Logan watched as his father absentmindedly put jam on his tie and tried to open the door with a fork. Not realizing that he wasn’t wearing any pants and his shirt was covered in coffee stains. Then my mother walked in and ruined my fun. She came in the living room and saw what dad was doing, realizing that he was sleepwalking again and giving me a nasty look for not getting her.

She walked up to him and softly took his hand, leading him back to bed. Still giving me the stink eye as she left. I held my hand over my mouth to keep my giggles quiet. It was a new routine of mine, to wake up early and watch my dad sleepwalk around the house. Sadly, my routine cant last must longer. The only reason he sleepwalks is because he has been taking a new medication. My mom was sick of waking up to a wrecked kitchen every morning, so she is making him get a new medication. One with hopefully fewer side effects.

I can hear mother coming back so I hold in my laughter in and turn back towards the tv. There was some sitcom playing for the past half hour. I just had the tv on in the background while I watched my dad fumbling around the kitchen and putting the laundry in the trash can. She said nothing as she started cleaning up the kitchen, but I could practically feel her eyes on the back of my head. I looked out the window and noticed the sun was coming up. It was almost time for….

What...

I can’t remember what I was supposed to do today.

Whatever, I turned around to ask mom what we were going to do for breakfast, but the kitchen was gone. I spun back towards the tv but now that was gone too. I was alone, floating in an empty space.

This must be a dream. Please let this be a dream.

I tried to wake myself up, but nothing happened. This blank space I was in didn’t change in any way.

I tried to relax and calm myself down to think about this rationally. Opening my mouth to take a deep breath I realize something horrifying.

I can’t feel anything. I can’t even move my body. I try to look around to see if I still have my limbs, yet I only succeed in wiggling my left eye to the left and right. I could even blink, but only that one eye. No other part of my body responded to me. After freaking out and trying everything without being effective I managed to calm myself down enough to try and remember what happened.

My memories from that day are missing after that morning. As are most of the memories of my life. I remember having a job, but not what I did there. I remember my house and my parents but nothing else about my life there.

A strong feeling in my left eye disrupted my thoughts. It was a weird feeling though, like my eye was being moved around separate from my body. Well, more like thrown. I felt the weird tickle of wind flowing around my eye before I felt something hard and rough smack into it. After inwardly cursing out whatever caused that I calmed down again, at least my eye was closed. Unconsciously opening my eye, I realize I can see a little bit. Apparently, something was covering my left eye and the impact knocked it loose. Now that my left eye was partially free I could see that I apparently was looking up at the sky. Tall trees reached up and almost completely blocked my view of the blue sky. The excitement bubbled up inside me as I realized that I’m still alive. I immediately tried to get up and look around, until I remembered that nothing except my left eye was working. Remembering that fact made me a little depressed. There was nothing I could do but sit here and wait, at least I can kind of see now.

I move my eye around to find out just how much I could see around me, and I found out a few things. First, there was a huge river with an extremely strong current to my left. Second, when I looked over to my right I realized that I have no nose. Or head.

I could see the bare rock below me.

WHAT.

THE.

FUCK!

How the hell am I alive!?

I felt like crying, screaming and cursing the name of every god I could remember. If I had a body I would be thrashing right now, but the most I could do was blink furiously and cry. Until something happened.

I moved. I stopped crying immediately and tried to remember what I did. But I couldn’t, all I was doing was thinking about moving everything I could as much as possible. Somehow, I shifted myself to the left a little bit. I could tell because I could see a little more of the river now. I looked as far to my left as I could, and I noticed something. I may not have a head, but I have...something. I could see something dark red just out of my field of vision. I focused on it, trying to see a little more of it and it twitched. I realized this was some sort of appendage. I closed my eye and tried to imagine moving my foot. I opened my eye and looked while keeping that in mind, but nothing happened. The appendage wouldn’t move at all.

I closed my eye and thought about why it wasn’t working. I thought about my body in my mind and realized that it felt, wrong. Then I understood what the problem was.

I was imagining myself with a human body and as much as I don’t want to admit it, I don’t have a human body anymore. In my mind I pictured a small fleshy jellyfish with an eyeball in it, sprouting many small tentacles. Then I focused on trying to move them.

Success!

Oddly enough once I changed my mental image of myself I could sort of ‘feel’ my new body. Not entirely, but I could feel several tentacles sprouting from around my eye. I concentrated on wiggling my tentacles and opened my eye again, looking to the left and sure enough a small tentacle was wiggling next to me. I was happy that I can move, but I couldn’t help but wonder about what the hell I am. Whatever, I put that to the back of my mind and focused on moving. I moved my tentacles underneath my ‘body’ and pushed upwards. Lifting myself off the rock was step one, I still must find out how to walk around with tentacles and an eye that was on top of my head. Maybe I was on my back and my eye is on my front? This is extremely confusing. But I continued anyway, I may be fine now, but I am in a forest and something may think I’m food. I mean something threw me earlier.

