Metamorphosis

→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 35: FALL/WINTER 2025

The fact of the matter is this: I cannot speak the language he speaks. I practiced the few words I knew before logging on to our scheduled video call. Buonasera, scusi, vaffanculo. I cannot speak his language, and he can barely speak mine. But there’s nothing to be done about it at present. I wait in a virtual lobby, programmed to resemble a corporate-type space. There are pretend chairs no one can sit on, and pretend cubicles, and even a pretend water dispenser. Every other second the water in it moves, the pretend chairs swivel. It’s an interesting touch, adds to the novelty. I wait twelve minutes in this graveyard before I’m admitted into the meeting room, at five-thirty on the dot.

He says hello first, in English. I smile. He smiles too. We cannot stop smiling, this washed-up Florentine dancer and me. I ask if he likes the Edible Arrangement I sent to his hotel room yesterday. Dragon fruit, apricots. Oranges cut into the shapes of flightless birds. He looks to the woman behind him for clarification on what it is I am asking. She doesn’t bother interpreting my small talk. She says he especially likes the oranges, their whimsical contours. Penguins amuse him. With her manicured hands, she makes a double thumbs-up.

“Penguins are my favorite,” I tell them. What is the Italian word for penguin? Are there any penguins in Florence? Sorry, Firenze. Surely not. Except, there must be a zoo in the city, or nearby, and a penguin or two might reside there. I think about Mediterranean penguins a little, while the woman hovering so close to the dancer’s side rearranges stationery on his desk. Papers, fountain pens, business cards. She moves everything around—once, twice. From what I can see, it is dark and substantial, the desk of a person who writes many things and conducts many meetings.

“I look good?” he asks. His question echoes. The wireless service in this motel blows. His mouth is no longer moving, but here comes the question: “I look good?”

“I gargled the letters in my mouth while emptying my bladder this morning, squatting over a pit latrine. Bellissima. Again, as I shaved all the hair off my pubic bone, as I rid my upper lip of peach fuzz. Bellissima. ”

“Yeah, you do. Bellissima.” That’s the other word I practiced, in the communal toilet of the motel close to my Apapa flat, a space so neutral it can be abandoned easily post-call, every word, every action left behind, incapable of polluting the sacred space that is my own home. I gargled the letters in my mouth while emptying my bladder this morning, squatting over a pit latrine. Bellissima. Again, as I shaved all the hair off my pubic bone, as I rid my upper lip of peach fuzz. Bellissima. 

He says something to his human mouthpiece, the well-dressed assistant, and the something is this: you have too much beauty for one person. I want to bat away the compliment, but I don’t do that. That is not who I am on this virtual call, with this effusive man who has almost no bilingual ability. I allow his praise to wash over me, a wave at perfect temperature—not too warm, not too cold. It is perfect, his compliment. “Grazie,” I say, wishing I’d worn something more daring than the t-shirt I have on. A white dress, a scarlet one. A blouse with no sleeves—no, the lace bralette crumpled at the bottom of my only piece of luggage.

His cheeks are unlike mine, not as full, and they have the bright, bright shade of burst blood vessels, or radish skins. Retirement must not agree with him, the sedentariness of it all. Too much drink, too much nicotine, poor sleep. At fifty-three, he is hardly pirouetting his way across continents. And there’s the injury, of course, the torn fibers inside his left leg, the pinched nerves in his lower back. Yet he is still attractive. I am reminded of a butter sculpture, looking at this washed-up dancer preening for me in our digital bubble, this wall-less conference room. Even as he melts, he continues to be a nice thing to look at.

I wish the assistant would leave. She cannot. We need her grasp on the  English language, and Italian. Without her, my words mean absolutely nothing. Will she remain on the call, off to the side, perhaps, when he takes off that button-up shirt, his tie? Will she pop back in after we are both undressed, to collect his clothes, to fold them with precision? I am nervous now, and I wasn’t before. Not really.

She’s speaking to me. “Have you done this before? Virtually, I mean.”

“Once or twice.” I lie easily, wanting to seem green, because that’s what they want: something fresh, or semi-fresh, and I am neither of those things. “He’s my first, in a long, long time.”

“Cool, that’s fine. Your hair, will you put it up?”

