Metamorpho-ma-sis
He woke up screaming.
This, in and of itself, wasn't unusual. He sometimes woke up, screaming in the night, to the chagrin, and occasional violent reaction, of his partner. She was all of four foot, ten inches. And she didn't accept nightmares of feral hamsters chasing him around a field, mined with cupcake-shaped (and tasting, don't ask him how he knew, he just knew) mines, regardless of their implications on their marriage or whathaveyou, as sufficient excuse to wake her in the middle of the night in such an alarming fashion.
This time had been a little bit of that, in that he'd been dreaming about feral hamsters again, something he suspected led back to his parents mysteriously, like some cloak and dagger government agency, "disappearing" his one and only pet hamster Timmy, when he was six. When John was six, not the hamster. These feral dream hamsters didn't look so much like Timmy, but John suspected they knew Timmy, or something. If you thought about it — and he spent a lot of lonely hours nursing a sore arm from where Beth would have punched him thinking about it — hamsters probably had some sort of code they followed, and probably had a lot of time for listening to each other, as if you were stuck in a plastic ball for a portion of the day for your exercise, and then moved to a plastic cage with wood shavings and a couple of see-through drainage systems you were expected to run through when you could plainly see there wasn't a whole lot worth trundling through the little tubes for, well, you'd become pretty damn close with all of those in the same plight as yourself. And so all hamsters were probably connected in some way or another. Not to deny them their individuality or anything, that was just the way it was.
Straight away, he could tell something was different, something felt... off. Like that time he woke up in one of his very first apartments as a mouse ran down the length of his body, starting at around his neck. He spent hours pacing around the apartment, getting the shivers and rubbing his body down every few steps to try and shake off that feeling of... almost having an extra, moveable body part. Like a bag of ball bearings, much like the gall bladder, no longer necessarily needed, but there you had it, the... mouse-o-tope. Or not the gall bladder, the other one, the really useless one. The appendix.
In the darkness, he reached up and felt his face... a little hair, but not hamster hair, more like he'd neglected to shave for a couple of days, and was feeling a mite scruffy, that last little bit of toughness before his beard got long enough to soften up.
No, it wasn't that. And he let his hands fall back down, down along his cheeks, fingertips coming together and palms slapping as they descended back down towards his stomach, and it dawned on him his wife would kill him, sleeping on his back again, and probably snoring, that was probably it, he'd woken himself snoring again, he should flip over on his side, and thump, his hands thumping down gently on his stomach... his stomach about a foot higher than it should have been. And now that he thought of it, acid arising in his throat, a small pain in his lower back, his feet throbbing at the end of the bed, and an almost imperceptible thump back on his stomach, from the inside. And beside him, his formerly pregnant wife, snoozing, lying on her stomach, a good foot lower than she had been, lion's grin on her face, turned on the pillow towards him.
He woke screaming.
Summary
disclaimer:
Welcome back to the serial.... wait. No, scratch that. The bad little dude from a few weeks ago still has not returned. But fear not!
This doesn't mean he's never coming back. It just means we're a little lazy about leaning on the writer for that particular one and decided to go with this, first.
So anyway, here you have it, a different story for the issue this week, one we hope you all enjoyed. Especially those of you with kids. Or with a kid on the way. Or who have heard of kids. Whatever.
And with that, bon nuit.
Discuss this in the forums
Discuss the horoscopes in the forums
Forum hosting provided by forumthing.