Prose – older students

 

Observer

He woke up to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become an essence of his former self. A sord of a spirit. He perfectly remembered what led to this realization – the fought with his wife after losing his job, went to bed and woke up. But not entirely, his body is laying right there. What now? He cannot move, he doesn´t have any effect on his surroundings and can only observe. What remained of his consciousness comfortably sat in the corner of his bedroom and waited. 

 

After few hours, he saw his wife entered the bedroom, shocked to find a lifeless body of the man whom she loved with her entire soul. She´ll never forgive herself for letting him go to bed without apologizing to him first. 

 

After a few months he saw his wife started to slowly return to her previous life she abandoned due to poisonous grief. She is slowly trying to find and adequate man to be a proper father for her only son, yet she always hears the keys unlocking the front door and hopes the one coming home from a late shift is the person who used to wake her up like this for the past 10 years, and with every phone call, she hopes she´ll be met with a cheesy dad joke, like it was since the birth of the embodiment of joy they chose to call Johny. 

 

After many years, he saw his wife staring out of the windows. She was old and grey, and their house that once beamed of joy is now painfully lonely crypt of the only man she could truly love. The sound of his laugh still echoes in her ears and every touch of fabric against her skin reminds her of his hands. Walking through the city, the hope that she might see him is still burning. Maybe she is just senile, maybe the mysterious sounds she hears in the attic are actually the footsteps of a long awaited visitor… At last, calm washes over her. 

Reunion is imminent.

 

 

As I lay dying

He woke up to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become what he always feared. He never wished for his life to be like this and most importantly, it wasn´t even his fault. 

 

Everything he had ever known felt distant, somehow anonymous. The bed, the bed in which he stayed at for the past few weeks felt hostile, the hospital blanket barely covered his sore feet and the cold kept creeping in from the naked fingertips. It spread like a venom and slowly infected his entire body. 

 

As he shivered in this agony, he noticed the air being a little more tender and a little less humid than usually. 

 

He always feared drowning, the surface locking him in the ocean´s nest, stuck under the monotonously repeating waves, not being able to swim back up. However, never in a million years would he think he could suffocate form the dry air. The air he breathed every day. 

 

On this day at this moment breathing felt like inhaling sand, cutting through his gullet and filling his lungs like a disease. 

 

As he was lying there, gasping for air he recognized sharp pain in his frontal lobe. The sharp pain he knew from years ago, when he prioritized his work over his family and remembered, how each day his wife would come up to him begging him to spend time with his newborn son, since the child simply cannot grow up fatherless. 

 

Oh, the migraines, the migraines were a horrible thing! Not even for a second did he feel a spark of sorrow for his own family. 

 

His head was a balloon waiting to overflow from all the pressure any minute. And when it all happened, the room was still hostile and his feet were just as cold, as when he first opened his eyes. 

 

 

Whisker

He woke up to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become a cat. At first, he thought to himself that he must be having some weird dream, however, any attempts to wake up made him realize even more, that this is not a dream, but reality. This was his new life. As he tried to speak the words on his mind, only meowing came out of his month. “Well, what now?”, he thought to himself. But time passed and he still couldn´t find a reasonable explanation for this turn of events. So, in the end, he decided to wait in his room, after realizing he was unable to open the door, which led into the rest of the house. He didn´t live alone, of course, and after it had occurred to him, he knew who will save him from his new cell, his family. What would have been minutes felt like hours to him and as he got bored, he decided to play around with his newly acquired form. 

 

First, he wanted to try jumping onto some furniture in his room. Jumping to the bed felt like stepping over a stair, which made him very curious, as he wanted to know how high he could go, thus he looked around and felt an almost child-like rush of enthusiasm when he spotted his closet. He immediately began to run towards it and then propelled himself with his tiny cat paws into the air. For a moment, it seemed he would make it, but despite the effort he put into his jump wasn´t enough for him to reach the top. Instead, he bashed with the closet doors making a lot of noise. 

 

After falling to the ground, it took only a moment before his sister, whom he had his room next to, came rushing in with anger, trying to blow her brother´s ear off for making such a loud sound. However, she couldn´t find her brother and only some cat which she thought was stray, thus taking him out on the street and leaving him to fetch for himself.

 

 

Former glory

He woke up to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become atrociously hideous. Once a man of the highest qualities others could´ve only dreamt of, now an unrecognized fool to be forgotten. 

 

His eyes? Faded. Nose, having used to grant teen sense of smell, bend in grotesque shape, incapable to detect almost any odor. And the month” Ladies, maidens, queens alike land passed out in the simple presence of his sashing smile. Now there was no need for a smile, for his presence has done enough. Awful hump doing his back, knees bend in all wrong directions – it all told the same – he wields none of his former charm.”

 

And there he lied, folded in the frame of his former glory. He wept: “Life, so giving, have I sinned? “Have I breached the pits of hell, dined with the devil eyes wide open? Have I bid my goodbyes to your blessing in turn for Satan´s robes?” Tears softened his face. A child would bear no difference in looks, a daft child without its favorite toy. 

 

Ruined man, a sliver of who he once was. Sharp knock on the door broke the silence. “Dear, are you getting ready? the breakfast already went cold.” A woman well into her fifties entered the room. “Oh, did you have another one of those awful episodes?” Quickly, she crossed the room, moving to side of her husband. “It´s alright, darling, it´s alright. We all age, after all.”

 

 

An exploration of gender roles

He woke up to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become the exact opposite of his original body. Meaning his is that of a woman now. What a way to start the morning. In front of his mirror stood a stranger, a weird stitched together Frankenstein´s monster amalgamation of his mother´s and sister´s attributes and he felt oddly …free.

 

The sharp edges and awkward angles of his body gave way for smoothest soft skin and shoulders that finally seemed to fit his frame. He felt attractive, desired for the first time in forever and he paraded around the bathroom mirror all problems seemed to simply sizzle away. There was no need to ponder on the remifications of this situation, of what this entails. 

 

Running down the hall to the closest bedroom he could find, he began unceremoniously rummaging through the closet, finding whatever skirt of dress would fit him. The urge to finally be what he´s always dreamed of spurred him on and as his reflection once again, showed a … girl, he realized that oh, none of this was real. This is the alternat reality he´s always dreamed of, the ideal world where he could be a girl. 

 

His knees hit the ground as the dress bunches up uncomfortably at his waist and he´s crying, weeping, for what could have been. Hands tagging at his roots uselessly is the last blurry thought he resembles before waking up again, for real this time. Curling up into a ball, he tries to will himself to go back to the dream realm with little success. 

 

God, how he hopes this weren´t a daily occurrence.