Screw Kafka

Screw Kafka

By Gustavo Bondoni

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer with over four hundred stories published in fifteen countries, in seven languages.  He is a member of Codex and a Full Member of SFWA. He has published six science fiction novels including one trilogy, four monster books, a dark military fantasy and a thriller. His short fiction is collected in Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019), Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).

In 2019, Gustavo was awarded second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest and in 2018 he received a Judges Commendation (and second place) in The James White Award. He was also a 2019 finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest.

His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com

More TTTV stories by Gustavo Bondoni: https://talltaletv.com/tag/gustavo-bondoni/

 

Goddammit, not this again!

I knocked on the door of number 23. I knocked again, and a third time before the door opened. An old woman sporting a prominent nasal wart stared up at me. “Ah, Greg, isn’t it? I see you’re turning into a large insect of some sort.”

“Did you do this to me?” is what I tried to say, but I imagine it sounded more like “mim nu nu ti tume?” as it was bloody difficult to say anything with only half the human anatomy remaining.

Mrs. Woolfy had the nerve to look affronted and innocent. “Why would you ask me about that?”

I no longer had fingers to count on, but I still responded. “Well, there was the time I became a frog, multiple cases of boils, the locusts and sixteen treatments for evil eye.”

“I had nothing to do with the locusts, but I guess I see how you could suspect me. But I will have to disappoint you this time. I wasn’t to blame.”

“Then who?”

“Ah, that is a conundrum. The last time you were a cockroach, I seem to recall that the pale warlock in the corner was to blame. But he’s been eaten by a demon since then, so we’ll have to look elsewhere. Would you like some tea?”

I attempted to explain that cockroaches almost never drank tea and stormed off. It is difficult to storm off when your legs are designed for stealth and scuttling, but I gave it my best shot. It made me feel better, but achieved nothing else, and I had the same problem as before at the end of it.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I went off in search of Gilda. She was always understanding about my problems, even if I suspected that she wasn’t always completely faithful in other ways.

It was probably a mistake. The single word, “Ugh,” and a slamming door were all I got for my troubles, and I finally gave up and headed where I didn’t want to be.

“Man, you look like shit,” Bernard said. A waft of pungent smoke drifted out of the room behind him. “You’d better come in. Are you like some sort of beetle?”

“Cockroach,” I replied. The loss of my speech centers was progressing slower than I’d feared. Last time, I’d been completely mute an hour after the transformation started, with the entire fire brigade running after me with axes ten minutes after that. It had not been fun.

“Bummer. Beetles used to be worshipped by the ancient Egyptians, you know.”

“Fascinating,” I muttered.

“Want a joint?”

I wondered if he was trying to kill me, but decided he probably wasn’t. He seemed to be off on some planet of his own where fumigation was either unheard of or considered a pleasant diversion.

I flopped onto a giant beanbag, being careful not to crack a piece of carapace. Exoskeletons looked tough, but I knew they were very brittle. “Can you get me some sugar?”

He looked at me, clearly disappointed, and shrugged. “Whatever floats your boat, man.” He tried to hand me a large pottery jar, but looked at my limbs and laid it down on the floor instead. He looked at me again, shook his head in wonder, muttered “man, that was really good shit,” and wandered off into the smoky gloom of the house.

“You really need to get that spell reversed,” a voice from out of the fug told me.

“D’ya think?” I tried to say, but she clearly didn’t hear me.

“I’d hate to be stuck in that shell. It’s only a question of time before someone manages to locate a really big can of Raid.”

“Very funny,” I said.

“I’m not trying to be funny. Those insect hexes can get you killed pretty easily. Kafkian ones are the worst. I wonder why it is that so many warlocks have that Metamorphosis obsession? I guess they think it makes them look dark and dangerous. I think it just makes them look like the losers they really are. I’m Gina, by the way.”

I looked her over. She looked pale and overtly mammalian, and I knew that she would have looked a lot more appetizing to me if she’d been dead and decomposing for a couple of weeks.

Crap, the transformation was reaching the nerve centers. Screw Kafka, anyway.

“You’d never see a witch fooling around with roaches. After all, they’re disgusting creatures when they’re tiny, so what would you want with a giant one? Frogs, bats, that’s good enough to punish someone with, without having to call an exterminator afterwards.”

I grunted agreement. She was definitely preaching to the choir. I wondered idly how much longer I would get to keep my human thought processes. It wasn’t making me particularly nervous, though.

“I’ll help you.”

That got through, all right. “Why?”

“Did you say ‘why’? Easy, because I feel sorry for you. Bernard certainly isn’t going to be of much use. He probably thinks you’re just a piece of bad acid, or whatever it is he’s on right now. But I can help.”

“How?”

“I’m studying witchcraft. Nearly done with first year!”

Something in my mind, some instinctive self-preservation function, reacted, and I slammed into the door with a chitinous thud.

