Antea opened her eyes in a hospital room.
The white, grainy ceiling seemed to vibrate slightly, as if the light had been wearing it down for hours.
Her gaze was turned to the left.
Her hand — that hand, the one that had once been Anton’s — was being held tightly.
Micheal was looking at her with a tense expression, his eyes glossy with worry.
“Bro, you finally woke up. How are you?”
Antea tried to speak.
Nothing.
Her mouth wouldn’t respond, as if her lips had been mounted wrong.
Mike.
Mike!
The words bounced inside her throat, unable to get out.
Why can’t I talk? I want to talk to Mike, fuck.
Her gaze slid forward.
Two soft, high, compact mounds.
Antea’s breasts.
Hers.
What the fuck… No. No.
The denial burst inside her head like a whisper gone wrong.
Then Micheal’s hand moved down.
He grabbed her left breast with a full, confident grip — as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
A shiver shot through her spine.
A short, instinctive jolt.
What are you doing!?
Her hand — her hand — moved on reflex to grab Micheal’s arm and push it away.
And that’s when she saw it.
It wasn’t the masculine hand she remembered.
It was Antea’s hand: slender fingers, smooth skin, a different structure.
A physical identity she hadn’t chosen.
“Your tits drive me crazy, you know?” Micheal said, with that tone he used when he wanted something.
Antea stared up at him.
His voice, the way he looked at her… as if he were talking to any girl he was interested in.
A complete reversal, and yet she felt no anger.
Just a technical void, a mental buffer that refused to process emotion.
His hand left her breast.
Then wrapped gently around her neck.
Not tight.
A slow gesture, almost tender — and for that reason even more out of place.
His face descended toward hers.
Close. Too close.
An intention.
A kiss about to happen.
Antea shut her eyes an instant before his lips reached hers.
When she opened her eyes again, the world was wrong.
Above her, a violet-blue sky, dense, like a bruise that was about to spread with no hurry at all.
Around her, pure desolation.
She didn’t know if it had been an explosion, a collapse, a total structural failure — whatever had happened had erased everything with a kind of uniformity that was disgusting even to look at.
Then she saw her own body.
The right side was there.
The left side — from just under the left breast downward — wasn’t.
Gone.
Erased as if something — a massive creature, with teeth too wide to even picture — had taken a bite to taste her and then dropped her there, still alive only because it didn’t like the flavor.
From the edge of her pelvis hung a strip of skin, still attached by a stubborn few millimeters of biological insistence.
Her left foot, the only survivor of that side, wasn’t a foot anymore: it was an assembly of bionic material, filaments and rigid surfaces, as if someone had tried to rebuild her without knowing how a human being was supposed to look.
If this is a fucking dream… why am I not waking up?
Holy shit…
Her chest rose and fell too fast.
She was breathing like she was afraid of losing the rhythm.
She tried to move her body.
Nothing.
Only the awareness that she no longer had control over anything.
The air around her flickered.
It wasn’t a change of scene — it was a mutation, as if that horrific landscape were only the cocoon and she the larva forced into a metamorphosis toward something she couldn’t tell whether it was a butterfly or a more sophisticated nightmare.
The world began to liquefy into a dark fluidity, a shifting mixture — shadowy colors dragging each other along — like the lazy pour of a bored artist trying to make something “acceptable” through a half-hearted pouring technique.
The only point not participating in that chromatic dance was her.
Or so it seemed — because her body too was being pulled into an ongoing ontological exuvia, a transformation that didn’t ask permission.
Her flesh — what remained of it — began to glow.
A radiant light, shameless in its desire to defy the surrounding gloom.
And then the body started to reassemble: graceful, yes, but with that unsettling kind of grace, as if tens of billions of hyperfast fleas were playing at reassembling the puzzle of a person.
The transition was quick, never abrupt.
Images slid into one another with a deliberate attempt to hypnotize her field of vision, as if the dreamlike nightmare had suddenly decided to coax pareidolia into playing pictionary with her brain.
Then everything settled.
