J. E. Landau

I felt it at the same time as everyone else, that one night in June.

The knowledge appeared in the back of my mind. I was alone when I felt it, in my apartment. I was washing dishes, and there were soap suds all over my hands, and I dropped a plate in the sink and spilled water all over myself and chipped my nail polish.

It was something new. I knew it like I knew that I could move my arms.

I wiped my hands on a towel and sat down on the couch and called my dad. Because who else was I going to call?

“Emily,” he said.

“Dad,” I said back.

“You felt it.”

“Yeah.”

We sat there on the line, for a while. And then we said I love you, goodbye, and hung up. And then I went back and finished washing my dishes, because I didn’t know what else to do. There were a lot of people I could call, and talk to. But now I knew.

I went to bed cold and tired that night. The kind of cold that you feel in your bones, that makes you want to curl up and cover your stomach and hide away from the world, because nothing was right. I don’t know if I slept much that night.

The next day, Alyssa called on the phone, and I picked up. There was this dread, like a lead weight in my gut.

“So,” she said, with her usual crispness, “something happened.”

“Yeah,” I said. I wanted to ask her if she’d done it. But I couldn’t. I was afraid.

“I changed,” she said. Her words hit me like a punch in the face. I hung up on her, and went to my bedroom, and cried. I sat for a while, and curled up on my blankets, and I thought I was gonna puke. And then I called her back.

“You should come see me,” she said.

So I did.

Her apartment is on the fourth floor of a building uptown. I usually take the stairs, but I didn’t feel up to it. When you climb stairs, every step is a commitment. You walk, and you walk, and you feel more and more tired. There were fourteen steps per flight of stairs, so I would have had to climb forty-two steps to get to her, which is forty-two more chances to go home.

I got in the elevator, which always stank of cigarettes, and I pushed the button for the fourth floor. My body told me not to. I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to know what had happened. I didn’t want to know what could happen to me.

But I got out of the elevator like a machine, lifting up one foot and then the other. I marched myself down to her apartment, 412, and I knocked three times like I always do. And I was drowning in dread.

She opened the door, and I saw her.

She was almost a square pillar of gleaming obsidian. Her mouth was in the middle of a deep circular hole, with a set of gleaming white human teeth inside. There was more to her, beneath and above and within her pillar-body.

It was absolutely Alyssa. I recognized her. I could see her little nose in her facets, and her smiling eyes in her luster. The way she moved—now by hovering—her body language, it was all there. It was more there. She was more like herself than I remembered. This was Alyssa, more than I was me.

She moved away from the door to let me in, but I didn’t move. She turned away, and I realized that I was still attracted to her. She had changed, for sure. But she was still hot—the way that her short hair had complimented the curve of her face, the shape of her body. It was there.

“Are you coming?” she said, from the hole in the middle of her body. And, of course, her voice! Her voice had changed. I hadn’t noticed it on the phone, but now she didn’t have lips. So the sounds came out as a slur, and she said something more like “Are you co-ig”, and I understood it all. And it was her voice.

I followed her into her apartment, and she made me a cup of tea, just like she usually does, including the little bit of mint that she ground between her fingers, even though she had none, and I looked at it, and held it in my hands.

“You’re afraid,” she said, as she was with me in her living room, floating next to her paintings of birds, and I stood next to the couch. I didn’t reply. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay to be afraid. It’s a big change. But I promise, you should try it. You’ll love it, baby.”

I’m not sure what happened after that. She told me I threw the cup and ran. And soon I was home.

I did what everyone does when they’re in the middle of a crisis. I did nothing but browse the internet, watch the news, and get myself more stressed out. I sat on my couch, huddled under my blankets which felt too cold. I didn’t eat anything, or drink anything, even though I knew I had to.

I sat on my couch. The news didn’t know anything more than I did. People were changing. The people who changed didn’t seem to be upset about it.

And I thought about it. I thought about changing right then and there. But I looked at my arms and my legs, the ones I was born with, and I knew I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to change, because I was scared. I didn’t know what I’d become. And I was afraid. Because Alyssa was hot, after she changed. And that was wrong.

