Reconstruction

A professional soccer goalkeeper's body is gradually turned into a woman's by an experimental implant while he's still starting for a men's team.Cole Brenner is thirty-two, captain of a second-division club outside Tulsa, when a collision in the air shatters his femur and ends his career in about two seconds. The mesh Meridian Biomedical threads through the leg gives it back. Four weeks after surgery he's sitting on a closed toilet lid at two in the morning with his braced leg jutting into the room, looking at a woman's anatomy where his own has always been, learning in one night that he no longer knows how to do the simplest thing a body does.The mesh keeps working. October is the chest. November is the hips. By January the face over the sink isn't the one on the billboard over the expressway.The season becomes logistics. Compression shorts a size down, bought at a big box store out by the highway so the equipment manager never handles them. Tape around his chest until the glands bruise. A neoprene vest and a cover story nobody quite believes. He arrives an hour early, waits out the shower block, gets into the cold tub only because the water is cloudy. He knows exactly how many seconds he has between the door and the bench. He still has to get dressed in the room he's captained for five years.Reconstruction is a slow, embodied transformation novel about a man concealing a woman's body inside the most male institution he knows, and what's left of a career built on a body that no longer exists.