My tentacles were now fully extended and holding me up. Now to tilt forward, slowly. Bending the tentacles in front of me while keeping the back ones straight I slowly leaned forward. I could see the river clearly now and I was almost sitting straight up. Whoever came up with the design of this body is terrible. Why couldn’t I have a body with an eye in the front?

I get distracted with my thoughts about better body designs and stopped paying attention to what I was doing. I lost control of my tentacles and fell forward, slipping off the rock. I instinctively reached forward and tried to stop myself from falling before I remembered I don’t have arms and then just screwed my eye shut to brace for the fall.

Five seconds passed before I realized I wasn’t falling. Opening my eye, I realized I was looking straight down at the dirt around the rock. Also, I saw that all my tentacles had appeared on the front of my body now. I almost laughed, apparently I can move them anywhere on my body that I want. Not only that but they were extremely long now. They were about as tall as the rock I was on and extremely thin. I would probably sigh in relief if I had a mouth. I wanted to get lower to the ground, I don’t like being up so high.

As soon as I had that thought the ground started getting closer and my legs felt a little weird. I looked at my legs and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My legs were shrinking. A couple seconds is all it took for me to reach the ground. Still staring at my tentacles in amazement, I raised one up and imagined it getting longer. It immediately started growing until I willed it to stop. I was curious about what else I could do so I spent the next 10 minutes shaping my tentacles into all sorts of things. A tiny chair, a spoon, a tiny house and a bunch of simple shapes.

I’m a shapeshifter!

YES!

This was awesome!

Since I’m a shapeshifter I can turn into anything right?

I tried to remember what I used to look like and imagined it as a 3d model spinning slowly in my mind. With some ‘enhancements’ I solidified my mental image and tried to will my body to shape into it. A couple things happened. I could feel my body start to take a different shape. My eye shifted upwards and I could tell the rest of my body was shaping what I assumed to be my big toe. But I was too damn small. I only completed about half of the toenail before I felt like I couldn’t continue. It took me this long to realize how small I really was. I looked at the rock I was on earlier and just now realized that it was only a pebble. There was grass farther away from the river but this area was just covered in what to me, looked like a sea of rocks. It was hard to not get depressed about this. I used to have a life with all the conveniences of modern society. Now I’m smaller than a toenail. Whatever, I need to get out of here and to do that I have to alter my body to something more manageable than an eyeball with tentacles.

Maybe one of those ideas I came up with earlier?

My thoughts turned to a baby spider. It’s the right size, but I don’t really have anything to attack with. I don’t exactly have a mouth. So, I added a scorpion stinger and gave myself claws.

After adding the claws, I felt like I couldn’t add any more. Like right now this was my limit. So, I went with this and willed my body to change. My body started shifting around getting longer and slightly smaller. I could feel the mass shifting and spreading out from my body to create my new tail and claws. Several minutes after it was finally done, and I started getting used to my new body. Moving one leg after the other I crawled through the sea of pebbles and away from the river. I noticed while I was changing that the clouds got darker and I needed to get to shelter before it rained. I was way too small to deal with the rain.

Several hours later I had finally reached the grass. I only got this far because I got used to moving in this body. I kept crashing into stuff until I managed to split my eye into two. My field of vision shrunk a little as my eyes are now a little smaller but it’s worth it to regain depth perception. I speed along as fast as I can. The sky is filled with dark heavy clouds, I’m amazed it hasn’t started raining already.

“BOOM”

I spoke too soon.

The rain started falling and every drop was like a massive explosion to me and almost just as deadly. I moved as fast as I possibly could to avoid the rain. But everything was too far away, I was too small to make it anywhere before I was crushed. I had hoped to make it to a tree before I stopped but it is clear I am just to slow and too small to get anywhere. In my rush to get somewhere safe I neglected to pay attention to my surroundings. So, I fell into a large hole in the ground. I couldn’t see the bottom, but I did see small tunnels on the walls of the hole every now and then. I used my new shapeshifting powers to flatten myself out and try to direct my fall. I was aiming for a tunnel that was coming up in a few seconds. I was larger than the other tunnels but seemed just as empty as the other ones. I shaped myself into an odd fleshy umbrella. It was the only thing I could come up at such short notice and angled myself towards the wall. I was feeling pretty smart until I smacked right into the solid dirt wall.

The impact made me disoriented and I missed my exit. I was spinning out of control, I collapsed myself into a ball and shot tendrils out in all directions. I made sure the tips were as sharp as possible and they all pierced the wall. They were too thin though and my momentum caused several of them to rip off. Leaving me with only two tendrils anchoring my body to the wall. The pain was so intense I blacked out, with my last thought being.

“Am I going to die again?”