That was just about when I realized that most doors were designed for humans, not cockroaches. How did one go about rotating a knob with an insect leg, anyway?

“Oh, come on, all I need is a small snippet of leg hair. There we go.” I felt a vibration which had no human equivalent, before I managed to locate a window and push my way out. Glass is not a problem when you have an exoskeleton.

Soon, I found myself in familiar surroundings: I was running down the street pursued by a screaming mob, at least one of which was a uniformed fireman wielding a large, serious-looking axe. Only the lack of pitchforks kept it from being a complete cliché.

Suddenly, I felt a wrench, an elongation of parts of my body and a contraction of others. The steady insectile scurry I’d been using so effectively to open the gap to my pursuers suddenly became disjointed. Something weird – well, weirder, at least – began to happen to my eyesight, and I nearly ran into a hydrant, mainly because I wasn’t quite certain which of the many hydrants I was suddenly seeing I should avoid.

I gained some respite because the crowd suddenly stopped to stare, faltering for a moment. I was delighted to see that the guy with the axe went down when he stopped and the crowd behind was slow to react. I hope they trampled him to death.

But after that single hesitation, they came after me with renewed vigor, and I tried to high-tail it down the street.

It wasn’t easy. I seemed to have more legs than before. A window I passed confirmed the feeling: the reflection showed one big-ass hairy spider. It was better than a cockroach, I guess.

Or maybe not. The cockroach could at least outrun humans on foot. This new shape simply couldn’t. I tried turning to the left, into an alleyway, but misjudged the angle and hit the wall instead.

It was an enormous relief to find myself climbing upwards, for which I thanked the spider’s reflexes as opposed to any quick thinking on my part. Sometimes, the human parts of the brain were a hindrance in these cases.

My pursuers milled about in front of the building I’d chosen for a few minutes before managing to gain entry. The fact that they were inside was cause for worry, but I was only a few moments to go to reach the roof.

The roof was a fairly typical example of its kind, with black tar and some kind of silver insulation covering a flat surface with a raised cabin into which a door was set. The drop off the side of the building seemed pretty long, but the spider in me was already plotting a trajectory for a line of silk to the next edifice over.

Sadly, that line had to be diverted, as one of my pursuers, puffing and red-faced, came through the door. He was soon wrapped in a white cocoon and rolled along the roof as he struggled to free himself.

But I was under no illusions. Pretty soon, the rest of my pursuers would arrive, and they’d probably be smart enough to use an elevator. I needed to move now.

It was a daunting drop. Even though my human thought processes were probably nearly gone, something deep inside, some primitive mammal, screamed from the subconscious layers of my being.

I had to stomp on that primal instinct and force myself to launch a strand. I had to shout down parts of me that said that the string would never support my weight, and that spiders only survived that sort of thing because they weighed sufficiently little that air resistance would keep them from hitting the ground as hard as I would when I fell.

But I managed, through an effort of will and discipline, to launch my thread and jump over the side. The thread held, and I swung majestically over the abyss between the towers.

It was a triumph of will over instinct, which makes it even more unfair that, as I traced my graceful arc, my body convulsed and changed shape again, causing me to lose my connection to the strand and fly straight through a window.

With what I felt to be almost superhuman patience, I digested that I no longer had an exoskeleton, just when the breaking glass would have made it useful right about then. I risked opening my eyes and crawled through what seemed like a hideously-decorated living room to a mirror. I got up slowly, and realized that, amazingly, Gina had actually hit the right species. I was human again, and the damage from the window seemed limited to a few minor abrasions.

Admittedly, I normally prefer to be much less feminine, and if being shaped like I was, I would have preferred to have been clothed. Those mobs with pitchforks and torches are a persistent lot, and they would have marked precisely which window I’d flown into and would be making their way over. If they found me looking like this and dressed in nothing but a few scratches they wouldn’t even bother trying to find the spider, they’d just get their entertainment elsewhere.

Time, therefore was of the essence, for that reason and also because I didn’t want Gina trying to change me again. Human form was good enough to try to track down whoever had done this to me and get them to reverse it. I hurriedly ran to what seemed like a bedroom, jiggling in unaccustomed places. That is to say I was jiggling, not the bedroom.

I located a pair of too-big jeans which I held in place with a belt and rolled up, and a man’s shirt which I knotted in place. Shoes were not in the cards – this was clearly a man’s apartment, but at least I looked semi-decent. The door, fortunately, was on the latch, and I managed to duck down the stairs onto the floor below just before the mob coming up reached the one I’d vacated. I calmly called the elevator, waited while the mob disembarked on the floor above, listened while they started to knock down the door, and took the descending lift to the ground floor.

“Hi Gina,” I said when I saw her waiting by the door. She took a second to understand what was going on, and then pumped a fist in the air.

“Yes!” she exulted. “I knew I’d gotten it right this time. You’re human again!”

