I awoke with a start, out of breath and bouncing on my bed. As if I had just fallen from some height. Did I sleepwalk? Whatever I was doing, I had a splitting headache.

I put my hand to forehead, so I could massage out the pain. My hand knocked against something rather large sticking out of my skull. Come to think of it, where were my fingers? I brought my hand down and saw that it’d transformed into a black nub. Wiggling my fingers just made the end of my arm flop back and forth. Hey, wait, why’d my elbow just bend the other way? That’s neat.

I launched out of bed as best I could, which wasn’t very well, when it turned out all my joints had swapped positions. I stumbled across my bedroom, bounced off everything in my path, and smashed into the opposite wall. I rebounded backward and came to a rest on the side of my desk, in the perfect position to admire the me-shaped depression in the (now smashed) plaster wall. Where some of it had fallen away, I could see the splintered studs I’d ruined. Whoops. Was I really that heavy?

Whatever. I had to get to a mirror, which was simple enough. All I had to do was open the door and—oh, right, I don’t have fingers anymore! I grumbled and pinched the door knob between my two hands-become nubs, and made an attempt to twist it. The results weren’t very promising; my grip had nowhere near the friction required to actually turn the perfectly circular knob. I sighed and tried again.

It shattered in my grasp. Wait, doorknobs aren’t all metal?

“Jake!” I shouted, hoping that my brother would be around to hear me. I could explain my bad hair day later—preferably once I was out of my room. It’d be a literal oven in here by midday. “Jake!” I shouted again, and I made extra sure to be as loud as I could. I listened for a few more seconds. Nothing. Really? “Jake—” My eyes nearly popped out of their sockets and I shut up immediately when I felt the house shake around me. Was I really that loud? Well, if my brother wasn’t coming after that, he probably wasn’t about to show up for anything else.

I punched the door, right where the knob used to be. I could see the mechanism keeping my bedroom door shut, and I figured that if I could knock it loose, I’d be free as a bird. It wasn’t as though my handnub was in any pain. In fact, despite the damage I’d done to my room during my blunders, I felt pretty numb. Nothing was sore. Maybe I’d feel it later, but I’d rather feel it while not slowly dehydrating on my bed.

It took a few punches, but I managed to bore a hole in the door that was large enough for me to wiggle the ‘lock’ assembly out of it, and it swung open in acknowledgement of its defeat. With my mission still fresh in my mind, I stumbled across the hall and, with a few well aimed bounces, grabbed onto the bathroom sink and pulled myself front and center.

When I looked into the three piece mirror, I found the alternate universe me staring straight back. He looked exactly as he had in the dream, albeit in a little more detail, now that I wasn’t all wrapped up in the Vaseline smear of La-La Land. The reflection copying my movements was enough of a confirmation.

Man, I took one shot. Exactly what had I been up to last night?

“Ah! Aaah!” The vertebrae in my neck popped, my head turned so quickly. Some creature was standing in the doorway, staring up at me with big dinnerplate eyes. Screaming. “Holy shit!” Hey, wait a minute—

It took off before I could finish my thought, headed back for my brother’s room. The door at the end of the hall slammed shut. That couldn’t have been my brother, I thought. I mean, yeah, the little thing had his voice, but there was no way my brother could’ve been turned into one of those little horses from the dream. Right? Ah, who am I kidding? I pushed off the sink and stumbled back into the hallway. I angled toward my brother’s bedroom door and shoved off.

When I got to his door, I didn’t even bother with the knob. I threw myself against it in the hope that my weight would let me plough through. I hadn’t expected it to actually work, but when it did, I smashed my way through Jacob’s bedroom door and clattered to the sweet, sweet, carpeted floor in a shower of splinters. It was a little grimy on the ground, but whatever! There were more important things to take care of. With some traction back under my nubs, I leapt to my feet, braced myself against the doorway, and looked over toward my bro’s bed to see if I could confirm my suspicions.

“Jacob?”

Well, I found the creature, at least. Some brownish, whitish horse thing. Screaming and waving one of its legs at me. It sounded like my brother, despite being half his size, and it was also in my brother’s bed, and it was probably wearing my brother’s tighty whities. My brother had been turned into a little horse? Thing? Like, a pony? If so, I knew I lived under a big rock, but I was pretty confident that was not what a horse looked like. Was this for real, or was this still a dream? If it were the former, well, that’d be impossible. If it were the latter, this was all awful involved to be some freaky dream. I was having real, conscious thoughts at this moment, and I knew for a fact that I was not a lucid dreamer.

I decided I ought to ride it out. If I woke up a few minutes down the line? Okay. If I didn’t wake up and this turned out to be real? I’d take care of it when the time came. I had bigger fish to fry.