Trees.
Familiar trees.
The atmosphere had changed, but not the sense of threat.
Darkness was expanding, letting the stars take over the job of ostracizing the sun, while she perceived everything as someone watching a disturbing first-person simulation through 3D glasses.
She lowered her gaze.
She was dressed openly sexually: dark stockings rising to mid-thigh, held by a garter invisible but unmistakable beneath a tight black miniskirt stretched like a pre-tear surface; above, a short overcoat left intentionally open, framing exposed patches of skin as if someone else had chosen them for her.
She was still paralyzed.
In front of her, in the black filtering through the brush, a figure emerged.
A silhouette.
A primitive warning sparking in her chest like a faint hiccup of fear.
Then she recognized the features.
Mark?
She thought his name with instinctive, almost childlike relief.
He still wore his intact vest and shirt.
And a lascivious smile.
A wrong smile.
He moved closer with a calculated slowness, like someone savoring every step separating him from her panic.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
When he reached her, he knelt.
“What if I spread these legs and we have a little fun, huh? Filthy slut.”
The line, filthy and flat, snapped inside her like a blade.
What the fuck are you saying, Mark? Have you lost your mind?
But she couldn’t speak.
Not yet.
The thought ricocheted inside a skull that no longer felt like hers.
Mark spread her legs with glacial ease.
Now he towered over her, his smile loaded with rotten intentions.
His hand brushed her exposed stomach, sliding downward.
No… please, Mark. Stop.
She thought it.
She didn’t say it.
It was like being walled inside her own body.
Then she looked into his eyes.
Yellow.
Not the warm amber of gentle light — the yellow of terror, of animal panic.
A wrong yellow.
Mark laughed.
A loud, living laugh.
His mouth distorted, opening beyond what was possible until the face stopped being a face.
Fear intensified, jumping an order of magnitude without warning.
It was no longer that emotional pallor she had relied on since the first day — that small semi-permeable psychological gap where the unwanted half of her identity pulsed like a toxic reminder: this isn’t yours, this isn’t you.
That space had always held together — thin but stable — a buffer zone that let her remain one step behind herself.
Now it was wiped out.
Terror flooded it like black water smashing through a dam: no distance, no filter, no safety margin.
She was sucked into the body she had tried to keep at bay, forced to feel all of it, down to the last beat.
And that was what jolted her awake.
Antea woke up on a low, makeshift bed, with a thin mattress that sagged in the middle as if someone had slept there for months.
She was in a cramped room, the walls uneven and cracked, lit only by an oil lamp that spat a weak, yellowish glow, unable to truly illuminate anything.
Voices to her right.
Heavy noises in the air.
The slap of flesh, someone shouting something in Valashian.
Someone in a nearby room was very clearly having sex.
And it probably wasn’t Mark and Nahely, since they had rushed toward her the moment she woke, asking how she felt.
Or at least Mark had asked. Nahely hadn’t said anything she understood — but why would she have asked anything different?
Nahely was gently stroking her right arm.
Antea pulled away.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the immediate hurt on the girl’s face — but she didn’t care.
She didn’t answer.
She didn’t want them to know how she felt.
And she certainly wasn’t fine — no genius required to figure that out.
She only said, dark-faced:
“Leave me alone, please.”
Mark tried to say something, hesitating, but stayed still and silent.
Nahely looked at her with a sad, genuinely worried expression.
You don’t even know who the fuck I am, idiot.
Stop clinging to me and mind your own business, she wanted to say.
Instead, what came out was:
“LEAVE ME ALONE.”
Message received.
The two pulled back.
She collapsed onto the pillow.
Then turned to her left, giving them her back.
Behind her, Mark and Nahely whispered to each other — something she had no intention of listening to.
Is this a dream?
Did I get into an accident and end up in a hospital, where I woke up for a moment?
Was I never actually male?
No.
I mean…
Her brain, in that moment, was a maze of dead-end corridors and fragmented epistemic loops.
A muddle of conjectures, one hundred percent imperfect and useless.
