He woke up smiling and that made her nervous because Randal was not a happy man, not by anyone’s stretch of the imagination.

“What’s gotten into you?” Veronica asked.

“Sun’s out, look at it,” he said, pointing to their bedroom window covered with a smear of light so sharp it hurt her eyes.

His hair was messy, lumpy. A swirl of it curled over the bridge of his nose and Veronica reached to pluck it free but then stopped. Randal did not like to be touched before noon.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m wonderful. I’m not me anymore, but I feel, I don’t know, fantastic I guess.”

Her eyes danced across his face like confused and industrious ants. She read this in his return expression. “I’m not going to hurt you, if that’s what you think. Not ever again.”

She’d heard these words before. Veronica was a patient woman. She got that from her Dutch Grandmother. Veronica wished she could be cruel. There were plenty of role models on television and many in her romance novels.

“Let’s do something we’ve never done in the morning.”

Veronica’s period had just started and the last thing she or her body wanted was sex.

“Let’s cuddle,” he said.

She bent into him. She had expected his body to feel stiff and leaden, that it would be like awkward dancing sessions in middle school. But it was nothing like that at all.

“What happened?” she whispered. She felt frightened and her reason for the emotion was part of its cause. For the first time since they’d been together, maybe even in her life, Veronica felt happy. She knew what it was now. Past joy and pleasure had been nothing of the sort. This was it. This was the real thing.

“You’re different,” she whispered to him. She watched his whiskered face break into a smile.

“Yeah,” he said.

“But will it last? What about when we have to go out into the real world and deal with real world shit, will you revert?”

“You make it sound like I know what happened.”

“Well, what did happen?” She didn’t like her tone, that she was sounding naggy, desperate, and insistent.

“In the middle of the night, I guess.”

“What?”

“Someone switched souls with me.”

“It’s drugs, isn’t it? You’ve been taking something.”

His eyes were shiny, like tiny moist grapes. He concentrated as his pupils flicked north-south, east-west, and back again.

“I just remember waking up with this zapping sensation. I thought I was having a heart attack and then, of course, I thought I was dreaming that I was having a heart attack.”

She studied his lips and saw a new crease in the right corner.

“I was awake at that point,” he continued, “and I saw my old soul sweeping away.”

“Huh?”

“It was like a threadbare dress shirt floating away and then this new oil poured into me.”

“Randall, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve gone crazy.”

“Nah, look at me.”

“I am.”

“No, really look at me.”

When she did, her heart ran over a curb and hit a trash can, a tree, a building and kept running.

“What’ll we do?” he asked, reacting to her fear.

She smiled as the solution came to her.

“It’s easy,” she said. “We’ll just never leave this bed.”