Long Distance Great Shift 3: USA to France

“Oh god, is that really what I used to sound like?” Frank thought with annoyance as a crowd of American tourists interrupted his walk to work. It had been almost a year since the Great Shift, and as the world was slowly starting to open back up to tourism he thought he would enjoy seeing some of his fellow Americans on the streets of Marseille. As he looked out at the loud, poorly dressed pack of English speakers, however, the feeling that came to mind was less relief and more irritation than he had expected. 

Funnily enough, he had been even more like them than he had remembered just a year ago: Big, loud, and absolutely convinced that he lived in the best country on earth despite never having left the US. Why would he? He had football, family, and his construction job right where he was. That is, until the Great Shift hit. Suddenly, while most of his family swapped with other residents of his Philadelphia suburb, the 6’2, 260lb man found himself in the body of a petite french woman half his size, overlooking the water from a chic, feminine Marseilles apartment. Seeing as most Great Shift victims had swapped with people in a close radius to themselves, borders worldwide were closed shortly after the shift as governments took on the task of verifying new identities and restarting their economies. The small percentage of international shifts like Frank were left in disarray, told to wait for updates that were slow to come, if they came at all. Seeing as the woman he’d shifted into hadn’t been contacted yet, Frank was advised to stay in her apartment for the time being. After a few weeks, the French government had managed to provide Frank with a small stipend for food, housing, and a french tutor, but maintained dead silence since then.

Frank quickly realized that his loud, brash personality didn’t exactly translate well into his limited french skills, forcing him to take on a more mindful, demure attitude to most of his interactions. More embarrassingly, with clothing stores shut down post-shift, Frank was forced to take advantage of the only wardrobe he had access to: That of the woman he had shifted into. He had found out on day one that her closet was full of expensive dresses, crop tops, and heels. Conspicuously absent, however, was even a single pair of sweatpants or loose t-shirts, his usual outfit of choice. Even laying around the house, Frank was quickly getting used to dressing his petite new body in name-brand, ultra feminine outfits. At the start, he had waited desperately for any news he could understand about when he’d be able to return home, but as the weeks turned into months with no signs of his situation changing, he was beginning to realize that the temporary solution was looking more and more long-term by the day. In the meantime, the thought of getting back to his old body was slowly being pushed further and further to the back of his mind. Although the borders were still closed, Marseille was slowly returning to its old self as people adjusted to their new bodies, and as Frank slowly integrated into his neighborhood, he was starting to act and be treated as the young, attractive woman he now presented as.

Now, almost a year into his new life, Frank knew he was never going back to America. The borders had opened up weeks ago and yet he was still finding excuses to stay in France. The truth was, once he had slowed down and accepted his new body, he was starting to love it - His french was getting better by the day and there was something intoxicating about his new lifestyle as the woman he now was. Besides, since his stipend had run out he had been working a job to pay for his essentials and had moved in with a few of the other girls from the office, although they knew him as Élise instead of Frank. He’d had more fun in the past few months going out to bars and gossiping about who in the office they’d hooked up with recently than he’d ever had back in America.