A Fatherly Experiment

The first thing I felt was a deep warmth that spread like a wildfire through my body. Once I felt it in my fingers and toes, my body jolted with its first breaths. It felt good to breathe. My lungs devoured air like a child devouring candy.

Within my first few breaths I felt a burning sensation in my nose. I took a breath too deep and began coughing. I hated the feeling, like something was kicking my chest from inside, forcing the air up my windpipe and scratching my throat before being expelled from me. I reached for my chest, as if I could push back against the assault, but my hands were bound. I felt the straps around my wrists, and the rage bubbled from my stomach and pushed past the kicking in my chest as a scream.

Then I felt a hand on my face, though I don’t remember feeling the initial touch; perhaps the hand was always on my face. It was warm and callous. Their thumb stroked my cheek. My bewilderment at the feeling distracted me, and silence filled the air.

I opened my eyes for the first time and saw him. I recognized him, but I couldn’t remember why. The oval shape of his face, the depth of his brown eyes, even the facial hair that peppered his face called to my memory. It felt like he was important to me. I felt like I should lean up and wrap my arms around his neck and pull him into a hug, and if it weren’t for my restraints I would have.

His eyes scanned my face, his thick brows deeply furrowed. I noticed the bags beneath his eyes, as deep as they were dark. As he examined the rest of me, I took in the sounds of my surroundings. Machinery whirred and beeped, birds chirped outside of a window obscured by thick curtains. Distant chatter made me sit up, but the restraints and tubes that were connected to me pulled me back down. The man made a hushing sound and brushed a strand of hair behind my ear.

“Dad?” I heard, in a voice I didn’t recognize, but I felt the sound through my vocal cords and felt the word on my lips. Was that who this man was to me?

His eyes brightened. “Miranda,” he said with a smile. Yes, I remember now. He was my father. It felt silly of me to forget.

“Where are we?” I asked, my voice quiet and hoarse. How long had it been since I had anything to drink? My mouth felt like I’d been chewing chalk.

Instead of answering, he freed my hands from their restraints. My hands found each other and rubbed at the wrist of the opposite hand. There was a red mark where the restraints were, and it felt like flames licked at my wrists.

At the thought of flames, a memory flashed through my mind. “Where is mom?” I asked, looking up at the widening eyes of my father.

His mouth opened and closed just as quickly. His eyes fell for a moment before finding mine again. “Miranda…” he trailed off. I could see his jaw grinding, the tears welling in his eyes. I knew before he told me.

“Your mother… There was an accident.” He paused to take a breath, and then another, until he was gasping uncontrollably for air in a fit of sobs.

As he fought to gain control of himself, I began to remember what happened. It played in the back of my mind unwillingly, and I watched it numbly, recounting the events.

I had been sitting in the back seat, turned around to watch a strange car. It was bright and colorful; unlike anything I had seen before. I might have smiled at the memory if it weren’t for what followed. I remember my father calling back to me, telling me to turn around and put on my seatbelt, but I was too entranced. My mother was reaching for me, I think. I felt a hand tug on the waistband of my pants before I heard my father curse and my mother scream before her grip tightened.

Everything after that was a blur, until I remembered laying there, on what, I didn’t know. It felt hard and cold. There was glass and some sort of liquid, and bright, blinding flame.

I don’t remember seeing my mother, but I do remember the blurry face of my father as he picked me up and began to carry me away. I think I fell asleep before we got here.

“It’s okay though,” he finally said. “You’re okay. Your mother will always be watching over us, okay?” I could tell he was forcing himself to smile. No one smiled like that when they cried as heavily as he did.

I returned the smile mechanically and nodded. He pulled me into an embrace and I leaned into it, grateful that I didn’t have to see his pain anymore. His arms pressed me against his chest and I could feel the thundering of his heart.

Behind him was a mirror that reached from one end of the room to the other. As we hugged, I was able to get a look at myself for the first time.

I expected wounds to dot my face and blood to be oozing from my scalp; I imagined something horrific to be looking back at me. But it wasn’t even me. I had long black hair and brown eyes, and my skin was darker and fairer than I’d ever seen it before.

It was all wrong. I was blonde and had grayish blue eyes and freckles and pimples. I pulled away from my father and took another look at him. He was my father, but was I his daughter? I remembered things we did together, but I remember them as someone else.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. He must have seen the bewilderment in my face and the way my eyes darted between his in search of answers. His grip tightened on my arms. “Miranda?”

I tried to pull away, but he was too strong. My heart began to race as my breathing became rapid. “Who am I?”

He pulled me into him again, as if another hug would make me forget about it. “You’re my daughter,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. I couldn’t tear my gaze away from my false face in the mirror as he held me. I wanted more than anything to be able to close my eyes and start over. His voice continued as I squeezed them shut.

“When the car crashed, your mother died instantly.” He paused to take a steadying breath. “You were almost dead – you were right on the brink. I picked you up and carried you to the hospital. By the gods I was so thankful that we were right next to one.”

He pulled back and rubbed the moisture from my cheeks with his thumb. I kept my eyes closed. “You died when we arrived, so I had to be quick. It was the only thing I could think of,” he said. He let go of my arms, and I opened my eyes. He held out a small crystal in his hand, half the size of his palm. It was mostly clear, except for a layer of chalky rock at its base.

