The door creaks open. All you can do is remain with your head propped up on the pillow, unable to pull forward or to slide your legs off the bed while your back is still throbbing from the overexertion. You see your sister standing there in the doorway, still in her pajamas, looking smug with her hands resting on her hips.
"How are you doing, 'Mom'?" your sister says, suffusing that word with all of the sarcasm available to her. "I heard you make a sound and I thought you might be in pain."
"Ari," you say from your immobile plank position. "You've got to listen to me. I'm not really Mom."
"But you are, Mom," Ari says with even more sarcasm dripping off her tongue, if that's even possible. "I mean, you look like her. You have her back problems... You have the womb that Michael and I came out of. Isn't that enough for me to call you mom?"
"What the hell are you...?" You taper off. Oh, that little...
Ari throws her head back and cackles. "Oh, brother," she says with a sad smile. "You were always really slow to pick up on a joke. I know it's you. Of course I do. You don't think I wasn't going to act on my very precisely worded wish from yesterday, did you? When, after all, you know your sister is a lover of all things Wiccan, pagan, and New Age. A neat little cover for my study of the occult, I know."
"Change me back right now," you say through gritted teeth, which doesn't sound so menacing with your mom's voice (she was never the stern matron type).
"Why should I?" Ari says. "You've always bossed me around, telling me what to do, how to do it, and getting angry if I don't things exactly your way at the speed you would like it. Mom, of course, has to live with that every day. It's her job to do all these things for her children. If she doesn't--if she, heaven forbid, gets angry and refuses to be a responsible parent--then there's always child welfare just a phone call away. I thought that you could benefit from a walk in Mom's shoes... or in her bra, you could say."
"You bitch!" you snarl. "I don't want to be Mom! Change me back into Michael!"
"Ah ah ah." Ari snaps her fingers and a piece of Duct tape materializes over your mouth.
"Mmph! Mmph! Mmph!" you sputter, before managing to rip it off and wipe your mouth of phlegm.
"Let that be a lesson of what you're in store for," Ari says menacingly. "I could do much worse than a piece of Duct tape, believe me.
"School's in another half-an-hour. I'd like to have breakfast first, and then you'll be driving me... You know? Like you always do."
Ari's out the door and back in the hallway before she has a chance to hear the string of profanity that flies from your mouth. Very delicately, you lift yourself out of bed, get onto your feet, and waddle towards the door, having half a mind to catch up with her and knock her upside the head, but you know A) how that would be construed, coming from your mom, and B) Mom is just not athletic enough nor strong enough to land a blow on Ari. You stop dead in your tracks a few steps from the door, leaning over and panting, looking down at your mom's bare feet, bulging with old woman's veins. You shake your head.
"Goddammit," you think. You shouldn't have said anything yesterday when Ari picked you up from the mall.
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