The Correspondence of the Swapped

Fiction

12 Ventôse, Year II. My dear Julian, The engine was not a metaphor. I awoke in a room that smelled of wet dogs and old grease. When I reached to brush the sleep from my eyes, I saw a hand that was not mine. It is a grey, skeletal thing, the nails jagged and black. The skin is like parchment stretched over stone. I attempted to scream, but the voice that emerged was a thin, rattling wheeze. I am in the body of a beggar, Julian. The Committee has seen fit to trade my lineage for a stomach that feels as though it is eating itself. 25 Ventôse, Year II. The physical degradation is more offensive than the poverty. I suffer from a tremor in the left wrist that makes this pen a torture device. My gums are soft and bleed at the slightest touch; I suspect scurvy. There is a cold that does not leave the bones, a permanent winter residing in the marrow. I spend my hours staring at the ceiling, calculating the exact volume of my atrophy. It is a clinical curiosity, really, to watch a mind of my caliber reside in a vessel that cannot sustain a simple walk to the window. 6 Germinal, Year II. I saw him today. The man who now inhabits my skin. He was crossing the Place de la Révolution, draped in my charcoal wool coat. He walked with a slouch that was positively primitive. He stopped to eat an apple, wiping the juice on the sleeve of my finest silk. The sight was an obscenity. He looked at me as I stood in the gutter, and for a moment, our eyes met. He did not recognize me. To him, I was merely another piece of urban debris. I am a ghost haunting a corpse, and the corpse is failing.