A living embodiment of “I don’t know.”
She cried, while the mental buzzing made her feel, fully and painfully, what pure undecidability was.
She had no idea how much time she spent in that limbo.
The last echoes of the sex — the ones that had served as background noise to the rupture between her and her own agency — gave her something concrete to think about.
That man knew what he was doing.
Hard to believe the woman had been faking anything.
And of course, the man’s body drifted back into her mind.
She couldn’t stop it.
The mental rendering launched on its own, like a background process she’d never approved: a sharp frame projected behind her closed eyelids, pushed there by the involuntary excitement that concert of moans and unmistakable sounds had stirred in her.
She tried to resist.
Covered her ears.
Forced herself to revisit one of the useless conjectures that had built the mental buzz.
She wanted to choke the image before it formed, starve it.
All she did was delay it.
Eventually, it played out anyway — herself, on all fours on an enormous bed, facing a mirror, dressed indecently.
Behind her, that man unbuttoning his shirt, those yellow eyes lit by an impossible glow.
The scene didn’t need to finish to hit her.
A dizziness of sensations slammed into her in a single wave — bolder, sharper than the flashes that had blindsided her over the last days whenever Mark had been too close.
A real want.
Unfiltered.
A want that belonged to the body she inhabited now, not the one she remembered.
A want from a woman.
Her heartbeat sped up.
Her breathing rose.
Desire took shape in a new, unfamiliar, yet brutally simple way: a warm, tyrannical pull, insistent, localized.
Her mind pushed it back; her body shoved it forward, determined, building an ideal around it.
Her fingers tightened.
Her hand clenched into a fist — right where she refused to let it go.
“Fuuuuuck…” she thought, furious with herself.
Finally, the noises that had been tormenting her imagination died out.
And with a deliberate act — not clean, not immediate — she managed to claw back a sliver of control over her own head.
But it took effort.
A lot of it.
A few minutes later, the door opened without ceremony.
A woman said something in a sultry, very feminine tone, almost sing-song.
Antea turned the other way to see her.
It was the girl she’d seen at the market.
Dressed the same way.
Her hair was messy, her cheeks flushed, her expression hovering between exhaustion and a kind of spiritual satisfaction—like she’d climbed a mountain and then had a couple of drinks at the summit.
She radiated euphoric relaxation, the kind that only comes after something very good.
She said something else.
Maybe, somewhere in that stream of words, her name was there too.
But how the hell was Antea supposed to identify it?
Mark got up.
He shot Antea a glance from which it was impossible to extract any information — a surface more than a face — and left the room behind the blonde.
Then the girl approached Antea.
Her lack of inhibition was almost blinding, like she carried an aura made of distilled “I don’t give a fuck.”
She said something, then grabbed Antea by the arms and pushed firmly, trying to get her to stand.
Fine, fine. I’m getting up… Antea thought, sitting, then rising to her feet.
She immediately realized she was taller than the blonde.
Ten centimeters, maybe.
The girl was about as tall as Nahely.
Looking at a bombshell like that—no point denying it—no straight guy could stay indifferent.
And yet inside her, nothing.
None of the sensations a heterosexual man is supposed to feel in front of a girl like that.
Maybe she was staring weirdly because of that pathetic, desperate attempt to make some imaginary virile remnant react… a remnant that, by definition, was no longer there.
Wanting a penis—that is what should happen to the consciousness of a man transplanted into a female body.
And instead? Nothing.
A clean, immaculate void.
The blonde gave her a compassionate smile.
Then she turned and went to a low nightstand, from which she pulled a comb and some cosmetics — or proto-cosmetics, whatever they were — and showed them to her, as if to say it was time to get ready.
Nahely had already started.
She had stripped almost completely.
Only her underwear remained.
She wasn’t curvy, but her thinness suited her: there was an unintentional, almost ethereal elegance to it.
She had her back turned, so Antea could only see her spine and shoulder blades.
And even that was enough to make her angry at herself.
She wanted to feel guilty.
