This story came to me in a creative writing club I'm currently participating in.
The theme of this season is “Metamorphosis.” It is inspired by Kafka’s novella of the same name. The first sentence of the novella goes, “One morning Gregor Samsa woke in his bed from uneasy dreams and found he had turned into a large verminous insect.” (Translations vary slightly).
The prompt:
Write a story that begins with the sentence “One morning [Name of Character] woke in his bed from uneasy dreams and found/realized/saw he had turned into/become … .”
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“So one morning I woke up in my bed from uneasy dreams and found… you there,” he grinned at her and she couldn’t suppress a smile of her own.
“You believe in fate?” he snorted at her words, and Ani poked him with an elbow under his ribs.
“What else would you call it? We were broken and then suddenly we weren’t. This is a quintessence of a metamorphosis.”
“We are past that phase, Ani. We are more like a part of a parabiotic experiment now.” M. finished his drink in one gulp and put a glass on the coaster with a muffled thump.
“Parabiosis,” he raised an index finger to draw Ani’s attention. “That’s what it is. Remember how we met?” under the table he put a hand on her bare leg, his fingers brushing the soft skin near the hem of her skirt.
M. had big pale hands, which stood in stark contrast to the rest of his body – tanned, tall and seemingly fragile as if he was a good ten pounds below slim. Exactly the way when she first had seen him at the entryway of the intensive care unit. In a narrow hallway she brushed arms with a beautiful stranger, oblivious to the world around him. A silent sorry slipped past his lips and when their eyes met she couldn’t look away. Unable to move sideways, glued to the man standing at the door, she just kept staring, confronted by the pain etched on his face. His sharp hollow cheekbones and purple shadows under the bloodshot eyes did a poor job at masking his beauty. He looked like he was holding the weight of the whole universe on his fragile shoulders, yet he had found the strength to wind up on his feet.
Without giving it much thought – any thought – she caught his trembling hands and intertwined their fingers. In retrospect, it had been a bold move, the one she would never find an explanation for. The man didn’t flinch or pull away, just stirred Ani closer and encircled her with his big hands breaking into wrecking sobs in her embrace. He was tall and she barely reached the middle of his chest encased in a plain gray t-shirt, her forehead pressed into his pectoralis major, her lips against his heart, contracting two hundred beats a minute. He smelled like medicine, coffee and sunflower seeds.
Whatever his ache was, it echoed her own, and she stood there quietly, absorbing his tears with her hair and his sorrow with her soul.
She could never forget his frenzied kisses as he’d mapped out her luscious curves with his big pale hands. As he’d pounded into her, his body slick with sweat. As he’d bawled pressed to the sharp cut of her clavicle in the aftermath of his climax. As the sobs had racked his body and she kept rubbing soothing circles over his back.
Her heart clenched at the memory. M. reached over to wipe off a lone tear trickling down her cheek, the sea blue of his own clouded with moisture. And then he smiled. They both were in tatters, and then they weren’t. The metamorphosis, indeed.
M. bent over the table and kissed the hollow of her neck. Ani pulled away, trying to look him in the eye, his breaths still dancing across her skin quickening her pulse traitorously. He was drawing numbers with his tongue on her flushed skin, dragging his lips to that sweet spot behind her ear, which he knew damn well made her squirm on her seat. She panted. She wanted him to take her back home and undress. The idea of making love to him was uppermost in her mind. She told him so.
He chuckled softly and nodded at a pizza on the table.
“You don’t want your pizza? I thought you were hungry!”
“Famished actually! Just not for pizza.”
M. looked down at her plate, his hand moving towards the apex of her thighs.
“Pizza is an example of parabiosis.” M. continued calmly as if giving a lecture. She cocked an eyebrow at him.
“Just think about it! They put cheese on this perfect oval of dough and then – voila – you get an entirely new thing. Parabiosis, Ani.”
“Did you just compare me with a slice of mozzarella?”
“More like a sprinkle of Parmesan… You, me, combined together. A family, a child, the whole nine yards. Parabiosis.”
“Well, as you said, it’s clear that we are way past the metamorphosis stage.” Ani got out of the booth and extended a hand to M.
“Time to start the parabiosis phase, Romeo. Let’s go.”