost before I go out among them and I don't want any trouble.”
“Nick,” I said, “there are thousands of outposts just like this one all over this planet and have been for many generations. Each outpost has those like us who became men to unknowingly perpetrate a lie about what it means to be a male. Doesn't that disturb you at all?”
“Not as much as being vaporized for treason,” he said, turning and walking back to the house.
* * *
In the middle of the night I was wide awake trying not to look at the walls of my bedroom covered in pornographic photographs. Staring up at the ceiling I was feeling hopeless about my future and despondent about having made the choice to commit to an irreversible mission to come to this planet. Through the open window of my bedroom a steady breeze carried in the scent of farmland. It was being awake that saved me most likely.
As the ship from my planet landed on the lawn in front of the house I jumped up from the bed and hurriedly slipped on my clothes and shoes and went to the window and watched as several females walked down the ramp from the ship toward the front door of the house. As they weren't bringing a new male to transition with us here at this outpost I surmised that only one thing would require such a visit, me. We had been overheard after all. I opened my bedroom door and ran down the hall, down the stairs, and out the back door into the forest beyond the pasture and hid among the trees, watching.
Even from that distance I could hear voices within the house, but not what was being said. When two flashes of light went off like quickly exploding light bulbs I knew Nick and Jake had been vaporized. I had been overheard after all. My home planet couldn't risk the threat of contagion spreading from me to them. I wanted to weep, not just for what had happened to the two men, but in realizing that while we had been given new bodies, we weren't acceptable as men unless we adhered to preconceived ideas of what men were on the inside as well as outside. We had been brought to this planet to maintain a status quo not to change it. From the forest I watched as the machines flew out of the ship and burnt or vaporized everything growing on or standing around the house, then scraped the earth clean, removing any sign that other than the house, no one had ever been there. Then the ships flew off into the night sky.
I haven't traveled far from the house which they left standing for reasons that I can't completely fathom. The sheen from the window glass hasn't dulled. The scars left behind by the machines that scraped away the lawns and gardens that once surrounded the house are dug deep in the earth like bloodless cat scratches. Dead leaves and other flora debris are piled on the porch, carried there by the wind. Now, in its second summer of isolation, it is neither landmark or signpost. But as I drive by it and see it there never aging, its white paint not altered by the seasons, I worry that it has been abandoned only for a short while.
Steve Carr (he/him), who lives in Richmond, Virginia, has had over 370 short stories published internationally in print and online magazines, literary journals, reviews and anthologies since June, 2016. He has had six collections of his short stories, Sand, Rain, Heat, The Tales of Talker Knock and 50 Short Stories: The Very Best of Steve Carr, and LGBTQ: 33 Stories, published. His paranormal/horror novel Redbird was released in November, 2019. His plays have been produced in several states in the U.S. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice.
His Twitter is https://twitter.com/carrsteven960 His website is https://www.stevecarr960.com/
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