"Hmm. There is just a bit of inflammation, but it's not so bad."

Grace did her best to keep her tongue still and hold in her drool while Doctor—was she actually a doctor? the question had never occurred to her—Szynski poked around in her mouth with two gloved fingers and shone a light at the back of her throat. She hated the texture of nitrile, all powdery and goose-bumped. The doctor moved her fingers under Grace's tongue, pushed it up to the roof of her mouth, and inspected its underside.

"I can give you some antibiotics for that, if you want. New stuff."

Grace gave a little negatory grunt, and shook her head. The last time the doc had given her antibiotics, she broke out all over in rashes and was itchy for days. It was awful.

"Sorry, I'll hold the questions. I'm almost done here." She shone the light at Grace's molars, and scrunched her nose. "God, you've gotta get to a dentist soon... You sure you don't want the antibiotics? I'm trying to get data on the interaction with the SSRIs, actually—pays an extra hundred for the completed survey."

She withdrew her fingers from Grace's mouth, peeled off the gloves, and wheeled across the exam room to dig through her drawers.

"Look," said Grace, "I dunno, you remember last time..."

"These are totally different!" The doc produced a small vial and a few packets of syringes and needles. Grace bristled—it was already enough of a struggle to get through her blood draws—but Dr. Szynski waved a hand and blew a curt raspberry. "Maybe you could convince your girl to help you out? Doesn't she do estrogen injections?"

"Yeah, but—"

"Perfect! These are exactly the same—IM in the leg—" she looked up and noticed Grace's apprehension—"how about an extra fifty today, too? For the phobia?"

Grace took a sharp breath in. It wasn't nearly enough, but it was better than nothing, right? Jeanne would be glad about it, at least. "Fine."

The doctor gave her a look that was becoming familiar. Behind the tangle of dirty-blonde hair and oversized circular glasses, her hazel eyes softened, blinking rapidly; her thin mouth drew thinner as she tucked in her lips. Grace read it as a sort of pity—decidedly not solidarity—a light concern, though not concern enough to act beyond her own self-interest. Her face shifted again, and she busied herself preparing the paperwork, before Grace could change her mind.

"So," she said, "that's the antibiotics and the new formulation of the SSRI... I'm sure you know the drill by now: stop taking everything if you notice any heartbeat irregularities, shortness of breath, yada yada... Don't forget to log your administration times—oh, and the antibiotic is a weekly shot, so you'll have to be on both of these for at least a month, for better data."

What? No. No no. "I'm sorry?" Grace asked.

"Now, I'm not entirely sure what the side effects will look like," the doc continued, not paying any mind to Grace's question or her increasingly rapid breathing. "These two are pretty different. Just cross-reference the lists first, pay attention to yourself—you're a smart cookie, you'll be fine."

Dr. Szynski crammed a folder and a paper bag of medicines into Grace's hands, and escorted her out the door of the exam room. "Holly will get you scheduled for next time. I've gotta dash, I'll see you next week!" And she was gone, down the hallway of the clinic.

Grace felt a pinch in her thigh, followed by a subtle cooling sensation flowing through her limbs.

"Injectable antibiotics, huh? How much'd she promise you for this?"

"Three hundred for both. She said she wants to see the interaction."

"That's all? You gotta start asking for more, babe, this is way more work than just the pills." The pinch returned, slightly duller, and then it was over. "There we go. That wasn't so bad, right?"

Grace opened her eyes and watched Jeanne smack a band-aid over her wound. She exhaled and released her grip on the sheets, rubbing her palms to ease out the fingernail indentations.

"You know I'm no good at that sort of thing," she said. "I only got that extra fifty today because she felt bad about my fear of needles."

"So?" asked Jeanne. "A win is a win. You can use that!" She busied herself with preparing her own injection, plunging a fresh needle into a vial of liquid hormone. Her short auburn hair fell around her face in half-twisted twine strands; every so often, she shook her whole head to scatter them from her vision.

"Maybe I should start going with you," she continued. "Y'know, to help squeeze more money outta her. Even with the extra, that's only, what, seventy? eighty? to put toward surgery for the month?"

"What, you mean like doing your own trials?"

Jeanne laughed as, in one continuous motion, she flipped the vial upside down, drew from it, and withdrew the needle.

"I'm serious! You only get so many hours, it might be nice to have another—"

"Come on, Gracie, I've got my job to think about! I mean, what if those pills made me totally forget where I am, or who I am? It's better for you to take that risk, y'know?"