Online, people were panicking. I wandered down a trail into the depths of Reddit, reading people talking about how they were scared, just like me, and that made me feel a little better in a corrosive sort of way. They thought it was the end of the world. And I wanted to think it was the end of the world, but Alyssa was hot, and even though it was wrong, I knew in my gut that after everyone had changed, they’d just keep on going with their lives. And maybe that was the thing that scared me the most.

On the news, they reported that uncontacted tribes in the Indian ocean had changed, and that made me feel even worse, because it really would be everyone. The astronauts on the ISS had been told not to change, and the same thing went for doctors and police officers and firemen, just in case something was wrong, and it all seemed very pointless to me. Because if something was wrong, it was too late. The Catholics were saying that the change might be okay, and there were American pastors on the TV calling it Satanic.

I called my dad again. “You should visit,” he said. “We should talk.”

And I knew that he had changed, too. I didn’t visit him, then, but I wish I had, now.

Instead I spent the next few days in my apartment. I didn’t go to work. Alyssa called a bunch of times, and she even sent a welfare check. One of the cops had changed, and he was vines wrapped around a sheet of glass in sunlight. I didn’t open the door. I told them that I was okay, and didn’t want to see anyone. They said that was okay, and they left without asking for any more details.

I didn’t sleep much. When I did, I had nightmares.

There were dreams about being a mass of tentacles, or insect legs, or a fat bag of flesh. I dreamed about becoming my father, my mother, Alyssa, in her dark splendor. Every time, I woke up feeling more afraid.

The waking world became less solid. I was too tired, and I was too scared to leave my bubble of normality. I had groceries delivered, and then I got too scared to open my front door. So they just sat there, and rotted, while I vacuumed my house for the fifth time.

The news was getting more and more chaotic, and the people online were getting more frantic. I saw that one of the newscasters on TV had changed. It turned out that people who changed could do everything about the same as before, and more and more people were changing. The preachers were more divided. I’ve never believed in God, but I wanted to believe, and I prayed for a day and pretended to be a Christian so that I could be one of the people who was afraid and thought that it was the Mark of the Beast from Revelations.

But I knew, in my heart, that I didn’t believe it. Because Alyssa was herself.

And I also knew that I had to leave my home. I was going crazy, and I ran out of insulin in the morning and was starting to feeling sick. I threw up in the bathtub. So, even though I didn’t believe in it, I prayed the way they say you should, to protect yourself from people who changed.

I stepped out over the threshold of my apartment. It smelled sickly sweet, from rotting fruit, and the milk was rotten and I dumped everything into the trash chute at the end of the hall. The lights overhead were the same. Everything was the same.

And I had to go. I’d waited until the last possible moment, before I left to get my insulin. Because I was afraid.

I took the elevator down, and I threw up as soon as I stepped out. It was mostly bile. The receptionist in the lobby had changed, into something that looked like half of a spider, its entrails laid bare, and the moon, and I staggered out over my vomit. “Are you okay?” she asked.

I just nodded. I kept walking. I felt sick, but I could handle it, and I was breathing really heavily but it felt like I couldn’t get enough air. I got to my car, in the parking lot, and I climbed in with a sense of vertigo, slumping heavily into my seat. There was someone else who hadn’t changed yet on the sidewalk, and I nodded to them. They ignored me. I started my car.

I knew then that I needed to go to the hospital. But I didn’t. I told myself that if I got to the pharmacy fast enough, I’d make it. And I didn’t want to know what I’d find in the hospital. People who’d changed, rotting from the inside out because now they were made wrong. People who’d changed, shattered into pieces, or sliced open, or delaminated, or melted. People who’d changed.

I threw up again halfway to the pharmacy, out the window at a stoplight, and nearly crashed my car when I saw the first changed person driving the other way on the road. They were driving just like anyone else, and they were made of fur and burlap.

I got to the pharmacy without passing out, but the guy behind the counter told me that I either had to drive myself to the hospital or he was going to call for an ambulance. “You look like you’re about to drop dead,” he told me.

I asked for my goddamn insulin. He gave it to me, and I told him I was going to drive to the hospital. I didn’t mean it. And I wasn’t sure what else to do, either, because I used an insulin pump, and I wasn’t sure if I should just fill it up again because all the information they’d given me about living with diabetes when I was diagnosed as a kid just said to go to the doctor if I was where I am now.

