Harpy

Damn it, a cat, a damn anime cat. Why not a dog? Why a woman at all?! The thoughts raced through my mind.

From my mom's room, I heard noises and realized there wouldn't be a good moment anyway. I caught my breath and entered her bedroom. I was going to say, "Mom, hi, it's me, your son," or something like that, but as I opened the door, I couldn't react in time. The cat reacted—it bared its teeth and hissed.

Standing before me was a harpy, the mythical harpy from legends, wearing my mom's torn nightgown around her waist. The harpy had bird-like eyes and my mom's face. The second shock of the morning, this time caused by terror rather than fear. A mostly human head, except for the hawk-like eyes, covered in my mom's beautiful, black-as-night hair, transitioned into a half-human body. But the halves were distributed differently than one would typically imagine. From the front, a human chest, uncovered now, a toned abdomen from years of training, and ending in a groin covered in small feathers below the pubic area. From the back, she was more bird-like, entirely covered in black feathers that created an impenetrable and anatomically beautiful armor. Two black wings protruded from her shoulder blades like those of a black angel. One might mistake her for a feathered angel if the feathers above her buttocks didn't transform into a bird's tail, if her fingers hadn't doubled in size due to sharp bird talons, and if her legs below the knees hadn't turned into scaly black bird feet.

She looked at me almost emotionlessly. I realized she was experiencing the same shock I had when I woke up. This was shock; she was a harpy, and an unknown girl, also not human, had burst into her room and hissed at her. I decided to act cautiously.

"Tracy, calm down, your brain can't handle the information. Breathe, try to sit and breathe so that everything you've seen normalizes," I began to guide her carefully. It was scary because standing before me was not just my mom but also an ancient monster. I had changed, and I didn't know how she had changed. I had forgotten how to write, and she might have forgotten that she was Tracy. But I saw fear and confusion in her eyes, which was somehow reassuring. "I just went through this too; I'm scared like you are. We'll figure out what's going on and how to deal with it together."

I fell silent. I saw that she was gradually calming down, just like me. She began to examine her hands, the easiest part to observe. Trying to move her fingers carefully, she rotated her hand. Then she turned her head back, fear in her eyes, looking at the edge of the wing above her.

"Trust your body; you'll instinctively understand how to move it," I advised.

She turned a frightened gaze on me, then back to the wing, and spread both wings, hitting the right one against the wardrobe. She folded them back just as quickly, apparently frightened by what she saw. I also initially hoped that the tail was fake until I wagged it. Turning her gaze from her enormous bird feet to me, she declared, "I don't want to move them; they're not mine. I'm not a chicken. Who did this? Who are you?" She started to get worked up, and it sounded threatening. Her voice had become hoarse and piercing, and her bird eyes seemed incapable of looking without aggression.

"I'm in the same situation as you," I tried to explain calmly. "I woke up in the room next to yours today, even though yesterday I was a boy, a school football player."

"Tyler?!" she squawked after a few seconds of thought and confusion. "Is that you?"

"Yes, Mom, I woke up half an hour ago, but as you can see, it was even harder for me to recognize myself. All this time, I sat in the same shock as you, trying to comprehend what was happening. I couldn't even imagine that I wasn't the only one until..." We were interrupted by a horrible scream from my older sister Teia's room. A terrible thought flashed through my mind: this wasn't just in my room; it was throughout the house or maybe even beyond. "Come on, Mom, we need to see what she's become and calm her down," I said as if this were already a normal thing today.