“Jake, Jacob. It’s me, Pete! Your brother.” I did my best to point one of my hand nubs at myself. Though, when I finally looked at their shape, they were more like hooves, weren’t they? “You can stop screaming now!” Nah, he was still going strong. “No, really! Seriously. Stop!” I do not admit to being a physician, but between when my ‘brother’ had taken off and when I started trying to calm him down, it’d been at least a minute. It couldn’t possibly be healthy to scream the way my brother was screaming, not for a minute straight. His head could explode! Or he might be hyperventilating! Or something else could happen, maybe a fly could wander down his throat! I’m not sure if what I did next was logical, but it was all I could think to do. I never suspected my brother could have such lungs, especially not as a little horse.

I pushed off the doorway and, for lack of any better description, dove right into my brother. That was apparently an invitation to panic harder, and he started flailing around while I tried to grab him. He managed to smack me a few times, with the ends of his limbs, and holy shit did it hurt, even through my plastic skin, although, plate armor was never known for its effectiveness against blunt force trauma. I utilized the half hour of wrestling he’d taught me one afternoon three years ago, and threw myself on him. I eventually wriggled into a position where we couldn’t clobber me anymore, with my arms and legs wrapped around his. I just sort of held onto him, shushing him like a baby, because that’s about all I could do. I think that, once he got tired of screaming and realized I wasn’t going to brutally murder him or whatever he thought I was going to do, he shut up. Which was actually kind of a surprise.

The two of us sat there for a long fucking time, with our limbs tangled around each other. He didn’t do much beyond staring straight ahead and taking deep, loud breaths. Eventually, I assume once he’d regained his wits and had a moment to think, he turned his head a little and got to I watch one of his giant saucer eyes look back at me.

“Uh. Pete? That really you?” he asked me. His voice was raw, from all the screaming.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Can you let me go?”

“Guess you’re done, then?

“Yeah. I’m good.”

I very casually let him go. Or, at least, I made an effort. It took a few seconds of twisting around before I was finally able to get my limbs free of his, and he tumbled forward and off the mattress. At the very least, he landed assfirst, so there wasn’t too much damaged by the short fall. With the excitement over and done with, I scooted off to the side and flopped onto the floor beside him. “You gonna be okay?” I asked him. He looked down at his new, fingerless limb and rubbed it against one of mine. He just gave me a bug-eyed look, and his irises—not just his pupils, which I found to be a little weird—weren’t much more than a couple brown specks vibrating in my general direction. Didn’t seem like there was anybody there.

It wasn’t as though I could blame him. We were human the night before. He’d gone to sleep without the slightest suspicion he’d awake to find himself as...whatever he was. I was pretty shocked myself, and totally confused as to what we’d become, just out of nowhere. It was some small miracle I wasn’t having the same reaction he was. Although, he’d just been walking around a few minutes earlier. Why did he only just now start freezing up? I’d probably have to ask him later. “Jake? You home?”

All he gave me was a weak grunt, and I realized I probably wouldn’t get much else out of him for awhile. He clearly wasn’t in a speaking mood. So I pushed at the ground and managed an awkward crawl, with my backwards arms straining against the carpet and my fucked up legs pushing me along. I did a bit of a walrus jig, over to the spartan PVC and plywood drawing table my bro had in his room, and pulled myself up, nearly tipping the thing over on my dumb ass in the process. I was looking for his mirror. It was the typical, cheap artist’s mirror that you’d use for making faces while you drew expressions. Stupid light, stupid durable, and stupid cheap. It really wasn’t hard to find and I really didn’t like what I saw, now that I had more than only a few seconds of facetime.

I was kinda gross. There were pits all over my skin, which upon closer inspection, didn’t seem to be skin, but rather a tight weave of plates. They were most likely scales instead of plates, but beyond my joints, they probably passed as a suit of armor. I had ten extra irises around my pupils and a giant spear poking out of my head—probably what I’d felt when I woke up. I had turned entirely black and blue. I didn’t stare into the abyss for more than a fraction of a second, for fear that the abyss might stare back, and clapped my stubhooves around the plastic mirror. I butt dragged myself back over to my brother and held the mirror by squeezing either thin end between my arms, so he could look at his own reflection. He just stared at himself. For a second, he raised up the stump that his hand had become, and rubbed it along his chin. Other than that, he still looked absolutely dead inside. Why wasn’t I, too?

“I’m going to check on mummy and daddy,” I said, after letting him stare for a bit. I set the mirror down between his legs. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, with some water or something.” And I left, struggling my way across the third floor of our house, causing a real ruckus as I went.