Is this what he likes? To see the neck properly? Nothing special, this neck of mine. I pull the stretched hair tie from my wrist, and I gather every braid sprouting from my scalp in both palms, taking my time. He watches intently, leaning forward, and his face fills almost all of the screen.

“All done,” I say.

“Did you look at the pictures? And the dossier? He emailed you a folder. Yesterday.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, then.” She pauses to listen to the Florentine dancer who employs her. And me for the next two hours. He has a lot to say. I’m patient, perched at the foot of my rent-a-bed, balancing the laptop on my thighs. Heat from a vent beneath the system scalds me but I like the warm sensation, the pseudointimacy of an overheating computer, although I would prefer the feel of his skin. It’s almost like he’s here, laying hands on my body.

“He wants to see a small demonstration first.”

I nod. “Ears? Nose? Mouth?”

She relays the message to her boss, and he points to his nose.

“There is some pain, but there always is, needles weaving in and out of the changing tissue and skin. This pain is bearable, at least. Just a nose, completely superficial.”

It is already happening, as soon as he points. The gesture alone brings the bones to obey. They are remembering how narrow the woman from the photos’ nose bridge is. A ski slope, not rounded, nothing rounded about it, not the pinched nostrils, not the delicate septum. There is some pain, but there always is, needles weaving in and out of the changing tissue and skin. This pain is bearable, at least. Just a nose, completely superficial. My nose is her nose, thirty seconds later. With her nose I inhale, and with my mouth I exhale.

“My God.” This is the interpreter; her voice has a wobble to it now, unlaced from its original tightness at the start of our call.

He says a name that isn’t mine, he clutches the loose necktie under his chin, and the movements he makes, the sounds he makes, are frenetic. More, he wants more.

Next is the forehead, and that hurts a little more than the nose. She has an aristocratic forehead, this woman he has paid me to embody, whereas mine is smaller, firmer. I make two deep dimples under my cheekbones, furrowing the tiniest smile lines into the skin beside my mouth; I lower my brow bone, and this is especially painful. Not needles, an anvil, battering my face head-on, an anvil that has been heated first on coals.

The ears, the mouth. Smaller, thinner. She doesn’t have the plump lower lip I do, her upper lip is a pink little line, her jaw a soft curve. And now the complexion. Where does the deepness go? Somewhere inside me, I think, the seat of my spirit, or maybe outside. Maybe the molecules binding to form dark pigment evaporate into the air, maybe I am a completely dissoluble thing. I don’t know. It is gone, my melanin, and I am a peach, the inside of an unripe peach. This is all wrong. Too rich, the hue, the undertone. Cooler, cooler still. Closer to raw milk. I remove the plain t-shirt I wore for the call to show him my handiwork, to show them both, the dancer and his assistant who speaks fluent English.

My shoulders broaden, my biceps are all muscle; the woman from the photos, Allegra, lifts weights recreationally and scales the vertical sides of mountains, the taller the better. She is always on a diet—high-protein, high-fiber—and has competed in four triathlons. Allegra was once a nun (briefly, at the age of nineteen), is double-jointed, loves olives but not figs. It’s all in the emailed dossier. We’re not at all alike, me and this Allegra. I’m afraid of heights and of God, but she must not be if she climbs rock faces and was cloistered voluntarily. Danger is more her friend than it is mine.

What is left? Hands, yes, the hands that have lived many lives. Nun, triathlete, alpinist. I callous my palms and my knees, I add texture to the barely-there love handles and the firm, high buttocks, one cheek slightly larger than the other. My clavicles become more visible. No, not mine. Hers. The woman from the photos, Allegra. She is naked in three of them, her vulva exposed, minora and majora. I know how rosy, how pursed to make my/her areolas, the width of them. I know the shape of her fingernails. I squeeze her out of me, like paste from a tube, and there is some resistance. Nausea hits me, unforgiving in my abdomen, and even her nausea is a different sensation, unfamiliar, starting at the back of her throat, whereas mine begins in the chest. Finally, her hair. Loose and wavy, no tight coils, but similarly dark. Darker, even. I add a sheen to it, something extra, an unnatural bounce as well.

