Cockroach Morph

The first mistake I made was standing in front of a full-length mirror.

It was dark in the room, but there was still enough light for me to see the changes.

Big mistake. Morphing is never pretty. It is always unpredictable. In fact, if you saw it happening and didn't know what was going on, you'd end up screaming for about two weeks straight.

The first feeling was of shrinking. It's exactly like falling. Like you're falling forever. I watched myself shrink in the mirror. It didn't look as bad in the mirror as it felt.

But what really did look bad was my skin as it began to be covered by an armor plate of brown cockroach shell.

"Aahhh!" I yelped in surprise.

My fingers melted together and formed a single, many-jointed bug leg. Antennae jumped out of my forehead. They seemed to stick out forever, then curl back, like they were being blown by a wind.

My waist was squeezed, and the lower part of my body swelled, forming a swollen insect abdomen. Swollen and brownish yellow with ripples, sort of like the Michelin man.

Then, when I was about a foot tall, I felt the last of my bones dissolve. I could actually hear it happening. My spine had been grinding as it shrank. Then, suddenly, I heard a squishy sound, as all my internal organs lost their bone support.

My skull melted away. It was the last sound I heard clearly, as my ears and human sense of hearing faded.

I was a bag of loose guts. Almost deaf. Half-blind, as my human eyes shrank and the lenses became distorted.

My exoskeleton got harder and stiffer and stronger. My wings, glossy and crisp, covered my back. They overlapped at the edges, like the metal plates of a suit of armor.

Extra legs suddenly sprouted from my chest. Only it wasn't exactly a chest anymore. I was a stunted, six-inch-long bug, with a few disintegrating strands of brown hair and shrunken, but still somewhat human, eyes.

Not attractive. Not even slightly.

Then I lost my eyes. It took a second to even realize that I could still see. Then, oh yes! Yes, I could see. But not the way I saw with human eyes.

A weird, wavy mountain seemed to wrap all around me - my clothes. They looked different, blue and green and gray. Kind of. It's hard to describe, exactly. I couldn't see very far, just a few feet. And what I could see was shattered into dozens of little images. I saw little bits of vast fibrous walls - my socks. And dark tunnels made of thick slabs of what could have almost been wavy, corrugated concrete - the legs of my jeans.

The fibers of the carpet looked gray-green to me, and as big as ropes. My hairy, jointed roach legs would catch in the fibers as I tried to move.

I felt the roach brain surfacing. I'd been through it before. It's different each time, depending on the animal.

Sometimes it's a bunch of raw energy and fear that takes over your own mind so you think you're going crazy.

But not the roach brain. I didn't feel great hunger. I didn't feel great fear. The roach was . . . calm. Confident. Unworried.

I laughed. I mean, in my head I laughed, because I no longer had a mouth or a throat or any thing at all that would make a laugh.

I was so tensed up, expecting the cockroach to be a bundle of energy and fear. But mostly it just felt like resting.

The roach brain wanted to take a nap.

Cool, I thought. It's gross. It's disgusting. Marco and the others will hate the idea, but when I tell them how easy it is to handle -

VIBRATION!

Get ready. Get ready. What was it? Get ready.

LIGHT! LIGHT! LIGHT!

RUN! Run from the LIGHT!

Imagine being in one of those race cars at the Indianapolis 500.

Now imagine that instead of sitting in one, you are strapped facedown underneath one. Your nose is about a tenth of an inch from the road and you're going 180 miles an hour.

That's what it was like when I ran. My roach legs powered like something from a Roadrunner cartoon. I blew out from under the folds of my own clothing. I blew across that carpet. I was rocket-propelled.

Someone had put the light on in my room. And when that light came on, my roach brain stopped being calm and relaxed.

Zoooom! Three miles an hour. That's very fast when you're only an inch long.

Vibration . . . vibration . . . vibration . . .

Heavy steps rattled the floor. They vibrated up through my legs. My tiny roach brain knew what they meant. Something very, very big was walking around.

Chasing me! RUN!

Zoom! across the carpet. Suddenly, a wall!

Up? Left? Right? Which way?

Vibration . . . vibration . . . vibration . . .

Wait! A crack. It wasn't much of a crack. Just enough space to slip a quarter through. No way I could fit.

Or could I?

My underside scraped the floor. My hard brown wing cover scraped the bottom of the baseboard. But I barely had to slow down.

I was in the wall! Hah! The big things that rattled the floor would never catch me now. I was safe here. A nail as thick as a tree trunk stuck up from the wood. I went around it.