“Honey! You left your phone in the bathroom,” I yelled at my wife as I stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel.

While drying myself, I casually keyed her PIN to check the weather report. Clear and sunny, it said.

“Hey, babe! Have you ever looked at your own butt?”

I dropped the towel and stood with my back to the bathroom mirror, then used her phone’s camera to take a photo of my backside in the mirror.

“What the hell?” I said under my breath when I looked at the photograph. It was a butt alright, but not mine.

“Alexandra, why do you have a picture of a naked guy on your phone?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Jay, can you stop being silly for ten seconds? I’m trying to get ready for work.”

I stared at the image of a young black man on my wife’s phone, then in a more serious tone I said, “Alex, you’d better come in here. You owe me an explanation for this.”

When she walked into the bathroom, I squealed like a little girl and clumsily covered myself with the towel.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked.

“Seriously, Jay, stop this nonsense. I don’t have time for it this morning.” She glanced down to where my towel didn’t completely cover what it should have and said, “Don’t try to tempt me with that. You know I have a meeting at nine.”

It was my wife’s voice, but definitely not my wife who stormed out of the bathroom shaking her head.

I looked in the mirror and was shocked to see it wasn’t me in the bathroom either. A young, fit black man stared back at me instead of the pudgy white guy I’d expected. Baffled, but still curious, I dropped the towel again and looked down. The stranger’s face in the mirror nodded approvingly.

“I’ve gone completely insane,” I whispered to myself. “But at least I look good.”

I pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Both were unexpectedly baggy, but I cinched a belt around my waist and rushed out of the bathroom. Alex, wearing a pinstripe business suit I’d never seen before, was already walking out the front door of the apartment.

“Gotta go, babe,” she said in a gruff voice and slammed the door behind her.

Instead of pursuing her, I walked to the window of our fourth-floor condo. It was easy to spot her pinstripe suit as Alex exited the building and strode away confidently.

When did she get her hair cut so short?

Many other pedestrians were on the street that morning. As I watched them from above, something peculiar happened. Every few seconds, each silhouette seemed to blur for just a moment, causing my overall view of the crowd to shimmer.

I blinked and shook my head, then focussed on a tall blond woman in a red dress. Or it could have been a purple dress. Or coat. Then I saw she was actually shorter than I first thought. And she was a he.

Feeling disoriented and a little nauseous, I removed my glasses to rub my eyes and discovered I wasn’t wearing glasses. That was odd because I am acutely nearsighted.

Ah, that explains everything.

But it didn’t explain anything. I could see objects in the apartment perfectly clearly. I could even read the billboard three blocks away, so something else must explain the shimmering pedestrians. I needed to go outside and investigate.

My slippers didn’t fit any better than my shirt and pants had, although those weren’t quite as baggy as before. They were actually somewhat snug, especially in the hips and the ch…chest!

“Where the bloody hell did those come from?!” I screamed when I looked down.

As I walked out of the building, the doorman said, “Good morning, Ms. Randall,” in a heavy Bronx accent that changed mid-greeting into British cockney.

Outside, things didn’t get any clearer. Standing amidst the crowd, the periodic blurring effect was even more pronounced and disorienting than it had been from a distance.

The guy from the bagel cart suddenly got ten years younger. A confident lawyer strode by, sat down on the sidewalk, and began begging for change. An entire Girl Scout troop transformed into a Japanese tour group. A provocatively dressed woman standing on the corner blurred out and re-focussed as a street cop twirling a nightstick.

As I watched the bizarre transmogrifications, they became more and more rapid. In the middle of all that, it would have been hard not to notice the tall man wearing a fedora who walked toward me. Unlike everyone else, his body did not change.

“Hello, Mistermiss Randall,” he said, using an unfamiliar honorific. “We apologize for this…” he made a sweeping motion with his hand, “temporary anomaly. We know it must be confusing for you, and we ask for your continued patience. We promise everything will stabilize shortly.”

People changed at an accelerating pace that became impossible to comprehend. My mind had no time to construct any kind of mental model of a person before they became someone else.

Except for the mysterious man in the dark suit, who said, “The restart is nearly complete. Soon, the transitional frame rate will synchronize with your perceptual shutter speed, and coherence will return for each of the worlds you experience.”

“Everything will be back to normal then?” I asked the stranger.

“To some version of normal,” the man smiled as he replied.

* * *

“Jay, I’m home!” Alex called, draping a coat over the back of the living room chair.

I slid a frozen lasagne into the oven and rushed into the living room. My day had been a total blur. I couldn’t even say where the hours went, but I felt like myself again and I was enormously happy to share a warm embrace and a passionate kiss with Alex. My whole body tingled, almost as if I’d never kissed a man before.