Unbecoming

Changing shape isn’t like slipping into another coat that wasn’t yours. No magic, shimmering light, or seamless transition from one form to another.

It is nothing like that. It is messy.

It begins in the marrow. My femur cracks first, splintering inward as I force my frame to shrink six inches to match Arthur’s height. The sound is like dry branches snapping in an empty forest, muffled only by the wet tearing of my muscle tissue. I swallow my own scream with vocal cords that are currently melting, dissolving into a grey paste before re-stiffening into the vocal register of a fifty-year-old accountant.

Skin is the hardest part. Human skin doesn't like to expand or contract on command. To match his sagging jowls and the deep crevasse between his brows, the epidermis has to tear itself open, bleeding transparent sap as it re-knits in real-time. I press Arthur’s cold, lifeless face against mine, absorbing the texture of his liver spots, the exact curve of his earlobes, the faint smell of tobacco and peppermint emanating out of his open mouth.

By the time the sun rises, Arthur is gone—dissolved down to calcium dust in the bathtub—and I am standing in his kitchen, pouring coffee into his favorite cracked mug. Adjusting the collar of the crisp white shirt and smoothing out the black slacks while checking out the shiny loafers on my feet. Getting all this from his closet as his wife lay in the bed nearby still sleeping.

I squeeze the handle of the mug testing grip. It feels right. Putting two fingers on the artery in the neck and checking the rolex on my wrist; heart rate is eighty beats per minute, steady, dull, human.

When his wife, Clara, walks down the stairs, her hair tied in a loose handkerchief, she smiles at me.

"Morning, Artie," she says softly, kissing my cheek.

Her lips pressed against skin that took several painful minutes to stretch into shape. I smile back, flexing Arthur’s jaw muscles. "Morning, honey," I say. His voice rolls out of my throat, smooth and perfect.

She turns her back to fry eggs. She doesn't notice. They never do. They only see what they expect to see.

But as I sit at Arthur’s table, picking up a fork, feeling the echo of the man’s old knee injury throbbing in my own joint, I look at the reflection staring back at me from the hutch near the stove.

Deep behind Arthur’s bright blue eyes, in the replicated brain tissue, something twitches. A memory that isn't mine—an image of Clara holding a newborn baby thirty years ago—floods my prefrontal cortex, searing like a hot cattle brand. Then another one invades: the taste of salt water, the cold horror of a car crash, the overwhelming, suffocating weight of Arthur's grief, losing that same child just a few short years later.

My hand shakes. The fork clatters against the porcelain plate.

I am not just wearing his flesh. His memories are replacing mine—this has never happened before—I try to recall my own face—the pale, formless mass I was born with before I took my first victim in 1842—and find only blank, white silence. Arthur's grief, his love, his decades of mundane life are flooding every synapse, drowning out the cold killer I have always been. If I stay in this form, it would no doubt kill me.

Clara looks over, concerned. "Artie? Are you okay?"

I turn to her, forcing a warm, husbandly grin. But beneath my cheeks, I feel a muscle shift out of place. A loose tendon slides under my cheekbone, coiling up toward my eye socket like a worm.

"I'm fine, Clara," I say, but my voice cracks midway through—a high, wet rasp that doesn't belong to Arthur, nor to any man. In the glass of the hutch, I see my left eye sagging out of its socket and the jawline sloughing downward as Arthur's form begins to reject me.

Clara stops. Her smile slowly vanishes. She stares at my jaw, where a tiny seam of skin has just unraveled, exposing a sliver of the pale, faceless flesh beneath.

"Artie..." she whispers, shaking her head, backing away toward the knife block. "What is wrong with your face?"

Panicked, I lunged across the kitchen table before she could grasp the wooden handle of one of the knives. My hands, now grotesque and half-melted, found her throat. Clara gasped, her soft eyes wide with horror as she looked into the twisted, unraveling mask of her husband before rolling back into her skull. As life left her, a sudden, desperate clarity struck me: the only way to purge Arthur's lingering consciousness was to overwrite it entirely with someone new.

I pulled Clara's limp body close, pressing my dissolving face against hers. The agony was immediate and violent. My bones shattered and re-knit, shrinking further, my shoulder blades narrowing as Arthur's coarse hair dissolved and Clara's soft, silver-streaked locks erupted from my scalp. I felt the suffocating tide of Arthur's grief begin to recede, washed away by the fresh wave of Clara's calm, quiet mind taking hold.

When the restructuring finally subsided, silence settled over the sunlit kitchen. I stood naked over the lifeless blob that was Arthur’s form. A chalky white powder, like a spilled flour next to it; all that was left of Arthur’s wife. Smoothing down the back of Clara's dark hair with small, delicate hands. Arthur's tormenting thoughts were gone. I took a deep breath through Clara's nose, smelling the lingering aroma of coffee and fried eggs, and smiled softly to myself. I was clean again—until the next mind began to bleed into my own. I made my way to the bedroom to find clothes and make myself look decent.

Slipping on a silky red dress and putting on matching heels, the doorbell rang. I smiled in the mirror, Clara’s form complete with perfect makeup smiled back. It was time to play the part of the woman that I’d literally broken my back to be.