TransformationStation

Original image taken from @preppymuscleboys

“Gift card?” Mason suggested, pushing through the door beneath a hanging rubber bat and a faded plastic skeleton.

Connor, blond, lean, and smug beneath the little mustache he’d grown mostly to annoy his dad, rolled his eyes. “For my father? He’d use it to buy socks and then tell me I ruined the surprise.”

Mason laughed. He was dark-haired, sharp-jawed, with a few days of stubble and the relaxed confidence of someone whose dad had never met a grill he didn’t try to dominate. “Then get him something stupid. Something he’ll actually wear once and pretend to hate.”

They found the aprons in a back corner beneath a sign that read DAD CLASSICS — HALF OFF. One was bright red and said KING OF THE GRILL in peeling yellow letters. The other was denim-blue with fake grease stains printed across the front and ASK ME ABOUT MY MARINADE stitched over the chest.

Connor held the red one against himself and made his voice deeper. “Boys, the secret is propane and emotional distance.”

Mason snorted and grabbed the blue apron. “No, no, you need to stand wider. Dads always stand like they’re guarding a cooler.”

There were changing rooms beside the novelty costumes. Neither of them knew why grill aprons needed changing rooms, but that made it funnier.

“Hey!” Connor said. “Take off your shirt and go try it on for the full effect. We can snap a couple selfies and use them as a prank later.”

“Gotcha, man! Good idea.”

They ducked behind the curtains, still joking through the thin partition as they tied the aprons around themselves.

The two young men stepped out to admire their aprons and take a sarcastic selfie.

After returning to their dressing rooms Connor fumbled for the knot on the back of the apron but before he could undo it he felt the knot tighten at his waist. Then his stomach lurched.

At first he thought the room had tilted. His knees cracked, his shoulders thickened, and a heavy warmth spread across his chest. Pale hair burst beneath the apron straps, crawling over his sternum and shoulders in dense, uneven patches. His blond hair thinned, then retreated, pulling back from his forehead until only a sparse ring remained around a mostly bald crown. His neat little mustache swelled outward, darkening, bristling, curling at the ends into a proud, ridiculous handlebar that dominated his face.

“Uh,” Connor said, but his voice came out deeper. Rougher. Familiar. “Are you feeling ok over there, Mason?!”

On the other side of the partition, Mason made a startled choking sound. “Not really, dude!”

His own body had softened almost instantly. His flat stomach pushed forward into a round, heavy belly that pressed against the apron. His arms grew thicker but less defined, covered in dark hair. His stubble lengthened down his cheeks and jaw, spreading into a thick beard that tumbled over his mouth until his lips nearly vanished behind it. His dark hair receded at the temples but stayed thick enough to look neglected rather than stylish. When he stumbled out of the changing room, he looked like a man who had spent twenty years saying he was “getting back to the gym soon.”

Connor stepped out at the same time, one hand on his bald head, the other gripping the edge of his huge mustache.

For a moment, they stared at each other.

“Mason?” Connor whispered.

“Connor?” Mason’s voice rumbled through the beard, muffled and older. “Why do you look like your dad?! You’re bald dude! You even have his mustache!”

“What about you, bro! Did you gain 100 lbs in there? And that beard!! You look just like your dad!”

They remembered everything. The shop. Father’s Day. The joke. Their real faces. Their real ages. The horrifying fact that Connor now looked exactly like his father, right down to the slightly squinting expression he wore whenever he tried not to admit he was confused. Mason looked like his own dad after Thanksgiving dinner: soft, bearded, hairy, comfortable in a way that felt impossible to fight.

“We have to take the apron’s off!” Mason said.

But neither of them moved.

Connor looked down at the red apron stretched across his broader, hairier torso. His hand settled on his belly, then rose to smooth the curled end of his handlebar mustache. The panic in his eyes weakened, replaced by irritation. Not fear. Just the vague annoyance of a man who had forgotten what errand he was running.

“Why were we here again?” he asked.

Mason frowned beneath the beard. “Grill stuff, I think.”

“Right.” Connor nodded slowly. “Need charcoal.”

“Already got charcoal.”

“Then steaks?”

Mason considered this, his memories sliding away like receipts tossed into a junk drawer. College apartments, group chats, late-night burgers, the urgent knowledge that he had once been someone else—all of it blurred and thinned until it seemed less like memory than a strange dream he had no reason to mention.

He patted his apron. “Could use a new spatula.”

Connor grunted approvingly. “Good spatula’s important. Better put our clothes back on and buy these new aprons. They are hilarious!”

A bored clerk watched the two middle-aged men leave the dressing rooms and approach his counter - still wearing the novelty aprons.

One was mostly bald with a grand handlebar mustache and a satisfied dad squint. The other was pudgy, dark-haired, and buried behind a long beard that swallowed his mouth. They paid in cash, argued amiably about whether lighter fluid was cheating, and walked out into the afternoon sun without once remembering they had come in as sons.

Across town, two older men woke up from accidental naps they had not meant to take.

Connor’s father jolted upright on a couch, suddenly blond, smooth-skinned, and twenty-two, his hand flying to a mustache that was far too small.

Mason’s father staggered back from a bathroom mirror, dark-haired and lean again, rubbing at the stubble on a jaw that had not been that sharp in decades.

For several seconds, both men stared at themselves in separate mirrors, stunned by the impossible youth looking back.

Then Connor’s father blinked and whispered, “oh shit, Father’s Day is coming up soon and I didn’t buy my old man anything yet!”

And Mason’s father, across town, touched his flat stomach with dawning horror - quickly fading into submission as he forgot his old life and responsibilities. His phone buzzed on the sink nearby. A text from Connor’s dad’s phone.