NZBC short fiction: Transformation

As Vernon K. Roach woke one morning from unquiet dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into the unbelievably well-formed figure of a human being. He was lying not on his carapace but on his brawny back, and when he lifted his head a little he could see his tanned body banded by rippling abdominals, on top of which the blanket, completely following his masculine contours, moulded itself to his athletic body. Both of his legs, perfectly in relationship with the rest of him, flexed sinuously in front of his steely blue eyes.

Vernon vaulted out of his bed and, turning his head away from the magnificence of his own reflection in the full-length bedroom mirror, went to the kitchen, where he found a refrigerator creaking under the weight of all manner of fresh food.

As his morning coffee brewed, Vernon studied the daily newspaper: rape; murder; genocide; crimes against humanity and the environment; unbridled consumerism; public relations campaigns for spurious pharmaceutical “breakthroughs”; talentless celebrities in tawdry television shows. All over the world, it seemed, men were busy killing each another; countries were consumed by the centuries-old legacy of archaic prejudices; their nations’ leaders were fanatical, corrupt psychopaths; the poor starved to death in countries cursed by famine; indigenous people felled the forests that fed them to raise livestock and grow cash crops for rich foreigners; impoverished farmers hunted endangered species to extinction; while rich countries produced scandalous surfeits of food and their people died from obesity, heart disease and a lack of exercise.

Soon, thought Vernon, he would put on clothes and leave for the office in his enormous, fuel-devouring four-wheel-drive vehicle, where he would join in with the rest of so-called society in its endless chatter, would contribute to its limited reality consensus and act as yet another co-conspirator in the massed criminal disregard for humanity and all things sacred.

“What a monstrous thing it is to be a man!” Vernon said to himself as he vomited all over his breakfast. There seemed to be no sense in being alive, no sense to existence at all. “But then again…” he said, as he set eyes upon his wife emerging from the bathroom.

She appeared, naked, in the doorway, looking even more splendid than he did, a dark vision of pure majesty; the pinnacle of evolution in the known universe. Her shining black hair was coiled in damp, shoulder-length ringlets. Her skin was tawny with a copper sheen. A faint indentation ran in a straight line, a groove between her breasts, dividing her abdomen and passing to her loins. Her navel was elongated, mysterious. Her hips suggested a superbly pear-shaped femininity. Rivulets of bathwater trickled down her thighs. Their curve and that of her hips caused her arms to bow outwards, away from her body. In the underspace between her legs, light shone in a convex-sided diamond. In that glow, Vernon the man shrank back to the vermin he had once been.

“Good morning, darling,” said Vernon K. Roach’s wife as she glanced towards the breakfast bar.

Then the beautiful woman opened her mouth and screamed.

—oOo—

To request a PDF of this story, send an email with the subject header “Transformation” to this address. Order more of Chris Bell’s fiction here. And if you’d like to read some more of his short stories, you’ll find a selection of them here.