That grubby guilt of a voyeur peeking at a girl through a keyhole.
Now she herself was basically a walking keyhole, and she wished she could at least feel a shred of that stupid, sticky embarrassment that belongs to the male mind when it looks where it shouldn’t.
But nothing.
No somatic reaction that could justify any of it.
The blonde undressed too, taking everything off except her bra.
Her perfect, round ass was the final test — a real reality-check for whatever masculinity Antea was supposed to have left.
But again, nothing.
She looked on purpose, almost to test herself.
Then she pulled her gaze away and stared at the open wardrobe, half dreamy, half numb.
The blonde girl — who had, in the meantime, slipped into a new skirt, finer than the one she’d worn at the market but just as short — interpreted that vacant stare toward the wardrobe as a patognomonic sign of indecision.
So, still in her bra — a simple, rigid thing, more like a worked band than anything from their world, but still managing to hold a small, firm chest — she began showing Antea some clothes.
Not that the selection was particularly varied: almost nothing but short skirts and outer garments that covered very little.
It was obvious the girl liked showing off her body, as if every piece of fabric were the bare minimum concession to modesty.
Antea didn’t want to show off anything, but when it came to her legs, she didn’t have much of a choice.
For the upper half she would at least wear a jacket — one of those stiff garments with thick seams, typical of that more primitive world, where every item of clothing felt like a proto-industrial ancestor of their own.
In the end, she chose a short black skirt and a matching black top.
While undressing, she noticed that most of the grime that had accumulated on her skin had been cleaned away.
She blushed.
And immediately afterward she got angry, imagining Mark telling the two girls she was his girlfriend and that he would “take care of it,” like an absolute idiot.
Then she realized Nahely had spent enough time with them to understand exactly how things were.
She decided to trust her — more out of self-suggestion, to keep everything from collapsing again, than out of real logical certainty.
But it was still a step forward.
She was starting to rationalize again, successfully.
She couldn’t get that sort of bra on.
The stiff fabric, the clumsy lacing, the thick seams — an ergonomic nightmare.
After two failed attempts, Nahely noticed and helped her, with a natural ease that irritated and relieved her at the same time.
Then she put on the top.
Meanwhile, the blonde came closer from behind and began brushing her hair with quick, almost professional movements.
She even offered her some cosmetics — or what passed for cosmetics in that world — but Antea shook her head.
Let’s not get carried away, for fuck’s sake, she thought.
When she was ready, the blonde took her by the wrist and guided her to the mirror that covered most of the left side panel of the tall three-door wardrobe — the same one she’d changed in front of.
And there she saw herself.
Truly.
For the first time.
Since ending up in that insane world.
So fucking sexy. Jesus Christ.
A tangle of feelings hit her as she looked at herself.
The first impulse was simple, primitive: she liked it.
She liked what she saw.
She liked it a lot.
She leaned to the side, her torso turning slightly, as if her body had decided to move before her mind could object.
The mirror gave back the full curve of her ass — high, firm, round to the point of looking sculpted just to show off.
An exact shape, precise, that elastic roundness girls get when they’re built, like those fitness influencers with perfect glutes — exactly like in the photos Antea had seen a thousand times without ever imagining she could resemble them.
The skin pulled in the right way, the black miniskirt framing the curve like an audacious border; the swell of the glute seemed to push against the fabric, as if it had its own will to exist.
Proud.
Feminine.
Aesthetic pride in its purest form — nothing to do with narcissism, more like looking at a piece of art and thinking, “fuck, this works.”
And yet, along with the satisfaction, came the anxiety.
When she shifted back to a frontal stance, staring straight into the eyes of the woman the mirror insisted she was, the impact hit clean.
The full breasts, the tight waist, the smooth, bright lines of her skin — everything conspired to make detachment impossible.
And in that long, dense moment, while her gaze swung between refusal and fascination, the two identities living inside her — the one the body now demanded she become and the one her consciousness was fiercely trying to protect from erasure — blurred into each other.
An interference.
A liminal identity, unstable, vibrating.