When I remained silent, he continued. “I took your soul, and I placed it in this crystal. It was my first time extracting a soul, but I’d studied it for years, so I figured I could do it, and I was right.” His pacing as he spoke quickened, and he straightened as he returned the crystal to his pocket. “I was limited in what bodies I could use, but I found one as close to your original body as I could. Roughly the same height and weight, the same age, and recently deceased. The only thing that differed were the surface things, which you’ve noticed.”

He smiled as if his explanation solved everything. He brushed a strand of hair behind my ear and leaned forward to kiss my forehead. I leaned back before he made contact.

“You put my soul into another body?”

“Yes,” he said. “It was to save you so you didn’t die.”

“But I did die. You said so yourself. I died.”

“Yes, but I put you into a new body so that you came back to life.”

I stared at him for a moment that stretched into several. “Why would you do that?”

He blinked. “Why wouldn’t I? You’re my daughter and I love you. I had to save you. I knew I could and if I didn’t, knowing I could have, I never would have been able to live with myself.”

I scrambled to move away from him, then. I didn’t recognize him after all. This wasn’t my father, but some mockery of him. I stepped off the hospital bed and slipped on the polished tile floor. I fell, and the cords and tubes attached to me were ripped from my skin. I cursed loudly and held my arm where a tube had been. Blood oozed beneath my hand.

The man gasped and rushed to my side. “Miranda, are you okay?” He leaned over, hands outstretched to help me.

I kicked at him and pushed myself away. “Get away from me,” I spat, pushing myself further until I was against the wall next to the door. Blood smeared on the floor in my wake.

The floor felt like ice. It bit at my skin with its cold touch, and when my back pressed against the cold wall, I understood it wasn’t the floor and wall that were cold, I was warm. Hot. It was sweat I had slipped on, I realized.

I touched my wrists together and examined them. The redness from the restraints was mostly gone, but I could still feel the fire beneath my skin, and it was spreading. I could feel it in my ankles now, and my knees and elbows and around my waist. Any time I moved, the fire blazed.

It became worse with each passing moment. I began screaming at the same moment the door opened and a nurse walked in. The ache from the air raking my dry throat was nothing compared to the inferno beneath my skin. I thrashed on the floor, grabbed at anything I could get my hands on to help me, dug my fingernails into my skin to feel something, anything else.

All of it was useless. There was nothing else. There was only fire. The man who called himself my father leaned down and tried to grab onto me, but I fought against him, pushing his hands away and kicking at his legs. All the while, I was still on the floor, pushing against the wall as if I could melt into it and escape.

The nurse was trying to reach for me too, but my father pushed her out of the room. A man in a suit and sunglasses stepped into the room in her place, quietly shutting the door behind him. I recognized him as my father’s chauffeur but didn’t know him outside of being his driver.

“What’s wrong, sir?” he asked my father. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but I imagined they were wide and darting back and forth between us. He was crouched with his arms out, torn between pulling my father from a random girl and helping him.

My father sighed as he straightened. He took a step back, his eyes glued to his feet. I’d never seen him look so disappointed before. “There was an accident, Mike,” he said. He repeated the story up to where he transferred my soul into a different body. “But her body is rejecting the soul and it’s causing her immense pain.”

I watched as Mike’s attention turned back to me before feeling a pressure in my head. It felt like a hand entered my skull and slowly spread its fingers through my brain, though there was no pain. When he screamed and all but crumpled to the floor, the feeling in my head vanished.

My father knelt beside Mike, placing a hand on his back. “What did you feel?” he asked. His voice was barely loud enough for me to hear.

“It’s like there’s an oven inside of her, cooking her from the inside. It burned so much, and everywhere.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly before he stood, using my father for support. “I couldn’t even hear her thoughts over the pain.”

Tears filled my father’s eyes as he looked back at me. “What am I supposed to do?” I didn’t know if the question was meant for me or Mike, but I couldn’t answer anyway. It was all I could do to keep from screaming.

He shuffled towards me and sat on his knees in front of me. He took my hands in his and pressed them to his forehead. “I’m so sorry, baby,” he said. I wanted to pull away, to fight him again, but the pain was too much. I couldn’t fight him and myself at the same time.

His gaze returned to mine. He caressed the back of my hands with his thumbs, holding them between us. “We’re going to figure something out, okay? We’ll find you a new body.”

I didn’t want a new body, though. I just wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to go back to my old body or join my mother. I didn’t want to be with the man my father became. I wished the flames weren’t so hot, or else I would have told him as much.

His attention returned to Mike. “I need you to make her forget everything from the accident until now.” His grip on my hands tightened ever so slightly. I wanted to pull myself away, but it hurt too much to move. “I’ll reexplain the accident and tell her something happened to cause the pain. That’ll at least buy me enough time to find another body for her.”

The realization of what he was saying came slowly, like the trickle of a leaking faucet filling a cup. By the time it dawned on me, Mike was already in front of me and the feeling in my head returned. I could feel whatever it was moving around, but when I pressed my hands to my head, as if I could grab it and pull it out, there was nothing.

“Please,” I managed to whisper to him. I tried looking into his eyes, but they were obscured by the sunglasses. I could only see my current body, folded against the wall, blood smeared on my face.

The pressure in my head increased, and my eyes rolled into the back of my skull. The pain disappeared for the brief moment before darkness overtook me.