Cornell had taken to sleeping in the backyard, not because he wanted to, but because it was necessary. The very first thing that had happened on that fateful morning was to splinter his bed. He had no idea how much he weighed as an alligator, but it was a lot. The bed had been crushed.
The loss of the HUD was terrible. If his implant was still there, connected to the reptilian optic nerve, it wasn’t working. To be cut off from the grid was to be cut off from life. His social media accounts were stagnating. At first he thought the loss might crush his spirit, but, as it turns out, a reptilian spirit is a tough motherfucker, so he persevered.
Unable to enjoy the fruits of the grid, he started taking long walks around the countryside. Sidney was in a beautiful part of Iowa, in a large, fertile valley carved out by the Missouri River a fuckall long time ago. He would walk the five miles to the river to watch boaters and any wildlife that might be around. He tried for a heron, but it had beat its wings hard and escaped. Lucky bastard.
On one of the return trips to town, he had sat beside a barbed wire fence and watched several cows in the distance, some black with white, and some brown with white. He was nearly overcome with desire. Hamburger that made a run for it had to taste better than hamburger that didn’t. Of that he felt sure. How fast could he close the gap? He had never tried running, but believed he was quite fast—faster than he appeared, anyway. Staring wistfully at the livestock, he realized he was near to the house of Old Man Art, the crank who got teased by the kids. Cornell had done his share of the teasing, but things were different now, so perhaps Art would forgive and forget. If not, he could always be bitten on the ass.
En route to Art’s, he went down a dirt road about a half mile, then stopped as he spied two horses grazing in a field. He spent untold minutes watching them longingly. He was so taken with them that he didn’t notice a pickup truck coming down the road until it had stopped beside him. He turned to see a man look down at him from the open window of the truck. Two children made faces from the backseat.
Cornell had the distinct feeling that the man was taking video with his HUD. He would rather not be on social media, not in his present condition.
“Can we shoot him, dad?” said the little boy with a gleam in his eye.
“Only if he eats our animals,” said the man.
With a whirring of electric motors the truck moved on down the road. Cornell watched until it was out of sight. Looking back at the horses, he found that he had lost his appetite. He also found that he was incapable of frowning. He had lost so much, even some of the little things.
He walked a few hundred meters farther down the dirt road and then turned onto a rough track, more of a fire trail. Soon he stood before Old Man Art’s small shack.
“Anybody home?” Cornell called through the open doorway.
“Of course I’m home, where else would I be?”
“I can’t see you,” said Cornell.
A noise of large, empty metal cans falling from a height came to Cornell’s surprisingly good ears, followed by some muffled cursing, and then Art himself appeared from a back room. He hadn’t known the ratty little shack had a back room. Wonders never cease. Then, to his amazement, the old man clutched his chest, muttered something unintelligible, and collapsed to the ground.
Without a HUD and grid connection, Cornell was unable to summon paramedics, but it didn’t really matter, because poor old Art was stone dead. For a fleeting moment he thought he should feel bad or something. He was almost relieved to feel nothing at all, except for a small curiousness—death was rare these days, with all the medical advances and whatnot. He waved his snout over the body and nearly lost control, but mounted a successful mental resistance, and backed away.
He decided it wouldn’t hurt anything to nose around a bit before heading home. He was disappointed to see that Art owned useless trash, and little else. He climbed up onto a dusty couch and looked at framed photos on the wall. They were all black and white, and everyone looked somber, the men with large gray-black beards and lifeless eyes, the women looking like unhappy statues over which black dresses had been slung.
He climbed down and continued rummaging. He spotted a dusty old blanket flopped over something squarish. He pulled the blanket off with his teeth, and made an interesting discovery. It was a stack of books, real paper ones. He had never seen one, and was quite curious. He used his snout to push the stack onto the ground and spread it around so he could see all the titles. Most of them looked incredibly dull, but a few seemed alright, and they gave him an idea. With the loss of the grid and his HUD, he should try reading. That might curb the boredom. He chose The Complete Works Of Franz Kafka, which looked dry, and Meat Juice Girl and Burrito Boy, apparently some kind of light action novella, and Jimmy Ray Meets the Royal Whores of Sumer. Anything with whores was probably worth a shot. Having no suitable appendages with which to carry books, he held them in his mouth.