And the guy behind the pharmacy counter must not have believed me, because an ambulance pulled up in the parking lot while I was trying to google how to dose myself and scroll past the dumb AI popup and one of the paramedics knocked on my window, and they told me I didn’t have to go with them. And one of them had changed. So I didn’t.

But I did drive to the hospital. The receptionist was unchanged, and since I told them I thought I was going into a diabetic coma they rushed me right through and got me in a bed. The nurse hooked me up to a machine and called for a doctor, and when the doctor came in I started screaming. There, wearing a doctor’s coat, and ready to perform medical care, was the doctor, resplendent as the rising sun and cloaked in dirt. And he was ready to touch me even though I wasn’t like him at all. He was ready to touch me. He was one of them.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I know that some people have been having trouble. Let me see if I can find an unchanged doctor.” And he told the nurse to pull the privacy curtain, and he was nice and considerate and that made me feel even worse. Maybe he was just pretending to be like me. Maybe they were all pretending, and they’d learned how to look like us again. Maybe in a moment, they were going to pull back the curtain, and give me drugs to force me to change, or maybe they’d lock me in a zoo for all the freaks who wouldn’t, or maybe it really was Revelations and I was about to be raptured or maybe they were going to peel me apart to study me and figure out how something totally made of meat and with two legs and arms could walk and talk and do things because they’d forgotten and they wanted to learn again.

The curtain parted, and an ordinary doctor came in. He asked me about diabetes, first, and that was simple. I’ve had diabetes for a long time. I understood what was going on, and what to tell him. And then he asked me, “Miss Garrett, do you have any history of mental illness?”

“No,” I told him. “And I’m not crazy for not wanting to change.”

“Oh, Lord, of course not!” he said. “And you’re not crazy for being afraid. We’ve been going through a lot, us unchanged folk, but it’s gonna be alright. I just wanted to make sure that you didn’t have any medications that you needed, since you seemed real scared.”

It was incredibly human, and kind, and it told me that he wasn’t really one of us. He was one of them. He was working with changed doctors, he didn’t think it was the end of the world. But he wasn’t changed, so I could stand to be around him. I craved being around people who were like me, even if only a little bit.

I got discharged. They told me that I shouldn’t miss my insulin again, and I told them that I understood and wouldn’t let it happen. On the way out, the receptionist was changed. I hurried back to my apartment.

I spent another week, sitting there, letting myself spiral further and further into despair. I didn’t reach out to anyone. My friends had all changed. They had all been taken from me. They had given up their humanity. But in the photos they sent me, they still looked right. They looked freakishly, unnaturally right, in their diversity of bodies and bizarre forms.

And that was the really horrible thing. The bodies that I had always known them to have, which they had been wearing for their whole lives, didn’t match them as well as what they had become. They were alien, but they were more familiar than they had ever been. It was like whatever it was that had happened to them was worming its way back into the past, or into my mind, or into something deeper, and changing what they were on a fundamental level, changing my expectations, changing reality.

For a few days, I still sat there. I got another welfare check, which I also sent away. In our group chats, Alyssa was telling everyone that I needed space but that people should keep texting me, and it was so kind of her that I felt more afraid than ever. The thing that she had become was kind and understanding. It wanted to help me.

So I got out a bottle of vodka, and I went to the bathroom of my apartment. I broke my ankle a couple years ago, and they’d given me a whole pile of pills for the pain when tylenol helped enough, and I poured them all out into my hands, little white pills with a crease down the middle. They looked like they’d been polished in the sea, little pebbles from the beach. I thought about writing a note. I didn’t have anyone to write a note to.

I hesitated, with the cap off the bottle and the pills in my hand.

And then I changed. It only took a moment, and then I saw myself in the mirror.

I was like the stars in the night sky and claws and talons and animal teeth. I was night wrapped around flesh, and flesh wrapped around night, without any need for skin or muscle, the white of my sinews and bones shining bare. I had no face. My clothes had fallen into a puddle of vodka on the floor.

And, I could see myself in what I was. In the curvature of my talons, there were my long legs, and the freckles on my cheeks had become the tangle of my bones, and my brown eyes had become like the night sky between stars. They were there more now than ever. I looked more like myself than I ever had before.

And I was magnificent. What had I ever waited for?