“Oh, God,” Sarah gasped, staring at her new reflection. “I don’t believe this.”
“Sarah. What’s happening to you?” Michelle managed to croak, still keeping her distance from her friend.
Sarah didn’t want to believe it, but the answer was staring right back at her. Maybe the questionnaire wasn’t exactly just for fun. “Oh, god,” she gasped again.
“Sarah?” Michelle echoed.
Finally getting the strength to do it and the think it, Sarah looked back at her friend from school, the biology teacher. “Michelle. I think I’m turning into a horse.”
Michelle looked like Sarah had just pointed a gun at her. “What? No that’s not—”
“Look at me and say that it’s not happening,” Sarah screamed through her budding tears. She was distantly aware of her rising ears pinning back as much as they could. “I’m turning into a horse, Michelle. Oh, God. I’m turning into a horse.”
“How, though?” Michelle asked.
Sarah paused for a second and looked off into the paddock, watching Michelle’s three horses graze. She’d be just like that before long. Her mind raced to remember the answers she’d filled in on the questionnaire last night. She’d filled in an hour for the length of transformation. Obviously that question meant it would take her an hour to transform. But did it also mean that she would be a horse for just an hour or that, after an hour, she would be a horse for the rest of her life?
Feeling her gut tighten up, more from the weight of the situation than her actual transformation, Sarah looked back at Michelle and decided to tell her. “One of my friends emailed me this questionnaire last night,” she finally began. “It was about what kind of animal you would change into if you could.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Michelle gasped, watching as rips started appearing in Sarah’s blue jeans. Her friend’s neck was getting longer and her nostrils wider, too.
“I thought it was just some goofy thing, you know? So I filled it out. Looks like it was for real.”
“How did it happen, though?”
Sarah bit her nearly equine lips and glanced off to the side. As her face continued to shift into a muzzle, she realized her eyes were being forced onto the sides of her head. She still mostly had binocular vision, but a blind spot was growing at the front of her face.
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice a bit thicker now. “There was a section on the questionnaire about how it would happen. I think I selected the option that it would happen by accident from another animal and that it would be caused by magic.”
Michelle glanced into the paddock behind her. “But none of my horses are magic – at least I don’t think so.” She couldn’t believe she’d said it shortly after she finished speaking. A loud ripping noise filled the air and Michelle looked back at Sarah. Dark reddish brown fur was starting to poke out of the tears in Sara’s jeans and shirt. The same fur color was starting to bud out of her lower neck, too. She looked like she was about half horse and half human. A quick twitch of movement behind Sarah caught Michelle’s eye and she felt light headed when she saw the dark black tail hairs hanging behind her legs. Sarah had a tail.
Sarah barely noticed, though, and shook her head after pursing her thick lips. She looked back out at the horses in the paddock. “I don’t think it was them. There was a quarter horse I came across at the equestrian center right before we left. He kind of sneezed in my mouth,” she added with a hint of embarrassment on her changing voice. “I think it was him. Or her. I’m not really sure.”
“So what do we do now?” Michelle gasped.