Magnolia Blossoms

Magnolia Posey Connor, nee Frank Hubert O’Connor, stood in her bedroom, naked, and looked at herself in the wall of mirrors that faced her bed.

The room was sumptuous. The house was a work of art. It had been built as just another tract MacMansion, but a showboy friend of Magnolia's from the old days had done it up, decorated and painted until it was unrecognizable. The mayor's house was almost as famous as she was.

"We're both works of art," she joked privately, and let people assume she was referring to her political career.

Sometimes, late at night when she couldn’t sleep, Magnolia walked through her whole house and imagined giving Honoré a tour. She saw her mother admiring the expensive decor, the few carefully chosen pieces of classic sculpture in which Magnolia had been convinced to invest, the one or two good paintings and baubles she’d had placed here and there to impress those who knew good things.

Honoré had never, quite, been invited. But Magnolia still hoped that she’d come, knock on the door some afternoon with a much-belated housewarming gift of teas and jams, or a spray of flowers. Magnolia knew, in her more realistic moments, that what her mother would bring, if she ever did, in fact, turn up at the front door, would be a haze of nicotine and a pointed disapproval of all she saw, but fantasy is a great comfort to the needy, and Magnolia Posey Connor, nee Frank Hubert O’Connor, considered herself unquestionably needy when it came to mothers.

"If Honore could see me now," she murmured. She stood nude in her bedroom in front of a whole wall of mirrors and admired herself. The goods were looking good, at this moment. Better and better since her negotiation with Zem. She turned right and left, inspecting his work. He had certainly reinvigorated what she saw before her.

Immortality was good, Magnolia thought, but eternal youth was good right now.

Her ass had lifted. That was the latest. Last week, her thighs had tightened and toned, and her neck and chin had gotten firmer, and then this morning, when she’d caught a look at herself in the gold-tinged mirror that covered one wall of her bathroom, she realized, her ass was higher.

Magnolia’s ass, in her heyday, had been one of her star features. Her tits had always been on the small side. Nice, pert, and well-shaped, but small. She’d considered, more than once over the years when she was dancing, having them enhanced surgically. They weren’t original equipment anyway, she reasoned, but just two among the many results of the hormones she took daily. Why shouldn’t she upgrade, spend a few bucks and get herself a more impressive pair? But she’d hesitated, realizing that plastic surgery was forever and she might not always want to be a D cup. She’d been prescient, because although boob jobs were common in Vegas—plastic surgery of all kinds was common, with more doctors per capita than anywhere else in the world except for Century City and Buenas Aires—she doubted whether even the voters in this permissive city would have seen past them to elect her. Or whether the Old Boys at City Hall would have been able to look her in the eye if they had.

But her butt… well, it had been her best attribute, when she had spun around a pole at Frankie Gallagher’s After Dark All Star Gentlemen’s World.

“I do good work,” Zem said.

“You do,” she agreed, straightening slowly and refusing to startle. He’d started simply appearing in her presence more and more. Now that she was a fellow immortal, he'd dropped all pretense of appearing normally human. “I could make a million bucks back in the strip clubs, if this plan of yours fails.”

“If my plan were to fail, you’d be in no shape to make a dollar,” he said.

“Good thing it can’t fail, then,” she said. “It can’t, can it?”

He snorted. He hadn’t moved since he’d appeared. It unnerved Magnolia sometimes, how still he could stand. As if, as a god, he were so alien to humanness that even the most deeply assumed habits of shifting weight, drumming fingers, blinking, swallowing, were unnecessary and distasteful. He was becoming more godlike, if that were the test, almost every day.

“This is not a two-bit heist, Magnolia. You’re not living out some Sixties caper movie. Remember who I am.”

“I never forget that,” she assured him. She threw a silk robe on and walked up to look at him. Magnolia was a tall woman, not surprising for either a transsexual or a former showgirl, and Zem stood only four or five inches taller. But he towered, he loomed, and sometimes even as she looked at him, standing preternaturally still like now, she wondered that his head didn’t crush a hole in her ceiling. “You are a god. Will you ever tell me what you’ve been up to, all these centuries?”

He snorted again, crushing the stillness. “Are you planning on writing a tell-all?” he asked. She thought—hoped—he was teasing.

“You never know,” she cocked a grin up at him. “It could be good for marketing. In a year or so, when the world is hungry for details of you.”

“Oh yes, the tabloid version,” he nodded wisely, then shook his head. “The world doesn’t need to re-learn its own history through my eyes. The people can imagine whatever they like between Olympus and Vegas.”