I’d like to say that when I got there I navigated the stairs with some amount of grace, but that’d be a bold-faced lie. I took one step before I lost my footing and resigned to slide down on my belly. It wasn’t as though it really hurt too much. I could barely feel a thing, thanks to all the plates covering my body. The most I ever really felt was the dull pressure of the impact as my torso thump, thump, thumped its way down. The kitchen and hallways on our cluttered first floor not only provided a wealth of objects to lean on, but the floors were all some combination of well worn, carpeted, or unpolished, so I was able to stumble forward on my feet and feel about with my arms. Bounce off the kitchen table, slide along the freezer, tilt toward the counter, lean over to the fridge…spread my legs in the hall, use the far wall to brace myself, with my shoulder against the other… It took work, but I was able to navigate with a semblance of efficiency.

“Mummy?” I stage whispered as I inched to the room that she’d taken to sleeping in, ever since her hip went out. “Mummy? You there?” I genuinely asked, a little louder this time. There was nobody in her bed. Maybe she was out. Was it Wednesday? I knew she had something to do on Wednesday mornings. Weight Watchers or something like that. Alright. “Daddy?” I raised my voice, turning to the living room. He’d gone to sleeping in a futon, once my mother was no longer able to climb the stairs to the original master bedroom. “Hey Daddy?” I shouted this time, disturbing the mountain of loose change on the front hall table when I rubbed against it. He wasn’t around either. Maybe they both went somewhere. I staggered backward, turned, clung to one of the hallway doors that we never really closed, and slipped into the first floor bathroom. I leaned up against the sink, much to its displeasure, and peered out the window that gave me a good view of the driveway. Both cars were still in there, and nobody was in them. Had they gone somewhere with somebody else and not said anything? Maybe a friend came and picked them up? Maybe. But it was still the early morning, wasn’t it? The shadows outside stretched pretty far.

But, something else was bugging me. It was quiet. We were in the middle of a residential Boston neighborhood, in the morning, with a main street not more than twenty yards from the house. There were no horns, no sirens, and no sounds of natural gas busses or diesel trucks. No delinquents in their shitty ricers with badly fitted, rattling, glasspack mufflers. No loud neighbors of minority descent. I heard nothing but the birds and the occasional howl of a strong wind against a tall, brick building. I blundered out to the front door and somehow unlocked it—if only because it was real metal. I swung the door open and hung out, holding onto the frame to keep from falling over. I couldn’t hear the city doing its city thing, and it was the most eerie silence I had ever heard. I stepped back inside and closed the front door, but I couldn’t get it locked for the life of me. I considered it a lost cause, and I made my return trip to the stairs at the back of the house.

I dug my face into the pallet of water bottles we kept in the back stairway, and emerged with a bottle between my teeth. It took me a few tries to actually get that far, as I found I now had a pair of folding fangs that loved tearing open bottles of water. No way the floorboards wouldn’t be getting water damaged. When I had finally succeeded in acquiring a bottle that wasn’t full of holes, I turned to my next challenge.

I had been able to go down stairs just fine, simply by being lazy and sliding the whole way. But now I had to go up stairs, and I couldn’t reverse gravity and slide on up, as much as I wished I could. I just sort of sat there and thought for a bit, experimentally flexing my arms as I tried to figure it out. I could grab onto the support beams that held the railings in place, and that would get me most of the way up, but there were a few steps at the bottom and the top that were completely without such handholds. Maybe I could reach up when the time came, and pull myself the rest of the way? With how the door was set up at the top, there was a bit of a rise, that might provide a decent grip if I approached from the right angle. It wasn’t the best of plans.

This was about when I considered how I was seated on the floor. I was sitting like a dog, butt down, legs folded up, arms between. But I didn’t bend like a dog. My arms were more like… Like the front legs of a horse? I growled at the ceiling. Duh! I wasn’t some freak from Amigara Fault, I was a little horse. Granted, I was an ugly little horse, but I was still a little horse, and I had a vague understanding of how horse legs worked. But horses don’t have grippy soles on their hooves. I’d probably slide around. How did horses even climb stairs anyway?

Pretty easily, as a matter of fact. I was surprised how quickly and easily I managed to accomplish a task so monumental as climbing stairs. In fact, I was good enough at stair climbing, I probably would’ve won a medal. The ‘Faster Than ASIMO’ medal. After that, I decided to stay how I was, walking around on all four of my limbs, as though I were some small, armored horse. Which actually felt quite natural. Uncannily so. Because I was an armored little horse. I needed a better name for ‘little horse.’ Unfortunately, the only thing that sprung to mind was ‘pony,’ which, to be honest, was a bit feminine for my tastes.

I found my brother in much the same position I had left him in. Just sitting there. Staring at himself in the mirror. Every once in awhile he’d angle it a little, to take a look at some other part of his body.

