Her sweaty body sticks to the bedsheets like she’s plastered with spunk; it’s hotter than St Helier in her room. The rays of the Sun are overdoing it this morning, she thinks. She can’t be sure whether this is the Sun though as her entire head is covered in dirty rags. The woman sighs. Even Godwin’s son Harold could’ve seen she’s upset about something, maybe everything. She’s mulling it all around and around in her mummified head: did she make the right decision? A complete new ball game awaits her eagerly.

‘All right?’ a voice asks.

She doesn’t try to answer. Not just yet. First she needs to find a way to move her limbs.

The voice knows she’s awake. ‘We’re going to get you cleaned up real quick, sir.’

Somehow that stings and now she doesn’t want her arms or legs to move at all; she wants to lie here in this bed forever. The sheets may be wet and smell worse than badger balls but they are also softer than a hundred million little kittens playing with a hundred million balls of wool. After a day, or maybe a heartbeat, she raises her arm.

It’s so heavy – too heavy. It falls back on her chest.

Oh dear.

‘Yes,’ says the voice.

She finally realises there is no way back now. Her chest is as flat as the Netherlands but a whole lot less interesting. She wills her arm to move, to caress her breasts one last time even though she knows she hasn’t got them any more. It’s pathetic, mental.

Bollocks.

‘Yes,’ says the voice again, as if it can read minds.

Her hand spiders down slowly over her spoiled body, then cups her newly acquired men parts. She sighs once more. Then there’s a tug and the bandage unwraps immediately: a new day opens up before her. It is a thin, grey man. She knows the doctor was called Sunshine, but she had expected something else. This isn’t what Sunshine is supposed to look like, this isn’t the brand new start of the brand new life she had hoped for. This is a little, drab chap and it dawns on her she made a mistake of about six inches.

‘Changing teams so quickly? Now that’s real expensive, love,’ says Sunshine as he reads her mind again. He bares his teeth for a smile – it hurts her eyes like Sunlight reflecting off snow-covered meadows. ‘Even in the darkest of days, I’ve always been a ray of Sunshine,’ he chuckles.

———————–
Mlaz Corbier lives in the north of the Neatherlands. He fills his days with laughing at commoners.

image from The Science and Art of Surgery, by John Eric Erichsen, 1860