Of course. Grace shrank. "I... guess so, yeah." She watched her girlfriend swap out the needle, wipe her leg with a disinfecting pad, and jab the syringe through the fat of her thigh with practiced care. Grace flinched as it went in, though Jeanne didn't.

"Look, just promise me you'll at least bring it up next time you go in. We've been so tight on groceries lately, and you know how the electric bill always skyrockets this time of year... Just promise, okay?"

"Yeah, okay," said Grace, sheepish. "I promise."

"Good girl," said Jeanne, and Grace forgot about the argument for a moment. She reached over and ruffled Grace's hair, scratching the area where her head met her neck and sending a warm bubbling down her spine. She leant into the touch, desperate for it to continue forever; desperate to disappear into the contact and forget everything else.

The feeling persisted throughout Grace's next day, even as she awoke to an empty bed. Her body seemed to her somewhat unreal—the longer she tried to substantiate herself, the less certain she was that she was taking up any space at all. Without Jeanne's hand at the back of her head, she was aimless, ungrounded.

She ignored it as best she could, swallowed her trial pill for the day, tossed an estrogen tablet under her tongue, logged her State of Mind (normal; slight fatigue) on the chart Dr. Szynski had supplied, and got on with her day.

Their place was puny, a single-floor ranch home in the suburbs of Phoenix that Jeanne rented from her aunt at a discount. Even at its modest size—two bedrooms (one of which they used for storage), a single bathroom, and an open-kitchen-slash-living-room area that would've been more at home in a hotel suite—the effort necessary to keep it clean had been paralyzing. Dust accumulated everywhere, at a rate far beyond Grace's capacity to scatter it; stains materialized in the furniture, stubborn against her efforts to rinse them out; there was a replenishing supply of soap scum in the bathroom, a tiny black speck on the kitchen ceiling that she prayed wasn't mold, a rotating crop of rotting vegetables in the fridge, crumbs embedded in the couch—an endless list of imperfections and blights that lit Grace's anxious mind aflame. She worked such a cushy office job—why couldn't she muster the energy to keep up with her chores? Then, when she was fired (corporate downsizing, they had said), a different anxiety took hold: the fear that she was being a burden. Jeanne's contract job at the garage down the street paid just enough to cover rent—but weeks of unemployment turned to months, then half a year. She threw herself into the job search, with little to show for it. Dejected, she turned instead to housewifehood, and found it no easier. Even with forty hours of her week freed, her to-do list never seemed to shrink.

She had been overjoyed when she found Dr. Szynski's clinic; finally, a way she could contribute financially again! All she had to do was offer up her body. It didn't bring in a ton of money, but it was enough to buoy their grocery budget, with a little extra each month for their shared bottom surgery fund. (Grace let Jeanne handle the finances, for the most part. She couldn't remember the last time she had even looked at her bank account.) So far, it hadn't been so bad. The incident with the previous antibiotics was the only hiccup—every other side effect had been manageable.

Today, though, as she inspected her throat in the mirror to see if the antibiotics were doing their job, she found her own eyes—her once-vibrant green irises had dulled, greyed. In the periphery, her hair undulated and her cheeks sloughed from her skull, until observed directly, and then nothing was wrong at all.

Grace noted the change on the chart, despite neither list mentioning hallucinations or changing eyes as potential side effects. She didn't feel especially bad, so she resolved to stick it out and see what the next few days brought. If anything were to truly go wrong, Jeanne would notice; Jeanne would help.

Grace fought to keep her eyes open, even as tears drowned them. The doc's light flitted over to the left one, leaving a purple imprint swallowing up her vision.

"Well," said Dr. Szynski, "there's definitely something going on. You said there's been some hallucinations, too?"

Grace nodded—Dr. Szynski interrupted it, grabbing her chin to hold it in place while she finished inspecting her eyes, her fingernails poking into Grace's cheeks. Then the light clicked off, and she blinked her tears out, watching the splotches in her vision warble and mutate.

"I don't have any formulation updates this week, so you're gonna have to hold tight. Open up?"

Grace obliged, accepting the pair of purple-gloved fingers wedging between her lips.

"Infection's looking much better, at least... It's probably something in the SSRI that's still causing problems..."

She trailed off, busy checking for any further complications in Grace's mouth. She spread her fingers apart, stretching the edges of Grace's lips until they nearly cracked. Saliva pooled under her tongue, rising in a tide until a drop escaped, dribbling down her chin and onto her shirt. She wasn't sure, but Grace was almost certain she saw Dr. Szynski crack a smile at that.