When he made it home to the porch, he discovered that the meat juice book and the one about the whores had been swallowed. That was disappointing. He had especially been looking forward to reading the meat juice one. The sole survivor was the book by Kafka, and it looked dull as shit.
A cooler full of ice and beer was waiting for him on the porch, which made him feel good. His dad had been doing that lately, bringing him beer. His family knew he had nothing to do, so they were helping as well as they could.
“You look funny when you read,” said Robert, Jr.
Cornell hadn’t thought about how he looked, sprawled out on the porch beside the lawn chairs and training one eye on the pages of the Kafka book (it was difficult to focus both eyes at something so close).
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
“You look funny when you’re fucking Callie,” retorted Cornell, keeping his reading eye fixed on the page.
“Have you been spying on me?”
“I’m in your closet most nights,” said Cornell.
“I should…”
“You should what? Beat up an alligator? I’d like to see that.” Cornell had always gotten into fights, including with his older brother Robert, but now that he was an alligator with the whole snout and teeth thing, nobody would put up fists. Besides, he never spent a night in his brother’s closet. He could never fit in such a small space. He was just goading him, like they always did to each other.
Robert stomped away. Cornell chuckled, which was more of a hiss and gurgle now that he was an alligator.
After his rude brother was gone, he returned to The Metamorphosis, which he was almost half way through. He found it mind-numbingly boring. In some ways he could relate to the story, which helped, but there wasn’t enough violence. That must have been an oversight of Kafka’s. Despite his limited experience with books, he understood that they were like slow, dull movies: chit-chatty dramas were boring, and violence was exciting.
The more he read of The Metamorphosis, the more he thought about writing his own story. He’d never written anything before, but he knew he could do something more interesting than a big cockroach lying around all day feeling sorry for itself and acting the baby. That’s not how it would be.
His reading was interrupted again, this time by his dad returning from work.
“What is that?” said Robert, Sr.
“Why hello, Robert,” said Cornell. Quaint terms like “dad” and “mom” seemed ridiculous after his transf… Metamorphosis. Yes, it had been a metamorphosis, after all. Kafka wasn’t totally useless. Terrible writer, perhaps, but not a complete fool.
“That’s a book, isn’t it? I haven’t seen one of those since I was a kid. Where did it come from?”
“I found it,” said Cornell, not willing to say where it had come from. He had done nothing wrong, but it might be difficult to explain about Old Man Art. Since becoming an alligator, he hadn’t felt so much as a mild twinge of fear, but if everybody ganged up on him, he wouldn’t come out on top. Back when things like news feeds were available to him, he would see stories out of Florida where an entire town would go after a troublesome alligator. There would be pictures of the alligator hanging dead from a tree with the hunters on either side. Those hunters were always smiling, like they were proud of what they’d done.
“What’s that?” said Robert.
“What’s what?” said Cornell.
“Whatever you’re pushing under your belly.”
“This? Nothing.” He showed his father a notebook and a pencil.
“Doing some writing?”
“Thought I might try my hand.”
“You mean claw?” His father chuckled after he said the words. Cornell didn’t find it funny. “Well, anyway, do you want some more beer?”
He did what he always did when offered beer. He quickly stalked around the porch, wagging his tail in joyful affirmation, which Robert hopped over (soon after the change, he was knocking people down, without meaning to, and they had all learned to watch the tail). As much as he wanted beer, he loathed himself for behaving that way. He was like a puppy about to be taken for a walk, and that was undignified, and he felt strongly that an alligator should maintain its dignity.