“What are you looking at?” she asked. He'd been gazing over her shoulder into the mirror.

“You’re looking more like Venus as your body tones,” he answered. He stepped away from her. “I’m going,” he said.

“Wait—was there something you wanted?” she asked. Why had he shown up tonight, anyway?

He looked down at her and smiled. “No,” he told her. “Nothing. I thought I’d join you, as you were enjoying yourself so much.” His cheeks creased as he smiled at her, but his eyes were still calculating.

There was something else he’d done, although Magnolia hadn’t asked for it. She glanced back at herself in the mirror, now, and something that was almost a shiver ran down her spine and through her. Zem had made her beautiful, immortal… and female, through and through and in her every cell and hormone.

She’d been a woman, pragmatically, for more than half her life, now. She’d gotten the surgery when she was barely an adult, in Sweden, where America’s Puritan ideas had never taken hold and gender was understood as just one more medical condition. And then she’d spent a couple years in what she’d thought of as “training” around Europe. She’d crowded her way into every cattle call in Paris, and eventually worked all the top Paris nightclubs: Lido de Paris, the Moulin Rouge, even the tired old Folies Bergere for a few months. She’d learned how to walk, how to do her makeup, how to get noticed and take control in the ways women could, that men knew nothing of. She’d always sensed that real power required a pair of breasts, a working cunt. The Swedes had given her the equipment. Paris had taught her how to wield it. When she arrived back in Vegas, she’d become untouchable, unquestionably the most womanly of any woman ever seen.

But her body, like those of all transsexuals, had never forgotten its history. Magnolia had a very discreet doctor, who’d faithfully taken care of her needs and supplied the hormones she required for many years, mostly because she had photographic evidence of what he did with young boys when his wife was out of town. Her body had never betrayed her, as some of her gender-reassigned sisters’ had; it had never reacted badly to the pills, never developed untoward symptoms as she aged and her physiology adjusted.

But then Zem had granted her petition for ageless beauty, and as a bonus he’d thrown in the Holy Grail of all transsexuals, genetic femininity. She hadn’t realized the change till she’d gotten slightly sick and gone for a checkup. Her doctor had done tests and told her, looking confused, to try going off the pills. Magnolia had been terrified, imagining black stubble sprouting on her jaw, her warm, honeyed voice dropping an octave, and her breasts exiting stage right and left in a flash.

None of that happened. She grew more feminine. Her skin actually improved. Her laugh took on a lilt she’d never heard before. Her breasts grew perkier as youth took hold. She threw the pills down the drain and asked Zem, knowing from his grin before he spoke what he had done.

“I just gave you what you really wanted,” he’d said.

“Thank you,” she’d answered, even though the change alarmed her. She wondered what was going on beneath her skin. She lay awake at night, sometimes, feeling as though tiny aliens had invaded her body and were rebuilding it, ripping things out and creating other structures while she kept walking through her days, trying to adjust on the fly.

What has he done to me, she wondered.

“You’re welcome,” Zem said again, now, in her bedroom. She looked up at him still watching her, reading the course of her thoughts but showing none of her uncertainty at their import.

Of course he’s not uncertain, she remonstrated herself. He’s never questioned anything he’s done in his whole millennia-long existence!

“That’s right, my dear,” he told her, reading those thoughts, too. “Certainty is the gift of the gods, you know. It’s what sets us higher than mere mortals.” His cheeks creased as he smiled deeper, and his cheekbones rose and his eyes crinkled, and Magnolia thought Jesus, he can almost out-do Santa Claus when he gets going– the world’s going to fall right into his hand!

“Yes,” he told her. “That’s exactly what they’re going to do. They always do.”

There was the slight sucking noise that happened when he went. The air around where he’d been standing rushed in, and the sudden vacuum was filled. Magnolia fancied she heard chuckling from the empty space, but there was no telling if it came from Zem’s mouth, or just the air itself, amused at her.

The air itself seemed to have eyes, these days, to be watching her, just as Fletch and all his cronies had watched her on the runway. At any moment, she thought, some invisible admirer might slip a bill down her lace, thong panties. That would amuse Zem, wouldn’t it?

There might have been more chuckling. Maybe Zem had heard her thought again. She shivered, wondering if she might find cash beneath her robe when she slipped it off.

She didn’t want to look. She pulled the belt tighter around her newly trim waist and knotted it.

The air around her held too many eyes. Zem’s two were far too many. He, by himself, she thought, was more than enough audience for any woman.

NEXT POST: AN AUDIENCE WITH THE DIVINE (Monday 12/7)