text: Nobody really paid the changes any mind at first. We all assumed they were nothing but minor ailments. The kind you’d barely acknowledge and, more often than not, keep to yourself and expect to fade with time. I did at least. It was nearly a year ago when I first noticed a change. It was getting late, I’d just gotten home from work and had headed straight for the shower. As I lathered myself, I noticed a pimple on my thigh. At least, it looked like one. It didn’t freak like one. It felt hard like acrylic. I didn’t pay it much mind. A few weeks later I went to get my annual checkup at the doctor’s office. After he measured my height, the doctor told me I’d shrunk nearly half an inch. We laughed it off. I was getting up there in years afterall. I also noticed, if only for a moment, a bump on his forearm alot like the one on my thigh. There came a time when the bumps could no longer be dismissed. They continued to appear all over mine and others’ bodies one after another. Eventually it became a topic of conversation, and soon every government had to make a statement. They were all along the same lines. They had no explanation for what was happening, but they said they had their top scientists working on it. At work I noticed myself struggling a little to type on my computer. It seemed my fingers, save for my thumb, refused to move independently from one another at times. Not often enough to be a real hindrance, but enough to annoy me. A few of my coworkers were having the same issue, and we assumed we’d gotten carpal tunnel or something. We petitioned to get better keyboards, and that seemed to solve the issue. It must’ve been placebo. After a while, everyone had encountered similar issues with their hands and lost enough height to notice, but not quickly enough to completely disorient us. It became hard for anyone to deny the changes without lying to themselves. We were afraid. I know I was at the very least, but we could only try our best to go about our lives as normal. We hadn’t completely lost hope yet. Scientists tried their best to prevent us from reaching a point of no return. That is, until their fingers fuse together and they could no longer use their equipment. We were all forced to abandon our work and our passions as our bodies became incompatible with the society we’d built, and it collapsed as our human desires faded. One day, I decided I needed to see my mother, as I found that even my love for her was fading. She was hesitant, afraid to see what had become of her son. I could hardly recognize her when we met. All her hair had fallen out like the rest of us. Her face was unnaturally wide and her eyes were beady. It was nothing I hadn’t noticed changing about myself in the mirror. When we met in front of my childhood home she tried to give me a hug, but her new body wasn’t built for hugging, and she ran inside crying. That was the last time I ever saw her. Our skin hardened and segmented as our bones dissolved, and soon we found ourselves shambling sideways through the streets. First on two feet, then four, then six, and then eight. We’d all given way to instinct as we began to make our way to one place. We knew the human world was no longer our home. We knew we belonged to the sea. I scuttled for miles past everything I was leaving behind. The office building where I used to work, the doctor’s office, my old highschool, my childhood home, and the hospital where I was born. The memories they evoked didn’t register as my own. I shrank smaller by the day, and the distance between me and the ocean seemed to grow at the same rate, but I never stopped for more than a moment. Eventually, the sea stretching into the horizon was within view. As my claws first grazed the shore all memory of what it was like to be human washed away, and as I first submerged beneath its salty waters I knew my transformation was complete. I knew what we’d become. I knew what I’d become. I was a crab.