Robert, Sr. returned with a cold six-pack of Easy Living beer, the cheapest brand at Sidney’s liquor store. He would rather have uppity craft beer, but he was dependent on these people, so he would accept whatever they offered.
He drank the first couple of cans in the company of a silent Robert, Sr., who seemed to be eying the Kafka book.
“You want to read it?” said Cornell.
“What? Me? No. I can hardly read.” Then he smiled at Cornell. “You went farther in school than me, son. I’m proud of you.”
In time Cornell dozed off with the sun still in the sky. When he awoke, Robert was gone, but there was a fresh six-pack of Easy Living beside him. He picked up a can in one of his front claws, a tricky operation, then used one of his many teeth to gingerly pop open the top, and poured it into his open maw. For the next one, he decided to try something different, seeing as it was so hard popping the top. He tossed the entire can into his mouth, bit down, and let the beer drain onto his tongue and flow toward the back of his throat.
“Fuck you you fucking freak!”
Cornell nearly choked on the Easy Living. He shook out the crushed can and coughed up the stray brew, which was a cumbersome and undignified procedure for an alligator. When he regained his composure, he looked out past the porch’s railing to see several of the neighborhood kids, mostly the younger brothers and sisters of the kids he used to attend school with.
“Fat Alligator!” came a familiar voice. He scanned the group and saw Tiffany.
Most people seemed cool with him being an alligator, but as Robert, Sr. had once explained to him, kids can be cruel.
“Are you deaf, you piece of fucking shit-for-brains?”
Piece of ... ? That didn’t even make sense. Kids these days, thought Cornell. He was sure he could run them down if he charged at top speed. He had never tried running as an alligator, but he just knew he could surprise the neighborhood kids. Feeling powerful and well buzzed from the Easy Living, he decided to let them live. Then he chuckled. Let them live! Like he would ever chase down children and bite them or anything.
He was awoken after dark by Robert, Jr. saying his dinner was ready. Not dinner, he noted, but his dinner.
He stood up to find himself dizzy from the beer. And here was an advantage he had found as an alligator—standing was quick and stable, having four short legs instead of two tall ones. He could walk just fine while drunk, better than the humans. Score one, Cornell, humans, zero.
He walked through the house to the back porch. Everyone was eating pork chops at the dining room table, judging from the wonderful smells wafting down from up there. For reasons relating to Cornell’s size and perhaps their fear, he couldn’t eat with them. His brother, Robert, Jr., and his dad, Robert, Sr., and Robert’s asshole friend, Red, all stopped eating as Cornell walked past. When he was on the back porch and had used his tail to whack shut the door, he heard their meal sounds resume.
Eileen, his mom, still wasn’t taking her meals with the family. She had gotten sick around the time of the transformation—metamorphosis, thank you K—and mostly stayed in the back bedroom. Nobody seemed to know precisely what the ailment was. It didn’t seem to be physical, although it could be women’s troubles. Cornell didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know. He wanted her to recover, and if she couldn’t, then to not get any worse, that was all. To be a reptile was to have muted emotions, and that wasn’t such a bad thing.
The smell of raw hamburger on the back porch was strong and delicious. He insisted that Robert, Sr. buy the high-fat kind. He waved his wide snout back and forth over the enormous pile of reddish-white flesh, inhaling the wonderful smell, before diving in. He rolled and thrashed and tossed large gobs of the meat into the air and caught them in his mouth on the way down. He put his head back and chomped again and again, voraciously, even though the flesh was soft. Every so often he let some of it slide down his throat to oblivion. Jesus it was good to be an alligator.
He had devoured 50 pounds of hamburger in about five minutes. The back porch looked like a killing field. Hamburger was stuck to the walls, and some was even sticking to the ceiling. Cornell looked up at the red splotches, hoping some would fall down into his open mouth, but none did.
As satisfying as the meat was, it would be better if it tried to get away. His basic hunger was satisfied, but there were other hungers that needed tending.