“Jake?” He looked up at me when I called his name. Emotionless. Completely broken. It was nothing short of heart wrenching to see what I assumed to be my own brother, completely lost. He was six years older than me, and more of a man than I was ever willing to be. I couldn’t do much more than sigh and walk over to him. I sat down beside him, took the bottle between my forelegs, and bit into the cap. I had intended to use the grip of my teeth to twist the cap off, but I wound up tearing it off instead. My teeth absolutely shredded the thing, and I barely felt the cap assembly come off, until I noticed it floating freely on my wiggly, snakey tongue.

I spat the cap onto the floor some distance away from us, and offered up the bottle. “Here. Drink.” When Jake didn’t immediately reach for it, I turned a little and lifted it up to his lips. “Drink.” He seemed content to let me just tilt the bottle over and give him little sips. He didn’t have near the kind of enthusiasm as I had hoped for, but the simple act of drinking from a bottle was enough to get his attention off that damned mirror. He looked me in the eye and, finally, I saw a little of that spark coming back. This was my brother alright. He knew that as much as I did, and neither of us were alone.

“Better?” I asked, once I pulled the bottle away, having dumped half of it into Jake’s mouth.

“Kinda.” But he hadn’t gotten past one word answers. I rolled my eyes and offered the bottle again. This time, he held it himself. “So,” sip, “How’re Mummy and Daddy?”

“Couldn’t find them. Both cars in the lot. Whole city’s really quiet.”

“Quiet?”

“Abandoned quiet.” Jake looked back to the bottle between his forelegs, before he went bottom up and drained the rest of it in one go. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m going to find out. Let’s get downstairs.”

I stopped my brother before he could actually get moving. “You gonna walk around in your underwear?” He looked at me, then at his butt, with those stretched out briefs on them, and with agility I didn’t know he had, he shook them off. I stared for a moment and blinked at him. “Bit casual?”

“Eh, I like this better. Besides, it’s a dream, I’ll wake up sooner or later.” Sweet summer brother, if only. I felt awful hearing those words out of his mouth, but I couldn’t summon up the courage to try and convince him otherwise. We went downstairs.

Neither of us were particularly fast, but we were able to get around without smacking into anything. Going downstairs still presented a bit of a problem. I made it most of the way, before tripping on air and sliding down, but Jake was surer of his footing. Which was probably for the best, since I had doubts he was anywhere near as durable as I was. We didn’t stop until we were in the living room, and decided to spend some time lounging on our father’s unoccupied futon.

There really wasn’t much to say. We sat there and stared at each other, basking in our newfound horseness. Or was it hopelesness? It was hard to tell at this point. Maybe it simply was our strange crisis, but whenever I looked my brother in the eye, it felt like I was tuning into his soul. Or something. Reading him like a book, discerning his emotions. And right now, all I found was chaos. We were both so frightened, dazed, and confused, that we just kind of shut down. We literally couldn’t hold all these feels, and they were sloshing out all over the place. His coping mechanism, it seemed, was to shut down. My coping mechanism was to not give a fuck.

“I’m gonna check on the neighbors,” I said, after a good fifteen minutes had gone by. “Try and turn on the TV or something. Maybe there’s something on the news.” I rolled off the futon and went back to the front door, pulled it open, and stepped outside.

Yeah, it was just as quiet as before. The birds didn’t count. Neither did the squirrels. I made my way down the porch and opened up the front gate, letting it swing open before I stepped onto the sidewalk and crossed the street. The two old ladies who lived in this house were about as old as my parents, and were easily the loudest folks in the neighborhood. Most outgoing too. So I climbed their porch (which was in much better shape than ours) and knocked on the left door. I rang the bell. I even called my neighbor’s name. Nothing. I wiggled my nub of a hand—a hoof, really—against the mail slot and peered in. No lights, no noise. Not a stir. I called again. Still nothing, except one of her cats walking between rooms. I went to the other door that led to the rest of the apartments, and rang the bells a couple times. No response. I went down the street and checked the other houses, almost all of which I knew held at least two tenants, and not a single person was home. Not one. I went up the hill, to the next street over. The main street, that was always, ALWAYS busy. I looked left, and I looked right. Not a car on the road. Plenty parked by the sides, but none in motion. Not a pedestrian on the sidewalks either. There was nobody around. Not a soul.

I checked around some other streets. Every condo, every house. No response. Some of the doors were unlocked, and they swung open easily enough. So I investigated. No signs of struggle, all the occupants’ belongings completely undisturbed, nothing. Nothing worth mentioning, at least. It was all as if everybody had up and simply vanished.

Whatever happened, I had the sinking feeling that my brother and I were the only human beings left in town. But, were we even still human?

Author's Note

Wanna play a game? Take a shot every time you see the word "just" in this story.

Also, patchwork writing, hooray!