My body is telling me something frightening and my body doesn’t lie. As soon as I’m awake I can feel the wetness inside me -- Patrick last night -- so I roll away from him still asleep beside me, and as I stand his semen starts to ooze and slide along the inside of my left thigh. It’s just barely dawn. It’s still dark inside the house but I’d know my way to the bathroom blind. I use some toilet paper on my leg and labia and then a warm wet facecloth for your basic whore’s bath, thinking I really need to depilate or wax down there, wondering how I’ve let it go this long, and that’s when I notice my legs. My legs are unshaven. I run the palms of my hands up and down over them and that’s stubble all right. I’d say about two-or-three-weeks’ growth of stubble. What the hell? I stare at my face in the mirror. My face looks the same. But something about my hair’s wrong. I had it cut and styled just last week but you wouldn’t know it now. It needs a good brushing and it might be my imagination but I could swear it’s longer than it ought to be-- longer than it was just last night. I reach up into it to shake it out and stop midway. There are light thin tufts of hair growing out of my armpits. This is not possible. What my eyes are reporting my brain can’t process. I feel something drop in the pit of my stomach and it isn’t hunger pangs, it’s nausea. I need to talk to Patrick right away. But in the hall I glance to my right, and what I see in the living room stops me in my tracks. My first thought is that we’ve been vandalized while we were sleeping, but I doubt that even a morphine drip would allow us to sleep this soundly.
