Must stay still so as not to disturb her, or him. How can one tell the difference between a male and a female? This feels like a her. Her legs lightly tickle my worn, thin, sickly grey skin. After all this time, I am surprised I can feel anything. Her wings, the color of the sky, the water, the eyes that once peered back at me from a mirror. The eyes were the last to change, leaving the semblance of humanity. Dressed head to toe as I am now, long coat, half covered face, umbrella, one could almost believe I were still alive. My metamorphosis started slowly at first. Day after day of isolation and loneliness, I started to petrify. First one leg until I walked with a limp, then a whole side of the body until I was dragging it along, dead weight. My hair left, fat melting from my face. One day, all at once, I was frozen, cocooned in dying flesh as organ after organ wasted away. I sat, conscious and confused. After what seemed like an eternity, my fingers twitched, then my toes and soon movement returned to me in full. My reflection should have taken my breath away but I no longer had breath. Looking back at me was a corpse, an animated corpse. It moved when I moved, it turned when I turned. The juxtaposition of my conscious mind and moving limbs with the absence of breath and pulse drove me to panic and near madness.

Now, here we are, the beautiful and the hideous. The irrational fear and the rational. The living and the dead. The metamorphosis and the metamorphosis.