Looking-Glass Ladyboy

But, now, I might have the perfect--not to mention free and painless--way to remove the accursed growth, once and for all time! If the mirror could change my hair from brown to blond, surely it could also remove this damnable, unsightly mole!

I fairly ran from the bathroom to my study. Standing before the looking-glass, I closed my eyes, and said, out loud, "I wonder what I'd look like without this mole on my face."

I felt nothing, and I feared that the accursed growth was still there, where it had always been, since the day of my birth, an outrage and an offense worse than the excrescences with which Joseph Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man, was afflicted--worse, at least, in my own estimation, for the mole afflicted me.

Dreading the sight of the mole's not only insulting, but also mocking, me with its presence, I opened my eyes, squinting into the mirror within the ornate frame. In the glass inside the bronze ivy which bordered the glass, I saw--and my heart leaped!--the accursed growth of skin was gone as completely as if it had never been!

The change was exhilarating. It was marvelous. It was also more than merely frightening; it was terrifying. In the twinkling of an eye, just because I had wondered how I might look as a blond and without the accursed mole I'd borne from my birth, I was changed.

Irreversibly?

Permanently?

God, I hoped not, for, although I could live with the blond hair and welcomed the loss of the mole, what if I had wished for something else, in a moment of mere idle curiosity, without considering the ramifications of the thought? What if, in such a moment, I had imagined something that I didn't want to retain forever, such as myself, perhaps, as a three-headed monster, a dwarf, a giant, a disembodied penis with wings, or, most ludicrous of all, a woman, for God's sake? Would I be stuck, as it were, in such an incarnation to my dying day? Would I be buried as such?

There was a way to know, I thought, and I said, aloud, "I wonder what I'd look like with brown hair.