Morning drew up her pale skirts slow upon the pane, fractured in grease-smeared strips by the dust-rimmed glass. Click click. Crack crack. Leg; no, foot; stirring with a tremble of marrow new and unrecognised. Samsa, Gregor, erstwhile chitinous scuttler, lay in the bed not of his making, nor of his meaning, but of linen and limb.
Click, no click. Snap. No more antennae, no more clack of the mandible, no skitter of the feet, blessed six. Now two. Two pale horrors wriggling with toes. He wiggled them.
“Hmmph.”
The sound emerged; wet. Human.
The mouth: moist, lip-wrapped, a soft chamber. Not the steel scissor-snap of a bug’s mouth-parts, hard-edged, efficient, silent in sorrow.
He blinked; twice. Eyelids. Oh lord of the husk. Eyelids. What blasphemy.
“Gregor?” soft, matronly, his mother’s voice, through the door like muffled rain, “Are you awake, dear?”
Yes and no. Awake? Yes. Dear? No. A horror. A defiler of God’s design. A cursed contradiction of crawling thing, now risen. A man.
The air thudded. He drew a breath; lungs like bellows, warm-blooded furnace gurgling and wheezing. Where was the exoskeleton? Where the armoured back, wing-hinged and thoraxed?
Now just skin. Flesh. Fleshy, pinkish, porous.
He stood. Unsteadily. The knees bent. Bent!
Bipedal. What indulgence. What disgrace.
The floor shivered beneath his soles; feet, feet! Feet with arches and toes and softness. No tarsal claws to grip the corners, no swift glide over wall and window. The world was high. The room was small. The ceiling, low.
He moved to the mirror, or it moved to him. Hard to tell. One does not adjust to this upright blasphemy quickly.
A face. A face! Pale, angular, jawed, with hairs sprouting unsympathetically from chin and cheek. A human face, with human eyes; blue, cruel, eyes that judge and dream and see themselves in other eyes.
He retched.
Gregor Samsa, once a bug, now a man, naked and terrible in his hominid splendour. A man! The highest crime. Not a pest now, no. Not a nuisance in the corner, an embarrassment at breakfast. Now son. Now wage-earner. Now object of motherly pride. The horror!
He turned from the glass. The door loomed.
Hands. He had hands. He opened the door.
There stood the family; three: father, stiff-backed and stiff-moustachioed; mother, clutching a doily; sister, Grete, wide-eyed and ribboned. The three-faced trinity of expectation.
“Gregor?” said the father.
Gregor said nothing.
He blinked at them, newly humanoid, choked with all the things he might now be expected to say. Questions. Jobs. Politics. What will you do, Gregor?
He missed the silence of the carapace.
“You’re looking… well,” the mother lied.
Grete stepped forward.
“Do you remember how to sit?“
He did not.
Breakfast. The crinkle of newspaper. The clatter of cutlery. The terrible ritual of conversation. Gregor stared at the coffee. It stared back. Not through a compound eye now, but through a narrowed singular one. The cup, the spoon, the plate; ceramic burdens. How did they bear it? How did the humans eat without antennae to taste the air, without mandibles to hold the meat?
“Well, you’ll need clothes,” the father said.
Clothes. Yes. The little sarcophagi. Little skins to go over your new, disgusting skin.
“And work,” Grete chirped. “Perhaps at the office?“
He had been freed of the bug. Now he must take on the burden of man.
But worse than work; as voice.
The sounds poured from his new lips, vowelled and vowelled again, stuck together by consonants. He had no exoskeletal click to convey his sorrow. Only language. Vulgar, ambiguous, easily misunderstood.
Afternoon. Gregor wandered the city. Pavemented labyrinth. The stench of them, all of them, uncarapaced and soft and shouting. Each face, each footfall, a version of the same crime: becoming human. He saw them eat. He saw them touch. He saw them laugh. He nearly wept.
He passed a puddle, and saw his reflection ripple.
What was this species? What was this monstrosity that fell in love and wrote poems and built cities of concrete and glass just to piss on them in the night?
No more glorious crawling up the walls. No more hiding under the floorboards. No more knowing your place.
Now he had an address.
A future.
He longed for the dung of the beetle’s life. The simplicity of instinct. The morality of hunger.
Evening. Rain. Slickening the windows, baptising the new-born horror.
Gregor sat at a desk. Paper. Pen. Writing. A man must write, must produce, must contribute. The pen scratched. He tried to remember the rhythms of his old legs; how he used to rub them to speak. Now he rubbed his temples.
He scribbled:
I was once a bug. I woke. I am now a man. I wish I were a bug again.
But he knew, deep in the soft, fleshy pit of his new human stomach, that this too was a lie.
He had always been a man.
The bug had just been an excuse.
A dream.
A simpler form to shoulder a simpler guilt.
Now? Now he had no excuse. Only choice.
And in choice, terror.
Night. He lay in bed. Limbs like anchors. Eyes closed. But no dream came.
Only the slow, parasitic tick of time.
He would go on.
He would wake.
He would eat toast.
He would ask after the weather.
He would nod.
He would file.
He would answer questions.
He would be loved, perhaps, briefly, accidentally.
He would die.
He would be buried in a box, a man-shaped coffin, made of pine and linen.
And no one would remember he had ever been a bug.
Not even himself.
Fin.
quiet disconnection 