The Morphing Role

                            

Matt sat in the comfy chair his partner gave him for his birthday, the event now past the relevance of time.  The chair existed, as did he.  Green. Perhaps, in the end, it would go to the dumpster, and he would go to his casket.  

Six feet under. 

He pondered on which would be worse.  To be once loved and then put into a landfill composed of garbage, never to be enjoyed again, or if he disappeared into the dirt only for his nice clothes to rot, his flesh to be pulled off by hungry ghouls known as worms, slimy and slick.  

A contradiction against reason.

Of course, the couch wouldn’t be cognizant of love or hate nor of its life.  It would only exist in Matt’s mind. Therefore, in the dirt, the memory of the personified couch, the place he sat in on long nights, would disappear from the consciousness of man and be a rat habitat.

Hopefully, it wouldn’t steal the remote with it.  

Not that it mattered.  Matt wouldn’t be changing the channel.

His bones would rattle in an earthquake, perhaps.  Would anyone remember care?  He could roll in his grave with its fake imitation of sleep while they used the phrase, “He’s rolling in his grave.”  

Unlike Kant, Shakespeare, Homer, and Milton, he was nothing. After the words left his tongue, they vibrated in the air, sometimes hitting others' ears with their lower notes and coming back to him with simple acknowledgment.  Most people don’t have anything fancy to say, he knew. Sure, he quoted himself, made puns, felt clever.  The fleshy mirrors showed him their amusement.  

Mainstream books kept the same stories going on in time.  

The detective found the murderer in his own cold blood.

The woman turned out to be a princess now rules her home kingdom far away with some handsome pauper man helping her. 

The man carries the woman up the stairs and makes sweet love to her in the way a woman would want, dream of, while she had to tolerate her husband in real life, a man with an eye for the apple above his reach. 

Then…

A boy beats all odds.

A girl beats all odds.

Good always prevails. There is justice in the world.

Evil fails or is ambiguous.

Over and over and over again. 

The end.

Only an educated princess felt the pea at the bookstore.  The languages she spoke, the riddles she solved, the blossoming world became a flower of culture and prestige.  

But those kinds of people don’t share wisdom with the common man or woman.  They keep ideas in their heads.  Wisdom is a weapon that must be used with caution.  Give the wrong bead off the necklace of knowledge, and you end up being God, chased by the paparazzi, hunted by devils of generations’ past.  Everyone has a dark secret, a passion that keeps them human. 

They find you.

Everyone prays to you with insults.  

You should only know love. Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil in a lover.

Matt’s thoughts became too deep for him.  His philosophical views on the world didn’t move a soul.   

Why bother? He asked himself.

Six feet under.

I wonder when Randy is gong to come home? Matt pondered.  He loved when Randy was a man first, not some princess dressed in white for a wedding with a rose in her hand, a damsel in distress, calling for a man, calling for cash. The sex was so much better.  As the cum went into Matt’s mouth, he tasted the nectar of the gods.

He’d met Randy ten years prior at work. They filed in a hospital, keeping the records meticulous.  Their flame raised into the heavens.  To Matt, Randy was God as man.  

But what about as a woman?  

As a woman, Randy wore a smile of the sun, lips red and tender, waiting to be poisoned by a kiss. Chemicals danced within both of them.  Her dark skin kept the night of her body.

She touched him tenderly, made him feel alive, made him feel manly and strong.  He entered her vagina then, warm and wet and moved in a way only sex can make you move, the high that other animals, with more respectable mating patterns, laugh at.  

Oh, you think you’re civilized, don’t you?  Climb higher and higher up the tree of knowledge, only to make the branches creak and turn on you, break as you climax then fall to the ground, in the dirt with the worms.  

Dirty.

He went to do the dishes.  His hands began to thin, his hair grew long, a blossoming cherry of red shade, and his body took the figure of a man off.  Down in the nether regions, his manhood was absorbed.  And lastly, his voice changed became a soprano’s.

Randy came into the door.  

A man.

“How was work, honey?” She asked Randy.  

“You know, the usuals.  I put cosmetics on people who have no intention of buying my products.  They sit in the chair, hiding the change in their pockets, their overdrawn debt cards.  They make silly excuses.  Sometimes they try to change into men, but the makeup won’t let them when they are in the role of women.”

“It’s a shame,” Mattie said.  The name in his mind had switched.  “Do you think one day we will ever get past such prejudice?  The world keeps turning, but we don’t seem to learn a damn thing.”

“Have you been pondering again with your silly puns and quotes?”

“And what if I am?”

Randy took a deep breath.  Women could be so annoying and self-absorbed, unable to ask even the most basic of questions. 

I’ll never understand, Randy told himself.  She opened the refrigerator and grabbed a cold beer.  

“You’ve been drinking too much,” Mattie said.

“When you come home from a long day,” he said.

“I work, too! Don’t start that bullshit with me.”

“If you were a woman, you’d understand,” Mattie put “a woman scorned” into her voice.  

“Perhaps I would only understand as a woman.”  Randy plucked a diamond necklace out of his pocket and put it on.  His flesh and bones snapped and transformed.  

Randy thought of the statement she made as a man.  

“I totally get it, honey.  I apologize.  Men don’t understand such things.  Give me a hug. It’s such a cruel world, but at least we have the love of each other.”

Then Randy blushed and said in a whisper, “Do you want to be the man or the woman or should be both be men or both be women. Tasty ways?” 

“Tonight?” Mattie smiled.

“Right now, honeysuckle, I’m in the mood,” Randy whispered, her hair long and free like a wildflower. 

“It’s too bad the government got rid of transgender to keep society’s roles harmonized.  One day, we will end oppression,” Mattie said.  

“I’ll be the man,” Randy said with a slight moan.  She took offer her necklace and pulled down her pants until the garden of Eden grew.  

“Come on, Eve,” a pet name for Mattie.

“I’ve got the apple,” she giggled.

“Let me take a bite,” Randy said as they headed into the bedroom before they lay naked again, two genders that could also be men together.  There were no secrets between them.  

They knew each other.  As they moaned, they said nothing. Pleasure rocked.

In the dirt,

The tree of life grew. 

        Green.

        Six feet under.