Change
He had no time to formulate a theory before he felt the onesie tighten around his body like a bag being vacuum-sealed. His spine shot into a straight line. He looked at the mirror and saw that whatever slack the suit had was now gone. It had fit into the contours of his body, leaving absolutely no room in between whatsoever. Most alarming was the hoodie which had fallen on his head like the top portion of a wetsuit. He was terrified that the suit would continue shrinking and crush him.
But the suit was not shrinking. It was assimilating. He felt something tingle down his wrists. He looked down and saw the fabric lengthening down towards his hands like a living liquid spreading its territory across his skin. His wrists disappeared, then the bottom half of his palms, then his hand entirely. “What is this?” he screamed. He shook his hands frantically. It didn’t work. He shook them harder. Nothing happened. He shook them so hard that they nearly flew off by the joint. The suit continued claiming his hand until no skin remained. What replaced it was a thick cushion of fleshy padding where his palm had been. What felt like a tugging sensation on the very tips of his fingers was his fingernails sprouting into long, white claws made for digging.
He felt a pressure on his feet. He looked down and saw the same process happening to them. What had been a tightening of the suit was now more like a physical melding. Flesh bonded with fabric. The cells of his skin melted and fused with the velvet liner. The hilt of the skunk tail drilled into the base of his spine. He wasn’t wrong when he thought it had bone inside of it. He knew that now that it was latching onto his vertebrae and rendering the tail a part of him. When he tried pinching the suit off of him, he could only wince in pain. There was no suit, only skunk.
He looked back into the mirror. The outer limits of his face had been consumed by fur. The rim of his eye sockets were black. A white stripe ran down his forehead. His formally brown mop of hair was now a shaggy white cumulus. He thought a black cloud would consume his vision as the fur crept down into his visor, but was spared that punishment at least. What he was not saved from was the black fur closing in on his nose and lips. “Ah!” A great pressure pushed out from inside of his head, right behind his medulla. He went cross eyed and looked at his nose. What were two bumps on the bottom corners of his peripherals became long, black protrusions that reached out to the center of his vision. His nose and jaws were sprouting forward into a snout, a painful process that felt like someone had stuck a hook in the roof of his mouth and was pulling it straight out of his face. He gripped the rim of the sink growling through the pain until it came to a stop. The very last bit of change he suffered through were the quick sprouting of whiskers from his upper lip, each one coming out individually.
All of the sensations stopped at once. His eyes snapped open to reveal the reflection of not a man but a skunk, a six foot tall, 180 pound, hard working skunk. He was speechless. The reflection in front of him moved in perfect accord with him. He held his hand- no, his paw -up towards his face. He dared to touch his cheek. He gasped. He felt both the tickle of whiskers on his palm and the tingle on his lip. It was real. It was all real.
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 06 December 2022
