essential

It had allofasudden gotten all summery, the night getting shorter, the stars blurred by the humidity in the air, drifting up off the tarpaper and the asphalt. We were sitting around the kitchen table at her apartment, drinking some local beer and staring at everything but each other through sixty watts of yellow electric light. It must have been around two, because I could hear the train creeping along beside the river, here to Saint Louis, coming in through the windowscreen above the television. I was making Rorschach shapes from the stains on the floor and she was watching the flightpath of a moth, tracing a jangled flittery line across the perimeter of the room. The refridgerator hummed and the Kamikaze Brothers, one floor down and to the left, were shooting cockroaches into clumped brown paste along the baseboards of the living room with pellet guns they stole the night that truck overturned down the street, by the empty Hy-Vee. The fan had broken at some point and had its head taped back onto its body, quietly buzzing and feebly pushing air around. She kept putting the ends of her hair into her mouth. I was wondering how much longer it would be before Star Trek was on. Finally, she said "I guess you know what time it is." I had no idea what time it was, and looked up at her broken cat-clock out of habit, and guessed at two-fifteen. "No," she said, "it's time you and I switched skins."
She went over to the drawers just beneath the toaster oven and got out a foot-long carving knife, which she set on the table before getting herself another beer from the case on the floor. "I guess I should start, then, if you don't know how to do it. You wanna get a couple towels out of the laundry basket?"
I was getting nervous, but for some reason I can't remember now I wanted to wait this out, see where it went before I did anything. I got the towels, took a leak, and came back to the kitchen table to find her out of her clothes, all heaped on the couch, trying to figure out where on her body to start cutting. "It's best to do it in one cut, otherwise you get seperate pieces and something gets lost and its just a mess."
"Well now, wait a minute. How is it I'm gonna be able to, like, fit in your skin? I mean, I'm a big fat load and you could probably squeeze yourself in the icebox if you wanted. I mean, there's this size thing. Y'know?"
"Well yeah but skin's super-flexible, I could so easily fit over you but you, hmm. No, I think it'll work out fine. I mean, it's not forever or anything. Bring the towels over here."
"Isn't it time for Star Trek, though?"
"We can do this and watch Star Trek at the same time."
"You sure?"
"Hell yes I'm sure. Now hop to, get me another beer and put those towels down there on the floor."
Which is exactly what I did.