until I found what I needed. A heavy needle and some even heavier thread. I lit a few candles and headed into the small bathroom, thankful that they had a real mirror and not one of those shiny reflective pieces of metal that really only allowed you to know that you were staring at yourself without any definition whatsoever.
I positioned my old face over pasty boy’s dough-ish features. It was going to be a tough fit. My face was longer and much more angular than Clarence’s Twinkie-inspired rendition.
“We can make this work,” I said aloud as I slogged the wet piece of facial meat around. I started with the forehead first, it took a few minutes to work out the mechanics of sewing a face on, but within a few minutes I was on a roll. By the time I was done, I had taken on a reasonable facsimile of my former self. Maybe like if you took a piece of paper and faxed it back and forth twenty or thirty times; the edges are blurred and some of the text is unreadable and canted at odd angles to the rest of the prose, but still a reasonable facsimile. That’s what I had.
I was careful as I sewed around my eyes, Hugh had shown he could only repair so much and I was already having him work on a few things. The more I taxed him the sooner he would want to eat, and I really wanted to have this on so I could surprise my new roomie.
***
“What have you done?” Clarence finally sputtered after about twenty minutes of body-racking sobs.
“Making some improvements. If I’m going to live here I want to be comfortable. You know…in my own skin and all.” I laughed at my rapier wit. “Now we need to work on some proper clothes.”
“Oh please let me be.”
“You’re kidding, right? We’re just getting started. Me and you are going to be best buds, at least until I kill you. I guess at that point all bets are off.”
Hungry , reverberated throughout our shared skull.
“What is going on? Am I insane?”
“No padded rooms for you, Clarence,” I told him. “That’s Hugh.”
“Who the fuck is Hugh?”
“Well I don’t want to get all philosophical on you, but Hugh is pretty much you now. Well, at least as far as your body anyway. He’s the zombie virus.”
“I’m a zombie? But I’m still me?”
“Not so much, Clarence. Try to move your arm. Better yet, here’s a visual that will drive you even further down the road of lunacy. This one almost broke my spirit.” I concentrated hard to make Clarence’s nuts – well, my nuts now – itchy. I mean ‘on fire’ itchy; the kind where you don’t care if you’re in the middle of Macy’s during Christmas and just need to shove your hand down the front of your pants and go to town. Women won’t understand this, but it might just be singularly the most irritating thing a man can experience besides a woman talking about her day.
I could feel Clarence’s meager consciousness beginning to squirm. He was searching for any means possible by which to move a body part, even attempting to thrust his hips so he could have his underwear rub up against his balls…anything.
It was actually starting to get to me.
“Please.”
“I was going to make you suffer a little longer, but it’s hurting me just as much.” I reached down and quenched the fire. We shared a moment as we both sighed in relief. “This doesn’t make us friends,” I told him. “Wish I could sew my old dick on, probably can’t even take a proper piss out of this thing. I’ve used bigger straws. What do you have? What’s the thing called? Oh yeah micro-penis. That’s it.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“I’d never even know it with this thing,” I said, squeezing his junk. I thought about rupturing his balls for the fun of it, but they were mine now, might as well hold on to them.
Hungry , surged through us again.
“Fuck, Hugh, you’ve been in two bodies now. You’d think you’d have picked up a little more vocabulary than that. Let me just clean up a little.” I washed as much