"Alright, your favorite part now," she said, drawing her fingers out of Grace's mouth and swapping out her gloves. "Arm preference?" Grace indicated to her left and the doc tied it off above the elbow with that rubber stuff that made her arm hair stand on end.

"I, um," Grace mumbled, while the doctor prepared the blood capsules, felt for a vein, and swabbed down her arm, "I wanted to ask you if..." Why was this so hard? It shouldn't be next to impossible to collect her thoughts. She'd promised. She worked to shove her way through the dense cloud behind her eyes. "I was just wondering—"

"You want a countdown this time or something?"

"Well, no, I—" But she was interrupted by the needle piercing the crook of her elbow. She squealed and squeezed her eyes closed.

"You're alright, you're alright," the doc was saying, "just deep breath in... and out, that's it."

She could feel the blood leaving her arm, getting suctioned out into those plastic capsules, hot and dark and viscous.

"Little bit more," said the doc, and squeezed Grace's wrist in reassurance. Then she felt the needle sliding out and a cotton pad over the wound and knew it was safe to look again.

Determined to overcome her phobia, Grace forced her eyes open while Jeanne performed her next antibiotic injection. As the plunger depressed and she watched the liquid draining into her skin, she felt herself drawing out from her body, like a ragdoll's pullstring that would never snap back into place.

The next morning, she watched herself, as if from a great distance, while she danced from task to task on autopilot. She unloaded the dishwasher, wiped down countertops, swept and mopped the kitchen, folded and put away laundry, made herself lunch—she had scarcely blinked and her day was half over. Seemingly overnight, she had found a cure for the paralysis that had surrounded her for so long.

It was Jeanne's off week, meaning she spent the majority of the day sleeping, and the rest of the day wishing she was sleeping. After lunch, Grace trod around the house on tiptoe, handling the remaining quiet tasks—taking out trash, dusting, rotating the couch cushions—and was surveying the fridge for the least questionable of their vegetables when Jeanne drifted out of the bedroom.

"Mornin'," she said, through a yawn. "What's for dinner?"

"Just some stir fry."

"Gotcha." Jeanne glanced in the fridge and snagged a stray soda. "I'm going back in tomorrow. Couple'a big jobs rolled in today, and I figured we could use the cash. How was your appointment, by the way? You mention a raise in compensation?"

Grace sucked air through her teeth. "I... didn't get around to it, no..."

"C'mon, Grace," said Jeanne, a stern edge creeping into her voice, "I thought we agreed you would mention it this week."

"I know, I know—"

"You promised. It's kinda the least you could do."

Grace blinked a half-dozen times, in surprise. "What does that—what?"

"I know it's been tough for you, without your job, but..." Jeanne trailed off, looking away. "I just—it's like you said, I only get so many hours, but you don't get any hours! I think you could be doing a little more to help us get by, is all."

"Well, I—why didn't you mention this months ago?"

"I dunno, I thought maybe having a side gig would help you! I know the job search can be brutal, but honestly, have you even been trying?"

"I... I'm sorry," Grace said, in a voice the size of the spot on the ceiling. She tilted her head back and found it. She really should take care of that. "I just thought we were doing okay..."

Jeanne sighed. "We'll be fine, I guess," she said, heading for the couch. And though she trailed off without completing the thought, she didn't say another word.

Grace blinked away the tears that were forming and turned her attention to the pile of peeled carrots on her cutting board. The knife, dulled from months of neglect, struggled to slice through the thicker end of the first one—it lodged itself halfway through, even as Grace put as much of her weight behind her right arm as she could. With an enormous effort, the blade slipped through the carrot, nicking her thumb in the process. The pain didn't register for a moment, her nerves lagging behind as she watched the blood pulse out in time with her heartbeat.

The remainder of the week passed by in unfocused vignettes; snapshots of domesticity, captured haphazardly in Grace's memory. By the end of each day, the house was tidied and dinner was prepared, with little conscious input from her. (The ceiling spot turned out, thankfully, to be nothing more than a smushed mosquito; she scraped it off with a butter knife and watched it tumble, spiraling, to the floor.) She was powerless to slow the process, swallowing the dregs of her mind even as they calcified within her.

Jeanne didn't have much to say, after their little spat—if she noticed the shift in Grace's demeanor, she didn't mention it. She commented, occasionally, on the cleanliness of the house, but the extra days of work wore her down to weariness. Each evening, she inhaled her food and collapsed onto the bed without another word exchanged between them. In the mornings, she was up before Grace, and would watch her sleep; watch her breath, evenly doled out, lifting and lowering her wiry shoulders; watch her face, perfectly still and serene, dreamless; watch her tangle of rust-tinged hair, drifting in gusts from the vent overhead.