“I have much bigger boobs than I wanted,” I told her.

“Who cares? Now you can investigate who did this to you originally. We’re in the pink!”

“Yes, I have that, too.”

“Stop it. Now, the first order of business is to make a list of anyone who might have wanted you out of the way.”

“No, the first order of business is to get me a bra and some shoes. Then we’ll talk.”

“OK,” Gina said, clearly wishing to get moving. “I think there’s some shoes that will fit at my place, but my bras are not going to help with those.”

In the end, we managed to use a combination of a t-shirt and a loose-fitting shirt from Gina’s closet to solve the issue at least from a visual point of view. Her protestations that no bra would lead to sagging were met by my firm resolve to avoid keeping them any longer than necessary.

“OK, then who hates you this much?” she asked.

“Well, I hadn’t had the faculties to think about it much so far today. There are a couple of guys at the office, I guess. Then there’s my cleaning lady. She’s always threatening to do terrible things to me if I don’t learn to put my clothes in the hamper – but I don’t think she has the talent. And then we also have…” I suddenly stopped and slapped my head. Gina looked at me as if I were mad, which I think is pretty unfair considering she hardly batted an eye when I was a huge cockroach. “Irene!”

“Who?”

“Irene. The last thing I remember last night was heading to the Olde Pub over on Krassnin street and having three or four drinks. They had rum in them, as I recall. The problem is that that’s the bar where I met Irene, and she still goes there. I remember seeing her and climbing on the table, and that’s where it gets really fuzzy.”

“Climbing on the table?”

“It seemed like the best course of action. I probably slept with her. I always hook up with Irene when I’m drunk.”

“So, what’s the problem, other than the fact that it sounds kinky when a girl says it?”

I rolled my eyes at her. “Irene is a little needy, in much the same way that Stalin was a bit of a sociopath. Every time we get together, she thinks it’s for good, and we end up having a huge argument the following morning. Last time, I thought that was the last I’d see of her.”

“But clearly it wasn’t.”

“Argh. I can picture it now. She probably asked me when I would marry her, and I probably said I’d rather be a cockroach, and voilà! People really shouldn’t sell spells like that to crazy ex-girlfriends.”

I paused for a second. “I probably didn’t even need to tell her about the cockroach. She’s totally into Kafka and dark stuff – she’s always seemed like the type that would try to kill herself and fail, just for the attention.”

I let out a frustrated sigh. “And now, I’ll spend weeks tracking down the guy who made the spell, and then getting him to sell me the antidote.”

“Well, there might be another way,” Gina replied.

“What? What would you do in my position?”

“Honey, if I looked like you, I’d pop into the nearest modeling agency, find the prettiest pretty boy in there, and offer to give him an amazing time. Then I’d do it again with the next nearest, and so forth. I wouldn’t stop till everything below my waist chafed like hell.”

I shuddered. “Not even remotely interested.”

“It’s your loss, there’s power in being irresistible.”

“Even so.”

“All right, then let’s try this: how about you let me turn you back? No, don’t run, remember what happened last time. I’ll just try anyway.”

“OK, I’ll listen. But letting first-year witches experiment on you is a good way of ending up dead.”

“Now that you’re not an insect anymore, it should be obvious even to you that we’re almost there. I think I can have you back to your old self in about two more tries.”

“Why two?”

“Well, first, I’m going to give you a form that will allow you to pay for all the help I’ve given you. I’m thinking of keeping your external beauty but making it more of a male beauty. And the big boobs… well, I’m sure I can find somewhere to put all that mass.”

“Can’t you just turn me back in one go? I mean, it’s probably fun to be handsome and, er… huge, but what if something goes wrong. Or if you can’t get me back on the second try? Or if you just say “to hell with it” once you get what you want? I might look better, but I want to be me! I like being me! And besides, isn’t charging me that way a bit uncivilized.”

“Don’t be such a whiner. Even if you did manage to track down Irene’s warlock. What do you think his price will be if you show up looking like that?”

It’s always something, isn’t it? “Crap. I guess I’ll just have to trust you.”

“Sure looks that way, doesn’t it.”

We walked in the general direction of Bernard’s opium den. I wondered, somewhat despondently, whether that was a good idea.”

“Have you ever had one of those days?”

“You mean when a crazy ex turns me into a giant insect to get their revenge?”

“Yeah.”

“Nope. Can’t recall any. I assume it isn’t all that much fun.”

I thought about it. “Beats going to work, I guess. Though how I’m going to explain yet another day lost to a cockroach curse to my boss is something I just can’t imagine.”

“Better make that two days”

“Why?”

“You’re pretty tired. I’m going to want you fresh and ready, so you’re paying off my magic tomorrow. You may want to take a third day to rest afterwards, too.”

“Oh, yeah. I guess that sounds logical.”

I immediately resolved to mend my ways. No more crazy women, no more late drunken nights, and especially no more witches.

Just like last time.