A unique emotional disturbance with no real name — the kind you would understand only if you could read the tears slipping down her face.
Liminal identity.
A concept that surfaced in her mind on its own, as if that moment — her body in front of her, her consciousness suspended halfway — had summoned it without asking permission.
In another context, it referred to something entirely different: a text by a sociologist, Jana Arsovska.
She described the so-called “dangerous hybrids”: young men raised within the traditional Albanian culture of honor and family, then catapulted into capitalist modernity after fleeing Enver Hoxha’s regime or after the chaos of Albania’s ’97 anarchy.
Bodies raised in one world, minds raised in another.
Archaic violence on one side, ostentatious consumerism on the other.
A hybridization that produced no balance — only something else.
A fracture.
A liminal identity.
That association — sudden, dissonant — dragged her thoughts to her older sister.
A UN official, a voracious reader of essays, capable of slipping expository monologues into conversations that revolved around completely unrelated topics — and, somehow, without ever sounding ridiculous.
She was good.
So good that Anton, over time, had begun to imitate her, letting himself be shaped by the way she articulated concepts far too complex for the situations in which she deployed them.
He had always admired her.
And it was strange — so strange — to think of her now, here, while staring at the body that was rewriting her from the inside out.
The liminal state snapped when the blonde grabbed her shoulders.
In the mirror, she saw the blonde’s head appear just past her left shoulder.
She said something — a stream of alien phonemes sliding over Antea like lukewarm water.
But one word stood out: bukur.
She’d heard it before.
Finally, one of the words Nahely had tried to teach her was actually useful.
At first she associated it with “girl,” because that’s how she’d memorized it.
But why the hell would someone say girl to a girl staring at herself in the mirror, crying?
No.
Maybe it meant beautiful.
Bukur means beautiful. Is she telling me I’m beautiful?
Well… I see it too, I’m not a blind girl, Antea thought — using the feminine for herself for the very first time without her brain firing alarms about identity.
She wiped her tears with her right arm and gave the girl a small, wavering smile.
She felt calm — suddenly, inexplicably.
Maybe because of the memory of her sister.
Maybe because she had finally looked that body in the face.
She didn’t know yet.
It was still an unstable calm — like the breath of a sailor before a storm that isn’t actually imminent but feels imminent.
A sui generis calm, like all the sensations that had torn through her over the past few days.
They left the room.
Mark stood by the exit door, lit by a small oil lamp mounted on the opposite wall of the corridor.
There was no trace of the man who had just been fucking the blonde.
Mark stared at her, embarrassed, then looked away immediately.
Antea said nothing as they went down the stairs.
The others did — especially the blonde and Nahely.
They chatted, laughed, exchanged comments she couldn’t understand.
Sometimes Mark replied, but not to her.
Outside, a surprisingly well-built carriage was waiting for them — far better crafted than anything she’d seen in that miserable district.
Polished wood, straight boards, wheels reinforced with actual iron.
On the street, not far from the carriage, a few drunk men started catcalling.
Nothing creative: the usual guttural noises, animal-like calls.
Antea quickened her pace.
She couldn’t wait to get inside the carriage, even though she had no idea where they were going.
Those men made her uncomfortable in a way she now recognized far too well.
One of them — probably the boss of that tiny pack — shouted something at the others, and the group shut up immediately.
The blonde walked up to him and they hugged.
Is that the guy she was screwing?
No. Too old.
Maybe her father.
His behavior made it obvious: this was fatherly affection, not desire.
Even the kiss on the girl’s cheek carried nothing sensual.
It ended quickly.
A few seconds later, they were all inside the carriage.
The interior was surprisingly neat: smoothed planks, a small lantern hanging from a hook, folded blankets in a corner, the scent of dry wood and warm metal.
A simpl
e structure, but solid — meant for transporting people, not goods.
During the ride, Antea stared at a dead point in front of her.
She didn’t listen to the voices.
She didn’t watch the landscape.
She just let herself drift — inside and outside.
Silence ruled even outside her head.
