The Jar

I remember waking up in the dark basement, and I had trouble controlling my body. Everything about it felt wrong, like even down to my arms and legs being the wrong length (which, of course, they were -- I just didn’t know it yet). As my eyes began to adjust, I stumbled over to a shelf with some jars; at least one had a brain inside.

As I reached out a voice spoke. “I’d be careful with that,” The voice said, “That’s your body’s brain in that jar.”

“What?” I asked without being able to quite tell where the voice was coming from.

The voice laughed, “If anything happens to it, well...it could break the chain and make it very difficult to restore the right brains to the right bodies.”

It was in that moment the realization hit me. It was why everything felt to strange. I was inside the wrong body; I was in a woman’s body. My arms flailed in a panic, knocking the jar off the shelf. It shattered on the floor as I heard the voice laugh again.