"Well?"

Dr. Szynski clicked off the pen light and Grace blinked a few times.

"You said she's been like this all day?"

"Longer than that—she's been getting worse since her last shot." Jeanne paced around the exam room. "Everything I say goes right through her, unless I ask her for something, then she's at it like a fuckin' dog!"

"Hm."

Grace's head listed from side to side as the conversation hovered around her, unabsorbed.

"So, can you do anything about it?"

"Well," said the doctor, beginning to rummage through her drawers, "the new SSRI formulation is ready, and the month is half over. Just keep collecting data, see if—"

"I want more."

"I beg your pardon?"

"More money. Look at her! If you're gonna make me keep—chemically lobotomizing her, I need more cash. I want six hundred."

Dr. Szynski scoffed. "This is not a flea market. You don't get to haggle over our agreement."

"Oh, please. We haven't signed shit. Your little secretary out there know you've been doing these under the table?"

"She is not my secretary, she—" the doctor paused, removed her glasses, and pinched the bridge of her nose—"I am not entertaining this."

"And what about the medical board?" Jeanne asked, stepping toward the doctor. "They know about your backdoor operation here?"

"Hah! You think they'd do anything for you?" the doctor retorted. "They'd just take my license, and then who'll pay for your groceries?"

"I could find another quack to rent her out to. It's a big city. Five hundred or I walk out of here and you don't get any of your precious data."

Dr. Szynski's nose twitched, and she huffed air out through her mouth, tossing her bangs upward. "Four-fifty. You trannies are going to run me into the ground, I swear."

The updated formulation didn't change much—Grace swam through the following days with the same disaffected look in her eyes, an emptiness that could only be satisfied by endless chores. She moved near-silently around the house, traceable only by the hum of the vacuum or the incessant scratch of thorough scrubbing, and responded to any given request in monosyllabic sentences with a voice that hovered on a single pitch.

Jeanne tried to convince her to stop taking the SSRIs, but her pleading was met by an unchanging face. She hid the bottle one morning, and Grace stood statuesque by the bed, until Jeanne retrieved the pills and fed her one.

For the first few days after the appointment, Jeanne followed her around, watching the mechanical way she moved, entrenched in whichever task was at hand—quite literally unshakeable; Jeanne tried—but eventually she had to go back to work.

Now, after a long day of grunt work at the garage, Jeanne was huddled on the couch, sobbing, when Grace pattered over and handed her a bowl of ravioli in vodka sauce. She wiped away her tears, took it, and began easing bites into her mouth, stealing occasional glances at Grace doing the same.

They sat there in silence, eating. Jeanne stopped crying, and took a long look at her girlfriend. She was wearing something different than usual: Ever since being fired, Grace dressed in a way that Jeanne referred to as "utilitarian"—sweatpants, t-shirts, shorts, tank-tops—but today, she donned an old work outfit, a modest black dress with a white collar and sleeves, buttons down the middle, and a black belt at the waist.

With a start, the ravioli came roaring back up Jeanne's esophagus; her cheeks reddened; her pupils dilated; and she vomited on the carpet.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I can clean it up—I'm—"

Without so much as an acknowledgement of Jeanne's sputtering, Grace rose from the couch, placed her bowl on the coffee table, and floated into the kitchen—with the same vacancy she performed any other task—to retrieve the carpet cleaner and paper towels.

"Grace!"

She paid her girlfriend no mind. Jeanne waded through the thick chemical smell released by the cleaner and seized Grace by the shoulders.

"You don't have to—Grace!"

The smaller woman's focus was entirely set on removing Jeanne's dinner from the floor before it stained. She wrested out of Jeanne's grip, but was quickly pinned—panting, heaving, sweat everywhere—Jeanne put Grace in a submission hold, an arm around her neck and another holding her arms back, clinching tighter until she dropped the spray bottle.

"Grace, please..."

Jeanne was crying again; Grace wasn't even wincing. Another shuffle—Jeanne had her by the throat, fingers splayed against her windpipe, twitching, waiting to tighten—but Grace's fight had died. It was like Jeanne had found her off switch.

Grace, blinking blearily, felt something akin to a head rush. Her consciousness rocketed back inside her head for a moment, reacting to the warmth of Jeanne's touch, even as it threatened violence.