“ He cannot be contained in the leather wingback chair he’s sitting on, and my body, Allegra’s body, likes how well he’s responding to the fracturing of bones, the scrambling of cells and atoms.”

Inside my laptop, the retired dancer is breathing heavier. He has repositioned his computer so that more of his long body shows. Maybe the interpreting assistant did the repositioning. Might be in her scope of work, for all I know. I see his legs spread wide, wider still. He cannot be contained in the leather wingback chair he’s sitting on, and my body, Allegra’s body, likes how well he’s responding to the fracturing of bones, the scrambling of cells and atoms. He shoves a hand down the front of his pants, rummages around in there, and pulls it out.

I have never seen the penis of a former dancer. A former prime minister, and a current one, a tobacco farmer, an anesthesiologist. Others. Too many. But not a dancer, I don’t think. Circumcised, cleanly, and he is unshaven; they always are. Where is the assistant? But this is not something Allegra would be thinking, is it? Allegra has no space in her mind for assistants and their whereabouts. She is self-serving, the dossier says, and self-absorbed. I place the laptop on the duvet, slip out of my own trousers, and my panties as well.

“See?” My legs part, showing him the finer details—rosacea on the inner thighs, minora, majora, smooth as an egg—and his hand blurs. He has so much to say. Nebulous Italian, a rapid stream of it, courses from his frothing mouth, and there, I hear it, the assistant’s voice, blank, monotone, directing my new limbs, my new mouth, my new everything.

“Turn around, yes, like that—slower, please. Now your right foot, put it over there. Is that a wastepaper basket? Say his name, not that high-pitched, deeper.”

What is Allegra up to, anyway, while I borrow her likeness? Is she in a flea market, alone, or with the friends she has made climbing mountains in Southeast Asia and Europe? Is she picking out the roundest, prettiest orange from the bottom of a fruit vendor’s carefully constructed pyramid? The cornerstone orange. Allegra destroys well-made things, because she can. It is all in the dossier, his appraisal of her temperament, under the weight, height, star sign section, dictated first in Italian, translated into English by the assistant paid to witness her employer at his most base.

I put a hand over Allegra’s throat, our shared throat. I squeeze, and he sighs. Her very European body holds bruises well, and the new neck I have flushes red, instantly. It will go purple, then green, maybe yellow, if I keep this up. How many colors can I press out of Allegra? I look over at the computer screen, and the washed-up dancer is a complete mess, clawing out his own hair, the great auburn mop, as the other hand massages away at his crotch. It isn’t enough, our distance, me in a dim Nigerian motel room, him in his palatial suite. I feel the middle-aged Florentine wanting to do what my new hand is doing, and to please him I press down on my throat, using both hands, all my fingers, until I see tiny stars, optical illusions.

“The former dancer’s head is thrown back and I see his bobbing Adam’s apple, his gritted teeth, I see his need for me, I taste his hatred of me, of himself. ”

He would snap my neck in an instant, wouldn’t he, and this new neck of mine is so prone to snapping, slender as it is? Out of his open mouth a noise spills, a strangled sound, and I know it well, have heard it from many others—the prime ministers, the anesthesiologist, the tobacco farmer. The former dancer’s head is thrown back and I see his bobbing Adam’s apple, his gritted teeth, I see his need for me, I taste his hatred of me, of himself.  I do not touch any other intimate part of Allegra’s borrowed body. Stick to the throat, the shoulders, the knees, if you must touch yourself, the dossier instructed, and I’m obedient; the money I’ve been given makes me obedient, three installments transferred from his account, a dummy account, to mine.

“Get on all fours,” his assistant says. Her voice is a whip, coiling out of my computer screen, flicking over the skin of my exposed belly, tauter than usual, no elastic droop to it. I adjust the monitor of my laptop, so that the webcam is pointing lower, showing the artificially plush carpet, the rust-colored stains covering every thick inch of it.