Then Jeanne moved her hand away, and the moment was over. The two women's breathing filled the room with an arid whine. As Jeanne released a long, slow exhale, Grace found her strength and wriggled out from underneath her. She lunged for the bottle of carpet cleaner, but Jeanne snagged her by the ankle. She was much less gentle about it this time, and was gripping Grace's hips so tightly that she actually reacted: a weak squawk and a kick to Jeanne's stomach.

The larger woman paid this no mind, scooping Grace into a fireman's carry with all the poise of a claw machine game and depositing her in the bedroom.

"Alright," said Jeanne, "since there's only one way to get through to you." She snapped her fingers. "Fuck me. Now."

Grace blinked rapidly as she processed the command.

"C'mon, you're my brainless housewife, right? Listen to me!"

In the same robotic way with which she did everything else, Grace began unbuttoning her dress.

"That's it, yeah. On the bed. I wanna ride you."

Grace was trembling. Jeanne either didn't notice, or didn't care—she busied herself with undressing, tearing off her tank and tied-off coveralls. Grace lay waiting, in near rigor mortis with the exception of her penis. It sat limp and shrunken against her thighs, even as Jeanne's nude form situated on top of her.

"C'mon, get it up! What are you waiting for? I thought you were so good at taking orders, huh?" Jeanne grabbed Grace's wrist and positioned her hand over her breast. "This any better?" It wasn't.

Jeanne groaned, leaned over to the bedside table, and dug through the drawer—fumbling empty and nearly-empty pill bottles—until she found what she was looking for: a half-empty bottle of white, ovular capsules—progesterone. She twisted off the cap; deposited three pills into her palm; gripped Grace's jaw in the other, forcing it open; and rolled them inside.

While certainly not the drug's intended purpose, Grace had a specific reaction to it—with some coaxing, her cock snapped to attention, stiff as the rest of her. Jeanne slathered it in lube, briefly inserted a couple digits into her own hole, and lowered herself onto it.

The sex didn't last very long at all. Grace lay motionless except for the half-second of airtime every time Jeanne bounced upward. At first, her girlfriend's wails of pleasure filled the room; eventually, her enthusiasm diminished and it was only the bed, creaking and whimpering under the repeated pressure.

When it was over—after Grace's unwilling womanhood deposited itself inside Jeanne—the two women lay in silence until Grace, as if piloted by remote control, strode out of the room and finished cleaning up Jeanne's vomit.

The x-ray clattered to life—Dr. Szynski said it was more than thirty years old, and it showed—its slab of a screen whirred as the doctor positioned it right at Grace's head. Both Jeanne and the doctor wore heavy maroon vests over their clothes, while Grace sat on the table in nothing but a light blue gown, open at the back. A high-pitched whine permeated the room while the machine worked, making Jeanne grimace.

"If you look here," said Dr. Szynski, pointing with her pen at a region of Grace's brain that radiated with white, "that's where the SSRI has been targeting—but you can see, it's a much bigger area than it should be, almost like it's corroding..."

Jeanne craned her head to see the screen, brows knit in confusion. The doctor kept going, talking about under-active neurotransmitters and the Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex and—briefly—about bacterial infections.

"Hang on," said Jeanne, interrupting her rambling about how she wished she had access to an MRI machine, "so is there—can any of this be reversed? I mean, will she ever go back to normal?"

"Oh, goodness, almost certainly not."

"Fantastic. What're we even here for, then? Grace—" she snapped her fingers, and her girlfriend's head bobbed up from behind the x-ray machine—"c'mon, get dressed."

Grace shuffled herself off the exam table and began shouldering off the gown.

"Well, hold on girls, let's not be hasty—"

"Sorry, doc," said Jeanne, placing a hand at the small of Grace's back, "but I think I've had enough of this place for a lifetime."

"Ah, c'mon, what's a few more hours? I promise I can make it worth your while." The doctor flashed a grin, one that made Jeanne shudder. Even still, her eyebrows arched, and Dr. Szynski pounced on the opportunity. "I'd like to run some more tests," she said, "keep her on for a long-term study—it'd pay very handsomely."

The hand on her back flooded Grace's mind with fresh awareness—the smell of linoleum; the buzzing fluorescent lights; the contact, skin-on-skin touch, sudden awareness of her nudity; horrible, overwhelming sensation; chemical cleaner so pungent she could taste it; the AC up so high it was raising goose bumps, turning her skin to sandpaper—and then Jeanne lifted her hand away and it was all gone, just as quickly as it had arrived.

Jeanne looked between the doctor and her patient, lips pursed. "Fine," she said. "Fine. Just—be careful with her."

Another grin. "Of course," said the doctor. "She'll be very comfortable."