On my knees, I’m still Allegra, so I arch my back, our back. We need to taunt him, the washed-up dancer. We must. It is all we know how to do, stringing decent men along, emptying them of decency. She is a sort of chameleon too, so says the dossier. He fell for the loveliness of her façade, thought it to be credible. Like a sap, he took little Allegra under his wing, financed her silly climbing hobby. Why, he even let her through his backdoor, her index finger lubed all the way up to the base knuckle, and he never does that, had never done it before their disastrous entanglement. But now she has fucked him beyond all meaning, running off to Monaco with God knows who, scraping the cash out of his safe (the combination code: her date of birth); even took the engagement ring he planned on presenting to her today, mother of pearl, an excess of diamonds. Thieving cow, all this typed in Montserrat, thirteen-point, bold, underlined. The washed-up dancer calls out to me. He says something, a litany of somethings, and his assistant repeats it, flatly.

“You are nothing.”

I rest my forehead on the carpet, piled too high to truly be comfortable. It feels exactly like a prickly cloud, a nimbus full of cacti. A prickly cloud scrubbed too many times over with disinfectant, but beneath that clean smell is the carpet’s true odor. Urine, vomit, perspiration, the soiled leavings of unkempt guests, decades worth of grime bonded to the forest-green polyester and wool blend.

“You are a fucking cockroach, and you will always be one. Look at you, wasting away, back where I found you, in filth, and look at me. Look at me.”

She is just a mouthpiece, the assistant, but I wish she would be quiet, only for a moment. “Stop talking,” I want to tell her, but I can’t. I’ve already been paid. My new thin lips are sealed shut.

“It is strange, being twenty-four for the third time this month. I feel twice as old, pressed into the prickly carpeting.”

I look up at the monitor, at the screen angled downward to face me, and the Florentine dancer is groaning, grunting, losing that tidy composure. Has Allegra found the perfect orange? Is she on her way home, carrying it in one hand? Has she grown impatient and peeled it already? Is the juice dripping down her wrist, fibrous pulp between her bottom teeth? Today is her birthday, and she always eats an orange to commemorate the occasion, for as long as the former dancer has known her. It is strange, being twenty-four for the third time this month. I feel twice as old, pressed into the prickly carpeting.

“Whore. You are diseased, every part of you—that thing between your legs, especially. Rotten, through and through. I’m going to end you, do you hear me?”

I writhe on the soiled carpet and ask him not for forgiveness (his mercy, allegedly, is too good for the likes of me) but for a chance to correct my wrongs, our wrongs, mine and Allegra’s. Beat me, break my stupid teeth, with that graceful foot crush my ribs. Yes, yes, I am a whore and a thief too. I ruin the things I interact with, the opposite of a Midas touch. I say that he is a better person than I will ever be, much better, much much much much better. 

It is sudden, his orgasm, and violent, and takes us all by surprise: me, the washed-up dancer, the assistant who has dressed me down so colorfully. She squeaks, and I can tell that she has never seen him ejaculate this way, like a rutting boar. He comes all over his tight fist and on the dark wood of the desk, probably on his laptop’s keyboard, semen dribbling between the A, S, and D keys, maybe, or near the space bar.

While he cleans himself, off-screen, the assistant asks whether I do home visits. She wipes down the soiled desk quickly, her manicure shielded by yellow latex gloves. I pretend to think about it, yanking the waistband of my jeans over my ass, mine again, not Allegra’s. “For the right price” is what I say.

“The right price. Name it.”

“Double what he paid me today.”

She turns away from the screen, confers with her employer, moving her gloved hands a lot; I can hear him sobbing, out of sight, and I enjoy the musicality of his torment.

“Fine. Anything you want, he will give. How soon can you fly out here? He’ll get the tickets, of course.”

“Of course. And soon. A week or so.”

“We will be in touch. Ciao,” she says curtly, signing off, and I am thrust back into the false waiting room.

“Ciao,” I say to no one. I close out of the pretend office on my screen and open a new tab. In the search bar of this tab, I enter the name of a local osteria, a favorite among the more financially solvent in the area. Decadence beckons me, and this is a call I can answer; the retired Florentine dancer has bloated my savings account with only a fraction of his net worth. Should my savings grow a tongue, it would be begging for mercy, complaining of a tummyache. I offload some of that burden onto the osteria’s checkout page.

Tonight I will eat pasta, the homemade kind, not boxed. Shrimp scampi, a side salad. Cannoli, shells hard enough to cut the roof of my mouth, with orange zest folded into the cold cream filling.